by Steven Conte
‘Could you introduce me?’ Bauer asked. Katerina Dmitrievna narrowed her eyes. ‘We keep seeing one another,’ he explained. ‘I’d like to greet her by name.’
Katerina contemplated this then said, ‘All right, if that’s all. Your name’s Paul, correct?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Then, Paul Bauer, meet Daria Grigorievna, our housekeeper,’ she said in Russian. ‘Daria Grigorievna, meet Captain Paul Bauer, fascist beast.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Bauer said, deciding not to press for her surname, since Daria Grigorievna looked far from at ease. She was a stout woman, round-shouldered. Middle height, middle-aged. A doughy face with burst capillaries on her cheeks and nose. Frizzled brown hair pressed down with a calico scarf, which, if he was reading the Cyrillic correctly, was fashioned from a sack of flour.
‘Goodbye, then,’ Katerina Dmitrievna said abruptly, and both women turned to leave.
‘But I have something for you,’ he said. She turned around and he tapped his chest where War and Peace was wedged beneath his greatcoat.
‘The Wehrmacht order of battle?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Then what is it?’ she asked, signalling Daria Grigorievna to go.
‘Could we go somewhere private?’ he asked. ‘The library perhaps?’
‘All right, the library. I was going there anyway.’
From the vestibule they went into the small entrance hall, along the corridor and into the library. Bauer shut the door.
‘Should I be worried?’ Katerina asked. Her tone was derisive, but with something like horror Bauer realised there was apprehension in her eyes.
‘No, no, no, I’m just returning your book,’ he said, drawing it out of his greatcoat.
Katerina glanced at the book with indifference. ‘I thought Metz was going to have it destroyed.’
‘I intervened.’
‘And you expect me to be grateful?’
‘I thought you might have had second thoughts.’
‘When you’re gone, everything in German will likely be expunged.’
Ausgelöscht – how pleasurable to hear such a polished turn of phrase. It was hard to believe she was not a native speaker. ‘Very well then. But the book. Will you take it back?’
‘If Metz won’t read it, why not an underling? Go ahead, since you’re such a big reader.’
‘I’ve already read it,’ he replied.
‘That’s right, you said.’
So she’d noticed his little boast. ‘A long time ago,’ he said. ‘I was fifteen.’
‘And how old are you now? Fifty?’
‘I’m forty,’ he replied.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘Your hair loss, I suppose.’ Involuntarily he palmed his hair. It felt no thinner than normal.
She smiled. ‘So it’s been – what? – twenty-five years since you’ve read it. Time for a reread, I’d say, this time as a cautionary tale.’
‘I’ll return it to the shelves,’ he said.
‘That would be a pity. A Wehrmacht officer following in Napoleon’s footsteps – now that I think about it, you and this volume could have been made for one another. Keep it. Read.’
‘Only if you’re sure.’
‘I’m sure. But first there’s a passage I want to find for you,’ she said, putting out her hand for the book.
‘You know it that well?’ he asked, passing it to her.
‘I’ve read it four times,’ she said, riffling through the pages. ‘Never in German, mind. Though I must admit, Krieg und Frieden sounds more euphonious than Voyna i mir – that partial rhyme, I suppose, the reason you Germans slip so readily from Frieden to Krieg, perhaps.’
‘I should go,’ he said. This was true. At the hospital they’d be wondering where he was.
‘This won’t take long,’ she said. ‘Keep talking. Start by telling me why you read War and Peace at fifteen.’
‘My house was in mourning. A brother. Verdun. My escape was reading. War and Peace was long.’
Had he spoken of this to anyone before? He couldn’t remember discussing it with Clara. Perhaps it helped that Katerina Dmitrievna was looking not at him but at the book. ‘Before I studied medicine I wanted to be a writer,’ he went on. ‘Even afterwards, for a while.’
Now she did look up at him. ‘Really? What sort of writer?’
‘A novelist, I suppose. At least that was the idea. I even started a novel. Never finished it, of course.’
‘Why “of course”?’
