The Goose Fritz

by Sergei Lebedev

  ***

  In mid-September, when the command of the Soviet troops near Kiev was falling apart completely, Gleb Schwerdt was captured. His German dossier stated that he had been concussed and caught in the battlefield; the Soviet file stated that he had joined the enemy side voluntarily and taken several soldiers with him. Kirill thought that the German documents were probably more truthful: at that moment, Gleb was more likely to obey fate than consciously switch sides.

  In the POW camp he became an interpreter, thanks to his childhood German lessons—both dossiers agreed on this. A low rank, captain, not a member of the Party, half-German, Volksdeutscher, his father arrested by the Soviets: the ideal portrait of a collaborator. The Soviet document said that Gleb began reporting on his former comrades, there in the camp; the German document delicately avoided that question, but Kirill guessed that the Soviet dossier was probably right: it would be strange to assume that the interpreter was not required to keep an eye on the other POWs. Of course, no one could say what exactly Gleb told them, whom he saved, whom he turned in, or even whether the camp guards had time for operative work. Kirill thought that Gleb might have worked as an interpreter because there was no one else and life had to be organized, food delivered, the wounded tended to.

  As an interpreter, Gleb lived through the winter of 1941–1942 in the camps, when most POWs died of hunger and cold. In the spring of 1942 emissaries started looking in the camps for personnel for the Russian National People’s Army (RNNA), the predecessor of General Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army, which collaborated with the German command against Communist Russia. Gleb was given the rank of corporal and once again put on the Soviet uniform (captured by the Germans) with new tricolor cockades and shoulder boards.

  “I have a burning desire to avenge my father, killed by the Bolsheviks,” he wrote in the German questionnaire.

  To avenge Arseny. Kirill realized to his surprise that he himself had no desire for vengeance, as if for him, born much later, everything that happened to his great-grandfather was like a natural cataclysm, not subject to the laws of revenge. Gleb’s sentiment frightened Kirill not so much because he went to work for the Nazis but by the intention, the confession of readiness to commit murder.

  Gleb’s service did not last long. The RNNA fought the partisans, and often the soldiers went off into the woods. One major operation called for RNNA units to take the commander of the Soviet paratroopers. But instead, several dozen soldiers joined the partisans. German counterintelligence suspected Gleb, who was in charge of a platoon, of treason, that he was a Soviet spy who took the name of the real Gleb Schwerdt; after being tortured and interrogated, he was shot.

  The German dossier noted that Gleb had admitted that he was not Gleb Schwerdt, that he was an agent left behind when the Soviets retreated, so that he could penetrate the occupation administration. The Soviet dossier said that Gleb had compromised the real Soviet agent in the RNNA who was giving the Germans false clues. Kirill felt that Gleb had been affected by the reverse stigma: in the 1930s he could have been arrested by the Russians as a German spy, but he was executed by the Germans as a Russian spy; the name Schwerdt saved him when he was a POW and then destroyed him.

  At first, Boris had better luck: in June he was in the Urals at a tank factory, in charge of receiving new machines, and avoided the border areas where his unit was demolished. He was not kicked out of the army because he denied his German father at the Party meeting.

  But then luck abandoned him. He was a good officer, but the war, which had gone so well for him, was now giving him trouble: his tanks would be bombed as they were being unloaded from a train, or a bridge tested by sappers would break beneath the tanks, or the tanks he obtained would be from a faulty lot, where the recoil would damage the turret, but that would only become evident under enemy fire. He acquired the reputation of an unlucky commander.

  The telegram informing him that his wife and children were going to Leningrad was sent to the old address of his unit. When Boris realized that his wife had left home, he telegrammed Antonina, asking if Marina and the girls were with her. But the reply from Leningrad did not reach him; the army was retreating too fast, the weakened units dissipated, changed numbers.

  Boris had betrayed his father for the sake of his wife and children, and now they had vanished as abruptly as Arseny. The whole bloody state, to which he had sacrificed his father, was shaken; the fronts collapsed, local draftees were hiding, Soviet officials ran to the east—he must have seen Party and NKVD bosses hastily evacuated, loading official cars with personal property, the people Boris had feared in 1937. He must have had the feeling, Kirill thought, that he had not betrayed his father because the regime was horrifying and the circumstances were cruel, but simply for the sake of it.

