by Roy Jacobsen
“She doesn’t want to leave, Herr Leutnant,” he said without hesitation.
“Doesn’t want to?!”
“No, Herr Leutnant.”
“Are you telling me you haven’t been able to remove an old woman from military premises?”
Jaromil hesitated, but then decided after a few seconds’ thought to keep any answer to himself. “You’ll have to shoot her then,” Markus said coldly. “She can’t sit here.”
“I can’t do that, Herr Leutnant.”
“No, right,” Markus said with some relief, mechanically registering that if he had been talking to a German soldier this incident could easily have had a more depressing outcome, now at least he wouldn’t have to pull rank.
“Have you got any food, Yadviga?” he asked in a sudden friendly tone.
She looked at him quizzically and nodded.
“Can you make me a hot meal?”
She nodded again, giving him a cautious toothless smile and got up stiffly; Markus noticed that the stool was a saddle, with legs which could be slotted into the pockets of a sheepskin over the pony’s back. He helped her to strap the saddle on, lifted her up onto the pony’s back and walked beside her through the blacked-out village, westwards to a rectangular clump of buildings at the edge of the built-up area. Two young boys darted over the ice-covered farmyard. From a shed with a sagging roof came the sound of horses snorting and stamping the ground. Otherwise all was still, it was dark and a dull starry sky hung above them.
Yadviga led the way into the hovel, which like the other buildings was made of clay and timber beams and half sunk in the ground. She lit a lamp and tried to place him in what must have been the house’s seat of honour, a cross between a divan and a child’s bed, covered with plush burgundy fabric, as far as Markus could see in the dim light, but he resisted such an undeserved homage and instead began to put logs in the stove while Yadviga struggled with pots and pans and filled the air with monotonous humming.
It was the first time for several months that Markus had found himself in civilian surroundings, the previous occasion was also with Cossacks, in the Crimea, who were evidently better off than Yadviga. When he asked who the various people in the carved wooden frames hanging on the walls were, she answered in monosyllables, she muttered names, maybe a date of birth, but she didn’t say a word about her son, perhaps because Markus deliberately skipped the picture he presumed must have been of her boy. But she was keen to talk about her brother, obviously a kind of modern-day Stenka Razin, who had been headman in a village near Starobelsk, fought in four wars and at the age of eighty had also gone off to fight in this one, on horseback with a rifle over his shoulder, only to be ridiculed by the German adjutant in charge of enlistment; later he had been killed in mysterious circumstances which had probably had nothing to do with the war, and now he stared out on the world, cross-eyed, proud and exotic, between a flaking icon and an Orthodox brass crucifix.
Markus had a meal of biblical lentils and Russian kale, in concentrated, solemn silence, while Yadviga chewed with her bare gums at ryebread and what looked like lard; she didn’t say anything, but when he thanked her for the food and the hospitality and wanted to leave, she made as if to go with him.
“I can’t do anything for your son,” he said wearily. “Regardless of whether you stay here or sit outside the barracks.”
She allowed him to leave alone, but next morning she was sitting there again, inside the compound, in the same freezing cold temperatures as before. And Jaromil made no attempt to move her on this time, either. Markus saw them talking when he was outside, he heard the Cossack admiring her embroidery with thoughtful grunts and saw him nod to something she had mumbled into her woollen shawl. She made no attempt to talk to Markus, to assail him with impossible demands or annoy him with requests only God could grant. She was just there, day after day, neither desperate nor grief-stricken but subject to her own laws of time, as strong as the force of gravity, and there was a rhythm to this relentless clock that suggested to Markus that not only were the Germans going to lose the war, that the Russian soul could not be vanquished by weapons and western obduracy, but that the breakout operation might fail too, for reasons other than lack of resources, inferior manpower and poor coordination between the supreme commands.
“This civilian nonsense” was therefore what he called Yadviga’s endurance outside in the cold. And those evenings he spent with her – three or four in all – he described in terms such as “They only served to obscure facts”, and by facts he meant what was happening in Manstein’s den, which was close to reality. But he couldn’t get rid of Yadviga, and it was one evening when he was showing her how to pray your way through the beads of a rosary that he got his pathetic idea. The background was as follows.
Operation Winter Storm had again been postponed. Manstein sent another written appeal to Hitler. Meanwhile Markus discovered that the Feldmarschall was now also assessing the positive aspects of keeping the Sixth Army in Stalingrad, as Hitler wanted: it could have the effect that “the Russians also dig in and slowly bleed to death in futile attacks; Stalingrad could become the grave of the attacking forces”.
This terrible thought had crossed Markus’ mind too, in the wake of Leutnant Weber’s speculations about Paulus’ propensity to selfless sacrifice, and it was obvious that Manstein would have to put this idea forward in order to be taken at all seriously in the Führer’s bunker, but why play such a high-risk game now, just before Winter Storm was about to be launched? There was still no doubt that this operation was going to go ahead, and Stalingrad was going to be evacuated, as far as Markus could see, but how clearly could he actually see? Wasn’t his sight getting worse and worse with every day that passed?
