Redemption: Supernatural Time-Traveling Romance with Sci-fi and Metaphysics

by Jacklyn A. Lo

  Elena sighs, thinking back to the carnage she has seen since they last met. Their first attempt to liberate Kharkov had been nothing short of a disaster. After months of preparation and a promising start, the Luftwaffe had muscled in and pummeled the Soviet forces resulting in casualties of over a quarter of a million. You bet I’ve witnessed plenty of destruction, she thinks, with a sad shake of her head. Enough for a thousand lifetimes. How I’ve survived is a mystery to me! She looks back at the page and continues to read Konstantin’s precise, Cyrillic script.

  “Oh, Lenochka, my love. You would not believe the state of Stalingrad now. It’s unrecognizable. It’s been so badly devastated by the bombing, fires and constant fighting. I remember it before the war, such a beautiful place, a city full of promise and prosperity, with luxurious gardens and bright fountains, great theaters and music halls. I remember coming to hear an orchestral performance with my parents. We had dinner together in a popular little bistro overlooking the Volga, with live music and the best fish for kilometers around. A happy evening. Well, I found the bistro again last week. There’s hardly anything left of the place. It’s just an empty shell with no music or laughter or life.” Elena stops again, this time to blink away a tear. Although this is not her own land, and there has been no warfare on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it is still truly heart-breaking to see the devastation the fighting has caused this country.

  “It’s day one hundred and twenty eight,” Konstantin’s letter continues, “and though we are getting help from the locals, it is mostly teenagers, but they know every part of this area—how and where to go, which place is which, even if the damn buildings aren’t there anymore. These bastard Nazis are making us fight for every inch of land here. There are even some buildings with different floors occupied by different sides, like some bizarre German-Russian sandwich, you wouldn’t believe it, my darling! Still, it means the Nazi airplanes have pulled out as they don’t want to risk bombing their own troops. So, it’s hardcore fighting, man to man, face to face and the Germans soon learned we’ve got guts! Most of the European countries; France, Belgium, Denmark; they all fell in a couple of weeks, so I heard. Well, not us! We’re still getting warm food twice a day and have plenty of ammunition. We’re going to win soon for sure. I hope this letter finds you well, dear Lenochka. Yours, in love, Kostya.”

  My Kostya! So brave. Elena smiles again as she carefully folds the letter up and places it back on the bed before picking up the second, still lying open on her knee. This one was sent not long after the first and Elena had received it by the time the Soviet army had begun their final offensive against the Germans in Kharkov, early the previous month. She shudders as she thinks back to those days, the massive amounts of causalities and the strain of living in constant fear of death. She wasn’t as scared as she thought she would be though. Pretty brave yourself, Helen. she thinks as she begins to read the letter.

  “What a day it’s been, my love! One of the luckiest days we’ve had so far. My team was given an operation to carry out. It was supposed to be hot, going up against a heavily defended outpost, but we won almost without any losses. We just strolled in and took them out! You’ll never guess why. Mice! Seriously, mice. They’d been nibbling away at the electric wire inside the German’s reserve Panzers and put the whole stack out of commission. You should have seen the look on the Nazis’ faces when they realized. Don’t mess with the Russians, even the mice fight for us!”

  Elena chuckles, remembering a similar situation in Kharkov when the Soviet troops had finally broken through the enemy lines. Rats! No doubt they had been attracted by the hordes of bodies the Germans had left hanging from balconies around the city, but they had soon found their food supplies too and reduced them to a stinking mess. The Nazis, trapped inside by the Red Army, had been forced to eat it all the same. No worse than their sausages, she thinks, her nose wrinkling in disgust at the thought. In fact, probably a step up! She drops her eyes back to Konstantin’s letter.

