Now different questions washed these out of his consciousness: If Guildenstern had remarried, then what about Rita? Did she get out? Had they divorced? Was Rita alive or dead? Did Urs know? Did he know anything about her fate? The only way to answer these questions was to do the thing he could not, at all costs, do: reveal himself to Urs Guildenstern.
Gil’s decision was quickly made. He picked up the telephone and called the waiting room nurse. “I am feeling ill. I must go home. Please shift all my intake for the rest of the day to Dr. Ivanoff.” He took off his white coat, slipped out his door, and was walking away from the building within a few moments.
A few days later, Gil called for the file on Guildenstern, Karla, Mrs. She was indeed pregnant, due May 15, 1944. If she was going to deliver in his hospital, in the Krupskya of all places, the likelihood of meeting Urs would be close to a certainty. Gil had six months to deal with this problem.
By the end of 1943, people in Moscow could already see the end of the war, though it was still years away. At Stalingrad the previous winter, the Germans lost 600,000 men and their commanding officer, von Paulus. Hitler had made him field marshal when already surrounded, knowing that no German field marshal had ever before surrendered himself. Von Paulus turned out to be the first.
As the war receded from Moscow, its café society was still willing to risk some visibility. And it had taken up exotic and interesting people such as Dr. Guillermo Romero. Gil and Lister made it a point of never finding themselves in the same bar, party, or reception after the night they had met. But for many in Moscow, the Spanish Civil War was a fragrant memory, a badge of honor unsullied by tactical compromise with Nazis. These people were eager to have a Catalan for a guest, even if he made no claim to membership in the International Brigades.
Standing alone one night, with champagne cocktail in one hand and an American Lucky Strike cigarette in the other, Gil was surveying the guests at the party, especially the women. He had just been assailed by the scent of Arpège cutting through the tobacco smoke. It brought Paris back with a stab of longing. Suddenly he wondered, Could Lena possibly be somewhere in this crowd? His reverie was interrupted by a tall man smoking a pipe, who walked up to him making such strong eye contact Gil was momentarily afraid he was about to be arrested. The man’s graying hair was parted nowhere at all, and some of it hung lank over his brow. His clothing was rumpled, high quality, and professorial. When he proffered his hand, it was ink-stained. Drink in his left hand, Gil had to put his cigarette in his mouth to shake the hand. The stranger gave his name, but Gil did not quite hear it in the noise around them. “Sorry,” Gil said, “I thought you said ‘Ehrenburg,’ a writer I used to read in Paris.”
“That’s what I said, Ilya Ehrenburg.”
Despite himself, Gil’s eyes opened wider. He did not even realize he was repeating the name out loud. “Ilya Ehrenburg?” He closed his mouth, thinking, Next I’m going to be introduced to Charlie Chaplin! Gil had indeed first read Ehrenburg’s journalism, stories, and novels in Paris. In the romantic imagination of the left, he was second only to Hemingway as the iconic foreign correspondent in Spain. Unlike Hemingway, Ehrenburg had made his way to the front and remained there long enough to become something of a hero among the Spanish.
Gil put down his drink and grabbed Ehrenburg’s forearm as if to see whether he was an apparition. “Con mucho gusto! I am Guillermo Romero.”
Ehrenberg smiled warmly and replied in Spanish, “We had better speak Russian. You never can tell who may want to listen.” He changed to Russian. “They tell me you are from Barcelona and you were a Republican stalwart.”
“I did not fight, alas. I was a doctor there, as I am here, in a maternity hospital. I was in the western Ukraine and joined the Red Army medical service when the Germans attacked. Technically I am a Pole, so I was demobilized when the Anders army formed.”
“Did you see much fighting before you left the service, Romero?”
“It was a six-month-long retreat, but we started getting some business when the army took its stand at Dnepropetrovsk.” The unwelcome recollection of the NKVD captain’s deathbed confession came back to him.
“Tell me, Doctor, does the Hippocratic oath require you to treat Wehrmacht wounded or Waffen-SS soldiers?”
“I am afraid it does.”
