4
A corporal stuck his head into Alexander’s quarters and shouted that Colonel Stepanov wanted to see him.
Colonel Stepanov was writing in his journal. He looked more tired than he had three days ago. Alexander patiently waited. The colonel looked up, and Alexander saw black bags under his blue eyes and taut lines in his face effected by the exertion of his will upon unwilling subjects.
“Lieutenant, sorry it took me a while. I’m afraid I don’t have much good news for you.”
“I understand.”
The colonel looked down into his journal.
“The situation in Novgorod was desperate. When the Red Army realized the Germans were surrounding the nearby villages only kilometers away, they recruited the young men from several camps around Luga and Tolmachevo to help entrench the town. One of those camps was Dohotino. I don’t know specifically about a Pavel Metanov . . .” The colonel cleared his throat. “As you know the German advance was much faster than we anticipated.”
It was Soviet-speak. It was like listening to the radio. They said this, but they meant that.
“Colonel? What?”
“The Germans got past Novgorod.”
“What happened to the young boys from the camps?”
“Lieutenant, beyond what I already told you, I don’t know.” He paused. “How well did you know this boy?”
“I know his family well, sir.”
“A personal stake in this?”
Alexander blinked. “Yes, sir.”
Colonel Stepanov was very quiet, playing with his pen, looking at the pages in his journal, not looking at Alexander, even when he spoke at last. “I wish I had something better to tell you, Alexander. The Germans ran over Novgorod with their tanks. Remember Colonel Yanov? He perished. The Germans shot soldiers and civilians indiscriminately, they pillaged what they could, and then they burned the town.”
Not backing away from the table, not looking away from Colonel Stepanov’s face, Alexander said steadily, “Let me understand. The Red Army sent underage boys into battle?”
Stepanov stood up behind his desk. “Surely you’re not telling us how to run our war, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful.” Alexander struck his heels together, saluted the colonel, but didn’t move. “But to use untrained boys along with battle-trained, command-experienced officers as fodder for the Nazis is sheer military madness.”
Colonel Stepanov did not come out from behind the desk. The two men were quiet, one young, the other already old at forty-four. Then the colonel spoke. “Tell the family their son died to save Mother Russia,” he said, his voice cracking. “He died in the service of our great leader, Comrade Stalin.”
Later that morning Alexander was called to the entry gate. He made his way downstairs, fearing it was Tatiana. He couldn’t face her just yet. He was going to meet her at Kirov in the evening. He saw Dasha standing with Petrenko. She looked shaken and tense.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her, leading her aside, hoping she, too, wouldn’t ask him about Tolmachevo and Pasha, but she stuck a piece of paper into his hand and said, “Look at this, just look what my crazy sister has done!”
He opened the note. It was the first time he was seeing Tatiana’s handwriting. It was round, small, and neat. Dear Mama and Papa, the note read. I’ve gone to join the People’s Volunteers to find Pasha and bring him back for you. Tania.
Making every effort to control his facial expression, Alexander gave the note back to Dasha with careful fingers and said, “She left when?”
“Yesterday morning. We got up and she was gone.”
“Dasha, why didn’t you come to me right away? She’s been gone since yesterday?”
“We thought she was just kidding. That she would come back.”
“Did you hope,” Alexander enunciated slowly, “that she would come back with Pasha?”
“We don’t know! She gets these ideas into her head. I honestly don’t know what she is thinking. She can’t go to the store by herself, much less to the front. Mama and Papa are beside themselves. They were so worried about Pasha, and now this.”
“Are they worried, or are they angry?” asked Alexander.
“They’re frantic. They’re deathly afraid for her. She—” Dasha broke off. Tears were in her eyes. “Dearest,” Dasha said, coming close to him. She put her arms around him, but Alexander’s face remained as closed as a bank on a holiday. “Alexander,” she said, “I didn’t know who to turn to. Help us, please. Help us find my sister. We can’t lose my Tania . . .”
“I know,” he said.
“Please?” Dasha said. “Will you do this . . . for me?”
Patting her on the back, Alexander stepped away. “Let me see what I can do.”
