Ch 39 62th Army
"Go to sleep…sleep for a while, Vanechka…"
Ivan knew that Wang Yao was caring him, but what he heard was "Don't sleep. Just talk with me for a little more!"
Wang Yao's hair band was soaked wet inside his clenched fist. When Wang Yao lay down beside him and meekly snuggled into his arms, he neurotically snatched it off and burried his face in the loose dark hair, breathing the aroma from the forest and the field. His lover was the forest and the field—he was life itself.
A strand of long hair got into the shirt collar, lying on a scar near the collarbone. He gingerly pressed on it with his finger, feeling his lover's blood pulsing faintly. Then he adhere his lips onto the proof of tenacity and muttered,
"You were tortured…but I wasn't by yourside, you were tortured…"
His right hand lifted Wang Yao's shirt, caressing that slender waistline and the absent bruise that was foreverly lodged in his heart. His lover only kept the face burried under his neck, and his Adam's apple felt a moment of rain…
…And this was everything remained in his memory. All the rest sank into the impalpable dreams.
"When you wake up, goodbye will have nothing to do with us…"
He felt the first ray of morning light tapped his eyelashes. So he reached out his hand and touched the space beside him.
His palm was met with emptiness.
Ivan sat up and looked around the room; his mind at a loss. His lover sneaked out of his arms without him knowing, packed up his belongings and left. What a wonderful job. An excellent scout afterall. Wang Yao didn't lie to him: all that was about the goodbyes—handshakes, hugs, kissings, parting words and even tears had gone along with his lover without a sound, turning into bubbles. And so, goodbyes really didn't concern them.
After a moment of thought, he was at ease. He jumped up like a soldier and quickly put on his clothes. Time stopped for one day and one night in this small room in Moscow. Now, it began racing once more and joint into the rumbling battle faraway, relentlessly counting life's every single minute.
The room was clean and empty, only Wang Yao's diary was left on the desk and was turned into a new page where inks still hadn't completely dried. It was probably what Wang Yao left for him, but he couldn't read it.
On top of the page there was a small piece of bark, with a heart shape carved on it; inside were two letters: "И" and "Я".
He cherished that piece of bark inside his chest pocket, determined never to be separated from it. But he didn't think that he was capable of carrying that most valuable diary with him, so he sent it home from the post office. Then he headed toward the train station.
As he walked past the nursery on the opposite side of his sister's home, children were playing near the entrance. Among them was a little girl about six years old. Her glittering green eyes stared at the pendant hanging from his neck.
He lifted her up high, "Why are you looking at me, young lady? Do you know me?"
"I don't know who you are, but I know who you love!"
"Then do you know where my lover is?"
"In the heart!" The little girl pat her chest like a lofty general, "People who love each other are always together, right here inside the heart. My papa and mama are…"
He put her down. Her laughing was like a nimble skylark dancing into the depth of sky with feathers that were bright as the frosted dawn.
On February 17, 1942, Ivan Braginsky arrived the Volga river and reported to the 33rd division subordinate to the 62nd army group. In the beginning of March, he received Wang Yao's first letter from the Ural military school. There was only one sentence in the letter:
"Today, the cranes flew back to the north."
As if to prove that this young biologist wasn't lying, the white cranes' singing came to the small island inside the Volga river. Their sounds were extensive like the sky, sending over as a gift of reunion to the people who were still guarding this land in the harsh winter. The Volga river flowed day and night. The spring tide bursting from beneath the ice and snow exulted with great passion that was repressed for the whole winter and would continue to occupy the entire spring.
As soon as Ivan spreaded out the letter on the bank of mother Volga, he knew what to write in reply:
"Alive and healthy. Take care. Vanya."
Three months were fleeting by like a bullet. Wang Yao still wrote to him, but the letter stopped mentioning about each other or the war. In these short and concise notes of phenological observation, there was only the eternal mother—the land herself. Even bathed in blood and fire, the land resilliently carried on its own eternal cause, raising fresh sprouts from bombed broken branches and grass and flowers from burned soil. Even if in the next second, those green poplar leaves turned purple from explosions and the snowy white chokecherry petals were painted dark red by young men's blood.
