Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (22 page)

Boyev lay down on the little sofa: It wasn
’
t proper to lie in a bed with your boots on, and with your boots off, what kind of soldier are you?

~ * ~

6

For some the war began in
‘
41, but for Boyev it began with Lake
Khasan
, in
‘
38. Then the Finnish War. And so the past seven years of his life had been nothing but war. He
’
d been off twice recovering from wounds, but with the war on there was no
leave to go back home. It had been eleven years now since he
’
d been able to get back to his native Ishim steppe, with its hundreds of mirror-like lakes and huge flocks of game birds, or gone to Petropavlovsk to see his sister.

Only when he
’
d gone into the army had Pavel Boyev seen some real life. What was there for him outside the army? Southern Siberia was a long time in getting back on its feet after the Civil War and the crushing of the Ishim rebellion. In a good many places in Petropavlovsk the fences along the streets and around the gardens still hadn
’
t been rebuilt; many had been burned, and those that had been repaired were leaning. Broken window-panes were stuffed with rags or pasted over with paper. The felt strips of insulation around the doors hung in shreds or had been replaced with straw or bark. Housing was really scarce, and he lived with his married sister,
Praskovya
. The problem of footwear was no better, and you went on and on mending the soles of your boots but your toes would still stick out. The food supply was worse yet: the bread you got on your ration card did nothing to fill a hungry working man . . . And you had to stand in line for everything, from five in the morning in some places. A mob would rush up to a store, not even asking what they
’
d be selling. Once a line formed they
’
d find out. The streets were filled with beggars.

In the army, though, they
’
d stuff you full of meat
borshch
and you had all the bread you could eat. The uniforms weren
’
t always new, but at least they weren
’
t full of holes. And the men in the army were the beloved sons of the people. Collar tabs were crimson for the infantry, black for the artillery, and light blue for the cavalry; and there were other colors too (red for the GPU). Life was organized on a precise schedule of drills, forming up, saluting, and marching, and your whole life had a purpose: life meant serving, and everyone had his job. He couldn
’
t wait to get into the army and joined even before he was called up.

And so he never had to adapt himself to anything other than army life, and he never married. Then the trumpet sounded to call him to this war as well.

In the army, Pavel Boyev realized that he was a born soldier, that he
’
d been meant for the army and it was his home. He knew that army routine—firing exercises, packing up the equipment, moving out, changing your maps, and adapting to new routine—was what life was all about. In
‘
41 they lost some guns and tractors, but that didn
’
t happen again unless a gun had a direct hit or a tractor was blown up on a mine. War was a job, but one with no days off and no holidays, with his eyes peering through a binocular telescope. The battalion was his family, the officers his brothers, the soldiers his sons, and each one of them was a treasure. He had learned to live with the idea that life was a movement from one dodgy situation to another, that happy moments were short-lived, and that now there wasn
’
t a turn of events that could surprise or frighten him. He had completely
forgotten
h
ow to be afraid.
And if some extra duty or risky mission came up, he would always volunteer. Under the fiercest bombing and the heaviest bombardment, Boyev never prepared himself for death but tried only to comprehend what he had to do and how best to do it.

He opened his eyes (he hadn
’
t been sleeping). Toplev came in. The horses had arrived.

Boyev dropped his legs to the floor.

Toplev was still a boy, a bit delicate for an adjutant. But Boyev didn
’
t want to pull out any of his battery commanders for his staff and so he took Toplev off his post as head of reconnaissance.

“
I want to see Boronets.
”

The battalion sergeant major, Boronets, was a solid, clever fellow whose eyes never missed a thing. He had already anticipated his orders and had set aside all the unnecessary things—the booty they had picked up and other odds and ends—from the sleds. Three sleds were loaded with gear for the observation points—spools of wire, radios, binocular telescopes, grenades, the weapons and packs of the men in the headquarters platoons, and some rations.

“
Did you see anyone on the road after Liebstadt? Any sign of the infantry?
”

Boronets only smacked his lips and shook his large round head.

“
Not a soul.
”

So where was the infantry? Had they disappeared altogether?

Boyev went outside. The sky was covered in thick cloud, the ground white with snow. The silence all around was complete and unbroken. No more snow was falling.

All three battery commanders where just were they should be, waiting for orders. One was always with the battalion commander. That would be Myagkov, as usual. Proshchenkov and Kasyanov were each a kilometer away, one to his left, one to his right, at their preliminary observation posts, and they communicated with the battalion commander only through their batteries.

Well, they had all seen a thing or two and they knew their own troops. Now the most important thing was to pick places for the OPs. But first he had to decide how far forward he could and should site them. And how could he decide that in such darkness, silence, and without any screen of infantry? If they were too shallow they
’
d be useless; if they were too deep they might well stumble on the Germans.

