Life And Fate (Orange Inheritance)

The division’s commander, a young Kazakh, said very clearly and without a trace of an accent:

‘You know what? Next year I’m going to grow some melons. You must come back and try one.’

The divisional commander was at home in the desert. He cracked jokes, bared his white teeth in a smile, and moved with quick and effortless steps through the deep sand. He even glanced amiably at the camels standing in harness by the huts with their corrugated-iron roofs.

Darensky found his cheerfulness irritating. In search of solitude, he decided to return to the emplacements of the 1st battery – though he had already been there during the day.

An enormous moon had risen; it seemed more black than red. Growing crimson with effort, it climbed up into the transparent black of the sky; the mortars, anti-tank weapons and the barrels of the guns looked strangely threatening in this angry light. Along the road stretched a caravan of camels; they were harnessed to squeaking village carts loaded with hay and boxes of shells. It was an unlikely scene: tractors, the lorry with the printing press for the Army journal, a thin radio mast, the long necks of the camels – and their undulating walk that made it seem as though their whole body was made out of rubber, without a single hard bone.

The camels passed by, leaving a smell of hay in the frosty air. The same huge moon – more black than red – had shone over the deserted fields where Prince Igor was to give battle. The same moon had shone when the Persian hosts marched into Greece, when the Roman legions invaded the German forests, when the battalions of the first consul had watched night fall over the pyramids . . .

Darensky, his head sunk into his shoulders, was sitting on a box of shells and listening to two soldiers who lay stretched out under their greatcoats beside the guns. The battery commander and his political instructor had gone to Divisional HQ; the lieutenant-colonel from Front HQ – the soldiers had found out who he was from a signaller – seemed to be fast asleep. The soldiers puffed blissfully at the cigarettes they had rolled, letting out clouds of smoke.

They were obviously close friends; you could tell from their certainty that whatever happened to one was of equal interest to the other.

‘So what happened?’ said one of them, feigning mockery and indifference.

‘You know the bastard as well as I do,’ said the second soldier with pretended reluctance. ‘How can he expect a man to walk in boots like these?’

‘So what happened?’

‘So here I am in the same old boots. I’m not going to walk barefoot, am I?’

‘So he wouldn’t give you new boots,’ said the second gunner. His voice was now full of interest; every trace of mockery and indifference had disappeared.

Their talk turned to their homes.

‘What do you expect a woman to write about? This is out of stock and that’s out of stock. If the boy isn’t ill, then it’s the girl. You know what women are like.’

‘Mine’s quite straightforward about it. She says: “You lot at the front are all right – you’ve got your rations. As for us, we really are having a hard time.”’

‘That’s woman’s logic for you,’ said the first gunner. ‘There she is, sitting in the rear, and she hasn’t got a clue what it’s like at the front. All she knows about are your rations.’

‘That’s right. She can’t get hold of any kerosene, and she thinks it’s the end of the world.’

‘Sure. It’s a thousand times more difficult to wait in a queue than to sit here in the desert and fight off enemy tanks with empty bottles.’

They were both well aware that there had been no tank attacks anywhere near them.

Interrupting the eternal discussion – who has the hardest role in life, man or woman? – one of them said hesitantly:

‘Mine’s fallen ill, though. She’s got something wrong with her back. She only has to lift something heavy and she’s in bed for a week.’

Once again the conversation seemed to take a different direction. They began to talk about the accursed, waterless desert around them.

The second gunner, the one lying closest to Darensky, said:

‘She didn’t write that to upset me. She just doesn’t understand.’

Wanting to take back – but not completely take back – his harsh words about soldiers’ wives, the first gunner said:

‘I know. I was just being stupid.’

They smoked for a while in silence, then started discussing the respective merits of safety-razors and cut-throats, the battery commander’s new jacket, and how you still want to go on living no matter how hard things may be.

‘Just look at the night! You know, I once saw a picture like this when I was at school: a full moon over a field and dead warriors lying on the ground.’

‘That doesn’t sound much like us,’ said the other with a laugh. ‘We’re not warriors. We’re more like sparrows.’