“I’m still hungry, and I’ve still got my prey. Don’t forget it.”
Early the following month, Elías was given a military rank and sent to Moscow’s School of Information Services, popularly known as the Academy. Students from various police academies who were considered to have the necessary aptitude were trained in general politics by commissars who, in addition to indoctrinating, taught classes on the history of the Communist Party. But the bulk of their training consisted of recruiting agents, handling information, learning espionage and counterespionage techniques, writing encoded reports, and doing fieldwork. After graduating, they were named NKVD captains or lieutenants.
One of the instructors was Vasili Velichko. He had been promoted since his days at the Tushino flight school and there was no longer any trace of the callow young man who in 1934 had presented a report on Nazino to Lenin’s widow and head of the Spanish Communist Party, José Díaz. He was now a colonel in the air force, his hair and thick goatee already gray. He’d aged a lot, despite being only twenty-seven. Those were the years of men growing old before their time, men for whom private lives didn’t matter or exist.
Velichko had become skilled at avoiding the various purges of the security services, although he’d earned himself many enemies after his report made it all the way to Stalin’s hands. People said that his uncle was head of the Fourth Department of the NKVD’s Main Directorate—the military intelligence services unit created by Nikolai Yezhov—and this kept him safe. And so it was that this young civil defense academy instructor became a shrewd man, with unique insights, endowed with a sincere belief in the virtue of his mission and infallible patriotism. Together, these qualities made him both very efficient and highly regarded at the Academy, although his dream was to be posted to a combat fighter squadron.
He was genuinely happy to see Elías again. They talked about the past, and even more about the future. Velichko was up to date on the situation with Stern and his proximity to power.
“Hard times are coming, my friend, and we need horrible scavengers like him. People like Stern ignore the rules that the rest of us abide by, and unfortunately this makes them useful. Did you hear about General Kutepov?” Elías nodded, having been told about the old White Army general who was kidnapped by the OGPU in Paris and died before they had a chance to kill him. “Well, nine years later, the same thing happened with his successor, General Miller. The day they killed him, a Soviet merchant ship, the Maria Ulyanova, was docked at the port of Le Havre. One of our embassy vehicles unloaded an enormous container, which was immediately loaded onto the ship. It pulled up anchor minutes before the French police arrived. And do you know what was in the container?”
Elías had a guess: General Miller.
“Exactly. The ship, the crew, the men who transported the container—all Stern’s. If the French police had caught them, they could never have formally accused our intelligence services. Stern would have been the one to go down. He charges quite a high price, but it’s well worth paying. This is the reality we live in, Elías. While you were at war in Spain and France, Igor Stern didn’t sit still for a minute. He’s become a very important man.”
“I saw Anna. Igor brought her to my house just so I could see her and hear her call him ‘Papa’ with my own ears.”
Velichko narrowed his eyes and clenched his jaw, mulling something over.
“For the first four years, she was in an orphanage on the outskirts of Kiev. It wasn’t a nice place, but I managed to find her and make sure she had everything she needed. She’s a wonderful little girl.” Vasili’s eyes lit up. “Cheerful, intelligent, alert, and communicative. When I used to go visit, I pretended to be her older brother. Sometimes I was able to rent an apartment nearby and get her out of that awful place for a few days; we’d take walks in the forest, go ice skating on the lake…Even my hardheaded mother fell in love with her. Then one day I found out that Igor had declared paternity. He forged the papers, and I have no doubt that it was with the consent of Beria, a little bonus for having kidnapped Miller. I’ve managed to keep seeing her every once in a while. She’s growing up quickly, and she realizes what kind of man Stern is but knows that all she can do is pretend to love him. A year ago, I got a call from a military patrol. They’d found her in Moscow and she gave them my name. She’d run away from the dacha where Igor keeps her locked up. Can you believe it? Nine years old and she came to Moscow alone! The authorities refused to listen to me: Igor demanded she be returned, and I was forced to give her up. I know what you think you saw, Elías. But Anna is Irina Akhmatova’s daughter. I visit her whenever I can, especially when Igor is away. We talk a lot and I try not to let her lose hope. But war is on the horizon and there’s no time for sentimentality or personal concerns. Everything is on hold, sine die. You have to understand that.”
