by Ben Pastor
“It doesn’t mean their commanders will release them.”
“They will as soon as they see the Field Marshal’s signature, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
More numbers followed, estimates, the minutiae of an organizational plan. Von Salomon read Bora’s typewritten notes with his face low, underscoring every line in pencil as if to impress words and ciphers in his memory. “Good,” he said at last, smoothing the pages on the teacher’s desk, all that Bora had to offer as a drawing table. “I’m glad you, at least, are keeping your lucidity. It’s not universal, you know. We all cope with the size and scope of what’s around us as best we can.”
“Yes, sir.”
There’s always a moment when the narrow door of formality between colleagues opens a crack more to reveal a space where a few liberties – if not exactly familiarity – are allowed. Von Salomon had already created this space by remarking on Bora’s lucidity. Later, putting away his pencil in a monogrammed leather case, he added in a low voice, “Just think, it was reported to me that a certain colonel in an artillery regiment demands that all his officers be born under the zodiacal sign Leo. ‘The sign of conquerors,’ he says. And a dear friend, whom I do not identify by name out of respect, has been collecting hair clippings from his fallen soldiers in an album, arranged by colour. I’m afraid he has filled more than one volume by now.” The leather case found the breast pocket, slipped inside it. “You’re aware that in the first winter on this front… well, in that first winter all sorts of things happened. Before Moscow we built a fence with the bodies of Russians run over by tanks: they and their long coats had turned flat and stiff like cardboard cut-outs. We used them as road signs, too. So you will appreciate it if these days I tell you how it reassures me to deal with a young man who has kept his right mind.”
“I am grateful to the colonel.”
Von Salomon had already remarked upon Bora’s impeccability in a complimentary way at their first meeting, an unusual show of approval for a higher officer. “Impeccable” meaning in fact “unlikely to sin”, it was about as far as any of them felt (or were) at this time of their warring lives. But Bora was not deluded; von Salomon referred to appearance and comportment. He did make a point of keeping up the appearance of a German officer, if nothing else. The stiff upper lip (“Stoicism”, Dikta called it, in her less spiteful moments) was a family trait. He’d thought a little less of the lieutenant colonel after the compliment. Not because he didn’t appreciate it, but because he was sure he did not deserve it.
“In your own way, Major, those of you who kept their lucidity are impregnable fortresses.”
Ein feste Burg… It was Luther’s hymn about God as inviolable citadel. As a Lutheran, von Salomon was surely not ignorant of Bora’s descent from the reformer’s wife, even though he might not know that the landed Boras from Bora (or Borna) itself had remained Catholic with the stubbornness of Saxons who do not give in to anyone, not even other Saxons. Whatever the case, it was excessive praise, and Bora said so.
The lieutenant colonel shook his balding head. “No, no, allow me. I speak from experience; I met my demons in the winter of ’41. If you haven’t been told – and I’d rather you heard it directly from me – I was repatriated in the winter of ’41 after a serious nervous breakdown. They sent me first to Bad Pyrmont, then to Sommerfeld, closer to home. It was just exhaustion, not insanity. As you can see, I have recovered perfectly.”
Bora nodded. Bad Pyrmont, at the border with Switzerland, was merely a spa, the same one where his stepfather had gone to brood over Nina’s first refusal to marry him in 1912. But at Sommerfeld the army had built nothing less than a sanatorium for the mentally unstable.
It was an unsolicited apology on the part of his superior in rank. Any comment would be superfluous. Yes, Bora had overheard how von Salomon had not come unscathed through the Russian experience, so he was careful (he would be, in any case: military sobriety required it) to keep the mildly expectant attitude of the younger officer. That the man had been repatriated for health reasons as early as the winter of 1941 did not change matters, even though increasingly erratic behaviour, coupled with the tendency to weep over setbacks, was wholly unacceptable in a lieutenant colonel, such as von Salomon had been since 1941. He’d served valorously enough to be decorated once back at the front, but promotion to full colonel still eluded him.