  “As I write this, I am sitting by a nice, warm fire, fresh from a swim in the bathhouse, which was another outpost we managed to seize today. I’m enjoying the brief respite and the chance just to sit and dream about you, my beautiful Lenochka. I wonder how you are doing, my darling. Is everything okay with you? If only I heard just a single word from you. I miss you so much. After the war, when our great land is once again at peace, we shall come here together. I want you to feel the power of the great Volga river and promenade through the streets of Stalingrad. It may be little more than a pile of rubble now, like one of those echoes of ancient Greece and Rome I’ve heard about, but unlike those ruins, Stalingrad will be rebuilt even better than it was before! Soon, I will see you and hold you close. Until then, I am still your Kostya, with love.”

  Elena smiles, a dreamy look creeping slowly across her face. Today’s the day! Today I shall see my beloved Kostya. Today we will be together!

  “Are you coming or what?” Katya’s voice startles her and Elena realizes her friend’s face is peering around the door. “Have you even moved?”

  “Not really,” she says, easing herself up from her bed and placing the letters carefully into a small shelf. She turns and looks up at her friend with a mischievous smile. “I’ll be doing my moving tonight!”

  The two women hurry off to join the crowd waiting to greet the soldiers of Konstantin’s regiment. As the men head into the city, looking weary from their long journey, the people wave and cheer, having heard of the great victory at Stalingrad.

  “Amazing, isn’t it!” says Elena, shouting to be heard about the noise of the crowd.

  Katya glances at her, still waving. “What is?”

  “That these men, our boys, surrounded and captured over ninety thousand Germans.”

  “I know. That’s Zhukov for you. The man’s a military genius.”

  Elena frowns at this, not being a fan of the Soviet general. “Rokossovsky, you mean, surely?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” says Elena, whose hard work gathering information to pass on to her U.S. contacts near Moscow has given her a clear idea of who the truly great commanders are in the Red Army. She keeps waving, searching the faces of the approaching soldiers for the one she most wants to see. “Say, when do you think they’ll be settled in and ready for visitors?”

  “As soon as they can, I reckon!” Katya replies, smoothing her hair back into place as it is caught by a stray gust of wind. “They’ll be keen to get welcomed properly!”

  Sure enough, barely an hour after they walk through the city gates, looking a little less tired after shrugging off their packs and having a quick wash in the river, the heroes of Stalingrad come out to play. Katya and Elena stand in what is left of the main plaza, trying not to think about the bodies they had to cut down from the overhanging balconies.

  “Can you see him anywhere?” asks Elena, peering at the faces around her.

  “Konstantin? No. But I see a poor, lonely-looking piece of muscle over there who appears to need a little local care. See you!” With a quick wave back at her friend, Katya hurries off and is swallowed immediately by the crowd.

  “That’s just great!” says Elena, shaking her head.

  “What’s great?” Her heart leaps at the familiar sound of the man’s voice.

  “Kostya!” she shouts, throwing her arms around Konstantin’s neck and planting a kiss firmly on his lips.

  Eventually he comes up for air. “It’s great to see you too, my love.”

  “Come on,” she says, grabbing his hand and leading him away from the square. “Let’s go somewhere a bit more private!”

  He holds her back. “Might I suggest my place? I’ve got something I want to show you!”

  At first, the couple strolls in an almost leisurely fashion, hand gripping hand, arm brushing against arm. But before long, that blissful little contact begins to burn a longing in them that quickens their step, a desire to be away from the noisy streets and watchful e
yes, to be together, alone. Their pace increases to a quick walk, a trot and finally to running along the street, still clutching each other’s hand, laughing in delight at being together again.

  Back in his barracks, Konstantin slips a record onto a gramophone, and Elena listens to it in amazement. It’s the first music she has heard since coming to Kharkov.

  “Kostya, it’s fantastic! Where on earth did you manage to get a gramophone around here?”

  “I brought this little beauty with me from Stalingrad! A company of snipers gave it to me after my division helped them hold back a troop of Nazis for a week.”

  “Really?” she stares at him in amazement. “And what were they doing with such a machine?”

  “Oh, they used it to play Russian music so they could wind up the Germans. Imagine it. Here they are, piled high thanks to Hitler’s insane ambitions, hungry, unwashed, frozen half to death and being picked off one by one by our snipers. And on top of all this they’re treated to a constant barrage of chirpy Russian songs. Genius!”

