by G. Zotov
A faint smile crosses her lips. “All this month you’ve been hallucinating about Moskau and your life there. You see, the bullet hit the part of your brain responsible for altering reality. Did you ask me about parallel worlds? I’m sorry, Erich. They don’t exist. Moskau, the California Republic, the Nippon Koku owning half the world… it’s all in your head. It’s only your mind playing up. Sorry.”
She stares past me into space. “Even unconscious, you can’t forget the little girl. The one you let be burned alive. Which is why I’m always here with you. You can’t stop thinking about me. The world around you fades, disappearing, turning into a phantom of itself. You’ll leave with it. The moment you breathe your last breath, your universe will die. I heard what the doctor said. You won’t see the end of this day.”
I raise my head to the sky.
That weird vision I had earlier. The viscous white mass, the clangor of steely objects, the little lights shining through the haze. But of course. Field hospital. The clatter of extracted bullets against surgery bowls. The flickering of dozens of candles in the dark because they have no electricity.
We’re besieged by the Russians. We survive gnawing on horse meat and frozen bread. Schnapps is the only thing readily available. I’ve been drinking it nonstop trying to forget the little girl in the cottage window. It didn’t work though.
All of a sudden I feel exhausted. That’s it. That’s the end.
I don’t need anything anymore. I just want to die.
My fingers close around the swastika-clutching eagle on my pocket. I rip it off, followed by my SS insignia, stomping the braided epaulette into the ashes covering the ground. My legs give way under me. I collapse, kneeling before Olga. She’s beautiful.
“I’m so sorry,” I sob. “How can you ever forgive me… please…”
I want to tell her so much but I’m out of words. I keep repeating myself. My last seconds dwindle, the world around me shrinking like the snow in springtime.
The forest crumbles into ashes. A large crack runs across the glasslike sky, revealing flames behind.
She crouches next to me and takes my hands in hers. “Tell me,” she whispers, “what you always wanted to tell me. Tell me now.”
“I love you,” I’m surprised with the ease the words fall from my lips.
Our mouths touch.
The kiss is brief and innocent. None of that French tongue nonsense (from what I heard at least). Her lips are soft, warm and inviting. I waited for this a long time.
A clap of thunder booms overhead. My ears don’t feel the impact.
The world disintegrates. The universe is no more. Moskau, London, Neuer York and the Reichskommissariat Turkestan — they all turn to ashes. The Führer’s monuments blur into nothing; the eagle on Moskau’s emblem fades as if painted with invisible ink. No Odin’s Temples; no Security office, no tanks in the streets. No Schwarzkopf guerrillas taking over the city.
They’re all gone. Evaporated. Born of my fantasy, the world of Moskau dies an agonyless death. Pitch darkness envelops us. We float in a space devoid of top and bottom.
I let go of her lips. Now I can see I’ve been kissing a skull. Strangely, I don’t feel scared.
I know who she is.
“I know who you are,” I whisper in the place where her ear should be, “You’re my death, right?”
“I am,” she says. “All people realize it sooner or later even though not necessarily consciously. Pavel believed me, though, as soon as I explained my nature to him. He was intelligent enough to understand he couldn’t fight the supernatural.”
“But why did you look… like her? Strange choice.”
The skull grins. “Standard option. I always assume the appearance of the victim to visit the killer. And this kiss… had the Russian sniper killed you, it would have been different. But you’re lying here comatose instead. It just shows the graveness of your crimes. Your soul can’t enter oblivion. You’re stuck between heaven and earth. In order to leave this world, you need to really crave death. In order for it to come, you need to fall in love with it. Which was why I came to you a long time ago; I knew you loved me. Still, in order for you to complete your life on earth you had to kiss me. So many times we were close but every time something happened. That’s why I asked you to come here. I thought it might work. It did.”
Holding hands, we scramble back to our feet.
I can see her face again: the young woman, the most beautiful one in the world. I’m completely smitten. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love her. She can take me, for all eternity.
“What normally happens next?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Dunno. My job is to take a soul into the darkness. No one ever told me what happens next. You still have two minutes. Would you like to wait?”
I close my eyes. Dozens of people stand before my eyes, all dead. Killed by me. I can see everything I’ve done. POW bodies blown to pieces. Burned cottages. Unburied bodies. Souls restless in eternal darkness.
The dead stare at me, silent and indifferent. A little Russian girl stands in front, hugging her rag doll.
“I don’t need to,” I say. “High time I burn in hell.”
We walk off, cuddling each other like two lovers. I have a funny feeling… then again, it’s probably just another illusion.
Thunder rolls, announcing the end.
Epilogue
GRETA BLEW ON HER FROZEN HANDS. Jesus Christ almighty, this place was cold. She’d have willingly given herself to anyone at all for a hot bath. Doubtful there’d be many takers, though.
