The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  What was happening to the Jews was intolerable to watch, Lai said. He had told me, week by week, about events in Riga during that winter just as the previous year he had told me what the Soviets were doing. The Jews of the region had been rounded up and forced to live in a crowded and squalid ghetto area in the town. Conditions got worse and worse as transports of Jews, deported from the Reich, arrived from the West. Dealing with overcrowding with their own appalling logic, the Nazis had taken thousands from the ghetto into the woods and shot them. More and more German Jews came; over and over again they and the Latvian Jews who were left were taken out into the forest and killed, thousands and thousands of people. Later, in the spring when the thaw came, the earth groaned and tossed as if uneasy sleepers lay beneath. Sometimes the ground gaped and an arm would be thrust up through the soil. The peasants, who were superstitious enough at the best of times, were terrified by the thought of the vengeful spirits that must haunt the woods.

  “Evil can’t be hidden,” Maris told me when she whispered these tales. “We can’t do anything. How can we stop them? But the time will come when the earth will open and their deeds will be revealed.” She used to tell her stories with a kind of incantatory tone and portentous vocabulary which somehow removed what was happening from the present. At first I did not believe what I was told, until Lai explained to me that the gases from the huge numbers of decomposing bodies really did cause the earth to heave. The scale of the slaughter was unimaginable; I could not imagine it. Lai did not need to do so; he saw the barbarities every day. The effect of living with evil was subtle and corrosive. The Nazis worked on Latvian hatred of the Russians and Jews to recruit them for their worst work. Under the Russians, the Latvians had been victims; now they were bullies. He couldn’t stand it any longer; he was going to run away.

  It sounded, the way he explained it at the time, as if it was a decision of principle. Only later did I hear the story of what had happened in Riga that week and realize that he was in danger of arrest. Lai had witnessed a small incident in the street. A work gang of Jews from the ghetto doing forced labour under the supervision of a soldier was being taunted by two or three Latvian youths. It was nothing, a feather in the balance of horrors; but it was enough to make Lai decide to go. The fact that they were Latvians, the soldier and the youths, enraged him. He had attacked them, started a brawl, fled home. He knew that he would be marked out for what he had done, so he packed at once and left Riga. He spent two days with me before disappearing into the forest.

  Of course, I slept with him before he left. Now, looking back on that other person who was Yevgenia Chornoroukaya all those years ago, I can see reasons for these things. Lai was going to fight. The instinct to love when confronted with death is primeval; if nothing else, it is, I suppose, natural for men to say, one last woman before I die. And as for me, the same instinct, to love in the face of death, is felt by every widow. I still missed Xan and wept for him when I woke in the night. But the body fights against grief, and resists the call of the dead from the grave. What’s more, I needed Lai, that is, I needed a man. I was a woman alone with a young child and I needed or would need help. The cunning of instinct tells you to bind your helpers to you in whatever way you may, and so I did. Cynicism, a life’s experience, tell me that these were the reasons for what happened.

  But if this was really the explanation, why did I not find a German officer to protect me? They were there, in Riga; it would not have been hard to find one who was more or less acceptable. If Lai needed a woman, there was no shortage. Yet I knew then and I know now more than an instinct for survival brought us together. I loved Lai. I sometimes wonder if I had not loved him more than Xan all along. Yet I never stopped believing he was responsible for Xan’s arrest and death. How can you love two people at once? How can you believe the worst of someone and still love them?

  Lying beside him during those two days before he left for the forests, I silently compared him with Xan, the ultimate disloyalty of the faithless wife. I knew I ought to love Xan best, every standard that I had been brought up by told me so. But I had to recognize then that I did not. I recalled those agonizing minutes beside the lake when Xan had mocked him and I had said nothing. I was Xan’s accomplice then; now I lay beside my husband’s murderer. I stroked Lai’s skin, like silk, I can almost feel it now. I grieved for Xan, but I loved Lai. I can remember, even though I am so old and I have not allowed myself to think of it for forty years and more, how I yearned for him, how I wanted more, with that unassuageable love that can never be satisfied, even by the presence of the beloved.