“Even though the Wehrmacht’s medical service doesn’t treat Soviet soldiers.” There was a question in the statement.
“The Hippocratic oath has never given much pause to German military medicine, comrade. Their medical orderlies carry sidearms to put their own soldiers out of the misery their fatal wounds cause.” Gil offered this bit of intelligence even though it had come to him as rumor.
“I’m afraid I side with them in this matter. We need to kill them all,” Ehrenburg admitted.
“I know. I have read that article you wrote in Pravda. ‘Kill.’ Wasn’t that the title?”
“Do you disapprove?”
“We can’t kill them all, and they aren’t all Nazis. Think of the Germans in the Thälmann Battalion in Spain. There must have been a difference between them and Nazis. Besides, articles like the one you wrote will make it hard to get any of them to surrender.” Here he was, a nobody, criticizing Russia’s preeminent wartime correspondent, one of his own few genuine heroes. But Gil needed to make a mark on Ehrenburg. This was someone Gil wanted to remember him.
Ehrenburg threw up his hands in mock surrender.
Gil said, “Enough politics.”
Ehrenburg replied, in Spanish, “Not enough, but not here.”
“Back to the Hippocratic oath then? How do we reconcile it with Marxism-Leninism? This is a question I have been struggling with since I was a student in France.”
“What is the problem? It’s just a relic of the outworn bourgeois class structure that gave it birth,” Ehrenburg replied.
“That won’t do, comrade. The Hippocratic oath was propounded two thousand years before the advent of bourgeois capitalism.”
“I suppose you are right.”
Gil didn’t notice the concession. “Besides, suppose we write off the Hippocratic oath as a bit of middle-class morality, frothy superstructure, a device to control the proletariat in the interests of the capitalist classes. Why can’t the same analysis apply to our own socialist morality? What reason is there to extol the higher morality of ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’? Isn’t that just more superstructure, the product of a new socialist substructure?” Ehrenberg was not interrupting, so Gil just went on to the end of his little lecture. “There’s really no basis for morality at all.” If Lena were not in the room, Gil thought, her ghost was certainly haunting it.
“I see.” Ehrenburg seemed impressed. “Lenin once quoted Proudhon’s line, that property is theft. He went on to say, ‘Yes, but theft is theft too.’ I think there is a moral in what you have just said for Lenin’s observation.” He smiled. “But I can’t think of what it is at the moment.” Gil laughed. Then Ehrenburg said, “Let’s meet again. Do you play chess?” Gil nodded vigorously. “Which is your hospital? I’ll track you down there sometime.”
“Maternity Number 6.”
“Aha, the hospital of the Nomenclatura. Very good.”
All that winter and spring, Ehrenburg would call and arrange to meet Gil at some chess club or other. They’d play three games, smoking and nursing small tumblers of vodka, usually drawing one game and splitting the others. Then they would go for long walks. Both understood that real conversations had to be reserved for the walks. It always remained a mystery to Gil why a world-renowned journalist would seek him out almost as a confessor, he who was uniquely unsuited to the role!
It was also suspicious to Gil that Ehrenberg never mentioned Enrique Lister, though they must have known each other well in Spain. Like Lister, Ehrenburg was wholly committed to Soviet power and the ideal of communism, but torn by the horrors of Stalin’s rule. Ehrenburg never hinted at any knowledge of Gil’s real
origins. His Spanish ear was not good enough to detect Gil’s nonnative pronunciation, and he had no Catalan. It was entirely possible that between Lister and Ehrenburg, their mutual acquaintance with a Catalan gynecologist might never come up. More improbable things had happened, such as Guildenstern’s new wife ending up in Romero’s waiting room.
