by Steven Conte
The sense of detachment he had felt in Metz’s study unexpectedly returned. ‘Don’t,’ he told Katerina, risking Russian again. ‘Don’t. I’m trying to save your life.’
‘I don’t care about my life.’
‘In German,’ Metz yelled.
Obliging him, she said, ‘You’re monsters, all monsters.’ Bauer seized her by the upper arm and managed to haul her through the doorway, her free arm flailing. Metz and the others backed away.
‘Keep that Bolshevik slut away from me,’ Metz said. ‘Do you understand? If I so much as see her again, I swear I’ll shoot her on the spot.’
‘Bastards,’ she yelled.
‘She’s just going, sir.’
In fact he was finding her hard to control. Their legs became tangled and he almost lost his balance, and with her free hand she started punching the side of his head.
‘Need any help, Captain?’ Ehrlich said maliciously.
‘I’ll handle it,’ Bauer said. Between punches he seized her free wrist, pinned her arms behind her back and then marched her to the landing.
‘If any of you touch her, I’ll kill you,’ she yelled. ‘Is that clear? I’ll kill you.’
From behind her he whispered, ‘Please, Katerina, please,’ only for her to ram her skull backwards into his face, the blow hard, bone on bone, his left orbit and cheek. Somehow he managed to hang on to her wrists, and like a trout on a line she began to writhe. ‘Please,’ he repeated stupidly, ‘please.’ She twisted around, her lips pursed, and warm spittle hit his face.
TWELVE
Helsinki
7 May 1967
Dear Paul,
How extraordinary it was to hear from you, and from such an unexpected source. I had thought you were probably dead. It was last September that Irina Petrovna came to me in Moscow and passed on news of your visit to Yasnaya Polyana. She had to work hard to convince me she had met you and not your ghost. Had I been able to, believe me, I would have written to you straight away, but as I will explain, it is something of a miracle I can write to you at all.
Paul Bauer. How often I’ve thought of you these last – my God! – two and a half decades. Time has mass, don’t you find, as well as duration, and those six weeks we knew each other in 1941 are among the most densely experienced of my life. Even before Irina’s visit not a month would pass without a memory of that time arising in my mind, and since September I’ve thought of it every day. Of course the war was a vivid period for all of us who lived through it, and I suppose it’s only natural that I’m haunted, as it were, by that brief time under enemy occupation. And yet I sense the same might be true for you – why else, I ask myself, would a West German citizen opt for an Intourist-supervised excursion to the Soviet Union, when presumably the Bahamas was an option, or Finland?
Not that I’m entirely surprised. Whatever else may have befallen you later in the war, you can have scarcely forgotten the maddening of Julius Metz (how exceedingly strange it is to write that name) or the deaths of your three comrades. (Their names, I regret to say, I no longer recall – so much for my supposedly excellent memory.) Was it to pay your respects that you returned to Yasnaya Polyana? ‘To the scene of the crime’, I was tempted to write, but that would be inaccurate, wouldn’t it, as I recall you behaved rather nobly there, or tried to. Do good Samaritans return to the scenes of their benignities? Perhaps you are like my late husband who once likened his compulsion to revisit Tula, his hometown, which he professed to hate, with a dog’s urge to eat its own vomit – a crude analogy, I know, but one I can’t help remembering when, under the cover of professional obligation, I sometimes go back to Yasnaya Polyana.
So how did the estate seem to you after such a long absence? Essentially unchanged, I hope, if I did my job properly when you and your comrades left, though visiting in summer is a different proposition from staying in winter, as you are in a position to know better than most. Irina confessed she didn’t recognise you, even after you introduced yourself, so I presume that, like me, you are not unchanged. Distinguished looking, is how she described you, which if I remember correctly you were already on the way to becoming in 1941.
Irina mentioned, too, that there were fingers missing from your right hand. Frostbite, I take it? Or wounding? I was desperately sorry to hear of it and immediately thought of your surgical career, which I can recall meant so much to you.
Learning of your injury made me wonder what your war was like. In the Soviet Union we haven’t put much effort into imagining the German experience of the war, but in your case I wish to make an exception. Where did you serve? How did you survive? I know that by the end the Wehrmacht was badly beaten up, and even without Irina’s report about your hand I would have guessed you had suffered.
