By the side of the road, a man is lying in the snow, covered with a coat, with a pillow under his head and a loaf and his wash bag beside him. He lies there motionless in the wintry solitude, with only his eyes showing any signs of animation in his bluish face. ‘Take me with you!’ he begs them quietly. ‘Take me with you!’
Peters sees the man but trots on mindlessly, utterly oblivious to his plight. He has seen too much, and experienced too much suffering… Even so, it is as though the solitary man by the roadside has surreptitiously planted a seed in his heart, which now starts to germinate vigorously. Thoughts begin to stir in his addled head, generating an unsettling humming and circling sensation that grows stronger by the second. One phrase above all starts to form from the background of white noise and push itself to the fore: ‘He saw the man and passed by on the other side.’ The biblical reference jolts Peters out of his stupor. Without warning, he stops dead in his tracks. He seizes Brezel by the forearm and stares wide-eyed into his startled face.
‘Saw the man and passed by on the other side,’ he mutters.
Brezel is alarmed. ‘Come on, we’ve got to keep moving!’ he urges, tugging at the padre’s arm.
But Peters stands his ground like a stubborn mule.
‘Saw the man and passed by on the other side,’ he repeats, turning aside. Stiff-legged, he starts to walk back the way they’ve come.
‘Padre!’ Brezel calls after him. ‘Padre!’ He really has gone mad, he thinks despairingly. He’s gone out of his mind; there’s no helping him any more. He doesn’t dare follow. His strength, too, is at an end. And now the crackle of gunfire resumes behind them.
Peters kneels down beside the wounded soldier. He wonders how on earth he got here. Some exhausted comrades may have left him here and put the pillow under his head as a final mark of their impotent concern.
‘Take me with you,’ he murmurs, over and over. ‘To Stalingrad!’
Peters lays a hand on his brow. It’s as cold as ice.
‘No, no, lad!’ he says quietly. ‘We’re not going to Stalingrad. What would the two of us want with Stalingrad? We’ve got our Dear Lord, and the only path we’ll take leads to him.’ His own words strike him as new. The crippled man looks up at him, silent and attentive. His eyes probe unknown realms. Peters takes off the silver crucifix that he wears round his neck and, holding it fast, prays with the man and gives him communion. He still has some altar wine left in his canteen and some wafers in his pocket.
Time drifts by silently. After slipping imperceptibly into the arms of death, the invalid by the roadside has gone into rigor mortis. Padre Peters stands beside the dead man, contemplating his calm, relaxed and peaceful face. A sense of profound loneliness suddenly folds him into its stifling embrace. His gaze falls on the crucifix in his hand… ‘And surely I am with you always…’ It is as if he is waking from a state of deep unconsciousness. Peters breathes a heavy sigh. What a Doubting Thomas he was! He can feel strength flowing into his body from the crucifix in his hand and from the dead man’s transfigured features. With a great upsurge of joy, he realizes that he can still help. And, isolated as he is, abandoned by everyone else and all alone with his crucifix, he comes to a momentous decision.
Peters covers the dead man with his coat and departs. But not in the direction of Stalingrad. He walks back through the abandoned town of Gumrak. But now he sees it through waking eyes. To his left is the cemetery. There, the bodies lie cheek-by-jowl, from a time when it was still possible to bury corpses. Each grave has its own cross. And there’s the house where the lieutenant lies dead, whose eyes they shot out. How often he’d come away from there feeling enriched and humbled by the young lieutenant’s confidence.
‘And surely I am with you always, to the very end of time.’
The frozen bodies of men still lie outside the door to the railway station. But there is no sentry there now, barring their entrance. No one outside wants to get in any more, while no one inside can now leave. The silent, desperate plight of the four hundred or so men lying in the darkness there screams out into the hush of the village. Peters moves on, towards the advancing Russians. He’s not thinking of himself. He senses that he, a priest, can’t hope for much leniency from the enemy. But death, whose gruesome presence he has now felt beside him a thousand times over, no longer frightens him. He thinks of the others, of this or that soldier in their foxholes and the men in the sepulchral station house. And he also calls to mind the blind lieutenant… Perhaps things aren’t as bad as he’s always imagined them, timid soul that he is? Maybe there are human beings on the other side too? He’d encountered genuine human beings many times in the farmhouses of the Ukraine, wherever he went.
The padre leaves the bounds of the village and makes for the POW camp up ahead in the gorge. The grey wilderness is wreathed in silence as dusk falls. There comes the sound of a single shot, somewhere in the distance. All is light now within Padre Paters, though; the darkness of the past weeks has lifted.
Suddenly, the calm is broken. Silent figures step forward out of the mist, white-clad figures wearing fur ushankas[2] and with their rifles at the ready… Red Army troops! Peters stands still – he can feel his heart racing, while his hand tightly grips the crucifix in his pocket. Yet his agitation is in no way tinged with fear. Slowly, hesitantly, the strange figures approach him. Peters takes out the crucifix and raises it to heaven:
‘Christos voskresty!’[3] he cries. His voice rings out clear as a bell across the snowy landscape.
‘Ya svyashchennik!’[4] Dear Lord, Peters prays to himself, if this be Thy will, then Thy will be done! But what happens next takes the padre completely by surprise. The Russians stop. One man who was ahead of the others, scouting out the terrain, lowers his weapon and his face cracks into a smile – and he laughs, a deep and hearty laugh. He lumbers up to Peters, places his hands on his shoulders and gives him an affable shake.
‘Batyushka!’ he says, and for a moment this little, friendly word entirely eclipses the war. The other soldiers stand around, seven small figures with snub-nosed, childlike, Ukrainian faces that appear somehow unfinished. They stare inquisitively at this curious saint. But in the background, three of them silently and bashfully make the sign of the Cross. Padre Peters falls to his knees and buries his face in his hands.
Back at the airfield, time passes excruciatingly slowly for the waiting First Lieutenant Breuer. Suddenly, though, the major tugs at his sleeve.
‘Hey, look over there! I think that’s him!’
‘Where? Who?’
‘The bloke with the passes!’
It is indeed the MO from Flight Control. Breuer and the major rush forward to speak to him. Has he got their sick passes, they want to know. Yes, he has them, and they have the requisite countersignatures. They urge him to hand them over without delay. Already, another aircraft is circling overhead. But the doctor is determined to take his time. He makes great play of deciphering their names, mistrustfully scrutinizing the recipients to make sure they are bona fide and asking to see their pay-books to confirm their identity. Finally, though, Breuer gets his hands on his sick pass. A signature has been hastily scrawled on it in ink – ‘Approved, Dr Rinoldi’. Above them, the plane keeps banking over the field. Breuer sprints over to the dispatch officer, who is busy selecting passengers from the seething crowd of soldiers.
‘Hey, hey, over here!’ he shouts ‘I’ve got an eye injury! Look here… here’s my authorization!’