Unforgiving Years (22 page)

Daria could not know that Colonel Fontov had already been through those stages; that he kept his crises in check by smoking, that he no longer expected anything either for or from himself, and that he adored a callous man-made deity which may be no realer than other gods but which you have to believe in to impose perfect discipline on soldiers, whether on the production line or the line of fire: the god Labor, brother of Death since its ultimate effect is to destroy the laborer. The machine invisibly devours the mechanic’s very substance, which is time. Production, you say? Production feeds and prepares war, which is a destruction of production and of man. Expanded production of the means of production is expanded destruction of human substance; the production of consumer goods has as its object maintaining the workforce in a fit state for labor, that is for wearing itself out, and this is the ring that closes the chain of pan-destruction … Idle for a few minutes (it was never more than four), he had spoken again to Daria. “I’m more of an economist myself. Political economy is worse than war …”

If he had begun to speechify — but before whom? — he would have said: “Our beautiful language, forged by serfs and by sages, employs the same word to denote two concepts: will and freedom … One word for an absolute antinomy, of a nature to delight the philosophers, who are for the most part mystifiers. What we mean by the will only acts to suppress freedom; what we mean by freedom is nothing but an illusory flight from the will … The living writhe between these two poles of incomprehensibility. I admire the determinists who think they’ve understood. I’d like to show them a bit of introspection five minutes before the signal to attack! The soldier obeys: neither will nor freedom, is that clear? The leader needs no more, and the leader himself obeys. It’s all anybody needs! The soldier is trapped between several formidable fears: fear of being killed while obeying orders, fear of being executed for disobeying them, fear of being a coward or appearing to be one, fear of despising himself, and many other fears all churning in his belly, causing him to piss and shit abundantly. What we mean by courage is decanted through this physio-psychological process which answers to profound natural causes: wounds to an emptied bowel are much less dangerous than wounds to a full one … Savages have magic formulas. In war, we are savages furnished with technical know-how. My magic formula comes down to this: work! Labor operates a practical synthesis of obscure imperatives, more potential than actual, more imaginary than real: will, liberty, necessity, finality. Labor destroys men, objects, and time, but it is a destruction which provides itself with aspects of creation. That may be the last myth. In war it’s clear and even yields an instant gain in accord with brute instinct. I work to destroy the enemy, a breed of men which must be destroyed so that our own breed may be able work in peace … I work to defend four kilometers of threatened road, whose loss would translate into twenty thousand deaths inside the city within a week … So, to work! Since the work consists of killing, it is only natural that we shall eventually be killed ourselves … To work!” Earlier, Fontov had exchanged only a few elliptical remarks with Daria while he was soaking his feet in a bucket of warm water; but Daria reconstituted what he would have said if he had expressed himself at leisure; which he never did, lacking leisure but also disdaining words, and out of prudence. The worker must be prudent and fear nothing so much as expressing truth or sincerity.

This night’s mission was to obtain information by capturing enemy troops — but not men out on patrol, who don’t carry anything on them. Battalion commanders would send raiding parties out into the enemy lines or against advanced outposts. Vosskov designated six men and a lieutenant. He seemed to know them personally, to be assessing the fortitude and destiny of each man as he considered him. Daria wished she could see into their souls. They were an ordinary bunch, with ordinary names. The inevitable Ivanov plus a Sidorov, to refine the banality, both unremarkable, stumpy, and gray-skinned; a Tziulik from the Ukraine whose name made the others laugh and who indeed had a tiny head on the body of an extremely wiry Punchinello; a moon-faced Tartar oozing deceptive sweetness named Maymedov-Oglu; Dzilichvili, a wiry Caucasian highlander; and Leifert, who was of German ancestry. Finally there was Lieutenant Patkin, who sported black tufts of eyebrows over a snub nose, and resembled the kind of small-time hood that prowls around marketplaces — clever brutes with a knack for counterfeiting and bootlegging, slipping home a blade under cover of a brawl, hopping over fences and bamboozling the girls with fine-sounding words (not one of which they mean). “Quite the charming rogue,” whispered Daria into Major Vosskov’s ear. “You’ve got it. He started off as a child of the road and the wastelands, spent two years in a penal colony, recently graduated as a cadre, with several commendations … He’s both astute and extremely brave. After the war, I can see him making a first-rate gangster …” Patkin was memorizing the map of the operation. Here the ice is cracked; but over here, right in the middle of the impassable section — as they believe it to be — the ice has resealed itself, the planks are laid, you can wriggle across one behind the other. There are forty yards between the two machine-gun nests on the opposite bank. Their trenches are damaged, and badly guarded ever since they pulverized ours; we’ve ostensibly moved our earthworks a little farther back … This is where their shelters begin … “Only shoot as a last resort, bring two or three prisoners back, whatever the cost. Whatever the cost,” repeated Patkin, frowning as he measured this authorization to sacrifice his companions if need be. “It’ll be done, Comrade Commander.” He spoke the words unemphatically, in an unwilling, almost bitter voice.

