by Nir Baram
There were no men in the villages he passed through. The fields, gardens and greenhouses were orphaned, unless young women or prisoners of war took the men’s places. In the stations he sometimes ran into a group of girls, all from the same village in Poland, Belorussia or Ukraine, who got off the train wrapped in heavy coats lined with cotton, and carrying cardboard cartons on their heads. Representatives of factories or workshops were waiting for them.
One day, for no apparent reason, he offered to translate for the masters of a group of young Polish women. The girls were dispersed in different houses. Thomas mediated between one farmer in particular and a few girls, even demonstrating as the farmer instructed them to thin out his sugar-beet field: you dug a little trench around the strongest plant and weeded out the stragglers. You moved forwards on your knees in a broad line: your knees turned black, but you got over that. You had to keep a straight line, and if someone went too fast, they’d hear the whistle. The farmer’s wife scolded Thomas: ‘Sir, it is not right to ruin such fine clothing,’ and she insisted on laundering his shirt and tie, and even sewed up his trouser cuff.
His sturdy body aroused surprise and drew nasty comments; then an old quarry owner asked him why he hadn’t enlisted. The homeland needs her sons. This isn’t the time for self-indulgence! Thomas amiably told him (venomous answers, that he would have loved serving up to the old simpleton, bubbled on his tongue) that he had worked in the office of Generaloberst Fromm in Berlin, had volunteered to serve and as proof showed him the document he had received.
Then he deluged the old man with gloomy economic figures: the economies of the Western countries that Germany had conquered were collapsing. We were wasting valuable raw materials on France, Belgium and the other countries, but the end of the war was near. And while the old man listened in awe, Thomas praised the power of the Luftwaffe and predicted that soon all of Moscow would go up in flames, ‘and we’ll visit the German Kremlin together’. The old man stared at him with bloodshot eyes and groped for a sentence that would stitch the predictions together, but Thomas had already gone away.
As the year drew to a close, the atmosphere grew murkier. Everyone was talking about tragedies: parents who had lost sons, miserable widows, children longing for their fathers or big brothers. The joyous shouts of victory, which he had been absorbed by in Poland, and which he had heard in Germany during the past summer, had disintegrated into little sighs, stammering discontent beneath the cries of faith in the Reich and the Führer.
When he encountered people mourning around a table in an inn, shouting about Germany’s righteousness and the cruelty of her enemies, he wanted to tell them about the Jewish woman whose face was smashed between the asphalt and the policemen’s boots in Lublin, or about the class of archaeological orphans who in his dreams were still at their studies.
One day he met a doctor who had come back from Ukraine on a short furlough, and who described dead men and women loaded onto wagons, and gigantic pits housing layer after layer of human beings. Only then did it occur to him that he wasn’t privy to such a great secret. All the people he met had friends and acquaintances and sons and relatives at the front or in Poland who probably knew much more than he did. It wasn’t the information, but how you arranged it.
For example, he had rebelled against the Foreign Office when he refused to give it the Model of the Belorussian People. But a stubborn voice within him argued that, big hero that he was, the real reason he had refused them was his remorse that his Polish model had sentenced so many people to death. Now that voice was mingling with other voices, with memories that, when the dust settled, would form his story. He would consign to some attic the knowledge that he hadn’t supplied them with the model because he was unable to write it; nor would he remember that maybe he had refused to finish it in order to defend his honour, because he wasn’t going to give another organisation the opportunity to absorb his strength and then vomit him out; and mainly he wouldn’t remember that he had refused them because he knew that the price wouldn’t be high, that they wouldn’t behead him. If they’d put a gun to his temple, would he have left the model unfinished?
Everywhere in the country horror stories were told about soldiers who had frozen to death in light military coats. ‘We lost twenty-nine men out of a hundred and twenty-seven in the Great War,’ the wife of a village mayor told him. ‘This time an even greater disaster will befall us.’