  Elena laughs, watching Konstantin slip another record out of its sleeve and load it onto the plate. “Oh, I can imagine it all too well! Still, nobody asked the bastards to come to Russia. If they want to come to our country they’d better be prepared to put up with having to listen to our music!” The music starts up again, and she recognizes it immediately. “Kostya! This is Wearied Sun, isn’t it? By Leonid Utyosov? Oh, it’s sublime. My favorite. How did you know?”

  “Well,” he says, slipping an arm around her waist and pulling her close to him, “it’s a favorite of a lot of Russians. Everyone loves Utyosov!”

  Elena enjoys the feel of his body against hers. That night in Yartsevo seems like a lifetime ago. “True,” she says. “What’s not to love. Though his real name’s Lazar Vaysbeyn. He’s a Jew, from Odessa on the other side of the Ukraine.”

  “Oh really? And who gave you that information, young lady?”

  “One of my Jewish friends from nearby. They’ve been in hiding since the Germans arrived, but we made sure they had supplies until it was safe to come out again. Nice people.”

  “Yeah. And some real talented people among them too, like Utyosov or whatever his name really is, and plenty of others. But of course, Hitler and his Nazis think they’re the great ‘Master Race’ and dismiss the entire Jewish race as nothing but ‘Untermensch’—subhuman! The same goes for most of us, apparently!”

  “And we are continuously proving them wrong!”

  A strange look clouds Konstantin’s face and he turns away to peer out of the window. A short distance away the crowds in the square are busy enjoying themselves and the sounds of singing and laughter mingle on the chill evening air. “I saw this so-called ‘Master Race’ in Stalingrad. Thousands upon thousands of them, filthy, stinking, covered in lice and not one of them prepared for our Russian winter. Anything they could find, scraps of cloth, dead animals, muddy paper, if they could wrap it around themselves in their desperation to try to get warm, they would. I saw men with noses and ears chewed off by the cold, fingers so frostbitten they had no feeling left in them, and they weren’t even capable of undoing their pants to piss in the snow. They just sat there, shivering, with urine spilling unnoticed down their legs. So much for the Nazi dream, huh?”

  Elena sighs, picturing the scene. It was not as bad here in Kharkov, since the Germans were concentrated in Stalingrad, but it wasn’t much better. The brutality of the Nazis filled her thoughts. Their rotting enemies littered the streets and buildings. “Animals!” she says, shaking her head to dispel the images. “They’re nothing but animals.”

  “And yet I remember one guy, after they’d all been captured and were waiting to be marched away, sharing a joke with me and asking for a cigarette like any regular guy back at home. You know we’re supposed to hate these people, and there’s much there to hate, but strangely I just end up feeling pity for them. I gave him the cigarette; the whole pack, in fact! I kind of liked the guy.”

  “I guess, when it comes right down to it, there’s no ‘Master Race’ or ‘Untermensch’. Just ordinary people. And most of these Nazis are nothing more than puppets dancing on the strings of Hitler’s ambitious plans. I heard that Field Marshal Paulus asked him for permission to evacuate Stalingrad with the army while he still had the chance, but Hitler ignored him. He didn’t even acknowledge the request! All he wanted was Stalingrad, the city of his worst enemy, and he didn’t care how many soldiers’ lives it cost.”

  She walks over and places a hand on Konstantin’s shoulder. “Soon, we’ll win this war and there will be peace again. Come on, Kostya, let’s drink to our victory!” He turns away from the window and sits on the edge of his bed as she fills two chipped mugs with a bottle from her pocket. “It’s not the best,” she says, handing him a mug. “But it’s as good as it gets around here. To victory!”

  “To victory!” he says, throwing the vodka to the back of his throat and swallowing it. He coughs a few times before he tries to speak. “Not bad. It’s got a kick like a wounded mule! Fill them up and I’ll grab us something to eat.”

  He soon returns with two metal cans filled with boiled potatoes and stew together with half a loaf of rye bread.

  “Well,” says Elena, sitting down and taking her share. “We’re dining like kings tonight, my love!”

  “One king,” he corrects her. “And his beautiful queen.”

