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The Assassins Gallery Liberation Road Last Citadel Scorched
Earth The End of War War of the Rats Souls to Keep |
Vasily Zaitsev shook the hand of the Russian president. The man, natty in a charcoal suit with fine pinstripes Zaitsev could barely make out, smiled broadly. The president's small eyes were made even narrower by his rising red cheeks. His head bobbed as he mumbled to Zaitsev something like We're so proud of you, but Zaitsev could not make it all out. The words seemed slurred coming out of the president's mouth. Why not, Zaitsev wondered? He's already muttered them to sixty others in this line this afternoon. He's probably exhausted by now, with only another dozen hands to shake and more grateful noises to mouth. Anyway, my hearing's not so good anymore. Not bad for a seventy-seven year old man, still sharper than most my age, but the doctors have told me for forty years my shooting those damned rifles as a child in the taiga, as a young man in the war, then hunting in the woods outside my home in Kiev, all of it would come together on me one day and deafen me. One day, everything happens, so why worry? Maybe it was the wind whipping past up here on top of Mameyev Kurgan that obscured the president's little private statement to me. Why do they make us line up here outside like this every time, at the windiest place in the city, 102.8 meters above sea level? Yes, I understand, it is the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Union's victory over the Nazis at Stalingrad, a big, important celebration, of course. Photographers, newspaper people, women writers even, military big shots handing out more medals, everyone looking at us, shaking their heads at our deeds on this soil so long ago. But, why make us line up outside? For the photographers? In other years, ten years ago, and twenty, thirty and forty years ago, we Heroes were younger. Now, most of us, the ones left anyway, are in our late sixties and seventies, a few of the generals are over eighty. Let us meet indoors from now on, inside one of these monuments or shrines planted everywhere you look. They've turned this hill into a carnival park of museums and memorials. Right behind me, standing on the peak of the hill, is one of the best in all Russia, the massive white statue of the Rodina, the mother of Russia. She holds up a sword in one hand, beckoning to the rest of the nation with the other hand to come, hurry, rush to the Volga to save our land and my children. A beautiful statue, it moved me to tears when I first saw it. It looms above the town, you can see it from almost everywhere it is so high and tall up here on Mameyev Kurgan. Below, at the eastern base of the hill, is a reflecting pool, surrounded by smaller statues, depictions of battle vignettes. A wounded commander sculpted in brownstone points and issues orders even as he collapses into another soldier's arms. A beautiful nurse carries a bandaged soldier on shaky legs to safety, her shoulder supporting his outstretched arm like wind under a bird's wing. A grim Red defender, his shirt in shreds around his waist, his torso rippling with power, raises his machine gun over his head in the center of a fountain to lead a charge. All quite stylized, like the Rodina above me, but war must be made into good theater if it is going to serve any purpose after the fact. My favorite shrine is the mammoth rotunda just below us, halfway down the eastern slope. In the middle of the circular roof is a big hole, open to the sky. This ventilates the eternal flame burning on a huge torch held in a giant white marble hand, cut off just below the wrist in the center of the floor. The hand comes up from the floor like a titan arising from hell with a torch held high in his hand to light his way. Bouquets of red carnations wrapped in plastic are piled in front of the hand, offerings from mourners and visitors who come to these memorials year 'round to remember us. On the wall, running the complete circle, are the names of the fallen, tens of thousands, each name individually inlaid in brilliant mosaic, yellow letters against a burgundy background to resemble velvet banners unfurled. All day and all night, five honor guards stomp up an inclined ramp circling the room. Their gait is painfully slow. They each raise one leg, straight out in a goose step, all five in unison, hold the leg out it for a heartbeat and then slam them down together, whomp! sending echoes from their heels off the mosaics to fly out the hole in the roof with the heat waves from the torch. It's as if they are trying to keep the names of the dead awake with the flame and the flowers and the stomping. Let them rest, I say. But, we do love our dead in Russia. We need them, to remind us of who killed them, and why we should not trust anyone but ourselves. I also like the big Stalingrad Museum, hard by the water's edge where the old main landing stage used to be. My long Moisin Nagant is in there, the one I shot Thorvald with, hung under a picture of me hunkering down in my white camouflage hood behind the scope. They never grow old in there, my rifle and my flat white young face. That's good. Five times now I have returned to Stalingrad to line up with the old Heroes. The line grows shorter every time we get together. I'm always