by Ben Pastor
“Take care, Peter.”
“You too.”
Bora was tempted by a physical, aching desire to exchange a hug – unusual for one so reserved – but refrained from it, lest Peter worried. Obscurely, and denying it to himself, he knew it was the last time they would see each other in life. Now and throughout the following week, in order to function, he repeated The one who will make it back has to be Peter, so all is well to himself until he became wholly convinced of it. They would talk by phone once again, and again never mention their mutual affection. Ten days from today it would be up to Bora, alerted to a German plane wreck north of Bespalovka, to discover how war really left its mark.
11
28 MAY, AFTERNOON, MEREFA
By midday, having safely landed in Kharkov, Bora drove von Salomon to divisional headquarters. There, he heard the unwelcome news that an SS Totenkopf battalion had pre-empted his plans to reconnoitre Krasny Yar, and as of dawn on Thursday had been engaged in the operation. Obviously no proprietary claim could be staked on missions. All the same, the timing and choice of target put him on alert. With only a few days left before his time would be absorbed by readying the regiment for full-scale action, Bora chafed at the bit at having once more arrived too late. Units of the 161st ID encamped in the area reported the passage of troops, shooting and random explosions in the woods. The latter detail set Bora off. If there’s a God, the snooping bastards have stepped into our own or Ivan’s minefields; more likely, they cleared their path that way, or blew up something in the Yar: what, and what for?
The use of firearms confirmed the presence of hostiles (although not necessarily, with Totenkopf); the blasts could point to a crude mode of getting at whatever might be concealed within the woods. It remained to be seen whether the SS were operating according to routine and had incidentally discovered occupants and materiel, or had been given the specific charge of seeking both at Krasny Yar.
“Do we know who authorized the operation?” Bora asked von Salomon’s paper-pushing lieutenant.
“As far as we know, sir, it was planned by SS Oberstgruppenführer Max Simon himself, and entrusted to the 3rd Panzer Engineer Battalion. Our HQ was informed after the operation was under way.”
“Why the armoured engineers?”
“Don’t know, sir.”
Bora had seen members of Totenkopf serving as a fire brigade in Kharkov, but knew their reputation for ruthlessness. Simon headed them now that their founding father, General Eicke, had been shot down and killed in the spring. Officially bound for Bespalovka and his regiment to follow up on Thermopylae, Bora left for Borovoye directly from divisional headquarters.
Lattmann couldn’t add much information. The SS had maintained radio silence and travelled quickly to the operation zone.
“Would you say in a hurry?”
“I would say they went in seeming to know exactly what they were doing.”
“Not the way you reconnoitre.”
“Hardly. Trucks and armoured vehicles went by; I could see them from here. I keep informants at Vodyanoy: we’ll see what they’ve got to say.”
“Vodyanoy? That’s not far from the Kalekina homestead.”
“Right. It isn’t healthy for my sources to move while Totenkopf is around. They’ll bring information as soon as the SS clear out.”
Bora spoke with his eyes on the map. “That might be too late for details. I met the Kalekin widows; there’s an excuse for me to go there. And it is on the way to Bespalovka. Hell, the farm is six kilometres from here; I could walk.”
“Don’t even think of it. You’d appear way too suspicious on foot if they saw you. What business do you have with the widows?”
“Their sons ended up in the Yar. If I’m lucky, they and others like them are the reason for Totenkopf’s raid. If I’m not, I’ve blown my chance of understanding why Khan and Platonov were done in.”
The widows were not at the farm. Bora parked the GAZ vehicle in the tractor shed – added when the place had been collectivized – under a giant sign that read “Friendship of the Peoples” on the wall. Chaff flew with the lightness of dead insects as his boots swept the dirt floor. A ladder led to a mezzanine where implements and spare parts had been stored, now empty. He climbed there and risked falling through the disconnected planks as he picked his steps to a small window, through which the south-western edge of Krasny Yar should be visible. Through a glass, darkly… The glass panes, opaque with dust, were in the way. Bora unceremoniously knocked them out with the grip of his handgun. He had to crouch to look through the low opening, balancing on the rickety flooring without being able to hold on, busy focusing his field glasses.