Alexander bypassed his immediate commander, Major Orlov, and went straight to Colonel Stepanov. He got authorization to take twenty volunteers and two sergeants to drive an armored truck loaded with munitions south to the Luga line. Alexander knew that the line badly needed to be strengthened. He told Stepanov he would be back in a few days.
Before dismissing Alexander, Stepanov said, “Bring yourself back. Bring the men back, Lieutenant.” He paused. “As always.”
“I will do my best, sir,” said Alexander. He had not seen many volunteers come back to the garrison.
Before he left, he went to see Dimitri and offered him a spot on the squad. Dimitri refused. “Dima,” said Alexander, “you should come.”
“I’ll go where they send me,” said Dimitri, shaking his head, “but I’m not swimming voluntarily into the jaws of the shark. Have you heard about what’s happened to Novgorod?”
Alexander drove the armored truck himself. It was filled with men, thirty-five Nagant rifles, thirty-five brand-new Tokarev rifles, two boxes of hand grenades, three crates of field mines, seven boxes of ammunition, a stack of oval artillery shells, and a keg of gunpowder for the mortars. Alexander thought it was good that the truck was armored.
He wished he had one of the tanks Tatiana had made.
The three towns followed in order from Leningrad: Gatchina was first, then Tolmachevo, then Luga. By the time Alexander reached Gatchina, he could already hear the distant thunder of artillery. His fleet of men trembled behind him as he made his way down the unpaved road. He heard bombs exploding like fireworks, and as if in a dream his father’s face flashed before him, wanting to know what Alexander was doing near death’s door before it was his time. He said, “Dad, I’m going for her,” and Sergeant Oleg Kashnikov, a brawny young soldier, said, “What did you say, Lieutenant?”
“Nothing. Sometimes I do that. Talk to my father.”
“But, Lieutenant, that wasn’t Russian,” Kashnikov said. “It sounded like English, but what do I know?”
“Not English, just gibberish,” said Alexander.
When Alexander and his men got out at Luga, the noise of artillery fire was no longer distant. The land was flat, and in the horizon there was smoke and sound. It wasn’t a sound signifying nothing, thought Alexander. It was the thunder of anger and of death.
During the evening of one Fourth of July barbecue, the family had gone out sailing on the sea in Nantucket Sound and watched the fireworks from their boat. Seven-year-old Alexander lifted his head up to the sky, enchanted by the rainbow lights exploding loudly overhead. He couldn’t imagine anything more spectacular than these vibrant colors showering the sky with life.
Straight ahead was the approach to Luga River. To the left were fields, and to the right was a forest. Alexander spotted children who were maybe ten years old picking what remained of this year’s crops. On the perimeter of the fields, soldiers and older men and women were digging trenches. He knew that after the crops were picked, the fields would be mined.
Calmly, holding his rifle tightly, Alexander told his men to stay put while he went to find Colonel Pyadyshev, who was organizing the defense line for a twelve-kilometer stretch along the river. Pyadyshev was pleased about the extra arms and immediately had his soldiers unload them and prepare to divide them up. “Only seventy rifles, Lieutenant?” he said to Alexander.
“All we have, sir,” Alexander replied. “More are coming.”
Then Alexander took his twenty charges closer to the river bank, where they received shovels and dug for a few hours. With a pair of binoculars Alexander searched the forest on the other side of the river and determined that the Germans had already advanced to contact, though they had not yet brought themselves into full offensive position.
The men had a bite to eat out of the canned goods they had brought with them. They drank water from the river. Alexander then left his two sergeants, Kashnikov and Shapkov, in charge, and went to find the group of volunteers who had come with the Kirov Works over four days ago.
He didn’t find anyone that day. But the next day he found Zina. She was in the field, bent over with her shovel. She was digging out the potatoes and throwing them into the basket, dirt and all. Alexander suggested she clean the dirt off first, to make more room for actual potatoes. Zina glared at him, prepared to say something rude, but then looked at his red star and his rifle and said nothing. Alexander saw that she did not recognize him. Not everyone can have my memory for faces, he thought. “I’m looking for your friend,” he said to Zina. “Is she here with you? Young girl, Tatiana.”
