“Yes, I remember,” said the German. “But we should put some markers here for the soldiers, markers with names. They have them in other battlefields. I saw some of ours in France once. Nicely kept, too.”

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“We have lots of monuments around. Big ones, too,” said one of the other Russians.

“The largest in the world,” chimed in the guide, sounding more cheerful again, as though she hoped to be useful. “You see over there, on the square, is the Victory Monument, and on the hill at Mamaya is Mother Russia, the highest monument in the world. It stands over one hundred….”

“Please leave us alone!” interrupted the Russian spokesman. “The place is full of monuments, big, small, ugly and thick ones, not one with a soldier’s name on it.”

“You shouldn’t talk that way in front of foreigners,” snapped the guide at her countryman. “We have the most….”

Again the Russian veteran cut her off. “There’s not one monument with my friends’ names on it. They’re all huge, lumpy, stone shrines dedicated to this and to that glorious thing. There’s not a stone in this city with a soldier’s name on it,” said the Russian quietly. He turned back to the German and said, “Here, let me help you.”

The two old soldiers stooped down and put the flowers between two stones from the ruined building. Then they looked at each other in silence.

“Those are for Walther,” the Russian man said finally.

“Ja,” said the German, “for Walther.” He paused. “And for your friends.”

They stood silently together for a long time, then suddenly embraced. I walked away as they stood together in the sun.

Our German tour boat had come down the Volga from Kazan to Volgograd (the new name for Stalingrad). After visiting the ruins of Stalingrad, we traveled through the Volga­Don Canal to the Don River and on to Rostov-on-Don. We toured factories, dams, enormous hydroelectric works, canals and locks, Lenin’s birthplace (now called Simbirsk), Saratov and Tol’yatti. We saw many massive monuments, but no graves.

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