Well, at any rate he could see the absolute ridiculousness of the High Command even considering attack – let alone a rescue bid – when the enemy was threatening to break through on all fronts. It was also becoming less and less likely that the Fourth Panzers alone would be able to smash their way through into Stalingrad without the Sixth Army linking up with them, and what was more, who was going to order Paulus to do this?
As there was no sign of a change of heart in the Wolfschanze, there was only Manstein who could give the order. But then you were back to square one: Hitler would immediately get wind of the plan over the radio and countermand orders – tell him to stay where he is, don’t move! And it was out of this dreadful circular train of thought that Markus’ “little idea” came into being. One evening he was sitting over a piping hot bowl of soup at Yadviga’s watching her old hands fiddling with the rosary he had been given by his grandmother in his lost youth. Why doesn’t someone in the cauldron sabotage the bloody radio line to Hitler? They all want to get out, the soldiers and the generals, too!
The situation was so chaotic there that there had to be an opportunity to do it. But was Markus willing to demand of his own son that he make such a sacrifice, which might not even lead to anything? It made Abraham’s quivering knife against Isaac’s throat seem like an Old Testament party game.
For two whole days he hovered in fruitless speculation, cast long, searching glances back and forth through history and also had a confidential talk with Jakob Spitz about the matter. The cartographer at first did not want to listen to this “rubbish”, but then declared him insane and finally threatened to report him for treason.
“But why has it not occurred to anyone trapped in the cauldron that the direct line to Hitler must be broken?” Markus said vehemently. “They can all hear each other’s voices. It’s the hearing that counts, not the seeing!”
“They’ve probably all had the idea,” Jakob said. “But where would it all end if people began to put everything they thought into practice?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t want to hear another word.”
“But don’t you have a conscience?”
“I have this uniform. It’s an Unteroffizier’s uniform. It tells me that I don’t have the kno
wledge to have the necessary conscience. Only Manstein does.”
Markus nodded in response to this profundity, but when Operation Winter Storm was postponed for a second time and December 10 dawned to new intensive attacks on the Chir Front, Markus panicked and sent off a message with an apochryphal reference to a Flemish saint who, during the Dutch War of Independence, had broken off his newly established spiritual links with Calvin and returned to the House of the Father in Rome and the Catholic Church. The conversion had cost the man his life but also earned him eternal glory in heaven.
There was no answer.
13
Markus worked steadily with Hoth on December 11. The Generaloberst had finally arrived from the Caucasus with the 57th Panzer Corps, which together with Raus’ units would form the spearhead of Winter Storm. The attack was to follow the railway lines to Stalingrad, so they hoped they could use the bridges on the two rivers, the Aksay and the Myshkova, and the whole operation was to be crowned with a convoy of 800 trucks and half-tracks which in an almost industrial tour de force had been brought in, over ten days, by means of the rickety railway to Kotelnikovo, in addition to 3,000 tons of supplies, mostly food and fuel, because if it wasn’t possible to open – and keep open – a corridor, then they would at least try, in the heat of battle, to slip some petrol reserves through for Paulus to fill up his battered tanks.
The date was also set – the 12th. And as the moment approached – the evening of the 11th – Markus again felt the acute, unsettling tremors that had afflicted him in the Crimea and Kerch and which he had also noticed during Balck’s drive towards the Chir Front. He could see that the same change had been taking place in others, too: Manstein’s silence, which became more and more intense, his permanent good humour slightly reined in, even though he still made strained witticisms, you braced yourself, as if to take a kind of leap …when, late that evening, at long last Markus received a reply from the cauldron, a standard update – Paulus had only seventy tanks left! – ending with the words:
“Bernard. Don’t understand Calvin? Malachy.”
Markus wrote the following without hesitation or rather without thinking:
“Malachy. Break with Calvin imperative! Bernard”, sent it himself and waited for the next few minutes in a “die is cast” mood of historic proportions. However, this was soon to change because his son repeated the question, first once, then again, and at half past eleven (again German time, the Russians stuck resolutely to their own) Markus sent the same “order” for the third time – “Break with Calvin imperative” – for there was no longer any doubt that his son understood what history expected of him – drop your new faith and come back to the old one, back to your senses – all he needed was a little time to think.
Then Kuntnagel tried to cajole Markus into helping him find Raus’ regiment frequencies so that they could listen directly to the voice of the battlefield when it all broke loose.
Markus had staged something like this at Kerch, but on that occasion had been given such a stinging reprimand that he hesitated to repeat the performance; Manstein had no wish to hear of all the ups and downs on the battlefield, where nothing ever runs smoothly, details confuse and blind you to the strategic overview, as they say. On the other hand, the thought of sitting here again with folded hands, begging the Lord God and Hoth for “official” communiqués was not very appealing, especially if it were to go on for several days, never mind weeks, and now it was as if Markus were on his own, that was how it felt, it was a personal matter.
The commanders and the tank drivers communicated openly in the field, occasionally also with their own divisional commanders, they used slang, dialect or some other internal code, but they never gave their names or any other identification, so they had to recognise each other by their voices.
“Maybe we should learn this, too,” Markus mumbled with feigned reluctance. “If we’re going to make any sense of it. Anyway, it’s too far away.”
