by Ben Pastor
“Go to the train station, Kostya. Your wife is coming.” He ignored the young man’s astonishment by continuing to transfer documents from the desk to his briefcase. “Take your things with you. Here are your papers: she has hers. You’re to climb on the train and travel with her to my family’s in Germany: there’s work for you at Borna, which you’ll like. Whatever happens, take my advice: don’t come back to Russia afterwards – hide out if you have to.”
Kostya began to cry. Bora, however, was in a cranky mood and not up to displays of emotion. “Yes, yes, fine. That’s enough. You have ten minutes to get there: take the sentry along with you to bring back the droshky. He’ll look after the chicks, don’t you worry. Be nice to your girl, and let her wear trousers once in a while.”
It felt lonely in the building after everyone left. Bora packed the odds and ends he hadn’t already transferred to Bespalovka in the past few days. From the open windows the chatter of birds, far and near, entered the room, and it was the only sound. He’d given the sentry the night off in order to collect his thoughts, or to take one last risk. Since Monday, it was the first occasion he’d had to consider things in a less pressing, immediate manner. He anticipated there would be a rise in anxiety as a result, when in fact it was bodily weariness that had crept in; more an irresistible, nearly desperate need to rest. In the frantic activity of the last several days he’d burned the candle at both ends; tension and lack of sleep made every muscle feel strained and sore, as if he’d been in a fist fight. His entire system wanted to shut down. Bora sat on his bed telling himself he wasn’t one to drop off during the day, much less when he had work to do – which was his last consideration before falling asleep.
In his dream, he lay with Dikta in their Prague room. It was all sweetness, not a back-breaking contest as their lovemaking often turned out to be. In Prague she’d been angry, and yet (to convince him not to go back to Russia? Who knows?) she’d given him more sweetness than he’d ever experienced. They’d shared such love, the recollection on awakening made him feel full of tenderness instead of merely aroused. In the sultry afternoon Bora tried to fall asleep again so that he might recapture fragments of the scene. All that emerged from his drowsiness was the ceiling of the hotel room, not as it was but cheaply ornate, tiles of pressed tin like those in the Narodnaya Slava movie house. Or no, not a ceiling, either: a borderless metal sheet, an immense aeroplane wing hovering down over the bed, a tin sky. It was unpleasant and oppressive and it woke him up for good in a state of foreboding and alert.
An hour later, Bora was burning in the wood stove the handful of papers he wouldn’t take along. Kaspar Bernoulli must have parked on the road because he didn’t hear the squeal of gravel under the tyres, only the sound of displaced pebbles as someone approached the door.
“Major Bora?”
“Come in, Judge.”
In his shirtsleeves and braces, Bora started to reach for his blouse when Bernoulli shook his head. “As you were, please. Continue what you’re doing.” He was himself severely attired as usual, and the glare from the window drew green and blue twin crescents on the glass of his spectacles. It made one wonder how he could see behind those colourful mirrors.
The heat and stillness in the room, a stunned silence all around, made this no less a ghostly time than the middle of the night. As soon as Bernoulli reached the middle of the room and stood there, his dark eyes became visible behind the lenses. “I’m returning to Berlin, Major Bora.”
“I thought you might be.”
“Is there anything you’d like me to hand-carry there?”
“No, thank you.”
“Not even for Colonel Bentivegni?”
“No.”
The burning bits of paper let out a crisp, acidic odour. Bernoulli observed the young man’s frowning paleness, his exacting care over the disposal. He said, “You must be aware of Commissioner Stark’s disappearance.”
“Yes.” Bora looked over, stared the military judge straight in the eye. “More than aware, Heeresrichter.” He crumpled a typewritten sheet and lit it with a match. “In Kiev you asked me whether I could prove who killed Platonov and my notorious relative, Khan Tibyetsky. Well, I now can.”
“So.” Bernoulli inhaled deeply, smelling as it seemed the invisible smoke. Outside, flies banged against the netting of the windows, unable to get in. “And I take it that doesn’t make you feel better.”
“Not one bit.”
“Tell me at least there was a higher motivation behind the crimes.”
“There wasn’t. Forgive me if I don’t say more about it, Dr Bernoulli. It’s best if we drop the subject.”
A fairly long silence followed, during which Bora also burned sketches and half-done watercolours from his trunk. The judge remained standing. Between them, next to its powder-blue envelope, Dikta’s studio portrait lay face down on the desk.
“Objectively, Major, you do look and sound rather troubled for one who’s solved a difficult case.”
