(no subject)
Dmitry Bakin. Excerpt from the short story “No Remaining” («Нельзя Остаться»). English translation by yours truly.
He had always known that memories of war would be his last memories, for the Great War was the most grandiose event of his life. Everything else paled in comparison: his daughter being born, his grandchildren not being born by her, outer space receiving man’s invasion, the ocean allowing its depth to be measured. Those were the only four years, of his eighty-nine, when he measured time by weight, like he might his own body. The bloody-earthen substance of those years had been a load he carried to this very day, when non-being, which alone was capable of taking the load off, finally loomed ahead. He remembered the beginning and the end of the war in minute detail. Between the beginning and the end, time’s viscosity and density surpassed the density and viscosity of water, for nothing is more important for a rank-and-file infantryman than mindless endurance and equally mindless courage with which orders are to be followed. He remembered his comrade who had been fatally wounded by a shell fragment, and seeing for the first time the horror of life in the open wound, where the dying pulse makes half a movement forwards and half a movement backwards. He remembered the first German soldier he had killed with his own hands, slitting his throat with a knife bayonet, and the savage fury that had come over him at the moment of killing like deep water, fury directed at himself, at his reluctance to kill, lodged deep inside him under the armor of duty. He remembered staring at his hands then, covered with thick, cooling blood, so sticky that it seemed fit to glue broken furniture back together. Resisting the pull of sleep, no less irresistible than the pull of earth, he sunk into the abyss of memory, recalling how he felt during those years: at times a part of a whole, which defended itself and then attacked, and at other times falling into a state of profound loneliness in the face of inescapable, fast-approaching death, because one can’t die as a part of the whole.
For four years he had walked towards the river, without knowing its name or even any awareness of its existence. He had walked towards April, towards its middle, when the armies of the three fronts encircled the enemy country’s capital, the city where he was deeply convinced he would meet his end along with thousands upon thousands of others like him, of the two and a half million soldiers who were to take part in the operation. And gigantic artillery and infantry forces swept onto the banks of Oder with tanks and gun vehicles. And on the sixteenth of April, at five in the morning, darkness shuddered and ascended to the sky, instantly overtaken by all-consuming fire, as though the solar wind’s plasma licked the Earth before the Sun itself would forever swallow and dissolve the Earth in its helium and hydrogen, breaking the order of planets. Tens of thousands of artillery guns and mortar-carriers struck at once and, deafened, he watched the morning fog compress at the river’s surface. Thunder-like strikes of large-caliber howitzers, blended into a continuous roll, the howling of rockets and the roar of guns bent people down to the ground like grass bent down by a storm wind. From above came spiral-like ear-drilling buzz and whistle, perforating the brain. Then, after half an hour of supporting artillery fire, during which half a million shells and mortars were fired, all the surroundings were flooded with blinding, deathly-white light, which seemed to deny the very possibility of life and carry the world’s doom, as nearly a hundred and fifty anti-aircraft projectors lit up at once, installed in a row two hundred meters apart, pointed not upwards but towards the besieged city.
He tried to recall the assault itself, the longest weeks of his life, and advancing from one building to the next, from one basement to the next, through smoke, dust, bits of rock, through the burning smell that masked not only the smell of sweat and gunpowder, but also the smell of death itself, through ruins of the city built by the hands of those with whom they had fought for so long, killing and dying, but at some point his memory failed him and he realized, with effort and with fear, that he could not recall things that he remembered yesterday, or even earlier today, before the fall, as if the leveled, conquered city’s smoke filled his memory, obscuring the events that were still more important for him than anything else. He could only remember a short, skinny German officer, who had shown up suddenly at the door of a half-standing building, unarmed in a hurricane of gunfire, and how haughtily he had met his death. He remembered a grey cat whose sacrum had been crushed by a motorcycle sidecar on a street, and how it circled in place, rowing its front paws, like a second hand on a clock missing the hour and the minute hands. And he remembered the victory, when he emptied his rifle’s magazine into the sky and wandered aimlessly around the destroyed, alien city, deaf and dumb from happiness, limping, as if a dozen iron horseshoes fell on his head, surrounded by soldiers whose wide-open mouths were letting out a silent scream and whose rifles twitched in their dirty hands, silently sending lead into the clouds.