Khatyn by Ales Adamovich

Author:Ales Adamovich [Adamovich, Ales]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: amazon
Published: 2020-04-28T17:09:06.498000+00:00

“Yes, one foot is still there.”

“But aren’t we becoming absorbed in it? Don’t you remember how they frightened Tolstoy by telling him that in this vast country there were a few men who had volunteered to perform the job of an executioner? At first there was one who was taken from Moscow to Kiev and Odessa to put the “hemp ties” round people’s necks. Then a few more volunteers announced themselves, Tolstoy was greatly alarmed. Well, who would be surprised at such news in the middle of the twentieth century? In My Lai it was not even a specially selected team that did the killing, but a normal platoon of ordinary nineteen-year-olds, who had just left their mums and dads. What kind of climate is needed for ordinary people to be capable of that! Doesn’t such acceleration, such concentration, prompt you to anything, Flariyan Pyatrovich?... ”

“Yes, but when was it that they openly rebelled against war? And where? In a warring, in a strong state!”

“When they collapse into fascism, you'd be surprised where your mutineers get to then. No, no, don’t beg me, I'm going to stop the experiment.”

I had never seen him, my constant opponent. I only remember his voice, slipping away into misplaced buffoonery. It was not easy for me to argue with Boky, because all too often I had to argue with my own memory. What Boky could only guess at, I could see because I had seen it yesterday....

The reconnaissance plane hovered over the forest where Glasha and I were going, either climbing or descending, spying out houses where people were still living. Perhaps it was already summoning the bombers. It loomed over everything, armour-plated and unhurried. It was as if the eye of a huge insect was looking at you.

A dream stuck in my memory, not the events of the dream themselves, but an unusual, ambiguous feeling. It was as if I were up there in the aeroplane, but I was also down below as well. I could see myself and was afraid of myself. I was chasing a small and unprotected person down below, about in an open field like a table top. Suddenly that furious, frightened little person who is also me rolls over on his back and begins to shoot, firing at the aeroplane. I felt that he had hit me and that I was falling; I was flying right at the person who was firing, now we would come together and strike each other to death and I begged and prayed that either the one who was falling or the one who was firing from below would survive, would escape destruction....

The forest welcomed me with its familiar shady paths and cuttings. First we walked through pines and oaks, then came the firs and the damp alder thicket, and beyond it the marshes with the “islands” where we always hid, where our people would be hiding now. In spite of all that had happened, all those events, the forest was just the same as it had always been.

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