Apricot Jam: And Other Stories (29 page)

About an hour later two light trucks drove up from Liebstadt in their rear. The first one, an Opel Blitz captured from the Germans, held the deputy chief of staff of the brigade, a major; the head of brigade reconnaissance, another major; and a few lower ranks from headquarters. They could not believe what they saw: This, after only a few hours? After that utterly quiet evening yesterday? And something like this happened? They hurried off to radio brigade headquarters.

The second truck held the deputy political officer of Second Battalion,
Konopchuk
, and the party organizer, Gubaydulin, who had obviously slept well and was quite sober.

There was also the head of the brigade
’
s SMERSH, Major Tarasov.

They huddled together with the officers: What happened and how? They were furious with Toplev and Kasyanov and heaped abuse on them: How could they allow a shambles like this?

Tarasov gave them a severe dressing down:
“
I don
’
t want to hear about
‘
surprise.
’
We always have to be ready for anything . . .
”

But Toplev, utterly worn out, completely forgot himself:
“
But we did know. We were warned.
”

“
What?
How?
”

Toplev told them about the deserter.

The full significance of what Toplev said struck Tarasov like a bolt of lightning:

“
Where is he now?
”

He
’
d been taken to the landowner
’
s house, over there.

The others who had come with him looked at each other and realized:
“
Uh-oh, someone
’
s about to get burned.
Time to get out of here.
”

And brigade headquarters had already been informed,
from above,
about a major German offensive in the north during the night, on a broader front than this one. Third Battalion was completely surrounded. They were ordered to pull their survivors out immediately, through Liebstadt to
Herzogenwald
.

They brought the deserter to Tarasov.

Despite the battle during the night, it seemed that he had been able to get some sleep. He tried to smile.
Inoffensively.
Anxiously.
Expectantly.

“
Ko
m
!
”
said Tarasov, pointing ahead with an abrupt wave of his hand.

He took him behind the barn.

He walked behind him, and on the way pulled his TT pistol from its holster.

From behind the barn came two quick shots.

After all the din of the past night they sounded rather quiet.

~ * ~

EPILOG

After the evening
of January 25, when the first Soviet tanks broke through to the gulf of
Frisches
Haff
and cut East Prussia off from Germany, the Germans prepared their counterattack in a single day and set it for the following evening. Their tank division, two infantry divisions, and a brigade of Jaeger troops began a westward offensive toward
Elbing
. During the night of January 26-27, three infantry divisions and the tanks of the Gro
ß
deutschland Division were added to this force, whose left flank had now seized
Wormditt
and Liebstadt.

Given that the wedge our tanks had driven into East Prussia stretched for some hundred kilometers, our infantry divisions had not yet managed to establish even a basis for a front line, and one of their three divisions had been surrounded and cut off. But
Elbing
, through which our Fifth Guards Tank Army had passed, remained beyond the Germans
’
grasp.
T
hey succeeded only in holding the territory from M
ϋ
lhausen to Liebstadt for four days. Their advance was checked in the south by our tank brigade and a corps of cavalry that was brought up from
Allenstein
—even the horsemen were, at last, of use in moving across the snowy ground.

On February 2 we again captured Liebstadt and the area to the west of it, and reconnaissance troops from our artillery brigade entered
Adlig
Schwenkitten. The guns of our two captured batteries stood in their former positions at the edge of the village, but all the breeches of all the guns and, in some cases, the barrels as well, had been damaged by TNT charges. They could not be repaired. The bodies of the gun crews, a few dozen of them, still lay unburied among the guns and back toward
Adlig
. A few had been stabbed to death: the Germans were saving their bullets.

We searched for the bodies of Major Boyev and his battery commanders. A few soldiers and battery commander Myagkov lay dead near Boyev. He had been shot through the head and through the jaw; he lay on his back. His fur jacket had
been taken from him, along with his felt boots, and his cap was missing. As well, one of the Germans had taken a liking to his medals and wanted them to prove the success of their attack. He had used his knife to cut out the large piece of the tunic on which Boyev wore all his medals, and the congealed blood of the knife wounds could still be seen on his chest.

He was buried in the central square in Liebstadt, where a monument to Hindenburg stood.

A day earlier the command of the artillery brigade had submitted to the army artillery headquarters a list of those recommended for the Order of the Red Banner for the operation of January 27. At the top of the list were the names of political officer Vyzhlevsky, chief of staff Veresovoy, and the head of brigade reconnaissance; at the end of the list were the names of Toplev, Kandalintsev, Gusev, and the commander of the sound-ranging battery.

