Dancer: A Novel

BOOK ONE

1

SOVIET UNION • 1941–1956

Four winters. They built roads through drifts with horses, pitching them forward into the snow until the horses died, and then they ate the horsemeat with great sadness. The medics went into the snowfields with vials of morphine taped beneath their armpits so the morphine wouldn’t freeze and, as the war went on, the medics found it harder to locate the veins of the soldiers—they were wasting away, dying long before they had really died. In the trenches they tied the earflaps of their ushinkis tight, stole extra coats, slept in huddles with the injured at the center, where they would get most warmth. They wore padded trousers, layers of underclothes, and sometimes they made jokes about wrapping whores around their necks for scarves. After a while they didn’t remove their boots too often. They had seen other soldiers—frostbitten toes dropping suddenly from their feet—and they began to feel that they could tell a man’s future by the way he walked.

For camouflage they fastened two white peasant shirts together to fit over their greatcoats, made drawstrings from bootlaces, pulled the cowl tight, and in that way they could lie in the snow unseen for hours. The recoil liquid in their artillery froze. The striker springs in their machine guns shattered like glass. When they touched bare metal the flesh tore away from their hands. They lit fires with charcoal, threw stones into the embers and later picked out the pebbles to warm their hands. They found that if they shat, which was not often, they had to shit in their pants. They let it lie there until frozen, pitched it out after they found shelter, and still nothing smelled, not even their gloves, until a thaw. To piss, they hitched oilskin sacks under their trousers so as not to expose themselves to the weather, and they learned to cradle the warmth of the pissbag between their legs and sometimes the warmth helped them think of women, until the bag froze and they were nowhere again, just a simple snowfield lit by an oil-refinery fire. They looked out over the steppe and saw the bodies of fellow soldiers, frozen to death, a hand in the air, a knee in a stretch, beards white with frost, and they learned to steal the dead man’s clothes before he became forever stiffened in them, and then they leaned down to whisper, Sorry comrade thanks for the tobacco.

They heard the enemy were using the dead to make roads, laying down the bodies since there were no trees left, and they tried not to listen as noises came across the ice, a tire catching on bone, moving on. There was never silence, the air carried all sounds: the reconnaissance crews on skis, the hiss of electric pylons, the whistle of mortars, a comrade calling out for his legs, his fingers, his rifle, his mother. In the mornings they warmed their guns with a low charge so that when the first volley of the day rang out the barrel did not explode in their faces. They wrapped cow skin around the handles of the antiaircraft batteries and covered the slits of the machine guns with old shirts to block the snow. The soldiers on skis learned to drop to a moving crouch to pitch their grenades sideways so they could still advance and maim at the same time. They found the remains of a T-34 or an ambulance or even an enemy Panzer, and they drained the antifreeze through the carbon filters of their gas masks and got drunk on it. Sometimes they drank so much that after a few days they went blind. They lubed their artillery with sunflower oil, not too much on the firing pins, just enough on the springs, and they wiped the excess oil on their boots so the leather would not crack and let the worst of the weather in. They peered at the ammunition boxes to see if a factory girl in Kiev or Ufa or Vladivostok had scrawled a loveheart for them, and even if she hadn’t she had, and then they rammed the ammunition into their Katyushas, their Maxims, their Degtyarevs.

When they retreated or advanced they blew a ditch with a 100-gram cartridge in order to save their lives if their lives were something they felt like saving. They shared cigarettes, and when their tobacco was finished they smoked sawdust, tea, lettuce, and if there was nothing else they smoked horse shit, but the horses were so hungry that they hardly shat anymore either. In the bunkers, they listened to Zhukov on the wireless, Yeremenko, Vasilevsky, Khrushchev, Stalin too, his voice full of black bread and sweetened tea. Loudspeakers were strung through the trenches, and amplifiers were put on the front line, facing west, so they could keep the Germans awake with tango, radio reels, socialism. They were told about traitors, deserters, cowards, and were instructed to shoot them down. They stripped red medals off the chests of these dead and pinned them to the undersides of their own tunics. To hide at night they put masking tape over the headlights of the cars, ambulances, tanks. They stole extra tape to put on their hands and feet, over their portyanka socks, and some of them even wrapped it around their ears, but the tape tore their flesh and they howled as the frostbite set in, and then they howled further against the pain and some just put their guns to their heads and said good-bye.

