by Steven Conte
‘Will do, sir.’
The newborn looked healthy, had a full set of fingers and toes and no obvious abnormalities. His heart and lungs sounded normal. Bauer removed his stethoscope and turned to the new grandmother. ‘Congratulations, Daria Grigorievna. You have a perfect grandson.’
Promptly she began crying again. The old woman, whose name he had forgotten, patted her daughter on the back, then she went and fetched hot water in earthen mugs and handed them around; she was sorry, she muttered, she had nothing else to offer him. Bauer thanked her; it was just what he needed, he said. Was this her first great-grandchild? he asked. She replied that it was. Her face was enthralling: thin and beaked and extraordinarily furrowed. On her chin were strands of white wiry hair, filling Bauer with what he supposed was a German impulse to retrieve a pair of tweezers from his instruments bag.
‘Tired?’ Katerina asked him.
‘A little,’ he admitted.
‘I’m exhausted,’ she said. ‘Shall we sit down for a while?’ He agreed and they sat on a wooden chest by the wall. ‘I’ve never watched a surgery before,’ Katerina said, ‘or seen a birth. Except my son’s. Not that I saw much of that.’ Irina Petrovna’s baby was crying again, ignoring the women’s efforts to soothe him. ‘He’s hungry,’ Katerina said.
‘It won’t be long before the anaesthetic wears off. How’s the mother’s diet?’
‘Before your occupation, adequate; after it, poor. We’ve given her whatever we have had to spare, but that can’t go on much longer.’
‘I’ll see what I can do about supplementary food.’
She turned to him, smiling. ‘Getting sentimental, Captain?’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘By rights I should be at war with every one of you, I suppose.’
‘Men, women, children, babies.’
‘Without distinction, yes. That would be more logical.’
Winkel came over to them and reported that the equipment was packed. Were there any further orders? Bauer told him he could stand down for a while; they would stay put until Irina Petrovna came to.
‘Permission to . . . you know, talk?’ Winkel said, gesturing towards Daria, her mother and sister, all three of whom were doting on the baby.
Bauer sent Katerina a questioning glance and she shrugged. ‘Go on then,’ he told Winkel, ‘but be ready to leave.’
‘Yes, sir, I will, sir,’ Winkel said, and went to Daria’s side.
‘Changed your mind about them?’ Bauer asked Katerina, keeping his voice low, though only Winkel understood German, and his attention was fixed on Daria.
‘I’ve just given up standing in their way,’ Katerina said. ‘At least for today.’
‘Like I’ve said, he’s a good man.’
‘And if his goodness could make Daria happy and safe I would marry them myself.’
Winkel, he noticed, was busy talking with the women in Russian, his syntax mangled but his meaning clear enough. ‘Listen to that,’ Bauer said, ‘already he speaks better Russian than I do.’
‘Less hampered by correctness,’ Katerina said. ‘And of course love is an excellent motivator.’
‘Is that how you learned your five or six main European dialects?’ he asked. ‘Love affairs?’
‘If only,’ she said. ‘No, it was governesses mainly, though now you mention it I was devoted to Signorina Pasquale. Nothing came of it,’ she said, noticing his eyebrows rise. ‘Alas. But my Italian certainly came along in leaps and bounds – molto velocemente, you could say.’
‘Poor Metz speaks only German, and so you had him outgunned that day. Certainly you made me feel inadequate.’
‘Why? Is Russian your only other language?’
‘Kind of you to include Russian. I speak French reasonably well. Also a smattering of English. But that’s it, unless you count Franconian.’
‘Franconian, eh? And what does that sound like?’
‘More guttural than Low German. That is, even more guttural.’
‘Say something in it.’
He searched his mind for some characteristic sentence or phrase. ‘There is this little nonsense thing,’ he said, ‘a tongue-twister. It sounds like Arabic, or in any case what a German imagines Arabic sounds like.’
‘Go on.’
‘All right,’ he said, paused to recall it then recited: ‘A Hammala hamma daham, a Mamalad’n-Amala hamma a daham.’
