by Steven Conte
At breakfast Molineux had to describe the incident to each new arrival. The first snowfall had excited him immensely. ‘Minus sixteen degrees Celsius!’ he cried when Winkel told him the temperature. ‘And it’s only the fourth of November! My God, that’s cold. My wife will hear of this, you can count on it. She won’t believe it.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Hermann, shut up about it,’ Bauer said. ‘Spare a thought for the men at the front.’
‘What about them?’
‘You could sound less cheery, that’s all.’
‘Why? You think it’ll keep them warm?’
‘You needn’t celebrate is my point.’
‘I’m just discussing the weather, Paul, not making it. You needn’t be so touchy.’
It was true he was feeling irritable. To compensate he said, ‘At least there’ll be fewer casualties.’
Metz, who was getting up from the table, paused and said, ‘What gives you that idea?’
‘Only that the snow will hamper combat operations,’ Bauer said.
‘On the contrary, Captain. The frost will solidify the mud, improving the manoeuvrability of our tanks. Never underestimate the toughness of the German fighting man. I won’t have it. It smacks of defeatism and sets a bad example to the men. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Bauer said, suppressing his annoyance.
‘That goes for all of you,’ Metz said, gazing round the table. ‘And the men under your command. I won’t have any talk of lulls or a slackening of effort.’
Breakfast continued in silence. Bauer breathed deeply and reminded himself how many operations he and Metz had performed the day before – twenty-seven and twenty-nine respectively. It was hardly surprising they were both feeling tetchy.
He needed a cigarette. He deserved one, he decided. Even after all the intervening surgeries, he remained troubled by the death of his first patient at Yasnaya Polyana, the young grenadier, who had survived the removal of his spleen, a haemorrhaging liver, repairs to rents in his small intestine and colon, plus the creation of a temporary stoma, only to die as the final bandages were being applied. Bauer had begun to believe that the boy might be one of his miracles, and mentally he had cursed him for holding on so long. None of his assistants had spoken. They hadn’t needed to, since all of them were experiencing the same sense of letdown. The boy had touched them somehow, bypassing their normal defences, their acceptance that a portion of their patients would die. In particular Bauer regretted refusing the boy a drink of water. True, having decided to operate he’d had no choice, but had he been right to operate? A zeal to save lives could tip into surgical vainglory, and in this case ego had perhaps affected his judgement. Though who could really tell? Unlike, say, engineering, where preparation and diligence more or less guaranteed success, surgery was an unpredictable trade. Patients died, or indeed survived, inexplicably, regardless of how skilfully he performed, and in this sense surgery resembled other operations on human beings: the arts, for example, or politics. Even so, there were days when he grew exasperated by the gap between the abstract and the real, between the anatomical illustration of a human being and the strange flesh and soul hybrid it was his job to cut open.
It had been Hirsch, of all people, who had tried consoling him about the boy – no surgeon could have done more; the patient would have died in any case. They were well-meaning words but the correct response would have been silence, something their acting anaesthetist might have understood had he been with them longer.
Given the harsh weather, two lorries were arranged for those wanting to ride the short distance to the hospital, and by 07:15 hours officers and orderlies were gathered in the vestibule, knowing that Metz would insist on leaving on time. Like the others, Bauer was wearing almost all of his clothing, and yet even indoors he was cold. His comrades were subdued, all except Molineux, who was marvelling at the blizzard outside. Bauer thought of the soldiers – on both sides – under canvas or in foxholes; of their having to rise and feed themselves, visit latrines, tend to horses and vehicles, see to their weapons and to dozens of other mundane duties in order to prepare themselves for combat.
When Metz arrived, Ehrlich held open the door and the lieutenant colonel led them outside. On the porch a duty sentry was taking shelter from the wind, his head so bundled in scarves and hoods it seemed doubtful he could see anything at all. Beyond the porch the wind was arctic – hard to imagine a human being surviving it for long. Faster men were already leaping into the cabins of the lorries, questions of seniority thrust aside, so that Bauer had to join the others piling into the back. Two bench seats. A tarpaulin cover buffeting its stays. Someone – Zöllner – pulled up the tailgate and mercifully the lorry got underway, its slipstream a vortex of snow. The air was biting but the tarpaulin was fending off the wind, and luckily the distance they had to travel was short.
