by Peter Golden
I act like I agree with her, nodding, because I got no doubt she’d kill me quick as a cat kills a mouse and with less regret.
And bless her heart, Hildegard smiles, all friendly after our girl talk. “I should not keep you from your work. I will have Joost send coffee and cake. If there is a problem, ask the guard outside the door to find me.”
For months, I copy Hitler’s meshuggeneh ranting. Once in a while Joost stops in and stands over me, reading over my shoulder, checking that I got the words right.
“Can’t you work faster?” he asks.
“Not without making mistakes.”
He clamps his hand on my shoulder, squeezing until I want to scream. “This book is for the Führer. No mistakes.”
“Frau Ter Horst has made that clear.”
He laughs. “Then I guess she is good for something.”
Usually it is Hildegard who comes, bringing coffee and strudel for us. We chat or she sits on the bench, taking apart the Matryoshka dolls and putting them together again. Sometimes, before she enters, I hear her and the guard go to the room next door. Where Emma, me, and the girls sleep on straw-stuffed mattresses. I hear them panting. Like thirsty dogs. Once, after the guard, Hildegard comes in and says, “In German law, sex between an Aryan and Jew is forbidden, Bashe, but if you are lonely I can order one of the young men . . .”
That’s all I need. An SS viper between my legs. The Nazis murdered my husband, but Hildegard don’t know that. “I can’t, one day I’ll go back to the man I married.”
“You are fortunate.”
“Blessed,” I reply, and of course, Hildegard don’t get the irony.
One day she says to me, “I might be pregnant.”
I look at her, not knowing what to say.
And she says, “Won’t you congratulate me?”
Then she starts giggling. “Joost will not care. He will have someone take a picture of me cooing at the baby on my lap, and Joost will frame it and put it on his desk. The perfect SS officer and father.”
A week later, Hildegard tells me she don’t think she’s pregnant no more. All she says about this is “Too bad. I would have been a good mother.”
I ain’t in no position to disagree, and she don’t got the time to brood about not having a baby. Her and Joost have a lot of parties—Nazi generals and officials passing through. They come for the cooking, which is why Joost wanted help in the kitchen, and to get under the uniform skirts of the young SS maidens who answer to Hildegard. I tell Emma about the guard and Hildegard, and Emma says she always selects a male guest to take on a tour upstairs and returns with her face flushed. Joost ignores it. Your grandmother says he don’t try nothing with her. She’s rubbed against him, hoping to get on his good side so he’ll protect her daughters. Alexandra’s in school with Darya now, the only student with dark hair. Nine Ukrainian and Russian kids in a palace room with an SS maiden teaching them German and organizing games for them.
I say to Emma, “We’re safe here, and maybe Hildegard ain’t that bad.”
“Bashe, the Red Army has millions more soldiers than the Germans and eventually will win. As the Nazis go home, they’ll kill every Jew and Slav they can. And we’re both. What’s that you told me Hildegard said? ‘God writes our stories in vanishing ink.’ ”
“Her father said it.”
“I don’t care who said it. If you don’t think Hildegard believes it, your brain’s in your ass.”
My brain is right where it’s supposed to be. I want to help your grandmother relax. She’s panicked about her daughters. I know the pain of losing a child—pain forever, pain you can’t imagine till it’s your pain. But I need Emma thinking clear. She’s craftier than me; we will have to escape, and it’ll be tougher than your grandmother knows. Hildegard allows me breaks from copying, and I walk outside and that’s when I seen things too scary to tell your grandmother.
Truckloads of wounded German soldiers arriving. The SS maidens sit them by the sunflowers, and several nurses give them injections. The men fall back, dead. Hildegard counts the bodies, Joost writes the numbers in a notebook, and soldiers load the corpses onto the trucks and drive away. And Hildegard herding a group of girls—no more than thirteen or fourteen years old—to the Happy House. And other girls being taken out and Hildegard, with her quartet of vipers in tow, leading them to the woods. The worst was the children the soldiers caught taking apples from the orchard. A boy ran off, the soldiers fired at him and missed, and Hildegard, who was strolling by with Joost and some SS maiden, watched till the boy was fifty meters away and shot him with her pistol. Joost, he starts clapping, and Hildegard stands there, smiling up at him.