These letters were no longer sent from the peaceful Ural mountain area, but from the frontier. After graduating from Ural military school, reconnaissance lieutenant Wang Yao wasn't deployed to the battleline where Ivan was located at. In the gaps of battles, Ivan would spend time reading these hurriedly written observation notes over and over. They were the messages sent forth by the land through the eyes and the pen of his lover.
Every letter written in reply was the same, "Alive and healthy. Take care. Vanya."
Half a year later, his troop left Stalingrad in ruins. That night, standing on the Mamayev hill, he gazed with his red eyes upon the flame-raging city that he had defended with his life; his figure was like a statue. White lights emitted from the launching "Katyusha" rockets hovered above his head, forming a halo that would never burn out. Volga mother river roared the blood of her sons and daughters, singing solmen songs for the troops that had gone afar.
With blood-stained footsteps, the battleline pushed westward across the warscarred land everyday. Ivan still wrote the same thing in every letter—"Alive and healthy. Take care. Vanya." These words were sent to his parents and sisters, except Wang Yao. He couldn't even remember when they lost touch of each other. One day in the beginning of 1944, he suddenly remembered that his address at the front had changed several times. When he wrote to inform Wang Yao, his lover's address had already changed, too.
Alas, these were the scouts! The highest glory and the most arduous test in the frontier all belonged to them. When missions caused their sudden contact change, they often had time to tell their families at the rear who had fixed addresses, but had no time to tell each other who were in different troops.
In war time, people often lost touch like this.
...It was an early morning in the spring of 1944, Ivan lay down on the hill where a deadly battle was been fought. His platoon leader died on the previous evening and soldiers just finished burrying him under the yellow soil.
Some nimble footsteps came from afar and stopped beside him. The people above sent the new platoon leader.
"Soldier Braginsky! Why didn't you salute your superior!"
"Ah—ha— Haven't met you for two years. Now you're putting on the airs in front of me." He didn't even open his eyes.
"Offending the lieutenant. You'll go to detention…"
He felt that the stranger bent over toward him, perhaps attempting to lift him up. He suddenly sprang up, grabbing the stranger's back and thighs, and putting the lieutenant entirely in his arms.
The shy and riled expression at once filled the lieutenant's dark eyes—those horse-like dark round eyes! The lieutenant's handsome face was burried deeply in his shoulder, as if feeling unease to what was about to happen—which was exactly what Ivan did! He carried this slender body affectionately and walked around the base to show those people—righteous people—who had withstood the test of war of how much strength he had and what a person he was loving. Afterall, the proverb said, "A burden of one's own choice is not felt".
…People grabbed Ivan's limbs and carried him onto a simple stretcher made of canvas covers. Their own people's fighter jets showering with fire-like morning glow swept above the hill and swirled above the horizon. A giant cloud of black smoke and fire rose above the sky, slowly moving towards the crescent on the west sky.
He turned away his face. The wounded land had began healing his war trauma with the melting winter snow, covering slits and craters with spring grass. The land commited all her attention to the small lives growing inside her; she was too busy to worry about his life. In fact, whether he lived or died, they would win in the end—this became obvious as the war had moved to the spring of 1944.
He reached out his hand and pressed on the pocket in front of his chest—there lay a piece of tree bark with "И" and "Я" written on it, adhering to his throbbing heart. Inside his heart, a little girl said happily, "People who love each other always stay together, right inside the heart…"
If he died, then his lover would never know that when he was thrown into the air then dropped on the ground by shock waves and passed out, he still saw his beloved one walking toward him…
But death merely marked his twenty-third year of life with a piece of shattered steel. After his recovery, he quickly returned to the front, pushing toward the nest of the Fascists. He didn't know that the powerful shock wave during the explosion had cause him severe neurological damage. The harm lurked in the deepest of his nerve and was only discovered after the war. The episodic vertigo, headache and angina had tormented him for his entire life.