The Tolstoy Estate

by Steven Conte

  Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you on account of the struggle I’m having accepting your verdict that you and I shouldn’t meet. Not that I necessarily think you’re wrong, mind you. When my mother opted to keep the past in the past, I remember thinking she had made the right decision, that this admirer, whoever he was, was a bit of a fool to believe he could waltz back into her life after thirty years, knowing nothing of who she had become, and perhaps only a little of who she had been when they knew one another originally. It was embarrassing. What was wrong with old people, I wondered (old people of fifty!) that they wanted to wallow in memory, when clearly the healthier thing to do was to stride into the future?

  And yet here I am. Here I am subsisting on memories. Here I am among books I aim to re-read, or have read twice or three times before, opting for the nourishment of repetition over the fizz and flash of the new.

  And so I have a proposition for you, Katerina. Let us meet openly. Let’s confound the KGB by being exactly who we are: Paul Bauer, former mayor of Nuremberg, formerly a Soviet prisoner of war; and Katerina Trubetzkaya, distinguished scholar and heroic defender of Yasnaya Polyana against fascist aggression. Let Mr Brezhnev have a propaganda victory. Let’s invite the press to our meeting, where in front of the cameras I will denounce German militarism. Magnanimously you could then accept my contrition, and we could embrace, symbolically reconciling our once warring peoples. I’m serious. After a performance like that they would surely let us have dinner together, wouldn’t they? Will you have dinner with me?

  Yours sincerely,

  Paul

  EIGHTEEN

  The night of his return from the front to Yasnaya Polyana he took to his bed feeling hot and disoriented, the nausea rising in him until every half an hour he was forced to vomit, first in the toilet down the hall and then into a pail Hermann put beside his bed. As the night deepened, so did his confusion – sleep and wakefulness cartwheeling one into another. He dreamed of gaping wounds, then of his brother, Jürgen, still with both his legs, his voice garbled but kind, then sinister and harsh. Then Jürgen was gone, and on a cliff edge Bauer was clutching the wrist of Sepp Winkel, who was imploring him to lift, lift him up, for God’s sake lift, just as, senselessly, monstrously, Bauer let go. He wept. He promised his father to be good. Arm in arm with Clara on a stroll through Ulm he watched the Danube plaiting currents underneath a bridge, then he sensed daylight, his pupils flinching under their lids, opened his eyes and saw that the ceiling had receded, or that his camp bed had shrunk, and only later understood he was no longer in his room but in one of the hospital wards. He heard movement, speech – some of it about him – before sinking again. Then it was night, he was conscious, and in the surrounding beds men were coughing, groaning, labouring to breathe. So much effort. So much misery. He slid again into sleep.

  When next he woke, someone was pressing a mug to his lips. He drank. Water. Opened his eyes and saw Zöllner. How was he feeling? Zöllner wanted to know.

  ‘Better,’ he replied, though he had rarely felt worse.

  ‘That’s good. You’ve been unconscious for two days.’

  Bauer asked him the date. The third, replied Zöllner. Of December, he added.

  ‘My birthday,’ Bauer said. ‘I’ve just missed it.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir. Happy birthday to you anyway. How old are you?’

  ‘Forty-one. What have I got? Typhus? Influenza?’

  ‘We don’t know. Maybe both. Or neither. You’re getting better, that’s the thing.’ There was a pause. ‘Terrible news about your men.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Bauer said.

  ‘I’ve been praying for their souls.’

  ‘Thank you, Hans,’ Bauer said, feeling moved, his atheist convictions beside the point.

  ‘They’ll be hard to replace,’ the young man said. ‘Especially Sepp.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Bauer said. He tried to think of something meaningful to add, failed and confined himself to nodding.

  The next day his condition was judged no longer contagious, if it ever had been, and he was stretchered to his room to convalesce, hospital beds being in short supply. He was still dizzy, unable to read or even follow conversation. ‘I’m thinking of putting Pabst onto it,’ Molineux said to him that evening.

  ‘Onto what?’ Bauer managed to ask.

  ‘The still. He’s tried to poison us before and none of us have died, so I figure we’ll be relatively safe.’

