A Writer at War (11 page)

A village near Tula. Brick houses. Night. Snow and rain. Everyone is frozen, especially those sitting in the Noah’s Ark: Regimental Commissar Konstantinov, a teacher, and Baru, correspondent of
Stalinsky sokol
.
¹
Lysov, Troyanovsky and I are warmer: we are travelling in the Emka. The vehicles stop in the middle of a dark village street. Petlyura, who is a real magician at procuring milk and apples and digging slit trenches, disappears into the night. But just for
once he fails. We enter an
izba
, which is cold and dark, like a grave. In the
izba
, a seventy-year-old woman is sitting amid the cold and darkness. She is singing songs. She welcomes us merrily and eagerly, like a young person, without grunting or whining, although, apparently, she has all the reasons to complain about her fate.

Her daughter, a factory worker, brought her to this village to stay with her son and went back to Moscow. The son, who is the chairman of the collective farm here, couldn’t allow her to stay in his house because his wife wouldn’t let him. This wife has also forbidden her husband to help his mother, and the old woman is living off what kind people give her. Sometimes the son secretly brings her a little millet or potatoes. The younger son, Vanya, had been working at a plant in Tula. He volunteered. He was fighting near Smolensk, [but] she hasn’t had any letters from him for a month. Vanya is her favourite.

She tells us the whole story in a kindly, calm voice, without any bitterness, resentment, pain or reproach. With a tsarina-like generosity, she gives all that she has to our frozen horde: a dozen logs which would have lasted her for a week, a handful of salt, leaving not a single grain for herself, half a bucket of potatoes. She keeps only a dozen, along with her pillow, a sack stuffed with straw, and her torn blanket. She brings a kerosene lamp. When our drivers want to pour some petrol into it, she does not allow this. ‘You will need this petrol yourselves.’ And she brings a tiny bottle in which she keeps her sacred reserve of kerosene and pours it into the lamp.

Having graced us with warmth, food, light and soft beds, she retires to the cold part of the
izba
. She sits down there and begins singing.

I went to her and said: ‘Babushka, are you going to sleep here in the darkness, in the cold, on bare wood?’ She just waved me off with her hand. ‘How do you live here alone? Do you have to sleep in the cold and dark here every night?’

‘Ah well, I sit in the dark, sing songs, or tell stories to myself.’ She boiled a cast-iron pot of potatoes, we ate and went to sleep, and she started singing to us in a hoarse voice, like an old man’s.

‘Oh, I used to be so healthy, like a stallion,’ she told me. ‘The Devil came to me last night and gripped my palm with his fingernails. I began to pray: “May God rise again and may His enemies be scattered.” And the Devil paid no attention. Then I began to swear and curse at him and he went away immediately. My Vanya
came to me last night. He sat down on a chair and looked at the window. I said to him: “Vanya, Vanya!,” but he didn’t reply.’

If we do win in this terrible, cruel war, it will be because there are such noble hearts in our nation, such righteous people, souls of immense generosity, such old women, mothers of sons who, from their noble simplicity, are now losing their lives for the sake of their nation with the same generosity with which this old woman from Tula has given us all that she had. There is only a handful of them in our land, but they will win.

The regal generosity of this pauper has shaken all of us. In the morning we leave her all our supplies, and our drivers, in a frenzy of kindness, loot the whole area and bring her so much firewood and potatoes that she will be able to last till spring on them. ‘What an old woman,’ Petlyura says when we set off, and shakes his head.

Soon after reaching the Orel–Tula road, Grossman spotted a sign to Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy estate, some twenty kilometres south of Tula. He persuaded his companions that they should visit it. As things turned out, the next visitor after them would be General Guderian, who decided to turn the writer’s home into his headquarters for the assault on Moscow.

Yasnaya Polyana. I suggested we take a look at it. The Emka turned off the panic-stricken highway, and the Noah’s Ark followed. One could see the green roofs and white walls of the houses amid the curly gold of the autumnal park. The gate. Chekhov, when he first came here, only managed to walk up to this gate and then turned away, intimidated by the thought that he would meet Tolstoy in a few minutes. He walked back to the station and returned to Moscow. The road leading to the house is paved by countless red, orange and yellow leaves. This is so beautiful. The more lovely the surroundings, the sadder one feels in times like these.

