Misha reeled with horror and the blood drained from his face. He collapsed into a dining chair.
Yegor shouted then. ‘Lyudmila, don’t upset the boy, and don’t talk nonsense. How can you talk such nonsense?’
Lyudmila’s eyes darted around the room, as though she were looking to escape. ‘I trust you are right,’ she said starchily and sipped her coffee, wincing a little. Misha hoped she would get up to go. But she didn’t. Instead she bowed her head and smiled. ‘I am sorry. I know I have tried your patience. So tell me, Misha, how are you faring at school? I hear you are quite a scholar. Your mama was a clever girl too . . .’
Yegor answered for him. ‘Misha is helping the workers at the Stalin Automobile Plant with their reading.’
‘We’re reading Shakespeare, actually, Papa. I talk to the ones who can read already,’ said Misha.
His papa shrugged it off. ‘He takes after his mother, you can see.’
Mila seemed more relaxed now. She sipped her coffee, peered out of the window and said, ‘I must go before it rains.’
When she had gone, Yegor blew a long stream of air through his lips. ‘Misha, we both know Lyudmila is rather detached from the world. I wouldn’t take anything she says seriously. Not least what she said about Mama being shot.
‘And that piano nonsense,’ he continued, before Misha could ask him any more about it. ‘You know Mama only played a little. We had the chance to have a baby grand piano – do you remember, when we first moved here? They asked, as there was one available, and Anna turned them down.’
Misha remembered all too well. He had wanted to learn to play himself and had felt angry with his mother for several weeks afterwards for depriving him of the opportunity. But he was puzzled why his father felt the need to remind him. And he was irked at his refusal to talk about Aunt Mila’s fear that his mother was dead. He didn’t seem particularly concerned about any of this. In fact, this whole conversation didn’t really make sense.
Chapter 10
21st June 1941
Bright sunlight burst through the narrow gaps in Misha’s curtains and as he woke he was pleased he did not have to go to school that day. He was glad to be at home most of the time, not least because he continued to worry about his papa. Yegor seemed to be in frequent pain and told his son he thought he might have a stomach ulcer. Misha urged him to see a doctor but he wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Plain food is what I need,’ he said. So they ate scrambled eggs and tinned tomatoes and cucumber salads. Misha developed a craving for steak, which he would occasionally satisfy with a lunchtime fry-up.
He was relieved that his papa had not told him anything more about the Germans since that night at the start of June. Nothing had happened since. It must just have been a rumour which got out of hand in the Kremlin. The other day he had read an article in Izvestia denouncing rumours of war as ‘totally without foundation’ and ‘lies and provocations’. Misha was beginning to think he’d get his lazy summer after all.
Today he thought he would ask his papa for the keys to the dacha in Meshkovo and see if Nikolay, Valya, and anyone else they could round up, wanted to catch a train out there and spend the day in the forest. If they left at eleven, they could arrive with a picnic lunch. It would be good to make the most of the warm weather. They would get home at dusk carrying bags bursting with summer fruits from the garden of the dacha.
He had heard his papa get up earlier and guessed he had been at his desk in the Little Corner since 9.00 a.m. When Misha headed over to talk to him, he found Yegor Petrov looking pale. Misha worried that his stomach condition might be worse. Instead, Yegor whispered, ‘There are all sorts of bizarre things happening this morning. German cargo ships are setting sail from our ports – even ones that have not yet loaded the goods they came to collect. And we’ve had reports from the fire brigade that at the German Embassy they are burning all their documents. We’ve been trying to contact the dacha at Kuntsevo but Comrade Stalin has given strict instructions that he’s not to be disturbed.’
‘What do you think is going on?’ Misha whispered back. He couldn’t believe his papa was discussing this with him in the office. He had a horrible sinking feeling in his stomach.
‘I think the Hitlerites are about to attack us,’ said Yegor wearily. ‘I don’t want you to go to Meshkovo. Once the attack starts, they will send aircraft to bomb the cities. I don’t know what the range of their aircraft is. Maybe we are too far away – but why risk it?’