Nothing else was said to elicit disclosure of any kind on Bora’s part. However, the photograph on the wooden surface automatically became the focus of both men’s interest, merely by lying there. Dikta needn’t be mentioned to be recognized as a factor or to subjugate their thoughts and channel desire, curiosity, male resentment. Bora acknowledged the guest’s attention on the rectangle of matte paper.
“I keep telling myself it’s not the case, but I think that by volunteering again I might have lost her.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.”
“Such things are possible.”
Surprisingly, or merely because his grief was beyond shame and well past social conventions, Bora did not react when the judge reached for the photograph and turned it over.
The result was a dispassionate, careful scrutiny. Bernoulli’s pensive face lost none of its sternness; it revealed how under his eyes the extreme intimacy of the image, its significance as a means of private seduction disassembled into its elements, becoming nothing else – and nothing more – than crucial evidence. No comments were called for. But clinicians make diagnoses; judges emit sentences. Bernoulli scrupulously replaced the portrait in its envelope. “Allow me,” he said. With steady-fingered hands he tore envelope and photo in half, and then in half again. “It is necessary.” One step took him next to Bora by the stove. He tossed the fragments in the fire, where they curled into a bluish flame and were gone. “This, too, is measured according to the St Petersburg Paradox.”
The determination of the value of an object must be based not on its price, but rather on the utility it can bring.
Bora tasted blood. His lower lip, bitten through, did not hurt, however. He rigorously kept dropping shreds in the stove until he was done. Save a farewell, he and Bernoulli had no further exchange until the judge left the schoolhouse, bound for the Alexandrovka turn-off. From there he’d travel to the Rogany airfield by way of Khoroshevo and Bestyudovka. Up to Alexandrovka, it was the same itinerary Bora himself, having relinquished his post to the radiomen, followed the day after, continuing, however, eastwards to Borovoye.
FRIDAY 4 JUNE, BOROVOYE
Lattmann turned down the volume on the radio. Some melancholy tune about homeland and shining stars was being crooned, and once the dial turned to the left the singer sounded far away, lost at the bottom of a solitary well.
He and Bora had no need for explanations or details. Geko Stark’s final exit was an accepted given, so much so that Lattmann didn’t ask about it, and his first news for his friend was that Krasny Yar had caught fire. “You can see the smoke drifting from the rise out there; it covered the sun at one point. That nutty priest of yours carried out his threat after all. The Ukrainian police caught him red-handed and arrested him, but it’s likely the Autocephalous Orthodox Church will plead for his release. It smells like charcoal if you pay attention. Ashes come down when the wind’s right.”
Bora sensed an odd relief. “When things come to an end around here, they really do.”<
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“Uh-huh. As long as we don’t have to memorize Nyema piva, nyema vina, do svidania Ukraina. Already there’s scarcity of beer and wine – it’d be too bad to have to say ‘goodbye to Ukraine’ as well.”
“I remain optimistic. Here’s Russki tobacco – best I could do for you.”
“My pipe thanks you. Say, I have a titbit about Odilo Mantau, too, that paragon of brightness: it seems one of his overinflated tyres blew up the other day while he was driving along a ridge road, and he plunged into the ravine with all he had. Well, he didn’t die, but he won’t see action for the remainder of the war.” With a critical grin, Lattmann looked Bora over. “Spurs, leather seat of the pants: off to Gothland for keeps, I see.”
“Correct. Nagel will be here in an hour to pick me up. The regiment’s moving out soon.”
Bespalovka, Regimental Camp Gothland, 7.29 p.m.
Few things are as beautiful, as deceptively serene as grass fires just before night comes. What breath of wind there is rakes their smoke gently to one side, all in the same direction, close to the ground. Like braids of milk, if milk could be braided. The immensity of this land, where time is absorbed to the extent of ceasing to be, becomes so harmless and tender, I have filial feelings towards it. Was I ever hostile towards it? Not towards this land, per se. I can walk on it and touch it, crumble its soil under my fingertips and recognize its essential goodness. It was the same in Spain, when my boyish fury against the enemy (it was six years ago!) had nothing to do with the mountains and the rock walls among which we killed one another. Riscal Amargo, the Bitter Cliff, was sweet to me all the same, and not only because it was there that I first heard about Remedios. And so Palo de la Virgen, so Huerta de Santa Olalla, so Concud, with its heaps of cadavers the wild dogs fought over later on. Poland itself, our foretaste of Russia, resembled my own country too much to despise it. This evening I looked at the Ukrainian grass fires and was at peace for a moment, or at least reconciled with the fact that I will wage war thoroughly against my enemy, without any hatred for the land he lives on.