  I find it strange how the memory selects the emotions that belong to the past. Those last years at Kornu were terrible, terrifying. I know I lived in fear all the time: fear for Xan, then fear for Lai, fear for Alek. At Kornu it was not a question of waiting for a knock on the door. The arrival of strangers was announced by the dogs. Anyone coming could be seen from the verandah, making his way along the road beyond the lake, turning the curve at the little temple and then beginning the climb to the house. I had Maris’s youngest son stationed much of the time in the garden at the front, in order to keep an eye on the approaches in case someone, a detachment of the Red Army, the NKVD, later the German Army or the Gestapo, should come, so that I could prepare myself to meet them. At Kornu then my fear was open, in England it was secret. In Latvia everyone dreaded the authorities with their arbitrary powers to force you out of the house, to shoot you in the garden, to drag you off to the trains that carried you away to your death. When they came in 1960 to Asshe House it was so politely. They interviewed me in my own drawing room. They were offered, and accepted, cups of tea. They probably ate home-made biscuits. But they were just as unpleasant. All the fear I had felt twenty years earlier returned. As I answered their questions, my mouth was dry, my hands sweated.

  Where was I on such an evening? At home.

  Was there anyone else with me? No. My husband was out on a call; it was Mrs Huxford’s afternoon off.

  Had I spoken to anyone? No.

  Made any telephone calls? No.

  Was there any way I could prove where I was? No.

  The older one was coarse, a bully, the kind of man who has an instinctive recognition of fear, who cannot be stopped from exercising his power, even when it would be in his interest to conceal it. The other said nothing. He was subtler. He wrote down the answers and watched craftily, waiting for me to contradict myself. When they had gone I wept. When Kenward came back he found me crying. I could not stop. In the end he gave me some sleeping pills and put me to bed. I could not explain why I was weeping.

  Lai said goodbye, but not for good; he came back from time to time during the next two years. The partisans lived in the forests. They were not going anywhere: there was nowhere for them to go. They were simply living outside the control of the German conquerors, whom they harassed when they could. The band Lai joined was a mixed group: some Latvians, some Jews, some Lithuanians, some Poles, some Russians. There were many tensions among them which sometimes erupted into fights, the Russians against the Latvians, the Poles against the Lithuanians, any of them against the Jews. There were desertions; a small faction would disappear in the night, taking with them precious food or weapons. However, they all hated the Germans and that basic enmity held them together in a fragile, mobile unity. It was, Lai used to say, a microcosm of the making of society. Each of them was Rousseau’s or Hobbes’s man in a state of nature who is forced to unite with others in order to live, to survive and to protect himself and so the sharp prejudices which each member brought from his origins had to be sheathed in order that the group could function. Lai’s band was a fighting unit. It consisted of between twenty and fifty men, ranging in age from fifteen to fifty. They occasionally had a woman or two who joined them for a time, but only as fighters. There were other bands in the woods, Lai told me, that had old people, women and children. Usually they were Jews who had fled from the ghettos in the towns. Such groups were particularl
y vulnerable in the winter time when the choice for the frail was between returning to a ghetto which would soon mean a place on the transports or the loan of a shovel to dig their own graves, or remaining in the woods to die of cold, hunger or disease.

  Even at Kornu those winters were cold. I would stare out of the window of my stove-warmed room and think of Lai in his encampment in the woods and shudder. Winter was a dangerous time for the partisans. They lost the cover of the foliage and the snow insidiously betrayed their tracks to any scouting aircraft or soldiers. The Germans would, every so often, turn their attention from their systematic rounding up and killing in the villages to hunting down the partisans. It must have been a sport for them, like a shooting expedition, a recreation from the drudgery of murder. They would force the peasants to reveal their knowledge of a band’s whereabouts and then go in with a few armoured cars and machine guns to clean up the area, retreating to their warm barracks after a couple of days out in the forest. Lai’s band used to break up in January and February, dividing into smaller units, going to ground and hiding in isolated farmsteads and hamlets. There were individual peasants and some whole villages who would help; though only then-own kind. Our villagers would help the Latvians but not the Russians or the Lithuanians; some would sometimes help their own Jews, but not the ones who spoke Russian or German or Polish. During these months Lai would come and hide with me at Kornu, as Xan had done, with this difference: the servants, who were all Latvians, knew he was there and never betrayed him.