Misha realised now that the terrible rumours about Germany were actually true.
‘You know, during the war against the Whites I was fighting down in Tsaritsyn and we were caught on a troop train,’ said Yegor. ‘Two fighter planes attacked us, and we were trapped in a wagon. When you’re fighting out in the open, you can always hide or throw yourself to the ground. On that train we were rats in a trap. There was a hailstorm of bullets and splinters and shards of glass. I was lucky; I escaped with a few cuts, but men right next to me were killed.’
His papa had rarely talked about the Civil War before and had brushed off Misha’s questions when he’d plucked up the courage to ask. Now, for the first time, he began to understand why.
‘What shall we do?’ Misha asked. His mouth had gone dry. He was desperate for a drink of water.
‘Wait. I can suggest nothing else.’
So Misha went back to the apartment and read Chekhov’s Three Sisters. That was playing in Moscow at the moment and he had wanted to see it later in the week. As the morning wore on, he went round to the Golovkins to ask Valya if she wanted to have a picnic with him in Gorky Park. She was pleased to see him and eager to get out of the Kremlin. She asked him to wait while she changed into a floral cotton dress.
‘Dmitriy might be there. I don’t want him to see me looking dreary!’
Misha sighed to himself. She had told him about Dmitriy – a boy she knew from the Komsomol. She’d taken quite a shine to him and kept hoping he’d ask her out. She came out of her room wearing a red ribbon around her thick curly hair and Misha thought she had never looked more beautiful.
They walked along the broad avenue on the southern side of the Kremlin down to the Borovitskaya Tower. They noticed an unusual amount of activity for a lunchtime on Day Six. Officials were hurrying to and fro between the office buildings, clutching box files and sheaves of documents. Every one of them looked harassed or anxious.
A cool breeze blew off the Moskva as they walked over the great bridge and Misha felt hungry. They bought black bread, salami and apples from a little grocery store on Bolshaya Yakimanka and reached the Park in a little over twenty-five minutes. There was an empty bench overlooking the Moskva Embankment so they sat there in the sunshine.
Misha was bursting to tell her what Papa had said but knew he couldn’t. He could think of nothing else to say. It was Valya who broke the silence between them. ‘I know you’re dying to tell me something, Misha, so I will spare you the torment. I know what’s about to happen.’
She waited for a young woman with a pram and two tiny children to walk past.
‘Papa says the whole Kremlin knows the Nazis are about to invade. Only Comrade Stalin denies it. But he knows something is wrong too.’ She paused. ‘I wonder how long it will be before they get here.’
Misha felt slightly disappointed. He thought he’d known something Valya didn’t.
‘You sound so certain that the Nazis will be successful,’ said Misha. ‘Papa told me Comrade Stalin says the Germans won’t attack because they know it will end in failure. He says that anyone with a rational mind will see this. And although the Vozhd hates the fascists as much as any good communist, he thinks the Nazi leader is a shrewd character. He has made some clever moves in Europe.’
‘He has a magnificent army,’ Valya said.
‘Yes, but Napoleon had the best army in Europe too,’ said Misha, ‘and that ended in catastrophe when he invaded Russia. We’ve all seen the pictures of der Führer at Napoleon’s tomb w
hen he went to inspect Paris last year. Hitler admires the little Emperor as much as any warlord. He’ll know what happened to Napoleon’s army, and if he forgets, I’m sure his generals won’t tire of reminding him.’
Valya let out a long sigh. ‘Or maybe they’re as frightened of him as our generals are of the Vozhd?’ She hooked her arm around his. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. Don’t ask how I know.’
It was obvious how she knew. Anatoly Golovkin must have told her. Just as his papa did with him.
‘That campaign in Finland, after we reclaimed our territory in Poland. It was a disaster. Russian corpses were piled up like pyramids, frozen in the snow. The Finns beat us! A little country hardly anyone has heard of.’
‘But we won, didn’t we?’ said Misha.