  She nods, acknowledging his words. “I’m so happy to see you again.”

  “You know, Lena, one of the biggest reasons I survived the horrors of Stalingrad was my desire to see you. It was like a beacon guiding me through even the darkest of times. That’s what Stalingrad was really about—spiritual strength, rather than military might. The Germans were fighting out of fear of their dictator’s wrath, while we were fighting for our homes and the people we love.” He reaches out and holds her chin, looking deep into her eyes. “Eat up!”

  She blinks and turns her attention to the dinner, skewing a potato on a slightly bent fork. They eat together in silence for a while, enjoying the comfort of being in each other’s presence.

  “How old are you, Kostya?” she asks, placing her empty tin down on a shelf.

  He looks up from his own dinner. “I’ll be twenty-seven in July.”

  Born so far apart, yet we could be twins, Elena thinks. “Where were you born?” she asks.

  “Moscow”. He waves his fork vaguely as if indicating the direction of the capital city. “But my parents traveled a lot. My father was an officer in the Red Army so I ended up living in many different places.”

  So he’d have grown up through the horrors of Stalin’s repressions and the execution of Soviet officers in the Thirties. But she makes no comment.

  “It was okay, though,” he continues, “I just had to put up with a constant stream of different schools and trying to make new friends.”

  “Girlfriends?” Elena asks with a slight blush.

  “Not really. No one serious anyway.”

  “Really? A handsome guy like you? Why on earth not?”

  He laughs and puts down his tin next to hers. “Too busy with studies, work and sports to have any time for that sort of thing. But then I never met such a wonderful girl as you, Lena.” He takes her hands in his and they sit together in silence, enjoying the moment.

  Then Kostya gets up and slips another record onto the gramophone.

  “Beautiful!” she says, standing up. “I have a little treat for you as well, Kostya.” He watches in silence as she lifts her foot and places it on the edge of the bed before easing up her skirt. “Have a feel.”

  He reaches out a hand and places it gently on her calf. His eyes widen in surprise and he runs his fingers slowly up her leg to the top of the stocking.

  “Wow! Is that real nylon? Where did you get a luxury like this, Lena?”

  “Oh, I have my sources,” she says, thinking, I can’t tell him I brought them with me from America, but at least I can make sure he enjoys them!
“So how long have I got you for, soldier?”

  He pauses, his hand resting on the top of her thigh. “Only a couple of days, I’m afraid. This is just a rest stop for me and my guys. We have to head north towards Kursk and meet up with the tanks cutting cross-country.”

  “Really?” Even now, in the heat of passion, Elena is on the lookout for new intelligence to pass on to her U.S. contacts. “What’s the plan?”

  “Who knows? General Zhukov doesn’t invite me into his war cabinet. I just get told where to go and who to point the tanks at!”

  “Fair enough,” she shrugs, but is disappointed not to have more information to pass on. “Come on, let’s dance.”

  As they turn around the small room, the scent of Red Moscow, perfume borrowed from Katya, mingling with the smell of their bodies as they press close to each other, Elena finally feels at peace, as though she and Konstantin are the only two people in the whole universe.

  She looks up into his eyes. “I just want to make you happy, Kostya.”

  “I am happy, Lena,” he says, his face serious. “I am truly happy now I’m with you, my little bluet.”

  He bends down, kissing her deeply before dancing her slowly towards the bed and gently lowering her onto it. As he bends down to join her, she reaches up a hand to hold him back, to keep him standing, watching. She can hear the excitement in his breathing, the pounding of his heart against her palm. With almost painful slowness, she loosens the hooks on her skirt to reveal the white lace-trimmed slip underneath, a luxury she got for the price of a tin of stew from a woman who had lost her daughter. Konstantin’s eyes widen in surprise and desire as he runs a hand down the lace until it reaches her knee. She shivers with delight as his fingers begin to slide beneath the slip and she pulls him down to her at last.

  “Kostya,” she whispers, stroking the hair in the nape of his neck. “I want to be with you tonight. I’ve longed for this since the moment I saw you in Yartsevo.”