Eugene Ganin. Karelian berries

Åâãåíèé Ïåòðîâè÷ Ãàíèí
Translated from the original Russian
by M. A. Ashot
............
Vladimir Lazar - Director & Produser & Publisher
Offis: USA 1-414-665-7212 & 1-415-806-4402
E-mail: waltv 2000@yahoo.com
............
PO BOX 16374
San Francisco,
CA 94116-0374
USA



O Finland, how wistful,
And yet how splendid thy spaces!
Gold and steel gleams
The water of thy azure lakes!

Z. Topelius
“A Summer Day in Kangasala”

1

Captain Panin lay flat on his belly. His head was resting against the swell of a hillock overgrown with moss. “Where am I? What’s happened to me?”
Slowly, he opened his left eye. Something soft and damp was pressing against the other one. The left eye saw an amazing berry, similar to a raspberry: large, creased leaves fanned out in various directions from the berry heart itself. The orange-hued fruit quivered on its long stem leg, as if seeking to acquaint itself with the eye of the human. Great big flame-colored forest ants crawled all over the leaves of grass, the leaves and along the berry’s stem; and there were other tiny bugs and beetles as well; flies swarmed; bees buzzed away – just as if there were no war. Silence and calm were everywhere. For an instant, a dragonfly hung suspended in the air, right next to him; and then, suddenly deciding to veer off, it vanished.
“Everything’s flying away, flying away, somewhere. But where?”
A ladybug landed comfortably on the berry.
“God, why does it hurt so much in my back, there, under my right shoulder blade? What is that?”
Panin pushed down against the swampy soil with both arms, hard; he raised himself up with considerable effort; he squatted. His head shook. Excruciating pain pierced his body. With a groan, he fell over onto his left side: he kept swimming in and out of consciousness. His head felt detached from the rest of his trunk:
“Why is everything spinning? The forests sounds disappear, then reappear…”
With a huge effort of will, he finally opened both eyes:
“What’s that berry, some raspberry variety? Ah! That’s moroshka! Karelian moroshka! My favorite berry! Sugary sweet… with that unique subtle tartness. Mama used to make such wonderful preserves from these orange berries! And Grandmother’s moroshka compote with dinner…But who am I? And why have I forgotten my name? What do they call me?”
Painfully he shifted back onto his stomach and with his left hand he tried to reach over to the right side of the back. His hand closed around some kind of handle.
“Oh, my God! That’s the handle of a Finnish knife stuck in my back! I’m wounded? When? Where? In combat. That’s right, yes! In combat, probably! Go on, remember! Your name is… Nikolai Panin, commander of a reconnaissance unit of the Blatic Sea infantry marines. It’s July of 1944. The Karelian isthmus. We are advancing on Vuoslami. I’m twenty-five years old. Before the war, I was a graduate student of the University of Leningrad. A philologist. My friends call me Nikolai, Kolya, Kolyan. I’m a philologist, language scholar – a military interpreter. I can think and speak in three languages: Russian, German, Finnish. I’m a Captain of the Reconnaissance Forces [State Intelligence Directorate]. I have a wife, Katyusha, and a son, Yura, also called Zhora… He’s two already! A little man! Why does it hurt so much? How is it that I can remember everything that came before, but whatever happened today, yesterday has vanished into oblivion… Look, there’s the sun in the sky: it dims, it brightens… Why, where am I falling all the time, all the time? Why is it suddenly so dark? Is it night now?”
Nicholas lost consciousness.
He regained it deep in the darkness of the night. The moon hung suspended in the dusky sky, like a field rocket used for illumation; the shadow of the earth had taken a bite out of it. He was shaking from the chill of fever, but gradually his consciousness cleared up: he could remember. He remembered that his recon team of seven men had moved soundlessly along the shores of the Vuoksa. The combat mission was to obtain – at any price – information about the enemy relative to the vicinity of the coming operations of the Red Army and the Baltic Fleet on the Karelian front. The mission goal was to capture talkers – Finnish and German soldiers and officers. The orders were terse and precise: objective intelligence must be gathered by any means necessary; any information gained about the combat readiness of the foe was to be backed by documentary evidence, reinforced by visual observations and the accounts of prisoners. The talkers were not to be brought back across the front. Any information obtained was to be immediately transmitted via encrypted radio communications, in German, back to the command post headquarters for the front. A special combat task of the unit was to identify the targets for attack by the naval aviation of the Baltic Fleet, and the warships themselves. The specified length of the reconnaissance mission was ten days. Captain Panin, disguised in the field uniform of a Finnish lieutenant, was charged with the task to beat the facts out of his captives at all cost – to ascertain the condition of the deployed troops, about the situation and condition of the reserve and heavy artillery; about the fuel depots; about the boundaries of minefields. The intelligence data he collected he was to transmit immediately via radio; as for the talkers, after interrogation with prejudice, they were to be disposed of quietly, without resorting to bullets: by drowning them in swamps. Above all, don’t allow yourself to be taken prisoner.
“Leave no traces!” the Reconnaissance Colonel instructed them, in his final exhortation to the group. “Bury everything meticulously: your wastes, your rubbish, the corpses.” The colonel said nothing about their own corpses. It was clear enough without further emphasis that they were to bury their own every bit as thoroughly, and in the same place – in the Karelian bogs.

