Borders

by Roy Jacobsen

  “At last you’re here, Hebel,” the General sighed. “Can you interpret for me? I don’t understand what this man’s saying. He’s talking about the rivers icing up. They’ve been cracking and crunching for weeks now, so it’s probably only a matter of days before they’re completely frozen over. I want to know what this means.”

  “Means, Herr General?”

  “Yes, at what temperature is the ice load-bearing, normally, after how many days, how much can it carry, where, what about the current and so on? – they built a whole railway over Lake Ladoga last winter …Ask him about all this and get back to me as soon as you’ve finished!”

  Markus discussed the ice question with the Cossack for almost half an hour. The man answered sullenly in fluent Russian – of course the enemy would be able to cross the Volga over the ice, in only a few days, maybe also the Upper Don, in a week, if the temperatures continue to fall, by laying down branches and planks or pontoons and spraying the lot with water for example, it’s an old method, but of course the ice can always be bombed to smithereens, we’ve got planes, haven’t we, ha ha, but sooner or later, before the New Year, I imagine, they’ll be able to move a whole army over anywhere they like, by then the rivers will have gone, it will all be steppe, there’ll be no difference at all…”

  Markus mulled on this.

  “And the Don’s tributaries?” he asked. “The Aksay and the Myshkova, the ones we can use?”

  “The Myshkova freezes over before the Aksay – the Aksay is …well, I don’t know…”

  Markus led him to Jakob’s map room and made him put crosses along the rivers on an operational map, on the Volga, the Don, the Chir and also the Don’s tributaries, and grade them according to their probable load-bearing capacities. He exchanged a few words with the meteorologist, a short-sighted professor and minor aristocrat from the University of Tübingen, whom Manstein had brought along from Vitebsk and who went under the name of Galileo because no-one else but him believed in the forecasts he dished up. Markus asked him what he thought about the prospects for the coming days – “Frost, hard frost, no doubt about that, the wind will come from the north-east, and as long as there’s no frozen mist the weather will be bright and clear” – and then he went to Command H.Q., where Manstein was sitting alone at his desk updating a logbook. From the room next door came the sound of loud voices, Busse and Eismann, as far as Markus could work out, through the half-open door, discussing the impossible situation at Verkhne Kumsky.

  Markus handed him the chart and at a nod from the General began to describe the reservations he thought needed to be added to the Cossack’s analysis, the Cossack was not from the area although he had an unfortunate tendency to act as if he were, but Markus was interrupted by an impatient growl.

  “I wasn’t asking for a dissertation, Hebel. This is good enough. Where have you been these last few hours?”

  “In bed, Herr General.”

  “You can’t have been doing much there then?”

  “Nothing at all, Herr General. Since there is nothing to do anywhere here for a man like me, I have realised that now!’

  Manstein seemed to be considering an enigmatic smile, but contented himself with a narrow-eyed, searching look.

  “The enemy has blown up the bridge over the Don,” he said matter-of-factly. “At Nizhne Chirskaya.”

  “What?!”

  Markus counted his heartbeats, he counted to eight, they were all soul-shaking; he felt more demoralised in the company of the General than anyone; here he had – as he himself puts it – studied his way out of farming’s ten tired commandments, adopted the intellectual arrogance necessary to survive with a certain dignity in the higher echelons of society, only to be thrust back into the cowshed at the mere sight of these small, calm eyes, which resembled those of John the Baptist as they stared sadly down at him from the Stavelot altar of his boyhood, and with a similar message, a blown-up bridge, the bridge. “It happened only an hour ago,” the General continued in the same flat tone. “And it doesn’t seem that this ice will be able to help any of us for now. That means that the 17th will have to cross further south, at Potemkinskaya, we’ll lose a day or two – can you deal with this, liaise with Eismann and see to it that …?”

  He hesitated and Markus grabbed his chance.

  “Does that mean that the Sixth Army will also have to cross at Potemkinskaya on its way out?”