‘Barely. D’you know what Papa told me? Oops, I’ve told you where I heard it now . . . He said the Finns used to attack when the Soviet troops were having their afternoon rest. Completely inflexible. And our soldiers were starving half the time because supplies didn’t get delivered. If the Finns can do that to the Soviet army, then we don’t stand a chance against soldiers who conquered Europe in just a few weeks.’
‘So much for our treaty with Germany!’ said Misha. ‘I was there at the banquet to celebrate it. It was only two years ago. I can’t believe they’re going back on that after such a short time. And even if they were stupid enough to attack, we’re much bigger than the other countries. We’re huge. We have far more soldiers and far more tanks and aircraft. There are twenty thousand aircraft in the Soviet air fleet.’ Misha was trying to convince himself. He finished with a flourish. ‘And we’re Russians!’
‘Misha, Papa says Comrade Stalin has had most of the top army men liquidated. Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Primakov . . . All those heroes of the Soviet Union we used to hear about and see on the podium in the Red Square parades, we don’t see them any more. They’re gone. Almost certainly dead.’
‘Rokossovsky came back,’ Misha said.
‘They must have decided he was more useful to them alive. But most of the generals and divisional commanders now are new men. They’re terrified of doing the wrong thing and they’ll be hopeless against experienced Nazi commanders.’
A cool breeze blew off the river and she shivered in her thin cotton dress and pulled him a little closer. Her body was touching his, from shoulder to feet. He felt her warmth and a hopeless longing but glancing at her face he saw she was staring forlornly out to the far embankment.
‘What can we do?’ was all Misha could think to say.
‘I’m going to join the partisans,’ Valya said firmly. ‘They’ll be asking for volunteers to fight behind the German lines.’
‘Then I will too,’ said Misha rashly.
She hit him briskly on the arm.
‘You, Mikhail Petrov, are not old enough. But you could join the air defence section of your Komsomol detachment. I dare say they’ll put you in charge of a Pioneer brigade.’
‘Look at this city,’ she continued. ‘All the effort, all the work we put into building it up since the Revolution. All these factories, all these new hospitals, apartment blocks, they’re all in danger. You know what the Nazi bombers have been doing to London.’
‘Papa says the bombers could be here tomorrow,’ Misha said.
‘No. They’ll need to set up airbases nearer to us.’ She paused again and looked him straight in the eye. ‘But they’ll be here soon enough.’
Chapter 11
Midnight, 21st June 1941 Polish–Soviet Border
Augustus Grasse breathed in the damp summer air that drifted across the River Bug. Grasse shivered a little and lit another cigarette, carefully hiding the light in the slit trench he had dug that evening.
‘Hey, me too, Dummkopf,’ said Steiner, holding out an unlit cigarette of his own. Both of them were soldiers in Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre, Fourth Army, 197th Infantry Division.
They were both from Berlin but Grasse didn’t really like Steiner. He was always banging on about the Jews, how they had started the war and how they would soon be getting what they deserved. Grasse wanted to tell him he sounded like a parakeet, parroting that poisonous Dr Goebbels. But he bit his lip. Grasse, the boy whose father was a communist, a traitor to the Reich. He just had to put a foot wrong and the Gestapo would be bringing him in for interrogation.
On the far bank of the River Bug were the Russians. At least he assumed they were there. His division had been perched in their start position for several hours now and they had not heard a whisper from the other side. The Germans had even brought up their tanks – there was no hiding the thunderous rumble the Mark IV Panzers made – and the smell of exhaust still hung in the night air like some monstrous creature panting and sweating after a night’s marauding.
The simple truth was, Grasse wanted the communists to win. As an eleven-year-old he had joined his father fighting the Nazis in the street battles in Berlin, before Hitler wangled his way into power. When the Nazis got in, his father was one of the first to be sent to Dachau. He came out five years later. Augustus didn’t recognise him – he was skin and bone, and bald. That fine head of black hair had disappeared, and his bushy eyebrows had gone white.
