Just before sunrise, the blond-haired joker and merry-maker Ivan Dobrik, a renowned Leningrad Front sniper, came running into my dugout. As usual, mixing together Ukrainian and Russian, he gushed out the purpose of his visit: ‘You know, old boy, snipers have appeared on our sector. Give us some help, brother, or else life is impossible. Yesterday evening they killed two of our riflemen, Ivanin and Smirnov. The snakes, they’re nestled in some spot from where they can see our trenches and lines of communications, and we can’t detect them!’
The sniper’s face with its high cheekbones was flushed with agitation and from his rapid walk to see me. His large blue eyes flashed with alarm. Dobrik was an outstanding sniper and as slippery as a fish. When ‘on the hunt’, he typically liked to creep out into no-man’s-land, set up on the edge of a shell crater, and from there he would hunt down enemy observers, and sometimes kill the sentries at machine guns as well. But Ivan knew that a particularly dangerous struggle was now in front of us.
Enemy snipers were cold-blooded and superb shots. A large group of specially trained soldiers supported the snipers by offering various ruses to smoke out the positions of our own snipers: they set up dummies, opened fire from different locations, raised helmets above the trench line, and created commotions in their own trenches. I had witnessed this masquerade many times in my own experience.
I couldn’t leave together with Dobrik right away. In parting, Dobrik told me: ‘So, tomorrow you’ll come and help me duel with them.’
‘But don’t go out yourself; I’ll look in on you with my guys in the morning.’
‘Fine! I’ll be waiting. But I’ll keep an eye on them, in case they start acting up over there.’
Ivan Dobrik departed. Later that evening, however, I learned that he had been badly wounded in the back of the head by a mortar fragment.
As soon as twilight had gathered, I went to Stroyeva to discuss with her how best to prepare for the duel with the Nazi snipers. I also had to alert the other comrades.
When I stepped into the communications dugout at regiment head- quarters, Zina, curled up into a ball, was fast asleep on a plank couch. Two soldiers were sitting in front of the telephone apparatus, smoking hand- rolled cigarettes and conversing in a low voice. I walked up to the sleeping woman and cautiously laid a hand on her shoulder. Zina woke up in a flash, rolled over onto her back, grabbed my head and firmly pressed it to her breast. The soldiers exchanged glances.
‘Yosif! You’re alive? Oh, I had just dreamed . . .’
The signalmen laughed: ‘It was just a dream. In reality, may he live to 100!’
We stepped out of the stuffy, smoke-filled dugout. A prime mover was passing nearby. With a howling engine, its clattering tracks were chewing up the earth. I told Zina about the appearance of the German snipers and laid out my plan of action.
‘I make only one request of you,’ Zina said. ‘Don’t go out with your pupils. I’ll have a chat with Tolya Bodrov, and we’ll decide together what we should do.’
With the sun still below the horizon, Zina, Bodrov and I arrived in the 1st Rifle Battalion’s sector. We took up our positions before the sun rose and began to observe the Germans’ trench line. What wasn’t over there! Rags of different colours, tin cans, buckets, bottles, bricks, pieces of plywood, bones, helmets, pieces of scrap metal, rolls of barbed wire, gas masks . . .
Bodrov had already been on this sector. He looked at me and gave a shrug: ‘Just try to find anyone among all this junk.’
Zina handed Bodrov a notepad: ‘Tolya, take a good look, it’s a sketch I made of their defences with all its ornamentations. Perhaps with a fresh eye you’ll notice something new.’
I peered at the enemy’s positions. Soon I spotted a prone fascist next to a rusty bucket on the breastwork. He was nestled in on the shady side of a scorched tree, his shoulder up against the trunk: the sunlight couldn’t reach his face and arms. His head was wrapped with a dark rag; only his chin, mouth and half his nose were exposed. I pointed out my finding to my comrades.
‘Well, I’ll be!’ Bodrov drawled. ‘What a rascal, look how he’s settled himself in!’
Stroyeva, fitting a spare armoured plate to her embrasure, couldn’t resist razzing Bodrov a bit: ‘You, Tolya, look sharp, or you’ll overlook things.’
‘My foot, I’m not overlooking anything. It’s not my first time to see that creature.’
‘Don’t rush to conclusions, Tolya. What if that’s only a dummy?’ ‘What the hell do you mean “dummy”, take a closer look: you’re shaking in your shoes from fear.’
