The Unwomanly Face of War Read online

  History through the story told by an unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, that interests me, that I would like to make into literature. But the narrators are not only witnesses—least of all are they witnesses; they are actors and makers. It is impossible to go right up to reality. Between us and reality are our feelings. I understand that I am dealing with versions, that each person has her version, and it is from them, from their plurality and their intersections, that the image of the time and the people living in it is born. But I would not like it to be said of my book: her heroes are real, and no more than that. This is just history. Mere history.

  I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all times.

  They say to me: Well, memories are neither history nor literature. They’re simply life, full of rubbish and not tidied up by the hand of an artist. The raw material of talk, every day is filled with it. These bricks lie about everywhere. But bricks don’t make a temple! For me it is all different…It is precisely there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is concealed and the insurmountable tragedy of life is laid bare. Its chaos and passion. Its uniqueness and inscrutability. Not yet subjected to any treatment. The originals.

  I build temples out of our feelings…Out of our desires, our disappointments. Dreams. Out of that which was, but might slip away.

  —

  ONCE AGAIN ABOUT THE same thing…I’m interested not only in the reality that surrounds us, but in the one that is within us. I’m interested not in the event itself, but in the event of feelings. Let’s say—the soul of the event. For me feelings are reality.

  And history? It is in the street. In the crowd. I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our truth. The nightmare of nuances. And it all has to be heard, and one has to dissolve in it all, and become it all. And at the same time not lose oneself. To combine the language of the street and literature. The problem is also that we speak about the past in present-day language. How can we convey the feelings of those days?

  —

  A PHONE CALL IN the morning: “We’re not acquainted…But I’ve come from Crimea, I’m calling from the train station. Is it far from you? I want to tell you my war…”

  Really?!

  And I was about to go to the park with my little girl. To ride the merry-go-round. How can I explain to a six-year-old what it is I do? She recently asked me: “What is war?” How do I reply?…I would like to send her out into this world with a gentle heart, and I teach her that one shouldn’t simply go and pick a flower. It’s a pity to crush a ladybug, to tear the wing off a dragonfly. So how am I to explain war to the child? To explain death? To answer the question of why people kill? Kill even little children like herself. We, the adults, are as if in collusion. We understand what the talk is about. But what of children? After the war my parents somehow explained it to me, but I can’t explain it to my child. Can’t find the words. We like war less and less; it’s more and more difficult to find a justification for it. For us it’s simply murder. At least it is for me.

  I would like to write a book about war that would make war sickening, and the very thought of it repulsive. Insane. So that even the generals would be sickened…

  My men friends (as opposed to women) are taken aback by such “women’s” logic. And again I hear the “men’s” argument: “You weren’t in the war.” But maybe that’s a good thing: I don’t know the passion of hatred; my vision is normal. Unwarlike, unmanly.

  There is a concept in optics called “light-gathering power”—the greater or lesser ability of a lens to fix the caught image. So, then, women’s memory of the war is the most “light-gathering” in terms of strength of feelings, in terms of pain. I would even say that “women’s” war is more terrible than “men’s.” Men hide behind history, behind facts; war fascinates them as action and a conflict of ideas, of interests, whereas women are caught up with feelings. And another thing: men are prepared from childhood for the fact that they may have to shoot. Women are not taught that…They are not prepared to do that work…And they remember other things, and remember differently. They are capable of seeing what is closed to men. I repeat once more: their war has smell, has color, a detailed world of existence: “They gave us kit bags and we made skirts out of them”; “I went into the recruiting office through one door wearing a dress, and came out through the other wearing trousers and an army shirt, with my braid cut off, and only a little lock left on my forehead…”; “The Germans gunned down the village and left…We came to the place: trampled yellow sand, and on top of it one child’s shoe…” I had been warned more than once (especially by male writers): “Women are going to invent a pile of things for you. All sorts of fiction.” But I’m convinced that such things cannot be invented. Who could they be copied from? If that can be copied, it’s only from life; life alone has such fantasy.

  Whatever women talk about, the thought is constantly present in them: war is first of all murder, and then hard work. And then simply ordinary life: singing, falling in love, putting your hair in curlers…

  In the center there is always this: how unbearable and unthinkable it is to die. And how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives it. Bears it in herself for a long time, nurses it. I understood that it is more difficult for women to kill.

  —

  MEN…They reluctantly let women into their world, onto their territory.

