In the compound everyone moved at once. The cook dropped the sack of bread he had been distributing. Evans reached for his pistol. Several soldiers rushed forward, but Filip got there first, took the pistol out of the sergeant’s weakened grasp and held it up to Becker’s forehead, while two of the Germans tried to loosen the lieutenant’s grip and pull him away from the fence.
The cord around the sergeant’s neck snapped just as Filip pulled the trigger. Evans slumped forward into the arms of several of his men. Becker staggered against the crush of prisoners at his back. Filip stood, dumbfounded, and let the gun slip through his fingers to the ground. In the melee, someone had jostled his arm; the bullet had missed its mark, grazing the top of Becker’s head, where a thread of blood now trickled down his temple.
Filip watched, spellbound, as it ran down the side of the German’s neck and oozed into the collar of his shirt. In the dust at his feet, he saw a piece of the would-be strangler’s cord. He picked it up. It was made of threads pulled from woven cloth—shirts, fraying coat sleeves, and the like, he guessed—braided together in many strands and twisted into a thicker length. Strong enough to strangle a man, Filip thought, not without admiration for the painstaking work, the patience, the ingenuity. Almost. Like Ilya and his bits of wire, making something out of nothing, fighting with all his wits for a shred of human dignity.
In the evening, the Russians gathered around the stove in the common room, not for the heat but for the “coffee” brewed from toasted acorns the cook had ground for them in his spare time. It was bitter and earthy, but no one complained.
“I still don’t understand why they won’t let the Germans use the empty barracks.” Ilya’s hands were busy, as always, with his pliers and wire. From time to time, he glanced at the scrap of paper where his new customers had written out their orders: Duluth. Chicago. Syracuse. Philadelphia. Nashville. Also Peace, and Love. “It’s cruel to keep them caged like that. One could easily go mad.”
“And it’s in violation of the international rules for treatment of prisoners,” Grisha agreed. “Becker’s right about that. He’s an officer; he shouldn’t even be in there, with the enlisted men. But the Americans don’t have enough guards to watch them. This is only meant to be a transit stop on the way to larger facilities.”
“How do you know?” Filip squinted at the older man through a haze of cigarette smoke.
“I had some English at university.” Grisha packed his pipe and lit it with a burning brand from the stove. “I paid attention.”
The next morning, Becker was gone. Not even Grisha could learn what had happened to him. “Maybe he’s been transferred to another camp, with facilities for officers.” Filip stirred his oatmeal.
“Or maybe he had an accident along the way,” Grisha growled. “Move along. You’re holding up the line.”
After their own breakfast, the German prisoners were taken in groups of three or four to wash under the camp’s cold-water shower, and issued clean underwear from the Americans’ own supplies. Anneliese offered to launder for them without pay. “Every person should have clean clothes, ja?” she cajoled a reluctant Sergeant Evans with her disarming smile. “Your men can check their Unterhosen for secret messages, if you want.”
In supply, they also found two large canvas tarpaulins. Half a dozen refugees were put to work climbing the barbed wire to stretch them across the top of the enclosure. Filip was spared this task, leaving it to others to cut their hands and arms to shelter the very men who had so recently been their own captors. War is strange, he thought. It could have been the other way around. We could be the ones inside the cage.
He found Evans in the far corner of the compound, as far from the prisoners as it was possible to be. “Filip.” The sergeant shook a cigarette from his pack. Filip took it, tucked it into his shirt pocket to savor later. “You saved my neck, buddy. I owe you one. That SOB would have strung me up for sure.”
Filip strained to understand the unfamiliar words. He could read the American’s easy, friendly delivery and pleasant expression, but the language, the words, remained shrouded in mystery.
“I’m assigning you and Ilya to the road repair project. You’ll be able to come and go at will, pretty much. What else can I do for you?”
That, for the most part, Filip understood. “Teach me English,” he said.
