War and Remembrance (119 page)

The car halted.

“Quiet,” said Yevlenko, speaking for the first time in a quarter of an hour.

“This is the most beautiful city I have ever seen,” said Pug.

“Paris is more beautiful, they say. And Washington.”

“No place is more beautiful.” Impulsively Pug added, “Moscow is a village.”

Yevlenko gave him a very peculiar look.

“Is that an offensive remark? I just said what I think.”

“Very undiplomatic,” Yevlenko growled. The growl came out rather like a purr.

As the day went on Pug saw much shell damage: broken buildings, barricaded streets, hundreds of windows patched with scrap wood. The sun rose, making a blinding dazzle of the thoroughfares. The city came to life, especially in the southern sector nearer the German lines, where the factories
were. Here the artillery scars were worse; whole blocks were burned out. Pedestrians trudged in the cleared streets, an occasional trolley car bumped by, and there was heavy traffic of army trucks and personnel vehicles. Pug heard the intermittent thump of German guns, and saw stencilled on buildings,
CITIZENS! DURING ARTILLERY SHELLING, THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS MORE DANGEROUS.
Yet the sense of an almost empty, almost peaceful great city persisted even here; and these later and more mundane impressions did not erase — nothing ever erased — Pug Henrys vivid morning vision of wartime Leningrad as a sleeping beauty, an enchanted blue frosty metropolis of the dead.

Even the Kirov Works, which Yevlenko said would be very busy, had a desolate air. In one big bombed-out building, half-assembled tanks stood in rows under the burned rubble from the cave-in, and dozens of shawled women were patiently clearing away the debris. One place was very busy: an immense open-air depot of trucks under an elaborate camouflage netting that stretched for blocks. Here maintenance work was proceeding at a hot pace in a tumult of clanking tools and shouting workmen, and here was Lend-Lease come to life: an outpouring from Detroit, seven thousand miles away beyond the U-boat gauntlet; uncountable American trucks showing heavy wear. Yevlenko said most of these had been running on the ice road through the winter. Now the ice was getting soft, the rail line was open, and that route was probably finished. After reconditioning, the trucks would go to the central and southern fronts, where great counterattacks were beating back the Germans. Yevlenko then took him to an airdrome ringed with antiaircraft batteries that looked like U.S. Navy stuff. Russian Yak fighters and Russian-marked Airacobras were dispersed under camouflage all over the bomb-plowed field.

“My son flies this airplane,” said Yevlenko, slapping the cowl of an Airacobra. “It is a good airplane. You will meet him when we go to Kharkov.”

Near sundown they picked up Yevlenko’s daughter-in-law, a volunteer nurse coming off duty at a hospital. The car wound through silent streets that looked as though a tornado had swept them clean of houses, leaving block after block of shallow foundations and no rubble. All the wooden houses here, Yevlenko explained, had been pulled down and burned as fuel. At a flat waste where rows of tombstones stuck out of the snow, the car stopped. Much of the graveyard was randomly marked with bits of debris — a piece of broken pipe, a stick, a slat from a chair — or crude crosses of wood or tin. Yevlenko and his daughter-in-law left the car, and searched among the crosses. Far off, the general knelt in the snow.

“Well, she was almost eighty,” he said to Pug, as the car drove away from the cemetery. His face was calm, his mouth a bitter line. “She had a hard life. Before the revolution she was a parlor maid. She was not very
educated. Still, she wrote poetry, nice poetry. Vera has some poems she wrote just before she died. We can go back to the barracks now, but Vera invites us to her apartment. What do you say? The food will be better at the barracks. The soldiers get the best we have.”

“The food doesn’t matter,” said Pug. An invitation to a Russian home was an extraordinary thing.

“Well, then, you’ll see how a Leningrader lives nowadays.”

Vera smiled at Pug, and despite poor teeth she all at once seemed less ugly. Her eyes were a pretty green-blue, and charming warmth brightened her face, which might once have been plump. The skin hung in folds, the nose was very sharp, and the eye sockets were dark holes.