Ehrenburg had been in Paris in the teens, ’20s, and ’30s, long before Gil arrived. He told endless stories about Diego Rivera, Modigliani, Picasso, André Gide, his marriages and love affairs, his novels, screenplays, and even a movie or two he had made. He would recount the times he had been in favor and out of favor, arrested by the Cheka, predecessor to the NKVD, deported by the French, censored when his reporting on Nazi Germany ran afoul of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Ehrenburg’s eyes glistened as he described the fall of Paris to the Germans. “I was the only foreign correspondent there besides the German ones.” It was an experience made possible by that very treaty that joined Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as allies, since few other non-German reporters could remain there. He talked about his friendship with the Spanish anarchist leader Durrutti and about the POUM, for whom he had a warm spot of which surely Lister could not have approved. Together they remembered sultry nights on the Ramblas—the Flamenco bars, the dives. Once when they were both drunk, each promised the other they would walk together down to the waterfront at Barceloneta once more.
Mainly Ehrenburg gave Gil war news he couldn’t print in Red Star, the Army newspaper he wrote for. It was read by more than two and a half million Soviet soldiers. Ironically, the first time Ehrenburg came for him at the hospital, it was Gil who put the great reporter straight.
Ehrenburg had won all three games, and they were leaving the chess club. When they got to the open street, he began to speak. “You heard the latest German propaganda? The Germans say they have found twelve thousand bodies buried near Smolensk. ‘Doctor’ Goebbels is trying to get the world to think the Russians shot twelve thousand Polish officers in ’40.” Ehrenberg was mocking. “And the lengths they’ve gone to dress the whole thing up—dragging in forensic detectives from the occupied countries, foreign POWs, as if these people have any choice but to sing Goebbels’s tune. And the Poles in London believe the Germans! Outrageous!”
“Ilya, what if it were true? Would it make any difference?”
“What are you saying? How could it be true? It’s Nazi propaganda.”
“Listen, Ilya. When I was still in the army in late ’41, I treated a dying NKVD captain.” Gil tried to repeat what the man had said to him before he died. “This was two years ago, Ilya. Long before Goebbels could have gotten hold of those bodies.” Why was he telling Ehrenberg this? Why was he even remembering it himself, putting himself and Ehrenburg at risk? Because he admired this man so much. Because for a moment, he wanted to tell dangerous truths, to rise to the nobility he saw in his friend. “Does it really make any difference?”
“It makes a difference. It adds to the burden we have to carry inside. It’s another lie we have to bury for the good of the cause.” Tears were running down Ehrenburg’s cheeks. “No, it only makes a difference where it counts, in one’s conscience.”
The words left Gil unmoved. He carried no burden. Gil consoled himself with a thought: I suppose the reason I am no artist is that I lack his emotions.
“We are winning, but the costs, Gil!” Ehrenburg mused one afternoon as they walked through early spring slush.
“What do you mean, such costs? War always costs!”
“For everything that has gone well, the Soviet people have been made to pay a much higher price by the madness, the stupidity, the suspicions of Stalin. To begin with, any fool knew the war was coming months before the Germans attacked. Stalin was warned by Churchill, by the Americans, by his best agents in Japan. He did nothing—worse than nothing. He ordered the Red Army to stand down along the borders: ‘No provocations,’ he demanded. So we lost a million and a half men in the first six weeks of the war, just because he had wanted so much to suck up to Hitler.”
“How do you know this?”
“Zukov told me.” Ehrenburg named the most successful of Stalin’s marshals. “Came back from the Manchurian border and saved Stalin’s neck. Anyway, Zukov thinks he’s mad.”
“Do you really think Stalin’s mad? You know him, Ilya.”
“I know Stalin is not fit to lead a country at war. And it is only his bodyguards that have kept him in power. For a month after the German attack, he cowered in his dacha, depressed, drinking, sleeping all day, unable to stir himself. Finally the politburo came to arrest him. Everyone knew his crimes. Instead, when they got there, they were disarmed by Stalin’s guards. Then, in his fury at his own friends, Stalin finally bestirred himself. And to do what? To order futile counterattacks that lost us another 750,000 men. A reserve lieutenant could have organized the defense of the motherland better.”
When they met a few weeks later, Gil was ebullient. “You have read the news? Stupid of me! You must have written it.” Ehrenburg waited. “The new Stalingrad, the encirclement on the Dnieper. A hundred thousand Germans?”
“Yes. But self-congratulations are not in order, Gil.”
“As usual, you must know more.”