2

All the details of the battle came back to him.
It had been dawn when they had walked into that magnificent, tranquil forest. It was hard to imagine that amongst these tall pines, perfect for building masts; amongst the lush firs, the brilliant white birches; the fantastic, massive granite formations richly carpeted in velvety moss – amongst all these magical fragrances – a deadly hunt was taking place, in which men stalked men. It was hard to believe that death was lurking behind every pure stream, at every bend of the winding trail in this fairy-tale forest.
Out of the blue, as the unit moved out into the meadow, they were fired at.
The radio specialist was killed instantly. The lads raced back to take cover under the dense fir growth. They hunkered down. They assumed a defensive circle position. The first thing to do was to ascertain the numerical strength of the enemy; only then could they make any kind of combat decision. Clearly, neither side had expected to come across the other. The adversaries had forced each other’s hands, exposing themselves in the process.
“Most likely they’re recon, like we are. Since they’re lying low,” reflected the Captain, “There can’t be too many of them. A small detachment, just as we are.”
It was not a large forest. It was obvious that whoever would be the first to emerge in the open spaces along the picturesque shoreline of the Vuoksa would be immediately destroyed. They had to get out of there. They couldn’t just lie around in the thick grass. But how to get out?
The forest was a temporary sanctuary, an oasis, but it was also a death trap for both the Finns and the Russians. There was only one way out: a fight to the finish, in these very woods. The exhilarating expanse of the open field, the beckoning freedom of the meadow, were turning out to be nothing other than life’s end. Naturally, no one wanted to wait for the end to arrive. Combat was inevitable.
An hour went by. Both sides understood perfectly that the smallest movement afforded an excellent target for a sniper. Using his naval binoculars, the Captain discovered that there were also about seven men on the other side: “Although, my radio man perished. That leaves us with six Russian infantry marines against seven Finnish front line soldiers. Whoever outwaits his enemy, wins.”
The Finns were the first to attack: “They must have been given orders to destroy any recon units from our infantry marines. No commander worth his salt would tolerate enemy intelligence operatives in his rear.”
Being well familiar with the Finns’ combat tactics in the forest, the Captain assumed they would already have mounted their cuckoos – snipers – high in the trees of all the possible escape routes available to his team. The cuckoo tactic was purely Finnish in origin – a death trap for Russia’s Ivans. Panin believed they would have at least three cuckoo callers perched in ambush, while a minimum of four Finns on foot would be busy trying to squeeze the six remaining Russians into the line of sniper fire of the ‘forest songbirds.’ A solid concept!
The battle formula was roughly taking shape: the two recon teams would not coexist in the same forest. Of course, it was also necessary to remember that ‘In war, combat never unfolds according to plan, nor according to regulations.’
“How can we outwit them?” Feverishly, the Captain went over all the possible tactical variants of the battle. “Do we feign a rapid retreat back into the depths of the woods? But how? While we ‘feign retreat,’ we are forced to cross the cuckoos’ line of fire…They’ve figured out that we’re recon: we’ll be avoiding direct confrontations. Do we force them to pursue us? We’re the ones who have entered their territory, not the other way around. Should we try to hold them back by stretching out our line? Or change positions? But how? The solution: to force them into hand-to-hand combat, preferably without gunshots and explosions. We go around the meadow and capture their trenches: we turn it around, so we’re on the offensive, not retreating. We cover our traces.”
Sivokhin, his second in command (and starshina), agreed.