With the coming of spring, he seemed to be flagging again a little. Bora thought of a colleague’s worried comment a few days earlier, when he had travelled to Generaloberst Kempf’s Poltava HQ to get official support for the organization of his unit. “But then,” his colleague told him over a mug of beer, “it could be worse. We’ve got folks here who are superstitious about walking on the shady side of the street, or leaving their quarters with the left foot. Did I tell you about the captain at Zaporozhye who collects live flies in a glass jar, just to see them cannibalize one another and eventually die? That’s sick, isn’t it?”
However von Salomon took Bora’s discreet silence about health matters, he seemed anxious to change the subject. “How’s the update coming along?” he asked.
He meant the painstaking work of gathering details about Soviet guerrilla methods in handbook form: the distilled essence of interrogation, wire-tapping of all kinds and on-sight observation, Bora and his colleagues’ ongoing project ever since 1941.
“Satisfactorily so far, Herr Oberstleutnant. It’ll soon be ready for use as a third edition of the Partisan Warfare Handbook, or as an addendum to what we have already. It’s a stand-alone text. Naturally, we’re adding items every week.” Bora said it to convince himself, trying not to think of the difficulties he was encountering as an interrogator.
“Good, good.” Von Salomon stood to place the typewritten sheets about the cavalry unit – meant for Generalleutnant von Groddeck – inside an already overstuffed briefcase. The meeting might have ended here, except he’d apparently heard about the deaths at Krasny Yar, and was “rather intrigued”.
“Are you familiar with the place, Major?”
Krasny Yar, again. Bora said he wasn’t, not really. “I only went there for the first time yesterday, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
Bora bit his tongue. Those Krasny Yar corpses kept coming up, adding trouble to trouble, surfacing in conversation in the same way they surfaced in the woods. Managing the unexpected is always difficult, even in peacetime; when abnormality reigns, the unexpected is intolerable, mostly because you don’t recognize it at first. You simply stagger when yet another weight is added. Lucidity, on the other hand, was something he took pride in. What else was there, when one had gone beyond courage and beyond fear? Both words were meaningless now, as if his mind (or soul) had developed calluses and no blow would register upon it until it bled.
He told the colonel what he knew, sketchily because he had errands to run and wanted to make it to the district commissioner’s office before a queue grew in front of his office. “None of the victims died from gunfire, so possibly the killer doesn’t want to be heard, or perhaps he has no firearms. The dead were mostly women or the elderly, which might make one suspect the attacker may not be in his physical prime; but then, as I understand, mostly women and older people went into the Yar. Our soldiers in the area were never harassed: for the reasons above, or because the killer feared we would then mount a full-scale operation. That’s all the solid data, Herr Oberstleutnant. The rest is peasant gabble.”
Thankfully, von Salomon had lost interest midway through the exposition. When they parted ways in downtown Merefa, each bound to his next task, the colonel insisted on seeing Bora to his vehicle. Walking between two buildings, he pushed his younger colleague aside with a sudden, barely controlled shove, so that Bora would be the one to step into the shade. It could have been a coincidence, and Bora was careful not to show he’d noticed. As he started the engine, however, he saw the colonel in the rear-view mirror still rigidly keeping to the sunlit centre of the lan
e, forcing a courier’s motorcycle to swerve around him and skirt the wall.
Only three kilometres lay between what Bora called his Merefa outpost (the small schoolhouse on the road to Alexandrovka, with a sombre row of graves outside its courtyard) and the office of Gebietskommissar Alfred Lothar Stark. Despite this, he had time during the brief stretch to face two stocky Russian fighter planes heading for him, hedge-hopping back from who knows where – without ammunition, otherwise they wouldn’t have spared the solitary army car. They swept over him so low that he slammed on his brakes and nearly went off the road. He’d just accelerated again when they veered ahead of him, cutting across his path this time. Bora was able to decipher the white letters – Gitlerji – painted on one of the fighters. Whatever curse they were addressing Hitler with in Cyrillic, they attracted the attention of the German pilots stationed at Rogany, who appeared from nowhere, skimming the roofs with machine guns blazing. And even if they barely missed Bora, they scored a direct hit on a picket fence, pulverizing it along with the ridge pole of the izba beyond, only to vanish behind the rooftops after their fleeing enemies, towards Oseryanka.