Has Krasny Yar burnt to the ground? It’s the only question I have. I have no curiosity about the way Stark in his greed must have planned Platonov’s death but only resorted to killing Uncle Terry as a knee-jerk response (which, however, caused me to investigate). I have none about Colonel von Salomon’s capacity to hold out after all (he will), none about the upcoming campaign. The events of the past six months would last many a lifetime, but I no longer wonder about them.
What we underwent last winter in Stalingrad is beyond telling. I couldn’t write it down, I couldn’t convey it to others in words, and yet I couldn’t keep it inside. We all died to ourselves; in that sense none of us will ever go back. Bruno doesn’t need to worry about it. Those who go back will be strangers to who they were when they left.
That’s why at last the Heeresrichter Kaspar Bernoulli can return where he came from, which isn’t Berlin, or anywhere else in Germany or in the world. I no longer need him, and as I summoned him, I can let him go.
In Stalingrad, week after week, in front of my eyes men lost their minds, killed themselves, fell into idiocy, reverted to a brute and beastly state. I didn’t. I held out. For myself and for others, I held out days, weeks, months. I never gave up. At what cost?
The right cost for a man like Martin Bora.
I limited myself, as late as the past month of May, to conjuring up an alter ego to keep me going – paradoxically to help me maintain my much vaunted and complimented lucidity.
I had to. In order not to hallucinate, I consciously created him. I fashioned Bernoulli as I needed him, as a thinker and a disciplinarian, a magistrate who would bring forward my protests against the evil committed here. What he was in fact made of, I don’t want to know. I do know that the likes of him console men’s loneliness and bolster them in vulnerable times, or else lead them into temptation. Providentially, I am not Faust, and he wasn’t Mephistopheles. Bernoulli simply spoke to me in my own words, listened to me as I alone can when I go out and listen. Thanks to him who never existed, whatever happens next I tell myself I can take: even the realization that my efforts to denounce all that is wrong might come to nothing, or soon turn against me. I tell myself I’ve got over Stalingrad, and will not miss the judge.
Standing by the folding table in his tent, Bora reread what he’d written and then tore off the diary page. One more scrap to burn, he told himself. He stepped outside, where the sunset paled to grey. Odours were strongest at this hour, including the hale, powerful animal scent of the regiment’s thousand and more horses. Men moved about the camp. Before long, his officers would arrive for a briefing. From here, the world appeared orderly, laid out according to a readable pattern.
It wasn’t beyond imagining that in such a world, under the conniving silence of the Abwehr, Arnim Weller would end up in the VII Wehrkreis mental hospital. He’d live, if only because it served others that he should – as it served others yet that Stark should never be found.
Bora pocketed the diary page. This afternoon he’d laid out the marching plan to go across the Donets, and eventually north. Tomorrow he’d gather his senior non-coms, speak to the ethnic Germans, look over the equipment. That was enough anticipation for now: he’d learnt not to look beyond tomorrow.
Yes, he congratulated himself, I am impeccably clear-minded. He unscrewed the top of his canteen. Dr Bernoulli, to your health. There was only water in the metal flask, but before drinking Bora raised it to the tin-coloured, summery sky.
THE MARTIN BORA SERIES
by Ben Pastor
LUMEN
£8.99/$14.95 • ISBN PB 978-1904738-664 • eB 978-1904738-695
October 1939, Cracow, Nazi-occupied Poland. Wehrmacht Captain Martin Bora discovers the abbess, Mother Kazimierza, shot dead in her convent garden. Her alleged power to see the future has brought her a devoted following. But her work and motto, “Lumen Christi Adiuva Nos”, appear also, it transpires, to have brought her some enemies. Stunned by the violence of the occupation and the ideology of his colleagues, Bora’s sense of Prussian duty is tested to breaking point. The interference of seductive actress Ewa Kowalska does not help matters.
“Pastor’s plot is well crafted, her prose sharp… a disturbing mix of detection and reflection.” Publishers Weekly
LIAR MOON
£8.99/$14.95 • ISBN PB 978-1904738-824 • eB 978-1904738-831
September 1943. The Italian government has switched sides and declared war on Germany. Italy is divided, the North controlled by the Fascists, the South liberated by Allied forces slowly fighting their way up the peninsula. Wehrmacht major and aristocrat Martin Bora is ordered to investigate the murder of a local Fascist: a bizarre death, threatening to discredit the regime’s public image. The prime suspect is the victim’s twenty-eight-year-old widow Clara.
“Atmospheric, ambitious and cleverly plotted, Liar Moon is an original and memorable crime thriller.” Crime Time