—— My First Partner ——35Ivan, perplexed. ‘What are we going to do? Maybe they’re not our
women?’ There was no one for Ivan to consult with. But then he
noticed that the women seemed to be having trouble coping with
their long skirts. This put him on his guard.
‘To hell with it, I’ll take a shot at them!’ Dobrik decided and shot
one of the women in the leg. Lifting up her skirts and screaming
blue murder, she ran off, limping heavily on her wounded leg.
‘She was limping towards the German side,’ Ivan told us later.
‘Limp on, you bitch. I’ll treat you to cabbages.. .’ and Ivan fired
in the wake of the disguised Nazi, who crashed onto the ground.
The other German had started hobbling away and failed to make
it to his trench – and he too was met with the same fate as his
‘g i rl f r iend ’.
‘Bastards! Well, have you eaten enough Russian cabbage now?’
After that the Nazi appetite for our cabbages vanished, while
Dobrik wiped out three more Germans the same day.
And so the cabbages remained in the field till deep snow fell
and only in winter, when food was really tight, did our troops
begin to harvest them. I went out a couple of times myself on these
‘operations’. We got some superb dinners out of it.
There seemed to be hardly anything left of the buildings in
Klin, which stood opposite our defences in no man’s land: all the
windows had long been smashed in, the walls were riddled with
shell holes, and bomb craters gaped all around. However, the
two Ivans were in the habit of walking over to these houses: Ivan
Karpov and Ivan Dobrik, the best snipers in our division. They
were very fond of this place – from the upper floors there was a
magnificent view of the German defences.
Before daybreak they would climb over there, make themselves
comfortable, camouflage themselves and observe the enemy. The
Germans meanwhile were preparing for yet another assault on our
trenches. Not anticipating any danger from these buildings, which
were, if anything, closer to their trenches than to ours, the Nazis
were gathering strength for another attack. Ensconced in their
building, the Ivans could hear the Germans playing harmonicas