In an almost undamaged neighborhood they entered a gloomy hallway smelling of clogged toilets and frying oil, and went up four narrow flights of a black-dark staircase. A key grated in a lock. Vera lit an oil lamp, and by the greenish glow, Pug saw one tiny room jammed with a bed, a table, two chairs, and a pile of broken wood around a tiled stove, with a tin flue wandering to a boarded-up window. It was colder here than outside, where the sun had just gone down. Vera lit the stove, broke a skin of ice in a pail, and poured water into a kettle. The general set out a bottle of vodka from a canvas bag he had carried up the stairs. Frozen through, despite heavy underwear and bulky boots, gloves, and a sweater, Pug was glad to toss off several glassfuls with the general.

Yevlenko pointed to the bed where he sat. “Here she died, and lay for two weeks. Vera couldn’t get her a coffin. There were no coffins. No wood. Vera would not put her in the ground like a dog. It was very cold, much below zero, so it was not a health problem. Still, you would think it was horrible. But Vera says she just looked asleep and peaceful all that long time. Naturally the old people went first, they didn’t have the stamina.”

The room was rapidly warming. Frying pancakes at the stove, Vera took off her shawl and fur coat, disclosing a ragged sweater, and a skirt over thick leggings and boots. “People ate strange things,” she said calmly. “Leather straps. Glue off the wallpaper. Even dogs and cats, and rats and mice and sparrows. Not me, none of that. But I heard of such things. In the hospital we heard awful stories.” She pointed at the pancakes starting to sizzle on the stove. “I’ve made these with sawdust and petroleum jelly. Terrible, you got very sick, but it filled your stomach. There was a small ration of bread. I gave it all to Mama, but after a while she stopped eating. Apathetic.”

“Tell him about the coffin,” said Yevlenko.

“A poet lives downstairs,” Vera said, turning the sputtering cakes. “Lyzukov, very well-known in Leningrad. He broke up his desk and made Mama a coffin. He still has no desk.”

“And about the cleanup,” said the general.

The daughter-in-law snapped with sudden peevishness, “Captain Henry doesn’t want to hear of these sad things.”

Pug said haltingly, “If it makes you sad, that’s different, but I am interested.”

“Well, later, maybe. Now let us eat.”

She began setting the table. Yevlenko took from the wall a photograph of a young man in uniform. “This is my son.”

The lamplight showed a good Slavic face: curly hair, broad brow, high cheekbones, a naive clever expression. Pug said, “Handsome.”

“I believe you told me you have an aviator son.”

“I had. He was killed in the Battle of Midway.”

Yevlenko stared, then gripped Pug’s shoulder with his good hand. Vera was setting a bottle of red wine on the table from the canvas bag. Yevlenko uncorked the bottle. “His name?”

“Warren.”

The general got to his feet, filling three glasses. Pug stood up, too.
“Varren Viktorovich Genry,”
said Yevlenko. As Pug drank down the thin sour wine, in this wretched lamplit room growing stuffy from the stove heat, he felt — for the first time — something about Warren’s death that was not pure agony. However briefly, the death bridged a gulf between alien worlds. Yevlenko set down his drained glass. “We know about the Battle of Midway. It was an important United States Navy victory which reversed the tide in the Pacific.”

Pug could not speak. He nodded.

With the pancakes there were sausages and American canned fruit salad from the general’s bag. They rapidly emptied the bottle of wine and opened another. Vera began to talk about the siege. The worst thing, she said, had been when the snow had started to melt last spring, late in March. Bodies had begun to appear everywhere, bodies frozen and unburied for months, people who had just fallen down in the streets and died. The garbage, the rubble, and the wreckage, emerging with the thousands of bodies, had created a ghastly situation, a sickening smell everywhere, a big threat of an epidemic. But the authorities had severely organized the people, and a gigantic cleanup had saved the city. Bodies had been dumped in enormous mass graves, some identified, many not.

“You see, whole families had starved,” Vera said. “Or only one would be left, sick or apathetic. People wouldn’t be missed. Oh, you could tell when a person was getting ready to die. It was the apathy. If you could get them to a hospital, or put them to bed and try to feed them, it might help. But they would say they were all right, and insist on going out to work. Then they would sit or lie down on the sidewalk, and die in the snow.” She
glanced at Yevlenko and her voice dropped. “And often their ration cards would be stolen. Some people became like wolves.”