“
Just keep in mind, boys, that when it
’
s this quiet and this deserted, things could get very, very serious.
”

To Toplev he said:
“
Zhenya, you have to find the infantry. Send out all the runners you
’
ve got to look for them. When you find them, have the CO of the regiment come and see me. Something
’
s not right . . . They
’
re taking too long . . .
Find out the situation from brigade. I
’
m going to pick out some OPs and then I
’
ll contact you.
”

He jumped into the first sled.

~ * ~

7

In the absence of the battery commander, the senior officer of Six Battery was the commander of First Platoon, Lieutenant Pavel Kandalintsev. Nearly forty, he was also senior in age to all the brigade
’
s platoon commanders. He was fairly tall, though without much of a military bearing. His shoulders were somewhat hunched, his hair prematurely gray, but he ran his platoon well. The other platoon commanders called him
“
Dad.
”

Oleg Gusev, who had grown up among a group of street urchins in the city, had learned a good many things from Kandalintsev, things that could not be learned elsewhere.

Even before siting all four guns in their fire positions, Kandalintsev had set a screen of outposts in a semicircle fifty meters to their front. The tractors that had towed the guns had moved back and fallen silent, and Kandalintsev allowed the crews to man their guns in shifts. He pointed out to Gusev a small stone barn not far to their rear.

“
Let
’
s go there for a bit and rest our weary bones.
”

By shifting the location of the battery slightly he was able to give easier access to the nearby houses, and it would be easier to fire from here as well.

The gun crews off shift came here to sleep as well. Gusev had gone into two houses and twisted the dials on the radios there, hoping to find one that had its own power supply. But none of them was working. Private houses with radio receivers were something new that they found only in Europe. They took some getting used to: in the Soviet Union all radios had been confiscated for the duration of the war, and if you didn
’
t turn yours in, it was off to prison.
But here . . .

Oleg really wanted to find out something about our breakthrough and pick up at least a few more details. But the battery
’
s radios could pick up only one of our stations, on the long wave, and there was no news at all about the breakthrough.

Kandalintsev had been called up from the reserves in 1941. He
’
d had two hard years at war on the Leningrad front, and after being wounded he
’
d been sent here, to the brigade, where he
’
d spent nearly two years.

Kandalintsev would never pass up the opportunity for even a few moments of rest.

They went into the barn and lay down side by side on the hay.

How quiet it was.

“
Maybe the Germans have just fainted away, do you think, Pavel Petrovich? They
’
ve been cut off and pushed back, so now they
’
re crowding into K
ö
nigsberg. Is this the end of the war, d
’
you think?
”

Kandalintsev, though, was by no means exhausted by the war, and unlike the others he was ready to keep at it for a long time yet.
“
A-
hh
,
”
he sighed deeply.

He was lying there not saying a word. But it seemed he hadn
’
t fallen asleep.

Young officers would dream of what might happen:
“
People are saying that after the war everything at home is going to change for the better. We
’
ll have a free life! We
’
ll really start living! And they say that they
’
ll do away with the collective farms, what
d
’
you think
?
”

He didn
’
t care if there were collective farms or not, but the whole fighting army was filled with such hopes. And, in fact, why shouldn
’
t they start living better and with more freedom?

Kandalintsev had heard all this many times before; he had gone through all the party purges hearing about it. In a tired though not contradictory
voice, he said:
“
No, Oleg, nothing
’
s going to change at home. We
’
ll be lucky if it doesn
’
t get worse.
The collective farms?
No, they
’
ll never do away with them. The state can
’
t do without them. We shouldn
’
t be wasting our time. Let
’
s get some sleep.
”

~ * ~

8

Yes, war was a heavy burden you bore every day, with times of sudden, violent eruptions when a careless man might easily fall on the battlefield or shed some blood. But even in war his heart was never as heavy as it had been when he was a quiet, well-educated man working in the ravaged countryside in 1930 and 1931. While some maliciously calculated
plague raged around him, he could only look at the eyes of the dying and listen
to the wailing of women and the weeping of children. It was as if he himself had been vaccinated against this plague but also dared not help any of its victims.

That was what faced Pavel Kandalintsev immediately after his graduation, when he was a young agronomist at a plant breeding station in Voronezh Oblast. He tended the sprouts of the seedlings in the greenhouse, while around him human seedlings of two years or three months were being sent away on sleds in the bitter cold—on a long journey to their deaths. In his own eyes he was also one of the oppressors. And secretly he knew—and could not share his knowledge with anyone—that the peasants who opposed the collective farms were destroying their own stock or grinding up their best seed grain to make flour for their bread. They
didn
’
t hide the fact that they were slaughtering their livestock, and they couldn
’
t be stopped. Then the grain collectors would come and scoop up every kernel that remained in their granaries, assemble a train of
“
Red carts,
”
and drive them into the city:
“
The peasants bring you their surplus.
”
There in the city a brass band would march at the head of the procession of carts.