Armed with a sniper’s rifle, the Captain crawled over to the left flank, while the other men, dashing from spot to spot in short bursts, made a highly visible run for the denser part of the woods. The Finns opened up out of their machine guns. Ours did not return fire. Panin watched as the arms of one of his soldiers jerked suddenly, flying up into the air, just before he fell onto his back: “Killed?”
Ducking their heads down, weaving and half-crouching, four Finns raced across the open meadow towards the dead man… Starshina Sivokhin coolly brought them back down to earth with two bullets. The others hunkered down.
“The main thing is to grab a talker and their papers!” the Captain reminded himself, as if giving an order.
Lying in the dense grass, he pulled off his camouflage coat, revealing the field uniform of a Finnish lieutenant, and began to crawl towards the enemy side of the meadow, carefully keeping his eyes trained the place where the survivors must be lying in wait. Once he had reached the shade of a birch grove, he got up and began crossing to the Finnish positions, in short dashes. Suddenly, a soldier jumped out of the thicket. Startled by the sight of an unfamiliar officer, the soldier gaped, his mouth open.
“What brings you here, Lieutenant? Headquarters sent you?”
“Headquarters! What’s going on here? We’re your reinforcements,” the Captain answered, in Finnish. “Report on the situation!”
“Your accent is unusual…” The soldier began to raise his gun to his shoulder.
But Panin was faster than the naïve young soldier: the blade of the Captain’s Finnish knife flashed in the light. The knife sliced into the victim’s throat up to its very hilt. Without thinking, the Finn reflexively grabbed the knife with both hands… The carabine fell onto a cranberry bush. Captain Panin looked around: no one had noticed him killing the soldier. Hiding no longer, he dashed out into the field and ran for the spot where the other two of the attackers were hunkered down.
“Get down! Get down! There’s a Russian sniper there!” warned one of them, rising to his knees and waving at him.
The Captain hunkered down.
“Stay there! We’re coming to you! Careful! There’s a Russian sniper right beside you!”
A few moments later, the low brush parted, and two young soldiers’ faces appeared in the grass. They wondered if there wasn’t something suspicious about the appearance of the phoney infantry lieutenant, because they rapidly released the safeties of their automatic weapons. And this time again the Captain was faster than his opponents: two precise shots to the face from two meters – practically at point blank range – instantly killed his two coevals, whom he had just seen for the first and last time in his life. Instantly, the stillness of eternity came over the bodies of the two young men, surrounded by the riotous glory of the incomparable Karelian landscape. In that instant, Nikolai felt neither malice, nor pity, nor fear. It was his job. Searching the bodies with business-like efficiency, he removed their papers, orders, maps and weapons:
“This is a field made for feasting. We should be making mothers out of our young beauties here, not killing each other,” came the involuntary thought. “How many decent young lads have I killed in this war? And for what? How am I to live with such a heavy burden? Who am I now? A professional assassin? A Russian ex-intellectual?”
An overpowering indifference to everything came over him, then and there.
Nausea rose towards his throat. The perception of life and the perception of death were level with each other. He got up to his full height and began to trudge towards the agreed-upon meeting place where the rest of his team would be.
“Strange, no one is shooting! Where did everyone go?”
Just then the Captain saw, unexpectedly, a tidy heap of Finnish rucksacks, packed with food. He helped himself to some crackers, sausage, cheese, boiled potatoes, chocolate; he sat down under a tree, exhausted, and taking small sips of vodka from a flask, began to wait for his men. “Only the cuckoos are left. But we won’t go towards them. We’ve won the battle. We’ve cleared the road to the Vuoksa shore. But how many of my men are left?”