They wrote home to Galina, Yalena, Nadia, Vera, Tania, Natalia, Dasha, Pavlena, Olga, Sveta, and Valya too, careful letters folded in neat triangles. They didn’t expect much in return, perhaps just one sheet with the perfume left on the censor’s fingers. Incoming mail was given numbers and, if there were a series of numbers missing, the men knew that a mail carrier had been blown to bits. The soldiers sat in the trenches and stared straight ahead and composed letters to themselves in their imaginations, and then they went out into the war once more. Pieces of shrapnel caught them beneath their eyes. Bullets whipped clean through their calf muscles. Splinters of shells lodged in their necks. Mortars cracked their backbones. Phosphorus bombs set them aflame. The dead were heaped onto horse carts and laid in huge graves blown out of the ground with dynamite. Local women in shawls came to the pits to keen and secretly pray. The gravediggers—shipped in from the gulags—stood off to one side and allowed the women their rituals. Yet more dead were heaped upon the dead, and frozen bones were heard to crack, and the bodies lay there in their hideous contortions. The gravediggers shoveled the final dirt on the pits, and sometimes in their despair they pitched themselves forward, still alive. More dirt was thrown upon them so that afterwards it was said that the ground quivered. Often in the evenings the wolves came from the forests, trotting high-legged through the snow.

The injured were lifted into ambulances or onto horses or put on sleds. A whole new language appeared to them in the field hospitals: dysentery typhus frostbite trench foot ischemia pneumonia cyanosis thrombosis heartache, and if the soldiers recovered from any of these they were sent out to fight once more.

In the countryside they looked for newly burnt villages so the ground would be soft for digging. The snow unearthed a history, a layer of blood here, a horse bone there, the carcass of a PO-2 dive-bomber, the remains of a sapper they once knew from Spasskaya Street. They hid in the ruins and rubble of Kharkov and disguised themselves in piles of bricks in Smolensk. They saw ice floes on the Volga and they lit patches of oil on the ice so the river itself seemed aflame. In the fishing hamlets by the Sea of Azov they fished instead for pilots who had crashed and skidded three hundred meters along the ice. Gutted buildings lined the outskirts of towns and, in them, more dead in their havoc of blood. They found their comrades hung from lampposts, grotesque decorations, tongues black with ice. When they cut them down the lamps groaned and bent and changed the spread of their light. They tried to capture a Fritz alive to send him to the NKVD, who would drill holes in his teeth, or tie him to a stake in the snow, or just starve him in a camp like he was starving theirs. Sometimes they’d keep a prisoner for themselves, loan him an entrenching tool, watch him try to dig his grave in the frozen ground and, when he couldn’t, they shot him in the back of the head and left him there. They found enemy soldiers lying wounded in burnt-out buildings, and they pitched them out of windows to lie neck-deep in the snow, and they said to them, Auf Wiedersehen, Fritzie, but sometimes they pitied the enemy too—the sort of pity only a soldier can have—discovering in his wallet that the dead man had a father, a wife, a mother, maybe children too.

They sang songs to their own absent children, but moments later they put the stub of a rifle in an enemy boy’s mouth and, later again, they sang other songs, Raven oh black raven why do you circle me?

They recognized the movements of the planes, the half rolls, the chandelles, the sudden twists, the pancake falls, the flash of a swastika, the shine of a red star, and they cheered as their women pilots went up to hunt the Luftwaffe down, watched the women as they rose in the air and then fell in flames. They trained dogs to carry mines and they guided the dogs, with shrill whistles, to walk beneath enemy tanks. Crows patrolled the aftermath, fat on the dead, and then the crows themselves were shot and eaten. Nature was turned around—the mornings were dark with bomb dust and at night the fires cast light for miles. The days were no longer named, although on Sundays they could sometimes hear, across the ice, the Fritzes celebrating their god. For the first time in years they were allowed their own gods—they took their Crucifixes, their beads, their prayercloths out into the battlefields. All the symbols were needed, from God to Pavlik to Lenin. The soldiers were surprised by the sight of Orthodox priests, even rabbis, blessing the tanks, but not even blessings enabled them to hold their ground.

