Dancer (2 page)

They sang songs to their own absent children, but moments later they put the stub of a rifle in an enemy boy's mouth and, later again, they sang other songs, Raven oh black raven why do you circle me?

They recognized the movements of the planes, the half rolls, the chandelles, the sudden twists, the pancake falls, the flash of a swastika, the shine of a red star, and they cheered as their women pilots went up to hunt the Luftwaffe down, watched the women as they rose in the air and then fell in flames. They trained dogs to carry mines and they guided the dogs, with shrill whistles, to walk beneath enemy tanks. Crows patrolled the aftermath, fat on the dead, and then the crows themselves were shot and eaten. Nature was turned around—the mornings were dark with bomb dust and at night the fires cast light for miles. The days were no longer named, although on Sundays they could sometimes hear, across the ice, the Fritzes celebrating their god. For the first time in years they were allowed their own gods—they took their Crucifixes, their beads, their prayercloths out into the battlefields. All the symbols were needed, from God to Pavlik to Lenin. The soldiers were surprised by the sight of Orthodox priests, even rabbis, blessing the tanks, but not even blessings enabled them to hold their ground.

In retreat, to deny the enemy, the soldiers blew up the bridges their brothers had built, ripped apart their fathers' tanneries, took acetylene torches to pylons, herded cattle over ravines, razed milk sheds, poured gasoline through the roofs of silos, hacked down telegraph poles, poisoned water wells, splintered fence posts and tore up their own barns for wood.

And when they advanced—in the third winter, as the war turned—the soldiers marched forward and wondered how anyone could have done such a thing to their land.

The living went west and the injured went east, packed into cattle cars, pulled by steam trains, which moved slowly across the frozen steppes. They huddled together, drawn to whatever light came through the wooden slats. In the center of each cattle car was an iron pail with a fire burning. The men reached into their armpits or groins to take out handfuls of lice, and then pitched the lice into the fire. They held bread to their wounds to stop the bleeding. A few of the soldiers were carried off, put onto carts, taken to hospitals, schoolhouses, clinics. Villagers came down to greet them, bearing gifts. The men who remained on the train heard their comrades leaving, all vodka and victory. And still there was no logic to their journeys—sometimes the trains passed right through their hometowns without stopping and the ones with legs tried to kick out the wooden slats; they were shot dead by the guards for insubordination and later in the night a family would trudge out through the snow, bearing candles, having heard that their son had died just a few kilometers from home, disgraced, left frozen by the tracks.

They lay awake in their blood-stiffened coats while the railroad cars rocked to and fro. They passed around the last of their cigarettes and waited for a woman or a child to shove a package between the slats or maybe even to whisper a sweet word. They were given food and water, but it tore through their intestines and made them sicker. There were rumors of new gulags being built to the west and south, and they told themselves that their gods had loved them this long but might not love them very much longer, so they furtively slipped their charms and icons through the floorboards to lie on the railroad tracks to be picked up by others in days to come. They pulled their blankets to their beards and threw more lice onto the fire. Still the trains poured steam into the air and carried the men through forests, over bridges, beyond mountains. The men had no idea where they would end up, and if the train broke down they waited for another to nudge up behind them, roll them forward, toward Perm, Bulgakovo, Chelyabinsk—where in the distance the Ural Mountains beckoned.

And so, in the late winter of nineteen hundred and forty-four, a train sped daily through the landscape of Bashkiria, emerging from the deep forest along the Belaya River to cross the wide stretch of ice into the city of Ufa. The trains made their way slowly across the trussed bridge, a quarter of a kilometer long, the steel giving out thuds and high pings under the stress of the wheels as if mourning in advance. The trains made their way to the far side of the frozen river, past the wooden houses, the tower blocks, the factories, the mosques, the unpaved roads, the warehouses, the concrete bunkers, until they reached the railway station, where the stationmaster sounded his whistle and the city's brass band blew their battered trumpets. Muslim mothers waited on the upper platform clutching photographs. Old Tatar men went up on their toes to look for their sons. Babushkas huddled over buckets of sunflower seeds. Vendors solemnly rearranged the emptiness of their kiosks. Tough-faced nurses in brown uniforms prepared to transport the wounded. The local guards stood weary against pillars under red metal signs for rural electrification that swung in the breeze—
Our Great Leader Is Bringing Electricity to You!
—and a smell penetrated the air, foreshadowing the soldiers, sweat and rot, and each winter afternoon a six-year-old boy, hungry and narrow and keen, sat on a cliff above the river, looking down at the trains, wondering when his own father would be coming home and whether he would be broken just like the ones they were lifting from beneath the steam and the bugles.