When Bora reached his destination, an ominous plume of black smoke to the west marked the place where one of the Russian fighters had most likely met its end. The sky was otherwise free of noise and of the peculiar happy blue of the season. As a pilot’s brother, on principle Bora did not wish evil to flyers in general. All he could do was hope that there was another reason for the black cloud out there.
The building that served as Stark’s brand-new headquarters had in the old days been the residence of a German manufacturer, such as one found in and around Kharkov before the Revolution. Whether descendants of Moravians settled here long ago or technologically advanced newcomers, Germans had frequented the region for years. The brick construction, gabled and tall, with the date 1895 inscribed on a limestone scroll under the peak of the roof, could have stood anywhere on German soil. Although the long-disused factory behind it had perished during the fighting, the house was still referred to as the Kombinat. A branch of the Kharkov railroad led directly to the factory and the residence from the old-fashioned little architectural jewel still called – the war notwithstanding – New Bavaria Station. The Kombinat’s façade bore signs of the house’s old elegance, including stained glass in the bullseye windows by the door, miraculously intact. And this even though (Bora knew; he’d gone in a couple of times before) the interior had been partitioned into cubicles years ago to host Rabfak worker–students of the Kharkov Technical Institute for Engineers, and later the aeroplane factory employees. Only the ground floor maintained some of the old glory, and the district commissioner’s office was just inside the main entrance, to the right.
Bora was in luck. No queue: only Russian prisoners on their knees, waxing the floor. In the small parlour to the left, a brown-jacketed assistant enquired as to his business; he then leapt from behind his desk, stepped across the corridor and opened Stark’s double door just enough to put his head through. Whatever he was told, the assistant simply slid both wooden leaves wide open and went back to his desk.
“Major Bora,” Stark called, seeing him on the threshold. “Come in, come in. What have you got for me today?”
Bora walked in. The panelled, well-lit room was overly spacious, but then space was needed for the amount of paperwork that started and ended here; in just a few weeks, the Gebietskommissar (Geko, as he was nicknamed) had set up an efficient system of managing people and resources in the area that the army countenanced mostly because it hampered the Security Service’s overbearing. Whatever Stark’s office had been earlier – most likely a parlour – it had some pretence of elegance: a high ceiling, coffered, a chandelier shaped like a transverse metal bar, on which etched opaline glass bulbs the size of melons lined up; glass cabinets; a spotless, carpetless oak floor. Stark himself, in his gold-brown SA blouse, radiated both optimism and a busy man’s problem-solving attitude. Asking Bora what he might have for him only revealed his trust that officers would spontaneously turn in captured goods or civilians for labour. They’d met a week earlier on account of the mounts Bora still needed to bring his unit to full strength, Stark displaying an impressive knowledge of the horseflesh yet available in the Kharkov Oblast.
Bora said, “I actually have a couple of questions for you, District Commissioner.”
Stark gestured for him to sit down while he continued to converse with someone on the telephone. “Not the insecticide again, Colonel… I’ve got your requests here. I read them; I understand. But we’re strapped for it; we need it for other hospitals. Believe me, if I could, I would. I shipped it all out last week. Well, bricks we do have; I got a load straight from Nova Vodolaga. If it’s bricks you want, and nothing else, I can favour you.” Covering the mouthpiece, Stark looked over. He saw that Bora remained standing, and took it to mean he was in haste. “Yes, Major?” he enquired.
“I need five women —” Bora began to say.
“Five women?” Stark lowered the receiver, smiling in a friendly way. “That’s the cavalry for you. You need five women?”
“— to do the washing and cleaning for us, Herr Gebietskommissar.”
Stark grunted a “Yes, goodbye” into the mouthpiece, and returned the receiver to its cradle. Looking over the top of his glasses, he leafed through the typewritten sheets in a neat folder of his. “Well, if that’s all you horse boys need them for, Major, I’ve got five babushkas your grandma’s age.”
“They’ll do.”