Yevlenko drank wine and thudded his glass on the table. “Well, enough about it. Big blunders were made. Crude stupid unforgivable blunders.”

They had been drinking enough so that Pug was emboldened to say, “By whom?”

Immediately he thought he had committed a fatal offense. General Yevlenko gave him a nasty glare, showing his big yellow teeth. “A million old people, children, and others who weren’t ablebodied should have been evacuated. With the Germans a hundred miles away, and bombers coming around the clock, food stores shouldn’t have been left in old wooden warehouses. Six month’s rations for the whole city burned up in one night. Tons of sugar melted and ran into the ground. The people ate that dirt.”

“I ate it,” said Vera. “I paid a good price for it.”

“People ate worse than that.” Yevlenko stood up. “But the Germans did not take Leningrad, and they will not. Moscow gave the orders, but Leningrad saved itself.” His speech was growing muffled and he was putting on his greatcoat with his back to Pug, who thought he heard him add, “Despite the orders.” He turned around and said, “Well, starting tomorrow,
Kapitan,
you will see some places that the Germans took.”

Yevlenko travelled at a gruelling pace. Place names melted into each other — Tikhvin, Rzhev, Mozhaisk, Vyazma, Tula, Livny — like American midwestern cities, they were all settlements on a broad flat plain under a big sky, one much resembling another; not in peaceful and banal sameness, as in the American repetition of filling stations, diners, and motels, but in horror. As they flew on and on for hundreds of miles, descending to visit an army in the field, or a headquarters in a village, or a depot of tanks and motor transport, or an operating airfield, Pug got a picture of the Russian front colossal in scale and numbing in wreckage and death.

The retreating Germans had executed a scorched-earth policy in reverse. Whatever was worth stealing, they had carried off; what would burn, they had burned; what would not, they had dynamited. For thousands and thousands of square miles they had ravaged the land like locusts. Where they had been gone for a while, buildings were rising again. Where they had recently been pushed out, shabby haggard Russians with shocked eyes were poking in the ruins or burying their dead; or they were being fed by army field kitchens in queues, under the open sky on the flat snowy plain.

Here was the problem of a separate peace, written plain across the devastated land. That the Russians loathed and despised the Germans as a form of invading vermin was obvious. Each village or city had its horror stories, its dossier of atrocity photographs of beatings, of shootings, of rapes,
of heaps of bodies. The pictures numbed and bored by their grisly repetition. That the Russians wanted vengeance was equally obvious. But if after a few more bloody defeats like Stalingrad, the hated invaders would agree to leave the Soviet earth, stop torturing these people, and pay for the damage they had wrought, could the Russians be blamed for making peace?

Pug saw vast quantities of Lend-Lease materiel in use. Above all, there were the trucks, the trucks everywhere. Once Yevlenko said to him, at a depot in the south where olive-painted trucks, not yet marked with Russian lettering and red stars, stretched literally out of sight in parallel rows, “You have put us on wheels. It is making a difference. Now Fritz’s wheels are wearing out. He is going back to horses. One day he will eat the horses, and run out of Russia on foot.”

In an army HQ in a large badly shattered river town called Voronezh, they were eating an all-Russian supper: cabbage soup, canned fish, and some kind of fried grits. The aides were at another table. Yevlenko and Pug sat alone.
“Kapitan Genry,
we will not be going to Kharkov after all,” the general said in a formal tone. “The Germans are counterattacking.”

“Don’t alter your itinerary on my account.”

Yevlenko gave him the unsettling glare he had flashed in Leningrad. “Well, it’s quite a counterattack. So instead we will go to Stalingrad.”

“I’m sorry to miss your son.”

“His air wing is in action, so we would not see him. He is not a bad young fellow. Maybe some other time you will meet him.”

From the air, the approaches to Stalingrad were a moonscape. Giant bomb craters, pustular rings by the thousands, scarred a snowy earth littered with machines. Stalingrad itself, straggling along a black broad river flecked with floating ice, had the roofless broken look of a dug-up ancient city. As Yevlenko and his aides stared down at the ruins, Pug recalled his own dismaying airplane arrival over Pearl Harbor. But Honolulu had been untouched; only the fleet had been hit. No city on American soil had known such destruction. In the Soviet Union it was everywhere, and worst in this scene below.