‘Get out, son. Go to Russia, or France,’ his father had said, shortly before he died of tuberculosis. ‘The devil has come to Earth.’
But Augustus didn’t go. He didn’t know the right people to bribe for a visa, and he knew instinctively that he had to keep his head down, otherwise they’d come for him too. So he went along with all the military training at school. Some of it he even enjoyed. No one could throw a grenade quite like him. He had a silver cup on the mantelpiece to prove it.
Augustus never forgot his father’s politics. It made perfect sense. Power to the people. From each according to his ability – to each according to his needs. There was almost a religious logic to it. Didn’t Christ want to help the poor and oppressed to make a better life for themselves? He looked at his watch. They were four hours away from H-hour. Barbarossa. The greatest invasion in history. That’s what the Division Colonel had told them earlier that evening. Why couldn’t they have posted him to Norway or the Afrika Korps?
Steiner finished his cigarette, coughed, spat noisily, and said, ‘I need a crap.’ He hauled himself out of the trench and disappeared into the bushes behind them. ‘Don’t step on a mine,’ whispered Grasse, half wishing he would.
In an instant a mad idea gripped him. Let them know. Let them know the Wehrmacht was coming. Let them know millions of soldiers and thousands of tanks and aircraft were about to pour into the Soviet Union and destroy their army. Grasse weighed up his chances. It was entirely possible he would die in the morning attack. And he didn’t like to think what the odds were of him still being alive when they reached Moscow. If he went over, the Russians would treat him like a hero, and he’d get out of this whole mess. Once he told them he was a communist too, or at least his father was, then they’d sort him out a cushy job, surely?
The worst that could happen was that he’d spend the war in a prisoner of war camp. He fumbled in his pocket for his hip flask and took a long drag of schnapps. Then he hurriedly removed his combat jacket and webbing. He took one last look around to see if Steiner was coming back, then gingerly made his way to the water’s edge. Slipping silently into the cool water he began to swim towards the other side.
Grasse emerged on the eastern bank of the River Bug dripping wet and shivering uncontrollably. The water had been colder than he had expected, and even as he swam he had begun to regret his decision to desert to the Soviet side.
He was sure the noise he made as he clambered up the bank, trousers swishing against his legs, water dripping from his shirt, must have drifted back across the river, but no one on the German start line seemed to have heard. His companion, Private Steiner, had noted Grasse’s absence but hadn’t yet realised that he had gone for good.
Grasse stumbled on into the darkness, expecting to
meet Soviet troops at any moment. But there was nobody about. He carried on hurrying east, desperate to make contact with the Russian soldiers before the invasion began and he was overtaken by his own side. He hadn’t thought that through. He’d be shot for desertion, without a doubt. Maybe he’d be the first German soldier to be executed in this campaign. That would be something that would have made his father proud.
He heard a town clock chime 1 a.m. and headed towards the sound. Within half an hour he had reached a small village where he heard Russian voices. In the moonlight he could see horses and a few motor vehicles and realised this must be a detachment of Soviet soldiers. There was a small group of them clustered around a field kitchen, and he called out as he approached, ‘Comrades! Don’t shoot.’
A moment later he found himself staring down the muzzles of several rifles. Instinctively raising his hands above his head he spoke slowly, in German. ‘Comrades, I must talk to your officer. Very urgent.’
The soldiers muttered rapidly to each other. Clearly no one here spoke German. Grasse noticed with alarm that one of the men was fixing a bayonet to his rifle. The soldier advanced towards him but beckoned Grasse to crouch on the ground.
He muttered a single word to him, like a man talking to a dog, and another one of the soldiers ran off into the darkness.
Within ten minutes the man returned with an officer. He had a smarter uniform and looked more intelligent than these peasant soldiers.
‘Who are you?’ said the man in poor but comprehensible German.
Grasse snapped to attention.
‘Augustus Grasse of Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Centre, Fourth Army, 197th Infantry Division. I have urgent news. My division, indeed the whole German army, is about to invade your country. Please be prepared.’
Red Shadow Page 6