And inevitably the war arrived right on schedule. That Sunday, Elías was reading Izvestia—the cover story was about public school education—when Vasili Velichko burst into his room looking fevered and troubled.
“The Germans have crossed the border. Voina, Elías, voina!” The cry of war shot through the nation like a surge of electricity. It was June 22, 1941.
Two days later, a general mobilization was ordered. Velichko and other pilot officers were sent to the airfields of Belorussia. The day he left, Vasili was not euphoric but did appear gravely resolute. He’d been preparing for this moment for the past two years and the time had come.
They embraced, promised they would meet again soon, and Vasili said goodbye with one final piece of advice.
“Be careful with Stern. He’ll be more dangerous than the Nazis now. Filth is his natural environment.”
In just a few short weeks, the Russian defense was decimated by three German armies, which managed to occupy a front almost two thousand miles long. Army Group North headed for Leningrad, Group Center went to Moscow, and Group South advanced at an alarming pace through Ukraine toward Kiev and Kharkov. Over three million men, more than six hundred thousand vehicles, nearly three thousand tanks, and two thousand planes attacked the Soviet units at full throttle. In the first week of the invasion alone, the Luftwaffe destroyed twelve hundred Soviet aircraft—among them Vasili’s squadron, taken down over the Polish border. Elías read about it in the operational command dispatch on the Western Front, where he was stationed. Brave Velichko hadn’t even had a chance to prove his skills as a pilot.
The news coming in to NKVD military headquarters on the Leningrad Front was devastating: On the first day of attack, German troops from Group Center had penetrated twenty-five miles along the Minsk–Smolensk–Moscow axis. On the Ukraine Front, Soviet prisoners captured in the Kiev pocket numbered over 650,000; hundreds of thousands more fell in Bialystok, Smolensk, and Bryansk. An officer gave Elías an issue of Signal, the Nazi propaganda magazine distributed to Axis soldiers. Its pages showed an illustrious prisoner who had surrendered on July 16 to the troops surrounding his artillery unit. The message was clear: If 7th Artillery lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili had fallen to the Germans, no Red Army soldier was safe. The man was Stalin’s son.
Elías had lived through the war in Spain, the civil violence in Barcelona in 1937, the retreat, and French concentration camps. He thought that after all that, and Nazino, nothing could surprise him. But he was wrong. When, in October, the NKVD learned that a division of Spanish volunteers was going to enter combat in the Siege of Leningrad as part of the German army’s Group North, he was immediately sent there.
What he found made his blood run cold. This was not a war whose objective was to conquer or defend territory; it was an extermination. It wasn’t about defeating the enemy but literally wiping him off the map. They fought relentlessly, viciously, with merciless cruelty and unimaginable hatred. Perhaps Beria’s prediction would prove true and the Germans would eventually be worn down by the endless expanse of Soviet land, but in the meantime, there might be not a single man left standing on either side.
In the middle of an endless frozen expanse, a forest of bare hands emerged from the ice as though the dead were seeking the warmth of the winter sun. A dog had frozen after falling into the water, half of its body above the surface, front paws on the shore it had so nearly reached. And in the immense expanse of nothingness, here and there, a smoldering black dot—a scorched country house, its stone fireplace still smoking as though to warm the hearth. Crows perched on the icy heads of fallen soldiers, pecking at their frozen eyeballs, beaks bouncing off the ice.
