The Tankman and the Sailor

The village of Myakishino had handed over all its men to the war, not that anyone asked their opinion on the matter. In the cemetery, by the ruined church, lay soldiers from other places who’d been brought to the little local hospital. But only two of their own came back, the Tankman and the Sailor – both Sashas and both with the same family name, Smirnov. The Sailor had fought at sea, on a torpedo boat, but he’d got hit just as they were tying up the ship in Murmansk, during Operation Silver Fox, deep in the fall of 1941. After that he rattled around from rear area to rear area and infirmary to infirmary, but then again, Sasha the Sailor was not especially keen on getting back to the front.

He being a two-fisted drinker and all, as soon as his pension came in, its fate was sealed. He’d be down at the store throwing his money around on drinks for everyone, but then he’d insist they sing with him, and it was always that golden oldie “The Boundless Expanse of the Ocean.” But how could you disrespect a combat veteran? So sing they did.

The Sailor was married – to a woman from “way up North,” as he put it. Either Finnish or Latvian she was, and a spry, dried-up, shrill old thing. They kept rabbits for sale, and the whole village said that the Sailor must know magic spells because for him they bred like mad. So the Sailor would make the rounds, would humbly ask the villagers to let him mow their land, and afterward, he’d shuffle off, stooping under the weight of the grass bundle and roaring “Brave and scrappy were we lads on our torpedo boats...” at the top of his voice.

Back home, his wife from the North would pummel him, and then the Sailor would go to his rabbits and complain to them how he, a combat veteran, a sailor, was being insulted by some German pain-in-the-neck. The Sailor drank home brew straight from the bottle, and the rabbits would wiggle their sensitive pink noses and sneeze.

The other old-timer, Sasha the Tankman, was short-statured (as a tankman should be), thickset, and dour. He’d gone all the way to Vienna in his tank, where he was accidentally put out of action by friendly fire. He was burned but survived, and for the rest of his life had a scorched face, pink as a baby’s and browless. That’s when he went gray, they said, burned all over, but his hair grew back gray, even bluish gray, and yellowish-white. They said all sorts of things about the Tankman, and he wasn’t popular in the village. They called him a gray-haired devil and a wood goblin.

The Tankman drank alone, which the village found unforgiveable. He lived on the very outskirts, where the forest came right up on the village and stopped short, as if pondering something. He was footloose and fancy free, kept no livestock, worked as an engineer for the forestry service, made money hand over fist, owned a motorbike and an aluminum boat with an outboard motor, and that’s how he lived – pretty much all for show. The ladies loved the Tankman, especially the soldiers’ wives, the widows, and they’d visit him in the dark of night and in plain view, during the day. He’d treat them to sweet wine and spice cookies and, people said, he didn’t scrimp on the gifts, but he outright refused to get married and instead broke things off clean when the hints started, so they wouldn’t want to try it with him again.

Tongues wagged about his earlier life, to the effect that he’d come home from the war and walked in on his wife in bed with the local police officer and didn’t want to hear a thing about it, so exactly as he’d come, kitbag and all, he took off. He just unloaded his rations onto the table and took off. And his only child, a little boy, blew himself up playing with live munitions – whose, no one ever found out, maybe the Germans had mined the place or maybe it was our own Soviet troops. There was fighting everywhere.

The Tankman was friends with nobody but a cat black as soot. Its name was Dirtbag, and it was ferocious. It’d brawl nearly to the death with the neighboring cats and lived in the old man’s home, deigning only to take an occasional saucer of milk. The Tankman would talk to Dirtbag as if it were a person; the womenfolk would hear that through the fence. It even went fishing with him, sitting on the prow of the boat and meowing.

Once in a while they’d meet up, the Tankman and the Sailor, at haymaking time or when they were helping each other plant potatoes. And they’d talk about everyday things, about how the weather wasn’t worth beans these days, how the hay’d gotten soaked but the clear-cut part of the far forest had caught fire, and how the store had been short on booze again. Never a word about the war. They wouldn’t even go to the social club if the movie being shown was about the war. They’re all the same, they said, a bunch of malarkey.

There was one time when they did get into it like nobody’s business. The Sailor, who’d been out on a bender, was walking along and singing. The Tankman wanted to give him a ride home on his motorbike, and he kind of joked that the Sailor was a seaman, yes, but there he was on foot, just like any old infantryman, while us tankmen ride along, cooler than cool: “Our armor’s strong and our tanks are the fastest,” as the old song had it. Then the Sailor came back with, “You couldn’t even call it fighting, if you weren’t on the sea.” Then the Tankman came back with, “You’re a lot of nothing, didn’t even serve a year. You’ve never smelled powder. ‘Sailing, sailing, over the ocean blue.’ But me, I went all the way to Vienna, and I’ve got decorations to prove it!” Then the Sailor went, “So show them if you’re not just running your mouth.” The Tankman saw red. “You don’t believe me? Who d’you think you are? I was burned all over. You can see straight off, and never mind the ribbons and bars, what kind of a hero I am.” And the Sailor, who wore a mariner’s striped shirt until the day he died, ripped his shirt open: “Here, get an eyeful of my decorations.” The Tankman looked, and there wasn’t a smooth spot to be seen. All scars, it was, like twisted braids, and with a hole on the left, where the ribs are. They cried, hugged, kissed each other, and for the first – and the last – time, they sat down and split a bottle between them.

Those two combat veterans were never friends, and they never matched up decorations and medals again, but on Victory Day, as is right and proper, they went to the quiet little village cemetery, where, each on his own, they grinned to themselves as a speaker sent from the regional center stood below a soldier statue painted silver and crumpled pages bearing his written text while he droned on and on, like he’d learned this by rote long ago, about the victory and the enormous losses. The villagers clapped, glancing over at the old campaigners, but everything they’d lived through seemed far-away and boring, like the black-and-white movies put on at the club. Yet the two old-timers were seeing, as if not a day had gone by, the mutilated people, the eyes mad with grief, the charred earth. And they said nothing.