by Ben Pastor
Scherer smiled under the black skull-badged cap. “They’d have to kill me first, Scotsman.”
Rumbling and screeching over a bed of flattened shrubs and small trees, the T-34 headed out of the Beriozovy woods, towards the clearing where the 11th Division tank busters waited in order to accompany it.
Another hour went by. Feeling under pressure to maintain the appearance of absolute control, Bora straddled the cabin’s doorstep. As for Khan, he unhurriedly let the cigar go out in his mouth as if this weren’t a pivotal moment in his life and he hadn’t fired four shots into his crewmen’s heads.
At last a requisitioned City Soviet president’s car, a sturdy pre-war GAZ-61 sent up from Smijeff under the escort of armoured cars, came bumping along the ruts of the forest road. It was only at that point that Bora handed the Panzer uniform to the Russian. “If you don’t mind, sir.”
Khan took a contemptuous look at the clothes. Showing no sign of accepting Bora’s invitation to wear them, he uncrossed his legs without haste. “Lighter, please,” he said. “I want to finish my smoke before we head out.” A moment later, however, he changed his mind about the cigar, dropped it to the dirt floor and squashed it under the sole of his boot. Before handing over the leather jacket he conceitedly took out of its breast pocket a photo of himself emerging from the tank’s cupola with a chestful of decorations, and began to change.
From the Donets, the quickest way to Kharkov was by the highway that ran through Schubino and Bestyudovka. Bora instructed the GAZ-61 army driver and the escort cars to take that route by themselves, while he’d transport the general in his vehicle up the dirt lanes that linked hamlets and farmsteads in long direct stretches. Keeping to the ravine road through the woods until he came to the Udy River and Papskaya Ternovka, he planned to continue north-west of Ternovoye, cross the rails north of Bestyudovka, then skirt the woods again. Straddling the sectors of the 161st and 39th Infantry Divisions, by long detours and winging it, he might avoid SD- and SS-controlled checkpoints. If all went well, he’d reach the Kharkov suburbs at Babai, and along unmarked paths his destination in Velikaya Osnova.
From Abwehr sources, Bora had a good idea of where Security Service units operated between the Donets and Kharkov. Partisan warfare was heaviest south of here, where the 15th ID had been bled white by guerrilla attacks, so the SS paid keen attention in that area. Still, entering the heavily manned city with a Soviet general in a Panzer outfit – and not losing him to the SS – would be the trickiest part of the journey.
Bora considered how he’d come to depend on the adjective sonder attached to his orders on this front: “special, particular”, paradoxically the same prefix that typified the most brutally aggressive SS mobile units. But sonder meant you usually got through, or could negotiate your way across sectors; as an interrogator, he needed that flexibility. Yet he never forgot that in old German sonder could also mean “lacking, without”.
Minutes later, oddly credible in his new outfit, Tibyetsky watched as his handsome jacket was folded into a knapsack and the photograph slipped into Bora’s map case. He asked for a fresh cigar. Bora handed him the box, but the Russian only took one. “You must have gasoline to burn if you send three vehicles off on a ruse.”
Bora checked the time: 4.20 p.m. By this time, Scherer and his staff must have reached the railroad station and would have perhaps already loaded the tank on to the waiting train. “For some things, Commander Tibyetsky, gasoline is worth burning.”
*
During the first few kilometres, Khan gave Bora the silent treatment. At one point he spoke to himself, opening with a sneer the army document supplied to him. “Let’s see who I am supposed to be. A forty-year-old. How flattering. A carpenter by trade, perhaps with a large family to keep on a sergeant major’s pay.”
Whether or not he meant to modify the impression he’d given of refusing all conversation, it was only while they were skirting the hamlet of Ternovoye, past broken-down fences where vetch and creepers reached to a man’s height, that he addressed Bora, who was of course dying to be spoken to. “What were you saying earlier, Major? Not about my beginnings, as you called them: about your relatives’ table-talk interest in the October Revolution.”
Bora glanced over. “It was a little more than table talk, Commander. We were directly involved on both sides of the family.”
“So you said.”
