The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  “What’s more,” she went on furiously, “all this persecution of Jean is entirely because she’s Russian and for no other reason.” She felt a momentary triumphant pleasure in catching him by surprise. “Don’t look so astonished. You must have enough self-knowledge to realize that right from the start you were convinced she was a murderer because she was Russian and Russians in your book are all savages. Civilization ends on the Bug, beyond that the barbarians.”

  “What have the fucking Russians to do with all this? Anyway, they are barbarians. Are you trying to pretend that they haven’t murdered sixty million of their own citizens in the last seventy years? You’re like these people who say the Holocaust didn’t happen. Stalin was dear old Uncle Joe and a few deaths are necessary on the way to socialist heaven.”

  “Of course I’m not saying anything of the kind. What I’m saying is… I’m Russian.”

  “You’re Russian.” She could see he was horrified.

  “Yes.”

  “You speak Russian?”

  “Yes. Do you speak Polish?”

  The atmosphere had lost all its vehemence. He got up. “I don’t know how we got into this. I’m going.”

  The phone pierced the silence. Zita looked at it for a moment in surprise that ordinary life still had the power to impinge; then picked it up.

  “Eta ti, Zita?”

  “Da, Mama, minutchka…” But he had already gone. She heard the front door close behind him.

  “Zita, you sound very tired. What’s the matter? Has Tom being playing up?”

  “No, no. It’s my quintet night. It’s been a long evening.”

  Part Fourteen

  YEVGENIA

  26

  I came to England because I wanted to be safe. I wanted to escape from the horrors and dangers and cruelty that I had seen in Latvia and Germany. I would’ve done anything to get here; just as I suspect Xenia will do anything to stay. And once I was here I was grateful, to Kenward, to his family, to the whole country. But underneath all my admiration and gratitude, I resented them. I chose to live in a little town and not to buy a country house. I could not bear the English petty gentry and their pretensions to an aristocratic way of life. I preferred to be a bourgeois, limited, safe. But from time to time I felt, what do they know? Nothing. What was their war? The jolly camaraderie of the Blitz, then sitting tight for four years until they got the Americans to help them invade France. In the meantime the Russians endured the siege of Leningrad, defeated the Germans at Stalingrad and pushed them back to Berlin, losing millions of lives in the struggle. I never said any of this. I became more English than they were, more patriotic. But when they made a fuss about what they went through in the war, or when the whole town was in a state of mass hysteria about the disappearance of a child, I thought, don’t they know that children died by the tens of thousands, shot and gassed and hacked to death not twenty years ago? Don’t they know that? Why should I care that one child goes missing? I lost my child. I searched for him, weeping, even though I knew quite well what had happened to him. Every mother knows that “lost” means “dead” and she is responsible for that death.

  When we took to the road the second time we joined thousands of people moving west. It was the very last gasp of the war. The German army of the east had fallen back to Berlin, the Russians were advancing like a wind which blows before it a tattered whirl of leaves, sticks and debris, anything that is not tied down. We were all desperate to reach somewhere, we were not sure where, before the Russians caught up with us. Some had a destination in mind, a cousin in Frankfurt, or Hamburg, a brother in Bavaria or the Pfalz. Our hope of escape in the short run, that is, escape from the rape, pillage and murder of the conquering Russians, was illusory. When Lai and I had set out the previous summer, we had only had German bureaucracy to impede us. The Russians then were holding themselves back deliberately, waiting for the Germans to destroy the Poles of the Home Army who had risen in Warsaw. By the new year the Red Army was moving westward fast and we, travelling on foot, had no hope of reaching the protection of the American or British in western Germany before the Russians in their armoured cars and tanks overtook us.

  The refugees from further east already on the road told us stories of the arrival of the barbarians. One woman, pushing a pram containing all she had in the world, said that the Russians had hanged all the young men in her village from the tree in the square. They had dangled from every branch to make a giant gamekeeper’s gibbet as a warning to others. The women had been herded into the church and raped for two days. She walked as if she did not know where she was or where she was going, moving forward because she still could. I couldn’t bear to ask about the pram.

  I wonder now if we had stayed on with my cousin, resisting his feeble hints and only half-hidden dislike of the invasion of his apartment, whether things would have been different, if Lai would have survived, and Alek too. This is another of the alternative lives I might have lived. The price we would have paid, I suppose, would have been a lifetime in East Germany under the communists. I can’t do that sort of sum; the calculation of relative values and exchange rates, the market in futures, of real lives, is beyond me.