  At the Minsk tractor factory I was looking for a woman who had served in the army as a sniper. She had been a famous sniper. The newspapers from the front had written about her more than once. Her Moscow girlfriends gave me her home phone number, but it was old. And the last name I had noted down was her maiden name. I went to the factory where I knew she worked in the personnel department, and I heard from the men (the director of the factory and the head of the personnel department): “Aren’t there enough men? What do you need these women’s stories for? Women’s fantasies…” The men were afraid that women would tell about some wrong sort of war.

  I visited a family…Both husband and wife had fought. They met at the front and got married there: “We celebrated our wedding in the trench. Before the battle. I made a white dress for myself out of a German parachute.” He had been a machine gunner, she a radio operator. The man immediately sent his wife to the kitchen: “Prepare something for us.” The kettle was already boiling, and the sandwiches were served, she sat down with us, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again: “Where are the strawberries? Where are our treats from the country?” After my repeated requests, he reluctantly relinquished his place, saying: “Tell it the way I taught you. Without tears and women’s trifles: how you wanted to be beautiful, how you wept when they cut off your braid.” Later she whispered to me: “He studied The History of the Great Patriotic War with me all last night. He was afraid for me. And now he’s worried I won’t remember right. Not the way I should.”

  That happened more than once, in more than one house.

  Yes, they cry a lot. They shout. Swallow heart pills after I am gone. Call an ambulance. But even so they beg me: “Come. Be sure to come. We’ve been silent so long. Forty years…”

  I realize that tears and cries cannot be subjected to processing, otherwise the main thing will be not the tears and cries, but the processing. Instead of life we’re left with literature. Such is the material, the temperature of this material. Permanently off the charts. A human being is most visible and open in war, and maybe also in love. To the depths, to the subcutaneous layers. In the face of death all ideas pale, and
inconceivable eternity opens up, for which no one is prepared. We still live in history, not in the cosmos.

  Several times women sent back my transcribed text with a postscript: “No need for small details…Write about our great Victory…” But “small details” are what is most important for me, the warmth and vividness of life: a lock left on the forehead once the braid is cut; the hot kettles of kasha and soup, which no one eats, because out of a hundred persons only seven came back from the battle; or how after the war they could not go to the market and look at the rows of red meat…Or even at red cloth…“Ah, my good girl, forty years have already gone by, but you won’t find anything red in my house. Ever since the war I’ve hated the color red!”

  —

  I LISTEN TO THE pain…Pain as the proof of past life. There are no other proofs, I don’t trust other proofs. Words have more than once led us away from the truth.

  I think of suffering as the highest form of information, having a direct connection with mystery. With the mystery of life. All of Russian literature is about that. It has written more about suffering than about love.

  And these women tell me more about it…

  —

  WHO WERE THEY—RUSSIANS OR Soviets? No, they were Soviets—and Russians, and Belorussians, and Ukrainians, and Tajiks…

  Yet there was such a thing as Soviet people. I don’t think such people will ever exist again, and they themselves now understand that. Even we, their children, are different. We want to be like everybody else. Not like our parents, but like the rest of the world. To say nothing of the grandchildren…

  But I love them. I admire them. They had Stalin and the Gulag,*4 but they also had the Victory. And they know that.

  I received a letter recently: “My daughter loves me very much; I am a heroine for her. If she reads your book, she will be greatly disappointed. Filth, lice, endless blood—that’s all true. I don’t deny it. But can the memory of it possibly engender noble feelings? Prepare one for a great deed…?”

  More than once I’ve realized:

  …our memory is far from an ideal instrument. It is not only arbitrary and capricious, it is also chained to time, like a dog.

  …we look at the past from today; we cannot look at it from anywhere else.

  …they, too, are in love with what happened to them, because it is not only war, but also their youth. Their first love.

  —

  I LISTEN WHEN THEY speak…I listen when they are silent…Both words and silence are the text for me.

  —

  —This isn’t for print, it’s for you…The older people…they sat on the train deep in thought…Sad. I remember how one major began talking to me during the night, when everybody was asleep, about Stalin. He had drunk a lot and became bold; he confessed that his father had already spent ten years in the camps without the right of correspondence.*5 Whether he was alive or not, no one knew. This major spoke terrible words: “I want to defend the Motherland, but I don’t want to defend that traitor of the revolution—Stalin.” I had never heard such words…I was frightened. Fortunately, by morning he disappeared. Probably got off…