“My stepfather and a few older cousins went straight from the trenches of the Great War to the Russian border… Take an acquired great-uncle of mine – that is, my maternal great-aunt’s brother-in-law: he went missing in 1919.”
“Thousands did.”
“Well, we lost Uncle Terry, as we called him at home. Great-aunt Albertina Anna was married to Jan Terborch, a German of Dutch descent; in 1918 his younger brother, lately of the Saxon Horse Guard, enrolled in the Brandenstein Brigade against the Bolsheviks. It was in Finland that we lost him, after his ‘flying detachment’ of mounted youngsters led the attack against the town of Lahti, cutting the connection between the Red Guard units in the east and west of the region. He’s got a gravestone – technically a cenotaph, since there’s nothing of him there – in Enschede. I wrote a school paper about him.”
“I see.” Khan flicked ash from his cigar on to the car floor. “I see,” he repeated. In fact, he seemed wholly removed from the words he was hearing. Under the lids, his grey-blue eyes had the lazy mobility of a cat’s eyes. What thoughts might revolve in a high-ranking defector’s mind at a time like this – what hopes or fears, and how irrelevant a younger man’s point of view on anything might be to him – Bora could only guess.
“Do you play chess, Major?”
“Do I? Only passably. I’m too impulsive at times.”
“I see.”
Another long silence followed; Bora had to bite his tongue to avoid breaking it. The combination of tension regarding his precious passenger, burning curiosity and this odd sitting side by side with the man who helped obliterate the Sixth Army in Stalingrad troubled him. He revealed none of it, and under the circumstances, claiming impulsiveness was at best improbable. Khan kept an indolent, attentive eye on him. The cigar had burnt down to a stub, which he carelessly put out on the metal of the car door and then replaced between his lips.
Bora paid attention to the road. It was unsafe to try to cut across the clear stretches of level flat land that temptingly ran on either side. What with minefields and the presence of unexpected ditches and invisible bogs, prudence called for keeping to the zigzag of dusty lanes, straight or crooked dorozhki of beaten earth and gravel. Through the side openings of the vehicle birds’ voices flowed in occasionally, as did the scent of wild grasses that grew stronger in the afternoon, strongest at sunset. Poplars, nameless shrubs shone like silver along brooks and canals.
One, two, three army checkpoints came up, at bridges and crossroads. In each case Bora promptly stopped the vehicle a few metres back and turned off the engine. The military police let him pass every time, without paying much attention to the Panzer non-com in the passenger’s seat. Then it was fields and ravines again, demolished farmhouses, rank grass and flowers going by, concealing or half-concealing the thickly manned expanse on this side of the Donets.
Khan looked outside. At last he spoke, the cigar butt lodged in the corner of his mouth. “So. What marks did you get on the paper concerning your relative?”
Bora was grateful to be addressed again. “Top marks, Commander. Mostly because I engaged in a sort of samokritika, by self-critically mentioning my hunch that Uncle Terry hadn’t fallen after all; far from it: that he’d gone on to a glorious military career in the Soviet Union.”
“Intriguing. Give me a fresh cigar.”
Bora did, holding out the lighter to his passenger. “Such are the vagaries of fate, I commented, listing the arguments in favour of my thesis. You’ll appreciate it took some gumption for an officer cadet to make such an assertion in Cavalry School.”
Khan took a puff.
“You may have a cigar, too.”
Not to mention his weeks in a Prague hospital battling pneumonia, Bora had quit smoking in June 1941, clearing his nostrils and lungs for heightened perception during reconnaissance duty. A cigar was the last thing he needed, but he deftly took out a second Soyuzie and lit it.
They smoked from the upcoming crossroads to the other side of the tracks north of Bestyudovka without a word, facing away from each other, sending an acrid cloud up to the canvas top of the car and out of the side openings.
“May I ask you a question, Commander Tibyetsky?”
“Only if it doesn’t relate to my present task.”
“It doesn’t. During the civil war, would you have defeated Ungern had his troops not mutinied on the way to Tibet?”
“Absolutely. He was finished.”