6
FILIP WAS AN EAGER STUDENT, even if Evans, preoccupied with his administrative duties, was a haphazard teacher. Evans gave him old copies of Stars and Stripes for practice. “Just underline the words you don’t know. You can ask me or one of the boys what they mean.” He reached into a desk drawer. “Better yet, use this dictionary. It’s English to German. That should help you out.”
The new project occupied all of Filip’s spare time. He found Stars and Stripes, with its personal accounts of the American experience of the war, entirely accessible; he especially enjoyed the poems, humorous anecdotes, and cartoons. Soon he was reading independently, calling on the sergeant only to clarify some colloquial expressions not found in his dictionary.
Before long, he had exhausted the camp’s stock of back issues. “Are there any books? Anything, just so long as it’s in English.”
Evans raised an eyebrow at the young Russian’s temerity. And surely he was Russian; that Yugoslav designation was an obvious self-preserving lie. “You think this is a library?” He wavered between respect for Filip’s thirst for knowledge and annoyance at his presumption. Did this bold fellow think he could have anything he wanted?
And yet. Here was a man facing the future with nothing to depend on but his wits. The years when he should have been meeting girls, studying at university, learning a trade, going out with friends, had been stolen from him without even the compensation of fighting for his country. Who knew what scars he carried under that arrogant facade, after being kicked around from camp to camp like a goddam football? Who knew what he had seen?
Evans sighed. “I’ll ask the boys, see if they can lend you something. But you can start with this.” He handed Filip a pocket-sized army-issue Bible. “It’s been through a lot with me. I want it back. By the way, if you want to find your family, start with your churches. It’s where a lot of people go when they’re in trouble.”
Filip wasn’t sure he could use that advice, even if it made a certain kind of sense. He wasn’t in the habit of visiting churches, had no idea how to start looking for one. He was glad to lay the Bible aside and return it almost unread when one of the men came up with a battered copy of David Copperfield. He had read a great deal of Dickens at home, in translation; the Soviets approved of the social criticism in his works and honored the author’s self-made status. Here was a chance to read a real book, in its original language. It helped that he already knew the story and could focus on learning scores of new words.
“Be careful with it, man,” the soldier had said. “I picked it up in London, for my kids back home.” Filip nodded and smiled, already immersed in the first paragraph. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life . . .
He carried the book everywhere, stopping to read whenever he had the time. It was slow going, its pages full of words he did not yet know, but he resisted using his dictionary so as not to interrupt the flow of the lively tale, picking up meaning from the context of each scene. How can people live without books? he thought. What kind of life is that?
The road project involved clearing debris from a section that had been heavily bombed. “Throw the loose stuff into the craters and pack dirt on top,” Evans instructed. “Pack it good. We won’t be paving here anytime soon.”
They were issued a pass and permitted to work without supervision. “I wonder why.” Filip leaned on his shovel and brushed the sweat out of his eyes.
“Who wants to watch a couple of men shovel rocks into a pit?” Ilya straightened, stretching his back. “They have their hands full with those prisoners.”
After another hour or so they sat down in the shade of an old oak. I
lya rolled a cigarette. A squirrel chattered overhead. Ilya craned his neck in time to see it disappear into a hole in the trunk, with an angry flick of its puffed-out tail, its mouth full of leaves and twigs. Nesting, he thought. Making a home.
“I wonder where our women are,” he said. He coughed and blew a stream of smoke into the clear May air. “Don’t you want to know? To see your child?”
“Of course I want to know,” Filip answered with half-closed eyes. “Pass me the tobacco. I’m out of American smokes.”
They smoked a while in silence, the squirrel, resigned to their intrusive presence, going on about its business overhead. Filip took a chocolate bar out of his pocket, took a bite.
“I heard the Americans talking the other day, through an open window. I couldn’t understand everything, but it sounded like they don’t know what to do with us.”
“What did they say?” Ilya waved his hand, refusing the last of the treat his son-in-law belatedly offered to share.