“It’s flat here,” Kuntnagel countered. “It’s possible.”
“It would take a miracle.”
“Isn’t that the reason you’re here?”
Markus looked up in bewilderment and started to work his way past the Russian jamming stations, misinformation and insidious offers of surrender and other rubbish that filled the ether between heaven and earth. “Raus is sure to be on the air tonight. You can listen and learn to identify the voices.”
They decided to let Beber in on the conspiracy because there was no other option; the new signals people, on the other hand, and Eismann’s mistrustful Intelligence Unit, would have to be left in the dark. But Beber wasn’t interested in any of this, he had received another alarming letter from home, in which his wife informed him that his son Erich had been transferred to Italy without warning.
“And what have we got in Italy? Isn’t that the road to Africa?”
Markus grudgingly read down through the lines of handwriting and had to admit to himself that Beber’s wife made no attempt to spare her husband at all, instead she used her pen to unload all the terrible speculation there was on the home front, now she was virtually begging him to prove that all the prattle she heard on the propaganda radio waves was true and correct, letters from the sons were few and far between, it seemed.
“Show it to Kuntnagel,” Markus said irritably, and went out into the waiting darkness of the night to have a few moments’ peace before the storm. But then he spotted Yadviga again, sitting on her “stool”, and the pony, which with closed eyes and bowed head wasn’t even nibbling at the clumps of hay she had scattered about in the gleaming snow. Jaromil had lit a fire for her.
Markus waited until the condensation on his glasses had cleared and then went into his sleeping quarters, got ready for bed and slipped between the sheets. But he was waiting for further telegrams from the cauldron which – if they contained the same question – would undoubtedly have the effect on him of a desperate appeal to get the spectacular idea of trying to break through called off, and he would have gladly acquiesced, the “Panzerruhe” hadn’t sent him into a coma yet, and after half an hour he got up again, looked at the thermometer, which showed minus eight, got dressed and went into the mess for bread, butter, a piece of sausage, and salt, which he took out to Yadviga. He mounted her saddle on the decorated sheepskin, lifted her up and led the pony to the small cluster of farm buildings. There he fed the meek creature, carried Yadviga inside and laid her on the divan, spread a blanket over her and covered the round table with an embroidered cloth, on which he placed two knives and two bowls.
“Soon over,” he said absent-mindedly.
Again they ate in silence, he soup, she bread, boiled kale leaves and the lard-like substance she stuffed down with a small spoon. He asked her whether she had any vodka. She nodded towards a cupboard beside a door which presumably led to her bedroom. He took out a half-full sea-green bottle without a label, a medicine bottle with a crumbly cork.
She insisted they should have a glass, they drank one each and finished eating. Then she fell asleep while Markus sat listening to the murmur of the universe, he had another glass of vodka, dropped off for a few moments, thinking that this was the first time he – who had forced himself to live so close to reality – had done anything concrete not to comprehend what was happening, he was hiding from reality here, in civilian surroundings, this is what he was doing, with his absence he was saying “no thanks” to further military analyses, to Kuntnagel’s eavesdropping, to Beber’s letters and Eismann’s depressing cauldron reports – the last one he had seen said that Hitler had given Manstein permission to move the 17th Panzer Division from the Upper Don to join Hoth, a manoeuvre which of course would increase the chances of a successful breakthrough. But Markus had also heard the reaction:
“Too late,” the Feldmarschall had mumbled, and that might mean, as far as Markus was willing to speculate, that at the moment Manstein was contemplating another postponement, or perhaps a total abandonment of the operation, unless, t
hat is, the monumental Winter Storm had become a matter of sheer moral necessity, a grandiose sacrificial rite to purge the commanders of their bad conscience, or else it was to be enacted for the sake of its place in history, a ritual of honour that was doomed to fail from the outset?
But Markus had put all this depressing military dissonance behind him; weak will lay at the heart of his last supper with Yadviga.
“I couldn’t just let her sit there,” he says in his defence when Robert presses him on this point. “She was on the point of freezing to death.”
“But Jaromil had lit a fire for her.”
“That man was not to be trusted. Remember what he said: ‘I’ve got four children,’ he said, ‘I know nothing.’ He just wanted to have control over me.”
“Now you’re contradicting yourself, Markus.”
“I always have done. You have to if you have any ambition to appear decent. But there’s another reason I couldn’t let her die that evening …let me put it like this: as long as there was any life in her, there was hope for us all. She held off the insidious bubonic plague that was penetrating our souls from these abominable Steppes – you think you know what flat land is, Robert, since you know Flanders, but the Russian Steppes are not land, they are earthen crust and horizon, it is the planet’s vast torso, a sea without a wave, which sucks out every thought and belief as we gaze at them, and our last ounce of energy, and we are reduced to empty reeds through which the wind can sound its lament…
“Did Manstein see her, too?”
“I don’t know, but he did of course sleep in the royal railway carriage he’d brought from Starobelsk, so he must have passed her now and then, in which case he can’t have done anything to have her removed, and why should he have, he let her sit there for the same reason that he put up with me, even God needs to show some mercy occasionally.”