“Of course not.” It was Gil’s automatic answer. The dying man beckoned him close and, with a powerful grasp Gil had no reason to expect, took him by the throat. “That’s a lie.” Gil could taste the spittle, he was so close to the man’s face.
“All right, yes, you are going to die, and probably tonight.” This man deserved complete candor for the distress he had just caused Gil. “I was about to give you enough morphine to see you through to the end.”
“First, you have to listen. I can’t die without telling someone. There is something I did; it was wrong. Something we did, the NKVD. It’s changed everything for me. I have to tell someone.”
Gil shook his head. He had no need to learn NKVD secrets. “Whatever you did was for the Soviet state, for Comrade Stalin. Rest quiet now.”
The captain closed his eyes. “I’ve been in the security organs since ’37, when we were beating confessions out of the old Bolsheviks—harmless . . . old comrades. It was for the good of the party, yes? We had to send a signal to the wreckers even if it meant liquidating some innocent true believers.” This was just what Gil didn’t want to know. But at least the man was whispering, and there was no one else on the ward that night to overhear. The wounded man stopped momentarily, and Gil breathed a sigh of relief. But then he continued. “Even when Stalin made the pact, we believed he was playing for time, that we weren’t ready.”
Here Gil was finally able to agree. “Yes, that’s right, Comrade Stalin understood everything.”
“So, why did he kill thousands of Polish officers who could have helped us fight the Fascists once we were ready?” Gil wanted to stop up his ears, but now he was hypnotized by the dying man’s words. What was he talking about? “Once Stalin got his hands on Poland, we were ordered to take them out of the POW camps and shoot them, one after the other. Was this Comrade Stalin’s way of preparing for war with Germany? To kill men whose only crime was to have fought against the Germans? No. He wasn’t getting ready for war against Hitler. He was going to join Hitler’s war, and the enemy of his friend was his enemy too. Our country is in the hands of one of Hitler’s pawns . . . who only fights him now because his loyalty was betrayed.”
Gil almost reached up to cover the commissar’s mouth before he realized they were the only ones still awake or even alive in the ward. No one can talk like this, not even a dying man, he thought. As for those Polish officers? If there had been any, it was hard for Gil to work up much sympathy for them. They were probably catechizing Catholics, foppish second sons of landed families, happy to compete in dressage and attend embassy parties, indifferent to the sufferings of workers and especially minorities in their new Polish state. These dead officers were probably men with nothing much against their German fellow officers, combined with three hundred years of hating Russians and Jews. Surely Stalin knew what he was doing when he liquidated this potential internal threat. This, at any rate, was what Gil was going to convince himself of now that he had learned what he didn’t want to know.
Of course, the NKVD captain could have been making everything up. Perhaps it was even a test. Might it be that if he didn’t report these remarks, he’d be in trouble himself? Would they maim someone like that just to set me up? No, that was too paranoid even in a nation where paranoia was the key to survival.
The NKVD officer began again. “We just followed Koba.” This was Stalin’s pet name. “I betrayed the revolution. I became an unworthy person.” He lay back and smiled. “Now I’ve confessed.” After a pause, he smiled again. “I am a Soviet person again.” The dying captain fell asleep, exhausted by his exertion, and the morphine wasn’t needed. He was dead before Gil’s shift ended the next morning.
When his replacement arrived, Gil asked, “Comrade captain, do you believe deathbed confessions are to be trusted?”
The answer came back, “Yes, when they come from enemies of the state.” Like every sensible person, his colleague was ever on his guard.
Don’t make waves. Don’t get noticed, not in Stalin’s Russia. Gil was familiar with the maxim. But there was nothing for it. After the withdrawal from Dnepropetrovsk, Gil knew he had to act before the steady stream of wounded turned into a flood. He had to find a way out before the front caught up with him again. There was really only one chance.