And after the war? You’ve returned to Nuremberg, I see, but what else? Did you remarry, and if so did you have children after all? Please write back and tell me all. (I will explain to you how.) Any letters between us are likely to be infrequent, so I warn you I won’t tolerate platitudes or evasion.
In my vanity I’m assuming that my curiosity about you will be reciprocated, so what follows is a summary of my life since 1941. After you and your comrades’ forced eviction from Yasnaya Polyana I continued working there until 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. The timing was not a coincidence. Do you remember me once telling you that my ex-husband Viktor had been murdered? What made me disclose this I don’t recall – at the time I was more than a little crazy. What I meant was that Viktor had been one of thousands of Party veterans who in the late thirties had fallen victim to Stalin’s Great Purge. Indeed, it was his arrest which drove me to Yasnaya Polyana in the first place, since I still had enemies on account of my first novel and, despite divorcing Viktor, felt vulnerable in Moscow. So I rusticated myself – went with Marlen to Tula and lay low there with Viktor’s relatives. From there I managed to land the job at the estate. Sixteen years later Stalin’s death reversed that process. I sent out feelers about returning to Moscow and ultimately secured a lectureship at the State University (an easier task, it turned out, than resurrecting my Moscow residency permit). I have been with the university ever since. My speciality? Tolstoy studies, with a focus on narratology – a dry and technical subject, but one on which Marxism rarely intrudes. Furthermore, after more than a decade of blameless service I have discovered to my amazement that I have acquired some blat – influence, pull – and for several years I have been permitted to travel internationally to speak about Tolstoy at academic conferences. Thus the postmark on this letter.
There isn’t a great deal more to tell. Needless to say, I have never remarried, but live happily by myself in a minuscule but comfortable flat in the Khamovniki District. I catch a bus to the university. I walk beside the river. If the need arises I shop at GUM, Moscow’s main department store. I attend the Bolshoi as often as possible. My income stretches to books. In short, I live a privileged life and couldn’t ask for more.
Irina told me that her supervisory duties made talking with you difficult, particularly since your Intourist guide might have asked awkward questions had he realised you’d once known each other. That and her surprise prevented her – again! – from thanking you for saving her and her baby’s lives all those years ago, and she has made me swear to put this right. She is profoundly grateful. That baby is now an Aeroflot pilot – Time the Conjurer working his usual miracles. Daria Grigorievna, sadly, didn’t live to see her grandson grow up, as she died in 1949. Drink, you won’t be surprised to learn. Her self-destruction was heart-rending to witness, because Daria was a kind soul who had a lot to live for: useful work, friends who overlooked her failings, a wonderful daughter and an adorable grandson who as a child was already handsome and smart. Even after the events of your stay I had hoped to save her, but I failed. You once told me of your feelings of powerlessness whenever a patient of yours died on the operating table, and after Daria’s death I believe I felt something similar. Her mother, you might be interested to know, li
ved well into her eighties, outliving Daria by several years. Agrafena Viktorovna – remember her? I’m smiling because I know you can’t have forgotten her part in your lieutenant colonel’s undoing.
Irina mentioned your discretion in handing over your address, which suggests you have some understanding of the constraints we continue to operate under in the Soviet Union. I am therefore hoping you will appreciate the need for the convoluted method I have devised for sending and receiving letters from you, assuming you decide to write back. In comparison to Stalin’s day the Party has become downright vegetarian, and as a Party elder (a better term might be ‘relic’) I probably wouldn’t be imprisoned, let alone executed, if this letter were intercepted. I would, however, lose my travel privileges, and this would be a pity, in particular for certain others who have come to depend on the blue jeans, contraceptive pills and other little luxuries I bring them from the West. I say this not in order to make you anxious on my account but simply to ask for your discretion.
Of course it would be more prudent of me not to write to you at all, since among other things I’ve wondered whether you might be acting on behalf of a Western intelligence agency. Does that seem paranoid? In my defence I should point out I’ve been approached before. Rome 1962. My first conference abroad. I can’t imagine what the spooks thought I might divulge, since my knowledge of the Russian military is one and a half centuries out of date, and in any case freely available in translation. I rejected that advance, needless to say. Needless to say, that is, unless you’re working not for the West but for the KGB – in which case, greetings comrades! May I keep my apartment?