Katerina clapped her hands a single time. ‘That does sound Arabic. What on earth does it mean?’
‘We have a little hammer at home, a little jam bucket we also have at home. Like I said, a bit of nonsense.’
‘Say it again,’ she demanded, and he did so, only this time when he finished she immediately repeated it, coming impressively close to the original. ‘And again,’ she said.
In less than two minutes she had it word for word, and it was Bauer’s turn to applaud, though discreetly, not wanting to draw the attention of the others. ‘So your method is remorselessness?’
‘Yes, and not only in language.’
For a time they said nothing to one another. Instead they watched Winkel, Daria, her mother and sister marvelling at the new baby boy, as Bauer grew more and more aware of how close to him Katerina was sitting. Wind keened in the chimney, and in the fireplace a log collapsed, spraying sparks. ‘I should check on Irina Petrovna,’ he said, got up and went over to the alcove. The patient was still unconscious but seemed fine. He went back to Katerina.
‘Are you a good man, Paul Bauer?’ she said to him when he sat down again. ‘Is that why you’re here?’ He glanced at her sideways to see if she was mocking him. ‘I have to say, I like you better as a saviour of civilians than as a cog in the German war machine.’
‘You’re most welcome.’
‘Is that why you became a surgeon – to do good?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Were you an earnest young man? I picture you as terribly earnest.’
‘You weren’t? What about your revolutionary zeal?’
‘That’s different. I was impassioned. I went into battle; you sat in lecture halls.’
‘That’s true,’ he admitted, and explained how after his brother’s death he had vowed to become a surgeon. ‘If I saved a single life, I told myself, my own life would be worthwhile.’
‘And here you are saving two.’
‘We hope.’
‘All right, no guarantees. But in half a day you have probably achieved your life’s ambition twice over.’
‘I suppose that’s right. Lately much of my work has seemed futile – like trying to catch falling water. The men whose lives I save are often permanently maimed. Or if not, they go back into that war machine you mentioned.’
‘And yet for all that you love it, don’t you? I could tell from watching you working on Irina.’
‘It was a rather special operation.’
‘Perhaps, but that’s not what I was seeing. Irina could have been anyone, I thought: one of yours, one of ours, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin – it would have been the same. You were so absorbed, so immersed in what you were doing. Here is a man in his element, I thought, doing what he loves and doing it well.’ With mock severity she added, ‘At least I hope you were doing it well.’
‘I do enjoy it,’ he said, ‘though I can hardly claim credit for that, can I? Especially lately. A war for the likes of me is a bonanza.’
‘You monster.’
‘War is filthy, of course. It hurts and it hardens. But the fact is that for surgeons it’s also an opportunity. Every month we’re making medical advances: honing old techniques, inventing new ones, even upending a dogma or two.’
‘You’re a seeker after truth.’
‘Is that irony I detect?’
‘Yes, but go on.’
‘Truth be told, professional satisfaction is the least of it, because as well as seeking truth I’m also revelling in mystery. I delve into people, and you’ve just seen how strange, how wondrous that can be. What I’m tryi
ng to express,’ he said, ‘earnestly . . .’
‘No matter. Go on.’
‘. . . is that surgery is more of an art than a science. There’s an imprecision to it – a fuzziness, if you will – that’s maddening but also compelling.’
Katerina said, ‘Well, I confess I envy you. To apply a Marxist analysis, it’s hard to imagine a worker less alienated from his labour.’
‘But I envy you!’ Bauer said. ‘All right, my work is important. For the individual it’s vital. But the body is transient, we all know that. It’s stuff. You writers, you forge culture – and culture is eternal. Or as good as.’
She pulled a sour expression. ‘Well, firstly, I’m no longer a writer. Secondly, I fear you’re exaggerating literature’s influence on the world.’
‘You more or less told Metz that Lev Tolstoy was going to win the war for you.’
‘I was trying to provoke him. If literature exerts any influence at all it’s subtle and slow. Possibly not even beneficial, at least not always.’