The talk—in the train, in restaurants and inns, in the street—didn’t change. Strangely, until now, he hadn’t paid attention to idle secondhand chatter of this kind. One day, consumed by pain because he was wasting his life among these miserable souls, Thomas tried something new: he complained with them and consoled them, predicted a smashing victory and hinted at certain defeat, praised the Führer and expressed doubt about future success. At last he had found an amusement that gratified him—playing the role of the ghost who floats all over the country creating confusion. There were fundamental contradictions in everything he said. People heard endless facts and figures, but nothing cohered. That was life, no? In Baden-Baden he terrified a small audience with the vast numbers of the enemy armies, and mocked the Red Army as a rabble; in Dessau a restaurant owner invited his friends to a secret meeting where Herr Heiselberg would lecture about the war; at the end, after the applause, when he had already left the restaurant, he heard them yelling at each other, and every voice offered a different interpretation of his views; at a dinner in the home of a wealthy estate owner in Lübeck, who invited Thomas after he had impressed his daughter in the library, he told them that in Dortmund they had melted down a precious statue because metal was badly needed for the war effort, and the next day someone had put a piece of paper on the empty pedestal. There was a poem on it—‘Woe to the nation who chose these men/ Wurm, Spiegelberg, and Franz Mor’ (and he explained to the young people that the scum who wrote it was apparently hinting at Göring, Goebbels and Hitler) —but in the same suburb women donated their fur coats to soldiers, and they all composed love letters to the Führer. ‘Doesn’t this faith in our victory makes one’s heart swell? Most regrettably, we can expect ruin,’ he declared, leaving an oppressive silence behind him.
The truth was he was saying nothing new, but as if in a nightmare he heard himself declaiming sentences from the past. These ignoramuses might be impressed, but he knew his motor was running on empty.
He wandered in circles around Germany. At the end of the year, on a dull winter day, he found himself in a village in the Saar district. Snow fell and melted. When he approached the church, some girls shouted at him, ‘Get out of here, you rotten ghost. We’ve heard enough fast-talkers from the city in old suits. Our men at the front would have killed you.’
To his astonishment he discovered he had already been in this village. Could he be blamed for not remembering? Red-tiled roofs, two-storey houses, little velvet lampshades, lawns, giant elms, an oak leaning over a muddy path, one or two taverns, fleeting welcome smiles, black nights—everything looked the same. It was possible that he would knock on Frau Gruner’s door again.
The people’s pride in victory was intertwined with their fear of defeat. He had no delusions—even if it took fifty years he knew how time eats away at the victors, how lethal its destructive power is, even during the exhilarating hours of glory, when it seems that life will always be like this. This awareness was imprinted in him. No one asked him whether he wanted it. To be means to sell your soul, with all you’ve got, each morning each day. He had no better definition of his life: to make your dreams big enough to let you escape the fear of extinction for a while. A clever man was a true believer in his life’s work.
Where was he heading? He was sprawled in a chair on a balcony, cold winds whipped his face and he struggled to dismiss the question. Where was he heading? To places he had already been, where people were still waiting for him to scatter the fog he had left behind? How could he do that? The truth was that he himself was a cloud of fog that invited people in
and then swallowed them up. Sometimes he observed himself from outside: what did others see? A grey cloud around the outline of a body and, on the edges, a black suitcase. A moment ago he was here and stunned everyone with his magniloquent performance. Now he was already far away, swallowed up on a train moving through a field among poplars and firs. Maybe he had gone north to the mountains that surrounded the village, and maybe he had turned around and retraced his steps.
BREST
JUNE 1941
Sasha woke up covered with hot dust. Her eyes stung with tears. Her breath was short. It was happening, and she mustn’t lose time.
She rushed to put on her boots which for a month now she had been placing next to the door every night, and between them the jackknife. The roar of motors. A plane was diving outside the window, spitting fire. Chunks of plaster fell.