Zina looked up at him, and fear flashed through her eyes.
“Haven’t seen her,” Zina said. “I think she must be over there.” She waved her arm.
What’s she afraid of? wondered Alexander, breathing a relieved sigh. “So she is here. Over where?”
“I don’t know. We got separated after we got off the train.”
“Separated where?”
“Don’t know.” She was plainly nervous. She missed her basket completely, and the potatoes fell on the ground. Not picking them up, she continued to dig.
Alexander banged the ground twice with his rifle. “Comrade Atapova! Stop. Straighten up. Stand up, stop moving.” Zina quickly did. “Do you remember me?”
She shook her head.
“Aren’t you wondering how I know your name?”
“You have a way of finding these things out,” mumbled Zina.
“I’m Alexander Belov,” he said. “I used to come to Kirov to meet Tatiana. That’s how I know your name. Now do you remember?”
Relief showed on Zina’s dirt-covered, unfriendly face.
“Tatiana’s family is very worried about her. Do you know where she is?”
Relief mixed with defensiveness. “Listen,” Zina barked, “she wanted me to get off with her, but I said I couldn’t. I’m not a deserter.”
“Get off with her where? And you can’t be a deserter,” said Alexander. “You’re in the volunteer army.”
Zina didn’t seem to or want to understand. “Well, in any case I haven’t seen her for days. She didn’t come to Luga with us. She jumped off the train at Tolmachevo.”
Alexander paled. “When you say jumped off the train . . .”
“I mean, the train slowed down a bit at an intersection, and she stepped down the rung and jumped. I saw her rolling down the hill.”
Steeling his face, he said, “Why did you let her jump off the train?”
Raising her voice, Zina said, “Let her? Who let her? I said, don’t do it. She wanted me to come with her.” She laughed. “She wanted me to jump off a train! Why should I go with her? I’m not looking for my brother. I came to join the People’s Volunteer Army. For Mother Russia.”
As he stepped away from her, Alexander said, “So for Mother Russia you would jump off the train, comrade?”
Zina had no answer. She turned away from him and continued to dig the potatoes, mumbling, “I wasn’t jumping off any train. I wasn’t going to be a deserter.”
Alexander quickly went to find some of his men. He took Kashnikov and five volunteers and drove the truck, now emptied of munitions, north to Tolmachevo. The town itself was nearly deserted. They drove through the streets, finally finding a woman carrying a child and a satchel. The woman told them Dohotino was three kilometers west. “But you won’t find nobody there,” she said. “Nobody there at all.”
They drove there anyway. The woman was right. All the huts had been long abandoned and the village bombed. There had been a fire, which had burned a swath through half a dozen homes. Still Alexander called out for her. “Tania!” he called. “Tatiana!”
He looked inside every single hut, even the burned-down ones. His men called for her also. It sounded foreign to him, her name coming off strangers’ tongues. But Kashnikov was a good sergeant. He didn’t question Alexander. The men were glad to help, if only to get away from the monotony of trench digging.
“Tania! Tania!” Their voices echoed through the small farming village in the middle of fields and woods. They did not find a soul. They found bits and pieces on the ground, blankets, singed backpacks, toothbrushes.
On the outskirts of Dohotino there was a small sign with an arrow: Dohotino Boys Camp. The seven men walked two kilometers through a wooded path and came out at a small meadow where ten abandoned tents stood in a row near a large pond.
Alexander looked through the tents and discovered that there should have been eleven, not ten. One of the tents had been taken down and its stakes removed. The ground was still fresh where the stakes had been pulled out. Alexander thought that was a good idea and had the soldiers remove the other ten tents. The tents were big and made of thick canvas.
The fire that had been set up by the campers felt cold to his touch, as if it hadn’t been lit in weeks. There was not a trace of old food around, of trash left by young boys or by a young Tatiana.