The six men waiting in the shelter formed an obscure mass, huddled within its silence. How many would return? They were a broad sample of the people of the Union. Each had turned over his documents — penciled letters and few personal belongings; the commander was now arranging these in little piles on the table, like the possessions of the dead. What a gap is left inside a man, when he has to part with his letter from home! They were trying on the white shrouds, lowering hoods over eyes, experimentally … Anonymous, faceless; dim white phantoms equipped with light weapons and a square of chocolate (chocolate is a treat even for those who court death, but it must not be eaten straightaway, however annoying it can be to die before eating it … ). A tram driver from Rostov-on-Don — Rostov, that had been burned to the ground; a tractor mechanic from the country outside Voronezh — the bombed, the ransacked Voronezh; a schoolteacher from Chernikov — occupied, ransomed Chernikov, inhabited by the hanged; a cattle farmer from the steppes of the lower Volga — a Muslim or perhaps a Buddhist, and the war was almost there; a young wine grower from the green and russet hills of Kakhetia — its hamlets emptied of young men; a printer from Moscow — wounded, famished, blacked-out Moscow … What will they achieve tonight, what will become of them, these peaceful men who believe in the future? Six, seven men counting the lieutenant, twenty-five bereavements suspended in their wake, en route to the torture of cold, darkness, fire, murder, and unknowable death …

They know it all, Daria thought, they are plunging tranquilly into an abyss, they are monstrously aware. If their souls could explode, broadcasting their lamentation to the world, all wars would end, how simple it would be! Simply impossible. The Ukrainian, Tziulik, asked the commissar for a glass of vodka. “Wiseass! You know how to exploit the situation,” said the commissar. “Pass the bottle around to the others, schoolteacher.” “If I don’t come back, you’ll be sure to write to my wife?” “I promise, but you’ll be writing to her yourself, lucky bastard.” The voices of these men were fraternal. The commissar put on a satisfied expression. “As for me, if one of these days I don’t make it back from the middle of nowhere, there won’t be anyone writing to anybody … I don’t have anyone left. A bird in the air with no nest!” Tziulik clapped him heartily on the back. “You’re a lucky bastard too.” Move! Daria was seeing men moving out for the first time in her life. She realized that such sorties had been taking place for years now, a hundred, a thousand times a day or night, along thousands of miles of battlefronts, on both sides of the lines, for the others are like us — the same dread, the same obedience. A hundred thousand times already these men had moved out never to return, but always they were replaced by fresh men sprung from the depths of the earth and the wombs of women, from the depths of the weeping and gnashing of teeth, from the depths of rotting cadavers and of love. Pure madness.

The commando unit moved off down a winding lane through the snow dune. It was instantly swallowed up by sepulchral whiteness. The twilit land was beginning to merge with empty space, and space into darkness. On the other side of a half-invisible sloping bank, pale as death, the presence of the river was palpable under its crust of ice and snow, an expanse of camouflaged pitfalls crisscrossed by hidden threats. The woods, that by day gave every horizon a bluish tinge, were now invisible, and there was nothing left but the absolute silence of uninhabited expanses. Distant explosions and quick-fading flashes in the sky did not interrupt so much as magnify the silence and the vastness. This site of immobility evoked only feelings from beyond despair: total extinction, uselessness, the biting cold. The landscapes of dead planets must look like this. “From here, Daria Nikiforovna, you can see a long way into enemy positions, but take care not to go past the salient, they have it under observation … We’ve had men killed there.” But there was nothing to be seen, neither there nor here, the two dead men had left no trace. And yet numberless eyes were on the lookout, trained through lenses; sound detectors were listening; radar beams were searching through space; field telephones were active from station to station; patrols were crawling over the ice … This is what man has become, this murderous worm! Machines for riddling puny human bodies, smashing holes into concrete, pulverizing the earth, whipping snow into squalls, drowning the night under torrents of fire, orchestrating screams of agony, drinking the blood of sacrifice, all these latent machines were crouched expectant on the brink of fury. The earth was as primed with violence as the air was with cold, the sky with snow, and the human spirit with that resigned anguish which journalists have distilled into “Bravery.”