  In military terms, an idiotic question, even to Markus, but he didn’t give a damn, there was only one thing on his mind, to elicit the General’s real intentions, to hear whether in the light of the last day’s discouraging developments any changes to Winter Storm had been deemed necessary. Manstein gave a sour smile.

  “As long as the ice cannot bear the weight, anyone who wants to cross the Don will have to go to Potemkinskaya,” he said. “Unless they go even further south …What happens after that, God only knows.”

  “I assume, Herr General, that the enemy has had problems navigating the Volga over the last few weeks, with all these ice floes …?”

  “Let’s hope so – what are you getting at, Hebel?”

  “What I’m getting at, Herr General, is that the army has to be evacuated before the ice sets in. Once it has, it is too late – it is too late for anything!”

  Instead of answering, Manstein asked – after another unnerving pause – a long question in French, whether Markus had had any contact with his son recently, and if so what had transpired from the conversation. Markus answered in the negative, also in French, and also corrected a grammatical mistake in the General’s question before saying:

  “Excuse me, Herr General, but I find it regrettable that the General Staff still consider it necessary to test me. French is my mother tongue, just as German is yours. That’s how things are and there’s no changing them. I now look forward to carrying out the tasks I have been assigned.”

  But this grandiose pomposity of his made no impression on his superior.

  “As far as I remember, you already have a task,” the General said. “To guide the 17th Panzers over the Don. And since you show such eagerness to do something – keep on your toes!”

  The conversation was over. Markus fell out and returned to the mess, had a quick lunch and heard from Kuntnagel that the prospects on the Chir Front were just as dismal, which would probably force Manstein to deploy the 17th Panzers there, Kuntnagel said with a lofty, self-important expression, rather than have them join up with Hoth’s forces, who by the way were still getting nowhere; Verkhne Kumsky was showing all the signs of becoming a real nightmare, it had been taken and lost and taken again, by Hünersdorff no less, the 11th Regiment, which fortunately appeared to be made of sterner stuff than flesh and blood.

  Markus chose to view all this as a lower-ranking officer’s natural tendency to exaggerate, left his friend with a forced shrug, and concentrated on the task of guiding the 17th Panzers south to Potemkinskaya. And as there were no counter-orders when the division – on his chart – crawled past the Chir sector, he concluded that the front was still holding up.

  Later that evening it was confirmed that the battle for Verkhne Kumsky, which General Raus in his daily log called “a massive wrestling match”, would go down in history as one of the war’s greatest tank battles. Kampfgruppe Hünersdorff had indeed been driven out of the village and, after a few terrifying hours of fighting their way round and north-west of the forlorn group of houses, they had managed to retake it, before once again having to withdraw all the way back to the Aksay. Casualties were very heavy, and Markus had to erase from his mind any speculation as to whether the high figures were intended to make Manstein consider calling off the operation or whether Hünersdorff only wanted more reinforcements as soon as possible, in other words that Hoth was again being liberal with the regrettable truth. Kuntnagel’s eavesdropping wasn’t producing any results, either, Kuntnagel had had enough; moreover, he had his hands full with the setbacks on the Chir Front.

  17

 
At a little after eleven in the evening the 17th Panzers reported that the forward troops had reached Potemkinskaya and found the bridge intact, they were already going over, and Markus made up his mind that this would have to be the last news from the battlefield for the day, it was good news too, something to sleep on, but he couldn’t restrain himself, he had to see the figures from the cauldron, it had been good, clear flying weather, but no more than 125 tons had got in, and with a loss of eighteen whole planes! Fighting in the north of the cauldron, dreadful casualties there, too. But there was no sign of life from his son.

  Markus considered sending another telegram and decided to repeat one of his earlier messages:

  “Malachy. Health. As on your first or second visit? Bernard.”

