Valentin’s foot crunched into the middle of Dimitri’s neck. This meant stop, fast. Dimitri down-shifted and hit the brakes. He brought the General to a skidding halt. No sense aggravating his testy son any more than he already was.
Valya’s voice swelled in the intercom. ‘Load AP!’
Behind and above Dimitri, Pasha rose from his knees to slam a shell into the breech. Valentin hit the electrical traverse and the turret began to whir and pivot. The turret walls, the dials, sights, and controls, the thick breech of the big main gun, all began to swing to the right. But Valentin’s and Pasha’s seats did not move. Valya’s feet left Dimitri’s shoulders, he had to stand and dance with the turret whenever he swung it around. This was a major design flaw in the T-34; the seats for the commander and loader were not mounted to the turret itself but to the ring of the chassis, so that the two had to skitter around with the swiveling breech and the firing controls whenever the turret was turned. Dimitri looked over his shoulder to watch his son. The boy contorted himself to keep his eye on his range telescope and at the same time twirl the elevation flywheel to raise the main gun to match his range to the target. At Valya’s feet, Pasha was folded again into the floor of the tank, he had the rubber mat in a shambles looking for two more AP rounds to satisfy his sergeant.
Metal clanged and the big boy began to rise with a shell cradled in his arms. Valentin lifted his right boot and laid the foot in the middle of the boy’s spine, forcing him back inside the bin.
Valentin had two foot pedals beneath his position, the left one for the 76.2 mm main gun, the right for the machine-gun mounted co-axially to the cannon. He kept his brow pressed against the padding above his telescope, his foot on Pasha’s squirming back. He turned the elevation wheel one more round, then stepped on the left pedal.
The big gun fired. The tank jolted with the blast, Dimitri wasn’t ready for it and knocked his padded head. Inside the tank, the breech rammed backward in its recoil, the metal slab just missed smashing Pasha’s head into pulp. A scalding casing popped out of the breech and clanged on the exposed bins. Valentin pulled his boot off the boy’s back to let him up. The casing rolled near Pasha’s cheek and he yelped, dropping the AP shell he held, making him dig frantically back into the bin to retrieve it. Sulphurous smoke backwashed down the breech into the cabin. The General’s ventilation system sucked at the fumes but with all the hatches secured drew them outside too slowly. Everyone coughed a little; quiet Sasha, crammed beside Dimitri at his gunner’s position, gagged.
The tank sat apprehensive, the diesel engine idled waiting for an order. Sasha kept his face at his own machine-gun vision block, a mirrored slit no bigger than Dimitri’s. Pasha sat up with the AP shell clutched to his chest, looking up at Valentin from bended knees. The turret traverse whined, spinning the main gun to face forward. Valentin glared tight-lipped through his optics to see if he’d hit his target, pirouetting with the green turret walls turning around him.
Dimitri gripped the handle over his head. He turned it and shoved the heavy metal hatch up. Sodden air tumbled in on him like a wet dog. He stood into the drizzly morning.
‘I need a piss break. Anyone?’
He laid his hands flat on the dripping armor and curled his feet up under him, to slide off the glacis plate to the trampled ground. The tank stank of exhaust, fumes from the fired AP shell still trickling out of its long muzzle, black diesel puffs issuing from its rear. Dimitri walked beside the T-34 and opened the fly on his coveralls. He waited for Valentin’s hatch to lift and a stream of abuse to fly at him. Instead, the floor escape hatch beneath the gunner’s position fell open and thin Sasha crawled from between the treads. The commander’s hatch rose. Valya climbed down the side of the tank and hopped off the treads. Round little Pasha followed.
The four of them peed into the ground. The General, surrounded by its keepers, purred.
Dimitri finished and kept his eyes out over the steppe. Craters and scorched spit-up ground dotted the crest of a low hill a mile off. This spot was where the tanks of his 3rd Mechanized Brigade came to calibrate their cannons and season their new recruits, their own Sashas and Pashas. All the land here on the southern shoulder of the Kursk bulge rose slightly to the north, favoring the Russian defense; here, the steppe was so flat that even a slight elevation was an immense advantage. The Germans will have to run uphill in their opening assault. Another tank on a nearby crest let loose with a shell, the thing whistled and struck, blasting into one of the holes already scarring the ground out there. Dimitri let his imagination create the coming battle on the field and hills below. The thunder and last pattering rain from the fading storm, plus the crash of gunnery from the other tanks in his company, made a grim and real fabric with his conjuration of havoc and punctured metal, screaming shells and geysers of metal and men.
Valentin came beside him.
‘They’ll get us killed, Papa.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say that,’ Dimitri kidded. ‘I was afraid all you Communists put no value on your own lives.’
Valentin ignored the jab. He fixed his eyes where Dimitri looked. Did Valya see the images? Did he perhaps see himself there, broken in the carnage?
‘I’m serious. These two got shit for training before they were sent here. They’ll get us killed.’
Dimitri expelled a breath. He winced up into the falling rain to release the vision of the battle, the image of his son dead below. Pasha and Sasha walked up.
‘I’m sorry, Sergeant,’ the loader said glumly. The boy had his sleeves rolled up above husky forearms. His skin was scraped raw from digging into the jiggling bins, several nails were blue from getting pinched between the jostling shells.
‘The sergeant says you’re going to get us killed, Pasha. You’re a Cossack now. Would you do that?’
The boy’s reaction pleased Dimitri. He didn’t cower or mutter, nor did he erupt into shocked shame. He firmed, like something made harder by fire. He lifted his head and inflated his chest.
‘No,’ he said. Pasha considered his answer under the eyes of the others, his little clan, then repeated it. ‘No.’
‘There,’ said Dimitri, laughing into the rain. ‘I knew it! Pasha won’t get us killed at all! It’ll definitely be a German who does it. Right, boys?’
At this Dimitri spread his arms and turned the two teenage soldiers back to the tank. He urged them to the General with a shove. The two boys climbed into their hatches and took their seats.
Dimitri looked at his son, and saw the young man wondering what to do with his impudent father. Dimitri reflected back to his own father, how many times the old man had taken the flat of a sword to his buttocks, the flat of a palm to his cheek, how many lessons handed down with a blow or a barb. He’d hated the old man too many days, and loved him here, now, long after the man was gone, for those lessons. He did not want to be hated by his own son, but how else could he teach, what other way did he know?
There is a straight line, Dimitri thought, from grandfather to son to grandson, like a saber skewering us all. Impatience, demands, love given too late. And now there is another war on; when would Dimitri have a chance to do it better than his father did?