Alpine Ballad

Alpine Ballad

Vasil Bykau

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

In lieu of an Epilogue

Introduction

Vasil Bykau (1924-2003)

Vasil Bykau

Vasil Bykau was undoubtedly the most significant Belarusian prose writer of the 20th century, who earned a wide international reputation through translations of his works into Russian, English and other languages. In 1980 he became a People’s Writer of Belarus, despite having had his works considerably censored in the preceding decade. It was, however, a great disappointment to his friends in Belarus and abroad that he was not awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2001, despite the support of such luminaries as Joseph Brodsky, Czesław Miłosz (both themselves laureates) and the distinguished writer and politician Václav Havel. It may be added that Bykau himself, a modest man, seemed least concerned by this event. The fact that in 1978 he was elected a People’s Deputy of the BSSR, and in 1989 a People’s Deputy of the USSR, witnesses to the high esteem in which he was held; nothing, however, was as powerful as an open letter in 1988 from the students of Navapolatsk (Novopolotsk) who described him as ‘the conscience of the Belarusian nation’.

Born into a peasant family in the Vitsyebsk (Vitebsk) region of north-east Belarus, after his schooldays he studied sculpture at the celebrated Vitsyebsk Art School, whose distinguished alumni included Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine, but was unable to continue for financial reasons. During World War II he served in an engineering battalion and from 1943 held the rank of a junior officer, and was twice wounded. It is precisely from the point of view of morally strong junior officers that most of his works are written. Recalled to the army after the war, Bykau began writing stories in 1951, and his first notable work was Zhurauliny kryk, (The Cry of the Crane, 1959) which is set in 1941 and depicts a small group of soldiers faced by a virtually impossible mission. Much of the novel’s point of view is that of a young boy experiencing war for the first time. Already Bykau’s concern with psychology and the behaviour of people in life-threatening situations is evident. In later works the themes of treachery (often by Stalinist officers) and the traces of the ruthless and cynical past in present-day Belarus also become prominent in his prose. Indeed, most of Bykau’s intensely realistic work is based on his own experiences of the war, and has little in common with most heroic, panoramic Soviet war literature. Instead, many of his works analyse the wartime choices and tough moral decisions of young officers dealing with existential crises usually in tight spaces and over short intense periods; the decisions demanded are based on humanity and realism, often in contrast to the immoral behaviour of cynical commanding officers as well as to cowardice and treachery in all ranks.

After an illustrious career as a highly respected Soviet writer, some of whose works were too outspoken to be published in his own country, Bykau emigrated in 1998, four years after the accession of Belarus’s current leader, first to Helsinki, then Frankfurt, and finally to Prague, returning to Minsk shortly before his death in 2003. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and particularly during his period of exile Bykau extended considerably the thematic range of his works, whilst retaining his strong interest in the Stalinist past and its present-day heritage of harshness and immorality. His prose written abroad became even more outspoken, and some of his later works took the symbolic rather than realistic form of parables, which illustrated obliquely his frequently bleak view of Belarus and Belarusians, although his concern for his countrymen’s weakness and mistakes never obscures his deep love for his native land, evident throughout his works.

Before turning to Alpine Ballad (originally Alpiyskaya balada), it is worth mentioning three outstanding works already published in English translation: the first, Sotnikau, 1970 (The Ordeal, 1972), is a powerful depiction of bravery and cowardice, but without overt moral judgment, in which Bykau cleverly shows the strong temptation of self-preservation as well as the difficulty of living morally under Stalin. Narrated by each of the two partisans on a particularly difficult assignment in occupied Belarus, the ordeal is extreme and the mission doomed from the start, despite their being sheltered by some peasants, one of whom is the village headman, allowing further discussion of how to behave under an occupation as cruel as pre-war peacetime had been. The double point of view of the narration enables Bykau to achieve the high level of objectivity for which he was famous.

Another prominent novel, probably the most autobiographical of Bykau’s works, Myortvym ne balits' (The Dead Feel No Pain), first appeared in a journal in 1964, but was subsequently banned for seventeen years, and only in 2009 appeared in full uncensored form, although it had been published abroad far earlier; its English translation came out in 2010. Bykau was persecuted by the highest political and literary authorities as well as the KGB for daring to write about individuals rather than epic struggles. The story is of a young officer who, detailed to escort some German prisoners in 1944, is severely punished because they escape, entirely through circumstances beyond his control. His disgust after the war at seeming to find one of his tormentors enjoying post-war life underlines not only the rigidity of Soviet views on World War II, but the longevity of Stalinist ideas and behaviour.

