Colum McCann - Dancer

They wrote home to Galina, Yalena, Nadia, Vera, Tania, Natalia, Dasha, Pavlena, Olga, Sveta, and Valya too, careful letters folded in neat triangles. They didn’t expect much in return, perhaps just one sheet with the perfume left on the censor’s fingers. Incoming mail was given numbers and, if there were a series of numbers missing, the men knew that a mail carrier had been blown to bits. The soldiers sat in the trenches and stared straight ahead and composed letters to themselves in their imaginations, and then they went out into the war once more. Pieces of shrapnel caught them beneath their eyes. Bullets whipped clean through their calf muscles. Splinters of shells lodged in their necks. Mortars cracked their backbones. Phosphorus bombs set them aflame. The dead were heaped onto horse carts and laid in huge graves blown out of the ground with dynamite. Local women in shawls came to the pits to keen and secretly pray. The gravediggers — shipped in from the gulags — stood off to one side and allowed the women their rituals. Yet more dead were heaped upon the dead, and frozen bones were heard to crack, and the bodies lay there in their hideous contortions. The gravediggers shoveled the final dirt on the pits, and sometimes in their despair they pitched themselves forward, still alive. More dirt was thrown upon them so that afterwards it was said that the ground quivered. Often in the evenings the wolves came from the forests, trotting high-legged through the snow.

The injured were lifted into ambulances or onto horses or put on sleds. A whole new language appeared to them in the field hospitals: dysentery typhus frostbite trench foot ischemia pneumonia cyanosis thrombosis heartache, and if the soldiers recovered from any of these they were sent out to fight once more.

In the countryside they looked for newly burnt villages so the ground would be soft for digging. The snow unearthed a history, a layer of blood here, a horse bone there, the carcass of a PO-2 dive-bomber, the remains of a sapper they once knew from Spasskaya Street. They hid in the ruins and rubble of Kharkov and disguised themselves in piles of bricks in Smolensk. They saw ice floes on the Volga and they lit patches of oil on the ice so the river itself seemed aflame. In the fishing hamlets by the Sea of Azov they fished instead for pilots who had crashed and skidded three hundred meters along the ice. Gutted buildings lined the outskirts of towns and, in them, more dead in their havoc of blood. They found their comrades hung from lampposts, grotesque decorations, tongues black with ice. When they cut them down the lamps groaned and bent and changed the spread of their light. They tried to capture a Fritz alive to send him to the NKVD, who would drill holes in his teeth, or tie him to a stake in the snow, or just starve him in a camp like he was starving theirs. Sometimes they’d keep a prisoner for themselves, loan him an entrenching tool, watch him try to dig his grave in the frozen ground and, when he couldn’t, they shot him in the back of the head and left him there. They found enemy soldiers lying wounded in burnt-out buildings, and they pitched them out of windows to lie neck-deep in the snow, and they said to them, Auf Wiedersehen, Fritzie, but sometimes they pitied the enemy too — the sort of pity only a soldier can have — discovering in his wallet that the dead man had a father, a wife, a mother, maybe children too.

They sang songs to their own absent children, but moments later they put the stub of a rifle in an enemy boy’s mouth and, later again, they sang other songs, Raven oh black raven why do you circle me?

They recognized the movements of the planes, the half rolls, the chandelles, the sudden twists, the pancake falls, the flash of a swastika, the shine of a red star, and they cheered as their women pilots went up to hunt the Luftwaffe down, watched the women as they rose in the air and then fell in flames. They trained dogs to carry mines and they guided the dogs, with shrill whistles, to walk beneath enemy tanks. Crows patrolled the aftermath, fat on the dead, and then the crows themselves were shot and eaten. Nature was turned around — the mornings were dark with bomb dust and at night the fires cast light for miles. The days were no longer named, although on Sundays they could sometimes hear, across the ice, the Fritzes celebrating their god. For the first time in years they were allowed their own gods — they took their Crucifixes, their beads, their prayercloths out into the battlefields. All the symbols were needed, from God to Pavlik to Lenin. The soldiers were surprised by the sight of Orthodox priests, even rabbis, blessing the tanks, but not even blessings enabled them to hold their ground.

In retreat, to deny the enemy, the soldiers blew up the bridges their brothers had built, ripped apart their fathers’ tanneries, took acetylene torches to pylons, herded cattle over ravines, razed milk sheds, poured gasoline through the roofs of silos, hacked down telegraph poles, poisoned water wells, splintered fence posts and tore up their own barns for wood.

And when they advanced — in the third winter, as the war turned — the soldiers marched forward and wondered how anyone could have done such a thing to their land.

The living went west and the injured went east, packed into cattle cars, pulled by steam trains, which moved slowly across the frozen steppes. They huddled together, drawn to whatever light came through the wooden slats. In the center of each cattle car was an iron pail with a fire burning. The men reached into their armpits or groins to take out handfuls of lice, and then pitched the lice into the fire. They held bread to their wounds to stop the bleeding. A few of the soldiers were carried off, put onto carts, taken to hospitals, schoolhouses, clinics. Villagers came down to greet them, bearing gifts. The men who remained on the train heard their comrades leaving, all vodka and victory. And still there was no logic to their journeys — sometimes the trains passed right through their hometowns without stopping and the ones with legs tried to kick out the wooden slats; they were shot dead by the guards for insubordination and later in the night a family would trudge out through the snow, bearing candles, having heard that their son had died just a few kilometers from home, disgraced, left frozen by the tracks.

They lay awake in their blood-stiffened coats while the railroad cars rocked to and fro. They passed around the last of their cigarettes and waited for a woman or a child to shove a package between the slats or maybe even to whisper a sweet word. They were given food and water, but it tore through their intestines and made them sicker. There were rumors of new gulags being built to the west and south, and they told themselves that their gods had loved them this long but might not love them very much longer, so they furtively slipped their charms and icons through the floorboards to lie on the railroad tracks to be picked up by others in days to come. They pulled their blankets to their beards and threw more lice onto the fire. Still the trains poured steam into the air and carried the men through forests, over bridges, beyond mountains. The men had no idea where they would end up, and if the train broke down they waited for another to nudge up behind them, roll them forward, toward Perm, Bulgakovo, Chelyabinsk — where in the distance the Ural Mountains beckoned.

And so, in the late winter of nineteen hundred and forty-four, a train sped daily through the landscape of Bashkiria, emerging from the deep forest along the Belaya River to cross the wide stretch of ice into the city of Ufa. The trains made their way slowly across the trussed bridge, a quarter of a kilometer long, the steel giving out thuds and high pings under the stress of the wheels as if mourning in advance. The trains made their way to the far side of the frozen river, past the wooden houses, the tower blocks, the factories, the mosques, the unpaved roads, the warehouses, the concrete bunkers, until they reached the railway station, where the stationmaster sounded his whistle and the city’s brass band blew their battered trumpets. Muslim mothers waited on the upper platform clutching photographs. Old Tatar men went up on their toes to look for their sons. Babushkas huddled over buckets of sunflower seeds. Vendors solemnly rearranged the emptiness of their kiosks. Tough-faced nurses in brown uniforms prepared to transport the wounded. The local guards stood weary against pillars under red metal signs for rural electrification that swung in the breeze— Our Great Leader Is Bringing Electricity to You! — and a smell penetrated the air, foreshadowing the soldiers, sweat and rot, and each winter afternoon a six-year-old boy, hungry and narrow and keen, sat on a cliff above the river, looking down at the trains, wondering when his own father would be coming home and whether he would be broken just like the ones they were lifting from beneath the steam and the bugles.