But after four months of this privileged, man-infused existence, something happened. Her mother’s eyes were no longer liquid, because Lyosha only stopped by once a week and was not there long enough to lift Sasha onto his shoulders so she could parade around the yard. He smoked by the porch, taking long and deliberate breaths so he didn’t have to say anything. Her mother stood next to him, waiting for something other than a nicotine cloud to emerge from his mouth, her eyes surveying the ground around her feet.
Then one week, he was not there at all, and her mother announced at dinner that Lyosha had been sent with his air squadron to an overseas military mission. She said this staring into her borscht, and from Grandma’s deep and silent sigh, Sasha knew that she didn’t believe her.
The war aftermath is what Sasha and Lara both remember, not the war itself. The time of women, children, and old men; the time of nettle soup in the summer and cabbage soup in the winter; the time of waiting for fathers, sons, and brothers to return. The time of the gradual realization of how many wouldn’t.
One evening, when Sasha searches for words to bandage around their postwar wounds, words she cannot find, she turns to Kolya’s journal and reads to Lara what she herself doesn’t know how to express. She is still astonished, after all these years, by the grace of his sentences written in the trenches.
February 19, 1942
It’s the end of February, eight months since the beginning of the war, and our division is hobbling toward the front, which has been recently pushed half a kilometer west by a few hundred men from the provinces. Bowlegged, sinewy, and short, they threw themselves over the German machine-gun bunkers with the same irrational abandon that propelled them, in the steam of a peaceful bathhouse, to down tin cups full of undiluted spirits and then jump naked into the snow. A platoon of sharpshooters followed over their bodies, and now it is our heavy artillery division, with six cannons pulled by tractors, which has been tossed into the maw of battle.
We step out of the woods to cross the railroad tracks, which are still under bombardment—no longer from machine guns but from heavy artillery—farther away. The forest on the other side of the tracks looks like a broken comb, with sharp, uneven teeth of splintered tree trunks against the sky.
“Run over the tracks, don’t walk,” Seryoga instructs. “Hurry.”
But it’s impossible to run. There are corpses everywhere, frozen in piles covered by the recent snow. Some are still fighting a fight that has now become eternal. A Russian soldier is clutching at the throat of a German whose hand still holds a knife dug into his enemy’s back. A sailor who was struck as he was throwing a grenade, frozen, like a monument to himself, towering with his raised arm, rooted into the ice, the copper buttons on his black jacket sparkling in the sun. An infantryman, already wounded, started bandaging his leg and froze forever, struck by a bullet he never saw. It won’t be until April when the snow melts and reveals what is below these winter corpses—more dead. Layers of the dead: at the bottom are soldiers in summer uniforms; on top of them are sailors in black jackets and flared pants; then lie Siberians in sheepskin jackets and felt valenki boots who died in the December attacks of 1941. On top of them are fighters in cotton-filled jackets and cloth hats that had been distributed in the besieged Leningrad. Layer upon layer of corpses: a monstrous, bottomless layer cake of death.
“Let’s go, move,” yells Seryoga and pulls me over the tracks, over the mountains of frozen bodies that keep rising before us. As I stumble into the woods on the other side, I think of Borodino, of Tolstoy’s Volume III of War and Peace we had to read in art school. Imagine this picture, the professor said: tens of thousands of bodies strewn across the battlefield, the ground soaked with blood, half the Russian Army killed in one day. And the most surreal thing of all is that we claimed victory. I still remember the image: the vast field under the murk of dampness and smoke, dark clouds spitting drizzle at the dead, the wounded, the frightened and exhausted survivors, as though nature were warning people to look around, take inventory of the carnage, and think of what they had done.
How many have been murdered here, on the Leningrad Front? Could this be half of our present army Seryoga and I are walking on right now, stumbling on its soldiers’ frozen heads and arms? But even if it were, our army has always been bottomless, like a magic lake in a Russian fairy tale. It is promptly replenished with fresh arms and legs and newly shaved heads mobilized from republic capitals and small villages, from factory towns and collective farms, dressed in new uniforms and thrown into the foul cauldron of new battles.