Misha nods, turning his eyes to the door. There’s a bullet hole in the center panel. The little man appears to see through the door, through the time directly ahead of them, what will happen inside that door and time, the way he can look at a map and predict how an attack will fare.
“Well then,” Misha says.
He climbs the steps and knocks on the door.
Ilya expects they’ll be made to wait, even to pound on the door, but the woman in the man’s clothes opens it soon. She puts her head in the open doorway. The kerchief is gone. Her hair is flaxen and there are hints of gray. She is not as young as her body made her seem carrying the water bucket. Her face is creased and thin, veiled with weariness, and striking.
“Ja?” she asks.
Misha greets her calmly. Ilya does not know what he says but there is courtesy in Misha’s voice, and there is want, like a door-to-door vendor.
“Ja,” she says, “komm.”
She pulls open the door and turns away. Before going in, Misha looks at Ilya with approval.
The house is in disarray. It has been ransacked. Drawers are emptied on the floor, the contents of closets tossed into piles. Furniture has been ripped by knives and the stuffing yanked out. Pictures are knocked from the walls.
In the hallway, a skinny teenage boy hangs a photograph back on a hook. He is listless, he doesn’t turn to look at the armed Russian soldiers in his house. His blond hair is pruned close, an inmate’s cut.
Misha speaks to the woman. She replies with a sardonic chortle. He answers her.
He interprets to Ilya, “I told her I was tired. She said I ought to sit down. I told her I wanted to lie down.”
The woman puts a hand on the newel post and hauls herself onto the first stair, to head to the upper floor. She says again, “Ja, komm. “The words seem not spoken but drained like oil out of her mouth.
Misha follows two steps behind. Halfway up the stairs the woman stops. She points at Ilya and speaks.
Misha says, “She wants you too. Both of us.”
Ilya shakes his head. He doesn’t want to be here. But he doesn’t know where else to go. There’s no more battle for him. This is the world that’s left, what he’s led them to.
He’ll stay downstairs. He’s in this house, there are answers here. He doesn’t need to be in the same bed as Misha and this woman. He’s here. Maybe that will suffice.
The woman hurries down the stairs. A renewed vigor infuses her step. She lays a hand on Ilya’s wrist. She smiles; the lines in her face are deep. She says, “Ja, komm. Komm mit uns.”
Ilya takes back his arm. “No. Nein. Misha, tell her.”
From the stairwell Misha speaks. The German on his tongue sounds imperious.
Misha says, “I told her to be patient. I want to be first.”
The woman laughs now. She speaks.
Misha says, ”She said I won’t be the first. Not by a dozen. Well, Ilyushka, we take what we can find, eh? Come along, Frau!’
The woman stays in front of Ilya. He towers over her, twice as wide, threatening and foreign in this house, but the woman seems inured to everything that he is. She glances to the boy in the hall, who now stands watching, listening. She must be his mother. She brings her gaze back to Ilya; she changes for those moments looking into his eyes, seeming to ask from him something she does not require of Misha. More than mercy, as though there is a thread of kindredness she has spotted. She wants Ilya to understand.
She says, “Bitte. Komm.”
Ilya says nothing, frozen in front of her. This woman’s face conveys to him an entirely separate war, one fought from this house. It teems on her cheeks and in her home like it does throughout Berlin. There is tragedy and suffering here to equal anything on the battlefield, all of it a different type from his, as though war is bragging to Ilya how many ways it can strike. But Ilya has no room for her war inside him, he has no desire to carry more load than is strapped to him already, the war he’s fought is abundant enough.
She asks too much.
“Misha, take her. Go on.”
The little sergeant comes down the steps. He lays hands on the woman and tows her onto the steps. Disappearing up the stairwell, she pulls her eyes from Ilya’s. She lays them on her son.
Her daughter.
Ilya sees it now. He sees everything in this house more clearly after looking for seconds through the mother’s eyes. The girl. Chopped, dressed, disguised. That’s why the mother wanted both soldiers upstairs with her. To protect the girl.
Ilya walks to her in the hall. She does not back away. She turns to face him, blocking the hall and, yes, she has a girl’s figure. Scrawnier than the mother, she is more beautiful, even with such stubbly hair. The beauty is her youth, and something else. The mother has courage, certainly; both women have it. Ilya knows bravery at an instant. But the mother’s courage is a wrapping to contain something else. Fear, perhaps. There is something hidden. This girl is not so frightened as the mother. She doesn’t ask for anything. She glares at Ilya’s approach.
She stops him with an outstretched hand to his chest. He could push her over with a stride. She finishes setting the photograph on the wall. It’s an old picture of a young man in uniform, from the previous German World War.
She walks by him in the hall, grabbing his big wrist. Her fingers are stronger than Ilya expects from a woman, she almost encircles his wrist. She leads him out of the hall. He notes a scab on the back of her cropped head. She guides him into the front room, a parlor. The sofa has been gutted. Some idiot soldiers came looting with knives. Ilya imagines what else these women have given at knifepoint.