  Now I am going to try to say what happened to us. This is something I have never spoken of before. Kenward never knew that Alek even existed, nor Lai. He knew of Xan only as the cousin who should have shared my inheritance, but was killed by the NKVD. I could not speak of it because to tell was an acknowledgement that it had happened. If it wasn’t said, and above all, wasn’t shared, if it did not exist for the people who surrounded me, I could pretend that the past did not exist. Or I could try, because if I cancelled out Alek, Lai and Xan, what was left of my life before I came to England? Nothing at all. Mention of any part of my childhood and youth led round from Xan and Lai to Alek. I could not really forget, of course. In the beginning, when I was still in Germany, it was easier not to remember. I was young and the will to live is inextinguishable. The struggle to achieve safety took so much of my energy that I was really able to forget, to pretend the past had not happened. Until I came to England, that is. Once I was here, there was time and peace. Life in the late forties was hard here, but the hardships were nothing, nothing, in comparison with what it had been like in Germany at the end of the war. And I found my great-uncle Yegor’s money and I had to prove that Xan was dead. So I learned you cannot go on without the past. It demands its due. And that I gave it, but nothing more; no thought of Lai or Alek. Still, I used to wake in the night. I didn’t dream of the events themselves. I woke at the instant it was over, when I knew what had happened. I knew that the minute could not come back, could never be cancelled, and I would live with the knowledge of what I had done for the rest of my life.

  We set out, the three of us, Alek well wrapped up in his little fur coat, perched on the sledge that I had found in my cousin’s cellar store, sitting on top of those possessions, mostly food, that we had decided to take with us. I think now of how adorable he was, his little face peaky with illness under his shapka with its earflaps tied down. It might have been an afternoon’s walk from Kornu, he looked so happy and excited.

  We went out into a very harsh world, and not only in terms of the climate. You might think that in extreme conditions common misery and common humanity would unite strangers: a little community of refugees, supporting one another. Not at all. The first rule is every man for himself and women and children last. You can trust no one except your own family and perhaps not them. If you are alone, you are desperately vulnerable. If you are a group, at least one of you can keep watch while the others sleep. For the danger comes not just from the approaching army, but also from your fellow refugees. The army will rape and kill; the refugees will steal: food first of all, then money, papers, valuables. Everyone is desperate, everyone’s need is supreme, no one acknowledges any rules or laws or conventions of ethical behaviour. No one can delay to help the elderly who are slow and weak, or women with young children. The young and fit mov
e ahead. To stay to help makes you likely to share their fate and the very fact they are there, to take the first brunt of the oncoming marauders, makes your own escape more likely. Survival is all. We were young, well fed, fit, but burdened with a sick child; we watched others overtake us.

  The moment comes nearer and nearer. When was it? Days after we left my cousin’s house. Where? A village on a small road, a speck on the flat and featureless north German plain, certainly not marked on the old map I had brought with us from Kornu. We had deliberately tried to keep to small roads; there were fewer refugees and we thought that the Russians, who were going to overtake us soon, might pass us by, rolling on the big roads in their tanks and armoured cars.

  It was late afternoon. We had not made good progress that day. The little roads inevitably are longer, indirect; they turn away from the direction in which you want to go. We had met a group of about a dozen travellers at a crossroads. Some wanted to continue on the road, even though it would be dark in an hour or so. Others, including me, wanted to approach the mayor or a big farmer in the village to ask for shelter, in a barn, a church, a school. Some places on the routes into the Reich were so used to refugees by then that they ran a soup kitchen to give hot food in the evening, had a dormitory set up in some public building. In the end more than half of the group walked on, the rest of us went into the village that we could see a kilometre or so ahead.

  The mayor was not welcoming. We trailed along the straight, blank street and found an abandoned shop which had been used by refugees before. The lock on the door was broken and we were told that we would be permitted to use it. It was bitterly cold, minus ten or fifteen, and to shelter from the cold, to light a fire seemed to me at first the only thing in the world I wanted to do. We went inside and at once I smelled a terrible odour, not strong but pervasive, there was no escaping it. It smelled of death. I insisted to Lai that we could not stay there. I was determined to leave in spite of the time and the temperature, because I suddenly had a powerful premonition of death, a terrible foreboding about that place, so that I could not stay there. I knew it must have been a Jewish shop; I could imagine what had become of its owners. I could not explain my feeling to Lai who would certainly have had no patience with such fantasies, so I said that I thought that it was unhealthy, contaminated, and that I could not bear to be there with Alek. This was persuasive enough for Lai and we left the others there and went on out of the village with the idea of finding a bam in the fields. We were, it appeared, luckier than that, because we saw smoke rising from behind a sheltering belt of trees, and as we drew nearer we discovered a farmstead. The large house and the arrangement of the farm buildings suggested that it was a German rather than a Polish one, whose owners might be more sympathetic to us than the glowering Poles.

  The peasants welcomed us with great kindness. The paterfamilias was an old man with a tangled white beard; he must have been very old, for his son was well over fifty. The son’s wife and her two daughters, huge and powerful women with red faces and blonde hair, fussed over Alek. They had helped other refugees and showed us the outbuilding across the courtyard from the main house where we could stay. They gave us fuel to burn in the fireplace and sacks of straw that had already been made up for earlier travellers to sleep on. They invited us to share their evening soup. I crouched by the fire and Alek played beside me on the floor clutching his mousie, a toy he had held in his fist for comfort since he was a baby. That night we slept on the floor near the fire, Alek between Lai and me, his warmth warming us both.

