Konstantin Simonov
Alyosha, remember Smolensk and those war roads...

To A. Surkov

Alyosha, remember Smolensk and those war roads,
The rain pelting us with malicious zest,
The milk which the weary farm women brought us,
Clutching the jug, like a child, to their breast.

Remember them furtively wiping their tears
And whispering after us: “God keep you, dears.”
They called themselves soldierwives as was the way
In Russia before, in a previous day.

The highroad that slipped out of sight over hillocks
Was measured more often in grief than in miles:
A village, a graveyard, a graveyard, a village,
As if all of Russia these graves symbolised.

As if on the outskirts of each Russian village
Our ancestors rising by common accord,
With the sign of the cross shielding all who were living,
For their atheist grandsons were pleading with God.

I now understand that homeland means hardly
The town and my flat with its holiday fuss,
But surely these roads which our forebears had travelled,
And the plain Russian grave with the plain wooden cross.

It was in the war that I first experienced
That country-road misery and all that it meant
To carry it with you from village to village
In the women’s sad songs and the widows’ lament.

Remember that cottage we came to, Alyosha,
The wail of the girl weeping for her betrothed,
The ashen old crone in a quaint plushy jacket,
Her man all in white, as in burial clothes.

But how could we comfort them, what could we say?
And then the old woman, she sensed how we felt
As women will do, and she told us: “We’ll wait.
We’ll wait for you back, sons, you go now, don’t fret.”

“We’ll wait for you back,” said the woods we were passing.
“We’ll wait for you back,” said the meadows and fields.
You know what, Alyosha, when night falls I fancy
Their voices are following close on our heels.

According to old Russian custom, just wreckage
And fires our troops for the foe left behind.
Our soldiers we saw with that true Russian gesture
Ripping the neck of their shirts as they died...

The bullets, so far, they have spared us, Alyosha,
Though three times I thought I had finished my span.
But all notwithstanding Pm proud of our Russia,
The land I was born in, my grief-stricken land.

fm proud I’ll be buried in Russian earth,
That it’s Russia, the mother, who gave us birth,
That a good Russian woman saw me off to the front,
Kissing me thrice, as we Russians are wont.

Translated by Olga Shartse