*   *   *

We cleaned out the giant greenhouse first. Nuriya gave the tomato plants to the farm boy who hung around the hospital. Katya, Marfuga, Olga and I shoveled most of the soil onto the ground outside. I was the oldest and my shoveling duties were light. Soon the greenhouse was clear, as big as two houses. We dragged in eight woodstoves, stood them next to the glass and lit the fires. After a while the greenhouse didn't smell so much of tomatoes anymore.

The next thing was the big metal sheets. Nuriya's cousin, Milyausha, was a welder at the oil refinery. She had gotten permission to take away fifteen sheets. She borrowed a tractor, hitched the sheets to the back of it, dragged them through the hospital entrance, down the narrow road to the greenhouse. The sheets were too big to fit through the doors so we had to remove the back windows to slide the metal in. The farm boy helped us lift the heavy sheets. He kept his head down—maybe he was embarrassed by all us women working so hard, but it didn't matter to us, it was our duty.

Milyausha was a splendid welder. She had learned just before the war. She wore special glasses and the blue flame lit up her lenses. After two days it was there: a giant metal bath.

But we hadn't thought about how to heat the water properly.

We tried boiling the water on the woodstoves that we had set up, but, even though the greenhouse itself was warm from catching the sun, the water never held its temperature. The bath was just too big. We stood around, quiet and angry, until Nuriya had another idea. She asked her cousin Milyausha to see if she could get permission for maybe a dozen more metal sheets. The very next morning she came up from the refinery dragging five more sheets. Nuriya told us the plan. It was simple. Milyausha set to work straight away and welded the metal into the giant bath, crisscrossing the strips until eventually the whole thing looked like a metal chessboard. She drilled drains in the bottom of each bath, and Nuriya borrowed an old car engine from her husband's brother. She attached a pump to the engine to take the water out. It worked perfectly. There were sixteen individual tubs and, because they were small, we knew the water would stay warm. We laid down planks for gangways so we could walk from bath to bath, and then we hung a portrait of Our Great Leader inside the door.

We lit the stoves, heated the water, filled the baths. Everyone smiled when the water stayed warm, and then we took off our clothes and sat in the baths, drinking tea. All around us the glass was steaming and we were warm as soup.

Sweetness, said Nuriya.

That evening we went up to the hospital and told the nurses we would be ready the next day. They looked exhausted, black bags under their eyes. We could hear the soldiers moaning from inside the hospital. There must have been hundreds of them.

Nuriya pulled me aside and said: We will start right now.

We did only eight the first evening, but on the second day we did sixty and by the end of the first week they were coming up directly from the railway station in their bloody rags and bandages. We had so many that they had to wait in lines outside the greenhouse on long canvas tarps. Sometimes the canvas got sticky with blood and it had to be hosed off, but they were patient, those men.

While they were outside Katya wrapped them in blankets. Some of them were happy, but others cried, of course, and many just sat and stared straight ahead. The parasites were on them and the rot was setting in. You could see the worst of it in their eyes.

Inside, Nuriya was the one to shave their heads. She was quick with the scissors, and most of the hair was gone in a few seconds. Without it they looked so different, some like boys, some like criminals. She shaved the rest of the hair with a straight-blade razor. She swept the hair up quickly because there were lice still crawling through the clumps. The hair was shoveled into buckets and placed at the door of the greenhouse, and the farm boy took them away.