‘The usual reasons: work, friends, love. Life,’ he said, then trailed off, suddenly aware how pitiful his old ambitions sounded in this of all places.
‘Ah, here it is,’ Katerina Dmitrievna said. From her jacket she took a pencil, marked the passage and with a scrap of paper bookmarked the page.
‘You won’t read it to me?’ he asked.
‘Read it yourself,’ she said, and flung the book at him straight and hard.
‘Ouf,’ he said, taking it on the chest. ‘I’ll return it when I’m done. But more gently.’
‘As you wish,’ she said. ‘Frankly, by then I expect you’ll be gone. And I don’t mean to Tula.’
‘But to Chern?’
‘I was thinking of Berlin.’
‘Well, if that happens you’ll be able to have those graves removed. Apologies – I couldn’t talk Metz into relocating them.’
‘You’re too timid.’
‘He outranks me, that’s all.’
‘Too ängstlich,’ she repeated, compounding the insult with a smile. ‘But don’t worry, we can’t all be heroes.’
* * *
All day he kept the bookmarked page of War and Peace closed, a task made easier by the demands of the operating room. It was not until midnight, sitting propped up in his camp bed, as Molineux snored on the other side of the room, that Bauer opened the book and, by the light of a Hindenburg candle, read the passage that Katerina Dmitrievna had marked.
Bonaparte was born lucky. He has excellent soldiers. And the Germans were the first he attacked. You’d have to be a do-nothing not to beat the Germans. Ever since the world began, everybody’s beaten the Germans. And they’ve beaten nobody. Except each other. It was on them he earned his glory.
Bauer chuckled. He liked her impudence. The passage was from relatively early in the book, and the speaker, he saw, was old Prince Bolkonsky – one of the novel’s patriarchs, he recalled, the knowledge shooting like a cork from the depths of his mind. Bolkonsky was addressing his son Andrei on the eve of his departure to fight the French, his fatherly anxiety wrapped in badinage.
Bauer closed the book, wondering if Metz’s hostility to it was in some sense justified. Everybody’s beaten the Germans. The old prince was partly a comical figure, his pronouncements often foolish, yet somehow Bauer was stirred by the thought that German principalities that had once been the playthings of Russia and France were now, as a single state, capable of dominating both; even if, in another part of his mind, he loathed nationalism and all its works. He’d felt similar ambivalence during the Berlin Olympics, an event he’d first dismissed as propaganda, a distraction from the regime’s crimes against workers’ unions and the Jews, only to find himself surreptitiously pleased as one German athlete after another won gold.
He glanced again at the book. It was a massive tome, well over a thousand pages. In the last three years he had read very little fiction, Clara’s death having sapped his desire – no, his capacity – to be moved by a story on a page. It had taken him by surprise, this impairment, as he’d had years to anticipate losing his wife. Clara had even spoken beforehand of how liberating for both of them her death would be: for her, from physical suffering; for him, from the anguish of having to witness it. But no. When she had died his only relief had been on her account, and far from experiencing her death as a liberation it had blighted everything that had given him pleasure, not only fiction but also art, cinema, friendship, talk of politics and ideas, travel, sexual desire and
even immersion in water, be it a bath, a lake, or, on rare occasions, the sea. Cigarettes, too, had lost their savour for him, though he still smoked two packets a day. In fact, the only source of satisfaction to escape this great winnowing had been surgery, which demanded so little of his heart but so much from his hands and brain.
He opened the book. Yes, it was monumental, but he had insomnia on his side. He found the first page, settled down and started to read.
SIX
One week into their stay at Yasnaya Polyana the flow of casualties from the front was if anything lighter than at first, contradicting Metz’s claim that the frost would intensify combat operations. From what Bauer could tell, the division was spent, the attack on Tula having faltered against defences far stronger than any the 3rd Panzer had encountered before, not only conventional trenches and barbed wire but also anti-tank ditches, scrap-metal hedgehogs and concrete dragons’ teeth, designed to funnel attackers into minefields or zones of concentrated artillery and machine-gun fire. Into these shooting galleries the already exhausted division had poured men, machines, munitions and fuel. And then fallen back. Tula remained hemmed in from the west, south and east, but according to aircraft reconnaissance reports the city was still receiving supplies and reinforcements from the north.