‘I believe it is beneficial,’ he said. ‘And enduring. Even the worst of it survives its author, and the best outlives the language it’s composed in. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be you and know that in fifty, one hundred, two hundred years there will be someone, somewhere reading your books.’
‘Not my books.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘My books are already obscure.’
‘But is that true?’
‘Most definitely.’
He searched her face for signs of false modesty, but she only shrugged. ‘Anyway, you’ve written,’ he said. ‘That’s something. More than something: it’s marvellous.’
‘I have dabbled, that’s all.’
‘Compared to whom? Tolstoy? By that yardstick almost every writer is a dabbler. You’ve published. You’ve earned the right to call yourself a writer.’
She made a scoffing noise but otherwise didn’t try to defend herself.
‘I still don’t know anything about your second book,’ Bauer said.
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that.’
‘It was nothing, a failure.’
‘According to whom?’
‘To critics, to readers, to me. It sank without a trace, and rightly so.’
He asked her what it was called and she screwed up her face. ‘Europa, 1975. It was awful, truly awful.’
‘It was science fiction?’
‘Of a kind. Social-science fiction, maybe. The setting was a neat fifty years into the future, which rather emphasises what a product it was of its time.’
‘And so – assuming you’re right – what was so bad about it?’
‘In short? Too little strife. The setting is utopian, a world in which sexuality is regarded as natural and love of all kinds is esteemed.’
Attempting gallantry, he said, ‘That doesn’t sound too bad.’
‘It was execrable. I’d been so shaken, you see, by the reaction to Three Women that I forgot to make my second book interesting – was too busy trying to prove my revolutionary credentials: under communism the sexes would be reconciled; all citizens would work for the common good. That sort of thing.’
‘And they weren’t? You don’t?’
‘Being invaded has done wonders for national unity. But unity of the sexes? That’s not decades away but centuries. Certainly you and I won’t live to see it.’
‘Can you be so sure of that?’
‘Very.’
‘I’ll tell you what: in 1975 let’s reconvene and check. If by then there’s harmony between the sexes, you can – I don’t know – buy me a drink or something.’
‘And if there’s not?’
‘I’ll mop your floors and iron your clothes.’
She laughed. ‘All right, Captain. We have a wager.’
My God, how he loved hearing that laugh. He knew better, though, than to attempt more humour. He was no comedian. ‘You know, your story surprises me a little – that you allowed the criticism to affect you. You don’t seem like the type to fold under pressure.’
‘It’s kind of you to say so, but remember I was only twenty-three. Also, much of the criticism was coming from men I had previously idolised. The book – I mean the first book – was pornographic, they said. Perverted. Sexually nihilistic. One reviewer pointed out there were no obscenities in War and Peace, whereas Three Women had four or five, and because War and Peace is the pinnacle of realism, it followed that my book had to be “unrealistic”. I was a philistine.’
‘A literary hooligan.’
‘Exactly. And that wasn’t the end of it. While some were calling me a barbarian, there were others denouncing me as decadent and Three Women as bourgeois – an unkind cut, let me tell you, for the daughter of a count.’
‘I can imagine. How did they justify such a calumny?’
‘The book’s portrayal of Anastasia, the romantic one. Bothering herself with the trivialities of love was criminal, they claimed, since love was a cult of the parasitical classes. I was dumbfounded. Lenin had urged us to rework morals to serve the Revolution, and that’s exactly what I thought I’d done, showing young women loving in ways old and new.’
‘Marrying Marx and Freud.’
She laughed so loudly at this that the others stopped talking and looked over at them, Daria and her sister with questioning little smiles on their faces. Katerina waved to them apologetically and resumed speaking, her voice hushed. ‘At the time I hadn’t read any Freud, but now that you’ve put it that way, that’s exactly what I wanted to do: show the Revolution its id. I suppose repression was the only possible reaction.’
‘So if Anastasia was your romantic and . . . Zhenya, was it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Zhenya was your good-time girl —’
‘No, that’s wrong. In fact Zhenya was the most politically ardent of the three. She only had sex as necessary, to meet her physical needs, the better to devote herself to the cause.’
