34

p The draftees together with the friends and relatives who were seeing them off to war were hastening to the stanitsa main square. Ahead of me ran two boys of around seven and ten. Their parents overtook me and left me behind. The father was a big, sturdy chap, a tractor driver by the look of him, dressed in neatly patched blue overalls and a well-laundered shirt. The mother was a young woman with a dark complexion, sternly compressed lips, and puffed-up eyelids that betrayed her recent tears. As she passed me, she said very softly for her husband alone to hear: 35

p “There they come at us again. Why can’t they let us live in peace? Give them what’s coming to them, will you, Fedya?”

p The bear-like Fedya wiped his sweating hands on a handkerchief that was black and greasy with machine oil, smiled down on his wife with an air of condescension and said in a deep rumble:

p “You’ve been lecturing me all night, and you’re still at it. Enough, now. I know my job, you don’t have to teach it me. What you’d better do is tell your team leader when you return home that we’ll skin him alive if he goes on stacking the hay the way we saw them doing as we came past Gniloi Log. Just tell him that, will you?”

p The woman tried to remonstrate, but her husband silenced her with an angry gesture, and said in an even deeper rumble:

“Shut up for heavens’ sake, you’ve said enough. Once we’re lined up, we’ll be told everything in a far better way than you can ever hope to put it.”

p The draftees were lined up in trim rows before the speakers’ platform on the square. A huge crowd had gathered to see them off. The first to speak was Yakov Zemlyakov, a tall Cossack with a powerful chest.

p “I was a gunner myself, a Red partisan, and I went right through the Civil War. My son is an artilleryman like myself, he’s serving in the ranks of the Red Army. He fought in the Finnish war, was wounded and is now fighting the German nazis. I couldn’t stomach the treachery of the Germans, so I handed in my application asking them to enlist me as a volunteer in the Red Army and put me in my son’s unit so we could give hell to the nazi bastards together, just like we gave it to the White bastards twenty years ago. I want to go into battle as a Communist, and I’m asking the Party organisation to admit me as a candidate member.”

p Pravdenko, an old industrial worker, said in his turn:

“I have two sons in the Red Army. One is in the Air Force and the other in the infantry. I gave them my fatherly blessing to strike down the enemy without mercy till there’s none left in the sky or on land. And if they need help, I’ll take my rifle and have a go at them myself like in the old days.”

36

p The winter wheat, thick and bright green, rose in a wall as tall as a stand of young reeds. The rye was taller than an average man. Its taut bluish ears were pulled down by their own weight, and swung heavily in the wind.

p A man on horseback appeared on the road. He turned into the rye field to give way to our car, and instantly vanished from view. We could not see the horse nor the man’s white shirt, nothing but the crimson band on his Cossack cap which showed against the green like a flowering thistle.

p We stopped the car, and the horseman emerged from the rye to speak to us.

p “Look at it, isn’t it a beauty this year?" he said, pointing at the rye. “And here it’s threatened by that Hitler bastard, blast his soul! He’ll be sorry he ever picked this fight. He sure will be sorry. Comrades, I haven’t been home for two days, I’ve run out of tobacco, so give me a cigarette, will you? And tell me what’s new at the front.”

p We told him what the latest communiques had said, and as he listened he kept stroking his greying sun-bleached whiskers.

p “Our young people are putting up a jolly good fight, aren’t they? And what will happen when we, the old hands who’ve fought in three wars, are called up? We’ll slash those nazis right down to their navels, right down to where the midwives tied the bastards’ chords. I’m telling you they’ll be sorry!”

p The Cossack dismounted, squatted on the ground and lit the cigarette we gave him, turning his back to the wind and never letting go of his bridle.

p “How are things at your farm?" I asked him. “What do the older Cossacks have to say about this war?”

p “Well, we figured on finishing with the haymaking and then reaping the rye and the wheat all right and proper. But if the Red Army needs us sooner, we’re ready any time. The womenfolk will manage without us. You know that we’ve taught them how to handle tractors and combine harvesters just in case. Soviet power is wide awake too, it has no time for sleep,” he said with a sly wink. “Sure it’s more quietlike living in the steppe here, but then Cossacks never looked for a quiet life and never tried to hide behind anyone’s back. We’ll gladly fight this war. People are pretty mad at this Hitler bastard. What’s the matter with him anyway, does he sicken for war or something?”

p He smoked his cigarette in silence, casting sidelong glances at his peacefully grazing horse.