Putting on a clean uniform, he made himself look as military as he could. The tunic fit nicely. Good-quality cloth, fully lined. There was smart beading down the trousers, the leather officer’s belt ready to carry a sidearm. As a medical officer, of course, Gil didn’t carry one. But there were officer’s tabs and epaulets. Hair cut short, but still the thin mustache. He’d put on a little weight, but his color was good. All that time in the outdoors during the retreat, no doubt. He enjoyed catching glimpses of himself in uniform. He would regret giving it up. But it wasn’t worth his life.
Steeling himself, he went to the colonel’s tent and asked to speak to him. He was shown in directly.
“Yes, Romero?” Colonel Volodin, commander of the evacuation hospital, was not a physician, nor was Leutnant Colonel Briansk, the party commissar who stood behind the seated colonel.
“Sir, as you will recall, I came to Poland from Spain before the war. The Soviet government has concluded an agreement with the Polish government in exile to allow former Polish residents here in the Soviet Union to join a Polish Army now forming on Soviet territory.”
“Yes. I am familiar with all this.”
“Sir, I request permission to be detached from this unit so that I can join these new forces.”
“You want to join Anders’s ex-POWs out east in Orenburg? That’s central Asia, man—there’s nothing there.” Apparently Volodin knew more about the matter than Gil did. He even seemed to know who was in charge of this fledgling army of Poles. “You’d be joining an army with no weapons, that probably won’t even get fed. The whole thing is just another stupid waste of manpower. I need you here, anyway.” He was about to conclude “Permission denied” when Briansk, the commissar, audibly cleared his throat. Gil tried not to notice its decided effect on Colonel Volodin, who turned. “Leutnant Colonel, what do you think about this request?”
“The first secretary, comrade Stalin, made this undertaking to the Poles, sir. He even had their general, Anders, taken from the Lubyanka to command it. Were Romero to file a grievance, he would have some grounds.”
Gil laughed inwardly. No one filed grievances in the Red Army. But his face remained immobile. Was this grievance talk coded language?
“Very well.” Volodin turned to Gil. “Report back for your orders tomorrow morning.”
He was packed at 6:00 a.m. the next morning and still waiting at the adjutant’s tent at eleven o’clock when his orders were finally cut.
Detached from this command. Major Romero will present himself at Polish Military headquarters, Moscow, for reassignment.
And now he had been promoted to major. Perhaps Volodin didn’t want Gil to remember what the colonel had said—“another stupid waste of manpower”—just before the commissar had mentioned the Lubyanka prison.
A major didn’t have to ride “hard class” to Moscow, though it did involve three changes. There was no rush. His orders were undated, and so long as he wore the uniform, he could eat at officers’ messes along the rail route, stay warm in officers’ waiting rooms, and even get a musjik to carry his bag along the platforms from one train to another.
Taking maximum advantage of his situation required some thought and some information too. Arriving in Moscow on November 24, Major Romero showed his orders at Paveletsky Terminal, received a billeting order, and checked his bag. He would explore Moscow on foot long enough to stretch his legs. Turning to look at the station’s vast structure as he left the building, Gil caught a glimpse of old Europe in its Baron Haussmann-like proportions, its rounded black mansard roof, and its entry arches, three levels high. The reminder of the D’Orsay Station beside the Seine in Paris made him feel worldly for the first time since he had left Barcel
ona.
Late November 1941 was hardly the moment for sightseeing. The Germans were rapidly approaching, and much of Moscow’s industrial capacity had already moved east. Romero didn’t know it, but babushkas, grandmothers in head-scarves, were digging tank traps in the western suburbs. There were suggestions that the Politburo was clearing out. These rumors Gil would not believe when he heard them a few days later. But there seemed to be an absence of NKVD in the railway station, traffic was thin on the streets in front of the terminal, and none of it seemed to be heading in the direction the street signs marked toward Red Square.
But people were moving, walking rapidly through the station and out of it. Moscow was the largest city he had been in since he left Barcelona. He was thrilled at the anonymity it afforded him. A snow squall began as he turned right out of the lofty station onto a double-laned boulevard, still lit by high streetlamps against the winter gloom. Gil began looking for a café or bar, someplace where he could have a drink and perhaps begin to figure out the lay of this new land. The almost complete absence of shops, stores, and businesses immediately struck him. How did a city of millions function without them? It couldn’t. So, where were they hidden?