In retreat, to deny the enemy, the soldiers blew up the bridges their brothers had built, ripped apart their fathers’ tanneries, took acetylene torches to pylons, herded cattle over ravines, razed milk sheds, poured gasoline through the roofs of silos, hacked down telegraph poles, poisoned water wells, splintered fence posts and tore up their own barns for wood.

And when they advanced—in the third winter, as the war turned—the soldiers marched forward and wondered how anyone could have done such a thing to their land.

The living went west and the injured went east, packed into cattle cars, pulled by steam trains, which moved slowly across the frozen steppes. They huddled together, drawn to whatever light came through the wooden slats. In the center of each cattle car was an iron pail with a fire burning. The men reached into their armpits or groins to take out handfuls of lice, and then pitched the lice into the fire. They held bread to their wounds to stop the bleeding. A few of the soldiers were carried off, put onto carts, taken to hospitals, schoolhouses, clinics. Villagers came down to greet them, bearing gifts. The men who remained on the train heard their comrades leaving, all vodka and victory. And still there was no logic to their journeys—sometimes the trains passed right through their hometowns without stopping and the ones with legs tried to kick out the wooden slats; they were shot dead by the guards for insubordination and later in the night a family would trudge out through the snow, bearing candles, having heard that their son had died just a few kilometers from home, disgraced, left frozen by the tracks.

They lay awake in their blood-stiffened coats while the railroad cars rocked to and fro. They passed around the last of their cigarettes and waited for a woman or a child to shove a package between the slats or maybe even to whisper a sweet word. They were given food and water, but it tore through their intestines and made them sicker. There were rumors of new gulags being built to the west and south, and they told themselves that their gods had loved them this long but might not love them very much longer, so they furtively slipped their charms and icons through the floorboards to lie on the railroad tracks to be picked up by others in days to come. They pulled their blankets to their beards and threw more lice onto the fire. Still the trains poured steam into the air and carried the men through forests, over bridges, beyond mountains. The men had no idea where they would end up, and if the train broke down they waited for another to nudge up behind them, roll them forward, toward Perm, Bulgakovo, Chelyabinsk—where in the distance the Ural Mountains beckoned.

And so, in the late winter of nineteen hundred and forty-four, a train sped daily through the landscape of Bashkiria, emerging from the deep forest along the Belaya River to cross the wide stretch of ice into the city of Ufa. The trains made their way slowly across the trussed bridge, a quarter of a kilometer long, the steel giving out thuds and high pings under the stress of the wheels as if mourning in advance. The trains made their way to the far side of the frozen river, past the wooden houses, the tower blocks, the factories, the mosques, the unpaved roads, the warehouses, the concrete bunkers, until they reached the railway station, where the stationmaster sounded his whistle and the city’s brass band blew their battered trumpets. Muslim mothers waited on the upper platform clutching photographs. Old Tatar men went up on their toes to look for their sons. Babushkas huddled over buckets of sunflower seeds. Vendors solemnly rearranged the emptiness of their kiosks. Tough-faced nurses in brown uniforms prepared to transport the wounded. The local guards stood weary against pillars under red metal signs for rural electrification that swung in the breeze—Our Great Leader Is Bringing Electricity to You!—and a smell penetrated the air, foreshadowing the soldiers, sweat and rot, and each winter afternoon a six-year-old boy, hungry and narrow and keen, sat on a cliff above the river, looking down at the trains, wondering when his own father would be coming home and whether he would be broken just like the ones they were lifting from beneath the steam and the bugles.

We cleaned out the giant greenhouse first. Nuriya gave the tomato plants to the farm boy who hung around the hospital. Katya, Marfuga, Olga and I shoveled most of the soil onto the ground outside. I was the oldest and my shoveling duties were light. Soon the greenhouse was clear, as big as two houses. We dragged in eight woodstoves, stood them next to the glass and lit the fires. After a while the greenhouse didn’t smell so much of tomatoes anymore.

