The Iron Rod
Then it was December 5. The day the guns all along the Moscow front roared, the day the ski troops and the Siberian divisions poured from our Capital and smashed into the Fascist lines. The day Zhukov had his way, the day our victory began and the salvation of the world dawned bright with the Red sun in the low eastern sky.
That was also the first day I could really use my right leg since I'd taken a splinter through the calf in October. I could walk only with a limp and considerable pain, but I made it through the day's march without staggering or falling. The wound was still a barely closed knot of flesh. I was still strong after weeks of light duty. I was small enough to subsist on poor rations while the big men hollowed and slowed. Hunger takes strong men first.
But I was at least six weeks pregnant with Vladimir's child. It took an iron will not to vomit up the black bread, stolen sausage and mealy potatoes that comprised our limited rations. Even a few missed meals in those weeks could mean death as those who slowed from fatigue fell to the Germans and were shot, or lapsed into waking dreams in the bitter cold and lay down, never to rise.
Before the counterattack in December, the snow was relatively light, the cold harsh only to badly clothed men. This gave the advantage to the Germans, for it was their tanks and motor vehicles that allowed them to sweep across the central plains of Russia and encircle whole armies. It made it easier for them to rundown partisan detachments, and Vladimir's combat group fell back from the Smolensk rail line in late November. There were more men now, two hundred some-odd soldiers, though we lacked everything: guns, ammunition, bayonets, shovels, food, boots, clothes, medicine. Most had come from other detachments mauled by the Polizei and the rear area forces.
As the operation before Moscow grew more serious, I began to calculate how long I had to live.
Vladimir was too busy, generally, to fuck me, and Heinrich displayed little interest in me. His men often served as the first echelon in attacks and his nerves had begun to fray after so many close calls with shells and wire and machine guns. Kiril, though I wanted him badly, maintained his revolutionary discipline, and Lev grieved so for his wife in Kiev that it seemed he would never look at another woman. So none had any idea what I was concealing.
But I still knew. I had a few weeks, until January or February at the very latest, before it was impossible to hide my condition and I became an absolute liability to the unit. Each night I prayed to miscarry. Each day that I woke nauseous, but healthy, was a spiritual defeat. There was a parasite growing inside me, a fragment of my destruction, pushing my organs aside slowly, like a piece of shrapnel moving a millimeter a day.
I hoped the poor food and the long exertion would kill this parasite. For I did not intend to perish now that Moscow fought on and winter ground the Germans and a gun in my hand felt natural. I would see the war to its end or to my death in battle. Nothing else would do.
The first days of the counteroffensive were tenuous. All we had were rumors: Klin liberated, Kalinin retaken, a great battle before Mozhaisk, Rzhev attacked, Tula near to freedom, great battles in the center where the tanks closed to within meters of each other on ground consecrated in the struggle against Napoleon.
It was only on December 18, midway through Chanukah, that definite news reached us of the enemy's withdrawal from Tula, the destruction of the German XXXV corps and the flight of 3rd Panzer Army to the lines about Rzhev, and of the American entry to the war.
That day we'd overrun a supply depot maintained by a rear echelon unit and captured liquor, food and ammunition. It was enough for our purposes and enough to hurt the operations of the enemy's patrols between Orsha and Smolensk. We learned the news from a captured German radio as evening fell.
At the time, we were crammed into a village a day's march from the rail line, abandoned by its inhabitants at the height of the summer fighting. It lay at the edge of the agrarian lands and the forests, too exposed for a permanent base, but too well situated to abandon without a fight.
I was in the officer's house with the radio and the captains and Lev and some of the others. Lev and I were reporting the results of recent intelligence work on the dispositions of the auxiliary Polizei units near Orsha. Vladimir rose from the radio, slid the headset off, and gave the news. Kiril took off out into the snow to spread it among the men.
There was no containing the celebration: Moscow was saved, for now. The Soviet Union would endure. The Fascists had not won. Winter marched beside us.
Vladimir cracked a bottle of vodka and one of schnapps and passed them round, toasting. Men gathered outside the officer's house, demanding Vladimir speak. He slugged back his drinks until he was red in the face, then clambered out onto the roof over the porch.
"Comrades!" he called to the assembled men, pointing east. "You turned them back! By your blood and your fire you weakened them, so the bayonets of your brothers could stop the enemy's onrush."
Then he sang the Internationale.
"Arise, ones branded by hunger. Arise, the starving and the damned."
Others joined, frigid mouths stumbling over the words, until by the first chorus, every voice lifted up in song.
"This is our final and decisive battle. The Internationale will lead man up!"
Then the Slavianka Farewell, Kalinka, Katyusha, the marches of the civil war. All the while, bottles passed from hand to hand, multiplying as if by magic. Lev was beside me, his breath billowing in the night air, his face red with joy. He seized my hand and brought it to his lips.
"We will survive," he said.
Men who hated the Union in peace sang now with their whole breasts. Soldiers nearly speechless with the horrors of defeat stood proud for the first time since June, waving their hats in the bitter cold. Those who'd never wavered in the defense of the Soviet Union wept at the sound of their comrades joining as one in the songs of our grand project.
Then, the warmth in the blood and the liquor in the belly proved enough and the men gathered in small groups, friends with friends and countrymen with countrymen, singing, then dancing, laughing.
I did not drink. I wanted to keep my wits secure. Waves of nausea partly from hunger, partly from my condition, made vodka singularly unappealing. Kiril and Lev drank until they flushed, Vladimir drank until his voice quavered and his steps grew uncertain. The other men drank and drank, until the stumbling officers began ushered them into the dugouts and the huts for fear of frostbite. Even then the singing continued. Some cried, shouting the names of murdered comrades and dead family members.
Heinrich, as officer of the watch, did not drink. But I saw him on the porch of the officer's quarters, clapping his hands in time to the songs, mouthing the words around a captured cigar that hung in the corner of his mouth.
I did not want to sleep yet. The sky was too vast, the cold too bitter, the feeling of victory too pure. I felt light. My boots left almost no print on the packed snow. And I remembered a night like this, just a year ago, the night my engagement to Lazar began.
He came to see me in Minsk and we walked the city in the snow from evening until dawn, talking. We'd been one soul that night. Dreams and plans, love and socialism, and maybe, one day, children, that was what we talked of, and I pledged myself to him under the unimaginable cold of the Minsk sky.
I wanted to feel close to him again.
The force of that desire hurt me deep and the wind stirred tears to my eyes. I turned back to the officer's post, where I'd left the notebook I wrote my coded reconnaissance reports. That was the same notebook where I scribbled messages to Lazar in Yiddish in the margins of the used pages, things he'd said to me, things I'd loved about him. It was my last piece of him, in that way.
The little furnace strained to keep the heat going. Draped blankets and scraps of cloth covered the windows and plugged the gaps in the log walls. The place was two rooms, a common room where men assembled for council, and a locked room where the codebooks and the paychest were. The officer of the watch kept his vigil from the desk in the code room when he was not walking the perimeter.
My notebook was on the code desk. But Heinrich had locked the inner door when the drinking began. His great coat hung on a hook beside the door, however. I crossed to it, felt the pockets, found the key. Wherever he was, he'd be back soon. Ten minutes without a great coat could be lethal in this cold. He was probably just at the latrine.
I knew what would happen if he caught me. But it was worse to leave my notebook. I needed it, down in my soul I needed that book, more than physical safety, more than food. How else could I tell Lazar that Moscow endured and that we would survive. Without it I had my worn boots and my memories and nothing else.
I turned the lock, stepped inside. The code room was colder than the main room, its small stove down to embers.
I picked my notebook off the table and turned to go.
