On the eve of Defender of the Fatherland Day
from obscurity returned the name of the pilot of the Great Patriotic War
Moscow. Evening traffic jams at the exit, people in a hurry to get into their homes, relax, forget in front of the screen, splashing negative or cloying, below the belt, vulgar humor, plunge into the virtual world of computer games, becoming the ruler of the universe or a brutal superhero. And we make our way to the exit to leave the city. We are going to a meeting with a Real person.
Our khaki UAZ "loaf" in metropolitan traffic jams looks like a simple infantryman Vanya at a court ball among polished thoroughbred secular characters. Shiny foreign cars cautiously, disgustedly parting in front of us. Lyokha Buravlyov, with calmness and dignity of a sphinx, scornfully looks at the elite drivers from the height of the lifted body, making his way into the exit stream. Forward, forward, there to life, to the river, to the forest, away from screens, gadgets, squabbles, indifference and callousness. We break out onto the track, the flow voltage drops. Less and less often, yellow comets bizarrely twisted in wet glass sweep past the headlights from oncoming cars. Night. The measured rocking of the UAZ on good asphalt lulls, and a saving sleep comes, like a shroud fencing off problems and worries.
… February 26, 1942, sparkling in the sun's rays with white snow, a rolled strip of the front airfield, the roar of aircraft engines and the business bustle of mechanics equipping winged combat vehicles for battle. Laughing handsome young guys in flight overalls, dog boots, warm fur helmets, with canned flight goggles seem to have stepped off the propaganda posters "Stalin's Falcons". Clap, a red rocket takes off, and a link of LaGGs, raising a snowy drift, is carried away into the blue heights. The earth covered with virgin white snow, the horizon line connects the impossible, two elements - the earth and the sky, blurring the boundaries between white and blue. There, ahead, they are one.
The young pilot examines the earth and the clear sky with curiosity, his heart is filled with the delight of flight and the omnipotence of a man who conquered the sky at the age of 20. Forward, forward to feat. Forward, to where the enemy smears our blue sky with the crosses of their wings, to where the caterpillars of their tanks tear the white cover of snow from our land, turning it into a black-bloody mess mixed with the blood of our soldiers. He is leading his plane forward, where the Germans are trying to break through our defenses on the Lovat River.
He is omnipotent, he is not afraid of death, because he is 20 years old.
Here the white blanket of the earth begins to dazzle with black blots of craters, intermittent dotted lines of trenches and dots of artillery and mortar positions. Here the blue sky is torn and stained by blots of anti-aircraft explosions, hatred and a thirst for revenge for the desecrated land boil in the heart. The pilot's face becomes focused, he bends in the seat cup, trying to merge with the combat vehicle, to become one with it.
Ahead is the goal - the river Lovat and the hated German planes. What can he, a sergeant with a dozen flight hours, oppose to them? To them, who passed and conquered all of Europe? To them, the "knights" hung with crosses, passing casually shooting the remnants of ammunition at the columns of refugees? A little or all! Hatred! Hatred and thirst for revenge.
The battle. Everything was confused: wings, propellers, the roar of engines, the crackle of bursts of cannons and machine guns. The sky mixed with the earth, changed places in aerobatics that had not yet been invented. Ours, strangers, darkness in the eyes and a blow - one, the second …
Smoke in the cockpit. The canopy of the canopy splashed with oil from the punctured engine, the flame licking the extended hood of the LaGG and creeping up to the cockpit.
A feverish glance at the ground and, like a flash in a brain, clouded with battle: "Ziiiiit". To live in order to be in time, to love, to give birth, to raise a son, daughter, to work, to build a country, to plant beautiful gardens. Mom, what about her ?! "Zhiiiiit!"
Here on the river, bound with ice, like a native airfield, there is a straight section…. There, rather there. There to live…. The flame is devouring a wooden plane, the burning fur on the high fur boots crackled like a giant frying pan, the pilot's chair is hot. This means that the flame is already below, and the parachute burned out. So, only down, only to the river, only together with the car.
"Zhiiiiit!" It is impossible, dishonest to die in a fire at twenty !!!!!
"Zhiiiiit!" - whisper unkissed boy's lips bursting from the gasoline flame….
"Zhiiiiit!" - the only thought beats in the consciousness fading from pain.
And, as a gift of God, as deliverance from torment - darkness. Hands in burning gloves let go of the control stick, the plane engulfed in flames powerlessly bite its nose, a powerful three-bladed propeller breaks the thickness of the February ice. A blow, an explosion, the hiss of a dying flame and the third element, the black element of water, absorbs the tortured machine and the human body. And death liberates the soul - and silence….
… In seventy-five years, before me is that propeller, already covered with shells and rusted, but retaining on its warped blades the traces of that terrible blow and the soot of that flame. Above me is a clear blue sky without a single cloud, not smeared with spots of anti-aircraft explosions. And beneath me is the pure white ice of the Lovat River, without craters and traces of flame.
My friends bent over the burnt remains of the twenty-year-old Sergeant Dmitry Pavlovich Malkov and the warped wreckage of his LaGG …
He flew in. 75 years later, but arrived.
Alexey, a resident of the village of Cherenchitsy, Staro-Russky District, Novgorod Region, showed Sasha Morzunov where the plane was lying in the river. The guys from the Novgorod divers' club found the wreckage of a car at the bottom. Valentin found the pilot's documents in the archive. Seryoga Stepanov, Mishka, Slavik, Uncle Vitya, Lyuba lifted his burnt body from the river for a week in the wind and frost from the ice. We helped him fly. And when we finished, Seryoga Stepanov, an adult man, a veteran of Myasny Bor, who raised, probably, thousands of fighters, at night heart-rendingly shouted at the entire old village house, which had become a shelter these days: Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
We all burned together with Dima Malkov, we burned with him for a week, taking out of the black water his seat, which had melted into aluminum ingots, black parachute buckles, still soiled with soot. We felt what he wanted to tell us.
How terrible it is to die at twenty, how terrible it is to burn alive in an airplane, how terrible it is not to have time for anything in life - nothing and everything! Have time to die for your country, die a terrible death, sink into obscurity …
If everyone, you hear, all the citizens of our country burned together with Dima Malkov, then there would not be so many indifferent and empty people, and our guys would never burn alive again, defending our land and our sky. Because any new war begins when the results of the previous one are forgotten. When people become callous and indifferent to the pain of others, to their Earth, to their ancestors. And then our children again burn alive at the helm of a combat aircraft or the levers of a tank. After all, they, our children, can turn out to be better than us and truly love their land.
Remember, it is very scary to die at the age of twenty, Sergeant Dmitry Pavlovich Malkov told me this, who burned down in his plane on February 26, 1942 near the quiet Novgorod village of Cherenchitsy.