The next thing was the big metal sheets. Nuriya’s cousin, Milyausha, was a welder at the oil refinery. She had gotten permission to take away fifteen sheets. She borrowed a tractor, hitched the sheets to the back of it, dragged them through the hospital entrance, down the narrow road to the greenhouse. The sheets were too big to fit through the doors so we had to remove the back windows to slide the metal in. The farm boy helped us lift the heavy sheets. He kept his head down—maybe he was embarrassed by all us women working so hard, but it didn’t matter to us, it was our duty.

Milyausha was a splendid welder. She had learned just before the war. She wore special glasses and the blue flame lit up her lenses. After two days it was there: a giant metal bath.

But we hadn’t thought about how to heat the water properly.

We tried boiling the water on the woodstoves that we had set up, but, even though the greenhouse itself was warm from catching the sun, the water never held its temperature. The bath was just too big. We stood around, quiet and angry, until Nuriya had another idea. She asked her cousin Milyausha to see if she could get permission for maybe a dozen more metal sheets. The very next morning she came up from the refinery dragging five more sheets. Nuriya told us the plan. It was simple. Milyausha set to work straight away and welded the metal into the giant bath, crisscrossing the strips until eventually the whole thing looked like a metal chessboard. She drilled drains in the bottom of each bath, and Nuriya borrowed an old car engine from her husband’s brother. She attached a pump to the engine to take the water out. It worked perfectly. There were sixteen individual tubs and, because they were small, we knew the water would stay warm. We laid down planks for gangways so we could walk from bath to bath, and then we hung a portrait of Our Great Leader inside the door.

We lit the stoves, heated the water, filled the baths. Everyone smiled when the water stayed warm, and then we took off our clothes and sat in the baths, drinking tea. All around us the glass was steaming and we were warm as soup.

Sweetness, said Nuriya.

That evening we went up to the hospital and told the nurses we would be ready the next day. They looked exhausted, black bags under their eyes. We could hear the soldiers moaning from inside the hospital. There must have been hundreds of them.

Nuriya pulled me aside and said: We will start right now.

We did only eight the first evening, but on the second day we did sixty and by the end of the first week they were coming up directly from the railway station in their bloody rags and bandages. We had so many that they had to wait in lines outside the greenhouse on long canvas tarps. Sometimes the canvas got sticky with blood and it had to be hosed off, but they were patient, those men.

While they were outside Katya wrapped them in blankets. Some of them were happy, but others cried, of course, and many just sat and stared straight ahead. The parasites were on them and the rot was setting in. You could see the worst of it in their eyes.

Inside, Nuriya was the one to shave their heads. She was quick with the scissors, and most of the hair was gone in a few seconds. Without it they looked so different, some like boys, some like criminals. She shaved the rest of the hair with a straight-blade razor. She swept the hair up quickly because there were lice still crawling through the clumps. The hair was shoveled into buckets and placed at the door of the greenhouse, and the farm boy took them away.

The soldiers were so shy they didn’t want to take off their uniforms in front of us. We didn’t have any young girls working with us—most of us were thirty or more. I was forty-seven. And Nuriya told them not to worry, we all had husbands—which was true, except for me, I never had a husband, no reason really.

Still they wouldn’t take their clothes off until Nuriya roared: Come on, you don’t have anything we haven’t seen before!

Eventually they shed their uniforms, except for the men on the stretchers. We used Nuriya’s scissors for them. They didn’t like it when we had to take off their shirts and undershirts, maybe they thought we were accidentally going to cut their throats.

The soldiers stood in front of us, hands over their private parts. They were all so skinny, poor things, they made even Katya feel fat.

We used the rotten uniforms for fuel but we made sure we took the medals off first, put them in little bundles until the baths were finished. All the men had letters and photos in their pockets, of course, but there were some strange things too—the spout of a teapot, locks of hair, bits of gold teeth. One of them even had a little finger, curled up and shriveled. Sometimes there were explicit pictures we weren’t meant to see but, as Nuriya said, they’d been through a lot for our great nation, it wasn’t our place to scold.

