rich field of study.
Day and night, his mind was occupied with a host of questions: food, a change of underwear, clean uniform, louse-powder, extermination of lice by ironing them with a heated bottle, by freezing them to death, by burning them to death… He no longer thought of women at all. He remembered a saying the criminals had used in the camps:
'You may live, but you won't love.'
58
Darensky had spent all day inspecting the guns of the artillery division. He hadn't seen a single plane or heard a single shot.
The division's commander, a young Kazakh, said very clearly and without a trace of an accent:
'You know what? Next year I'm going to grow some melons. You must come back and try one.'
The divisional commander was at home in the desert. He cracked jokes, bared his white teeth in a smile, and moved with quick and effortless steps through the deep sand. He even glanced amiably at the camels standing in harness by the huts with their corrugated-iron roofs.
Darensky found his cheerfulness irritating. In search of solitude, he decided to return to the emplacements of the 1st battery – though he had already been there during the day.
An enormous moon had risen; it seemed more black than red. Growing crimson with effort, it climbed up into the transparent black of the sky; the mortars, anti-tank weapons and the barrels of the guns looked strangely threatening in this angry light. Along the road stretched a caravan of camels; they were harnessed to squeaking village carts loaded with hay and boxes of shells. It was an unlikely scene: tractors, the lorry with the printing press for the Army journal, a thin radio mast, the long necks of the camels – and their undulating walk that made it seem as though their whole body was made out of rubber, without a single hard bone.
The camels passed by, leaving a smell of hay in the frosty air. The same huge moon – more black than red – had shone over the deserted fields where Prince Igor was to give battle. The same moon had shone when the Persian hosts marched into Greece, when the Roman legions invaded the German forests, when the battalions of the first consul had watched night fall over the pyramids…
Darensky, his head sunk into his shoulders, was sitting on a box of shells and listening to two soldiers who lay stretched out under their greatcoats beside the guns. The battery commander and his political instructor had gone to Divisional HQ; the lieutenant-colonel from Front HQ – the soldiers had found out who he was from a signaller - seemed to be fast asleep. The soldiers puffed blissfully at the cigarettes they had rolled, letting out clouds of smoke.
They were obviously close friends; you could tell from their certainty that whatever happened to one was of equal interest to the other.
'So what happened?' said one of them, feigning mockery and indifference.
'You know the bastard as well as I do,' said the second soldier with pretended reluctance. 'How
'So what happened?'
'So here I am in the same old boots. I'm not going to walk barefoot, am I?'
'So he wouldn't give you new boots,' said the second gunner. His voice was now full of interest; every trace of mockery and indifference had disappeared.
Their talk turned to their homes.
'What do you expect a woman to write about? This is out of stock and that's out of stock. If the boy isn't ill, then it's the girl. You know what women are like.'
'Mine's quite straightforward about it. She says: 'You lot at the front are all right – you've got your rations. As for us, we really are having a hard time.' '
'That's woman's logic for you,' said the first gunner. 'There she is, sitting in the rear, and she hasn't got a clue what it's like at the front. All she knows about are your rations.'
'That's right. She can't get hold of any kerosene, and she thinks it's the end of the world.'
'Sure. It's a thousand times more difficult to wait in a queue than to sit here in the desert and fight off enemy tanks with empty bottles.'
They were both well aware that there had been no tank attacks anywhere near them.
Interrupting the eternal discussion – who has the hardest role in life, man or woman? – one of them said hesitantly:
'Mine's fallen ill, though. She's got something wrong with her back. She only has to lift something heavy and she's in bed for a week.'
Once again the conversation seemed to take a different direction. They began to talk about the accursed, waterless desert around them.
The second gunner, the one lying closest to Darensky, said:
'She didn't write that to upset me. She just doesn't understand.'
Wanting to take back – but not completely take back – his harsh words about soldiers' wives, the first gunner said:
'I know. I was just being stupid.'
They smoked for a while in silence, then started discussing the respective merits of safety-razors and cut- throats, the battery commander's new jacket, and how you still want to go on living no matter how hard things may be.
'Just look at the night! You know, I once saw a picture like this when I was at school: a full moon over a field and dead warriors lying on the ground.'
'That doesn't sound much like us,' said the other with a laugh. 'We're not warriors. We're more like sparrows.'
59
The silence was suddenly broken by an explosion to Darensky's right. 'A hundred and three millimetres,' he said to himself at once. All the usual thoughts immediately went through his mind: 'Was that a stray shot? Are they registering? I hope they haven't already bracketed us. Is it going to be a full-scale barrage? Are they preparing the ground for a tank-attack?'
Every experienced soldier was asking the same questions.
An experienced soldier can distinguish one genuinely alarming sound from among a hundred others. Whatever he's doing – eating, cleaning his rifle, writing a letter, scratching his nose, reading a newspaper; even if his mind is as empty as only that of an off-duty soldier can be – he cocks his head and listens intently and avidly.
The answer came straight away. There were explosions to the right of them, then to the left of them – and suddenly everything began shaking, smoking and thundering.
A full-scale barrage.
The flames of the explosions pierced the clouds of smoke, dust and sand; at the same time, smoke poured out of the flames. Everywhere people were running for cover, dropping to the ground.
The desert was filled by a terrible howl. Mortar-bombs had begun falling near the camels; they were running wild, upsetting their carts and dragging their broken harnesses along the ground. Darensky just stood there, forgetting the whistling shells, gazing in horror at the appalling spectacle.
He couldn't rid himself of the thought that these were the last days of his motherland. He felt a sense of doom. The terrible howl of maddened camels, the anxious Russian voices, the men running for shelter! Russia was dying! Here she was, driven into the cold sands of Asia, dying under a sullen, indifferent moon. The Russian language he so cherished had become mingled with the terrified screams of wounded camels.
What he felt at this bitter moment was not anger or hatred, but a feeling of brotherhood towards everything