Good job Mom couldn’t hear her.
They’d already cut all the available trees for cooking fires. Venturing any further under Russian sniper fire was pretty pointless. No one had ever come back from these forage missions. The hospital was dark: they’d burned the last candles the night before.
The groans of the wounded behind the makeshift “wall” had subsided since morning. Not that it mattered: the nurse was too used to them to notice. Her mind had stopped registering them about the same time that she’d stopped wondering what the hell she was doing here, in this icebound city, its shattered streets piled up with hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.
She was already used to the thought she’d follow them soon. She didn’t give a shit it was February 2 1943. Her birthday. She’d seen enough death to know that a painless death was the only thing that really mattered in life.
That might have been the best birthday gift for her.
She lay her hand on the patient’s forehead and promptly snatched it back: it was scorching hot. Erich Tannenbaum had a high fever but they’d run out of meds. Dr. Paul had warned her the man’s condition might become critical tonight. His agony could begin at any moment.
She took a mug filled with icy water and brought it to the man’s lips. He didn’t swallow. The water trickled from his lips down his neck.
In all this time nursing him Greta had studied his face so well she’d be able to draw it from memory. He might have been quite handsome once you’d shave him and remove the ugly shrapnel scar from his cheek. It didn’t belong there.
The girl shivered, wrapping the tattered blanket tighter around her trench coat. Dr. Paul hadn’t done his morning rounds. He couldn’t have, could he?
Dr. Paul, the cheerful bastard whose crooked smile had turned every nurse’s head in the hospital! His appearance was quite ordinary with gaunt cheeks, balding temples and an aquiline nose — but the man was an unquenchable fount of optimism and had his own unique strain of humor.
Dr. Paul seemed to have had a soft spot for Erich, investing a lot of his time and expertise in the wounded obersturmführer. He’d had some reason to believe that he would bring the man back to life, turning his case into a medical sensation. Any person with this sort of wound should have been dead a long time ago. But Erich was still alive. Did that mean he might have a chance?
Many a time Dr. Erich had arrived at work in defiance of military protocol, either wea
ring a clown’s wig with his uniform or a big red rubber nose. Both items had ended in his possession thanks to his little daughter who’d planted her favorite toys in his suitcase before his dispatch to the Eastern Front. Not to even mention his mustache! Time after time Doc would start growing it only to shave it off after a week.
“I’m trying to deceive death,” he’d laugh. “It already knows all my tricks. So when it comes next morning, still groggy from its slumber, it just won’t recognize me. It might think I’m some new doctor on the team! A new face to look into!”
The way he behaved, you’d think he was on a pleasure cruise, not in a field hospital. He was probably right. Humor must have been the only thing that could save you in this madness, under the nonstop cacophony of roaring bombers and wailing missiles.
But even Dr. Paul, this incorrigible optimist, had come to the end of his tether. As Erich’s wound failed to improve, Doс had grown somber. Lately he’d be seen helping himself from the hospital’s alcohol flask.
“He’s gonna die,” Doc would admit to Greta. “I don’t think I can do much there anymore.”
And still Erich, this comatose vegetable, continued to breathe. From a medical point of view, his case was extraordinary: a man living with a bullet buried deep in his brain. He reacted to touch and even to light exposure, moving the stumps of his right hand (his index finger and pinkie had been septic and had had to be amputated) and even twitching his eyelashes. Things had seemed to be looking up. Still, whenever Dr. Paul had decided to prepare him for surgery to remove the bullet, his condition would rapidly deteriorate.
Greta would often speak to Erich in his “private room” staked out with sheets of frozen cardboard. She’d told him about her life and work in the League of German Girls, about her home city of Düsseldorf which every spring lay smothered with lilac blossoms. An occasional smile would cross Erich’s lips. Could he hear her?
All last week, Erich had been getting worse. He’d developed mouth and nose bleeds, black blood escaping his brain which was being killed slowly by the bullet. Dr. Paul had grown depressed. He’d forgotten all about his wigs and clown noses, emptying the alcohol flask before lunchtime. The other day, hospital director Major Storch (who looked eerily identical to Paul to the point where the two could pass for identical twins) had found him in the surgical theater drunk as a skunk and sent him to the cooler for three days.
“And?” Doc had laughed drunkenly. “When the Russians come, I’ll be their hero! We’re done for, anyway!”
This was enough to put him up against the wall for treason but Storch had chosen to turn a deaf ear to his ramblings.
His good deed didn’t go unpunished: half an hour later, Doc had beaten the cooler guard to pulp and arrived at the hospital with his rifle. He’d whistled Lili Marlene as he opened fire, killing Major Storch and one of the patients with his first two rounds. Then his rifle got jammed and Doc was gunned down.
Greta had seen his frozen body in the hospital corridor, his face a gory mess of crimson. The clown’s red nose lay on the floor next to it.