  Boris must have started a journal around that time, which soldiers and officers were not allowed to do; Kirill saw excerpts from it in the file. There were no military secrets, only doubts that the interrogators characterized as defeatist moods; there was the underlying question of how it was possible for the Germans to be at Moscow’s gates. Was it because the Soviet regime, which tortured its people, opened the path for them?

  The file also had reports from an informant, one of Boris’s subordinates. Reading them, Kirill thought of Lieutenant Kolakovsky and his part in the Myasoedov case: yet again the family crossed paths with this kind of man, a genius of denunciation, an inspired swindler who could create a complex and massive lie using the ideological mindset, and come out looking as though he—the snitch—had exposed a conspiracy responsible for grave damage.

  The informant had probably served with Boris back in the 1930s. And therefore he knew what Boris did not advertise: that he was a Schwerdt and not a Morozov.

  Boris might have held up his promotion or chewed him out in front of the formation, and the soldier, whose name was hidden under the pseudonym Ermak, compiled a report for the special section of the brigade.

  Ermak wrote that in 1937 he had believed like everyone else, like their superiors, that Major Schwerdt had sincerely denounced his father, a traitor of the Homeland, a former German agent; as Comrade Stalin teaches, a son is not responsible for his father. But now, once again under the command of Schwerdt-Morozov, he suspected that the denunciation was false, the trick of a spy so determined in his hatred of the Soviet regime that he was prepared to break family ties, change his name, just to sabotage the land of the Soviets.

  At the start of the report, Ermak called him “Schwerdt-Morozov,” but on the second page, just “Schwerdt.” Even Kirill felt that the two words “Major Schwerdt” created the image of a German agent, an officer of the Abwehr. The name itself implicated Boris, and that was more than enough.

  Ermak had no other proof. Except for the fact that Boris went with an orderly to the neutral zone at night and returned toward morning. There was a shot-up German tank there and Boris was studying it to learn its weak points in battle. He went at night because the Germans shot at the tank during the day. But Ermak wrote that Boris had a sort of mailbox in the tank, and once the soldiers saw him come back with papers written in German, a pack of typed pages, and read them in the trench. Boris testified at the investigation that the pack of papers was a technical manual he’d found in the tank, but it was too late.

  Ermak also added that he considered the whole Schwerdt family, for Boris had talked about his brothers and sisters, a spy nest, for despite his false denial of his father, Boris continued getting clandestine letters from his sister Antonina, who worked in some secret enterprise in Leningrad and was probably giving him information.

  Kirill knew that even if Boris had a high-up patron, no one would dare not act on a denunciation like that. But they didn’t arrest him right away, either because they didn’t believe Ermak totally, sensing a lie, or because they decided to find all his connections first.

  Boris was allowed to fight for another two weeks. He learned that his wife and children were in besieged Leningrad. And
his army, the 2nd Shock Army, was headed for Leningrad to break through the blockade!

  Boris lost his head and phoned a friend at headquarters to ask about the general plan of the operation, which unit would play what role—hoping to be first to reach the city. The staff officer reported the strange request that violated the chain of command and secrecy; the intelligence people decided that Ermak’s report was fully credible and that the German agent Schwerdt was trying to learn highly important military plans.

  The final nail in the coffin was a report from the partisans that former Red Army commander Gleb Schwerdt, considered missing in action in September 1941, was discovered in the RNNA as a platoon commander.

  So a brother avenged his brother, thought Kirill; for Gleb must have known what would happen to his family if the Soviet authorities learned he was in the RNNA. Did he hope the Germans would win quickly? That his service would remain a secret? Or did he want to sentence his brothers and sisters to death for continuing to live, eat, drink, marry, and have children after their father’s arrest?