Silence again. Near Babai, less than ten kilometres from the Kharkov city limits, Khan seemed to lose a shade of his coolness for the first time. Had he betrayed himself? No. Bora simply felt it, and couldn’t have said why. The sensation was gone as soon as it came, and what in the Russian had actually occasioned it?
By the time they reached the city gates, Khan was again a paragon of composure, on the side of a traveller’s boredom. Eyes closed, he kept his arms loosely folded on his hefty chest.
“Did any of yours go crazy last winter?” The question came wholly unexpectedly. Pointless to wonder whether Khan had enough information about Bora to know he’d been at Stalingrad; besides, Stalingrad was on Bora’s mind but not necessarily his passenger’s. Bora’s delay in answering could in itself be a reply. Khan bit his cigar, without opening his eyes. “Some of ours did. Not to speak of civilians. If you don’t have a strong ideology, you go mad.”
“Well, I think you can go mad regardless of ideology.”
It ended there. They were now in the industrial periphery of the city, where unkempt open spaces alternated with built-up manufacturing areas; sluices and service roads ran side by side along torn fences, blind walls. Ruined smokestacks, like towers beheaded, formed pyramids of reddish bricks. The secondary lanes Bora was following, muddy with broken pipes, wormed through piles of rubble.
Looking out for the first time in several minutes, Khan remarked, “Not exactly the high road to town.”
Silently Bora considered his options. The most hazardous part of the trip lay just ahead, in the last two kilometres leading to the Velikaya Osnova district. Overhead the day, perfectly clear until now, was beginning to turn. A ridge of clouds to the west would soon swallow the setting sun, and there might be rain coming. Bora took it as an omen. “From here on, for credibility, the lower in rank ought to drive,” he said, braking and then stopping for the time needed to switch places with Tibyetsky. “I’ll give you directions.”
No sooner had the station and its many tracks leading to the Donbas become visible ahead, with the south-eastern brick factories, than another checkpoint barred the way, and it was manned by the SS. “Whatever the level of your spoken German, put this under your tongue,” Bora told Khan on the spur of the moment, handing over the first thing he found in his pocket, the button recovered from Krasny Yar. The Russian, however, was ahead of him. He’d already placed the unlit stub of his cigar between his upper molars and right cheek, inventing an abscess that might justify any imperfect speech.
“Documents please, Herr Major.” The SS men leant over to look inside the vehicle.
Bora carried several typewritten passes allowing him to move around alone or with a driver at any hour of day and night. He presented his paperwork, and the examination was soon followed by “Fine, thank you, Herr Major.”
When Khan’s turn came, however, the SS scrutinized the Panzer Corps Soldbuch a long time, flipping the pages back and forth. They said nothing; only kept reading a few steps away from the vehicle. Motionless in the passenger’s seat, Bora looked at them. They were young, untried, replacement fellows whose training surely amounted to a handful of weeks. He ostentatiously pulled back his left cuff to check his wristwatch, because doing it in a furtive manner would give his anxiety away. “Is there something wrong with my driver?” He judged his irritation just right. “You can keep him here if you want to; I haven’t got time to sit here all day.”
The SS promptly gave the papers back, and made room for the vehicle to pass.
Once in Velikaya Osnova, the officers traded places again. A tickled Khan spat the cigar stub out and a wad of saliva after it. “You wouldn’t have really left me behind back there.”
Bora calmly looked over. “What do you think?”
“That it takes one to know one who’s ready to shoot his way out of a tight spot.”
They met no more delays, nor did they converse, until they reached the detention centre. Bora drove through the car entrance into the inner courtyard, away from the street, parked and came to open the general’s door. Khan put one leg out to dismount, the same leisurely movement he’d made to emerge from the tank’s cupola. He remained seated a moment more, looking up at the German. “What marks did you earn for the paper on my early career?”
“Top marks, same as for Uncle Terry’s.”
“Ah. Good student.” Exiting the vehicle, Khan adjusted the canvas blouse on his hips. “And probably a good chess player. We’ll have to talk about it some time. Even if I can’t imagine when.”