“More than I want to know. It’s always that way. It was half the number we announced. And we lost more men than the Germans in that victory—twice as many—and five times the number of tanks.”
“Why?”
“Many reasons. Because the army throws men away instead of using weapons. Gil, do you know what trampers are, or blocking formations?”
“No, never heard of them.”
“Blocking formations are machine gun units deployed behind our lines, with orders to shoot down our own solders retreating . . . not just the occasional deserter, but whole units. Why are whole units withdrawing, fleeing against orders? Are they cowards? Fascists? No. It’s because they are senselessly ordered to charge into German fortified positions. When the war began, they were being ordered to advance without weapons! Think of it, Gil! Even after the victories of 1943, the army still needs blocking formations!”
“And trampers . . . what are they?”
“Punishment battalions, filled with prisoners, deserters—people whose willingness to fight is suspect. Or zeks from the gulag, and worst of all, our own soldiers—prisoners of war we’ve managed to liberate. They’re used as human minesweepers. You fill them with vodka and march them in straight lines into a minefield. Whoever walks to the other side has found the way through for the rest of the army. Does the general staff order this because they lack mine detectors? Do they do this because they are sadists, or because they are ordered to do it?” Gil had no response to all this. “It’s hard to cheer victories when you know what they cost.”
In 1944 March passed into April, making the problem of Karla Guildenstern more pressing. Every few weeks he had called for her chart among many others and seen that her pregnancy was proceeding normally. Worse luck, the final lifting of the German siege of Leningrad meant her husband would almost certainly be able to come to Moscow for her lying-in. As a physician Urs would be accorded all the courtesies of a colleague, including the doctors’ common room, the cafeteria. He’d be introduced all around. There would be no way to avoid him. What to do?
By May Day the matter was urgent. The next morning, the medical staff was called to a meeting by the hospital director.
“Gentlemen and ladies,” he began (there were several women among them), “I have been ordered to seek volunteers for a”—he was searching for the right word—“an unpleasant . . . uh, a difficult mission. It will require the volunteer’s absence for two weeks to a month and will begin in a week’s time. I am not allowed to say more than this: medical officers are required to accompany a large forced deportation to the east. It’s a nationality that has given aid and comfort to the Fascists during their occupation. Conditions will be very severe for these people, and no picnic for those who are required to carry out t
he deportation. Party members are expected to volunteer. Others are invited to do so.”
He paused, considered, and went on, “Do not volunteer if you are uncomfortable with the concept of collective responsibility or the guilt of a people as a whole.”
Everyone listening realized that the director was himself taking a risk making this observation in the presence of several physicians who, as party members, would be obliged to report his remarks. Gil’s admiration for the director’s bravery was immediately followed by the realization that volunteering could get him out of the hospital and out of Moscow for just the period Karla Guildenstern would be in the hospital.
“If you wish to volunteer for this assignment, see the hospital party secretary. Meanwhile, this matter is confidential, and no one is to discuss it. That is all, colleagues.”
So Guillermo Romero spent sixteen days on a train that started with 2,498 Crimean Tartars, a few old men, but mainly women and children. They were to be moved from their homes on the Crimean peninsula five thousand kilometers to Samarkand in trackless Central Asia. When it was over, he reflected that no matter how hard it had been for him, at least he had the food and the warmth of an NKVD guard car. The poor Tartars had been given thirty minutes’ warning to leave their homes and then were marched to the railway line, where they were crammed into cattle cars and moved without letup for two weeks through the barren landscape of war-ravaged Ukraine and the empty desert of Kazakhstan, only to be left to shift for themselves in the steppelands north of Samarkand.
Gil had been briefed about their crime before the deportation began. They, or at least too many of them, had welcomed the Germans as liberators. Worse, they were guilty of sending large numbers of their menfolk to the Wehrmacht, where they fought ferociously against the Red Army, even after the Crimea had been retaken from the Germans. And this after twenty years of Soviet enlightenment, electrification, schooling, the mechanization of their agriculture. Twenty years after scientific socialism had freed them from the feudal yolk of their religion. All this, and they were still disloyal to the state.
The Girl from Krakow Page 18