Bauer dropped a forearm into his lap. ‘That leaves the young mother,’ he said, ‘your autobiographical character.’
‘Semi-autobiographical,’ she corrected. ‘Dominika.’
‘I see. And how did she enrage the critics?’
‘Well, among other things, Dominika develops a weakness for fashion. At first she dresses drably, as befits a revolutionary, she thinks; but when she has a baby her husband takes a series of lovers who Dominika notices are always glamorously dressed. Secretly she’s always enjoyed nice clothes, and so she begins to dress fashionably herself.’
‘Rather than leave her husband?’
‘From the start he’s advocated free love. Made no secret of it. He quotes Engels: “Bourgeois domesticity is a sham, in which artificial sentimentality disguises exasperation and malice.” And she agrees with him.’
‘But only in theory?’
‘Why “only”? Naturally there’s a gap between what she thinks and what she feels. It doesn’t follow that what she thinks is wrong.’
‘I stand corrected. Maybe it would be better to ask whether by dressing differently she gets to keep her husband.’
‘Her husband goes on loving her like he’s always done, only more so now that she’s borne him a child and got a better wardrobe. And so she goes on loving him in return, all the while tortured by his liaisons with other women.’
‘So there’s no resolution?’
‘Not unless you count self-knowledge.’
‘Like life, then.’
‘Like life,’ she agreed.
He wondered when he’d last had a conversation like this one. Years? Never? No, that wasn’t right: he’d had one recently. With Katerina. How pleasurable this was, and how pleasurable to learn about her life in this way, by refraction, as it were, through this Dominika. ‘So the critics didn’t like her taste in clothes?’
‘A doll-parasite, one female critic called her. Worse, she claimed that as a former aristocrat Dominika was taint
ed, her marriage to a proletarian akin to bestiality.’
‘No. She wrote that?’
‘In Pravda no less.’
‘I can see why you might have been shaken.’
‘In hindsight I should have been amused. Some of the time I was, but as I said, I was young and overawed by these people. Not Viktor, though. He was superb. He was a handy writer himself and sent a counter-blast to Pravda, which they were good enough to publish. If cross-class marriage resembled bestiality, he asked, how were we to regard Marx’s marriage to a woman of the minor nobility? And besides, didn’t the same hot blood run in the veins of communists as that of other people?’ She was smiling at the memory, a faraway expression on her face. ‘Around the same time a notorious killjoy on the Central Committee published a “Regimen for Youth” in The Young Guard, and Viktor sent in a parody, which amazingly they also published. I can paraphrase if you like.’
‘Go ahead,’ Bauer said, wondering if it were possible to feel jealous of a dead man.
Katerina looked inwards, visibly collecting her thoughts, then looked up and began to recite:
Wake up
Don’t think about women
Clean your teeth
Go to the factory
Work hard
Don’t swear
Go home
Bathe
Attend Komsomol meeting
Avoid touching women
Don’t think about women
Go home Find a rope
Time to hang yourself.
Again she smiled. ‘Or something like that.’
‘He sounds like a character.’
‘He was. Funny, combative. Throughout the twenties he wore a knee-length leather coat and had the swagger to match. He was more Italian in temperament than Russian, really. But a Tartar in war. Viktor wasn’t his real name but a nom de guerre: Viktor Krasny.’
‘Red Victor. Clever.’
‘I’d say blunt rather than clever. A lot of the ambitious men gave themselves noms de guerre – Lenin, of course, and Stalin. Viktor’s real name was Gennardy. Oh, they were grand days,’ she said, smiling, ‘thrilling days. You’ve no idea. We were poor, of course. Everyone was. But there was a feeling of extraordinary possibility in the air: factories would end want, mechanised agriculture would abolish hunger, science would conquer disease. People would be free to work as they pleased, play as they pleased, love as they pleased. Some of this we even accomplished. Homosexuality was made legal, though that was later reversed. And literacy – there’s one achievement that’s endured.’