Сергей Огольцов – DIY Masterpiece (страница 8)

These were the survivors, whose fate was more tragic than that of the civilian Germans who knew about the death camps but never saw them firsthand. And here—the streets were strewn with corpses frozen until spring, and it was best not to go to the city bathhouse, where blackened skeletons rub their skin-covered bones.

The "Road of Life" was neither shelled nor bombed; truck drivers delivered the cargo, without loss, in the volumes determined by the management. The mass graves of Piskarevskoye Cemetery pound at my heart, deceived for too long. And the graves of the other 200,000 who died after the breakthrough and the lifting of the "blockade", because the human body has its own limits, which a ration of 50 grams of flour (=125 grams of bread in the daily ration of nothing else) crosses irrevocably. But they, the green lawns of Piskarevka, cannot reach for the completely duped, hoodwinked, and befuddled hearts.

Why were Soviet losses more than twice those of the aggressor?

Because of the double burden. The Soviet soldier advanced under enemy machine guns and retreated under the machine guns of his "native" SMERSH (‘Death to Spies’) units. I don't know the exact number, but I know that millions were probably executed by the SMERSHists, hacked to pieces by machine guns of barrier squads… 20 million dead? Hey, that's lucky!

Recently, when St. George's ribbons, the signature of the military bravery in the czarist Russian Empire, were reintroduced, talk of traitors at the level of the Red Army General Staff began. But it's all bullshit: not traitors, but amateurs in general's uniforms, fit for no more than the office-level maneuvering of bureaucratic sycophants, and their hands, which no one cared to buy, are also stained with the blood of a heroic people.

There are too many holes, and the stench is too heavy everywhere, just like from that 15 square kilometers where yesterday's boys march, hand in hand, to the slaughter, shouting "Hurrah!". Anesthesia for the doomed…

And, leaving the podium from which I've just been spilling the venom of vile, hostile slander on everything we hold dear and sacred to the marrow of our bones, I come to my senses, cast off the trance of pathos, shake off the buskins of a frenzied orator-before-the-void, and want, purely for the record and honest accounting, to note that, yes, of the confined in those 15 square kilometers, including a stretch of dirt road between Fyodorovka and Krutoyarka villages, up to 30,000 Red Army soldiers did break out.

They managed to break through in a few areas, where the German machine guns had grown tired of clattering—they had indeed jammed from such ungodly overloads, after 75,000 perished (out of the already mentioned 280,000 Red Army corpses, with the insignia of various branches of the armed forces on their khaki tunics).

. . .

‘Welcome, Ivan, to your combat post.’

The platoon commander stretched out on the soft May grass along the slope of a small ravine. A gusty night breeze, understanding and merciful, blew not from the direction of the road, overhung with the nauseating smell of torn and gutted corpses rotting for 2 days already…

The moon, past its quarter-full, got often hidden behind the black screens of clouds, while crawling prone, silently, across the sky… To the west.

Ivan sat down nearby, alertedly peering into the night around.

‘Relax, namesake, the 'Fritzes' won't be going on reconnaissance today, and they won't be removing our security posts to attack in the dead of night. They don't need bringing a live one either; we're right there in the palm of their hand. How many times have you watched the movie “Chapayev”?’

‘Three… maybe four.’

‘That's obvious. And how many women have you fucked, Ivan, in your entire young life?’

‘Well…’ the perfectly natural question made the guy hesitate: after all, there's an officer right there… ’

‘Well, a wooly well,’ the Junior Lieutenant mimicked him. ‘Too few, Ivan, as I see. Just like me—not enough.’

The platoon commander raised himself on his elbow and suddenly switched to a harsh tone:

‘And now tell me, Red Army soldier Zhilin, where is your backpack?’

‘Well, so… Comrade Junior Lieutenant… well, as we were attacking, and then we ran from the machine guns, and then there was artillery fire… and the bombers started then…’

‘Then it’s clear about you, Red Army soldier. So, it turns out—there's no backpack, which, as required by the military statute, a soldier of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, also known as the Red Army, must always have by him.’

‘Well, aha… it turns out… ’ Ivan lowered his head with dejected honesty.

‘Aha! And so, the emergency rations—in the untouchable kit—were also lost while running back and forth?’