Beyond the one-floored sheds of the farm compound, five Opel trucks sat at the grassy threshold of the woods. Against a parched, tin-white sky, the operation proper must be drawing to a close; Bora had got here just in time. The Death’s Head unit was regrouping to leave. Non-coms led them, and the most interesting part was that wooden crates (Bora counted four, but there might be more already loaded) were being hauled towards one of the trucks. From where he was, they resembled the ammunition box he’d seen during his survey with Nagel. Judging by the effort needed to lift them onto the vehicle, they weighed a great deal. No attempt was made to open them, much less look inside. In fact, one of the non-coms made sure the locks were still fast before allowing the containers on board.
At once, Bora was in a hurry to get going. Most of the unpaved country lanes in this area ran roughly north–south. Whether the Totenkopf engineers meant to head south toward Smijeff (and the railroad) or north to Kharkov, they first had to travel the only narrow track, white with powdery dust, which linked Kalekina to Vodyanoy. Covering the small distance to Vodyanoy before the SS started out, and waiting there to see which direction they took, became imperative. Bora slid down the ladder, backed the GAZ out of the shed to the threshing floor and drove west from the farm, crossing the open fields at his peril to keep from raising telltale dust on the lane. At Vodyanoy he barely had time to find an unseen lookout point behind a barn. Once the trucks reached the crossroads, the first four without hesitation continued to Borovoye (and the highway to Kharkov); the last truck turned left and motored south toward Smijeff and its railroad junction. Bora paused a moment longer, thinking. With the Donets dividing German and Russian lines, Smijeff was nothing but a rather exposed terminal for the railway from Kharkov: either the truck and its contents would stop in Smijeff, or else the intention was to load the material and ship it by rail with a higher degree of safety to the district capital. The distance from Vodyanoy to Smijeff being at least four times the distance to Borovoye, Bora let the SS trucks go their separate ways and then hightailed to Lattmann’s radio shack. There he contacted his regiment. He dispatched Nagel to the Smijeff rail station – twelve kilometres from the cavalry camp – with orders to relate whether any material was loaded by Totenkopf men on to a Kharkov-bound train.
After a tense half hour, he was ready to break the seal of his untouched cigarette pack and go back to his smoking habit. It was a gamble, presuming to know the destination of the single truck. And, time being of the essence, he had to depend on Nagel’s resourcefulness when it came to communications. Fifteen more minutes went by before Bora’s hunch was confirmed. He’d meanwhile memorized the various directions a train could take once it reached the Osnova junction south-east of Kharkov. Some terminals sounded less likely than others (Kharkov South on the Moscow line; Bolashivsky heading back east); the most promising stops for unloading were New Bavaria (to Poltava), Osnova itself (to the Donbas) and Lipovy Gai (to Rostov, via Merefa).
Lattmann assured him there’d be no stop before Osnova, as the Schtcherbiny station was presently unused. “Your best bets are Osnova and then Kuryash, or Osnova and then New Bavaria, or Osnova and then Pokatilovka–Merefa.”
In all cases, it meant a twenty-five kilometre foray to the Osnova junction for Bora, where he’d wait for the “locomotive pulling three cars” Nagel had d
escribed to him. On the way there, he silently fidgeted through checkpoints; where emotions and beliefs, extraneous thoughts and considerations went at times like this he couldn’t tell – somehow they were shelved away or shoved out of range, leaving him capable of single-mindedly taking the next step necessary and nothing else.
At Osnova, when the locomotive from Smijeff did come into view, Bora watched it leave the braid of many tracks and set off along the rail to New Bavaria. Not good. He grew discouraged at the idea it would travel beyond his reach towards Poltava. But New Bavaria didn’t only provide a stop between here and Poltava: a switch east of the railway bridge on the Udy River allowed a deviation down a minor, less used set of southbound tracks to a terminal outside Merefa. The problem was that from Osnova there was no practical way for a road vehicle to cross the Udy and the Lopany in advance of the train: he’d waste precious time getting through Kharkov’s southern districts before finding a bridge. Bora took a worried swig of water from his canteen. It seemed centuries since he’d stood in the Kiev square, with Peter filming the ceremony. An exhausted bloody sun sank westward, clouds strangely cupped beneath it as if to receive it. Decapitations came to mind: John the Baptist, the French Terror. Gordon in Khartoum, old Kalekin at Krasny Yar. Bora looked away from the lurid red. With nothing to lose, he had to take another wild guess and gamble on the deviation. It meant taking the highway to the small town of Lednoye, crossing both the Lopany River and the Sebastopol rail line south of the Filippovka district, to reach a point where he could discover through his field glasses whether he had been right or wrong.