3

Weaving, staggering, limping on both legs, Sivokhin, the starshina, emerged from the brush.
“Sivokha! You’re alive!” The Captain got up and walked towards him.
Sivokhin did not recognize his Captain Panin. He was rocking back and forth, staring dumbly at the Finnish uniform of his commanding officer… His eyes were clouding over; his gaze fixed on Panin’s Finnish getup. Slowly, Sivokhin began to raise his automatic rifle.
“Halt, Vasilyevich! It’s me… Don’t you recognize me? It’s me, your commander! It’s me, Panin!”
“Aaaah!” groaned the starshina, and toppled over.
His blood gurgled in his throat; the Captain struggled to make sense of the starshina’s hoarsely uttered phrases: “I’m the only one left, the fuckers… Bastards! Cuckoos got all our boys... The whores! I’m pretty sure we got all of them, too, though… Friend… Nikolai…”
Sivokhin was trying to say something else, too, but soon could speak no more.
Grieving, the Captain closed his eyes. Out of the entire unit, he was the only survivor, the commanding officer. There’s nothing worse for a commander than to be the only survivor of a mission: “Mission failure. The entire team gave their lives. No talkers captured. No bombing targets revealed, motherfucker! You’re no commander, you’re shit, Captain Panin! What now? Go where? Court martial? Punitive battalion? A bullet to the ear? Life over?”
Drawing himself up to his full height, he got up and went over the entire battlefield. He stood silently over the corpses of the slain enemies; removed their documents and maps; bade a silent farewell to his fallen comrades; found his discarded camouflage coat, put it on with some effort, and then moved forward again in the direction of the front line: “I must at least take back the captured papers, documents and maps, without fail!”



4

When he was just about to exit the forest, something small, alive and breathing loudly jumped from a tree onto his back, as might a cat. The Captain felt something sharp dig in under his right shoulder blade.
A shrieking pain pierced his flesh, as if he had been given an electric shock. Reflexively tossing aside the load that had fallen on top of his back, the Captain turned sharply: on the ground at his feet he saw, like a small turtle that had been flipped over, the supine form of a very young Finnish boy-soldier.
Just a boy! His eyes were filled with fear. He is babbling something rapid-fire in the Karelian idiom, sticking his peasant’s hands out, palms up, with their fingers splayed out.
“You son of a bitch! You reptile! You killed me!” Panin shouted at him, in Russian, forgetting altogether about his fluency in Finnish. With the last of the strength he could muster, he yanked the trophy signal-rocket flare gun from its canvas holster, and, cursing foully, unloaded it into the kid.
Hissing, the signal rocket skewered him in the gut: scattering multi-colored sparks, it bore the soldier-boy away, into the bushes. He leaped to his feet, howling piteously, fell again, and leapt up again. Bengal lights spun wildly, and sizzled, in his torn open belly. Finally, the rocket nailed the boy through his back to the trunk of a pine. Croaking incoherently, he slowly slid down towards the ground, which was covered with pinecones. He was still alive. Next to him, the scarlet-hued berries of Karelian moroshka gleamed strikingly like drops of blood.
“Oh, you no-good fool of a cuckoo! You stupid little brat, why did you have to jump on me? You could have stayed up there, in the top of the pine tree, nice and quiet… You could have let me make it home… You’d be alive, and I’d be alive, we’d both still be here, living and breathing, you idiot!” Nikolai could feel himself drifting off to sleep.
“I’m really tired…”