At the command post, men were playing cards with a pack reduced to tatters. Noncoms were on the line to other hidden dens, swiftly writing down the hour, the minute, the response, “all quiet, all quiet.” Vosskov had dropped off with his elbows on the map, a wax dummy. Time flowed like invisibly falling snow, the time of the last certainty, charged like all else with the inevitability of catastrophes moving closer and closer. A devouring second toward what, yet another second toward what? Who will ever understand?

“It’s starting,” whispered the chubby-cheeked telephonist.

“Right,” Vosskov said, shaking himself out of his torpor, “pass me the receiver.”

The voice at the other end launched into an algebraic report, the pencil traced a curve on the map as though impelled by a will of its own. “I see, good, very good …” This meant: disastrous. Major Vosskov was no longer listening, but he could hear through the silence. Patkin’s six stumble into hell one hour before the projected time. Bad. They will be destroyed because of that timing. First a volley of machine-gun fire rips through the emptiness, instantly followed by tracer bullets striping the night with low arcs, like maddened colored stars. Now a planet ignites in the sky and spreads a colossal glare over the white desert it conjures into being. Ice and snow become peopled with shadows, obscure forms drawing bursts of projectiles from automatic weapons; most of these shadows turn out to be illusory. Everything dies down suddenly in a panicked silence, a darkness of inexistence. And then it all begins again, the rising and sinking of northern lights, the whistling upward blast of a torpedo … Major Vosskov rose to his feet and put on his shroud, imitated by several men and by Daria. Outside, at first, they saw nothing. Even the snow was black. But there are different kinds of nothingness, and this one was a sham. Sure enough, less than a mile away a searchlight skimmed the snows like a small, jerky snake. Were the seven men headed back across the river already? Was that possible? Downstream bright planets leaped, the facing shore thundered chaotically, silence fell, and the river arched its back in an eruption of black water and fire. “They’re breaking up the ice, the vicious bastards!” Vosskov hesitated. Should we start firing, to create a diversion? His orders were to operate discreetly and husband the ammunition. The enemy would fire back, which could hamper the return of the commando unit and entail the loss of a few men … Things might escalate into an artillery duel, prompting the division to hold an inquiry into the waste of munitions occasioned by his recklessness … Then should he do nothing? Like an anxious schoolboy, Vosskov imagined the general shouting: “And you simply sat back? Where did your duty lie?” A note would appear in his file: “Lacks initiative.” Where did his duty lie? Our bank was silent, or nearly. Ring through to post 4 with instructions to open fire? Patience, I shall be patient as death. “Find out,” he told the liaison officer in a steady voice, for the leader must display exemplary calm. “What have they seen? Have they spotted them?” Under a rigid posture, he was squirming. “No, sir.” A cone of pink light had stabilized out there, boiling on the spot with each regular explosion. At last the riposte was under way. Vosskov was delighted to see that the order had been given by someone else (one less responsibility). Dark white sprays spurted up beyond the Neva, a thick cloud blurred the left flank of the luminous cone. “Ten to one the survivors are through safe … Did you understand the operation?” he asked Daria. “I think so …” It was hideously beautiful. “You there, Rodion, run back and check the casualty figures. If our people are inside the sector, increase firing for another five minutes …” He stooped to light his pipe under a soldier’s coat. “I reckon they’ve taken more losses than we have … That big strike you saw, it must have hit a blockhouse …” His pipe had gone out immediately; he was inhaling imaginary smoke and expelling it through protruded lips. “All right, the night has had its little epileptic fit. Home we go.” The battle was tapering off into ever-shorter spasms of brilliance and noise. Darkness reclaimed the snow, dappled at first, then total.