In February 1943, I finish copying the six hundred and eighty-seven pages of Mein Kampf. Hildegard’s lost interest in the book. She’s never shared no news with me, but now she rambles on about the war. The Germans surrendered at Stalingrad. Eight hundred thousand of their troops are killed, wounded, or captured. They lose at least half a million more at Kursk and Rostov. At the palace, the mood is somber. There are fewer dinner parties. Emma pilfers tinned meat and fish and biscuits from the kitchen, and hides them in our rucksacks.
“It’s coming,” she says.
In May, I’m almost done checking and correcting my written copy of Mein Kampf, and we can hear the artillery duels in the distance. The Red Army is getting closer. I’m in the Jew Room one morning with the window open. Trucks are outside the palace, and soldiers are yelling to each other to separate the furniture and carpets from the dishes and silverware. I go to the window. In the woods there is the crackle of gunfire. I’m scared, and it gets worse when I hear Hildegard outside the door talking quietly to the guard.
They stop talking. I wait. And wait. The soldier calls, “Bashe.” I don’t reply. The door swings in. I’m standing behind it. Your grandmother saved my life. She explained how to use the Luger and insisted I bring it with me every day, hiding the pistol by securing it to my calf with a belt. It’s in my hand when the soldier fires a burst from his Maschinenpistole at my chair before realizing it’s empty. I yank on the barrel of his gun. He stumbles forward. I press the Luger to his neck and fire. He staggers to the side. I stick the barrel against his ear and fire again. His blood splatters my face. I take his submachine gun and the three-magazine pouch from his belt. Nobody is in the hall. I go to the room where we sleep, slip my arms through the straps of my rucksack, jam the pouch and Luger into Emma’s rucksack and sling it over my shoulder, then hurry down the hallway and out to the grand entryway, where Joost is standing with a soldier and the SS maiden who teaches the children.
“What is this?” Joost shouts.
I answer him with the Maschinenpistole. I don’t know how to unfold the wire butt stock or aim the weapon, but it shoots so many bullets I just point it and squeeze the trigger, and Joost tumbles backward and the soldier and the teacher go down with him. I want to check if they’re dead, except I hear Emma screaming. Shrieking and screaming from the other wing of the palace. I enter the hallway that leads to the children’s classroom. The rucksacks are heavier with every step. Emma is silent. Did you know even if you got a broken heart, your heart can break some more? I didn’t. Not till I looked in that room. Your grandmother sits on the floor, her apron bloody and Alexandra’s head on her lap. Some children are slumped over their little desks. The rest are lying together.
“A soldier killed them,” Emma says, her voice full of the cold fury you hear in the winter wind slashing across the steppes. “And Hildegard took Darya out the door at the end of the hall. Get Darya, Bashe. Get her.”
“Your Luger’s in here,” I say, dropping a rucksack, then running outside.
A convoy of trucks and jeeps is a couple hundred meters past the sunflower field, and soldiers in coal-scuttle helmets run through the dust cloud churned up by the wheels.
I go to the classroom. Emma looks at me. I shake my head. She kisses Alexandra.
“I don’t want to leave her, Bashe.”
/> Her face looks like she’s crying without tears. I help her stand and take off her apron. She removes the Luger from the rucksack and puts her arms through the shoulder straps.
Staring at Alexandra, your grandmother, as if stating a scientific fact, says, “We will find Darya.”
I don’t argue. Why bother? Emma says we have to stay off main roads—we don’t want to bump into the Germans or the Red Army, who sometimes believe escaped prisoners are spies and shoot them. We tramp through forests, along fields, and around burned villages.
That night we slept under fir trees. Your grandmother is silent, and her silence continues until the following morning at the sugar-beet field. We smell the field before we see it, the stink of death so thick it seems to poison the sunlight.
Today, everybody hears about Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dachau, the popular names. But there are other camps the Nazis set up because they need them at the moment, camps with no names, where the killing is so thorough no one survives to remember them.