A kind of crazed humour convulsed the unit. Before dinner one night Molineux performed an imitation – all the funnier for its unsparing realism – of a gibbering, shell-shocked man who’d lost control of his limbs. In the barracks practical jokes became cruel: two corpsmen reading a letter to an illiterate comrade pretended his fiancée had married someone else; others convinced an eighteen-year-old recruit that his tinea cruris was syphilis.
The first frostbite cases began to arrive. Bauer had never seen frostbite, let alone treated it, and had cause to be thankful again for Metz’s experience of the previous war. The key was patience, Metz explained to a gathering of doctors and nursing attendants. In the right conditions frostbitten tissue could regenerate, either partially or in some cases altogether. To encourage healing, patients were to be put in a warm but well-ventilated ward, their bedclothes pulled aside to allow blackened limbs and digits to dry. Amputation would only be considered if and when a clear line of demarcation had formed.
At this time a Landser arrived in theatre with a mortar wound to his leg. He was conscious and admitted to ‘bad enough’ pain, and to take his mind off it during the examination Bauer asked him what his occupation had been before the war. Stonemason, he replied. His accent was Swabian. He gestured at the wound, a brutal gash to the thigh. ‘Do you think I’ll get back to it?’
‘It depends on what I find in there. But based on what I’m seeing so far I don’t see why not. The bone’s unbroken. We’ll do our utmost with the muscle.’
‘Thanks, doctor,’ the Swabian said. ‘I know you’ll look after me.’
Bauer pressed the man’s arm, knowing that a well-timed touch could do more to reassure a patient than any number of reassuring words. He handed the Swabian over to Hirsch, went to the basin and scrubbed and soaped his hands, rinsing with the aid of a pair of elbow taps made by Winkel from the gearsticks of shot-up lorries.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he heard behind him and turned around to see Winkel ripping the ether mask from the Swabian’s face and replacing it with oxygen.
‘A problem?’ Bauer asked, striding over to the stretcher.
‘Heart’s stopped,’ Winkel said, then with the heels of his palms began pumping rhythmically on the Swabian’s chest. Bauer seized the patient’s wrist, probing for a pulse. Nothing, nothing, nothing. After half a minute Winkel ceased his thrusting, tore off the drapes, called for silence and put an ear to the man’s chest. ‘I think he’s gone, sir.’
‘Try more compressions.’
Winkel obeyed as Bauer held on to the patient’s wrist. Demchak and Pflieger were standing by in silence, while Hirsch . . . Hirsch remained seated by the head of the stretcher, his expression stunned. This was an anaesthetic death, pure and simple. Again Winkel checked for a heartbeat. He straightened up. ‘He’s dead, sir.’
Around the stretcher the others were immobile, as if in imitation of the corpse. Bauer himself couldn’t move, felt weak and empty, a roaring noise inside like wind in a tunnel.
It was Winkel who reacted first, nodding at the body and telling Pflieger and Demchak to take it away. They obeyed. Bauer felt stupefied. He had lost plenty of patients on the table before; it was to be expected, part of the job. But not like this.
Winkel was tugging him by the sleeve, by his medical patch, the staff of Asclepius with its helical snake. ‘Sir?’
‘I’m taking a break,’ Bauer said, and peeled off his scrubs. He said nothing to Hirsch, couldn’t bring himself to look at him, though God knows he had to be in a bad way himself. ‘I’ll be having a smoke,’ he announced to nobody in particular. He fetched his coat from the reception room and went outside into a punishing wind. Turning his back to it he lit up, drew the smoke into his lungs and began walking, just walking, allowing himself to be driven along by the wind, knowing that the return journey would be arduous, even painful, and not caring a jot. He had to get away. It was mid-afternoon but already the light was dim. To the south-west, beyond the main drive, the sun was a pale disc crashing at an angle through the trees.