  As soon as he was able to sit up and think more or less clearly he asked for paper, a bottle of ink and a pen to write to Winkel’s and Pflieger’s families, a task he wanted behind him as soon as possible. Their men had died trying to save the lives of others, he wrote truthfully. He considered calling them heroes but didn’t want to imply they had taken stupid risks. And he definitely wasn’t going to describe the true facts of their deaths, which he could hardly bear to think about himself: the tipping metal trap, the freezing water rushing in – a naval death thousands of kilometres from the sea. No, it was out of the question. Truth of that kind was only tolerable at one remove, say in a novel or poem, a mirror of words in which to glimpse the Gorgon’s head. Instead he wrote that Winkel and Pflieger had died instantly when a shell hit the tank they were in. They had died ‘for the Fatherland’, he added, avoiding the phrase ‘for the Führer’ favoured by Metz in such letters, a formulation that Dieter Clemens’s wife, for example, would have felt as a twist of the blade.

  Dieter. For the first time in weeks Bauer remembered helping to lower him into the ground, a last favour to a friend, or so he had thought. But Dieter’s uniform, as he’d shovelled mud onto it, had jellied and bounced; and when they left that place – the little barrow of mud, the cross on which Dieter’s dog tag was slung – Bauer sensed the man under it calling out to him, begging him to stay, not to leave him alone in that dark hole among the trees.

  And von Rauschenberg, a man of a different stamp, more hardened than Dieter had been but, Bauer sensed, no less good. Chance traveller with Pflieger and Sepp. This country will consume us, Bauer thought as he sealed the letters to the families of his men. One way or another, sooner or later, it will swallow us all.

  ‘Metz wants to know when you’ll be fit again,’ Molineux said that evening. ‘He’s scared of coming in person. Contagion, I suppose. It’s a mystery to me why such a fastidious man chose to go into medicine.’

  ‘You can tell him I’ll be able to work tomorrow,’ Bauer said, thinking that he could do with at least another week.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ Molineux said. ‘And I mean that sincerely. God knows we need a competent surgeon. Pilcz went down in flames faster than the Hindenburg, and now even Metz is going to pieces.’

  ‘To pieces how?’

  ‘Losing his touch. If I’m not mistaken he’s getting a tremor, which believe me is unnerving when he’s cutting near an artery.’

  Bauer remembered how, at the end of their marathon shift, Metz’s hands had been trembling. At the time this had seemed understandable. ‘Have you discussed it with him?’

  ‘Are you mad? I have to work with the man.’

  ‘All the more reason to speak with him.’

  ‘Bauer, you know it doesn’t work that way.’

  And he did know. When lives were at stake elsewhere – a gasworks, say, or the railways – procedures were in place to protect against human error. Only surgeons and the Pope were considered to be infallible, and though personally he benefited from the status thus conferred, Bauer doubted it made him a better surgeon, any more than Molineux’s tact would help to keep Metz up to the mark.

  Through the open doorway drifted the distant sound of a piano – not from Weidemann’s gramophone, Bauer realised, but from the Bechstein downstairs. To his inexpert ear the playing sounded flawless. ‘My God, who’s that?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Molineux replied. ‘Schubert? Brahms? One of their lieder, I’d say.’

  ‘Numbskull. I mean who’s playing?’

&n
bsp; ‘Your man Demchak, it must be. Weidemann was threatening to summon him over here this evening. Someone mentioned he could play.’

  ‘Someone wasn’t joking.’ The music sounded lovely, not only skilful but also, he sensed, infused with melancholy and pathos.

  Molineux cocked an ear and said, ‘You know, you’re right. Certainly an improvement on old Bertha. All Weidemann’s records are scratched to shit. Better investigate. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Bauer replied, and held up War and Peace. ‘I have reading to do.’

  * * *

  Even getting out of bed the following morning was arduous, making Bauer wonder how he would get through the day, especially if there were more than the ordinary number of casualties. In the corridor he passed Molineux returning from the bathroom. ‘You’re up late,’ Molineux said.

  ‘Instead of dying,’ he replied, went into the lavatory and had to lean over the bowl as a fit of dizziness passed. The porcelain was as finely cracked as a Rembrandt or a Titian, and it occurred to him that Tolstoy himself must have shat here often. Sitting down felt disrespectful. His own output was meagre.