The commander of the army artillery, a tall, thin, and tough lieutenant general, realized full well the rashness of his decision to allow a completely undefended brigade of heavy artillery to deploy so early in a place that was an operational void. But when he saw the list his blood boiled. With a thick slash of his pen he struck out all the names of the senior officers of the brigade that stood at the top of the list. And then he added his own instructions in language not normally found in official documents.

Many days later, in March, an official citation was issued for Major Boyev as well: he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, First Class. Everyone was satisfied. But no one ever saw this golden medal, and his sister
Praskovya
never received it.

And, to be sure, did it add much to what some German soldier had cut away with his knife?

~ * ~

In his postwar
memoirs, the commander of the infantry division made no mention of his one-day regimental commander, Major Baluev.

He simply disappeared, as if he had never existed.

<
>

~ * ~

ZHELYABUGA VILLAGE

1

T
hree days ago
our troops moved through the breach on the River Neruch. For these past days, my central station had been located inside a smokestack by the railway embankment. The brickwork was solid and gave good protection from enemy shelling. Some peasant women with their little ones had crowded in with us, and a couple of dozen gypsies who had popped up from somewhere had also settled in. After two months in areas occupied only by troops, it was odd now to see civilians about. At three that morning my battery got the signal to stand down: we were to pack up and move. By the time we had pulled in all the listening posts, it was already getting light. We rolled in to Zhelyabuga Village before there was enough light for aircraft.

Rolled in isn
’
t quite the right expression. A sound-ranging battery is supposed to have as many as six specially equipped buses; what we had was a battered three-ton truck and a one-and-a-
halfer
. They could haul only our equipment and supplies along with a small crew, so the rest of the battery had to chase after them on foot. Lieutenant Ovsyannikov, the commander of the line-laying platoon, normally took charge of the battery,
while Botnev, who ran the instrumentation and plotting platoon, and I rode in the trucks, hurrying ahead to find a site for our central station.

This was a critical job: the whole setup of the battery depends on the location of the central station. The more quickly it can be sited, the more quickly and safely the battery can be deployed. But it has to be sited absolutely correctly: a shell fragment in this heart of the battery means the whole battery is knocked out. There were times when we had to dig in our station in the middle of a rye field and cover it with a tarp, but this was asking for trouble.

I was nearly burned out after the pressure of the last four days and the lack of sleep. Yet it was a joyous exhaustion. We were making our general offensive, approaching the Kursk salient and taking some giant steps forward.

What a keen feeling we had for the places in this area and for the names of the towns and villages! Though we had never spent much time here, we had been here many times, registering targets from behind the Neruch as we devoured the maps with our eyes and imprinted them on our retinas—every patch of woods, every little ravine and ridge, the stream called
Beryozovets
, the village of
Setukha
(we had stayed in it the day before yesterday), the village of
Blagodatnoe
(we were now passing it on our left but couldn
’
t see it); then Zhelyabuga, and then here was Zhelyabuga Village. We already knew where the houses were situated in every little village.

It
’
s just as the maps show: Zhelyabuga Village is on a gentle slope down toward
Panikovets
Creek. And here we are, after rocking and jarring along the rutted track from the main road. So long as there are no aircraft we can move
about openly. I yell to the boys in the back of the truck:
“
Dugin!
Petyrkin
!
Kropachov
! Scout around and see if you can find a cellar somewhere.
”

They tumble out of the truck and run off to search. There are already a few troops in the village—trucks here and there, sitting tilted downward with their noses dug in. The mortars have moved on ahead. The divisional artillery is on our right, across the hollow. I
’
m still searching the map to find sites for the listening posts. In front of us to the west is Mokhovoe, a sizeable place. Just last week the trains were still coming here, offloading supplies for the Germans. They
’
ll try to hang on to Mokhovoe, so we
’
ll probably be here for a while.

I pick out some approximate sites for the listening posts. (Ovsyannikov is the one who
’
ll site them precisely.) They should cover about five kilometers of frontage (the book says as much as seven kilometers, but we
’
ve long modified what the book says: we never deploy six posts, and if we
’
re really pushed we
’
ll put out just four; now we
’
ll use five). Ahead of our posts we have to find a place for our forward observer and the warning post. It has to be in a place (and often it
’
s in the infantry trenches) where the observer can hear each sound from the enemy before any of our posts on the flanks can. Then—and this was where the whole art of the thing was—he has to decide for which sounds he has to press the button to turn on a station and which sounds to ignore.

“
Found one!
”
someone is shouting as he comes running. Who is it? Our
“
regimental mascot,
”
the fourteen-year-old
Mitka
Petrykin, a lad we picked up from Novosil, a town completely flattened by the war. Once it was a district town, but now it is a pile of white stone that stands as a silent sentry over the spot where the Neruch and the
Zusha
join.
“
Comrade Senior Lieutenant! Over
he
-e-ere! A cellar!
A good one!
”