The Volga Rises in Europe by Curzio Malaparte

Author:Curzio Malaparte [Malaparte, Curzio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DUST AND RAIN

Petshanka, September.

AFTER a week of rain, here at last is the fine weather. The dust returns, and the soldiers inhale it with delight. (The choking dust returns, the accursed pall of red dust. Yet we inhale it with pleasure, we greet it with joy, like a dear friend, after all these days of mud, after all these days of weary plodding along the terrible Ukrainian roads, which the rain has made like sheets of glass smeared with vaseline. It takes no more than a shower to cover the surface of these roads - a clayey surface, hard, compact, impervious to water - with a film of sticky, slippery mud, which periodically opens up to reveal a deep fissure, a treacherous crack.) At last we can resume our advance, at last we can continue our march towards the Dnieper. 'Schnell! Schnell!' - the cry echoes from end to end of the column. The guns have started to bark again on the horizon. Bursts of machine-gun bullets whistle through the deep, waving corn.

The rain began to fall a week ago. There was a moment, just before it started, when I said to myself: 'I'm turning back. I've had enough of this.' I couldn't stand it any longer. I was already a war-invalid - I was a victim of the last war, the war of 1914-18, during which my lungs were burnt by mustard-gas. And I was unable to breathe in that dense, acrid cloud of dust, which filled my mouth, burst my lungs, made my lips, nostrils and eyelids smart. I prayed for rain. I scrutinized the clear horizon, I looked for a sign of a stormcloud in the harsh blue sky. I had already stopped two or three times and allowed the column to go on ahead in order to escape from that dense trail of dust. Now the column was miles away, and it was pressing on with all speed so as not to lose contact with the retreating enemy. Even if I hurried I could not have caught it up in less than a couple of hours. I had been left behind, but I did not care. I was tired of coughing and choking in the midst of those clouds of red dust. 'If it doesn't rain before evening,' I said to myself, 'I'm turning back.'

It was terribly hot. But there was about the weather an air of uncertainty, an air of unreliability. The sky was clear, yet one felt that something was brewing within the secret folds of the horizon! 'This isn't summer weather as they know it in the Ukraine,' I thought. I knew from experience what the Ukrainian summer is really like. It is a very hot season, pervaded by the long, slow shudder of an airless wind, which draws from the boundless fields of corn its own characteristic flavour of straw, its own peculiar scent. In 1920, when Marshal Pilsudsky's army invaded the Ukraine and marched on Kiev, I accompanied the Polish troops, in my capacity of official Italian observer, all the way to the Ukrainian capital.

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