  Boris was arrested and removed to the rear. There was no evidence except his ill-starred name, the stupid inquiry, and his brother’s service in the RNNA. There was a chance—one in twenty—the tribunal would have simply demoted him to private instead of sentencing him to death.

  But mid-March the Germans counterattacked, and soon the 2nd Shock Army was ensnared. Someone had to answer for the sudden German blow that ruined their attack. Now Major Schwerdt’s story was seen in a completely different light; they worked him over so that in two days Boris was ready to confess that he was an Abwehr agent, and his brother Gleb was an Abwehr agent, and his father was also an Abwehr agent. The intelligence people were in a hurry, for they might have been asked how they missed an enemy spy under their noses, and so Boris was shot without delay.

  The Myasoedov story came back to the family as a grim ghost, as if back in 1915 the fate of the boy Boris had already been written down to the last letter and had been shown to his parents in the mirror of someone else’s drama: look.

  Or—the death of a universally calumnied colonel, made the scapegoat for the generals’ mistakes, cold-bloodedly sentenced to the noose by a court that knew his innocence amidst the rejoicing in the press and the cries “Hang him!” and then subjected to such defamation after the execution that people were ashamed of the name Myasoedov and hurried to change it. The death of one innocent man became a black funnel that pulled in all of Russia, applauding that death (the way France was almost pulled down to the bottom of shame by the Dreyfus case). Everything that later happened to the country, arrests without trials, mass killings, was just a multifaced reflection of an ancient drama that grew, like a poisoned seed, in the fate of those who applauded and even those who were simply alive then, barely born.

  Boris was executed by firing squad in the days when the few remaining tanks of his division were trying to break through the “corridors” to the surrounded Soviet troops, while the German counterattacks from the flanks once again closed those loopholes, narrow strips of swampy land where the soil had already sensed the coming warmth.

  Kirill traveled to the place of his execution, a small train station where now peat was extracted. They said that they sometimes found bodies in the peat, the dead of 1942, uncorrupted, sunken in the unfreezing depths.

  Everything was low there, the buildings, the platform, the station, so that the old water tower seemed tall, although it would have been lost at a big station. Kirill imagined that they shot people at the water tower: you had to shoot near something, connect death to a target, a sign that meant the end and took some of the responsibility from the guards as if this were the measure allotted the dead man—to live to this point and no further, and the one who pulled the trigger was only following the lines marked by fate.

  Kirill looked at the scrubby grass, the dappled tracks of bicycle tires in the dust, and thought how Grandmother Karolina, such a cherished and indispensable force in his life, could easily have been turned into this unsightly dust and brittle earth, in which shards of broken bottles glistened. The secret services could have started an investigation of the other family members, based on Ermak’s report. But the remaining Schwerdts had already died in Leningrad, and she, the only survivor, was stuck in evacuation. The case was closed for good, and she lived. If they had found Karolina, there would have been yet another dusty station, a water tower pockmarked by time or bullets and sunbeams on the green bottle glass.

  Then Kirill went to the Vitebsk Oblast, to Osintorf, yet more swamps and peat works, where Gleb had been executed. The tidy rotting of swamps, scattered trees, dry switches of reeds drearily rustling in the wind.

  In Osintorf, Kirill remembered the German Cemetery and his guess that so many dead were missing from family mausoleums and graves: families destroyed, surviving descendants scattered around the world. The old monument on Balthasar’s grave, the limestone altar with the stone book, now seemed like a lighthouse, a sign known to all the dead in his line, in his family. Grandmother Karolina went to the German Cemetery the way people visit places where they saw someone for the last time. She had been spared the blockade, had lived through the war, was called in as a military interpreter, getting her job and measure of food thanks to the dangerous Schwerdt legacy, the German language, and then she waited endlessly at Balthasar’s grave for the ones who had been killed by that same legacy.

  ***

  Now Kirill returned his thoughts to the German Cemetery: what role it had played in his topography of Moscow, how it had been connected to other places, to the houses of his family.

  They walked to the cemetery but rode back, leaving by the other exit, on the trolley. Always, as if it were an immutable law of the universe.