I didn’t take my cross hairs off the fascist’s head, waiting for him to turn in our direction. Just then, a large brown rat came running up to the prone German. Without any concern, it approached his face, sniffed first his chin and then his mouth, and then rose on its hind paws. Startled by someone or something, the rat darted down the front of the German’s shirt.
‘Screw you, devil! Where the hell did that just come from!’ Tolya was gaping in surprise.
‘Tolya, shut your trap, or even better, bite your tongue!’
The chagrined Bodrov gave a dismissive wave: ‘Fie, devil, just how did I fail to make it out? Stop your chuckling, it’s the first time I’ve seen such a prop.’ Then he added, ‘And I, by God, was just about to fire, but I felt sorry for the rat.’
‘You would have planted a bullet in his skull. Look for a real one; he’s got to be around here somewhere.’
This incident reminded me of a meeting with an old acquaintance, Petr Andreyevich Timonin. I ran into him on Lenin Square, when I was going to visit my son Volodya in the second half of February 1942. At the time, I could hardly recognize this former top-class gymnast. Emaciated, Petr Andreyevich’s skeletal face was ashen, and his eyes were sunken. His mouth appeared unnaturally large, and his lips trembled.
In a word, he was at the end of his rope. His athletic, lithesome body had become hunched over, and his arms were hanging like dead sticks. Petr struggled to recognize me, but then immediately began to talk about his family: ‘You know, Yosif, Zoya Nikolayevna managed to slip through aboard the last train on 28 August, via Mga Station. Yes, yes, don’t be surprised – she literally slipped through, because at that time fighting was going on with German tanks just 2 kilometres away from the Station.’
‘And you, Petya, where are you living now?’
‘Me?’ With the tip of his tongue, he slowly moistened his trembling lips, and looking in the direction of the Neva, he shivered from the cold. ‘I live like a prisoner. At first I got meals at a dining hall, but when they stopped feeding people there, that’s when it all started.’ Petr Andreyevich extended his arms, and then continued: ‘Just look at my arms, not a bit of meat on them, just tendons. But my work requires a lot of strength, because you see I now work as a railroad’s deputy chief of freight. You yourself know the situation at the front; but the people are weak.
You instruct someone to check the serviceability of the boxcars, and he never reaches the place. I must go myself, though I don’t know where to find the strength, and we can’t let down the front. So you run yourself dizzy.’
We started to cross the Liteynyi Bridge. A cold wind was howling in our face. Petr Andreyevich tugged his fur cap down a little lower, raised the collar of his greatcoat, and laboured to keep pace with me, his boots shuffling in the snow. Reaching Tchaikovsky Street, he suddenly stopped beneath a loudspeaker and began to listen to the music coming from it. As if excusing himself for his weakness, he said: ‘You understand, Yosif, no matter how hard things are for me, I love to listen to music. I recall on 20 January, I returned to my room. It was cold. I had one thought – to find something to eat. For the hundredth time, I began to rummage through the shelves in the cupboard and search the kitchen table; I looked in the stove and behind the stove in search of a morsel of bread or a handful of groats. Nothing. So then I took the frying pan and began to scrape it with a knife. The crumbs of crust freed by the scraping lay on my tongue and fell onto the bed. There was absolutely nothing else available . . .’
Petr Andreyevich fell silent. He started to search for something in his pockets.
‘In the city, you understand, they often stop you and demand to see a pass. Now, where was I?’
‘You were on a bed.’
‘Yes, yes, there I was, lying on my bed, and suddenly the radio began to play “The Dance of the Swans”.’ Petr Andreyevich paused to lick his lips, and leaning on my arm, he continued: ‘I always love to listen to music with my eyes closed. So there I am, lying on the bed and picturing not the dancing swans, but train after train coming, loaded with bread, sugar and cases of butter. What didn’t my hungry brain imagine!’
We stopped to rest a bit. Petr Andreyevich leaned against the wall of a building. I took the arm of my acquaintance, and we trudged along further.
‘Petr, you haven’t finished telling me about the music,’ I reminded him.
‘Oh, yes, I totally forgot. Well, when the music stopped, I opened my eyes and saw a large brown rat directly in front of me on the windowsill; yes, yes, it was brown. It didn’t take its tiny, voracious eyes off of me. You understand, I couldn’t lie there, so I gathered my last strength, stood up – and caught sight of some spilled grains of kasha under the nightstand.