As the soldiers waited their turn, Olga sprayed them with a chemical that came in boxes all the way from Kiev. We used fertilizer tanks and mixed the chemical with water—it smelled like bad eggs. We had to cover the soldiers’ mouths and eyes. But we didn’t always have enough dressing to put over their wounds, so when we sprayed them it sometimes hit their open sores. I felt so sorry for them the way they howled. Afterwards they leaned against us and cried and cried and cried. We sponged down the wounds as well as we could. They dug their fingers into our shoulders and clenched their fists. Their hands were so bony and black.

When their wounds were swabbed, it was time for the bath. If one of them had lost his legs, it took four of us to lower him in the water and we had to be careful of the level so he wouldn’t drown. If he had no arms, we propped him up at the edge of the metal sheet and kept ahold of him.

We didn’t want to shock them so we kept the water lukewarm at first, and when they were immersed we poured kettles full of boiling water around them, wary not to splash. They said ooh and aah, and the laughter was contagious; no matter how many times we laughed in a day another man would make us laugh all over again.

The thing about the greenhouse was that it made the sound much bigger. It wasn’t exactly an echo, it was just that the laughter seemed to bounce from pane to pane and back down to us, bent over the baths.

Olga and I were the ones to sponge. I didn’t use soap to start with. That was a treat for the very end. I gave their faces a good scrub—they had such eyes!—and I cleaned very carefully, the chin, the brows, the forehead and behind their ears. Then I went vigorously at their backs, which were always filthy. You could see their ribs and the curve of their spines. I went down towards their bottoms and cleaned a little around there, but not so much that they got uncomfortable. Sometimes they would call me Mama or Sister, and I’d lean forward and say: There there there.

But most of the time they just stared straight ahead without a word. I went to their necks again, but this time I went much more gently and I felt them relaxing.

It was harder to do the front of their bodies. Their chests were often bad, because a lot of the time they had been hit with shrapnel. Sometimes, when my hands were at their stomachs, they hunched over very quickly because they thought I was going to touch them down below, but most of the time I got them to do that themselves. I was no fool.

If a soldier was really sick or had no spirit, then I had to wash him down there. Mostly he would close his eyes because he was embarrassed, but once or twice he still got aroused and I had to leave him alone for five minutes.

Olga wouldn’t leave him alone. She carried a spoon in her apron and if a soldier got excited she bashed him there, and that was that. We all just laughed.

For some reason, I don’t know why, their legs were the worst—maybe it was from standing around in those boots all the time. Their feet were covered with sores and scabs. Most of the time they could hardly walk straight. They always talked a lot about their legs, said they used to play soccer and ice hockey and how good they had been at long-distance running. If the soldier was a very young boy, I let him put his head on my chest so he wouldn’t be ashamed of his tears. But if he was big and mean, I washed him much more quickly. He might say rude things to me about my arms, the way they wobbled, and for punishment I wouldn’t give him any soap.

We washed their heads last and sometimes, if they were nice, we gave them a final rub of the shoulders.

The whole bath took no more than five minutes. We had to drain the water each time and disinfect the metal. With the hoses attached to the old car engine we were able to pump the water out quickly. In summer the grass died where the water jetted out, and in winter the blood made the snow look brown.

Finally we wrapped the soldiers in blankets and put new foot cloths on, hospital shirts, pajamas, even hats. There were no mirrors, but sometimes I saw the men wiping the steam from the greenhouse windows, trying to have a look at themselves in the glass.

When we were finished and they were all fully dressed, they were ferried up the road towards the hospital by horse and cart.

The men who were waiting outside the greenhouse watched the clean ones go away. The looks on their faces! You’d think they were at a picture show the way their eyes lit up! Sometimes children came up and hid in the poplar trees and watched, it was like a carnival sometimes.

When I got home at night to Aksakov Street, I was always exhausted. I ate some bread, turned off the oil lamp beside my bed and went straight to sleep. My neighbors in the room next to mine were an old couple from Leningrad. She had been a dancer and he was from a wealthy family—they were exiles now, so I steered clear of them. But one afternoon the woman knocked on my door and said the volunteers were a credit to the country, no wonder we were winning the War. And then she asked if she could help. I thanked her but told her no, we had more than enough volunteers. It wasn’t true, and she was embarrassed, but what was I to do? She was an undesirable, after all. She turned away. The next morning I found four loaves of bread at my door: Please give this to the soldiers. I fed it instead to the birds in Lenin Park. I did not wish to be tarnished with their brush.