  As a child, Kirill had liked the Moscow trolleys. The black stone of the old cobbles showed between the rails, they traveled unknown streets where in the autumn drizzle or winter snows the lights burned sweetly and tearfully in the building windows, teapot-shaped churches flew by, old women shuffled on a store’s slippery porch, where a mangy poodle was tied up, called Totoshka or Froufrou, afraid of the local yard dogs and whining at the sharp scent of their urine.

  They rode past the pocked snow, icicles on the roof, the signs that read SPORTING GOODS—OCEAN—BARBER—POST OFFICE—VEGETABLES—GASTRONOM—APPLIANCES—the red M at the Metro entrance—GLORY CPSU on a rooftop—MILK—another GASTRONOM—MEAT—RUBBER TECHNICAL FACTORY—CINEMA—into the darkness where there was more light in the puddles than in the streetlights, where resin from the discarded holiday trees and dried tangerine peel scented the air.

  The trip from the cemetery was special. They didn’t go home, but in the other direction, to another Moscow; it seemed so far, not seven stops, but seven meridians, which he liked to count on the old-fashioned globe that showed mountains in relief, oceans with a blue glaze, a caravan of camels strode across the Arabian Desert, reindeer pulled a dogsled in the Siberian tundra, and a sperm whale sent up a spume in the Pacific Ocean; the globe on a bronze turtle pedestal stood in the apartment of Grandmother Karolina and Grandfather Konstantin.

  When Kirill was little, he perceived Grandfather Konstantin the way Arseny had seen Balthasar; Kirill thought his grandfather was a mysterious wizard. His apartment was full of marvelous objects like ones Kirill had seen in a museum; no one ever said where they came from, as if they had appeared at the wave of a magic wand.

  It was only in ninth grade after a conversation with a friend whose grandfather was a retired general that Kirill understood where Grandfather Konstantin got his mysterious “inheritance.”

  In his own way, he was a follower of Prince Uryatinsky. The mad grandee imported dwarves, magicians, aphrodisiacs, surveyors, engineers, and agronomists from Europe; Konstantin’s colleagues brought back specialists—rocket scientists, designers, chemists, physicists, atomic experts from Germany; Konstantin brought trophy art for Soviet grandees.

  Grandfather Konstantin was part of a
special army that followed on the heels of the fighting troops; they were armed with sealing wax and seals and shopping lists—the Chief Administration for War Spoils of the Red Army. On battlefields they picked up damaged hardware that could be repaired or melted down; they expropriated reserves of strategic materials, disassembled factories; in the Ore Mountains, special units of the NKVD were in the closed zones around the uranium mines. The ancient castles, libraries, galleries, museums, mansions, and churches were scoured by art historians in civilian clothes, who took away paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, books, altars, and jewels. Grandfather Konstantin was one of them.

  Called up from the reserves in the fall of 1941, he served as an interpreter in frontline headquarters, or at least, that was the story he told, and in late 1944, when the Soviet army reached European borders, Grandfather Konstantin got a new assignment. Kirill thought he had initiated the move, had suggested it to someone who had enough military power to make it happen.

  Behind the Soviet frontlines in Germany there were hundreds of organizations, thousands of groups with the most varied mandates (Konstantin told him that even the Moscow union yacht club sent people who brought back a trainload of sail boats from the imperial yacht club in Bremerhaven). In that chaos and the general scramble for booty, a determined and qualified man who knew how to recognize a master’s brush, the age of the canvas, the value of decorative objects could make a fortune, as long as there were relatively reliable documents, transportation, a dozen loyal soldiers, and the ability to bring the things to the USSR. During the Civil War, the Red commanders had traveled with truckloads of plundered goods, dined on stolen family dishes; the same thing was repeated in Germany.

  Naturally, his grandfather did not go into these details; he avoided the question of where he had served and under whose command in the last months of the war.

  Kirill understood that at first his grandfather did not have the rank to trophy hunt on his own or to seek out a very high patron. The most he could have had was the unspoken support of a corps or army commander: a pass, five men with machine guns from the commander’s personal guard, a truck, and access to the quartermasters.