David Robbins - Last Citadel

‘Hey, Andrei!’ Dimitri shouted over to the next tank in line.

‘Yeah!’

‘Keep an eye on the General for me.’ Valentin was gone in a company truck to pick up their new crew for the General .

Dimitri recalled the Cossack fable about the old stallion and the young colt. The young one said to the old, Let’s run down the hill and get us a filly! The old stud shook his great mane and replied, No. Let’s walk down and get them all.

Dimitri strode into the steppe grass, the reeds were as high as his waist, the color of bare and untanned skin. He ran an open hand over their tops and recalled the feeling of silk skirts, long, clean hair, and gentle, nervous flesh. It had been a while.

He walked to the lip of the trench and stopped. He was an old horse, yes, but he only wanted the one. He looked down at her, he’d kept a watch on this one all morning from his perch on the fuel barrel. She was one of dozens toiling below his boot-tips at the lip of the trench but she stood out. She would not lean on her shovel handle and gab, she paused only to mop sweat from her brow. She assaulted the soil and heaved great heaping shovelfuls into the waiting buckets, filling them with only three or four loads of her spade. She was not lean like some hungry peasant waif but a woman, with curves and swoops in her figure, she was ample. Around her worked old men in hats and beards with shirtsleeves rolled up, and girls dressed in billowy blouses and patterned skirts with kerchiefs around braided hair. She laughed once at something one of the girls said and he’d heard her through the scraping of a hundred tools and grunts and flopping dirt. He picked up an empty bucket with a rope attached to its handle and tossed it down into the trench. It landed with a hollow thump just where he willed it, at her feet.

Without looking up, the woman righted the bucket. With a few deep stabs of her shovel, she topped it with dirt. She paused now to run her sleeve across her forehead. The bucket did not disappear the way it was supposed to. She followed the slack rope up the trench wall into Dimitri’s hands.

‘Take it away,’ she said.

Dimitri tilted his head at her now that he had her eyes on him. Her voice was like her body, deep and round. He liked it.

‘Take it away,’ she said again, knowing what the old fool over her head was doing. She made her voice an instruction, a schoolmarm to a stupid student.

Dimitri inclined his head as though she were royalty and tugged up the bucket. He dumped it at his own feet, not on the pile behind him where the dirt belonged, and tossed the pail down to her again. She raised her eyebrows and turned away to another empty bucket. She filled that, and found Dimitri at the rope of this one too, pulling it to the surface to dump the dirt again in the wrong place.

She turned on Dimitri. Even ten feet below him, her eyes were sea green.

‘You’re not helping.’

Dimitri put his hands to his hips. He pretended to be wounded by her scold.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’

Dimitri clambered down the slope of the pit. His boots skidded and he almost fell, the ditch was steep. His hurry and lack of balance made her laugh. This was her second laugh for his ears.

Dimitri tugged his shirt tail out of his pantaloons and pulled the tunic over his head. Bare-chested, he reached for the woman’s shovel. She did not hand it over. He locked on to her eyes and saw how she took him in.

‘What?’ he prodded, expecting her to comment on his slim torso.

‘You’ve got no hair on your chest,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the chest of a woman.’

Okay, Dimitri thought, good, the filly bucks. He pulled his eyes from hers and slid them down her.

‘So do you, my dear.’

She sent her face skyward, shaking her noggin at something up there, her God, a dead husband, something, and said, ‘Ha!’

She would not give up her shovel. Dimitri turned to the girl behind him, she was a teenager, and asked her if she needed a rest. The girl sighed in relief and handed over her tool.

Dimitri made a display of his strength and stamina. He dug two to the woman’s one, filled buckets, and showed impatience when they were not hauled up fast enough. He worked for fifteen minutes, almost to the point of exhaustion. He finally speared his shovel into the ground and left it. She stood behind him with a ladle of water.

He poured it over his head. He handed it back to her. She walked away to bring him another. Yes, Dimitri thought, she’s ample.

She returned with the ladle dripping. He quaffed the lukewarm water and ran a filthy forearm across his lips. Again she laughed at him.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Dimitri Konstantinovich Berko. At your service. And who are you?’

‘Sonya.’

‘Just Sonya?’

‘Yes, Private. Just Sonya.’

She did not smile when she called him Private. This was a hard one, this woman, not a silly girl from the villages. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, a well-preserved lass, even in these war years. She must be, in fact, a teacher or something like that, maybe one of those damned Communists. She was firm in her ocean eyes, even her smiles and laughter were resolute. Dimitri had the instant concern she was smarter and better born than him.

‘Yes, well.’ He made a face. ‘Just Sonya.’ He played the clown a bit for her. ‘I’m a private in this army. But actually, when there’s no war going on, I’m a hetman .’ He tapped his own chest, in the mud there from the dripping water. ‘My father was a hetman . And his father.’

Sonya pursed her lips, impressed. ‘What is a hetman?’

He narrowed his eyes. She doesn’t know. Ah, she’s too much trouble. One more go-round, then enough. Back to my tank.

‘I am a Cossack leader. In my sietch , I am the final say.’

‘Your sietch .’

‘Yes, woman. My… my community. Village. Me. The little private.’

‘The dirty little private. Are you a tanker, Dima?’ This was the diminutive of his name, the affectionate form.

‘Yes. Right up the hill there. Those tanks. The 3rd Mechanized Brigade.’

‘You’ll be fighting here, then. When it starts. Around this trench.’

‘Yes. Along the Oboyan road. The Germans are going to give it everything they’ve got to take it. But I think this trench alone will stop them. I mean, look at it. You’ve done a marvelous job. There won’t be much fighting for me to do.’

Sonya took a deep breath and looked at Dimitri with softer eyes. He noted the change and heaped on more, this time for sympathy.

‘Me and my son. We’re in the same tank.’

‘The same tank.’

‘Yes. It’s an old tradition, Cossack families go to war together.’

‘That’s splendid.’

And my daughter.’

‘Oh.’ Sonya smiled her best yet. ‘Where is she?’

‘Up there. Somewhere.’ Dimitri pointed into the sky.

Sonya’s face fell.

‘Oh, Dima, no. I’m so sorry. Ay.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘To lose a child.’

No, he thought, you goose, Katya’s not dead! She’s a pilot…

‘How did she…?’

Dimitri froze for the moment, raising a hand to wave off the incorrect notion. Sonya touched his shoulder.

‘No, no, Dima, it’s alright. You don’t have to talk about her right now. I understand. It must be so hard for you.’

Dimitri lowered his hand. He drooped his eyes to the dirt and sniffed once, faking. He left Katya unexplained. Sonya patted his neck. Katya would understand, he thought.

She pulled her spade out of the facing wall. Dimitri followed suit. Sonya seemed to want to let some silence hover, to return to work, as though she dug now with a new purpose, for the dead daughter and the brave Cossack hetman who would fight beside his son here along the dangerous Oboyan road.