surprised, foolishly, as if the line could get longer. Only Heroes of the Soviet Union are invited to be honored at these celebrations every ten years. Wrongheaded thinking, really, just to invite those of us who came to the attention of the people who gave out the medals back then. Chekov should be here. He is still alive, I hear from him once a year, he lives also in Ukraine. Viktor Medvedev would have been a Hero, but he would not have made the first celebration. He died fighting in Yugoslavia in '44, at night I heard. Shaikin, dead. Kulikov, dead in Kursk. Tania. Young Tania, blonde hair and hips white and smooth like snow drifts. Eyes on fire. I remember Viktor telling me the story about her smelling like shit when she first tumbled into our trenches outside the Lazur from no-man's-land. I think of her sometimes, not often anymore, but when I do, I shut off. Like thinking about eternity or the universe; my mind cannot conceive or contain her. She should be here, she was a hero. Is she still alive in 1992? She would be about seventy or seventy-one. She was hurt badly in the gut. I remember her blood, running in it, blood sloshing in my boots as I held her so tightly against me, trying to be her bandage until I could get her to the medical station. I doubt she survived. I even hope, somewhere in a mean chamber in my heart, that she did not live. If she was dead, she could not have said, I would not say, I betrayed her by walking away into the rest of the war and the rest of life, never turning back to see if she was still there, behind me, as she was so many mornings in the alleys and stairwells and trenches. Oh, events, they roll past like the green Volga down there and take you with them. I can see the river from up here, that's why the Nazis fought so hard to keep this crest. Events flow. When you are as old as I, you finally admit it. You take your hands off your life and let it go, like riding a horse that knows the way home. It will usually turn out the way it was supposed to. To make choices, to act on choices that fling you against the current of events is sometimes too hard a swim. So most of us humans, we just float along. Not Tania, though. She was a hard swimmer, damn the current. Did she live? Too late to know, it has been too late for very long. But my life has turned out all right. I am still living it and who would have bet on that? Each celebration, with a decade in the interim, I come back to Stalingrad when the Military Council contacts me. Every time, I have shaken a different man's hand on this hill. Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, who died just before the forty-year celebration and left us to shake hands with Yuri Andropov, a nobody, and now this big fellow with the fleshy face, Yeltsin, I think is his name. He is the best dressed, yet. The wind blows his nice white hair. He keeps brushing it back into place with his free hand. Every other president called me "comrade." Now, this big one calls me "Mr. Zaitsev." Brezhnev hugged me, hugged all of us, over two hundred in line then twenty years ago. Stalin had the best handshake. He cried when he shook our hands. His moustache was soaked and glistening with his tears. He was a caring bastard; I hope he has something to care about in hell, though I miss him in some ways. He was law and order. Too much so, really; he became vindictive and paranoid. Now, the city isn't even called Stalingrad. They dumped the old man's name, now calling it Volgograd, city on the Volga. Khrushchev did that to him, but he claimed the people of the city voted this way. Poor Stalin. We needed a strong leader, and he gave us one. The country isn't even the Soviet Union anymore. It's the Russian Republic and a spate of little, angry republics with their hands out to the world. No Communism anymore, either. What once made us the unquestioned leader of half the world is now nothing but an unfashionable fad. The East Germans did the best job with Communism. We planted it there after the war and they spent only fifty years playing with it before tossing it out. It doesn't work. Socialism was better. From each according to his abilities. To each according to his work. The Communists made it different. To each according to his needs, they told us. Compassionate, perhaps, but wrongheaded, not in keeping with human nature. I was a hunter and a sniper, I knew nature, of animals and men. The East Germans were better at it, more mechanical and determined to make it work. Communism failed quicker for them, with less pain. We took seventy-five years before we threw it out. Russians. Hard-headed about everything. Will we be hardheaded about the new freedoms? Everybody is using the word now, freedom. They don't know what it is, they know only what it is not, for that is what they have been living with, the not, under the Communists. I have always been free, in the taiga, in the war, even in my family and work. If you are good at what you do, better than the others, then you are free, you make your own rules. It's acknowledged by the others, they let you pass. That is how I lived and how I fought all the way to Berlin as the Hare. It's why I'm still standing here, wearing another medal on my overcoat. Perhaps I can say with a small smattering of pride that, over the years, I have even earned a small nod for myself from death.