He found himself walking across the Moscow River, or at least a canalized section of it. The snow squall had stopped, and the heat of the traffic made the pavement glisten. Here he saw men and women striding purposefully in both directions over the bridge—some carrying briefcases, others sheaves of documents, still others empty-handed—each, including the women, striding manfully, apparently on a war-urgent mission. None appeared to need the watchful eye of a security service to make them do their utmost. This was something entirely new in his short experience of Soviet life. Never in the vast tail of logistics that stretched endlessly away from the front lines had anyone ever worked hard when no authority was around. Until this very morning in Moscow, he had no idea how Russia could win the war. Now he was reassessing his pessimism. Suddenly he wanted to be part of something larger than himself.
The next morning Gil found himself the only person seated in a waiting room inside one of those vast courtyard blocks only a few streets from his billet and the station. The room was warm with men coming and going, and it was awash in Polish. Some of the men entering and leaving were dressed in Polish uniforms badly the worse for wear, others in the enlisted men’s garb of the Soviet army, and a few seemed to be dressed in cleaned-up prisoners’ coveralls. All were thin, some scrawny, but they carried themselves with an unreasonable élan.
A door opened, and someone shouted in Polish, “Major Doctor Romero.” Gil rose and took four steps into a smaller room with a desk, behind which sat an officer in one of the weather-beaten Polish uniforms, one of those absurd four-pointed cavalry officer’s caps from before the war hanging on a coatrack behind him. Probably a prop, Gil thought. The officer took Gil’s heavy woolen greatcoat, hefted it, and smiled, putting it on the coatrack. “Handy in this weather. Wish I had one of those, major.” Gil suppressed the urge to try barter. “I’m Colonel Radetksy.” He offered his hand, then looked at Gil’s papers spread out before him on the desk: Soviet identity, military orders, Polish residency papers, statements from the hospital director in Lvov, medical certificates from Marseille and Barcelona. “So, you want to join the Polish Eastern Army.” He looked at the papers again. “You’re not a Pole.”
“Is that a problem?” It was one Gil could solve by opening up a seam in his medical case and pulling out his real papers—Tadeusz Sommermann, Polish citizen.
“Not really. You’re not Russian, so you’re covered by the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement. But all that did was make anyone who became a Soviet subject when they invaded along with the Germans in ’39 a Polish subject again as of July ’41. You’re free to join the army General Anders is organizing or not. If you don’t, you can take your chances in Russia as a civilian.”
The option surprised Gil. “I see. What happens if I join up?”
“You go east to Totskoye in Orenburg and wait. Maybe you get to fight with the Russians against the Germans; maybe you sit out the war. Maybe Stalin changes his mind and re-Sovietizes us. Maybe he sends us back to the POW camps. That’s where most of us came from. Maybe we fight our way out of the country. The Czech Legion did it in 1920—twenty thousand men, all the way from the Eastern Front across to Vladivostok.” Gil knew of this feat of arms. He had met a few of its veterans in Spain, still seeking adventure in late middle age. It didn’t interest him except as a footnote to history.
Radetsky read Gil’s silence correctly. “It’s not for you, is it, our little Polish army? Frankly, we want willing volunteers, Poles who are ardent for the nation. We’ve already lost a fair number of recruits, men who took one look at Totskoye and decided it wasn’t for them. General Anders has issued orders that they are not to be stopped. It’s not a cause for the national minorities.” This, Gil understood, was code for Jews. “Poland was never really for the minorities. And you are really a minority—a Spaniard in Poland!”
“I think you understand, Colonel Radetsky. What do you suggest?”
“Well, I’ll give you enlistment papers. They should be enough to get you out of the Soviet medical corps. Then come back and we’ll cancel them. You’ll have papers that should keep you out of trouble as a civilian, to the extent that’s possible in this country.”