“Something like ‘We’re supposed to start sending them back, but their papers are a mess. I can’t figure out who goes where.’”
“What else?”
“One said, ‘These ROA guys, you know they’re DOA. They won’t get a hero’s welcome.’ And the other one said, ‘Stupid bastards. Why do they keep coming back?’”
“What does DOA mean?”
“I asked a soldier later. It means ‘dead when you get there.’”
It couldn’t be more obvious. If the Americans started following orders to the letter, the repatriation would begin. It wouldn’t matter what anyone’s papers said; there was no guarantee their stateless status would protect them. Sergeant Evans had given them a clear chance to get away, and they had nearly squandered it.
Ilya stood up. “Get your things together, Filip. We’re leaving.”
“What, now? But we haven’t finished. It’s still early—”
“Not the road. The camp. Tomorrow morning.”
In the morning, just after breakfast, they simply walked away. Outside the gate they met Anneliese. She pedaled slowly, her basket balanced on the handlebars. Her knowing glance took in the rucksack Ilya carried, but she said nothing, pausing to follow them with her eyes before entering the compound to deliver the laundry.
Once they put the camp behind them and it was clear there would be no pursuit, the men picked up the pace, moving into the trees when the sun rose higher in the sky.
“Good thing we’re in the American sector.” Ilya shifted the rucksack to his other shoulder. “I’ve heard the British are sending all ROA back to the Soviet Union, even if they were only auxiliaries or sympathizers.”
“Why? Aren’t we all refugees? My feet hurt. Can we stop now?”
Ilya ignored his son-in-law’s complaint. “They see us as enemy combatants.”
“Combatants? That’s ridiculous. The Allies were never our enemies.” And I never wanted anything to do with this stupid idea. I never wanted to fight anyone.
“The British are a cold people, logical. They can’t see how anyone wearing a German uniform can be anything but the enemy. Americans are more practical. They can use our hands to help rebuild the country they destroyed.”
“So why did they let us go? The sentry must have seen us.” Filip slowed down to demonstrate his growing fatigue.
“They are not disciplined. Do you remember how they rolled into camp, handing out chocolate, laughing and waving? Their people feel secure between the oceans, they know nothing of living with war or the harsh realities of military occupation.”
Filip sat down defiantly on a fallen tree trunk. “Where are we, anyway?”
“South of Berlin, southwest of Dresden.” Ilya swung the rucksack to the ground and rubbed his shoulder where the canvas strap had bitten into the cloth of his coat.
“I know that.” Did the old man think him stupid? “But where exactly are we going?”
“To find my wife, and yours.” Ilya rested against a boulder, drank deeply from his water flask.
“Where? How?” Filip’s voice rose in exasperation. “Who will help us? The Germans hate us because we’re Russians. The Russians see us as traitors. So we can’t go back, and we can’t stay here. We left our passports and working papers, false though they are, at the American camp. So we can’t leave the country, either.” He stopped ranting and turned his face away. “And don’t say, ‘God will help us.’”
“We must keep moving,” Ilya said with conviction. “There are others like us, many others. When we find them, we will find our strength, and get information about our family, too, I’m certain.” He leaned the rucksack in Filip’s direction. “You take this for a while.”
Filip winced when the frayed strap settled onto his shoulder. “What did you put in here to make it so damn heavy?”
“My toolbox. A rusty hatchet head the Americans threw away; we can easily make a new handle for it. The boots you won in last week’s card game. A little food. Extra underclothes and socks. What we don’t have, and need, is a change of clothes.”
Filip grunted. He kept a few paces behind Ilya on the forested path, walking parallel to the road. He knew the toolbox alone made up most of the weight. It was made of wood panels several centimeters thick, filled with awls and files and chisels, flat polished disks of ivory and horn ready for carving, cutters and pliers and spools of wire.