Directly opposite Bauer was Egon Ehrlich, watching him intently with close-set eyes. ‘Sir, do you really think we should go on the defensive?’ Ehrlich asked, swaying like a cobra as the lorry shifted gears. The concern on his thin face was laughably false, the malice behind it unsettling, since technically defeatism was a capital crime. In his peripheral vision Bauer sensed Hans Zöllner turning away, either unnerved or too innocent to grasp Ehrlich’s intent.
‘The lieutenant colonel is no doubt right,’ Bauer said, speaking to Ehrlich coolly, as if from a communiqué. ‘Our fighting men are more than capable of overcoming whatever challenges they might face.’
* * *
When Bauer and the others from his lorry reached the hospital they found Trubetzkaya berating Metz in the entrance hall. ‘I protest,’ she was saying, ‘and in the strongest terms.’
‘Protest all you like,’ Metz replied. ‘It won’t do you any good.’
‘It’s desecration,’ Trubetzkaya said.
Corpsmen, drawn by the noise of raised voices, were appearing at the edges of the hall. Metz drew back his shoulders and thrust out his dimpled chin. ‘The presence of our fallen can hardly constitute desecration.’
The cause of the woman’s anger became clear soon enough: the designation of the Tolstoy burial glade as a German military cemetery. This was news to Bauer. The first batch of dead was already in the ground.
‘I’d rather see your troops in Soviet soil than on it,’ Trubetzkaya said, ‘just not anywhere near Tolstoy. I want them disinterred.’
‘Must I point out to you again who’s in charge here?’ Metz asked.
‘In charge temporarily,’ Trubetzkaya said.
‘I’m not listening to any more of your ignorant prophecies, gnädige Frau. From now on if you have anything else to say, you may say it to Captain Bauer here.’
‘You think you can palm me off onto a flunky?’
‘She’s right, sir,’ Molineux said. ‘Palm her off onto me.’
‘German swine,’ Trubetzkaya said. ‘There’ll be plenty more burials, you can rely on that.’
‘See, sir?’ Molineux said. ‘She’s too much for Bauer. Sorry, Paul, but you know it’s true.’
‘Bauer speaks Russian,’ Metz said.
‘Not according to Frau Trubetzkaya,’ Molineux replied. ‘And besides, she speaks such lovely German.’
‘I’m appointing Bauer,’ Metz said, ‘and that’s the end of the matter.’ He turned, saw the spectators, bawled at them to go back to work, then strode into the reception room. Trubetzkaya stared after him, her face so full of hatred that for a moment Bauer wondered if he’d been wrong to advise Metz to let her stay on at the estate. Each time she entered a building she would be searched for weapons, but in that stare he thought he glimpsed a woman ready to sacrifice herself for a chance to crush a skull with a poker or plunge a fork into a throat. The sniper who killed Dieter Clemens had died for the privilege. You’ll never kill enough of us, Trubetzkaya had said.
Molineux clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Well played, friend.’ To Trubetzkaya he added, ‘Now, don’t go thinking you can push our Bauer
around. He might seem like a poodle but the man’s a lion.’
From the reception room doorway Metz called out, ‘That includes you, Molineux.’
‘Just coming, sir,’ Molineux yelled over his shoulder. ‘Quickly, tell us, Katerina Dmitrievna, how cold will it get?’
‘Much colder.’
‘How cold?’
‘Too cold for you.’
‘Molineux!’
‘Yes, sir,’ he yelled, then beamed at them and left.
Bauer turned to Trubetzkaya.
‘The reader,’ she sneered.
‘When I’m able,’ he replied, wishing he’d never mentioned his reading.
‘You think I’ll hate you less?’
‘I suppose the answer must be no.’
She peered at him. ‘You know what I think?’