“Have them picked up tomorrow morning sevenish at the Merefa station, and then stop by to sign the paperwork. What’s the other question?”
“Well, it was insecticide until I heard you a moment ago. I did try to remedy things on my own, but – I brought along a list the medical corps gave me. I think it’s a crescendo, in terms of efficacy. Pyrethrum, for example. I don’t know where to find it, even though I have access to three out of the four other components – coal oil, ether and turpentine. Naphthalene I think I could scrounge from maintenance if they have some to spare.”
“Pyrethrum? We’ve got none.”
“Potassium arsenite was my next bet. Other ingredients: ten parts of milk is fine, but where do I find molasses?” (Stark shook his head.) “So, I’m down to sulphur dioxide, even though without pressurized bottles we’d have to burn it on a gas cooker for – what, seven hours or so? With wooden huts and straw roofs, it’s not a great idea. For best results, hospitals recommend hydrocyanic acid, better if Zyklon B, poured on floors and sealed off. But the ventilation time —”
“Please!” Stark raised his hands in an alarmed gesture. “Leave the hydrocyanic acid alone; don’t even think of it! You’d kill yourselves and your mounts. I’ll see if I can get you bottled sulphur dioxide. You’ll have to ration it like water in the desert, though. For a closed room, 100 grams per square metre will do, in about five hours.”
“When may I send for it?”
“I said I’ll see if I can get it. Send someone on Friday if I don’t call you back.” The phone rang again as Bora left, and Stark picked up the receiver while shaking his head. “Zyklon B,” he muttered. “What are they thinking?”
Bora thanked him and left. As golden pheasants went, District Commissioner Stark was better than most. Physically, he’d have resembled a sturdy pheasant even without the administrator’s telltale brown-yellow blouse. The fact that his office had just been set up here within the bounds of militarily administered Ukraine represented an escalation in the infighting among the Party, the SS and Rosenberg’s Ministry for Eastern Occupied Territories. The Army steered clear of the tiff, but Bora’s “new father-in-law”, as he called his wife’s stepfather, was too close to the Party’s inner circle for him not to have heard about it.
By all accounts, considering that it was his charge to extract all that was possible from this region, Geko Stark did it with some basic humanity. Perhaps his early days as a newspaperman had a role in that. He’d giv
en up a rich post as a Gauleiter to serve here, and now operated from Merefa like a tranquil spider in its web, keeping in touch with his assistants on the road. Stark’s strong voice (the voice of an industrialist, more or less his own grandfather’s voice at the publishing house, clear and distinct) reached Bora in the corridor, where he had stopped to read communiqués on a bulletin board. The Russian prisoners waxing the floor drew back on their knees, making room for him, without raising their heads. Yes, Stark was organizing things. Soon everyone would have to come knocking here to get what was needed. If Generaloberst Kempf resented having such gross civilian interference in his sector, he kept it to himself, or had other things to worry about. Leaving the Kombinat, Bora overheard Stark bellow, “And where am I to find those?” over the phone, whatever those were.
Eventually all of Ukraine (Gothland, now that Himmler had renamed it) would be under civil administration. If there was time. To Bora it made little difference whether he had to go to Army supply or to a former SA in order to get what he needed. But for SA Oberführer Magunia of the Kiev General District, not to mention Ministerial Director for Ukraine, Erich Koch – who by squeezing blood out of turnips had exasperated the sleepy locals into armed resistance – finding oneself next door to a spurious Area District under the cool-headed, effective Alfred Lothar Stark might be a nuisance. Magunia had taken his vengeance by granting him no more than a skeleton crew, so that the Commissar had to do most of the work himself out of the busy little office at Merefa. Whatever insecticide he used, there were no flies in his office, but the moment Bora stepped out, they were a nuisance again. On the other hand, there was no running water anywhere; jerrycans had to be hauled for the most basic needs. Toilet bowls – when available – reeked; sinks reeked. Latrines reeked of carbolic acid over the stench of human waste. Bora chased the flies from his path. The five babushkas he’d send for in the morning would have to do the troopers’ washing on the bank of the closest river, like in the beginning of the world.