Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (30 page)

Botnev and I walk quickly over to it.
H
ere the cellars aren
’
t under the houses; they are built separately, with bricked roofs and a dozen steps leading down. This cellar isn
’
t cool and stuffy: people have been living in it for the past few days—the owners, perhaps, or some neighbors. They
’
re hiding out here and have brought in their belongings. The brick roof is vaulted, though, and you couldn
’
t ask for anything better.

It
’
s very odd and very cheering for us to see living Russian peasants, to see gardens planted near the houses and grain growing in the fields. On the Soviet side of the front line, all the peasants have been sent some twenty kilometers farther back out of fear of treachery. This is now the third year that area has been without a living soul, no crops planted, and the fields overgrown with weeds as in the time of the
Polovtsians
.

(And yet your heart still contracts with love for this
unworked
and unpeopled land. It is clear: You could die without regrets for this Russian heartland.
Especially after the swamps of the Northwest.)

But as soon as we crossed to the German side, we saw that people were still living there!

The people in the cellar look at us fearfully. No, we
’
re not going to drive them out, they
’
re our own folk:
“
Listen, friends, you
’
re going to have to crowd in toward the back. We need to use the front of the cellar.
”

The women—there are no young men, just one very old fellow and some kids—heave a quiet sigh: How can they squeeze back any farther? But all their faces seem so familiar—our own folk. And they
’
re happy we aren
’
t chasing them out altogether.

“
Now my lads are going to stack your baskets and sacks up a bit higher. Let
’
s go, boys!
”

We can squeeze in ourselves, but we still need a good bit of space for our equipment and our four small folding tables. But it looks as if we have enough room.

Choosing a place for the central station was the first urgent thing that had to be done. Now there is the second: we have to set up the station in the cellar as quickly as possible. But we have the men here to do it: Dugin and
Blokhin
, the two who work in shifts at the central instruments, along with some people from the plotting platoon.

I go up the stairs. An ominous rosy glow has covered half the sky in the east, revealing a few small cirrus clouds that weren
’
t visible before.

But then there is also the ominous throbbing of airplane engines. We were absolutely fed up with those damned things. Why can
’
t they leave us alone?

Wait, now. It
’
s all right. They
’
re
our
planes!

Since the spring we
’
ve seen many more of our own planes in the sky. We can stop crouching now. When we were in our defensive positions we
’
d seen more and more large groups of our long-range bombers, engines roaring under their heavy loads, flying off on some bombing mission far away. (And what were we so glad about? Their loads were being dumped on our own Russian cities, after all.) As we neared Oryol we could see it happening sixty kilometers beyond: the intersecting searchlight beams, the silver bursts of the antiaircraft guns, the red trails of the rockets, and the lightning flashes of the bursting bombs. And just in these last days we could recognize the triumphant waves of
Ilyushins
and their fighter escorts, flying low as they came back from some mission quite near to us. We
’
d give a cheer as their wings passed over: this was direct help to us, right nearby.

Those planes of ours are flying high. They
’
ve chosen their time well: the sun is just coming over the horizon, and the Germans will be blinded.

The plotting platoon is working well; they
’
ve done all this more than a few times. They carefully remove the central apparatus from its case and carry it down the stairs. The tables come behind them, along with all the measuring and plotting
equipment. The linesmen are stacking up reels of cable outside, each one labeled with the number of a listening post. Once they
’
ve hooked them up, they
’
ll run all the lines from here. Sergeant Major
Kornev
, a capable manager, has found a spot for the kitchen, lower down among the bushes; it doesn
’
t have much cover, but
it
’
s
well away from the houses in the village. Machine gun fire along the line of houses would pass well overhead. He has the drivers dig ramps for the trucks not far from the bushes; he
’
s a sturdy fellow and lends a hand. The main thing is to get the truck engines down below ground level. All this we can manage to do quickly.

I walk around, smoking and feeling anxious. I keep senselessly opening my map case and checking the map again and again, though I have it almost memorized.

The sun is now fully up. The clouds are melting away.

One of the streets of the village rises up the slope from our position; there are already some fresh, deep black shell holes in it. Beyond the small ravine to our right is a second street, a level one. A battery of seventy-sixes has deployed there. The houses seem to be empty; some of the villagers are in the cellars, some have gone off to the forest. None of the chimneys are smoking.

Come on, Ovsyannikov, you don
’
t have that far to go.

Here they come! An extended line of men is coming up from the little hollow. Even without my binoculars I can sense that they are our boys. They are marching cheerfully along, with Ovsyannikov setting the pace. And once they get here, the third rush job will begin: each listening post will collect its equipment, reels of cable, packs, and dry rations; and while these minutes tick away, Ovsyannikov will be establishing the exact location of each listening post, based on the estimations he made on his map. On the basis of the strengths of each crew, he has to determine which one will man the first post, the second post, and so on. Each crew chief has to hustle away to his post along an exact compass bearing, so as not to go astray. The forward observer has his own job to do. These ten or fifteen minutes when the whole battery is bunched up here are the most dangerous. It will be easier once all sixty of us aren
’
t crowded in the same spot.