Dusk had taken on the tinge of lead when he returned to the schoolhouse. A small miracle had been worked there: Bora found a makeshift shower (featuring an oil drum as a water tank) installed in the courtyard, fine netting in the windows to keep insects out. Weariness and the day’s excitement vying for dominance inside him turned to abject physical consolation: he stripped and showered and changed in the twilight, standing on planks arranged so that he wouldn’t have to walk on dirt to reach the door. Kostya deserved all the compliments he received.
The new comforts and cold beet soup were welcome; less welcome was hearing that the Russian priest had been looking for him and would be trying again soon. Bora opened his diary with an ear to the sound of crickets across the interminable expanse of grassland outside; he counted on Nitichenko’s visit before night sealed over. Shortly – because a mention of the devil brings him around – the creaking of peasant boots announced the priest’s arrival. Bora addressed him from the window without waiting for the sentry to announce him. “What’s up, Victor Panteleievich?”
Nitichenko’s looks were more ruffled than usual. He made the sign of the cross three times, mumbling Gospodi pomiluy to ask God’s mercy as he entered the schoolhouse. “You question me, bratyetz, but it should be the other way around. I spent the day at Krasny Yar.”
Bora put away his diary. “You did?” The gesture he made, pointing to the chair, was calm in inverse proportion to the rise in tension he experienced. “Well, what of it?”
“What of it?” The priest slumped in the chair. “Don’t you know what happened there?”
I’ll know when Lattmann hears from his informants. Bora kept a moderately curious air, sitting on a corner of the desk with his right foot on the floor.
Merefa, 10.49 p.m.
Man, the priest gave me an earful. He’d ridden to Losukovka on Wednesday for some concern related to his psalm reader (psalomshchik). Early on Thursday, when Totenkopf’s operation began around Krasny Yar, he was “in the vicinity of the Kalekina farm”. I may be being malicious, but I’ll wager he’s started bedding the younger Kalekin widow, with whom he familiarly uses her first name without its patronymic. At any rate, from what he said I understood more or less how the operation went. The sporadic shooting reported by our units lasted all morning; next came a set of explosions “to the east, inside the woods”: that is, where Ivan placed his mines. It’s engineers who draft the minefield maps, so it’s probable the SS set the mines off for reasons of their own, possibly to make a safer, wider swatch in which to advance. Nitichenko holed up in the farm throughout the following night. This morning he found another hideout, from where he could not directly observe the Yar (he apparently knows nothing about the removal of the crates). He heard a single, major blast from that direction as soon as it became light enough to see (read below). Until the time I reached the Kalekina farm in the afternoon, more shots were fired intermittently. Only after he glimpsed the SS leaving did the priest pluck up the courage to go into the woods. To make a long story short, he found the bullet-riddled bodies of the Kalekin lads and those of three more youngsters unknown to him lying about; he believes there may be others. The rise, or hillock or kurgan I crawled inside was, according to him, partly demolished and “opened up” with explosives. So I’d say the SS went in specifically looking for the crates, surprised and shot anything that moved, in their usual fashion, found what they wanted inside the kurgan, searched through lesser holes and lairs to get rid of any witnesses, and went off to the next thing.
Nitichenko is returning to the Yar in the morning; for now, he’s chosen not to tell the Kalekin women the bad news. If I know Russians, there’ll be a toing and froing in and out of the woods tomorrow and in the days to come until all bodies are recovered. And this is whether or not they know if the dead are their relatives, besprizornye, partisans or God knows what else.
I listened, careful not to comment. There’s really nothing to say. Our expression “Alles in Ordnung” applies here no less than in other war-related operations. All’s in place. The priest speaks of waste, but everything is waste at war. There’s nothing but waste. He and I are as disposable as the wild boys and the Totenkopf engineers and the millions of Russians waiting beyond the Donets.
To me, it all comes down to this: specific directions were given to the SS (by Max Simon or others); the material recovered as a result was shipped unopened to Merefa’s Kombinat. Martin Bora is an idiot, and has been grasping at straws while timber was floating right by him.
