L. Kosmodemyanskaya

The Story of Zoya and Shura


Farewell, Shura

"Where have you been, Shura? What kept you so long?"

"I'm sorry, Mummy darling, forgive me, please. I couldn't help it."

Every day Shura came home later and later. Something was worrying him, and he was thinking hard about it all the time. What was on his mind? He did not tell me. We were not in the habit of questioning each other. We shared our innermost thoughts without waiting to be prompted. That was how it had always been. Why was he so silent now? What had happened? What else lies in store for us? Perhaps there had been a letter from Aspen Woods? Were the old people all right? I decided to ask Shura about everything.

On the day I made that decision I was cleaning the table and swept off a sheet o paper lying there. I bent down and picked it up. On the paper in Shura's handwriting there were written the lines about the tank driver who, like Captain Gastello, died ramming his flaming tank into the enemy.

The tank roared on across the ruts,
No power could hold it back.
The smoke behind it whirled in gusts,
In wreaths of smoky black.
As an avenging sword it darts
Now here, now there again
To crush a string of transport carts
Amidst the German slain.
Across a ditch he dashes on—
So fast the eye can't follow;
And not one yard of land he's won
Will he yield back tomorrow.
And though he perished in the flames,
Yet shines his glory far;
It lives while on our tanks engraved
Still gleams the Soviet star.

As I read these lines I suddenly understood something I had been afraid to think of all this time: Shura would go away. He would go away to the front, and nothing, nothing could stop him. He had not yet told me anything, not a word; and he was not yet seventeen, but I knew: it would be so.

And I was not mistaken. One evening when I came home I heard the sound of noisy conversation coming from our room, and on opening the door I saw the five of them—Shura, Volodya Yuryev, Volodya Titov, Nedelko and Yura Braudo—sitting there, each with a cigarette between his lips, the room full of tobacco smoke. Until that moment I had never seen Shura smoking.

"What are you about?" I asked.

"The General himself treated us," answered Shura unhesitatingly, as if he had made up his mind. "We are going to the Ulyanovsk Tank Training School, you know. They have already accepted us."

Silently I dropped down on a chair.

"Mummy darling," Shura said that night as he sat down on my bed. "Please try to understand! Strangers write to you, 'We will avenge Zoya.' And am I, her own brother, to stay at home? How could I look people in the face then?"

I was silent. If I had been unable to find words to stop Zoya, what words could I find now...?

On May 1, 1942, Shura went away.

"No one will be seeing them off," he said about his friends. "And you needn't see me off. Or else they'll be hurt. All right? Just wish me a good journey."

I nodded, for the words stuck in my throat. My son embraced me, kissed me hard and was gone. The door slammed shut, and this time I was left quite alone.

A few days later a letter came from Aspen Woods. Mother had died. "She never got over Zoya's death," wrote my father.


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