  —

  —I’ll tell you in secret…I was friends with Oksana, she was from Ukraine. It was from her that I first heard of the horrible hunger in Ukraine. Golodomor.*6 You couldn’t even find a frog or a mouse—everything had been eaten. Half the people in her settlement died. All her younger brothers, her father and mother died, but she saved herself by stealing horse dung at the kolkhoz*7 stable by night and eating it. Nobody could eat it, but she did: “When it’s warm it’s disgusting, but you can eat it cold. Frozen is the best, it smells of hay.” I said, “Oksana, Comrade Stalin is fighting. He destroys the saboteurs, but there are many.” “No,” she said, “you’re stupid. My father was a history teacher, he said to me, ‘Someday Comrade Stalin will answer for his crimes…’ ”

  At night I lay there and thought: What if Oksana is the enemy? A spy? What am I to do? Two days later she was killed in combat. She had no family left, there was no one to send the death notice to…

  —

  I touch upon this subject carefully and rarely. They are still paralyzed not only by Stalin’s hypnosis and fear, but also by their former faith. They cannot stop loving what they used to love. Courage in war and courage of thought are two different courages. I used to think they were the same.

  —

  THE MANUSCRIPT HAS BEEN lying on the desk for a long time…

  For two years now I’ve been getting rejections from publishers. Magazines don’t reply. The verdict is always the same: war is too terrible. So much horror. Naturalism. No leading and guiding role of the Communist Party. In short, not the right kind of war…What is the right kind? With generals and a wise generalissimo? Without blood and lice? With heroes and great deeds? But I remember from childhood: my grandmother and I are walking beside a big field, and she tells me: “After the war nothing grew in this field for a long time. The Germans were retreating…And there was a battle here, it went on for two days…The dead lay next to each other like sheaves. Like railroad ties. The Germans’ and ours. After rain they all had tear-stained faces. Our whole village spent a month burying them.”

  How can I forget that field?

  I don’t simply record. I collect, I track down the human spirit wherever suffering makes a small man into a great man. Wherever a man grows. And then for me he is no longer the mute and traceless proletarian of history. With a torn-off soul. What then is my conflict with the authorities? I understood—a great idea needs a small human being, not a great one. A great one is superfluous and inconvenient for it. Hard to process. And I look for them. I look for small great human beings. Humiliated, trampled upon, insulted—having gone through Stalin’s camps and treachery, these human beings came out victorious. They performed a miracle.

  But the history of the war had been replaced by the history of the victory.

  They themselves will tell about it…

  SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER

  2002–2004

  —

  I’M READING MY OLD journal…

  I’m trying to remember the person I was when I was writing this book. That person is no more, just as the country in which we then lived is no more. Yet it is that country that had been defended and in whose name people had died in the years ’41 to ’45. Outside the window everything is different: a new millennium, new wars, new ideas, new weapons, and the Russian (more exactly, Russian-Soviet) man changed in a totally unexpected way.

  Gorbachev’s perestroika began…*8 My book was published at once, in an astonishing printing—two million copies. This was a time when many startling things were happening, when we again furiously tore off somewhere. Again into the future. We still did not know (or else forgot) that revolution is always an illusion, especially in our history. But that would come later, and at the time everybody was drunk with the air of freedom. I began to receive dozens of letters daily, my folders were swelling. People wanted to talk…to finish talking…They became more free and more open. I had no doubt that I was doomed to go on writing my books endlessly. Not rewriting, but writing. A full stop immediately turns into an ellipsis…

  —

  I THINK THAT TODAY I would probably ask different questions and hear different answers. And would write a different book—not entirely different, but still different. The documents (the ones I deal with) are living witnesses; they don’t harden like cooled clay. They don’t grow mute. They move together with us. What would I ask more about now? What would I like to add? I would be interested in…I’m hunting for the word…the biological human being, not just the human being of time and ideas. I would try to delve deeper into human nature, into the darkness, into the subconscious. Into the mystery of war.

  I would write about my visit to a former partisan fighter. A heavyset but still beautiful woman. She told me how her group (she was the oldest, plus two adolescents) went on a scouting mission and accidentally captured four Ge
rmans. They circled about in the forest with them for a long time. Ran into an ambush. It became clear that they would not be able to break through with the captives and get away, and she made a decision—to dispose of them. The adolescents would not have been able to kill them; they had been wandering together in the forest for a few days, and when you spend that much time with a person, even a stranger, you get used to him, he becomes close—you know how he eats, how he sleeps, what kind of eyes and hands he has. No, the adolescents couldn’t do it. That became clear to her at once. So she had to kill them. She recalled how she did it. She had to deceive her own people and the Germans. She supposedly went to fetch water with one German and shot him from behind. In the head. She took another to gather brushwood…I was shocked to hear her tell it so calmly.