The soldiers were so shy they didn't want to take off their uniforms in front of us. We didn't have any young girls working with us—most of us were thirty or more. I was forty-seven. And Nuriya told them not to worry, we all had husbands—which was true, except for me, I never had a husband, no reason really.

Still they wouldn't take their clothes off until Nuriya roared: Come on, you don't have anything we haven't seen before!

Eventually they shed their uniforms, except for the men on the stretchers. We used Nuriya's scissors for them. They didn't like it when we had to take off their shirts and undershirts, maybe they thought we were accidentally going to cut their throats.

The soldiers stood in front of us, hands over their private parts. They were all so skinny, poor things, they made even Katya feel fat.

We used the rotten uniforms for fuel but we made sure we took the medals off first, put them in little bundles until the baths were finished. All the men had letters and photos in their pockets, of course, but there were some strange things too—the spout of a teapot, locks of hair, bits of gold teeth. One of them even had a little finger, curled up and shriveled. Sometimes there were explicit pictures we weren't meant to see but, as Nuriya said, they'd been through a lot for our great nation, it wasn't our place to scold.

As the soldiers waited their turn, Olga sprayed them with a chemical that came in boxes all the way from Kiev. We used fertilizer tanks and mixed the chemical with water—it smelled like bad eggs. We had to cover the soldiers' mouths and eyes. But we didn't always have enough dressing to put over their wounds, so when we sprayed them it sometimes hit their open sores. I felt so sorry for them the way they howled. Afterwards they leaned against us and cried and cried and cried. We sponged down the wounds as well as we could. They dug their fingers into our shoulders and clenched their fists. Their hands were so bony and black.

When their wounds were swabbed, it was time for the bath. If one of them had lost his legs, it took four of us to lower him in the water and we had to be careful of the level so he wouldn't drown. If he had no arms, we propped him up at the edge of the metal sheet and kept ahold of him.

We didn't want to shock them so we kept the water lukewarm at first, and when they were immersed we poured kettles full of boiling water around them, wary not to splash. They said ooh and aah, and the laughter was contagious; no matter how many times we laughed in a day another man would make us laugh all over again.

The thing about the greenhouse was that it made the sound much bigger. It wasn't exactly an echo, it was just that the laughter seemed to bounce from pane to pane and back down to us, bent over the baths.

Olga and I were the ones to sponge. I didn't use soap to start with. That was a treat for the very end. I gave their faces a good scrub—they had such eyes!—and I cleaned very carefully, the chin, the brows, the forehead and behind their ears. Then I went vigorously at their backs, which were always filthy. You could see their ribs and the curve of their spines. I went down towards their bottoms and cleaned a little around there, but not so much that they got uncomfortable. Sometimes they would call me Mama or Sister, and I'd lean forward and say: There there there.

But most of the time they just stared straight ahead without a word. I went to their necks again, but this time I went much more gently and I felt them relaxing.

It was harder to do the front of their bodies. Their chests were often bad, because a lot of the time they had been hit with shrapnel. Sometimes, when my hands were at their stomachs, they hunched over very quickly because they thought I was going to touch them down below, but most of the time I got them to do that themselves. I was no fool.

If a soldier was really sick or had no spirit, then I had to wash him down there. Mostly he would close his eyes because he was embarrassed, but once or twice he still got aroused and I had to leave him alone for five minutes.

Olga wouldn't leave him alone. She carried a spoon in her apron and if a soldier got excited she bashed him there, and that was that. We all just laughed.

For some reason, I don't know why, their legs were the worst—maybe it was from standing around in those boots all the time. Their feet were covered with sores and scabs. Most of the time they could hardly walk straight. They always talked a lot about their legs, said they used to play soccer and ice hockey and how good they had been at long-distance running. If the soldier was a very young boy, I let him put his head on my chest so he wouldn't be ashamed of his tears. But if he was big and mean, I washed him much more quickly. He might say rude things to me about my arms, the way they wobbled, and for punishment I wouldn't give him any soap.