The Kindly Ones полностью

In Kotelnikovo, the staging area for Hoth’s offensive, they were unloading another train before ours, so we had to wait a long time to disembark. It was a little country station made of worn brick, with a few platforms of bad cement laid between the tracks; on either side, the cars, stamped with the German emblem, bore Czech, French, Belgian, Danish, Norwegian markings: to gather materiel as well as men, they were scouring the farthest reaches of Europe now. I stood leaning on the open door of my car, smoking and watching the confused commotion of the station. There were German soldiers of all kinds there, Russian Polizei or Ukrainians wearing armbands with swastikas and carrying old rifles, Hiwis with hollow features, peasants red with cold come to sell or exchange a few meager marinated vegetables or a scrawny chicken. The Germans wore coats or furs; the Russians, padded jackets, most of them in rags, from which tufts of straw or pieces of newspaper escaped; and this motley crowd was talking, heckling, jostling each other at the level of my boots, in huge jerky waves. Just beneath me, two big, sad soldiers were holding each other by the arm; a little farther down, a haggard, dirty Russian, trembling and wearing only a thin cloth jacket, was stumbling along the platform with an accordion in his hands: he approached some groups of soldiers or Polizei, who sent him away with a rough word or a shove, or at best turned their backs to him. When he came up to me I took a small bill out of my pocket and held it out to him. I thought he would go on his way, but he stayed there and asked me, in a mixture of Russian and bad German: “What would you like? Popular, traditional, or Cossack?” I didn’t understand what he was talking about and shrugged my shoulders: “It’s up to you.” He looked at me for an instant and struck up a Cossack song that I knew from having heard it often in the Ukraine, the one whose refrain goes so gaily Oy ty Galia, Galia molodaya… and which relates the atrocious story of a girl carried off by the Cossacks, tied by her long blond tresses to a pine tree, and burned alive. And it was magnificent. The man sang, his face raised up to me: his eyes, a faded blue, shone gently through the alcohol and the filth; his cheeks, beneath a scruffy reddish beard, quivered; and his bass voice, hoarse from coarse tobacco and drink, rose clear and pure and firm and he sang verse after verse, as if he would never stop. Beneath his fingers the keys of his accordion clicked. On the platform, the agitation had stopped, the people were watching and listening, a little surprised, even the ones who a few minutes before had treated him harshly, overcome by the simple and incongruous beauty of the song. From the other side, three fat peasant women were coming in single file, like three plump geese on a village path, with a large white triangle raised in front of their faces, a knitted wool shawl. The accordionist was blocking their path and they flowed around him the way a sea eddy skirts round a rock, while he pivoted slightly in the other direction without interrupting his song, then they continued along the train and the crowd shuffled and listened to the musician; behind me, in the corridor, some soldiers had come out of their compartments to listen to him. It seemed never to end, after each verse he attacked another one, and no one wanted it to end. Finally it did end, and without even waiting to be offered more money he continued on his way to the next car, and below my boots the people dispersed or resumed their activities or their waiting.