That was the camp in the sugar-beet field. Posts with barbed wire enclose the field. There are four guard towers and shacks inside the wire, and bodies of men, women, and children in and out of the enclosure, like the black soil is growing corpses.
I ask your grandmother, “Is God going to destroy the world again?”
“It’s not raining, so there can’t be a flood.”
“Maybe He’s got another idea.”
Two seared German armored cars and a tank, with black crosses painted on their sides, are across the field. Dead Soviet soldiers surround them, and dead German soldiers hang out of the cars, and another soldier is half in and half out of the tank turret.
I say, “Our army tried to free them.”
The fury is gone from your grandmother’s voice, but not the coldness, “We should see if there are weapons and some better clothing.”
“Emma, the smell will kill us.”
“Breathe through your mouth.”
I feel like a grave robber, stepping over and around the dead, and I avoid their waxy faces. We come away with Red Army tunics and trousers held up by belts with a Communist star on the buckle; boots made of artificial leather that don’t fit till we wrap several cloths around our feet; ponchos we stuff in two duffel-bag packs; a dozen more magazines for my Maschinenpistole; a holster and seven magazines for Emma’s Luger; and a Soviet submachine gun with a big round drum underneath it for the bullets. Technically, I find out, its name is PPSh-41, but Soviet soldiers call it papasha—daddy.
I inspect us in our new outfits. “Now the Nazis will shoot us on sight.”
“At least our toes won’t be blistered.”
I laugh, believing your grandmother has recovered enough to make jokes. As we leave, though, she pauses by a little red-haired girl on her back in the dirt, a stuffed bear held to her chest that don’t fully cover her wounds. The girl is in an embroidered Ukrainian blouse and skirt, but her skirt is up, and she has no underwear. Emma pulls down the skirt, then gazes at the girl like she’s intending to stand in that field till the Messiah shows up.
I tug her sleeve.
“I will find Darya,” she murmurs, as if reciting a prayer.
And it was late one afternoon, with shadows darkening the steppes, that we smell stew cooking from behind a row of oak trees and become partisans.
Listen to me. It’s important if you really drive all this way to understand your grandmother—if you can feel in your heart the woman the war made of my dear Emma. There was lots of brave partisans fighting, but after the war, when Soviets talk, you’d think every one of them witless braggers was partisans and rescued Mother Russia from the fascists. A dime gets y’all a dollar they did nothing except stand around burping like cows. If your grandmother was here, she wouldn’t lie. We was partisans till the winter of 1944, and for many of them seven or eight months we hide in forests, in a hole in a hillside, in a barn or hut the Nazis don’t remodel with their flamethrowers. But this is as true as you and Yulianna is sitting there. People lived because of us, and we made the German army a little smaller.
Here’s how it starts. Your grandmother smells that stew and says, “These idiots are too close to the fields. They keep doing that, the Germans will get them.”
“I’m hungry.”
“Then let’s meet some of the dumbest people in the Ukraine.”
We go past the oaks, and there they are, a man and three teenage girls sitting around a cooking fire with a three-legged pot simmering over the flame.
The man, in a Red Army uniform, with a mustache like Stalin and a belly hanging over his belt, pops up to his feet. “I am Valentin Ivanovich Vedenin, commander of the Vedenin Partisans.”
Me, I’m betting he’s a deserter and his opinions is bigger than his balls, but I’m saying nothing. I want some stew. Then the oldest girl stands, kerchief on her head, a peasant skirt and blouse. She’s maybe seventeen, with white-blond hair, milky skin, eyes the color of cornflowers—one of those virginal-looking dolls men can’t wait to ruin.
“I am Katrya. And these are my twin sisters, Oxana and Olena.”
The twins are younger—I guess, fifteen—with long thick brown hair. They ain’t as pretty as Katrya, but got sweeter smiles and wide dark eyes. One of them ladles stew into a mess kit and says, “Please, eat with us.”
“Hold it,” Valentin says to Emma and me. “Do you want to join the Vedenin Partisans?”
Emma chuckles. “Can we have dinner first?”
“You do not believe we are serious?” Valentin says, and walks around a thicket.