It was late in the evening when they returned to Luga. He and his men pitched their newly found tents by the forest in the rear of the army camp. Covered in his trench coat, Alexander lay on the ground. He couldn’t sleep for a long time.
Back in America, in the Cub Scouts, they used to pitch tents and sleep in the woods and eat berries and fish they caught in the lake, and have fires at night. They opened up their cans of ham, they toasted marshmallows, they sang Cub Scout songs, and stayed up late, and during the day learned how to survive in the woods and how to make knots. It was an idyllic existence when Alexander was just a boy of eight, nine, ten. The summer months he spent at Cub Scout camp were by far the best months of his childhood.
He knew that if Tatiana hadn’t broken her neck jumping off the train, she must have found the empty camp. Maybe, if she were smart, she took the missing tent. But what would she do next? Would she come back to Leningrad?
Alexander couldn’t see that. If she had set out to find Pasha, he didn’t see how she could return without some answer as to his whereabouts. After Tolmachevo where would she go?
Luga. There was nowhere else. She would go to Luga, because that’s where she would think Pasha had gone — to help build the Luga line.
Invigorated and hopeful, he slept.
The next morning at sunup Alexander heard the distant roar of planes. He hoped they were Soviet planes.
No such luck. The black swastika was clearly apparent even from 300 meters below. Sixteen planes in two formations swooped, and he saw something drop from them. He heard screams of panic, but there were no bombs. In a few moments white and brown pieces of paper floated down like tiny parachutes. One landed in front of his tent. He picked it up. Soviet Man! the paper proclaimed. The end is here! Join the winning side — and live! Surrender — and live! Nazism is superior to Communism. You will have food, you will have jobs, you will have freedom! Now!
Another piece of paper was an actual pass to cross the front line. Shaking his head, Alexander dropped both to the ground and went to wash in the Luga tributary that ran through the woods.
By nine in the morning Alexander saw more planes, all of them with the Nazi insignia. They flew just a hundred meters above ground. The heavy machine guns inside the planes made popping sounds as they shot at workers in the fields.
Everyone ran for the trees, for cover. One of the tents caught fire. The Nazis weren’t throwing bombs, Alexander thought as he put on his helmet and jumped down into a trench. No, they were saving their precious bombs.
Then Alexander saw they might have been saving some bombs, but not the fragmentation bombs, which ultimately fell from the planes and burst overhead. Alexander heard screams muffled by the continued shelling.
He looked in the trenches for his men but couldn’t find anyone he knew. The bombing continued for another thirty minutes, after which the planes flew away, but not before they threw out new leaflets. Surrender or die! was all these said.
Surrender or die.
The black smoke floating overhead, the scattered fires, the groaning human beings looked apocalyptic to Alexander. Bodies floated in the Luga. On the banks of the river, right along the ditches and the concrete reinforced holes, injured people writhed on the ground. Alexander found Kashnikov, who was alive but missing part of his ear. The wound was bleeding freely onto his uniform. Shapkov was in working order. Alexander spent the rest of the morning helping to move the wounded into field tents and the rest of the day digging not trenches but mass graves. He and sixteen of his men dug a large hole by the forest, into which they put the bodies of twenty-three people who had died that morning. Eleven women, nine men, one old man, and two children under ten. None of them soldiers.
Alexander looked into the face of every one of the women, his heart stopping each time.
Then he walked among the dozens of wounded, but again he did not find Tatiana. He even looked for Pasha, just in case, having seen a picture of him when he was a thirteen-year-old boy, standing in swimming trunks by Tatiana, pulling at her blonde braids.
He looked for Pasha reflexively. He knew that Pasha was not in Luga.
Alexander could not find Zina again.
He finally went to talk to Colonel Pyadyshev. After standing at attention for a few moments, Alexander said, “Hard to work in these conditions, isn’t it, sir?”
“No, Lieutenant,” said Pyadyshev, a brooding, balding man. “What conditions would these be? The conditions of war?”
“No, sir. The conditions of being ill prepared to face a relentless enemy. I am merely expressing a measure of sympathy for the struggle ahead. Tomorrow we will resume fortifying the line.”
