Barkat was driving at the rear of the column when, as they passed through a village so small it wasn’t even marked upon their maps, an old woman wearing an ankle-length blue dress and white shawl beckoned to them from the front gate of her garden.
‘What does that woman want?’ barked Commissar Sirko, sitting beside Barkat and smoking two cigarettes at the same time.
‘It looks like she’s holding a bottle,’ replied Barkat.
‘A bottle? Stop the truck!’
Obediently Barkat pulled to the side of the road and Sirko jumped down on to the road. He strode across to the woman. ‘What is it, granny? What have you got for me?’
She handed him an ornate glass container of the kind used to hold home-made vodka.
Sirko leaned over the garden’s white picket fence, which was twined with purple chicory flowers and kissed the woman on her sunburned, wrinkled cheek.
The old woman nodded and smiled and patted the air in farewell as Sirko walked back to the waiting truck, the bottle raised triumphantly above his head. ‘They love me!’ he announced to Stefanov and Ragozin, who had stuck their heads out from under the canvas flap at the back of the truck in order to see why they had stopped. ‘Even though we’re leaving them to an uncertain fate among the Fascists, they don’t hold it against us. You see, Stefanov. .’
‘Are you going to share that?’ asked Ragozin.
‘Go find your own vodka-making granny,’ replied Sirko. He drank half the bottle before the woman’s house was even out of sight.
When they stopped an hour later to change a flat tyre, Sirko threw up on the side of the road. ‘I drank it too fast,’ he remarked, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
After struggling to catch up with the other two trucks, which had driven on ahead, Barkat eventually found them pulled off the road in a forest, where they were settling in for the night. Thick stands of white birch, with loose bark curled like scrolls against the bone-white trunks, spread away dizzyingly into the depths of the forest.
Rather than unpack the truck, they lay underneath it, wrapped in their brown rain capes, with rucksacks for pillows.
Sirko threw up again.
Stefanov, lying beside him, could smell from the vomit that what Sirko had drunk was not vodka but wood alcohol.
‘That witch has killed me,’ whispered Sirko, touching his fingertips against his face. ‘I think I’m blind.’
He died before dawn.
They wrapped Sirko in his rain cape and buried him in a clearing in a pine forest, his helmet on a stick to mark the grave.
From then on, Sergeant Ragozin was in charge.
Later that morning, the three trucks of the convoy set out across a marsh, travelling on corduroy roads made from thousands of tree trunks laid out side by side over the swampy ground.
Halfway across, with Barkat still driving in the rear, the ZiS-5 slid off the corduroy road and their vehicle became stranded in the mud. The rest of the convoy pushed on, with a promise to send help as soon as they had reached Leningrad.
‘But you can’t leave us here!’ Ragozin pleaded. ‘Not in this miserable place!’
His only reply was a wave from the driver of the second truck, as it teetered away across the swamp.
‘If that selfish bastard hadn’t drunk poisoned alcohol, I would never be in this predicament!’ wailed Ragozin.
‘And if he hadn’t been so selfish with it, neither would the rest of us,’ replied Barkat.
The two other men watched Ragozin as he marched dementedly up and down the rotted tree-trunk road, stamping at the ground as if the earth itself required punishment. ‘I am a civilised man! I used to have the most popular radio programme in the entire Soviet Union!’ He shook a knotty fist up at the sky. ‘People from all over the world wrote to me. Once I got a letter from Vanuatu and I don’t even know where that is!’
‘I knew he’d crack eventually,’ said Barkat, scratching at his week-old growth of beard.
Ragozin glowered at the men with bloodshot eyes. ‘What are you looking at? Haven’t you ever seen a man in torment before?’
‘Not one as civilised as you,’ Stefanov replied.
When they woke up the next day, they discovered that the 25-mm gun had sunk so deeply into the mud that it threatened to drag the truck down with it. In desperation, they unhitched the gun from the truck and in less than a minute the 25-mm had vanished completely into the reeking black ooze.
It took them three hours before they had finally extricated their truck and eased it back on to the corduroy road, by which time they were dangerously low on fuel.
They managed to reach the village of Vinusk on the other side of the swamp before running completely out of petrol. They found the place deserted but intact. As of that moment, the three men had no idea which side of the line they were on.
The autumn sky glowed powdery blue and the air flickered with late-hatching insects in a light turned strange and gold. The breeze smelled sweetly of poplar leaves, which fell in cascades of yellow upon the wreckage of the battlefield.
For their command post, Ragozin selected a house in which a deep bunker had previously been dug beneath the floor. The bunker was reached by a staircase cut into the clay and reinforced with slabs of iron tank track. The tank which had supplied the tracks, a massive Soviet KV-2‚ lay with its turret blown off in a shallow pond across the road.
Judging from the equipment they found, including rifles, a box of ration food and a Golub radio precariously balanced on a collapsible army desk, the bunker had been built by Russian soldiers. The previous tenants had even left behind a map, pinned with bayonets to the earth walls of the bunker. Red and blue grease pencil lines, which marked the positions of opposing forces‚ had been drawn, erased, then drawn again so many times that in places the map was illegible.
Perched on a crate that had once contained land mines, Stefanov turned on the radio and listened through veils of radio static to a Russian artillery commander giving target coordinates for a barrage that was about to begin.
Beside him, on a bed made out of wooden planks with a chicken-wire mattress, Barkat was taking a nap.
‘Grid seven,’ said the voice on the radio, ‘point H-12.’
Satisfied to hear that somebody in the Red Army was doing more than just retreating from the Germans, Stefanov pulled a slightly rotten pear from one pocket and a stag-handled switchblade from the other. He pressed a button on the side of the knife and the blade flashed out with a noise like someone sucking their teeth.
Barkat sat up suddenly. ‘Do I smell food?’
Stefanov sighed. It was not a very big pear and he had been hoping to eat it by himself. But now he cut off a slice, speared it on the end of the knife and offered it to Barkat.
Barkat reached across, took the slice off the switchblade and crammed it into his mouth. Then, from around his neck, he pulled a small white linen bag containing his ration of machorka tobacco. Next, Barkat produced a neatly folded page from the Izvestia. He did not read the news, but no rolling papers were issued with army tobacco rations and the wafer-thin teture of Izvestia was best for cigarettes. Barkat tore off a finger-length strip of paper and wiped it on his matted greasy hair before folding it into a cigarette with some flakes of machorka from the sweat-stained bag. ‘What are you looking so thoughtful about?’ asked Barkat.
‘To tell you the truth,’ admitted Stefanov, ‘I am having some trouble understanding the difference between Fascism and Communism.’
‘You think too much. They are the Fascists. We are the Communists. What more is there to know?’
Stefanov gave a dissatisfied grunt.
‘What’s on the radio?’ asked Barkat. ‘Any music?’
‘Only if you count the Stalin organ.’
‘Why don’t you come upstairs and get some fresh air?’
‘Maybe later,’ he said.