Finally should be mentioned a novel thought by many to be Bykau’s best, Znak byady, 1982 (The Sign of Misfortune, 1990). In this work, set at the beginning of the war, there are no Soviet soldiers or partisans, only intermittently brutal occupying German soldiers and their willing Belarusian collaborators the Politsai. On a desolate farmstead an old couple face a particularly bleak future; the old man feels that only an accommodating attitude can save them, whilst his wife remains determined to take revenge. Particularly interesting are the extended flashbacks to the fanatical and ruthless dispossession of the kulaks (rich peasants) at the end of the 1920s witnessed by the old woman in her youth, for it is the bitter children of the dispossessed peasants who naturally join the Germans’ local helpers. Any of the three novels mentioned above may be recommended to readers enthused by the novel now presented to the public.

Alpine Ballad, first published in 1964, is in some respects untypical of Bykau’s writing, having elements of lyricism and intimate feelings not found elsewhere in his work. It is moreover not set in Belarus but in a foreign land, with finely detailed nature descriptions, and contains far more dialogue than this writer’s characteristic terse exchanges and interior monologues. Following its appearance in Russian (Bykau always translated his own works from Belarusian into Russian), the novel became popular and was soon turned into a film; the Russian version, incidentally, was considerably censored, and Bykau’s original text modified, for instance, by watering down Ivan’s criticism of the collective farms to Giulia, his naive Italian friend, as well as completely removing parallels between the Fascist and Soviet systems. Ivan frequently attempts to disabuse his companion of her idealised pre-conceptions, preferring honesty to beautiful lies and clearly remembering Stalin’s appalling purges in the years leading up to the war, but towards the end of the book he recants and praises his homeland in order to console Giulia. The publication of Russian versions of Bykau’s works often gave the censors, always suspicious of this uncompromising and relentlessly honest writer (of all the major writers of his generation Bykau never joined the Communist party), a second chance to change and remove anything that did not follow the Soviet version of the Great Patriotic War, their name for World War II (which for them, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, lasted from 1941 to 1945).

Although Alpine Ballad is more romantic than most of Bykau’s works, his qualities of taut realistic narration, honesty of principles and a strong sense of Belarusian patriotism are also evident here. In this, the only one of his works to give a major role to a foreigner, moral and other questions are mostly raised through dialogue rather than reflected in internal monologues. Ivan is almost the only character in Bykau’s works to feel intimate emotions; also notable are the writer’s experiments with a rather comic, though ostensibly realistic depiction of Giulia’s speech. Bykau was known to his friends as a mild, modest man with a good sense of humour, although his prose is generally too severe and taut to allow any levity. Alpine Ballad was a new departure, allowing him, through the words of a foreign Communist, to show an idealized and completely unrealistic picture of the Soviet Union; it was Ivan’s modest, though not unpatriotic, attempts to modify the Italian’s extremely optimistic views that, amongst other things, fell foul of the censor.

This new translation of Alpine Ballad into English provides a welcome introduction to an early work of a major Belarusian writer acclaimed throughout the Slavic lands and beyond.

Arnold McMillin, emeritus professor of Russian literature in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

1

He stumbled over something, fell and immediately jumped back to his feet, feeling that he had better get away from this place, from the dead Kommandoführer (Kommandoführer – SS work detail commander in a concentration camp), before the alarm was raised. He had to hole up somewhere, hide and maybe even fight his way out of the factory. However, almost nothing could be seen in the swirling clouds of dust that had filled the workshop, and he nearly stepped into the black crater created by the bomb. He ran around the hole to avoid snags in the dust, stretched out one hand, gripping his pistol with the other, rolled over a huge concrete slab that had apparently been ripped from the ground and hit something painfully with his shin. He immediately regretted the loss of his clogs when he jumped up barefoot and his skin began to burn on the crushed stone littering the ground.