The day's celebrations were over. Zaitsev sat in a leather reading chair in the lobby of the Volgograd Intourist, the best hotel in town. The hotel was built along the park where he and Thorvald once dueled. Now the park was the Square of Fallen Heroes. A black obelisk stood sharply upright surrounded by a dozen squirting fountains in the center of the park. Coins lay sparkling on the black marble floor under the water there. The city of Volgograd was one of the first to be entirely rebuilt by the Communists after the war. Everywhere Zaitsev strolled here, he saw how the Party used the city as a canvas for its icons. Red stars topped every roof. Hammers and scythes stood out in bas relief on every public trash can, street light pole and cornice. The effort was exhaustive. Zaitsev still admired and was irked by the Communist ability, like old Danilov the war commissar, to always have something to say. They look a little silly now, he thought, with Communism swept away into the trash bin of history along with the rest of us. Years before, Zaitsev stopped thinking of the old places in the city, where his bunker was, where the trenches were, and what had been built on top of them as the twentieth century rolled on. He was glad he could stop, even more because he saw others who couldn't, men who dropped tears into their drinks at the dinners, who mourned openly the horrors of half a century ago. His visits to Volgograd became less pointed and sad occasions. He could enjoy the place, the honors and the parties better without the constant silent toasts to the dead. Zaitsev rattled the ice in the glass in his hand. The ice cubes spun in the slippery film of good English scotch whiskey, what he always drank at the Military's expense at these celebrations. He was tired; his eyes hurt. Long ago, out there twenty kilometers to the west on the open steppe, he stood as erect as that obelisk in the park as an artillery shell exploded beside him. He was told by the doctors on the east bank of the Volga after his hurried sled ride across the bumpy frozen river that the heat flash from the explosion seared his corneas. He would recover, perhaps not fully, they told him, but he would see again after a rest with his eyes bandaged. When the wrappings were removed a month later, he could indeed see, but as if through a silvery wash. This was to become permanent, a curtain of thin scar tissue over his corneas. Outside his window at the hospital, Zaitsev watched the endless processions of German prisoners marching east into captivity through the mist in his eyes. He remembered a rooster, strutting around the medical shacks for days as he convalesced, hooting and crowing at the stumbling Germans until someone wrung the thing's neck. The damage to Zaitsev's eyes initially diminished his abilities in middle to extreme distance shooting. But, he quickly learned to compensate. The fog held small openings. He tilted his head back and forth to move the crosshairs to the places where he could see unhindered through the scars. No one noticed any reduction in his abilities on the road to Berlin as they fought the retreating Germans across Russia and into Europe. The Hare ended his career as a Red sniper with over four hundred kills recorded. But the film, like steam on cool blue glass, gave him an eerie countenance. Zaitsev the Siberian, fair skinned and light haired, always had only the blue of his eyes to give his face color. After the war, the blue gradually paled and whitened, the clouds in his eyes gathered, making him appear as if the war had bleached him white completely. This evening, no one came to sit in the plush, empty chairs on either side of him. He finished his scotch and raised the empty glass into the air. He held it up for a minute, then lowered it, his arm tired. Years ago, under Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, someone would have taken the glass and refilled it, like magic, with the English whiskey. Now, no one hugged him or even touched him, no one sat in these chairs anymore and grew old with him, laughing until the scotch was gone and the men chose not to switch to vodka for the headaches they would get and so went to bed. Vasily Zaitsev set the whiskey glass, wet with condensation, on a table. One by one, he thought, the last Heroes are joining the shining mosaic names on the walls of the rotunda. The names glow there for the tourists; they can read them by the flame of the eternal torch held up by that giant white fist in the center of the memorial. "Time," he said to himself. He rose from the chair, pushing up on the padded arms that were still warm from his weight. Zaitsev took a few steps and stopped. He turned around to look at the three empty chairs, the worn reddish leather of the one in the center still rumpled with his absence. He watched as the leather of the chair slowly smoothed itself, inflating almost, regaining its cool form, forgetting him. Time, he thought. Time has broken through the ranks of the Heroes of Stalingrad and is mopping up. |
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