He thought of the Swabian, the stonemason, Hans Jürgen Voigt, who had trusted him to do his best; a man whose existence had been as rich, as vivid and involving as that of anyone who had lived. Such a stupid death, and one for which Bauer felt responsible, since twice before he had pushed away the suspicion that Hirsch’s ineptitude had cost a patient his life. Well, no more. He would never work with Hirsch again.
* * *
Dinner was tense, or Bauer found it so, rage rising in him each time he glanced at Hirsch, who for his part avoided his eye.
So far Metz didn’t know of the Swabian’s death, but after dinner Bauer meant to remedy that. As if sensing what was coming to him Metz looked irritable. The others, too, seemed out of sorts. Molineux’s conversation was cutting and mean, a reliable sign he’d run out of booze, while the situation at Tula probably explained the glumness of the rest. Strategically, the stalemate there was disastrous, further delaying the capture of Moscow. The latest aim was to take the capital by Christmas, though if Tula kept resisting even this looked unachievable.
‘Quartet?’ Molineux suggested as two of Pabst’s men cleared up the plates.
Drexel adjusted his spectacles, slurped on his saliva and said, ‘Give me twenty minutes.’
‘Bauer, what about you?’ Molineux asked.
‘The same,’ he replied. When he was done with Metz, a game of cards might be calming.
‘You won’t slink off to that damn book of yours, will you?’
It had been impossible to hide the book he was reading from Molineux, and just as hard to get him not to mention it in the mess. Bauer flashed him a warning look and he appeared to get the message, turning instead to Zöllner. ‘Hans?’
‘Sure, I’ll play,’ Zöllner said, smiling his agreeable smile. ‘But not for too long. I have to write to my fiancée.’
‘Christ alive, you write to her every night.’
‘Every second night.’
‘Either way she’ll get the impression you love her, and then where will you be?’
‘In love with each other?’ Zöllner ventured.
‘Ha! Have you had her yet?’
‘For the love of God,’ Metz said from the head of the table, ‘some decorum, Captain. This is an officer’s mess, not a bawdy house.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Molineux said. ‘I got carried away.’
There was silence for a while, then Zöllner said, ‘I’m a practising Christian, if that answers your question. And so is she.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Molineux said piously. ‘As long as you’re up for cards. In fact, put some cash down and you could be Zoroastrian for all I care.’ He swung about. ‘Hirsch, what about you
, you retrograde microbe? Are you in?’
‘I don’t think so. Not if you’re playing for money.’
‘Come on, just a few pfennigs. To keep things interesting.’
‘I’d better not.’
‘Oh, come on, don’t be such a pansy.’
‘You took six marks off me last time.’
‘So your luck is due to change.’
‘My luck never changes. Not at cards.’
‘Hear that, sir?’ Molineux said, appealing to Metz. ‘Defeatism. And look, he’s not even ashamed of it.’
In fact Hirsch was blushing, more overtly unsettled by Molineux’s teasing than by accidentally killing a patient.
‘If the lieutenant is unlucky at cards,’ Metz said, ‘he shouldn’t have to play.’
‘But, sir, he’s not unlucky, just cowardly.’
‘If the stars are against him,’ Metz said, ‘he’d be a fool to play.’
‘Stars?’ Weidemann said, drawing everyone’s attention; it was rare for the major to speak at table. ‘You mean that figuratively, I take it.’
‘Both figuratively and literally, Major,’ Metz said.
‘You think the stars could influence – literally – the lieutenant’s luck at cards?’
‘I don’t say they do – at least, not with any certainty. How could I? But Major, let me ask you this: can you prove that they don’t?’
Weidemann swatted away this idea. ‘I can’t prove a negative, Herr Oberstleutnant. But what you’re saying is superstitious rot. Astrology belongs in the Dark Ages.’
Bauer suppressed an urge to applaud.
‘You’re assuming science knows everything,’ Metz said, ‘our ancestors nothing at all. Has it crossed your mind that the traditions you deride as superstitious might contain insights into the workings of the cosmos?’