The dead from the Spanish Volunteer Division were recognizable by their blue shirts. Although they wore German infantry uniforms, the men had refused to take off their Falangist shirts and became referred to as the Blue Division. Not all of them were in fact volunteers, but Elías was surprised at the number of those taken prisoner who were: university students from Franco’s Spanish Students’ Union, local politicians, teachers and doctors, and many men in midlevel and senior positions. According to the NKVD’s information, there were eighteen thousand of them split into three regiments, in addition to sappers, artillerymen, and pilots.
“Why are you here, fighting a war that isn’t yours?” Elías asked one of them.
The prisoner was an infantry sergeant. His platoon had been wiped out an hour earlier by a machine gun belonging to Elías’s NKVD company. Elías had been astonished that even after being wounded, many Blue Division soldiers continued to drag themselves toward their defensive positions, leaving a literal trail of blood and guts behind them. The vast majority had been killed in the first attack, and yet they’d fought on, exposed in open country, until there were no troops left.
“It’s cold in the trenches. Better to keep warm with a good fight,” the sergeant responded, gravely injured, shot in the side. Two other prisoners laughed at his joke, harsh animal-like cackles.
Not one of them talked. They withstood torture, cursing Stalin and his mother, and when Elías aimed his revolver at the sergeant’s skull, the man called his bluff by pressing his forehead to the barrel.
“Arriba España, you Red bastard!”
Elías pulled the trigger.
Why all this hatred?
He wrote to Esperanza that night.
Today I shot a Falangist in the head. And that’s what I kept wondering, as I saw his body at my feet, a shapeless mass, an enemy. But the truth is that I killed a thirty-two-year-old chemical engineer named Rogelio Miranda from Medellín, according to his military ID. A miner from Mieres shoots a chemical engineer from Medellín in the head, in a land that means nothing to either one of them, before an orthodox church that we defend and they attack, thousands and thousands of miles from home, from our lives. He had a family, I saw a photo in his wallet. Two beautiful children, six or seven years old. His wife was pretty. Looking at her in this cold brings warmth.
Who will tell her he’s been killed? Will his children find out I was the one to murder him? Will they ever understand why their father died here? Will we ever understand it ourselves, Esperanza? The Nazis are surprised at how ferociously the Blue Division attacks our positions, having thought Spaniards rebellious and undisciplined. Red Army commissars are astonished at how valiantly the Spanish volunteers among our ranks fight, citing us as examples of brave and battle-hardened soldiers. None of them understand, not the Germans or the Soviets. They think we’re fighting for them, but we’re simply fighting against each other. They can’t see that all it takes is a single man calling out the name of a Spanish battle—Belchite or Badajoz or Toledo—for the other side to pounce like rabid dogs. Seeing the Blue Division banner riles our men up more than the swastika does; raising the Republican flag on our side incites them to launch a brutal attack. How much damage did the war do to Spain? Too much. I wonder if we’ll ever manage to leave it behind, and I’m terrified of the answer.
Be careful, Esperanza, and take care, as I do. This will end, one way or another, and we’ll be together again, I promise you.
In Leningrad, December 23, 1941
Your Husband
Elías reread his letter in his refuge by flickering candlelight. Amid the still-smoking ruins of the church, men lay dozing, tired of killing and of trying to keep from being killed. The wounded were lined up in what remained of the presbytery, not shouting, simply stirring uneasily and, from time to time, moaning or weeping softly, imploring their mothers, their girlfriends, their children not to abandon them on that cold dark night. They didn’t want to die alone.
Through the shot-out church windows, Elías could see the field outside strewn with corpses, most of them from the Blue Division. Small mounds, slowly being covered in snow. From time to time he heard gunfire, saw the flash of a shot. A patrol circulated, finishing off those near death. They couldn’t be taken prisoner; there was no medicine to treat them, no food or enough water. In the distance, beyond the lake, the glare of bombs falling on the city of Leningrad was like a beautiful fireworks display, the thunderous explosions sounding like a distant storm that was, perhaps, moving off. No one heard the cries of the wounded, the mutilated, and the dead.