There’s an angry, pre-departure confusion in the house. Piles of boxes. Bare walls. Suddenly I feel with a terrible intensity that this place has turned into Lysye Gory, which the old and sick Prince is about to leave.
²
Everything has combined to produce an entirely new image, the events that occurred a century ago and those happening
today, and what the book tells with such strength and truthfulness about the old Prince Bolkonsky now seems to refer to the old Count Tolstoy himself and has become inseparable from reality.

Meeting with Sofya Andreevna.
³
She is calm and depressed. [She] says that the secretary of the local Party Committee has promised to provide her with railway carriages to evacuate the museum, but she isn’t sure that it is still possible, now that the Germans are so close and are advancing so fast. We talk about Moscow and friends who have passed away, and then we remain silent for a while thinking of their unfortunate fate. Then we discuss the theme that everyone is now talking about with pain, bewilderment and sorrow: the retreat.

Tolstoy’s grave. Roar of fighters over it, humming of explosions and the majestic calm autumn. It is so hard. I have seldom felt such pain.

Tula, seized with that deadly fever
, the tormenting, terrible fever we’ve seen in Gomel, Chernigov, Glukhov, Orel and Bolkhov. Is this really happening to Tula? Complete confusion. An officer finds me in the Voentorg military canteen. He asks me to come to the OBKOM. A representative of the
Stavka
who is there at the moment would like to find out from me where the headquarters of the Bryansk Front is at the moment, as he needs to send units there. Fragments of divisions are arriving. They say that only part of the 50th Army has managed to escape the encirclement. Where is Petrov, and Shlyapin? Where is Valya, the girl nurse who played dominoes with us and wound up the gramophone to play ‘The Little Blue Shawl’?

The streets are filled with people, they are walking on pavements and in the road and still there isn’t enough room. Everyone is dragging bundles, baskets and suitcases. At the hotel where we are given a room we run into all the other correspondents. Krylov with whom we had bolted from the Central Front is here too. The correspondents have already made themselves at home in the hotel. Some have embarked on blitz affairs.

We say goodbye to our travelling companion, the teacher whose face cream and collars we used to clean our boots. This night our
truck performs the function of Noah’s Ark for the last time: we give a lift to the railway station to the families of people from the Tula office of the newspaper,
⁴
with their belongings. Petlyura is angry: ‘We should have made them pay.’ But Seryozha Vasiliev, who drives the Noah’s Ark, is against it. He is a wonderfully kind, sweet and modest fellow.

Suddenly during the night, a conversation with Moscow on a direct line. Order to go to Moscow. Violent, irrational joy. Sleepless night.

In the battered Emka, the two-hundred-kilometre journey due north from Tula to the Soviet Capital may well have taken them most of the day.

Moscow. Barricades at the outer approaches, and also closer in, particularly around the suburbs, as well as in the city itself.

We all had a luxurious shave [at a barber’s] on Serpukhovskaya Square. The public was kind and gentle, asking us to go first, asking about the war. Without going home we went straight to the editorial office [of
Krasnaya Zvezda
].

The editor [Ortenberg] came to meet us. He was up in arms. ‘Why have you left the headquarters of the Bryansk Front?’

‘We were ordered to leave, and we left, after all the other correspondents did.’

‘Why didn’t you write anything about the heroic defence of Orel?’

‘Because there was no defence.’

‘That’s all. You may go. At six o’clock tomorrow morning you – Grossman, Troyanovsky, Lysov – will return straight to the front.’

People say that [Ortenberg] is a good editor
. Perhaps he is. But how come this small-town man who hasn’t even completed his secondary school education is as ambitious and arrogant towards his juniors as a Roman patrician? After all the months we’ve spent at the front he hasn’t even asked his subordinates, if only out of politeness, how they feel and whether their health is all right.

Ortenberg later felt uneasy at the way he had behaved. This is how he recorded the events of 7 October.

The morning and evening reports from the Sovinformburo
recounted the same things as at the beginning of the month: hard battles with the enemy everywhere. Nothing on the situation at the Western and Bryansk fronts. And Orel has already fallen. I learned this at the
Stavka
.