‘I can’t say I do.’
‘I think your commanding officer expects you to placate me with polished manners and talk of books.’
‘If I did, would that be so bad?’
‘Yes, if those graves aren’t relocated.’
He considered this and said, ‘Metz is less unreasonable than he seems.’
‘Your Metz is unstable. Drawing his gun. And now this.’
It was true that Metz had been behaving erratically of late. ‘You have to understand that he’s fearful,’ Bauer said, then realised how disloyal this sounded. ‘Of course, in our own way we all are. It would be strange if we weren’t.’
‘True, since most of you won’t see Germany again.’
So much for conceding that he and his comrades were human. He was annoyed with himself. ‘I should check on my patients,’ he said. ‘But later this morning would you show me the grave?’
‘You haven’t been there?’
‘I’ve been working.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘But if it helps, certainly; I’ll show you the grave.’
Ninety minutes later they met by the large entry doors. ‘That’s all you have for your head?’ she asked him, gesturing at his forage cap.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘And you think you’ll be able to stand it out there?’ On her own head she wore an ushanka.
Bauer gazed out the windows flanking the large entry doors. The snow had stopped but there was still a powerful wind. ‘You told Molineux the weather would only get colder.’
‘True enough. Now or never.’
If anything the wind felt harsher than before, an ice-spiked gale all the way from the tundra. Big clouds flew fast and low overhead, their edges frayed, wild and unstable. Trubetzkaya led him into the wind, and enviously he glanced at her clothes: a grey cape over her quilted jacket, fur-lined boots and mittens and her ushanka, the flaps of which she’d tied beneath her chin. His own cloth cap did little to fend off the wind and left his earlobes cruelly exposed. His wrists stung where his gloves didn’t reach. Already his face was stiffening.
‘Cold?’ Trubetzkaya asked him.
‘A little,’ he mumbled, his lips no longer quite under his control.
They passed the delousing station, a raw-looking cabin that contained the hospital’s sauna, built by Weidemann’s men in a single day.
‘You know what I find odd?’ Trubetzkaya said. ‘That in the whole of recorded history only two men, Hitler and Napoleon, have failed to realise that in winter Russia gets cold. Don’t you find that odd?’
Bauer replied with a grunt, and Trubetzkaya didn’t press the matter, perhaps because she too was finding it difficult to speak. On the right Bauer glimpsed the roof of the Kusminsky Wing; above it scudding clouds, before it thrashing trees. The cold was bad, the wind intolerable, so he was glad to reach the rise at the rear of the estate and in its lee get some warmth back into his clothes. From the bottom of the rise a track rose diagonally through a forest, most of it made up of birch, its silvery bark scarred and banded in black. The snow underfoot was deep and new, and as a courtesy Bauer took the lead.
‘And the Swedes,’ he said, looking back over his shoulder.
‘True, the Swedes,’ she replied, immediately grasping the conversational thread. ‘But they learned. Your Führer is a fool.’
He hesitated, aware this was treacherous territory. ‘That’s not for me to say,’ he replied. ‘I’m just a surgeon.’
‘“Just a surgeon”,’ she mocked, making him wish he hadn’t spoken. Since joining the army the only person with whom he’d discussed politics had been Dieter, and only then after they had worked together for months, sounding out each other’s views and by stages coming to trust one another. The desire to confide in this woman felt fiercer, more reckless.
‘So tell me, Herr Surgeon,’ Trubetzkaya asked, ‘when will the Führer equip you with winter uniforms?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘And of course frontline troops will receive them first.’
‘They haven’t already?’
‘Not in every case,’ he said, though in fact he knew of none.
Trubetzkaya smiled at him. ‘Oh, how you’re going to suffer.’
He and Dieter had co-operated to build trust, he reflected. From Frau Trubetzkaya he would get no such help.
‘How did you come to have a governess?’ he asked.
‘Who wants to know? You or Metz?’
‘Me,’ he replied.
‘But you’re reporting to Metz.’
‘As a matter of fact, I doubt he wants to hear from you again.’