In the center of the room, on a bloodred carpet, she releases him. Without a word, her eyes downcast, she hooks one heel behind the other to slide out of her boots. Ilya watches the girl set them aside. She unbuttons her pants. They are too big for her, they collapse from her waist into a pool at her feet. She steps out of them.
She wears no undergarment, she is immediately naked there. She does not pull her sweater over her head. Her pelvis protrudes in horns out of her hips, this girl is hungry. Bruises discolor her knees and thighs and groin.
She stands splay-footed on the carpet. She is two statues welded at the middle, a comely boy on top, a sad and trammeled woman on the bottom. Her face is a cipher. She has learned to keep it empty.
The girl bends. Her motion is empty too. It gives everything, and so grants nothing to be taken. There is no conquest of this girl.
She lies on the carpet, arms at her side, legs slightly spread. Her head is back, eyes at the ceiling. Her boots and the bunch of her dropped pants are beside her, like a melted man, another symbol of absence.
Ilya has not been with a woman since before Stalingrad. Three years. She is gaunt but beautiful.
Ilya walks forward. He stands over the girl. Her eyes shift to his. Looking down at her, the sense Ilya has is staring down into a well. If the black bottom has a face, it is this face below him now. He feels a chill.
Ilya has quested for answers but has he gone far enough for them? He’s seen life and death daily for four years now, in more manners than he would have once thought conceivable. But how much is there in between that he’s missed? Everything. Everything.
This girl on the floor is a casualty. Ilya is the same, but still on his feet. He is drawn to her the way a man is drawn to a mirror, to get a better look at himself. This girl, her hair is almost as short as Ilya’s. Her hands, for a woman, are stronger than his. Her body is marked too; Ilya lowers his eyes to her crotch, threads of her pubis are rusty with dried blood. She has battled, she and her mother, as much as any soldier. The cost of her war is not measured in other battered bodies, only her own. The battlefield is not a tract of torn-up, faraway land, but the carpet in her own parlor. And what she fights for is far more precious, more rightful, than anything Ilya has ever waged for. She fights to live. Only live.
Misha is right. War doesn’t end. It turns into this. This is where it waits and
incubates, in this girl. You can see it already, in her body, the bruises like purple explosions, bloodshed between her legs.
As much as Ilya has done, he cannot do this.
Misha is wrong.
Ilya is war.
War stops right now. Here.
He kicks the clump of pants over her bare legs.
“Get dressed.”
Ilya whirls from the supine girl. The chill he felt moments before is a sirocco now.
He stomps out of the parlor. His boots on the steps are heavy, purposefully announcing he is coming.
Ilya finds Misha in a bedroom. The little man is on top of the mother. His trousers are bundled around his ankles, he did not take off his boots. They are on a bed. Misha does not stop humping or look around from his labor. The woman lies beneath him like a five-pointed star, spread wide and white. Ilya grabs Misha’s lowered pants and yanks, pulling him by the legs backward off the woman until Misha hits the floor facedown, buttocks in the air. Misha blusters and curses for Ilya to let him go and get out. Ilya presses Misha to the floor with his boot between the man’s squirming shoulder blades. The woman does not slide out of bed. She must figure the big one wants her now and is tossing the little one out. Her lower body bears the same ugly badges as her daughter’s.
Ilya hoists Misha from the floor. The little sergeant is livid. Ilya does not listen to his tirade, does not give him time to pull up his pants. He makes Misha hop, dragging him out of the room. Snatching up Misha’s rifle and coat, Ilya heaves them into the hall and down the steps. Misha stumbles, grabbing at his pants. Ilya hauls him like a garbage sack.
At the bottom of the steps Ilya lets him fasten his trousers and shoves him his coat. Misha has not stopped yelling.
Ilya says nothing. The girl has risen from the parlor floor. She stands again where she was when they entered, in the hallway. Misha sputters. Ilya does not listen. He reaches back to cuff Misha across the scar on his cheek. The little man recoils and clams up. Untucked and flummoxed, Misha slings open the door. He flees into the street. Ilya walks out of the house behind him, tossing Misha’s rifle to clatter in the road. Misha steps forward with care to pick it up. The watches he left outside are gone, snatched by other greedy hands.
“Ilya.”
“Go away, Misha. Now. Don’t come back.”
“What ... ?” Misha staggers, still confounded, only seconds ago he was buried in a woman.
“Go. I won’t say it again.”
Misha jams his tunic into his pants. He bounces from small foot to foot doing it. Not taking his eyes from the sergeant, Ilya leans back and closes the door.
“What are you doing?”
Ilya answers by sitting on the stoop. He brings his PPSh down from his shoulder and lays it across his knees.
Misha nods at this.
“All right.”
The little man laughs.
“Good for you, Ilyushka. And good fucking luck.”
Misha pivots and walks away with even more of the false stature Ilya noticed before. Misha has swollen, bigger now that the whole war is inside him. Ilya thinks: Good luck to him, as well. Ilya watches him go.
