The winter of 1943 in Stalingrad was a picture of a city suffocating in frost, devastation, and the bitter smell of gunpowder. Snowflakes could be seen drifting in slow agony over the skeletal remains of buildings, settling upon the unmarked graves of men – men who had once laughed, once fought, once dared to dream beyond the war.
Lieutenant Igor Ivanovich had long abandoned the notion of dreams. In fact, the war had carved such notions out of him, instead placing in him the cold pragmatism of survival. He crouched in the remains of a bombed-out pharmacy, his fingers stiff with the bite of winter and his rifle pressed against his knee. The war had stolen much from the soldier—his youth, his innocence, and now, he feared, the woman he loved.
He couldn’t tell with certainty whether Natalya was still alive.
Natalya Vasiliev had been his before the war, before the call to arms had torn them apart. She had promised to wait, and he had promised to return. But both knew that in war, promises were fragile things.
Mikhail had met Natalya three years prior, in the quiet warmth of a bookshop. She had been standing by the poetry section, her gaze fixed on the book and her fingers running over the pages delicately.
“You love words,” he had remarked as he watched her from a distance with curiosity.
And she had smiled. “I love what they can do. How they can shape people and keep them alive long after their bodies have turned to dust.”
“And… what words do you think will keep you alive?” he had asked, half-teasing, half-sincere.
She had tilted her head: “Ones worth writing down.”
And so, over time, he had written to her, from trenches, from frozen warzones, from the hearts of cities taking their final breaths. They were letters filled with hope, with stories of children playing fearlessly in the fields, with longing of a world without the madness, with the wish of smelling the aroma rising from bakery chimneys. And she had responded with letters of survival, struggle, endurance.
But then, there was silence.
Her last letter had come two months ago.
Now, crouched among the wreckage, Mikhail clutched that final letter like a talisman. He had opened and read and cried over the letter so much that the ink had smudged in places, but he had read it enough times to know every word by heart.
“My dearest Mikhail,
The bombs fall every night now, and the city groans under their weight, yet we endure. The bakery on the corner of the street still stands, though the loaves are smaller, the flour thinner. I still read at night by candlelight, even though the books feel heavier in my hands. I often think of the bookshop, of the streets before the war, and of you standing there watching me, wondering if I would ever look back. I did, in fact. I always did.
Write to me soon. Tell me you are safe and tell me this war has not stolen all of you.”
But the war had actually stolen everything.
Mikhail exhaled, forcing the lump in his throat down into the pit of his stomach. If she was alive, he HAD to find her.
The trek through the city was death-defying; the Germans still held portions of Stalingrad, and their snipers perched like carrion birds upon rooftops, their eyes fixed on the streets like a locked radar. But Mikhail moved with the surety of a man who had nothing left to fear, nothing more to lose.
The bakery was his first stop. It was a ruin. The windows had shattered and the door was nowhere to be found. He stepped inside, crunching glass and ash beneath his boots.
He saw an old man sitting in the corner. More than a man, he was a bundle of layers of rags with eyes clouded with hunger.
“Natalya Vasiliev,” Mikhail said, his voice desperate. “Do you know her?”
The old man blinked, as if dragging himself back from some distant place. “She worked at the hospital… before they came.”
A chill colder than the winter outside made its way through Mikhail’s bones. “Who?”
The old man did not need to answer; the knowledge was already there, waiting in the shadows of Mikhail’s mind.
The Germans had overrun the main hospital weeks ago.
Mikhail ran.
The hospital was a shell of its former self: its roof had caved in, and snow and rubble spilled into the hallways like people would once rush in. The scent of death clung to the air.
And then, amid the wreckage, he saw her.
Natalya!
There she lay, amidst a cluster of makeshift beds, her body wrapped in an oversized coat, far too large for her frail frame and her face of the palest shade Mikhail had ever seen. And her eyes… the eyes once shining with life fluttered open as he approached.
“Mikhail,” she breathed, as if disbelieving.
Mikhail fell to his knees beside her and cupped her face, reduced to bones, in his gloved hands “Natalya, I came back. I came back as I had promised.”
A weak smile ghosted her lips, “I knew you would.”
But there was something wrong: life was slipping from her, the warmth already fading.
“You’re hurt,” he murmured while tracing the bloodstains beneath her coat with his fingers. “I will take you away from here, away from all this destruction. We will leave the city, right now—”
“No, no, Mikhail, listen. I wrote one last letter.”
His throat tightened, “Natalya—”
“Promise me,” she whispered with all that was left in her. “Promise me you’ll live. Promise me that you’ll leave this city when the war ends. And promise me that you’ll write.”
He swallowed the sob rising in his chest. “I swear it!”
Her grip slackened, and her eyes, those eyes that had once held entire worlds within them, fluttered shut.
And just like that, she was gone. Natalya was no more.
The war raged on, but Mikhail no longer felt it. All he felt was the weight of Natalya’s last words in his heart. And when, at last, the war ended, he left Stalingrad behind.
And just as she had asked, he wrote. He wrote until his fingers ached and the ink bled into the pages like old wounds. He wrote of everything, of love, of war, of life and of death, and most of all, of promises made under the shades of devastation.
And in the quiet of some distant new city, he sat in a bookshop much like the one where they had first met, and there, he placed her last letter upon a shelf.
“Ones worth writing down,” she had said.
And so, he did.
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