“Lieutenant, you will resume tonight, until there is no more light. What do you think, is tomorrow a holiday for the Nazis? You think they won’t bomb us again?”
Alexander was sure they would bomb again.
“Lieutenant Belov,” continued Colonel Pyadyshev, “you just got here, and today you worked very hard . . .”
“Got here three days ago, sir,” said Alexander.
“Three days ago, good. Well, the Germans have been bombing the line for the last ten days. There was bombing yesterday — I don’t know where you were — and the day before. Every morning like clockwork, from nine to eleven. First they throw the leaflets telling us all to join their side, then they bomb us. We spend the rest of the day burying the bodies and digging trenches. Their main units are advancing on us at a rate of fifteen kilometers a day. They’ve mowed us down in Minsk, they’ve mowed us down in Brest Litovsk, and they’re finishing mowing us down in Novgorod. We’re next. You’re right, we have no chance. But when you tell me that we’re ill prepared, I tell you no, we do everything we can, and then we die. That’s the whole point.” Pyadyshev lit a cigarette with trembling hands and leaned on his small table.
Alexander saluted him. “We will continue to do all we can.”
While there was still light, Alexander walked with three of his men around the front-line camp. As he passed the hundreds of soldiers on the Luga shores, waiting for the Germans, playing cards, smoking cigarettes, he was surprised by how many wore ranking colors on their shoulders. It seemed to Alexander that one out of every ten men was an officer. Many were lieutenants, some first, some second, but there were captains, and quite a number of majors, all on the front line, ready to face the enemy. Front line. Who was left to command the troops if the majors were down on the ground? Alexander didn’t want to think about it.
He combed the fields diligently, using the grid method and going up and down, looking into the face of every person either shoveling out potatoes or shoveling out trenches. He did not find her.
Alexander went back to talk to Pyadyshev. “One more question, sir. Some volunteers came from Kirov Works about five days ago. Is there any place besides here they might have been diverted to, to help in the war effort? Could any of them have been sent farther east?”
“I command these twelve kilometers, and the rest I don’t know about. These twelve are the last line of defense between here and Leningrad. After this there is nothing left. There is only retreat. Or surrender.”
“There is no surrender, Colonel,” Alexander said firmly. “Death before surrender.”
Now it was the colonel’s turn to blink. “Go back to Leningrad, Lieutenant Belov. Go back to Leningrad while you still can. And take the volunteers you brought with you. Save them.”
The next morning when Alexander went to speak to Pyadyshev, he saw that the colonel’s tent had been dismantled overnight, the stakes had been removed, and the holes where the stakes had been filled in. More and more soldiers arrived at the river, and the front was split into three sectors, each with its own commander, since it became increasingly clear that it was difficult to organize such a large regiment of troops with just one command post. The new commander’s tent was pitched fifty meters from Pyadyshev’s old tent. The new commander not only did not know where Pyadyshev was, he did not even know who Pyadyshev was. The date was July 23.
Alexander did not have time to marvel at the speedy work of the NKVD, because at nine the shelling started again and lasted this time until noon. The Germans were trying to kill the front-line soldiers before they attacked with ground troops. They were biding their time, but not for long. Alexander suspected that it was only a matter of days before part two of the blitzkrieg. Either he was going to find Tatiana or he was going to remain at Luga and stand in front of the German tanks.
With a heavy heart Alexander walked up and down the river, looking for her. The rest of Alexander’s men were taken into the entrenching service. Those who had been trained by him had been given rifles. They were told it was a crime punishable by death to get separated from their weapons. “To lose your gun is a crime against the Motherland!” But during the next air raid he watched three of his men drop their rifles as they ran for cover. When the air raid was over, they smiled sheepishly at Alexander, who smiled wearily back, shaking his head.
Another day went by. As soldiers took their positions along the banks, as they set up artillery cannons and mined the potato fields, as they loaded what vegetables they could onto trucks that carried them back to Leningrad, the tight feeling inside Alexander’s chest did not let up from morning until night.
Pasha was lost, that much was obvious. But where was Tatiana? Why couldn’t he find her?