I began to sweep them into a little pile, and then spotted a briefcase in the corner behind the nightstand. I noticed that a hole had been chewed through its side. Next to it on the floor was a little pile of kasha. I opened the briefcase and gave such a loud cry that the brown rat scurried from the windowsill and disappeared. I found a kilogram package of kasha in the briefcase. You understand, the rat helped me find it. My wife had not remembered to take the kasha out of the briefcase, or I had not thought of it myself; I don’t know, but we had forgotten about it . . . This kasha saved my life.’
‘Is he really alive?’ I wondered to myself, never taking my eyes off the enemy’s trench line.
A shot rang out, but from which side, I couldn’t determine.
Zina laid her rifle flat.‘Osya, come here,’ she called. ‘Look, what the heck are the Nazis doing?’
I took a look through the periscope. Two Germans were engaged in something unbelievable: taking turns, they were bending over, and then straightening back up; one stood back up and rested a wooden mallet on his shoulder.
‘Guys, they’re playing croquet,’ Bodrov said. ‘They’re looking for fools in our trench, the tricksters.’
After long searching, I nevertheless spotted the German sniper. He was lying about 30 metres away from the dummy, in among some stone rubble. I indicated his position to my comrades, and then suggested that they take a look to see whether or not another enemy marksman might be lying in wait near the croquet players.
A couple of minutes later, someone started to cough in our trench, and I saw how the sleeves of a German wearing a camouflage cloak, who we had believed to be dead, slowly straightened out. The fingers of the fascist’s hand, wrapped around the rifle stock, raised the barrel above the ground and then held it steady. The muzzle of the rifle was pointed in the direction of my embrasure. The foe was aiming at one of a small group of our men, who were moving out of their outposts. I was compelled to fire at the hand, to try to avert a shot that would have been fatal to one of our comrades.
The enemy rifle jerked upward, collided with the edge of a piece of rubble, and dropped to the ground. I closed the gun port.
Zina asked, ‘Well, did you finish off that one behind the pile of rubble?’ ‘No, Zinochka, he was ready to shoot at one of ours, and I had to fire at his hand.’
‘Where did the croquet players go?’ ‘They disappeared after the shot.’
Bodrov and I took a seat on the floor of the emplacement and had a smoke. Stroyeva continued to observe the German line while chatting with us.
. . . The slanting rays of the afternoon sun fell on the edge of the sniper emplacement. The first yellow leaves were slowly circling in the air and falling on the floor of the trench and on the still green blades of grass, decorating it with a yellow pattern. A gossamer thread extended through the air – all of this spoke of the coming autumn. My cigarette died out. I had forgotten that I was sitting in a front-line emplacement.
‘Guys!’ Zina called to us in a half-whisper. ‘Osya, take a look; someone else has appeared by that clump of sage.’
I slowly turned the periscope in the direction Zina had indicated and spotted a head. The arms and weapon weren’t visible. The fascist’s eyes were looking in the direction from where my shot had come.
‘Comrades, let me go out into the trench, and I’ll at least make this sharp-eyed snake move!’ Bodrov said. ‘Tolya, stop joking and keep your eyes peeled!’ Zina replied.
‘My eyes are tired, and I have a crick in my neck – it won’t turn.’ I didn’t intervene in the discussion. Bodrov himself knew what could and could not be done.
I knew that Tolya wouldn’t make it across the exposed area of the old trench unnoticed, before he reached the main lines. I held the cross hairs of my rifle scope on the eyes of the prone enemy. He immediately spotted the crawling Bodrov. His blond eyebrows started and rose; his eyes were looking slightly to the side. I could see flecks of dirt on his face. The Nazi, twisting his mouth, said something, his thin lips moving, but he himself didn’t pick up his weapon. I waited for the other German, whom we hadn’t yet managed to spot, to show himself. My temples were pounding. In the expectation of a shot, I started to count the seconds, but I immediately lost track and had to start over. Stroyeva was lying as if she had become stone. Only the eyes of the fascist were moving. From this beast’s tactics, it wasn’t hard to guess that we were dealing with an experienced sniper: he didn’t rush to fire at the crawling Russian, but was waiting instead for a more important target.
Suddenly the German dropped and began to squirm backwards towards the corner of a shed.
‘Look, Yosif, the viper is slithering away. He plainly noticed some- thing. I’ll move off just a bit to the side at once, to get a better angle.’
‘Don’t worry, Zinochka; he’s not getting away from me.’
There was the sound of a single shot. The fascist’s arms flopped and he died on the spot.
The brown rat, which had been scurrying among the rusty tin cans, was startled by the shot. It scurried quickly away along the enemy breast- work.
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