It was a mystery to Filip how the old man had managed to hold on to his precious box since leaving Yalta. Time and again, it had been confiscated by guards and camp officials, only to reappear in his possession a day or two later with no explanation. Even in the pandemonium of Dresden, Ilya had refused to leave his toolbox with the piles of carefully labeled luggage on the railroad platform, as if he knew it would only be safe in his own hands, like a cherished child.
PART VII
Family
1
THE OLD MAN was still sleeping when Filip got back. The sun was already high in the sky, the walls of the dilapidated shed pierced by its rays. Filip hated sheltering like this, moving with the stealth of escaped criminals, hiding in barns and outbuildings, scrounging for food, sleeping, as often as not, in the woods. But we are criminals, he thought grimly. Turncoats and traitors. And now Ilya was sick, very sick, Filip guessed, looking at the face and neck flushed with fever, the dull, sweat-soaked hair. He had never known his father-in-law to sleep so late.
At home, in Yalta, Ilya was always up at first light, bent over his worktable, tapping and scraping at one of his brooches before leaving for his job at the shipping office or the market, depending on the day of the week. This steadfast industriousness, along with the innate goodness of the man, the quiet, unswerving moral certitude, was what Filip found unspeakably irritating.
Filip would lie in bed, listening to Ilya’s and Ksenia’s voices in the kitchen, his a low, calming counterpoint to her higher, more agitated tone. He would wait for them to finish their breakfast tea, consciously avoiding the silent reproach he was sure he saw in Ilya’s eyes, evading, too, the unspoken questions about his own lack of occupation or thought about his future.
That was all long ago, or seemed like it. Before the flight from their homeland, where, he felt, it had been possible to live in relative safety, not like this furtive animal existence. He had come to terms with the German presence, had learned their language. But no, they had to go right into the thick of it, shunted from labor camp to work detail, not knowing whether the bombs they dodged were Russian, German, American, or British. He was sick of it—the hunger, filth, humiliation, disease—and through it all, the peculiar numbing boredom, and the stupid perpetual discomfort.
“I should have stayed in Yalta,” Filip muttered. “Taken my chances.” But the family had insisted on leaving and Galya was going with them, carrying his child.
He stepped outside and sat down on a tree stump. His head hurt from too much cheap wine, but at least the Fräulein had been a fine one, resting her plump arms on his shoulders, whirling with him, fast
er and faster, propelled by the driving polka tempo. What was her name?
Gretchen? No, they can’t all be Gretchens, just as we are not all Ivans. Anna? Sophie? No matter. There were others. The tavern had been full, the dancers spilling out into the yard, where it was cool and lit only by the lamplight streaming out the open door. It had been a relatively calm night, with only two or three fights breaking out over who got which girl, none of the fights involving him. There were enough girls.
Still, he hated not remembering her name. After Anneliese, whose mute kindness had left a permanent imprint on his heart, there had been others. Hilda of the dancing eyes, her mouth hungry for kisses and chocolate; plain, serious Stella, whose cool hands took him into new realms of previously unimagined pleasure. Barely twenty years old and now free of camp restrictions, he was full of restless energy. Whenever he could detach himself from Ilya, he was his own man.
These stops in his personal odyssey were more memorable to him than the nameless towns, the places they had passed through since leaving the American camp; stops leading him back to Galya, of course. Of course to Galya, his wife.
And who knew where she was? The country was awash with bands of wandering refugees prompted to keep moving by hastily enacted municipal decrees: you may stay within the village limits only forty-eight hours or a day or, in rare cases, one week. Filip chafed under the obligation to stay with Ilya, but had to admire the older man’s survival instinct, his ability to earn a little money and find food, while quietly gathering information. He knew it was better to stay together, that finding one person would require an extraordinary stroke of luck. Two people, he reminded himself, not one. Galina and Ksenia were certainly together; nothing short of death could make Ksenia abandon her daughter, of that he was sure. Two women, then, and a newborn child.
Roads Page 27