  He waited for half an hour, in vain, killed another half an hour looking for Hünersdorff – when did they actually sleep? – but due to the crackling cacophony from the ether he didn’t have a clear picture. He played a game of chess with Jaromil, got annoyed as usual at the Cossack wanting to introduce new rules when Lady Luck didn’t smile on him and then walked out into the cold night air, where he was struck by the silence and a distant cosmic rumble, which aroused thoughts that had been lurking at the back of his mind all day, especially when he was outside and felt this breath of eternity. They circled around a chapter in Russian history which had made such a huge impression on him during his schooldays, a kind of nightmare, “Charles XII’s march from Romni to Gadiatz” it was called, kilometres and kilometres of the frozen terrain north of Poltava, in the context of military history a relatively short march but undertaken in such lethally freezing conditions that the Swedish king’s army was halved in the course of a single night. There was a majesty, a kind of national romanticism, about these accounts, illustrated as they were by splendid and pompous masters. The march was called everything from “Charles’ definitive defeat” to “the actions of a fool” – as the Swedish King could easily have stayed at Romni – to “the turning-point in Russian history”, while the Russians, the poor wretches, were depicted everywhere in an ignoble, unchivalrous light: Peter the Great, who let the winter do the job for him rather than leaving his lavish tea salons and fighting like a man, which he only dared to do at Poltava, when Charles was wounded in the foot and had to hand over command to the indecisive General Rhenskjöld, with well-known results. Markus had learned that the winter of 1708–9 had been an ice age of its own, through all of Europe. The Rhone and the Loire were iced over for months, the fish froze to death in the canals of Venice, the farm animals keeled over in the cattle stalls in the Ardennes, and across the Ukrainian Steppes whole flocks of small birds rained down from the skies. The Swedish invaders sank to the bottom in the Russian eternity like lead in water, as holy Theophan Prokopovich of Kiev observed, for God holds His hand over this people even though many may have secretly wondered why the Lord didn’t also use the opportunity to free them from their own tyrant, Peter the Great, but God speaks in tongues, He appears in the guise of a devil and confuses His flock with unsolvable riddles, and moreover, He repeated this exercise a hundred years later when He sent Napoleon into the same abyss, and He was well on the way to doing it a third time, He allowed the ice to take over the place that hellfire had earlier occupied in the European religious consciousness, cold desolate landscapes and a deafening silence which people traverse with bowed, trembling heads, more and ever more slowly, until they come to a standstill and are transformed into sculptures at absolute zero, to blocks of frozen life, where everything is preserved but nonetheless abandoned, where monuments are created by the same inscrutable God who has breathed life into the wild flowers and the leaves and the quails, certainly not by the survivors, who allow their memories to be embellished by the sentimental trumpets of mourning. Markus thought about all this again now, for on this night he saw Yadviga for the last time.

  She was sitting as usual on the saddle beside her pony, the fire had died down and she was no longer doing her embroidery, her hands were buried in two great mittens, she had a sheepskin around her body, held together by a coarse hemp rope. Markus went over to her and greeted her with dignity, first in German, then in Russian, to emphasise the foreigner’s natural modesty. She responded with a weak smile. The next moment she died.

  He saw her final breath, a white cloud that issued from the toothless mouth and disappeared into thin air. No part of her moved. Her arms did not fall to her lap, they were there already. Her head did not sink to her breast, it was held firmly in place by the fur collar, like a crane’s egg in a nest of straw. Her eyes did not close and the smile did not leave her lips. Small crystals of ice appeared on the invisible down of her face, the ice’s hazy flame made it glisten. Around one of her nostrils a drop formed, but it never fell.

