What Am I Doing Here?

Author:Bruce Chatwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-01-09T16:00:00+00:00

We arrived at dawn at Volgograd. The city once known as Stalingrad is a city of stucco and marble where Soviet veterans are forever photographing one another in front of war memorials. Rebuilt in the ‘Third Roman’ style of the Forties and Fifties, it rises in layers along the European bank of the Volga; and from the flight of monumental steps leading down to the port, you can look back, past a pair of Doric propylaea, past another Doric temple which serves as an ice-cream shop, across some sandy islands, to a scrubby Asiatic waste with the promise of deserts beyond.

At ten, to the sound of spine-tingling music, we, the passengers of the Maxim Gorky, assembled in Fallen Heroes Square as a delegation of penitent Germans to add a basket of gladioli and carnations to the heaps of red flowers already piled up that morning around the Eternal Flame. On the side of the red granite obelisk were reflected the Christmas trees of the garden, and the façade of the Intourist Hotel, built on the site of Field-Marshal Paulus’s bunker. A squad of cadets came forward at a slow march, the boys in khaki, the girls in white plastic sandals with white tulle pompoms behind their ears. Everyone stood to attention. The rum merchant and the schoolmaster, both survivors of the battle, performed the ceremony. Their cheeks were wet with tears; and the war widows, who, for days, had been bracing themselves for this ordeal, tightened their fingers round their handbags, sniffed into handkerchiefs, or simply looked lost and miserable.

Suddenly, there was a minor uproar. Behind us was a party of ex-soldiers from the Soviet 62nd Army, who had come from the Asiatic Republics. Their guide was showing them a photo of Paulus’s surrender; and they, hearing German spoken nearby, seeing the ‘enemy’ inadvertently trampling on a grass verge, and thinking this some kind of sacrilege, began to murmur among themselves. Then a bull-faced man shoved forward and told them to clear off. The ladies, looking now more miserable than ever, shifted hastily back on to the concrete path. ‘Most interesting,’ said Von F, as he swept past on his way to the bus.

Once the war was over, someone suggested leaving the ruins of Stalingrad as they were — a perpetual memorial to the defeat of Fascism. But Stalin took exception to the idea that ‘his’ city should remain a pile of rubble, and ordered it to be rebuilt the way it was, and more so. He did, however, leave one ruin intact – a shell-shattered mill-building on the downward slope to the river. Now marooned in acres of concrete plaza, the mill lies between a model bayonet, some two hundred feet high and still in scaffolding, and a structure the shape and size of a cooling-tower where visitors (by previous appointment) can view a mosaic panorama of the battle. I stood on the plaza and felt I could almost chuck a stone into the river – yet, despite Hitler’s hysterical screaming, despite the tanks and planes and men, the Germans could never reach it.

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