Meanwhile, someone screamed behind him, and submachine gun fire rang out at the other end of the workshop. Like hell, he said to himself as he lightly jumped over an iron girder from the ruined ceiling and ran onto a precariously tilted partition. Although the dust from the explosion was slowly settling and clearing, it still provided good cover. He climbed to the very top of the partition and finally got a view of his surroundings. A gust of wind rushed over him and quickly drove away the dust. Using his arms for balance on his concrete perch, he reached the edge of the damaged area. The pockmarked wall of the outer fence was about three steps ahead, and beyond it, nestled in vegetation and quiet, without a care in the world, stood several houses, with a green forest just up the slope and the Alps—his hope, his life or death, his destiny—a stone’s throw away. Taking a quick look around himself, Ivan stuck the butt of his pistol in his teeth and jumped. He gripped two of the sharp iron spikes that topped the fence and, without stopping, flung his body over to the other side. He did not jump immediately. Instead, he lowered his feet to soften the fall and then let go. He landed among weeds, grabbed the pistol with his hand and ran all out across the potato field along the tall wire fence.

People were shooting and shouting behind his back, and Alsatian dogs were barking somewhere in the distance. That was the worst-case scenario, but he had no time to think or change anything. Several bullets whined high over his head, and he felt that they had not been fired at him, that he had not yet been spotted. Tearing his bare toes, he climbed over the fence mesh and ran even faster along a slag path leading ever higher towards the nearby suburb.

The workshop blast had caused a stir in the town. Two boys were running as fast as they could toward the factory from some white house. Luckily, they did not notice him, and Ivan pressed on. All of a sudden, a girl in a floral skirt carrying a watering can stepped almost directly into his path from behind acacia shrubs. Her eyes widened with terror. She screamed and dropped the watering can onto the path with a clang. He rushed past her in silence and found himself on a wider street on the outskirts. Looking up and down the street and seeing no one, Ivan ran across it, scrambled through some thorny growth, and then fell. There were no more houses ahead, just a quiet unmown meadow on the hillside, with daisies dozing in its windless silence and wisps of grass gently swaying gently. The more distant gullies and ravines were covered with woods. The towering grey masses of the Alps in the hot June sky overlooked the landscape.

Stifling his violent gasps, Ivan stopped to listen. People were screaming and shooting behind him, the Alsatians were barking more loudly, but the sounds were coming from the factory, and no one seemed to be chasing after him. He ran the sleeve of his striped coat over his face to wipe streams of sweat from his brow, rose slightly, looking for a way across the meadow, and noticed a gully that came particularly close to the town. Fir trees, sparse at the edge of the woods, stretched over the steep slope down towards the gully. He jumped back to his feet.

With his legs extremely unresponsive and slack and his body growing heavier, the movement proved very difficult. Halfway up the slope he looked back again. The barking was getting closer, gunfire erupted nearby, but he did not hear any bullets—he was clearly not the target. Others were under fire. The pursuers were probably scattering. That made things easier for him, and he thought about the lads for the first time. And for the first time, his heart throbbed painfully. There were probably no survivors—the others must have paid with their lives for his freedom.

He was trudging uphill, wearied. The whole Austrian town was now in plain view behind his back. Its nearby half was covered with long hulking factory structures that resembled hangars and were dotted with gaping holes and bombed-out ruins. One section of the long fence was ruined, and twisted ceiling girders protruded next to it at the end of a building. The place was crawling with people. He hunched in the grass—a kneeling person could already hide behind the hill—and ran down towards the stream for several minutes. Screened by the hill, he finally straightened out. A wooded slope lay before him.

Ivan wiped his face with his sleeves and stopped running. Now he would make his way along the grassy gully. The terrain grew even steeper. Near him a stream was churning noisily among slippery stones. Ivan walked briskly until he reached the sparse fir trees. And then the barking behind him grew much louder. The dogs seemed to be very close, right behind the hill, and he resumed his exhausting uphill run. He only wished he could somehow get to the forest, to the dense fir trees, where it was easier to hide, trick the pursuers, or, if his freedom was forever lost, make his death count.

However, Ivan never made it to the forest.

He was climbing the grassy slope, strewn all over with scree, past large and small fragments of rock, and had almost reached the edge of a pine tree forest when dogs shot from behind the hill and burst into loud, furious barking. He dashed sideways to a small fir tree, bent slightly, and looked through the branches. Racing along his tracks over the hill, flashing its brown back in the grass was an Alsatian dog. Another Alsatian was barking hoarsely somewhere behind it. But the Germans were nowhere to be seen.