Our correspondents at the Bryansk Front, Pavel Troyanovsky and Vasily Grossman, who had arrived back from the area of Orel, confirmed this, too. I saw their Emka – dented all over by shell fragments. Staff from the editorial office had gathered round the car. They were examining it, shaking their heads, as if saying: ‘Look at what these fellows have just been through! They are lucky to have got out alive.’

After they had spent enough time with their friends by the Emka, Grossman and Troyanovsky came to talk to me and told me about the disaster at the front. I listened attentively to what they had to say, but couldn’t refrain from harsh words. Of course, the newspaper couldn’t publish their report about the breakthrough at the Bryansk Front and the capture of Orel before the official confirmation came. We thought, however, that any battle, even a disastrous one for us, reveals the true heroes and feats, about which one should and must write!

I told Grossman and Troyanovsky point-blank: ‘We don’t need your shot-up Emka. We need material for the newspaper. Go back to the front!’ This was probably unfair. I want to make no excuses even now when I know for sure that the special correspondents had achieved a miraculous escape from the enemy’s encirclement. I had to, when looking into the lost and worried faces of these men, who were in fact brave, even courageous, to find some other words for them, to be nicer. But let us remember that time! One could not indulge in sentiment.

Grossman and Troyanovsky left at once for the I Guards Rifle Corps of Major-General D.D. Lelyushenko, which had succeeded on that very day in stopping the enemy near Mtsensk. And my remark about the shot-up Emka started circulating around the lobbies at the editorial office and even our correspondents’ offices at the front.

Despite Ortenberg’s order to return to the front early the next morning, Grossman managed a fleeting visit to his father that night.

I spent some time at home [with] Papa and Zhenni Genrikhovna.
⁵
I spoke to Papa about my biggest worry, but I don’t need to write about it. It is in my heart day and night. Is she alive? No, she isn’t! I know, I feel this.

Part of Lelyushenko’s I Guards Rifle Corps of two rifle divisions and two tank brigades had been airlifted to the area of Orel on Stalin’s personal order to halt the German breakthrough.
⁶
Mtsensk, where the T-34s of the 4th Tank Brigade under Colonel Katukov counter-attacked, is fifty kilometres north-east of Orel on the road to Tula and Moscow. Both Lelyushenko and Katukov would become famous commanders of Guards Tank Armies in the assault on Berlin four years later.

We set off in the morning along the same highway by which we had returned to Moscow yesterday. Everyone at the editorial office was indignant, complaining (in a whisper of course) that the editor hadn’t allowed us even one day’s rest. And the main thing is that [this hasty mission] is foolish.

We rushed without respite through Serpukhov and Tula. Terrible weather. We were lying in the back of the truck, huddled against each other. Night came, but we went racing on. In Moscow we had been given the name of the settlement where the headquarters of the tank corps is situated: Starukhino. We drove and drove without rest. The radiator began to boil over, so we stopped the vehicle. The road was completely empty, we had driven dozens of kilometres without seeing a single vehicle.

Suddenly a Red Army soldier steps out from behind a birch tree and asks in a husky voice: ‘Where are you going?’

‘To Starukhino,’ we reply.

‘Are you off your heads?’ It turns out that the Germans have been there since yesterday. ‘I am the sentry and this is the front
line here. Go back quickly, before the Germans see you. They’re just over there.’ Naturally, we turn back. Had the radiator not boiled over, it would have been the end of our careers as journalists.

We look for the headquarters in the terrible darkness and terrible mud. Eventually we find it. It is hot and stuffy in a small
izba
filled with blue smoke. After the fourteen-hour drive we immediately feel sleepy in the warm room. We are dropping off, but there’s no time. We start asking officers different questions, reading political reports, doing all this as if in a daze.

At dawn, having had no rest, we boarded the truck and returned to Moscow. Deadlines remained unrelenting. We arrived at the editorial office in the evening . . . We chain-smoked all the time to keep awake, and drank tea. We got the story down, as journalists say, and submitted our copy. The editor didn’t publish a single line.

Whatever the frustrations of journalistic life, Grossman was not deterred from his persistent note-taking, whether for novels or articles.