  You can say what you like to Markus to get him to admit that this must have happened the other way round, that Yadviga’s quiet death stimulated his thoughts on the historic ice and the frozen monuments, in other words, that they occurred afterwards. But he categorically denies it. He came out of Command H.Q. and stood still for a few minutes listening to the creaking of the boards beneath his feet while the images of Charles XII’s hapless army – and the ice – circulated around his brain – long before he spotted Yadviga’s glowing monument to the Cossack soul. So he has also predicted this death, or has seen it coming, prompted by the atmosphere of the war museum that was Novocherkassk, where time has stood still and the war is still going on and will continue to do so forever, and he cites in his defence – after all, it is his sanity which is being questioned here – that he had made this prediction the very first time he looked into her wizened face. This is therefore not a miracle we have witnessed but a realistic course of events, just as Leutnant Weber’s demise could not have come as a surprise to anyone who had smelt the stench from his wounds, and we will have to make do with this explanation, or at least desist from claiming that it is not completely true until Markus himself reappraises the issue and turns it on its head.

  He lifted the little woman onto the pony and took her home, tethered the animal in the low shed and gave it fodder for a couple of days, then carried Yadviga into the house and laid her on the divan, which henceforth he called the “sarcophagus”, with a wry smile, and a vain attempt to drive away the memories. He also maintained that he opened one of the windows so that the frost would tend to her, but he didn’t remove her sheepskin, though he did her mittens. At that moment he saw the rosary in her right hand and exchanged it for the Orthodox cross he had been given by Jaromil, but actually by her – he did these things without thinking. Afterwards he went out into the farmyard and knocked on the door of the neighbouring house into which he had seen two boys scuttle on the first evening. But no-one opened up. Everywhere there was this same electric peace, the sky was star-filled, the air was crisp like sandpaper with not a movement anywhere. But on his way back he saw Jaromil smoking a cigarette outside a blacked-out shack, with a man Markus had not seen before, presumably negotiating the price of a new delivery of vodka, Markus’ standard explanation of the Cossacks’ mysterious behaviour.

  He greeted them briefly and carried on towards the quarters and Command H.Q., where Fatty Beber’s body odour had made its heavy presence felt in the radio-room atmosphere. Markus immediately wanted to back away, but the big man twisted in his chair and said with a startled grin:

  “It’s still undecided in Verkhny Kumsky. They’re fighting for the third day. What do you say to that?”

  Markus was about to ask how things were by the Chir and the Upper Don, the fronts on which the relief operation depended, but stopped himself and went to his quarters. That night he didn’t sleep a wink. At just after three he was called by Jaromil, who barged in with a finger to his broad lips while pulling theatrical grimaces – Leutnant Hebel had to go at once and help him out of “a delicate situation”.

  Annoyed, Markus got up again and dressed, went over to the Cossacks’ barracks, which had been set up in the main building o
f the collective. To the sound of deep grunts and snoring from the rows of bunks on either side, Jaromil led him through the dormitory into the adjacent washrooms, and from there into a coal shed. Here, the Cossack shone his torch on a corpse, clearly one of the guards. The man was lying on his back with a gun in his mouth and his brains blown out over the glistening lumps of coal. Markus bent down and put his finger in a pool of blood and ascertained that it wasn’t frozen, which in these temperatures must have meant the tragedy had happened only a few minutes ago – and this right next to the sleeping soldiers?

  Markus asserts that he made his decision – suicide – while suspecting that the real cause may have been completely different, it was “a pragmatic decision”, as he calls it, for all he knew it could have been the result of an internal disagreement, for example about their accursed vodka, unless the dogs had been scrapping again, the Cossacks who in all wars on Russian soil have fought on both sides, like two nations, and have often changed sides in the process, all according to how the wind blew on the battlefield, or because of other factors that have tempted them; was this the first sign of a new “conversion”, back to Russia and the Soviet Union, brought to a bloody end by Jaromil, for example?

  Markus asked where the head of the guards was, and Jaromil decided to answer that the man was somewhere in the village – in a civilian house, which Markus took to mean with a woman he was unlikely to be married to.

  He asked Jaromil if he’d had any thoughts about why this poor wretch had found it necessary to depart this world. And again the Cossack began to prevaricate:

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled, “but he’s been to Stalingrad. He came back today.”

  “He’s been where?”

  “To Stalingrad.”

  “In the cauldron? How the hell did he manage that?”