  During a winter attack, in 1943, Lai lost his left arm. He was wounded, not very seriously, by a gunshot, a bullet passing through his lower arm and breaking one of the bones. In the six days that it took him to reach Kornu, gangrene had set in. Our local horse doctor amputated his arm above the elbow in the kitchen in Kornu, in conditions like an eighteenth-century battlefield. I watched the operation and thought I was witnessing my lover’s death. But it was too early for that. Lai was extraordinarily strong and within weeks he was planning his return to the band. His arm had healed up very well, leaving an abrupt, puckered stump just above the elbow. He let me construct a protection for it out of some old silk underclothes of Aunt Zoya’s, to prevent the chafing of the scars by the knotted sleeve of his woollen shirt.

  All this time, from when Xan died on Riga station in June 1941 to the spring of 1942 when Lai ran away to the partisans, until the summer of 1944, I knew that what had happened to them would one day happen to me. I was given a temporary reprieve because I counted as German, and I knew I must take every second of respite in order to let Alek grow up. But it could not last. I am not sure whether I really thought Germany would be defeated, but I was certain that in the long run Russia would push back and Latvia would be conquered again from the east. Lai hoped for an allied victory and for renewed independence for Latvia. For him everything was different. In the last resort he was Latvian and could find a home among his own people. But I was of no nationality. As a Baltic German I was not welcome in Latvia; I had no home in Germany and indeed did not want one there. As an aristocrat, I was an enemy of the people in Russia. So I knew that one day, sooner or later, I would be on the run, living like Lai in the forests. I had no plan except that, as I knew my camouflage worked best among Germans, I intended to run west rather than east. America, Xan’s goal, became mine. I dreamed of crossing the Baltic to Sweden, a paradise of neutrality. Lai disabused me of that hope very early on. There could be nothing more unrealistic than any thought of bribing a fisherman and making a secret crossing of the Baltic or fleeing across the Gulf of Finland, dressed in white furs, as Russian aristocrats had done in the winter of 1918.

  I began to make preparations quite early, from at least 1942 when Lai joined the partisans. I cut down an old fur coat, there were plenty of those at Kornu, for Alek. I sewed several pearl necklaces into the hem of my own fur coat like curtain weights and kept a box in my room of the smallest, most portable, most valuable things I could find-diamond rings, a Faberge egg, gold roubles and sovereigns. We had been hoarding as much food as we could in any case. In the cellar beneath the kitchen we kept honey, flour, salt, lard, bacon, dried beans. Anything we could preserve, we did. We boarded up the steps into the cellar and left only a trap door over which we placed a table. We only went down to add to our store at night.

  The moment I had been waiting for arrived in the summer of 1944. The news from the BBC and Radio Moscow had made us aware that the Russians were no longer simply holding off the Germans, they were pushing back. The front was advancing westward and, although the main impetus was the thrust towards Minsk, Warsaw and Berlin, we knew that even our backwater of Latvia would be scoured clean of Germans as the Russians moved on and tidied up behind their lines.

