The Story of a Life

45

Lefortovo Nights

Bathed in the hissing, chalky incandescence of arc lights, Brestsky station was at the time the main army transport junction for Moscow. Troops embarked here for the front. At night, long hospital trains smelling of chloroform moved stealthily up to its darkened platforms and unloaded their wounded.

Every night around two o’clock, when the city lay asleep, we drove our white trams to Brestsky station. Special camp beds on springs had been set up in all the cars. We had to wait a long time and hung about smoking alongside the cars. Women in heavy shawls kept coming up and quietly asking us if it would soon be time to load the wounded. This expression – ‘load the wounded’, meaning to haul men who, though still alive, had been ripped to shreds, as if they were so much inanimate freight – was one of the absurdities of the war.

‘Just wait!’ we told them.

With a heavy sigh, the women went back out to wait silently in the shadows on the street, their eyes trained on the big station doors. The women came to the station every night in the hope of finding among the wounded a husband, a brother, a son or someone from a regiment who might give them news of a loved one. Despite our differences in age, personality and political views, all of us conductors feared nothing more than one of these women discovering a badly maimed relation among the wounded.

As soon as the orderlies appeared at the station doors with the stretchers, the women swarmed around them, peering into the blackened faces of the wounded, pressing bread, apples or cheap cigarettes into their hands. Others just stood about sobbing. Stifling their moans, the wounded comforted them with homespun words – the kind of words every simple Russian keeps ready for a rainy day and shares only with others just as simple as himself.

The men were loaded into the trams, and we started our slow, careful trip through the Moscow night. We usually took the soldiers to the main military hospital in Lefortovo. Ever since then Lefortovo has reminded me of cold autumn nights. Many years have passed, but when I think of Lefortovo now, I still picture it on just such a night, the hospital looming out of the dark with its long, monotonous rows of lighted windows. I can’t rid myself of this image because I have never been back to Lefortovo and I never did see it, or the wide square in front of the hospital, in daylight.

At Lefortovo we helped the orderlies carry the badly wounded to the wards or out to the huts scattered about deep in the park some distance from the main building. A noisy stream ran through a gully; it smelled of chlorine. We had to carry the men slowly, and so we often worked at Lefortovo until it was almost dawn.

Sometimes we cared for wounded Austrians. We jokingly referred to Austria at the time as the ‘Rag-and-Bone Empire’ and the Austrian army as a ‘Gypsy bazaar’. At first glance their multi-ethnic army created the impression of a hotch-potch of swarthy and emaciated men in blue greatcoats and faded forage caps with tin cockades and the initials ‘F’ and ‘J’ for Emperor Franz Joseph. Talking to the wounded prisoners, we were astounded by all the different nationalities the Austrian army contained. There were Czechs, Germans, Italians, Tyroleans, Poles, Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Hungarians, Gypsies, Herzegovinians, Hutsuls, Slovaks … I had never even heard of some of these nationalities, even though I had excelled in geography at school.

One day along with a group of wounded Russians an Austrian in grey puttees, as long and thin as a rake, was brought into my tram. He had been wounded in the throat and lay there wheezing and rolling his yellow eyes. As I walked past him, he moved a dirty hand. Thinking he wanted a drink of water, I bent down to his drawn, unshaven face and heard him whisper in a soft rattling voice. I thought this Austrian had spoken in Russian. Surprised, I drew back. Then, with great difficulty, he repeated himself:

‘I’m a Slav … Taken captive in a big, big battle … my brother.’

He closed his eyes. Apparently, he attached great importance to what he had said, but I didn’t understand what that might be. I had the feeling that he had waited for just the right moment to speak these words. I thought about it for a long time afterwards. What had this dying man with the blood-soaked bandage on his throat been trying to tell me? Why hadn’t he complained, or asked for a sip of water, or pulled out the metal chain holding the regimental disc engraved with the address of his next of kin as the other wounded Austrian prisoners did? He seemed to want to say that the world is run by the powerful and it wasn’t his fault that he had been forced to take up arms against his brothers. In his fevered mind this idea was connected with the memory of some great, bloody battle to which the ‘Swabians’ had sent him straight from his village. From that village where the centuries-old nut trees cast large shadows and where a tame Danubian bear danced to a barrel-organ on feast days.

When we started to carry out the wounded at Lefortovo and came to a red-haired soldier from Vologda, he said: ‘Take the Austrian. He’s in a bad way. We can wait.’

We picked up the Austrian. He was heavy and began moaning softly as we walked. ‘Oh-oh-oh, Mother Mary! Oh-oh-oh, Mother Mary!’ By the time we reached the hut out in the garden he was dead. The military doctor told us to take him to the morgue. This was a shed with large, wide doors. We carried the Austrian to the morgue, lifted him off the stretcher and laid him down on the hay which had already been flattened by the weight of so many other dead bodies. A yellowish electric bulb hung from the ceiling.

Trying not to look around, I pulled out the identity disc from under his collar. It was a tiny booklet made of two hinged leaves of white oxidised metal with three engraved lines on it: ‘Iovann Petrić, 38719, Veseli Dubnjak (Bosnia).’ I copied it down.

Later, back at home, I wrote a postcard (for some reason in block letters) telling of Iovann’s death and posted it to the Petrić family in Veseli Dubnjak, Bosnia. As I wrote I imagined a low white cottage, so low that the windows were an arm’s length off the ground. I saw the dry burdock under the windows and a hawk floating in the hot sky overhead. I saw a woman take a child from her breast and gaze with gloomy eyes down the road where the wind was kicking up dust. Perhaps the wind was blowing from the field where Iovann lay dead and buried, but it couldn’t speak and would never tell her anything. And no letters came.

‘Taken captive in a big, big battle … my brother.’ I recalled his rough whisper. Whose fault was it that ‘Swabians’ in their tight green uniforms had torn him, Iovann, away from his home? He had been obedient and good, Iovann – you could see it in his soft, round eyes, the eyes of a boy on the face of an old man.

It was during those nights at Lefortovo, nights filled with war and suffering when I first contemplated man’s tortuous path through life, that I became a man. With every day I shed a bit more of the bright glitter that had coloured my vision of reality. I became aware of life as something fierce and harsh that demanded ceaseless effort to rid it of its grim ichor and delusions and to reveal it in all its magnificence and simplicity.