As for the wife, she also made an impression. She wore the Order of the Red Star.
They all knew the brave cameraman Pogozelyi, so they talked about him. This led Karmen to tell the tale of the woman sniper at Stalingrad, in the Orlovka sector, to be precise, who’d taken a bullet to the heart, coughed, slowly raised her rifle and sighted through it, squeezed off one more shot (which, however, flew wild), and fell back stone dead. Was it true? Why shouldn’t it be true?—She had long dark hair like Elena, said her husband, and Elena can do anything.
Elena smiled and stared at the wall.
Whereas all the Fascists are cowards, said the commissar. You witnessed Paulus’s interrogation. How I wish I could have been there! Did he break down immediately?
Well, said Karmen thoughtfully, it’s true that when he lit a cigarette his hand was shaking.
That made the commissar happy; Roman Karmen always knew how to please us.
No one wanted to stop talking about Stalingrad. Our victory was less than a month old. With cheerful eagerness, Karmen told how it had been on that first cold night—oh, it was very, very cold!—when the German Fascists marched into captivity by the thousands.—You know, that crunching sound hovered in the air! he said with a smile. It reminded me of an enormous waterfall over the meadows of Privolskye. Did you have the same reaction, Comrade General?
Chuikov nodded tolerantly, staring at Elena.
Roman Lazarevich, said the commissar, I’ve heard that last year you spoke at the Conference on American and British Cinema.
So I did, said Karmen. That would have been in August.
And what did our Allies have to say?
I’m sure you can imagine, said Karmen with a smile.
The cone of lamplight brought Chuikov’s decorations to a soft white sheen. I’ve heard it said that he was now one of Comrade Stalin’s favorite generals.—Please eat, he said.
As a matter of fact, aside from the tea and the bread it was all American food: G-rations, to be exact, which Lend-Lease had brought us. There was even American butter! And so the conversation naturally turned to various presents received from the Allies. They’d sent us hand-me-down Aerocobras and Spitfires; the Aerocobras weren’t so bad. Their tanks were useless, especially the kind the British gave us, which we called tombs for seven brothers. The jeeps were better than anything we could have imagined.
And didn’t you also film Churchill last year? asked the commissar.
Yes, at Vnukovo Airport. He and Harriman were in Moscow to negotiate the second front.
Elena laid her hand on his in proud encouragement, so he went on: I filmed him close up as he reviewed his honor guard.
What did Churchill say, Roman Lazarevich?
Oh, that he was fully resolved to continue the struggle… Then he raised his fingers in that V-sign of his.
Karmen’s ingenuous crooked grin had never seemed so charming as in that instant. Everybody burst out laughing at Churchill and the Allies.
The spring thaw was just beginning. We had straightened out our front, excepting the Kursk Salient, whose bulge ran favorably westward. When the snow had finished turning to mud, and the mud to dust, then our Southwestern and Southern Fronts were to liberate Slavyansk and Mariupol, thereby positioning us to destroy the German Fascist Army Group Center. But it was hard, so hard to shatter that German magic which turns villages into mud and corpses! Last month we’d liberated Kharkov, and now the Fascists had gotten it back again.
No, he’s von Paulus, the commissar was insisting. All of those people are.
Chuikov sat morose and weary. Elena drank her tea. It felt very late.
The commissar was acquainted with Boris Sher, who had been Karmen’s assistant cameraman at Stalingrad. They also both knew a woman named Ekaterina at Moscow Newsreel Studio. Neither Elena nor Chuikov knew her.
The most important thing is not to forget any detail, said Karmen. At Stalingrad I tried to remember everything—not simply to record it, but to remember it! And I know that once we get to Germany I’ll do the same.
In that case, be sure and remember the second front! replied the commissar with a horrid chuckle.
Startled, Karmen blinked. He seemed to see a frozen, grimacing corpse in the snow, with a dead tank on the horizon.
Chuikov, pale and ghastly with fatigue, asked his guests to excuse him; he had to take some rest.—In other words, he added, I’m fully resolved to continue the struggle!
Everybody laughed, and Karmen made that hilarious V-sign.
A few days later, Karmen set out with a small detachment, including the tank commander who kept the pet porcupine, so that the remnant of a Panzer group which had been hiding in the woods amidst the shells of their own broken tanks—fifty men at most—could be captured and their capture recorded. Log barricades on those snowy Russian roads, frozen bodies, it was all old news. But Roman Karmen would make it significant. Moreover, he’d meet his deadline.
He’d been hoping to film Chuikov himself, but that individual seemed overtired. It would be easier to film the Front commander, Malinovsky, whom Karmen already knew from the defense of Madrid. And the commissar, who seemed exceptionally friendly, had promised to introduce him to one of Chuikov’s most photogenic subordinates: Major-General N. F. Batyuk, Seventy-ninth Guards Rifle Division.
He longed for Chuikov’s approval. He worshiped him, really. He’d dealt the Fascists an unyielding blow! Leaping, running at a crouch, Karmen would spend the war trying to live up to men such as Chuikov. Have you ever seen Dziga Vertov’s seven-reel declaration of love for the women of our Soviet military forces? Roman Karmen wanted to create something like that. And if he couldn’t make seven reels, he’d make one. Soon he’d begin work on his film “The Battle of Orlov.” (New T-34s swarm over the curving streetcar tracks, while civilians run between them; they’re all aimed for the front!) His newsreel from Operation Citadel would explain both in words and in a shockingly dangerous camera sequence how the enemy’s vast eight-wheeled “Ferdinand” tank-destroyers were effective at frontal assaults with their eighty-eight-millimeter gun, but vulnerable to being attacked from the side or swarmed by our Red infantry. He was one of us; he actually flew aerial missions against the enemy. He filmed; he released the bomb-release lever with his own hands.
The tank commander with the pet porcupine told him a story about something horrible which had happened in ’41, amidst the giant caltrops in the snow around Moscow, and Karmen pretended to listen as he stared ahead, remembering how Elena had told him in her soft voice of perfect gentleness: I can’t honestly say that I do feel any hope.—He couldn’t stop hearing that. And all the time she was so gentle with him; her gentleness was as unreal as the second front.—And so they came into the woods.
Combat! The gun lunged forward, replicating the flash of a concert pianists bow. Fascists in the round turrets popped their heads out; they were centaurs. The tank commander with the pet porcupine was almost killed, but we rescued him. Roman Karmen filmed it.