The battle for the Reichstag is still in the air. Thumps and haze denote the final front lines between the warring countries. A new front line is drawn at Ilya’s feet. He will sit here on the steps of this house and anchor his end of it, to see how far it may reach.
Behind him, the door opens. Ilya doesn’t look over his shoulder. He expects some soft touch, perhaps a sob. He doesn’t want gratitude.
An odd man sits down on the step beside him. He is slighter than either of the women, his skin as pale as their bellies. He wears a gray civilian suit, bedraggled, the hems unravel at the wrists and ankles. A brown tie is pulled tight to a yellowed collar. Thinning dark hair lies greasy across a speckled scalp.The man mimics Ilya’s resolved posture on the steps, elbows on knees, except he has no gun.
He lofts his gaze up to the sky. He seems to admire the size of it.
He turns a large nose and unblinking black eyes to Ilya. The men are face-to-face only for seconds. In that short space Ilya sees the man has questions, as many as Ilya. He has strength too, more than Ilya.
Neither man will budge from these steps.
Ilya smiles. There is an ally. The new front grows.
* * * *
Epilogue
* * *
May 7, 1945, 6:05 a.m.
Stalin’s office
the Kremlin
Moscow
T
he war is over.
Stalin slams a fist on the telegram. The few items on his desk jiggle.
The general who brought him the sheet retreats as though Stalin’s fist might split open the floor.
The cable is from Eisenhower. It was sent an hour ago from the Supreme Commander’s headquarters in Reims, France:
the mission of this allied force was fulfilled at O24I, local time, may 7, 1945.
Stalin surveys the disarray on his desktop. His pipe has spilled tobacco. Lenin’s picture has tipped on its face. A blue pencil has rolled to the carpet. Stalin knows his teeth are bared. He takes one long breath through his nose. His jaw is tight, he can barely unclamp his molars to speak.
He lifts his eyes.
“General?”
“Yes. Yes, Comrade?”
“Who is responsible for this?”
The soldier in front of Stalin’s desk is clearly a man of long service. He has his code of loyalty. He is reluctant. He bends to retrieve Stalin’s blue pencil. He reaches it out. Stalin does not extend his hand to accept it. The general places it on the desk.
Stalin glares.
“General. Who signed the surrender on behalf of the Soviet Union?”
“It was Susloparov.”
The officer begins to fidget. The man wants to do something. What? Straighten Stalin’s desk? He wants to say something more. To defend his comrade. To tell Stalin that Susloparov is innocent.
Innocent? This Susloparov flies to fucking France to accept the surrender of the German army, in Eisenhower’s headquarters? France! What did the French lose? How many bottles of wine did they have smashed? And Eisenhower. How many soldiers did he expend? Two, three hundred thousand? The Red Army lost that many between the Vistula and Berlin. This war cost Russia ten million of its people.
A week ago Hitler shot himself in his bunker. His whore Eva Braun took cyanide. Goebbels and his wife poisoned their children, then killed themselves. That’s because the Red Army was one block away and storming their gates. The next day the Soviet battle flag flew over the Reichstag.
The Nazi empire slipped and fell on Russian blood. Germany lies coated in it.
Who is Susloparov? He wasn’t authorized to report to France like one of Eisenhower’s lackeys. Who designated him to accept the German surrender? He has no right to agree to anything on behalf of the Soviet Union. Stalin was not even shown the surrender document before it was signed. In France.
“General, do me a kindness.”
“Of course, Comrade.”
“Somewhere in the Kremlin there is a bottle of vodka, yes?”
The general does not trust the question. It’s barely dawn. And Stalin does not drink alcohol.
“It’s all right,” Stalin assures the man, there is no trap here. “A bottle of vodka, General. And two glasses. You will join me in a victory drink.”
The officer licks his lips. There is hesitation. The man lifts his head and neck, giving the impression of a proud man at the gallows.
Stalin smiles, showing his yellow teeth again. The general comes to rigid attention. Such fuss, Stalin thinks, for a bottle and two glasses.
“Of course, Comrade Stalin. At once.” The officer spins on his boots and departs.
While the officer is gone, Stalin tidies his desk. He repacks his pipe and puts it aside. When he is done, he stands from his chair to pace. The soyuzniki. They nibble always at Stalin’s authority. Little gambits like this one. Eis
enhower commanded the French, British, Americans, and Russians to come to him and sign his paper. To him, like he is some big shot. No, no, no, Stalin chuckles, you will not catch me so easily. It is you, little allies, who have been nabbed.
Stalin is ever on guard. Daily he reads Churchill’s telegrams and Truman’s cables of concurrence. They warn Stalin, they request, they beg. They offer nothing but friendship, threaten nothing but the withdrawal of their good graces. They bear no cudgel Stalin fears, no treasure Stalin covets. Every utterance from his allies is an attempt to sway him one way or another. Like wind.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 54