‘Aha… Yes, that’s it,’ Ivan glanced briefly at the platoon commander's hand, which he could see patting the officer’s backpack, carefully laid by in the darkness, and sighed guiltily and regretfully.

‘And tell me one more thing, peasant soldier of the Red Army: why did the infantry platoon commanders are nicknamed “Vanyok”, eh? You don't know? Don’t lie! You know perfectly well that a platoon commander's lifespan is one calendar month. This decision was approved by statistics, at a plenary session of its statistical luminaries. Because a person doesn't have time to grow into his full name in a 30-day span. That's how it is, namesake.’

‘But the men said, you're Nikolai.’

‘Listen to the men; they know a lot, but not everything. After the advance from near Moscow, I've been living with that kiddish nickname for months now. From this moment I'm a full-fledged "Ivan", and your namesake. What good does it do that my documented name is Nikolai Alexandrovich? I'm not going to be a colonel anyway, so I'll end up as a platoon commander, but not as "Vanyok". So, Ivan, we'll remain namesakes… as in, like, our father's name?

‘Alexandrovich.’

‘Well, surprise! And here we are, double namesakes! And what about your age, young Ivan warrior?’

‘Well, it's 19, in August.’

‘Well, that's where you lied, Ivan: your birthday is tomorrow. Remember, and for the rest of your life, mark it strictly—May 27th.’

‘Well, whatever you tell.’

‘I'll not only tell you, but I'll also drink to it. Where's the mug? But why am I even asking this Red Army soldier who doesn't observe the Red Army regulations?’

The platoon commander loosened the straps of his backpack, opened it, and rummaged around inside.

His hand returned with the ghostly sheen of an aluminum mug, followed by the flask, now completely dark, gurgling with the sound of liquid. The night had thickened around them, but the objects in it stood out by their vague, nightmarishly outlined counturs.

The platoon commander raised the mug higher and, turning his ear to it, concentrated on counting the "gulp! gulp!" coming out from the neck of the field vessel. At one of the gulps, he stopped pouring and handed the mug to his companion on the grass.

‘Go ahead, Ivan.’

‘Well, but…’

‘Don't argue with your superiors, Ivan, don't argue with them. It's not just my rank, I'm also older. I'll be 21 tomorrow morning.’

From the way his tongue stuck so hotly and tightly to his mouth inside, Ivan guessed the liquid was pure alcohol. He wanted to choke, but a scorching fire engulfed his throat, sweeping away any trifling comments.

‘Well, that’s my man,’ said Nikolai-Ivan Alexandrovich, the white metal in his dental crown glittered in a smile. ‘Have a snack, Vanya, have a snack.’

He rustled the emergency supplies bag, placing a rye rusk in his companion's palm.

Ivan took a crunchy bite and waited until a little saliva trickled into his mouth to soften the burning. Through tears in his upturned eyes, he saw a half moon break through a cloud.

The platoon commander, without counting, emptied his mug of everything that remained. He peered inside:

‘What a keen eye! In addition to perfect pitch! Oh, gods! What an artist is wasted!’ And he drank it down in one gulp.

The alcohol had already loosened Ivan's tongue:

‘Shchurin said your parents were of “formers”… ’

‘And you listen less to Shchurin—there are no such things as former parents. You can't choose your parents neither get rid of them, even the 58th Article won't help you here."

‘The men say you can't talk when Shchurin’s around.’

‘And you, Ivan, listen to the men; they smell rats with their guts. Well, that's for later, now let's call it a night.’

‘Shchurin's coming to relieve me.’

‘No worry, he won't show up. He knows there's no one to hand him over to for court-martial in the morning. Go to sleep, Ivan. We have a reverse decimation scheduled for tomorrow.’

‘So, what's that?’

‘Decimation is when one out of every ten is laid waste, and reverse decimation is when I don't even know how to put it in layman's terms…’

. . .

In the morning, Ivan was awakened by the roar of artillery barrage. He didn't feel the slightest bit hungover. Getting up on his feet and ran after Romanov in an awkward long-stepped gait.

He doesn't know what happened next, what followed what—until evening, when he was sitting on the ground, in a crowd of prisoners of war, without his rifle or his cap, which he had also lost during the day.