It seemed for all the world as if Taras Tarasov had grabbed armfuls of paperwork from his places of employment and stuffed them inside the wicker suitcase. Kapitolina Nefedovna must have hoped it would contain better things than old letters and ledgers from Tractor Factory No. 183 and the FED camera factory. In fact, when Bora had unceremoniously taken the suitcase from her on the day of the accountant’s death, she’d acted like a woman cheated of her rights until the major snapped it open and exposed reams of old paper.
When he had less to do, Bora would sit down another time and go through the material with an Abwehr officer’s thoroughness. Tonight, having found some usefulness in the Makarenko note about the employment of Ukrainian waifs (in Poltava up to 1927, and then in Kharkov), he set aside accounts and documents dated between 1919 and 1939.
In the hope of finding traces of the political and social circle around Platonov and Tibyetsky (or Petrov, Dobronin or whichever alias he’d used at the time), he then singled out paperwork from the NEP years, up to 1928. After all, Khan’s penchant for doing business in and around Kharkov could have left a paper trail.
The results were disappointing. Bora dug out a copy of a note sent to the government by a Tractor Factory worker called Schtschetinin, lately of the Zaporozhye Metal Works, protesting about the expropriation of a piece of woodland near the Works, the last remnant of the family estate. The recipient, a party official, had scribbled across it “formerly a landed rich man (pomeshchik in the text) and exploiter of the people: deny intervention.” Nothing to do with Krasny Yar. Another brief originated from the FED camera factory, where an employee, a retired Navy officer, complained that “co-workers who hardly distinguished themselves during the Revolution” affected sailor uniforms, “trying to live off the fame of brave Soviet mariners”. Bora even found a note regarding shipments from an American group – Hoover’s Relief Association – during the famine; t
wo mentions of The Giant, a massive student dormitory on Pushkin Street, and a request for labourers to be recruited from the political jail for minors in Kharkov. Khan appeared nowhere. Platonov was absent as well.
Bora decided then that if he couldn’t find the protagonists of the tale, he’d settle for the supporting actors – that is, the foreigners and other “strangers” who had frequented Kharkov after the Revolution. Naturally, an English, French or German surname did not imply that the individual had gravitated to Khan and Platonov’s entourage. But I am looking for one specific name, after all, he told himself. It took much renewed leafing through documents in search of non-Russian acronyms and names of firms, governmental agencies, individual businessmen and sales representatives. All were transliterated to accommodate Russian spelling, an added complication. Eventually, he came across some names he’d anticipated, and others he hadn’t expected: American Quakers, executives from the newly created Leica factory, Turkish tobacco growers, listed according to the concession granted to them under Lenin’s New Economic Policy: “Type I” (pure concessions); “Type II” (mixed concessions); and “Type III” (technical assistance). Under “Type III” were listed German technicians connected with the Locomotive and Tractor Factory, soon to produce tanks in 1928. A joint note from 1926 (signatories, Schmitt and Kravchenko) dealt with the name change of the Association for The Management of German Factories in Russia, “to be known now and henceforth as Wirtschaftskontor”. On the back of the sheet, in an obvious attempt to save typing paper, the names of the German–Russian Flight and Transport Companies’ executives newly appointed in Kharkov had been added. The first, Deruluft, listed Abel, Karl; Dahm, EP; Strasser, Bernd; Wilmowsky, Andreas. The second, Derutra, gave the names Herzog, Heinz-Joachim; Merker, Gustav; Stark, AL: Ziehm, Werner.
Bora paused. AL: Alfred Lothar. Stark had mentioned his days with Derutra in passing, on the morning he’d shown him the Karabakh horse. He’d added something about Russians robbing you blind the moment you turn your head, or something similar. Finding confirmation of his presence in post-Leninist Ukraine meant nothing per se; still, Bora became aware of each nerve in his body. Instead of accelerating, his search slowed down; it became a deliberate perusing and careful page-turning, looking through the typewritten or neatly penned Cyrillic script across the dreary documents of the past generation. Taras Tarasov, who might simply have salvaged what he could from his old desks upon the Germans’ arrival in 1941, showed no specific intent through his choice. On the one hand, he’d grabbed carbon copies on paper as thin as onion peel; on the other, he’d missed the second and third pages of lengthy letters: it all bore witness to the haste of removal.