He must have gone off his head, she thought, impassive. He couldn’t take it anymore, as simple as that.
Nothing could baffle her anymore. Nutcases weren’t something extraordinary. The week before, they’d discharged Unteroffizier Kurt Priebke; having checked out of the hospital, he walked into the duty doctor’s office, said “Heil Hitler!”, then shoved the butt of his handgun into his mouth and squeezed the trigger. They’d never managed to clean his brains off the wall as it had already frozen solid.
Human life wasn’t worth a dime anymore. There were no sane people left in Stalingrad. They were all raving mad here.
The curtain parted. Greta jumped to her feet.
Johann Peter, the patient’s old friend, stomped into the makeshift room: a burly man nearly seven foot tall in a Captain’s uniform, with huge arms and a square head. Apparently, he used to be a school physics and chemistry teacher. She wasn’t sure if it was true or a joke: the Captain looked more like a stevedore than an intellectual.
Without looking at her, Johann Peter shook the snow off his cap. A woman’s woolen shawl clung to his cheeks. Greta didn’t laugh: a soldier had to do everything necessary to prevent septic frostbite.
“Did you hear the news?” the Hauptsturmführer asked without raising his eyes.
“Sure,” she said. “Field Marshal Paulus has signed the capitulation order. He and his HQ have surrendered. The front has collapsed. Those of the patients who could walk, all the nurses, the guards and the hospital direction have already surrendered to the Russians. But I can’t leave Erich. The Russians will come here anyway, won’t they? They are checking every building in Stalingrad.”
The Captain studied Erich’s pallid face. “Still nothing?” he wheezed.
“Paul said he wouldn’t survive till the third,” she shrugged the chill from her shoulders. “It certainly looks that way. The bleeding has intensified. His brain is literally floating in blood. He’s got a high fever. My experience tells me he’s in his death throes.”
The Captain heaved a sigh. He rubbed his forehead, thinking about something.
The dying man opened his eyes, staring nonsensically at the ceiling. A smile fluttered on his lips.
“I always wondered,” the Captain said. “Why is he always smiling? Is he happy?”
“According to Paul, the bullet hit the brain area responsible for lucid dreaming,” Greta replied, her voice hollow. “Amazing what incredible fantasies such a tiny piece of lead can trigger. Erich believes them to be true. He’s probably dreaming about something really good.”
“I hope so,” the Captain grumbled. “A victory in this war would be nice.”
Outside, motors roared.
“Soldiers of Germany!” a voice came. “Field Marshal Paulus has signed your capitulation. Any resistance is pointless. Drop your weapons and walk out of the building with your hands raised over your heads. The Soviet Army guarantees your lives will be spared.”
The voice enunciated the German words awkwardly, like a good school student. The loudspeaker mounted on the truck distorted the sound while the wailing of the wind added a diabolical note to the speech.
Greta covered her face, suppressing a sob.
“You should go,” the Captain wheezed, choking on a cough. “You’ll freeze to death in here. You can’t help Erich anymore. I don’t think the Russians will even take him. Why should they bother? They’ll just leave him here to die on his own. Once you go out of the building, continue straight ahead. There’s a POW collection point they made in the silo building. You go. Happy birthday, sweetheart. Twenty-five is a great age. I’ll take care of Erich, don’t worry,” his frozen fingers scraped blindly against his holster.
Greta sobbed. She struggled to wrap the trench coat around herself; twisting her blonde hair in a knot, she used a scrap of blanket to cover her head, then fastened the helmet’s strap under her chin.
The room swam before her eyes. Without saying goodbye to Johann Peter, she staggered along the corridor. Her feet in combat boots padded with rags for warmth skated on the icy floor.
She’d almost reached the front door when a shot rang out.
Greta slowed down, listening in. After a brief interval, the gun banged again, choking on its own sound. She heard something heavy crash to the floor behind her.
She scrambled to the entrance and froze in the doorway, numb with the scene.
A column of German POWs walked past the building: all that was left of the 6th Army of Field Marshal Paulus. Their limbs black with gangrenous frostbite, they staggered past wrapped in stolen shawls over their flimsy uniforms, their noses red with cold. They were a far cry from those cheerful bronzed soldiers in rolled-up sleeves who’d been so impatient to taste the water of the Volga. This wasn’t an army but a maddened bunch of cripples, a ragged band of pillagers eager to die for a warm coat and a slice of roast.
One of the Russian guards turned around and lo
oked at Greta. He was a young guy in white winter camos, with a red star on his hat and a round-clipped submachine gun slung over his shoulder.
He grinned and made a clumsy bow to her, saying something she couldn’t understand. His friends laughed. The only word she’d made out was Fräulein.
Slowly Greta raised her hands in the air and stepped down from the porch.
The End
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