Sniper's Honor(46)
It was a T-34, Soviet main battle tank.
“What the fuck is that guy doing here?” Karl said.
CHAPTER 23
The Museum
Kolomiya
THE PRESENT
The last hall was lighter than the others, as a skylight let the sun’s illumination pour in through the roof. Swagger quickly saw why. It was an exhibition of paintings, grandly realistic things that seemed from afar compositions depicting various highlights in partisan battles against the Germans. He went to the first, called Our Fellows at the Bridge over the Ravokokov, and examined it.
It looked like a scene from an extremely expensive movie, everything in perfect focus whether it was ten feet from the painter or a thousand. In the center, a bridge split in two as a fiery blot of explosive took its center and it deposited into midair a German locomotive and several armored cars. Screaming German soldiers fell off of it, sure to die when they hit the rocks below. In the foreground a partisan dynamiter exulted as he looked at what he had wrought, having just plunged the handle on a detonating mechanism; around him, handsome men with Red tommy guns leaped and smiled in celebration at the defeat and destruction of the train.
“They call it socialist realism,” said Reilly. “Very big under Stalin. Art was for the purpose of celebrating and advancing the state. Many of the big moments are commemorated in artworks.”
“The guy sure was careful,” said Bob. “There’s four cooling slots in the sleeve of a PPSh-41, and damned if he hasn’t got all four of ’em. Also, he’s got the bolt back, which is how they’d carry it for fast shooting, and that opens the ejection port on the top for the empties to fly out, and dammit, he’s got the bolt back and the port open. He may have been a tommy gunner himself.”
“I’m sure the Ministry of Culture and Moral Improvement provided him with one to copy. They may have even blown up a bridge and crashed a locomotive so he could get it right.”
Swagger walked on, encountering dozens of perfect little war scenarios as depicted by state-sponsored artists of the day. Each one boasted the same immaculate research, the absolute perfection in equipment—T34Rs, not T34Cs, when appropriate—and the same crew of happy, handsome partisans celebrating this or that triumph over the German beast. The artists—it all looked like it was painted by the same very busy guy, but indeed there were at least a dozen in this hall—had the same range of attributes: a good mechanical draftsman’s sense of machinery, weapon, aircraft, structure, and vehicle, and a good feel for weather. Skies were mottled with storm clouds, snow scythed down horizontally so that you could feel the ice pellets stinging your face, the wind was cruel and cutting. The illusion broke down slightly at the humans, who seemed to share pretty much the same face and posture. Hands good, particularly when gripping weapons, torsos a bit awkward, as if he didn’t quite understand the underlying struts of the body, legs seeming to get in the way.
There was no fear, no squalor, no fatigue, no filth, no sweat, no despair, all common to Swagger’s experience of war. Also the snow was pristine where depicted, and since Russia was a wintry sort of hell, there was a lot of it depicted. No dogs or men had pissed in it, there wasn’t a sense of the eternal stench of war, which was a miasma of burned powder, blood, shit, sweat, and various kinds of rot and decomposition. No blood was seen anyplace, nor were any blasted bodies, nor grievous wounds to face or head or limb or gut.
“It’s all kind of phony to you, I suppose,” she said.
“Yeah, but I get it. You don’t want to tell people how it was but how they wanted it to be. Maybe the kid got a bayonet in the guts and it pulled his entrails out and he died three hours later. You don’t want to tell his folks that. So you tell them he got it clean between the eyes as he led the squad up the hill. The kid don’t care. It’s for the parents, to ease their pain, so I think it’s okay in the long run.”
“Too bad there’s not one for Mili,” she said. “The White Witch Slays Obersturmbannführer Von Totenkopf in the Town Square at Stalingrad, something like that.”
“No snipers,” he said, “it ain’t that popular.” He was thinking, The truth is, after the war is over, people get sort of nervous about snipers. Unlike taking the hill or blowing up the tank, the sniper works in cold blood. It’s murder. Yeah, I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago, and I never allowed myself to think of it that way, because it’s just the kind of doubt that’ll get you killed in war, but still and all, I know, I face it, it’s real, it’s just cold-blooded killing.