  In the bathroom he found Drexel brushing his teeth, his face unnaturally close to the mirror. Bauer greeted him and Drexel grunted in reply, which as a fellow night-owl Bauer could understand and excuse. Despite the cold, Drexel was wearing only a towel, revealing his short but strong and stocky frame. Dense dark hair on his chest and abdomen. An almost shaggy back.

  The tub was free and Bauer ran a little hot water, got in and washed himself, his lower half scalding while his upper half froze. Drexel was taking his time with his brushing, arm working hard as if filing his teeth to the nub. A rivulet of dental foam was running down his hand, and with more disgust than as a surgeon he was entitled to feel, Bauer watched the foam snake from his wrist onto his forearm. Hadn’t the fellow noticed? The mirror was only starting to mist over, and anyway couldn’t he feel his own arm? Or was he aware and didn’t care? Bauer kept glancing over at him until finally, with foam dripping off his elbow, Drexel ducked and spat, rinsed his arm and left the room.

  Shortly afterwards Bauer got out of the tub and took his own turn at the mirror. He looked terrible, he thought: haggard and gaunt, the lines bracketing his mouth noticeably deeper than before. Half his stubble was white and his hair was greying at his temples and ears. As far as he could tell he wasn’t balding, at least not from the front, and though he knew it to be futile he ducked to glimpse the top of his head. Yes, impossible. No doubt there were parts of the soul, he thought, that likewise resisted inspection.

  The bathroom door opened and Hirsch appeared, and quickly Bauer took up his razor. Hirsch looked startled then pleased – it was so good to see him, he said. He had visited him in the hospital and then later in his room. Had he noticed?

  Bauer admitted he hadn’t.

  ‘You would have sensed it,’ Hirsch said firmly. ‘At some level you would have noticed, and . . .’

  ‘Appreciated it?’

  ‘Taken heart.’

  Like so much of what Hirsch said, this was irritating, though as usual Bauer found it hard to identify why.

  Hirsch pointed at the bath. ‘Sir, would you mind if I . . . ?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Even though you’re shaving? It won’t, you know, fog your mirror too much?’

  ‘I can manage.’

  Hirsch thanked him and began to undress. Bauer started to shave. His arms felt heavy, weak. Hirsch had still not mentioned Winkel and Pflieger, and perhaps it was this that was annoying him. Or was ignoring their comrades’ deaths understandable, or even necessary? In the mirror Bauer glimpsed Hirsch getting into the tub, his soft, hulking body almost hairless, especially in comparison with Drexel’s. His penis, like the rest of him, was flaccid and large.

  Bauer returned down the corridor to find Molineux leaning in the doorway to their room. ‘Slacker,’ Bauer said. ‘Short of things to do?’

  ‘I’m waiting for you, aren’t I,’ Molineux said.

  This was touching, or would have been if Molineux had looked less distracted. ‘How soon do you think Hirsch will be getting out of the bathroom?’

  ‘Fairly soon, I suppose. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Just wait, you’ll see.’

  Bauer entered their room and set about getting dressed. ‘What are you up to now? You should leave him be.’

  ‘It’s just a little fun, that’s all. God knows we need it.’

  ‘But does Hirsch?’

  ‘Him too.’

  Bauer was buttoning his tunic when Molineux ducked back inside. ‘There he goes!’ There was a pause and then a shriek, its tone womanly, its loudness the work of a man.

  ‘Je-sus,’ Molineux said, sounding half amused and half annoyed. ‘Now Metz will get involved.’

  For a while there was silence in the corridor, Hirsch presumably having recovered from the shock of whatever Hermann had done to him. If shock was the right term – there had been something willed about Hirsch’s cry, a suggestion not only of fright but of indignation. There followed the thudding of boots, including from downstairs, and as predicted Metz demanding to know what was going on. Bauer followed Molineux into the corridor, still buttoning his tunic. Not only Metz but Drexel and Weidemann were there, as well as a duty sentry with both hands on his rifle. Seconds later Hirsch emerged in his underwear from his room, his arm outstretched and in his hand a glass of water which contained a sphere, a human eye, its pupil bobbing about in surprise.

  ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ yelled Metz.

