Beyond the Urals

From Part I, Chapter 3: The young soldier’s face pointed skyward, frozen in a state of disbelief, shocked at life’s cruelties. Here, sprawled on a battlefield, was a boy who had not yet fully grasped the complexities of existence, had not the opportunity to plunge into life’s mysteries, and ask himself if, despite its hardships, living had any meaning beyond the pain now exhibited in his empty stare, his final testament. Lying beside him was his rifle, useless, unable to answer any of the questions so evident in his expression. Feeling dizzy again, Arkady sat on the wet snow. The wound on his forehead had stopped bleeding, but he could feel the depth of its cut. It was sharp, a thin but ragged blade. “Ignore it. Concentrate. The sun is going down. I will freeze. The enemy will come back. I cannot stay here. What to do?” From where he sat, he could see billows of grey and black smoke rising from decimated metal hulks. “What to do?” No vehicles, no companions. He was isolated in the dead of Russia’s harsh winter, perhaps as much as five hundred kilometers to the northeast of Stalingrad. “What to do?” Return to Stalingrad: Out of the question. Hopeless. Retrace the highway west, try and find help: There was nothing along the way. No villages. No life. His hand, like his thoughts while observing from afar the German assault on Stalingrad, crept out on its own, somehow landing upon the icy metal of the young soldier’s rifle lying in the snow. Perhaps this weapon did, after all, contain an answer? In one moment—a moment Arkady would not remember, nor even feel—all of the pain would disappear, all of the mysteries would be solved. Death: Was he ready to face that which he so passionately feared? A wind blew from the east against his back, gently wisping past his ears, over his head, and around his body. Its calmness momentarily soothed Arkady’s mind. He turned around and there, far away, were the rough outlines of the Ural Mountains. The low foothills he had seen earlier punctuated the flatness of the terrain near the horizon. There they gradually became larger, more rotund, until their defining smoothness gave way to rough edges, ridges, and peaks shooting high into the heavens. It was the first time Arkady had laid eyes on the physical barrier between Europe and Asia, the boundary beyond which lay Siberia—the Janus face of Russia, the vulnerable, empty abode about which Sasha spoke so cryptically, yet so passionately. The image of Sasha at the grove splashed into Arkady’s mind… …the kiss …the brass crucifix …the smile. Arkady shuddered. His friend lay on the ground behind him. Still. Unflinching. Slowly, inevitably, Sasha was being buried by falling snowflakes, disappearing into the earth. He stared at the mountains for long minutes. Every so often an errant drop of blood dripped from Arkady’s forehead, staining dark crimson the elegant, cloud-like texture covering the ground. Behind him the setting sun threw shadows from his hands, moving in concert with the sun’s position, until out of nowhere a dark flickering deformed their outline on the ground. Arkady peered up, seeking the cause of the interruption. Swooping in loops above his head was the Siberian Thrush. Like a needle threading a complex quilt, the bird would dip behind a wrecked vehicle before emerging unscathed next to another one nearby. After making three or four laps around the whole of the site, it came to rest near Arkady. They studied each other, the only living creatures within sound or sight. He had last seen the bird in his delirious dream, when it had touched him with its wings, blessing him with a reprieve from his pain, when he heard the voice of Natasha succinctly reminding him… “You will come back to me, won’t you?” Another option now entered Arkady’s mind. Natasha, somewhere on the other side of those mountains. Her letter she had last written him… Where was it? Arkady frantically searched his pockets. Nothing. In the chaos, he had lost it. There was nothing now to remind him of his wife, except the stars in the skies, and the last lines from her letter, which he had memorized. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. A verse this beautiful, a love this full, deserved a response, a response other than a deliberate bullet to his head, a bullet which would bring him suddenly face-to-face with answers to mysteries not yet fully explored, and into secret places that usually take lifetimes to uncover. There was more to learn, more to understand. Arkady was not ready to invite death. For now, it seemed the answer lay in only one place, with one person. “I may never make it. Even if my journey over the mountains is successful, what then? I have only the vaguest idea of where Natasha is. But is she not the only thing in which I find fulfillment, peace?” Arkady’s breathing evened out, his pulse slowed. A calm descended over him, the type of calm that arrives when one is, at last, upon the threshold of a decision. He stared harder at the bird, examining it, contemplating it. O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock… At last Arkady nodded, and as he did the bird floated gently up into the sky. Whisked away by its wings, a rolling wind came suddenly from the west, expelling the creature from the plains more quickly than it could logically fly. Arkady collected his rifle, his pack, and pulled his coat around him as tight as he could. Following the Thrush, he headed away from the setting sun, toward the mountains in the distant east.