Ivan looked around and, realising that the thicket was too far away, moved his feet wider apart and tightened his grip on the pistol. Despite knowing that his survival depended on ammunition, he had no idea how many rounds his magazine held and no time to count them. He relaxed his muscles for a moment and tried to breathe more evenly. He had to calm down, pull himself together, and slow his heartbeat so as not to miss.

Meanwhile, the dog spotted him. Its barking grew more intense and vicious as it flew uphill, its paws pressed together, panting and wheezing. Ivan stooped behind the fir tree and pointed his pistol towards a sharp piece of grass-covered rock, judging that it was about fifty steps away.

The Alsatian was advancing in huge bounds, ears flat against its head, tail straight. He could now see its gaping mouth and its lolling tongue flanked by yellow canines. Ivan held his breath, trying to take aim as best he could, and fired just before the dog had reached the rock. He immediately realised that the shot had gone wide. The barrel of his pistol jerked upwards, the smell of gunpowder filled the air, and the Alsatian squealed with even more excitement. Hastily, and almost without aiming, he fired again, physically certain of the direction of the vicious attack.

And then he felt a glimmer of joy in his heart as the dog yelped, jumped wildly, flipped over, and crashed some twenty steps away, its body going into convulsions and spasms on the grass. He was about to dive into the woods when he saw one more dog. The huge animal with spots on its sides was powering uphill, stretching out its legs, breathing heavily. A long strap leash was dragging and bouncing behind it through the grass.

Alas, Ivan had not noticed the danger on time. He swung the pistol in its direction but never got a shot—the gun had probably jammed. He yanked his weapon back and slapped its bolt with his palm, but he was already within the reach of the hound, which gave a throaty growl and pounced. Ivan bent over and ducked behind a fir tree. The dog flew just above his shoulder, rolled over heavily and lunged at him, its jaws agape. Ivan threw up his arms, not knowing how to defend himself.

So powerful was the momentum of the jump that it swept Ivan off his feet, knocked the pistol from his hand and sent them both, the human and the animal, rolling on the ground. It looked like everything would soon be over, but Ivan managed at the last moment to grab the hound by the collar and push it back, making an almost superhuman effort to keep its teeth away. There was the sound of tearing cloth as the dog ripped at him with its claws. Holding the Alsatian’s collar as tightly as he could, Ivan reached out with his left hand, grabbed the dog by a front leg and flung it over. They rolled over each other twice, and he ended up right beside the dog. Ivan spread out his legs and tried to straddle the animal, but it was coughing, wheezing, and clawing at him so furiously that he knew he would not last long. Gathering all his dexterity for the final, decisive attack, he spun on the ground, caught hold of the dog, threw it over his shoulder and fell on top, driving his knee as hard as he could into its ribs. The dog jerked, almost tearing the collar out of his hand, and yelped. Ivan felt something crack under his knee. The dog let out a piercing shriek, and the human pulled the collar tighter with raw fingers and pressed harder with his knee. However, the hound squealed, threw up its rear, pulled violently, and broke free.

With some brutal hardness in his heart, Ivan tensed in anticipation of another jump. However, the dog sprawled on the ground and lay there with its thick snout pointing forward, tongue hanging out. Its breath was rapid and tired as it watched the human with wild eyes. Ivan’s right hand, the one that had held the collar, was on fire, a muscle in his forearm was twitching spasmodically from exertion, and his heart seemed about to jump out of his chest. For a few seconds, he also stood on his knees and shaky hands in the grass and stared at the dog as if he were some savage beast.

The human and the dog eyed each other wildly, wary that the adversary would pounce first. Ivan also feared that the Germans would appear at any moment, and those few seconds felt to him like eternity. He finally decided that the hound was unlikely to attack and cautiously rose to his feet. Never taking his fixed gaze off the dog, he jumped away and grabbed a stone from the grass. The hound arched its back and lashed the ground with its tail, but stopped short of a jump. The animal was probably no better off than the human, and all it could manage was a helpless whimper. When Ivan took a more decisive step backwards, the hound rose slightly and started forward, its leash moving in the grass. However, it did not run or pounce. This made Ivan even bolder, and he quickly moved up the slope, taking sideways steps toward the fir tree where his pistol lay.

The dog whined in helpless rage as it dragged its crippled hindquarters through the grass, crawled forward weakly and stopped. Meanwhile, the human snatched the Browning from the ground and started uphill along the gully, trying to make the best of his remaining energy to get to the fir trees.