The Volga Remembers

My beloved Natasha,

I am writing this by the light of a burning building. The city is on fire around us, and the glow is so bright that I can see my own hands as if it were noon. The Volga is behind us — grey, cold, the only way out, and the German planes are over it constantly. The ferries cross at night, when the moon hides. Men die on those boats. But men also arrive, and that is something.

Stalingrad is no longer a city. It is a pile of bricks and broken glass and frozen bodies. Every basement holds someone — civilians, dead or alive. I passed a child today sitting on a pile of rubble, holding a doll. She was not crying. There are no tears left in this place.

The Germans grind through the streets with their tanks. We are shadows with rifles, living among the ruins. We fire from holes in walls, from sewers, from the skeletons of apartments. A man can be alive at dawn and gone by noon. My friend Yuri was eating bread beside me yesterday. A moment later, nothing but a wall where his head had been.

I try not to think of our dacha. Of the apple trees. Of your laugh, Natasha — that low, warm laugh you have when I say something foolish. I try not to think because thinking makes me weak, and weakness here means death.

But I will let myself think of you now, just for this letter. I remember your hands kneading dough on Sunday mornings. The way you hummed while you worked. The freckle behind your left ear.

If I don’t make it, know that I died standing. Russia will never fall. Not because of our generals, not because of our tanks, but because of children like the one I saw today who still holds her doll. Because of men like Yuri who ate bread and died and whose last word was “Mama.”

I have to go. The Germans are shelling the factory again.

If I could hold you one more time, I would never let go.

Your Dmitri

Если я не вернусь, знай — я умер стоя. Россия никогда не падет.