We follow him, the three sisters follow us. Sitting on a log, their mouths gagged with cloths and their hands and feet tied with rope, are two Nazi soldiers.
Valentin says, “They were wandering near here, and we captured them. They don’t speak Russian or Ukrainian, so I could not interrogate them.”
I tell him I speak German, and he removes their gags. “Ask them where the unit is located.”
I ask, and both give the same answer: if they knew where the unit was, they wouldn’t have gotten lost. I tell Valentin, and then, what happens next, I won’t never forget if I live to a hundred and twenty.
Your grandmother takes a snapshot out of her rucksack—the one she carries of her, Gak, and their daughters. It’s bent and peeling on the edges, and she shows it to the two soldiers, and tells me to ask them if they’ve seen the girl on her lap. I ask. The soldiers shake their heads.
And your grandmother puts the photo in her rucksack, then raises her arms and shoots those two with her submachine gun. The papasha hurts my ears, and the soldiers fly off the log.
Valentin, the girls, and me gape at Emma, while she’s acting like killing a pair of Nazis before dinner ain’t nothing unusual.
“Is the stew ready?” she asks.
Your grandmother eats—it’s a hare stew with potatoes—and reads a book Katrya lends her—The Partisan’s Companion. It’s put out by the government to teach partisans how to hurt the Nazis, something Katrya and her sisters want badly to do, because the fascists murdered their parents.
It’s dark now, Emma and me wrap ourselves in our ponchos and try to sleep. Close by, Katrya says, “I don’t want to. Not anymore.”
Valentin replies, “If not you, then your sisters.”
“No, no. They’re too young.”
“Then move over.”
Emma says, “Go to sleep, Valentin. By yourself.”
“Mind your business, woman.”
“Sleeping is my business now, and you’re disturbing me. Leave her alone.”
“Perhaps you’d like to take her place.”
“Sure. After the Nazis kill me, you’re free to climb on.”
Emma gets up, and in the dark I hear the click of her pulling back the bolt of her papasha. She sits by Katrya and again tells Valentin to go. He leaves, but to save face says he’ll discuss this with Emma in the morning.
There’s no talk when we wake up, but I don’t ha
ve no more cigarettes, and Valentin’s got packages of Makhorka—that’s loose tobacco—and he’s rolled himself a smoke.
“Comrade,” I ask him. “May I have tobacco for a cigarette?”
He laughs. “Do you have five rubles?”
I do, but I’ll be damned if I’ll pay him that for one lousy smoke. I say no, and he replies, “Then maybe we can discuss an arrangement for this evening.”
Emma, she’s reading the handbook, and puts it down, stands up, and, just as I seen the Luger in her hand, your grandmother shoots Valentin in the forehead. This shocks me and the girls, but I’ll tell you what—it’s some kind of miracle. Maybe not like a cup of oil lasting eight days, but it’s a sight to see. Valentin on his back with a hole in his head and the cigarette still in his mouth. Your grandmother takes the cigarette and gives it to me.
I say, “You’re developing a bad habit.”
“You should try it. It’s more fun than smoking.”
From then on, your grandmother leads us. The Nazis, they hunt partisans and kill the ones they catch. We hide and specialize in picking off their sentries at night or shooting those dumb enough to get lost. Fact is, we is lost most of the time. That’s what happens when you ain’t got a map. Katrya says we’re south of Kiev, but that’s as helpful as knowing we’re south of the North Pole.
One adventure I remember. We seen seven Nazi soldiers riding toward a stretch of evergreens. We know this area, there’s a trail that goes to a stream, and your grandmother tells me and the twins to hide behind the rocks across the stream and shoot the soldiers if they come. Start with the horses, she says. Then she goes up behind the stream with Katrya. The Nazis ride down the trail like they’re in the German countryside and don’t got a care in the world. We fire at them. I feel terrible seeing the horses fall, but I don’t got a chance to cry about it, because we don’t hit all the soldiers and some is on the ground firing at us—till Emma and Katrya sneak up from behind and finish off the fascists.
That night, for dinner—God forgive me—we got grilled horse filets.