She ran down the steps into the street. Buildings and trees were burning, and fire was licking the grass. Loaded wagons lurched among a line of people snaking its way down the avenue. She leaped into the crowd, entirely focused on the distance between her and Kolya at the fortress. She climbed up onto a truck that had turned over. The driver was still in his seat with his charred hands on the wheel. Next to him lay a small, wrapped-up body; a little girl whose hair looked like a bundle of charred twigs gathered in a bow. Fragments of glass lacerated Sasha’s bare arms, a deep breath shook her, the pain passed through her whole body as quick as mercury. Dizzy, Sasha leaped down and raced forwards, clenching her fists to dull the burning. She turned right and went past the building where the map room was. A thin film of brown dust coated her. A curtain on the second floor was slightly open, the way she had left it.
…
In early June, on a fine morning, Maxim had come to visit. It was a holiday and the streets were flooded with young men who were celebrating their graduation from military school. When he got off the train, she brought him to the map room. He stood in astonishment in the middle of the room uttering curses, then started tearing up the large sheets of paper. They tore up the maps, the copies of them, the position papers and the letters she had exchanged with Thomas Heiselberg.
When he learned that she had corresponded with the German representative under a false name, he pushed her up against the wall and slapped her hard. She had paid some woman named Viktoria Sovlova on Devortsovaya Street to receive letters from her close friend in Lublin. The code was her aunt’s illness: ‘My aunt’s illness has got worse. No one is interested in her. Even those who love her are reconciled to her death—in all sincerity I don’t know what to do.’
Maxim shouted that she was crazy. At last, she thought, he had learned to detest her. In all the years they had known each other, he raged, he had trusted her good judgment and now he found out that his wife was someone else altogether.
They stuffed all the scraps of paper in an iron box and burned them. Then they burned the ashes. After the Germans attacked, anyone connected to or friendly with them would be condemned as an enemy of the people and executed! Even during war the good old machine would work. People would be arrested, graves would be dug, just as before, but the pace would be accelerated.
Maxim stomped on the ashes and asked whether any other papers remained. Tears choked her throat. A few miniature copies of the parade maps were buried in her mattress. She didn’t dare tell him. Every time she heard a knock on the neighbours’ doors, she still hoped it would be representatives from Foreign Affairs who needed her documents to prepare for the parade. She strained to remember whether there was anything in her office cabinet, but her brain was a mist. She recited instructions to herself: now stand, now sit and now drink water.
Maxim suspected that she was indifferent to his fate and wouldn’t lift a finger to save him. It wasn’t true. It was just that his efforts to hold on to life were too complex. She was amazed she had once made these detailed calculations, designed intricate plans. At night, in bed, she learned that her husband was visiting Brest for another reason: he had heard that Comrade Nikita Mikhailovich Kropotkin was planning his revenge against Sasha for some little episode. Yesterday Maxim had met him and was informed that she had dared to threaten Comrade Kropotkin, her direct superior who nonetheless refused to reveal the circumstances of the incident.
Fortunately, Comrade Kropotkin was a decent and reasonable man. He understood that a gratuitous struggle would harm them all, and they reached a satisfactory agreement.
‘What agreement?’
‘A satisfactory one.’
‘An agreement that I’m to leave the district?’
‘Are you crazy?’ he hissed. ‘I understand that you want to stay here and greet the Germans. A good husband allows his wife to fulfil her dreams.’
After he took off her clothes and sat her down on top of him, then they lay hugging each other, and he declared that it was fine if she wanted to stay. He wouldn’t leave Brest without her.
He knew it was a lie. Two days later he was summoned to Leningrad.
‘I risked my life when I married you. I did everything I could to save you, and in return you doomed us both,’ he reproached her at the station. ‘You no longer have the will to live. That’s your right.’
To leave her there, on the front line, without guilt or shame, he had to believe she was beyond remedy.
He didn’t kiss her, just held her hand and looked in her eyes, as though searching for a remote spark of love. She didn’t doubt his courage. If he believed they had any hope, he would have taken enormous risks to stay with her. He was pale, twirling his moustache as though indifferent. ‘When you return to Leningrad, we’ll talk about our marriage,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll see things differently.’ He held her but didn’t pull her close. ‘Maybe we can see things differently.’