After decades of conditioning, this is how my mind runs. I tell my friends it’s our era that’s deranged not ourselves, but the sane ones think I’m a little mad. I can see their point. Though normally cautious, I seem to be compelled, every decade or so, to behave really recklessly. Hardly surprising, I suppose; one doesn’t need to be dear old Dr Freud to see how lengthy periods of repression – in both senses of that term – might account for these eruptions of unreason of mine, but most of my friends have managed to behave rationally, or at least warily, throughout their lives, so clearly there’s something amiss with me. And here I go again, losing my mind, pushing my luck and deciding to trust you, Paul Bauer, as I did once before. The cost that time (this will sound mawkish, but it can’t be helped) was a disconcerting sense of sadness when you left; but sadness, I tell myself whenever it threatens to overwhelm me, is the coinage of a richly lived life.
As you may know, with the exception of diplomatic mail, the KGB monitors all letters in and out of the Soviet Union. By ‘monitors’ I mean ‘reads’. Every single word. Sadly, my blat doesn’t reach into diplomatic circles, so I must ask you to address any reply you wish to make to a Canadian friend of mine, Professor Simon Fleet, whom I believe I can trust and whose address I will append to this letter. Professor Fleet regularly attends the same conferences I do (including one last year at Yasnaya Polyana), and he is willing to help by passing on any mail in person when he and I meet at our next conference, which will be in March next year, in Sydney, Australia. That’s a terribly long time to wait, I know, but really there is no safe alternative. Even this method is not without its risks, as I am generally shadowed when abroad by ‘cultural attachés’ from the closest Soviet consulate or embassy. To save me skulking around postboxes, Professor Fleet has also agreed to post this and any future letters I might write to you.
Let me end by again requesting your discretion. If you dispose of this letter, I’d be grateful if you burned it; if you decide to keep it, please do so securely. Apologies again if these precautions and warnings seem ridiculous. I do hope they don’t deter you from writing back, since frankly I’m fascinated to learn what’s become of you. Until then, Paul, farewell.
Yours,
Katerina
* * *
28 Jonah Strasse
Nuremberg 1
February 1968
Dear Katerina,
How good to be writing to you at last. I had hoped but not expected to find you at Yasnaya Polyana, and with mixed feelings learned from Irina Petrovna of your long-ago move to Moscow. I was pleased for you. Am pleased. Despite some restrictions, you do appear to be living an enviable life. That this is due to your devotion to the ‘old man’, as you once called Tolstoy, strikes me as wonderful. What an excellent match you and Lev have turned out to be. Sophia Andreyevna will be enviously writhing in her grave.
I chuckled at you picturing me at Yasnaya Polyana as a ghost, since I felt just like one as I wafted up the driveway and into the main house. From poor Irina’s perspective I might as well have returned from the dead, what with the veil of all those years between us, not to mention the Iron Curtain my guide drew around me. Ivan, his name was, which I noted because ‘Ivan’ was our generic nickname in the Wehrmacht for the Russian fighting man. Fortunately for him, this Ivan was too young to have seen combat – had he done so he might have been friendlier towards me, as I’ve noticed that old soldiers tend to grow fond of former enemies in proportion to how bitterly they once tried to kill one another. My Ivan knew I had been a surgeon in the Wehrmacht (I had admitted as much, and more, in my application for a visa), and perhaps as a result he seemed to think it his duty to make my stay in the Soviet Union as unpleasant as possible. And who could blame him? He’d lost an uncle at Kursk. Naturally I didn’t tell him I’d been stationed at Yasnaya Polyana, though it is possible he guessed this from my demeanour there, which was hardly that of the casual tourist.
Yes, my compliments – I did find the estate essentially unchanged, though with all the furniture returned the buildings felt homelier than they had during our occupation. And of course the grounds were indescribably lush in comparison to how they were in the winter of 1941. I experienced the visit as a series of recognitions of the strange in the familiar, and the familiar in the strange.