  The Russian advance broke up Lai’s band. Their last exploit, which had taken place several days’ march to the north-east of Kornu, had been the sabotage of the trucks and armoured cars of retreating German forces, an enterprise performed in co-ordination by radio with the commander of the nearest advancing Russian corps. The group was about to be overtaken by real soldiers and this fractured the guerrilla band into two: those who looked forward joyfully to rejoining a proper army, to being assigned a uniform, rations, orders, and those for whom the Russians were at least as much to be feared as the now receding Germans. Lai was among these last. He had seen the Russians in Latvia in ’40 and ’41 and had no illusions about what their return would mean for his country. If what the optimists urged came true, that at the peace conference after the war the West would see that Latvia was re-established, as it had been at Versailles in 1919, then he would be able to return in peace. Until then he would leave. I knew that I had nothing to hope for from the Russians, so when Lai arrived at Kornu in July with the news that the Soviets had reached Minsk, I knew we would have to go.

  It was not an easy decision. It seems strange to say so now. At the time, from the perspective of Kornu, it was not clear that the war would end soon and with an allied victory. We were moving, Alek and I, from the only home I had ever known, my only possession, and going, where? Into Germany, with no clear idea of where or what we would do when we got there, with no means of support. For Lai, it was going into the heartlands of the people he had been fighting for two years. But for both of us the Russians were worse, and so we began our trek earlier than many others. The Germans of East Prussia did not start their flight westward until the middle of the winter; ours at least began in summer weather.

  This first stage in the late summer of 1944 was comparatively easy, although I found it terrifying at the time. It was to be a journey far longer and far worse than anything experienced by my parents on their escape with me in their arms from St Petersburg to Kornu. Although I had papers that were acceptable to the German authorities, Lai was a renegade. I had no influence, but I had the means to bribe, so before we began, we had to turn him into a German. He disappeared to Riga with a ring of Aunt Zoya’s and returned a few days later with papers describing him as Nicolas von Korff. His empty sleeve explained on sight why he was not in uniform; his flaxen hair made him look as Aryan as necessary.

  We departed with suitcases, as if we were real von Korffs of the old days, en route for the Riviera. When I think of how we began our trek, I laugh at our optimism. Two suitcases contained our fur coats in the heat of August, extra shoes, some food. We set off in style, by train. It was not an easy matter to get on a train. Civilian traffic had low priority and it took some time and some payments, under as well as over the counter, in order to obtain the necessary permits. Where were we going, setting off into the hostile unknown? What did we intend to do? I keep asking myself that. There must have been some plan, some rational view of the future in our minds. It would have been destroyed by the events that overtook us, but to have had it would have been a sign that we still thought we had some control over our futures. But I don’t think we had a plan. We were already refugees when we left Kornu, after sitting for a while in silence on the verandah, Russian fashi
on, kissing the maids goodbye and then picking up our bags and walking down the steps. Our only purpose was to survive, to wait for better times and, each day, to find something to eat, somewhere to sleep, the two fundamental priorities.

  Our first destination was Danzig. Not far from the city was the estate of an elderly cousin of my father’s. It took us a week to get there. We waited at stations for trains without timetables. We sat in darkened carriages, stationary amid the trees. We were forced off a train, and had to wait twenty-four hours for another. When we reached Danzig, we had to walk the fifty kilometres to my cousin’s estate, carrying Alek, only occasionally managing to beg a ride from a peasant with a cart, returning from the fields. That part took us three days and two nights, one of which we spent in a bam, another at an inn. We were the first refugees that they had seen in that part of Pomerania. Later they were to become familiar with the miserable stream of humanity pushing carts, motor cycles, bicycles, prams, wheel barrows, hand carts, sledges, piled with bundles, children, old people. Then they were to become part of the stream themselves.

  When we arrived, we found that Baron von Uxkull had abandoned his estate and was living in rooms in his market town, looked after by a housekeeper. He did not want us, had barely room for us. However, family duty told him he must make room for us and so he did. His chief worry was Nikolai who would not fit into the Almanach de Gotha of his family and all its connexions that he carried in his head. Who was his father, he kept asking me. He might have asked the same question about Alek, though he never did, perhaps fearing to hear the answer. He clearly assumed I was travelling with my lover and illegitimate child, which was not so wildly short of the mark. I kept Alek and Lai out of his way as much as possible and waited to see what would happen next.