Someone said that in the Blue Division trenches, men were singing Christmas carols. Elías smiled. His father was an atheist and had never allowed religious celebrations at home, and so Elías had always been jealous of friends like Ramón when he saw them on their way to midnight Mass, carrying drums and tambourines.
He would have liked to get up, leave his revolver and cartridge belt, and walk the quarter of a mile to enemy lines to sit with them and perhaps share some Christmas turrón and have them teach him the carols he never learned to sing as a boy. But he had to make do with the dark night, no stars to herald glad tidings or epiphanies.
Peace on earth to men of goodwill, someone had written in the snow. Maybe somewhere, but not on this earth. The only men of goodwill lay buried in the snow.
24
BARCELONA, NOVEMBER 2002
The first stone sailed over their heads and crashed against an excavator, shattering its cabin window. The fifty or so protesters momentarily stopped their chants against politicians and the Gil family and cried out in celebration. Gonzalo’s property had, over the past several months, become a sort of stronghold, the final obstacle keeping construction on the lakeside development from continuing. But according to the protesters’ signs, Gonzalo Gil and his mother had caved to the “interests of capital.” An embarrassment to the memory of Communist hero Elías Gil. Gonzalo’s name had gone from being hailed to hated the moment his signature dried on the bill of sale. Police were called in, their services exhaustively employed in order to clear a path to the machinery surrounding the lake. There were skirmishes and confrontations, and they even came to blows.
Agustín González and Alcázar watched the action from a hilltop, a Roman general with his centurion, following the unfolding of a battle from a strategic yet safe position.
“Why do they insist on defending something they don’t care about? Half of these people aren’t even from the region.”
The man sounded genuinely astonished, unable to see the source of their strife. To him, it was all a question of numbers, a price per square foot, a matter to be resolved in offices by attorneys, notaries, urban-planning officials, and local authorities. The protesters were simply a nuisance, something incomprehensible that was interfering with the perfect mechanics of the plan as drawn up.
Alcázar saw it in a less pragmatic way. This landscape, vaguely similar to that of his own childhood, was going to disappear. He didn’t feel nostalgic or have any roma
ntic notions about it, but he understood that the protesters felt as though something that belonged to them was being taken away, something that had been appropriated by a band of speculators. And they were right.
“People pick their battles,” he said laconically.
“Well, they’ve picked one they’re not going to win.”
That wasn’t what it was about, Alcázar thought. It wasn’t a question of winning but of standing up, defending what they thought was just and thereby soothing their conscience. In a few years, if the lake and its environs no longer existed, some of these protesters would visit the new golf course, walk around the luxury homes and tell their kids what used to be there, and with great self-regard they would recount the tale of being hit by a police baton in their attempt to preserve the land. And their children, if they were lucky, would be proud, and maybe deep in their hearts the desire to emulate their parents’ rebellion would take root.
That’s the way things advance: slowly, with small and futile heroic gestures. Generation after generation.
“Well, it seems that finally everything is going to go according to plan after all,” Agustín concluded, brushing dust off of his coat. November had brought a significant drop in temperature. It wouldn’t be long before snow returned to the mountains. With a little luck, the lawyer thought, blowing on his fingers to warm them, the complex could open in a couple of summers.
Alcázar was less optimistic. He still hadn’t found Siaka, and although he knew Gonzalo had kept his part of the bargain—withdrawing his name from the Matryoshka proceedings—the prosecutor’s office was forging ahead. Information obtained from Laura’s computer was still being sent to the prosecutor, but that didn’t seem to concern Agustín González.
“Without witness testimony at the oral hearing, they’ve got nothing. Their documentary evidence is circumstantial; it hasn’t been cross-checked and there’s no way for them to do it. The originals no longer exist; I made sure of that. So it comes down to the word of a depressed, unstable, drug-addicted murderer against ours.”
A Million Drops Page 47