Why did I go back? you ask. Well, for a start let me assure you that I am not working for an intelligence agency, Western or otherwise, though I can see why you might have wondered. No, my reasons were entirely personal. As you suggest, I was thinking of the men of my unit who had died there or thereabouts. But by the end of the war I had lost more comrades in Russian fields and barns and forests and swamps than I could possibly recall, and so there was more to it than that. You asked me to write candidly, and so I will. The overwhelming reason I returned was my hope of seeing you. In your letter you write of how frequently you recall the time we knew one another in 1941, and this gladdened me because as time passes I think of it more and more often myself. Indeed, looking back, I have come to regard those six weeks as something like the fulcrum of my life – because, while events occurred after it which affected my fate more drastically, at Yasnaya Polyana I turned from the past to the future, from mourning my wife to imagining some kind of life with you. Not that I was naive about this; I was forty, not twenty, and understood the obstacles. I also had my reading of War and Peace to remind me not only that love doesn’t always conquer but that, arguably, it’s better that way – that thwarted love is stronger, more enduring than the domesticated kind, which as you once pointed out often descends into bickering, as happened between Lev Nikolayevich and Sophia Andreyevna. War and Peace also had the effect of restoring my faith in doing good in the world; because if, as Tolstoy argued, we are all specks in a vast world-historical drama, including those who think they’re in charge, it follows that everyone’s actions are potentially significant, that the humblest person can influence events as much as any general, emperor or tsar. When I became a killer I had to accept the full implications of this: that the young man I shot (or his unborn descendants) might have – I don’t know – written great symphonies, cured cancer, or in some more subtle way made the world a better place. But even then I found self-serving comfort in the thought that I was neither good nor bad but simply human, an atom in the claw of a beast intent on flaying itself.
No doubt that last
sentence shows how wise I was not to pursue a career as a writer. You, Katerina, have no such excuse. Is it too late for you to go back to fiction? I have a memory of a conversation of ours at Yasnaya Polyana in which you unfavourably compared your writing with Tolstoy’s. Since then I’ve encountered a quote of Isaac Newton’s, which he borrowed from elsewhere, I believe, about his seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants; and it seems to me that, likewise, modern writers might aspire to see further than Tolstoy by mounting his shoulders. If I’m wrong about this, set me right. If not, you may send me a draft of your next novel – or for that matter, copies of your previous ones, since you’ll be pleased to know I can now read reasonably complex Russian. I’m rather proud of this skill, a small compensation for the loss of three fingers and six years of my life, and lately I have been putting it to use by re-reading Russian novels which as a youth I read in translation.
You asked how I spent the remainder of the war. After retreating from Tula and abandoning Yasnaya Polyana, the 3rd Panzer withdrew to the neighbourhood of Chern, though the term ‘withdraw’ in no way captures the chaos, panic and despair of our flight, particularly during its early stages. What happened later at Stalingrad is so well known that it tends to obscure the cataclysm we experienced in the winter of 1941, when we lost hundreds of thousands of men and, I am convinced, effectively lost the war. When the 3rd Panzer went back on the offensive the following spring – bypassing Yasnaya Polyana and the tough nut of Tula – we did so without the sense of invincibility we had carried into previous campaigns; and even after our subsequent capture of Voronezh the dominant emotion in the division was anxiety, an anxiety which of course turned out to be well founded. From 1943 onwards I experienced the war as a sequence of retreats, each more catastrophic than the last, until in October 1944, in the vicinity of Lvov, a Soviet armoured brigade overran the tent hospital in which we were operating. I wish I could report to you that I stayed with my patients that day, but those who did so were killed, without exception, and their patients too. I can’t even pretend I made a conscious choice, because the truth is I simply started to run and kept running, like a hunted animal, a cliché that aptly describes what I had become: a pop-eyed, panting, sweating beast. And so I saved myself. For the next several days I attempted with a handful of others to get back to our lines, huddling around a fire at night like Neolithic survivors of a slaughtered tribe, then on 12 November 1944 we were duly captured and marched directly into Lvov. Years later I learned that in 1943 the SS had rounded up the Jews of Lvov and sent them to their deaths at Auschwitz and Treblinka, so there was some crude justice in what happened to us next: transportation, by stages, from Lvov to a place I came to know as Gulag Hozzi, near Borovichi, roughly halfway between Leningrad and Moscow – the first of several prisoner-of-war camps in which I was interned until May of 1950.