By the time it came to celebrate the Revolution in early November, there were only a couple of dozen soldiers to bathe each day, stragglers coming in from the front.

In the afternoons I began to visit the hospital. The rooms were crammed full of men. The beds were stacked five high, nailed to the walls like shelves. The walls themselves were splattered with blood and grime. The only good thing was the children who came in to perform on occasion, and also the music that came through the loudspeaker—one of the nurses had set up a system where they could play the gramophone from the front office. The music could be heard all over the hospital, lots of wonderful victory songs. Even still, the men moaned and shouted for their sweethearts. Some of them were glad to see me, but a lot of them didn’t recognize my face at first. When I reminded them, they smiled, and one or two of the cheeky ones even blew me a kiss.

Of all the soldiers there was one boy I remember best—Nurmahammed, from Chelyabinsk, who had lost his foot to a mine. He was just an ordinary Tatar boy with black hair and high cheekbones and wide eyes. He hobbled in on crutches made from tree branches. We sprayed him down, and I unwrapped the bandages from around the top of his stump. He was bad with the parasites, so I had Nuriya take good care of him. She swabbed the wound well while I got the bath ready. I checked the water temperature with my wrist, and then three of us supported him, walked him across to the bath. He was silent the whole time. I washed him down, and finally he said, Thank you.

When he was clean and dressed in hospital pajamas he gave me a strange look and began to tell me all about his mother’s vegetable patch, how she spread chicken manure to make the carrots grow, how they were the most wonderful carrots a person could want in his life, how he missed those carrots more than anything else.

In my lunch box I had some leftover martsovka. Nurmahammed put his face to the food, smiled up at me, kept smiling while he ate, his head rising up from the plate as though making sure I was still there.

I decided to go up to the hospital with Nurmahammed. We got on the back of a horse wagon, the animals clopping their way forward.

All sorts of things were going on that day because of the celebrations—a special food truck had pulled up to the hospital kitchens, red flags were flying from the windows, two commissars had arrived to pin medals on the soldiers, a man sat on the steps playing a balalaika, and children were walking around in Bashkirian folk-dancing costumes.

The Song of the Fatherland came over the loudspeakers, and everyone stood still while we sang it together.

I squeezed Nurmahammed’s hand, and I said: See, everything will be all right.

Yes, he said.

Usually the men were pushed around the hospital in wheelbarrows, but to our pleasant surprise there was a wheelchair for Nurmahammed that day. I helped him with the paperwork and wheeled him along the corridor to his ward. It was noisy in there, all the men shouting under a big cloud of cigarette smoke. Some of the soldiers had gotten hold of a huge vat of methylated spirits and they were dipping cups into it, passing them along the bunk beds.

Everyone wore bandages—some of them were wrapped from head to toe—and things had been written on the walls by their beds, names of girlfriends, favorite soccer teams, poems even.

I pushed Nurmahammed on through to D368, halfway down the ward. His was the second of five bunks. He used his one leg to prop himself on the edge of the first bed. I pushed from below, but still he couldn’t heave himself up. Some men came and got their shoulders under Nurmahammed’s weight. He flopped down on the bed without even lifting the sheets, lay there a moment, smiled down at me.

Just then the big troupe of children came into the room. There must have been about twenty of them, all in costumes, green and red, with caps. The youngest was maybe four or five years old. They looked so nice and clean and scrubbed.

A woman in charge made an announcement for silence. For a moment I thought it was my neighbor, but thankfully it wasn’t, this woman was taller, sterner, no gray in her hair. She made a second announcement for quiet, but the soldiers were still roaring and laughing. The woman clapped her hands twice, and the children began dancing. After a few minutes a sort of hush came over the room—a slow wave, like a good thing being whispered through a crowd.

In the spaces between the beds the children performed. They twirled and reeled and went under bridges of arms for a