Our boys keep coming in, and they go on working just as they have been trained, by the book. The listening posts smartly make all their preparations for deployment. Ovsyannikov and I sit down on a fallen tree trunk to fix the location of the posts more precisely. There
’
s an argument over a reel of cable: someone has walked off with a good reel and left one with a lot of spliced wire.

Everyone looks exhausted, and no one has had enough sleep. They wear their field caps every which way. Yet they move quickly, each of them well aware that we are not in some nameless little local operation, we are part of the Great Offensive! That itself gives them much more energy.

The linesmen are connecting their cables and beginning to lay out double lines. The Germans are already sending over a shot: a heavy shell passes over us
and goes on to burst with a spectacular crash. It was probably in
Setukha
, near the main road. Then
comes
the first
“
picture frame,
”
the twin-fuselage
Focke
-Wulf reconnaissance plane, buzzing about high overhead, looking for a target. Our antiaircraft
don
’
t
respond: it
’
s basically a waste of time firing at
“
picture frames,
”
they always manage to dodge the shrapnel. Then a few heavy bombers fly over as well, toward
Setukha
.

We should be pinpointing our position while the morning is still cool. They hadn
’
t moved us out at the best time.

Each listening post has four or five men, and they have a lot of heavy equipment to carry. A single storage battery is enough to throw out your shoulder; they usually need eight reels of cable, and sometimes more than ten; the sensor isn
’
t heavy, but it
’
s a cube, awkward to carry, and you have to guard it like your life so as not to tear the large diaphragm, and it would be useless if a shell fragment hit it. There
’
s also the transformer, the telephone, and some other small equipment.
Submachine guns, carbines, sappers
’
spades—
all that has to be hauled out as well. (We
’
ve long since stopped wearing gas masks and just toss them all in the back of the truck.)

Stocky little Burlov takes his crew to post number one, on the left. He holds his compass in his hand like a watch, always checking the bearing to make sure he
’
s on track. The lanky, imperturbable Siberian,
Yermolaev
, a man who can put up with anything, is in his crew; Ovsyannikov always picks the most reliable people for the distant posts. Then there
’
s Shmakov, who probably has some charges hanging over his head: he
’
d been in an anti-tank unit and couldn
’
t take the close combat, so he turned and ran and happened on our unit. We
’
ve had more than a few deserters of our own, so the commissar just said to hell with it, we
’
ll take him on. And he
’
s been a good soldier.

Shukhov, a quick and capable fellow (we promoted him to corporal to replace a wounded sergeant) leads his crew to post number two. The dark, sullen Volkov is on post five, the other
far
one, on the right. The central listening posts are closer, with shorter cables and just four men in each.

I go over the map with the gloomy, freckle-faced Yemelyanov (whenever we have an extra map, he
’
s the one who gets it): he
’
s the forward observer and has a delicate job, almost an officer
’
s, but the position means that he wears a senior sergeant
’
s insignia and is always the man at the very front. He has to react to every significant sound of firing and determine by ear the caliber, not wasting a second. (Later, someone closer to the shell burst can still correct him.)

The forward lines are getting livelier, with mortars pounding on both sides. The seventy-sixers from our Zhelyabuga Village are already firing, and we
’
re still not ready. Once they need us, there can
’
t be any delay.

Ovsyannikov is itching to get up to our farthest post: the final selection of a place to dig in the sensor is critical (the soldiers tend to choose the place that
’
s most comfortable, and close to some water as well). He also has to make sure that
the location isn
’
t screened by any objects around it. (There was a case when a crew just hauled their equipment into a barn to get out of the rain; meanwhile, we were wondering what the hell was going on and why all the recordings were so blurred.) So Ovsyannikov strides off to catch up with Burlov.

Behind us another little group is walking up to our position. These are the surveyors, carrying their striped poles and tripods. Come on, hustle, we need you right now! The commander of the survey platoon, Lieutenant Kuklin, a sweet-tempered young fellow with the face and the stature of a boy, has brought them up. My Botnev, not much bigger than he, is telling him off:
“
Where have you been, taking a nap? Without you we have to fix all our coordinates by eye, and what good is that?
”
And he
’
s right: someone
’
s always on our back, checking such things, and if they miss a target it
’
s always our fault. Would anyone ever walk out and check the surveyor
’
s work? That never happens. If the surveyors make a mistake in one of their fixes, the locations of all the targets will be off.