37

p “When I heard about the war last Sunday, everything sort of turned over inside me,” he resumed in a reflective tone. “I couldn’t sleep that night, I lay thinking that last year we were attacked by the Colorado beetle, and this year by Hitler. There’s always some trouble or other. And I was thinking, what kind of a lousy insect was he to jump on everyone and give no one any peace? And then I remembered the first German war where I fought till the end, and I remembered how I cut down the enemies. ... I cut down eight of them with this hand here, and all during attack,” he smiled shyly, and dropped his voice. “Nowadays I can tell about it outloud, but it was sort of awkward before.... I earned two St. George Crosses and three medals in that war. I didn’t have them pinned on me for nothing, eh? I should say not. And so, I lay in my bed thinking of the last war, and suddenly I remembered reading in a newspaper that Hitler himself had been in that German war. And a sorrow so bitter gripped my heart, that I sat up in bed and said outloud: ’Dammit, why wasn’t he one of those eight who came my way that time? I’d have swung my sword just once, and he’d have been in two halves.’ The wife was awakened, and she asked me: ’What are you fretting about?’ I said to her: ’About Hitler, be he thrice cursed! Sleep, Nastasya, this is all above your head.’ "

p He pinched out his cigarette and swung into the saddle.

p “Well, never mind, he’ll get what’s coming to him, damn him.” He gathered up the bridle and, turning to me, said gravely: “If you happen to be in Moscow, you tell them that the Don Cossacks of all ages are prepared lo do their duty. Well, goodbye. I must hurry to the haymaking to help our female citizenry.”

He spurred his horse and in a minute vanished from sight. Only the light puffs of dust kicked up by his horse’s hooves on the loamy slope of the ravine floated on the wind and showed us the way he had gone.

p That evening a group of farmers gathered on the porch of the Mokhovsky village Soviet. Kuznetsov, a middle-aged man with hollow cheeks, was speaking and I noticed his huge workworn hands which lay serenely on his knees.

p “... I was wounded when I fell into their hands. As soon as I was a bit better they put me to work. They harnessed eight of us into a plough, and made us plough their German soil for 38 them. After that they shifted me to the coal mines. The daily loading quota was eight tons of coal, and we barely did two. When we didn’t do the quota we got beatings. They’d stand us up, facing the wall, and hit us on the back of the head so we’d smash our noses into the wall. After these beatings they’d lock us up in barbed wire cages. The cages were so low, you had to squat on your haunches. A couple of hours like that, and you had to be pulled out with a poker because you couldn’t even crawl.” Kuznetsov glanced at his listeners with gentle eyes, and continued in the same calm manner. “Take a look at me: I’m skinny and sick just now, but still I weigh 70 kilos, but in that prison camp I never weighed as much as 40 in all the two and a half years I was there. That’s what they did to me.”

p After a momentary silence, he spoke again.

p “Two of my sons are fighting the nazis just now. I reckon the time has come for me to settle accounts with them too. Only, begging your pardon, citizens, I’m not going to take them prisoner. I just can’t.”

p A profound, alerted silence fell upon the listeners. Without lifting his eyes from his brown, twitching hands, Kuznetsov said in a softer voice:

p “Begging your pardon, of course, citizens—-But they drained all the strength from my body, down to the last drop. And if I have to fight, I’ll maybe take their privates prisoner, but their officers—never. I just can’t, and that’s all there is to it. The most terrible things of all I suffered at the hands of their gentlemen officers, so you must forgive me.”

He stood up—a big, skinny man with eyes that suddenly looked brighter and younger with hatred.

p On the second day of war, every man, woman and child at the Vashchayevsky collective farm turned out to work. Even the very old who had long been relieved came out to do their bit. The clearing of the threshing floor was left entirely to the old men and the old women. One ancient, really mouldy-looking from old age, was scraping at the floor with a shovel, sitting on a stool with his shaking legs spread wide apart.

p “Why d’you work sitting, Grandad?" I asked him.

p “My back won’t bend, son, and I’m happier sitting down.”

39

p One of the old women there said to him: “Why don’t you go home? We’ll manage without you.”

p At this, the ancient raised his colourless, childlike eyes and said to her sharply:

“I have three grandsons fighting in this war, so I must help them in any way I can. And you’re too young to teach me, woman. Wait till you’re my age, then teach me all you want.”

p Two feelings live in the hearts of the Don Cossacks: love for their Motherland and hatred for the nazi invaders. Their love will live forever, but may their hatred last until the enemy has been routed completely.

p Woe to those who have aroused this hatred and incited the cold fury of the people’s wrath.

1941