A week later Nikita Mikhailovich summoned her. ‘At the end of June you’re leaving the district and returning to Leningrad.’
She wasn’t surprised to hear that he had made this arrangement with Maxim, who had lied to her. Again.
…
The wife of a city official passed her, pushing a wheelbarrow with two or three children in it, curled up like foetuses, a mess of faces and hair, closed eyes, a blue sweater, girls’ underpants, pink arms, stretched legs. She turned to Sasha and asked her to push the wheelbarrow for her, ‘Just for a minute or two’, she had no more strength.
Sasha didn’t answer. The distance between her and Kolya remained a vast desert that couldn’t be crossed. How much death there was in the chasm of time between them.
A plane dived and she heard the whistle of the bombs. Everybody lay down. The official’s wife put her body over the wheelbarrow, and Sasha started to run. She ran down alone and prayed that the people lying down wouldn’t get up. Behind her machine-gun fire chattered, screams could be heard, weak moans. She could smell burned skin. A huge brown mushroom of dust—apparently pulverised bricks—spread above her and hid the avenue. Everything was silent, dislocating her senses. Her imagination roamed through the fortress, painting Kolya with the pallor of death, wherever he was: in the meeting room in the winter palace, at the end of the bridge over the river, beneath the tunnel that led to the Kholmsk Gate. She struggled against weakness, twisted her body as though fighting off a ghost and kept running. Maybe he was alive, maybe he was only wounded, there was no certainty he was dead, if she could find him she would get them out of there.
For a few minutes that seemed like an eternity, she ran blindly in the swirl of dust until it settled a little, and at the end of the avenue she could see a column of refugees moving along Pioneer Street towards Moscow Street.
She ran faster and pushed through the tangle of people. She was already close. Figures were bending over plane wreckage and tore hunks of aluminium from the wings. Suddenly, through the smoke, the fortress rose up.
Fire raged above it, explosion after explosion, and in her imagination each bomb pierced his body anew. To her right, from the edge of the field, soldiers in dusty uniforms emerged. She joined them,
and together they ran towards the citadel. These men, who looked as if they had risen from the dead, encouraged her. Her body was flooded with lightness and life, his life. Was it an illusion? Could such complete awareness be a lie?
The soldiers knocked on the gate of the citadel again and again. No one opened. She shrieked and banged on it. The minutes passed. She lost the clarity in which she had heard him breathing. She felt pain from the pieces of glass in her arms. She had already lost sensation in her hands, which were still pounding on the gate.
A bearded officer with two barefoot soldiers by his side approached her, raised his rifle and shoved the barrel into her face. For a moment she thought it was all over, and a moan of happiness formed in her throat—she had never understood those who clung to life. He cursed in Ukrainian, wrapped the stock in a rag and hit her in the face. The earth beneath her shoulders was a mound burning like coals.
‘I’ll burn you along with your wife and children,’ she provoked in Ukrainian and gaped at the rifle like a girl looking at a magic wand.
He aimed it at her. One of his escorts approached and placed his bare foot on her lips. ‘She’s crazy,’ he shouted to the bearded officer. ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.’
A shrill girl’s voice shouted in Russian, ‘Kill the whore! She’s NKVD.’
The soldier pressed his foot against her mouth. She tasted dirt and gravel, blood and pain, a tooth breaking. She felt with her tongue and didn’t find the tooth. Maybe she’d swallowed it. The earth resounded with thudding earth thrown into the air by a bomb. Death and life had been snatched from her control. The gate was locked. A stubborn voice wheedled, tempting her to faint.
The gate moved. She came to: now to get in. The bearded officer talked to someone. A group of soldiers raced out. ‘The telephones are dead. It’s a rat-trap here,’ the escapees shouted. ‘Withdraw to Kobrin!’ ‘Kobrin?’ the bearded officer shouted. ‘You can barricade yourselves in here. Outside you’re running right into death.’