“How can I thank you?”
Radetsky merely shook his head while taking Gil’s extended hand to shake. However, the answer to his question immediately suggested itself to Gil.
A week later a package arrived at the Polish Eastern Army headquarters. It was labeled Attention: Colonel Radetsky. When he opened it, he was surprised and pleased to find a best-quality military greatcoat, shorn of all its Soviet military insignia.
By the time the battle of Moscow was over, Guillermo Romero was hard at work at Maternity Hospital Number 6, Moscow’s oldest and best lying-in clinic.
With the German offensive roaring into the suburbs, Gil reckoned he could be choosy. Fainthearted physicians had suddenly found pressing business to the east, leaving vacancies urgently to be filled. Childbirth did not take a holiday either for Christmas or the Wehrmacht’s timetable. Thus he reasoned, and found his way to City Maternity Hospital Number 6, on Miusskaya Street. It was still called the Apricot by porters and orderlies, after a local chocolate factory, an unpatriotic name that was still undetected by the state security organs. The building took up the better part of a city block, three stories high, a turret on each corner connected by bays of nine windows, and surrounded by mature trees, leafless now in winter. When the spring came, a lovely garden would bloom within the building’s quadrangle.
Finding an apartment on Miusskaya Ploshchad overlooking the broad square behind the hospital was not difficult for Gil either. Lots of important bureaucrats “called away” beyond the Urals to the east were eager to have the concierge sublet their flats.
He had been right to think that Moscow would be held. Gil prided himself on his powers to predict these matters on which life, and comfort, for that matter, depended. By the time the house staff returned after the battle of Stalingrad a year later, he had made himself indispensable. Gil would ride the war out here very nicely, thank you.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Finishing his examination, Dr. Romero snapped off his rubber gloves. “You may dress now, Comrade Madame Malov. Then please come in and sit down.” Gil turned and moved back to his consulting room.
After several months supervising midwives on the delivery floors, Gil had found his métier in the gynecology department, just as he had in Lvov. It was a combination of his skills, his way with female staff—a willingness to listen—and his manner. The romance of his name and his exotic history did not hurt either. But mostly, he thought, his advantage was that he liked women, including the young woman now seated before him. She was only a few years out of the Komsomol, her red skirt over a white blouse practically an homage to her time in the league of young party
members.
“Can you tell me when your last menstrual period was, comrade?”
“I have missed two cycles, Comrade Doctor.” Most women in Moscow could recall such matters exactly. Hunting for sanitary products had been a monthly task even before the war. Now it was a mission, and women noticed when a month had gone by without having to find some.
“My congratulations. You are pregnant.”
Comrade Madame Malov choked slightly. “That’s what I feared.”
“Feared?” Gil had seen enough patients not to be surprised.
“It’s not convenient, Comrade Doctor. It’s worse. It will devastate my husband, ruin my marriage, harm a friend for life . . . What can I do, Doctor?”
They both knew perfectly well what she was really saying. Only a few years before, it would not have been an issue. For a long time after 1917, abortion was a matter of women’s reproductive rights. Contraception was widely available, and the double standard was condemned as a vestige of bourgeois morality. But as the five-year plans took hold, sexual freedom began to seem too revolutionary, almost Trotskyite. Then in 1935 the Supreme Soviet had passed strict prohibitions, largely, it was said, to accelerate population growth.
“I can’t help you, comrade. We both know the relevant laws.”
“Doctor, listen. My husband has been out of Moscow for eight months, first in the Far East and now at the Leningrad front. He is almost forty, much older than I am, professional military, and very senior, a division commander. I made a mistake with a young friend from the party. If I have the child, everything will be ruined. My husband’s subordinates will find out and laugh at him, his superiors will condemn him, my friend will be ruined in the party, and my husband will repudiate the child. Please, you must help me.” It didn’t seem to be working. The doctor was not even looking at her anymore. Instead, he was writing something out on a pad.
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