On the third floor, the rooms set up for special prisoners were lined in a row from one end of the corridor to the other. Platonov occupied the room farthest from the landing, but even so, the cries from his nightmares would be all too audible from the same level. Bora directly led the way up one more floor, to the single room set up for the interrogator.
Every level of the structure had been inhabited by visiting German businessmen and engineers in the late 1930s. Naturally, every suite was thoroughly bugged; then, as now, the windows were high and had solid, artistic grilles across them. In this room, modern wallpaper in a zigzag pattern resembled stylized factory roofs, smokestacks trailing vapour. During the battles for Kharkov, the fine furnishings had disappeared: the Abwehr had had to hunt all over for decent beds and a bare minimum of comfort.
Khan looked inside before stepping in. “I’ve seen better.”
It would not have done to reply that he’d have much preferred for a defector to be flown out of the Rogany airfield directly to Berlin, and it was unnecessary for Bora to remind Tibyetsky that he was merely honouring his demands to wait in the area for Bentivegni’s arrival. “Your things will be brought up next, so you can change. The photo of yourself and the cigars, too. May I provide anything else, Commander?”
Khan sat on the bed to test the mattress. “Yes, my provisions. No need to prepare my meals, Major. As you saw, I brought along enough sealed food for two weeks. I’ll touch nothing else. In the morning, a single chocolate ration is all I require.”
“Understood. I must, however, insist on a routine medical check before I leave.”
“What? Don’t make me laugh. Do you really think I plan to commit suicide after going through all this effort?”
“I must insist. If you prefer, I’ll remain present in the room.”
“That’s ridiculous. Send the damned quack in, and make it snappy.”
Weller happened to already be in the building, checking General Platonov’s blood pressure. He followed Bora upstairs, promptly carried out the check-up, found nothing out of the ordinary with (or on) Khan, and left.
Bora’s watch read 6.13 p.m. Time to meet Scherer at the Tractor Factory. Before leaving the detention centre, he enquired about Number Five with a variation on the usual question. “Has he asked for me?”
“No, Herr Major.”
“Anything else to remark?”
“Only that he hasn’t called us names, Herr Major.”
It was just like the bastard, Bora thought, to react to the first news about his family in years by simply not insulting his jailers. He stopped to scratch Mina’s fat back on his way out of the building. Dusk wa
s closing in fast, even though the clouds hadn’t yet risen to fill the sky. He took Moskalivka Street to Rybna, crossed the bridge over the Kharkov River and headed down the long Old Moscow Highway/Staro–Moskovskaya road to the Tractor Factory district. Soon he was driving alone on the wide boulevards leading out of the city. Side streets petered out, the steam factory and the Russian army cemetery went by, and still Bora followed the German signs in Gothic script that read Nach Ch.T.S.
The Kharkov Traktorenwerk Siedlung, a small industrial city at the edge of the city, had suffered much in the repeated battles for Kharkov. In the near dark, Scherer was waiting off Narodna Street, in front of Building G. Bora gave him back the Tank Corps suit and the rest.
“Did you have problems getting here, Jochen?”
“None, other than it was a bear loading the tank on to the damn train.”
“The convoy?”
“It’s parked around the corner. Was already here when we arrived. Not very happy; Russki fighters strafed them around Bestyudovka. No casualties, but a round barely missed the car. If you want the GAZ-61 back in Smijeff tomorrow, my men and I will go along part of the way, to rejoin our unit. Make sure you take along the trunk with the Russian’s foodstuff; he’s got all kinds of goodies in it. So what’s the Field Marshal going to do, send for the T-34 or have it disassembled here to study it?”
“He’s flying in himself in the morning, so they might work on it in Kharkov. Or in Zaporozhye.”
Scherer took a wistful look at the menacing, dark bulk filling up the hangar behind him. “It’ll take more than what we presently have to confront this model if they plan to use it in large numbers. It’s so new, the paint on it is still fresh. I wonder how many of them they’ve got in the hamper.”
“However many they have, we’ll make good use of this one. Start the tank up and follow my vehicle down Ivan Frank Street. There’s a better place to keep it for the night.”