She laughed. ‘Then he’ll be disappointed.’
‘Very well, but are you evading my question?’
‘Not at all. I’ve nothing to hide. My father was a count. We had a governess.’
‘Yet you’re a communist.’
‘As I said, my father was a count.’
‘That’s your answer?’
‘It’s one answer.’
From further up the slope, among the birches, there came a resounding crack; Bauer ducked and unclipped his holster. Behind him, Trubetzkaya chuckled. ‘Why, Captain, you’re so nervous.’
‘A branch?’ he asked.
‘Freezing sap.’
‘Yet the trees survive?’ he asked.
‘Of course. These are sturdy Soviet trees. With ice in their veins,’ she added, laughing. They continued up the trail.
‘You never hear the shot that kills you,’ Bauer said. ‘Or so they say. I find that comforting.’
‘But the one that wounds?’
‘There’s that,’ he admitted.
They reached the top of the trail and entered a clearing, the burial glade, in which five Wehrmacht graves stood opposite a snow-covered mound that Bauer took to be the grave of Leo Tolstoy, as if a firing squad had shot the great man, only to be gunned down themselves and buried where they fell.
‘No monument?’ Bauer asked.
‘His tastes were simple. At least, they were by the end.’
As he could afford them to be, Bauer thought. Each of the German graves was marked with a birchwood cross and a wooden plaque on which the fallen man’s name and service number were inscribed – those snippets of biography with which ordinary mortals strove to ward off oblivion. Bauer went over and read each man’s name in turn and, as he reached the last grave, the young grenadier’s, a gap in the clouds strafed the clearing with light. He turned to Trubetzkaya. ‘Are we in it, the Bright Glade?’
‘Quite possibly,’ she said. ‘You should see it in summer.’
Already the light had zoomed away. ‘I’d like that,’ he replied. He imagined the forest in full leaf, the burial mound covered in grass. He turned back to her. ‘If you’re so sure the Red Army will drive us out, why not wait and exhume the bodies later?’
‘Because there’ll be more of them by then. Naturally. And because the memory of them will linger – unnaturally – long after their corpses are gone.’
He sniffed. The hairs in his nostrils, he noticed, were spiny with frost. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked, making a move to leave. Even out of the wind his face was in pain.
‘Not before you promise to have these men disinterred.’
‘I can’t promise you that.’
‘Then what good are you?’
He surveyed the clearing. Quite apart from its cultural significance for the Soviet people, the site was impractically small. In weeks it was likely to be full.
‘It’ll be up to Metz,’ he said.
She scoffed. ‘I was right. You’re the shapeless pillow shoved between me and him. I’m meant to punch you till I’m out of breath.’
‘At least you’ll be warm,’ he said, pretending the insult hadn’t hurt. Again he looked enviously at her winter clothes. ‘Is this your way of killing me, Katerina Dmitrievna? Exposure?’
She smirked at him. ‘You know what this is, don’t you, this situation?’
‘No, what is it?’
‘A portent. You arrive and learn that you’re not dressed for the conditions, then have to abandon your dead and scurry back home.’
He was shuddering from the cold now. ‘You win. I have to scurry.’
She chuckled at this but relented, and they returned to the trail, Bauer relieved but also sad to cut the excursion short. It was so long since he’d spoken at length with a woman, let alone one as smart as Katerina Dmitrievna. ‘So when did you become communist?’ he asked.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m just being polite.’
She laughed at this but tried to disguise it as a cough. ‘Officially?’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘April 1919. Shortly after the Revolution. By conviction, a few months beforehand.’
‘You were how old?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘That young?’
‘Isn’t seventeen the perfect age to cast off one life for another?’ she asked.
‘Some would leave it till later. Or not do it at all.’ He calculated that she must be thirty-eight or thirty-nine and felt a frisson of slight seniority.
‘It was then or never,’ she said. ‘The Civil War had begun and my father had taken us – my mother and sisters and me – from St Petersburg to the Crimea, to Yekaterinodar, where he was high up in the White government. He was sending us to Paris.’