The resumption of war made it up for him. Six weeks after the German invasion, Alyosha was called up again—but his bones balked. The accumulation of agitprop lectures about "Finnish aggression" which he had endured as a soldier generated a suspicion that the current line about the treacherous Nazi invader was similar propagandistic perversion. The more strident the broadcasts about "everyone's sacred duty to battle the fascist foe with his bare teeth," the stronger his conviction that Stalin and Hitler were somehow in league, and that this war—perhaps any war—was not his.
Among his reprobate acquaintances was a certain Abram Aronberg, known to friends as Abrasha Abramchik and celebrated by them as one of Moscow's cleverest raconteurs and most adroit cardsharps. An "underground" tailor of great girth, undersized hands and an appearance decades older than his thirty-odd years, he was in a relatively jovial mood that summer because a host of physical impairments, from severe boils on his neck to feet painfully inadequate to cope with his weight, had earned him one of the highest categories of unfitness for military service. The lucky man—who was to die of food poisoning that autumn—tried to lift Alyosha from his draft-notice depression by agreeing to present himself as Aksyonov at the latter's induction
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physical. Both surmised that the disastrous miHtary situation had aggravated the Army's bureaucratic muddle. Abrasha Abram-chik's shrewd gambling sense assessed their ruse an odds-on bet to work.
But Alyosha again ran afoul of the Army's unpredictable standards. Although Aronberg was indeed accepted as Aksyo-nov—no one questioned the hastily forged identity papers they'd bought—the physical wreck was pronounced fit for combat and ordered to report for induction almost immediately.
"To his own horror, he flunked for me—that is to say, he actually passed. Poor Abrasha couldn't hold his cards steady. He wouldn't even eat. He was terrified he'd pass muster on his own examination next time around."
When sober the following morning, Alyosha dispatched an irate letter to his examining board, protesting that a deplorable error by the induction clinic had confused him with another draftee. It was a venture that few Russians would have risked, even if genuine victims of such a mistake. But Alyosha had guessed shrewdly again. And when directed to report for a second physical, he fell back on his tried success with eyes, this time choosing a weasel of a pickpocket for his surrogate—who, when his heavily besmudged eyeglasses were removed, had to be told that the chalky blur on the wall was the chart. This fine fellow failed admirably for Alyosha, affording him respite until the next call.
Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht was closing in fast on Moscow, whose bomb damage and ominous rumors—radio sets having been confiscated—"rather less than compensated for panic and food shortages." In early November, Alyosha joined thousands of citizens similarly impressed, digging antitank trenches on the city's western approaches. That evening, he visited a library to contemplate a map of his native land; he had decided on a quick self-evacuation. "Was it Lenin who coined the phrase about discretion and valor? Besides, there was talk that Stalin himself had snaked out of town. I chose not to insinuate I was braver than he."
Since only the south promised both distance from the advancing Germans and a hospitable climate, Alyosha's choice of haven seemed to make itself. Walking, hitchhiking and riding the rails
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of guarded, war-packed trains, he made his way to the Black Sea coast, setthng, for no particular reason, in the sleepy Georgian town of Sukhumi, where asses outnumbered cars on the packed-dirt streets. Although hardly a gay resort even by Soviet standards, Sukhumi enchanted Alyosha even beyond a venturous young man's first discovery of the seaside. He fell in love with the sun, palms and evening air's scent of dissipation; he learned to swim great distances and to carry himself among the clannish Georgians. For work, he was hired as a handyman by the local dramatic theater, a pretentious palace on the central promenade with more columns on its facade than productions in its repertoire. As the theater's personnel were drafted one by one, he was propelled up the slender hierarchy, becoming an actor and ending with appearances in major supporting roles. By this time he was also a star in the town's scanty society, to which he brought energy as an organizer of parties as well as linguistic amusement. The summer heat seemed to swell rather than deplete his strength. He had always been unusually robust; now he became the very picture of tropical health. He had a quiet love affair with a tender Russian girl who sewed him shirts and trousers. It was the best year of his life.
But by the end of it, the Germans had reached the Caucasus, from which they threatened the entire coast. Knowing he'd be drafted again sooner or later, Alyosha staged a week of parties and "gave myself up." Although this was less an expression of patriotism than restlessness, he had begun to believe that fascism must really be stopped. For some reason (he did not yet suspect that his never-seen father might have been Jewish), Russian anti-Semitism disgusted him, and by this measure, the Germans were probably that much worse.
Although he spent two years at the front, the record of his service itself was less interesting, because more commonplace, than his long avoidance of it. He spurned the commission his Sukhumi friends offered to arrange, preferring a soldier's dismal rations and serflike treatment to an officer's obligatory hypocrisy and troubled conscience. First a cavalryman, later a mechanic, he was finally transferred to tanks, in which he fought in the great battle at Kursk—which weakened the Wehrmacht more than Stalingrad had—and across the Ukraine, through Poland
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and into central Germany: a thousand-mile, village-by-village slog including some of the hardest fighting in the history of warfare. "Our invincible-armed-might-of-the-Soviet-Motherland films have it right—except that those prebattle 'hurrahs' from us were actually for an issue of a few grams of vodka or a lick of jam. Believe me, we were too scared, exhausted and wary of our own officers for any unauthorized exuberance."
(His early months in the cavalry reinforced his obsession with cartography. When he overheard staff" officers ordering company commanders to capture Wehrmacht maps as the first step in counterattacks, the symbolism of Russia's condition which this suggested now stung him less than the universal acceptance of absurdity as a guide to action. Apologizing for nothing, leaders behaved—with officers whose lives were at stake—as if the need to steal information about one's own country from the enemy were utterly normal. "No one questioned it. Even mentioned it in passing. Communism hasn't turned this land of ours surrealistic; it's the monkeyshine of a whole, mute people pretending-—or believing!—that black is white.")
Although wounded twice by enemy fire and once, severely, by the crash of a Soviet fighter beside his tank, he was never again subjected to the stark horror of the Finnish campaign. Indeed, the war ended with an episode which Alyosha saw as a kind of reversal of the first satanic weeks in Karelia. In the euphoric days after the Allies' historic meeting at the Elbe, a contingent of American soldiers crossed the Soviet lines for celebrations with hand-picked politically rock-solid Russians who would uphold the Party line while making merry. From a safe distance behind a row of potato sacks, Alyosha stared at the first Westerners he could remember seeing in person. More than their informality— open-necked uniforms, jokes and drinks swapped with officers— he was fascinated by what their gestures revealed about their state of mind. The GIs were loose, happy, unafraid. One glance established that they knew nothing of commissars and Marxist-Leninist chants, witch-doctor myths and inexplicable prohibitions—of everything that, in trying to account for and remedy clumpish hardships, only made them worse. These were children of the land where he belonged!