  ‘It was by my bed, sir, when I got back from the bathroom,’ Hirsch said, his face noticeably white.

  Metz took the glass and held it up. ‘Who’s responsible for this? It’s an outrage. Un-German. I’ll have him up on charges, whoever he is.’

  ‘It was me, sir,’ Molineux said, much to Bauer’s surprise. ‘Just a bit of fun.’

  Metz bared his teeth in rage. ‘I should have known. Captain, this time you’ve gone too far. I’m a tolerant man, but this I can’t countenance. No and no and no. Where’s your sense of decency? Your respect for the dead?’

  ‘It’s not one of our own, sir. That’s a Bolshevik eyeball.’

  ‘Bolshevik? From where?’

  ‘From the Ivan who died, the one Bauer brought in.’

  Metz hesitated, then said firmly, ‘Even so.’

  ‘How did he die?’ Bauer asked.

  Metz handed the glass to the sentry and ordered him to get rid of it. ‘The incinerator.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How did he die?’ repeated Bauer.

  ‘The usual way,’ said Weidemann, speaking for the first time. ‘Of his wounds.’

  ‘That’s enough time wasted here,’ Metz said, and turned to go.

  ‘What about me?’ Hirsch said.

  Metz stopped. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Captain Molineux owes me an apology,’ he said, his voice tremulous but determined.

  ‘Oh, for what?’ Metz asked.

  ‘The intrusion,’ Hirsch said, ‘the . . . I would call it humiliation. In my own quarters. It’s not . . . it’s improper.’

  Metz stared at him then jerked his head in annoyance. ‘For goodness sake, man. Get a grip on yourself.’

  * * *

  After breakfast, Metz offered to drive Bauer to the hospital in the ZIS, and in his sorry physical condition he was quick to accept. ‘It’s very kind of you.’

  ‘Kindness has nothing to do with it,’ Metz replied. ‘I need to brief you on what’s been happening while you’ve been loafing in bed.’

  From the porch they stepped into a wind armed with chips of ice. Fortunately the ZIS was parked close to the porch, its engine running. Bauer got into the back and found Ehrlich at the wheel, hardly a surprising discovery but unpleasant all the same, reminding him of the comrades he’d liked more but who now were dead.

  ‘Yes, a lot’s changed in your absence,’ Metz said when they were under
way. ‘For a start I’ve brought Frau Kälter to heel.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Ever trained a dog?’

  ‘Not personally, no.’

  ‘Frankly it shows. If you had done, that bitch might have given you less trouble.’

  Despite himself Bauer was taken aback; Metz was nothing if not correct. ‘The other night you seemed on good terms with each other.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. Any dog can be petted once you’ve established dominance over it. You were too trusting, too soft, and look where it got you.’ Already they were approaching the hospital. ‘Anyway, all you need to know is that from now on Frau Kälter will report directly to me. You needn’t communicate with her. In fact, don’t – you’ll only undo my good work.’

  ‘I’m forbidden to speak with her at all?’

  ‘If you have reason to speak with her in passing, so be it. But for God’s sake, do try to remember who’s in charge.’

  Ehrlich pulled up at the front steps of the hospital and Bauer got out with Metz, saluted the sentry and went inside. They crossed the entrance hall and began to mount the stairs. Metz stopped. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You wanted to brief me?’

  ‘What do you think I’ve been doing? Reciting nursery rhymes?’

  * * *

  According to Zöllner, the death of the young Soviet soldier really had been routine. Yes, the presence of an enemy patient had raised eyebrows on the wards, but he had received the same standard of care as their own wounded did. Bauer was inclined to believe it. His own assessment of the boy’s chances had been pessimistic, though he couldn’t shake the feeling that had he not fallen ill he might have saved him, if necessary by willpower alone. But no. He had a victim now. Pyotr Maximovich Kirov, twenty years old, service number TF9674652.

  ‘What happened to the corpse?’ he asked.

  ‘Frau Kälter took it away,’ Zöllner said.

  ‘Kälter?’

  ‘She offered, we agreed.’

  ‘Took it away how?’

  ‘On a sled.’

  ‘By herself?’

  ‘With the help of that old man of hers. White beard. Looks like God.’