5

The Captain woke up in the middle of the night.
“Yes! Evidently, God has sentenced us to depart from our mortal flesh in the midst of this gorgeous beauty…” Kolya already knew he was waking to his last morning on earth. “Why did we kill each other? We could have been friends. We could have come over to visit each other. We could have sung songs together. We could have lived, and lived, and raised kids side by side… Hah!”
The morning came. The day began. The sky remained sunlit, studded with divine clouds. Death drew nearer. There was no need to hurry anymore. God was right there, by his side.
Kolya had always loved to make out some fantastic shapes and figures in the masses of clouds: “There’s an elephant! And there’s a royal castle! And over here you have a cow with horns grazing in mountains of clouds! And there’s Mephistopheles, with horns!” He would see faces, masks, profiles, white airy flowers, devils, women, men, coaches, ships, steam locomotives, all in turn, taking shape across the heavens, and then disappearing…
The pain had left his body. His soul rested. It was making peace with itself before its eternal sleep. The Captain crawled up close to the moroshka and, smiling, his eyes full of tears, tenderly picked a berry with his lips…
He felt its familiar sweetly tart flavour in his mouth: “And so it ends! Finita la commedia! Sleep, sleep…”
He closed his eyes: a succession of faces appeared, one after another. His baby son, legs kicking; his wife – with sadness in her eyes – kissing him for a long, long time; his scowling father shaking his finger in disapproval; his mother, smiling tenderly; friends running away across an open field; a crowd of strangers walking by; a bucket of blood going down a well full of dark water; smoking coming back in reverse through a stove chimney… Nikolai Panin stepping onto the porch of his parents’ home… There was no fear of death. There was only regret, that he had lived so little… And of his short life, two-three long years at the front. What had he seen? His hand had grown used to killing others before they could kill him. He had never envisioned his own death. And now, here it was! Death had arrived.
Reality was dissolving as his consciousness began to flicker out… Eternity was slowing down the ticking hands on the clock… He began to see visions: he caught glimpses of girls, young women, women… And then, all at once, there he was, covering it all up, shoving it aside and taking over, that soundlessly dancing boy in the uniform of a Finnish soldier: the burning rocket is still lit in his belly; soundlessly it whirls on, scattering showers of sparks, of festive fireworks, while the child-soldier keeps laughing away…
The boy jumps around merrily, now making the funny steps of the popular Finnish folk dance, polkis; he grabs Kolya by the hand, attempting to drag him, pointing upwards into the blue haze of the northern sky: “Get up! Get up, my friend! God’s tired of waiting for us!”
Someone’s otherworldly voice, from far away, is reading a poem by Tegengren:

My soul is kin to a dust-mote
That clings to the wings of a moth,
To a dewdrop, transparent, untainted,
In a blossom’s open mouth.
I race with the rebel whirlwind,
I shriek with the grief of a bird:
I am earth:
I, earthly ashes,
To ashes seek to return!

Unexpectedly, Nikolai felt himself to be weightless. Effortlessly, cheerfully he soared high above the universe.
“How strange, all the same, to see one’s self from a distance, to see the mortal remains of the deceased flesh lying upon the ground: the head is poking up oddly against a hillock, wwhile the rest of him is standing nearby. Next to him, the berries of Karelian moroshka are nodding at him with their heads, shedding their pure, transparent dew upon the ground:
“Good-bye, Nikolai, good-bye! We’re the tears of the North…”
“How perfect! The Karelian moroshka can speak!”
But the Finnish soldier boy is tugging at Kolya’s hand. Like two friends, spinning in a weightless dance, they are borne aloft at great speed, embracing like two siblings, inside an infinite black pipe towards some bright shining drop of light, far away – to the start of a new life, perhaps, but yet a different life, one filled with eternal peace, solace, and love.
What bliss begins, when war is left behind!