Suddenly everything was clear about his obligations to himself and to society. In those thirty-three hours, he shed his tough-guy affectations and became not just an adult, but roughly the kind he was to remain: cynical and cunning, a master manipulator of
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the system. Deciding that he wanted to Hve, he simultaneously recognized that the principles of Soviet rule made this synonymous with living cunningly and well. Honest men were peons or cannon fodder; there was no third choice.
The following morning, he launched his personal war of survival. By evening he'd wangled the job of headquarters messenger, a few hundred splendorous yards from the front. An intelligence perceived as exceptional in comparison to his fellow peasant-soldiers won him rapid advancement to divisional postman: opportunity to inch farther away from the carnage. Here too his ability to memorize names (training for the girls?) and to remember a few consecutive sentences—above all, his facility with pencil and paper—made itself known, and his next promotion was to divisional clerk. But his recognition of the obtuseness and rigidity of men in command was more important than all his quick learning of army forms and procedures. Because divisional officers struggled to formulate simple sentences without errors, he was increasingly called upon to draft their dispatches. His own disillusionment and cynicism now absolute, he made the stunning discovery that his superiors still thought in the language of patriotism, duty, belief in authority. His salvation lay in that very obtuseness, which would keep them from suspecting his scheming.
The next promotion made him ghost-writer of the divisional wall-newspaper for the Party commissar: as the soldiers continued to slog forward to be chopped down, Alyosha composed the necessary paeans to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist leadership inspiring their glorious victories. (In the end, twelve of his company's one hundred and eighty enlisted men survived, four without permanent injury.) When the political commissar was killed, Alyosha was temporarily entrusted with the additional duty of censor, one of the lapses—since Alyosha was non-Party— for which the officer responsible was subsequently executed.
Although relatively safe from snipers' bullets and entitled to hope that his wits might see him through, Alyosha's single interest was to get as far away from Finland as fast as he could. "War and obligations to History, defending the sacred Motherland and world Communist cause—such noble instincts can impair your health." Although he wanted nothing less on
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earth—except to remain near the front—than to become an officer of the Army of Workers and Peasants, this, he discovered through his access to secret circulars in headquarters, was his sole escape. He applied for officer's training, was quickly accepted, and feigned modesty at his commanders' gratification that a local boy should hear the call to higher duty—simultaneously pretending to be full of regret over leaving the front while socialism's treacherous enemies still breathed life.
It was now late February. Packed with limbless and lice-ridden soldiers, Alyosha's railroad car resembled tsarist convict wagons before Alexander II's nineteenth-century reforms; but as it struggled—south!—down the single track, he kissed its clammy wall.
The officers' training school was located in a dismal base in the western Ukraine. His arrival there having served its purpose, his goals altered accordingly: at all costs, he now had to avoid becoming an officer—that disastrous prospect, with years of obligatory service—and, if possible, part company forever with army life. His plan was to demonstrate himself as manifestly unfit for a commission: as incompetent as zealous. This seemingly sensible scheme was foiled by an underestimation of the army's sorry condition and extreme need. Desperate for recruits, the school accepted for training "everyone who had four limbs and could remember his birthday."
"Once in, you didn't get out. Each new body was a prize; only outright spastics were rejected. Even the hack doctors were surprised at some of the types. And you had to be a genius to flunk the so-called entrance tests."
Industrious and conscientious as in no school exam, Alyosha worked two dozen eye-popping grammatical errors into the single-page composition designed to test knowledge of the Russian language. The unreadable narrative was marked "B." During the ensuing physical exam, he managed to fall over a chair and to collide with the senior doctor—Act One in his mime of appearing virtually blind. Under his breath, he admitted to a medical corpsman that his vision was blurry beyond ten meters and headaches had tormented him since childhood. He was pronounced fit for combat.
When the course began, Alyosha became anxious. Rejecting a
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plan to stutter in favor of continuing the eye gambit, he was unable, however, to attract anyone's interest in his seeming disability, even though it kept him from properly making up his cot. "So help me, I couldn't stand out. Some of my colleagues couldn't cope with th^ principle of bed-making." Only after weeks of scrupulous and sometimes painful melodrama—crashing into doors, plummeting into trenches—was he given his chance to botch a re-examination of his eyes one afternoon while a painful sprain was being dressed. Finally, grudgingly, he was pronounced unfit, and during weeks of cleaning horrendous latrines, impatiently awaited his orders. Would he be assigned to clerical duty? Discharged from the Army entirely? Good God no, he was ordered to return to his unit—back, that is, to the Karelian front.
"Finland, by Jesus. Back to the slaughter! I had to puncture the ploy, of course. I waylaid the doctor and told him a wondrous whack on the head by my drill corporal's rifle had restored me to perfect vision. Oozing compliments about my patriotism, he considered that the circumstances excused this transparent lie: I'd flunked the eye test so badly that there was no sense even trying me again. Do you know the Russian saying about wit generating woe?"
As the train rolled north this time, Alyosha brooded while earnest green soldiers in his wagon broke into song about Stalin's wisdom providing fearlessness in battle. By now, his old divisional commanders were probably killed or executed; he'd have to start as a foot soldier at the front again, a lamb awaiting sacrifice at the altars of officers' incompetence and terror. When the train approached Moscow, where he was to change, it occurred to him to write a last postcard to the aunt who had helped raise him.
Stepping from the Kiev Station into Moscow's now dear streets, he thought better of his idea: why not visit auntie in person? Indeed, why not take a short holiday in the capital of world socialism before proceeding north to die for the great cause itself? Living hand-to-mouth among his Damon Runyon friends, he stayed two months in the relatively-undisturbed-by-war city. By this time, the spring flowers were in full bloom and a peace treaty had been signed. Wangling his way onto a train, he returned to his unit, which was now guarding the newly
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expanded frontier. Six weeks later, he was demobilized. As he had foreseen, his papers were lost in the bureaucratic farrago and never arrived from the officers' training school; traveling alone, he was lost cargo. No one knew or cared about his Moscow detour.
A civilian again, he was back in the capital by June—to become, while pondering possible professions, a poker player, school janitor, truck driver and warehouse watchman. He had discovered literature and was reading widely in the Russian classics, but his musings about writing himself were always quashed by the recollection that nothing about the Moscow he knew and loved—and cherished more than ever after his experience of Karelia—could be penned; like everyone else's, his material would have to be hosannas to socialism and Stalin. Recognizing the agility of his hands, he considered training for surgery. Meanwhile, the eighteen-year-old continued to drift and observe, not hurrying to make up his mind.