  We had often heard the sound of guns in the distance behind us, which had hurried us forward. This time we heard nothing until they reached the village which we had left the night before. In the early morning there were gunshots and Lai, after consultation with the farmer, went out to investigate. He returned an hour or so later to report that he had seen four Russian armoured cars, a small detachment, who had evidently raided some liquor store, either in the village or in a nearby great house, for they were already drunk and still drinking. They were banging on the villagers’ doors with their rifle butts, shouting, rounding people up. For us, some distance from where all this was going on, the question was whether to stay or to go. The farmer would not hear of our leaving. We might only cover a few kilometres before the Russians came across us; we would be on the road with nowhere to hide. We must stay with them and with any luck the detachment would pass on during the day and we could set off again tomorrow. He insisted on our staying in the house with his family and we spent the morning beside the stove in the kitchen, receiving reports from time to time from Lai, from the farmer and his son, of what they could see or hear from the village. The firing of the abandoned house where our fellow refugees had spent the night convinced me that my premonition had been correct and we had been right to leave. We could only hope that the occupants had been evacuated before the building went up in smoke and that they were not burned alive, as I feared they might be.

  That afternoon another Russian detachment was spotted moving along the road towards the village from the north. Immediately the farmer’s daughter-in-law and her daughters got ready to hide. They had their places well prepared and with methodical speed lifted floor boards to step down into the cellars. The farmer led us along a corridor into a little storeroom. Here he raised a trap door and showed us a shallow storage hole, no more than a couple of feet deep, rather like the one we had constructed at Kornu to keep our extra preserves hidden under the floor in one of the outhouses. I jumped in first and inserted my feet and legs under the floor, reaching up to take Alek whom Lai handed down to me. He then followed us and with a combination of deliberation and haste the farmer lowered the planks on top of us. I could hear him scuffing the dusty floor to conceal our tracks and moving some bundles on top of the loose boards.

  My premonitions which had been so active the previous day should have told me that we were being shut in a grave, but they did not. My fear was so great that I felt instead like an animal in its burrow, safe and hidden and enclosed. We lay as we had lain that night, with Alek between us, tightly packed like plums in a jar. Alek’s back lay along my body; he was facing Lai’s shoulder blades. He lay quietly, relaxed. For a long time there was no sound and he fell asleep; I could feel the gentle rhythm of his breathing. I leaned across him, my lower arm being the only part of my body that I could move, to touch Lai. I found his hand against his side and held it.

  I think I may have dozed, for the first sounds of the Russians sprang on me without warning. There were shouts and shots, cries and inexplicable silences. I had no idea what the farmer and his son intended to do, whether they planned to hide themselves and let the marauding Russians take anything they wanted, or whether they intended to defend their property. It became evident that, even if they had hidden, they had been found, for there were renewed screams, shouts, banging and the sound of heavy boots. I moved my arm with difficulty from holding Lai’s hand and put it over Alek’s ear to try to shield him from the noise of alarm and pain.

  They came nearer and burst into the room where we were hiding. The noise now resounded over our heads; there was no need to see to understand what was going on above us. A heavy body was flung down on the wooden floor, but she was not dead. She rolled and squirmed above our heads, her heels hammering the floor. The animal sounds of struggle and protest told us she must be gagged. She was being held down by several men. I pressed my hand more firmly over Alek’s ear, wishing you could close off sound as you close off sight. The obligation to hear was horrible; the lack of words even worse. One man was forcing himself on her. The violent banging of her head on the floor, the stamping of the boots of the watchers in time to the penetration, the parody of a bayonet thrust or the entry of a bullet, the bestial breathing were unmistakable. Finally, the gag must have worked itself loose and the repeated act was accompanied by smothered groans, over and over again, over and over again. The horror for us was to lie and do nothing. I could feel the tension in Lai. We couldn’t he
lp. Nothing we could do would stop the violence and the rape, but to be a witness was to be an accomplice. As I lay there, I thought of my mother and of how I must have heard this once before. But then I hadn’t understood, and I prayed that Alek didn’t understand. Perhaps I had slept, as he seemed to sleep.

  Then he woke up. The noise was too great for me to protect him from the brutal sounds above our heads and he began to whimper. I don’t know whether he actually emitted a cry or whether, in my anxious anticipation, I just felt him preparing to sob. I put my hand with difficulty between Lai’s back and Alek’s face and pressed my hand over his mouth to stifle his moans. Above us was just piston-pounding, humping, groaning. The woman fell silent, as if she had lost consciousness, could no longer fight or even feel. Perhaps she was dead. The tiny thread of Alek’s cry pierced the brutish sounds above like a child soprano through a mechanical digger.

  I held him closer, the back of his skull ground into my chest; I crushed his mouth with the palm of my hand. For a moment he resisted, turning his head against me in protest. Then he seemed to submit and lie still. But still I didn’t take my hand away.

  I wanted to envelop him, to take him back within me and so protect him from what was happening above us. I don’t think it was so much the danger to us that concerned me at the time. I didn’t want him to be a witness. The row above went on and on, but Alek’s will to cry left him. He lay against me quietly. I didn’t dare to move my hand and so we lay as still as corpses in a mass grave. We were there for hours. Many men took their turn above us and all the noises were the same. After a time it was like a night in a storm which denies you sleep. You go into a waking dream in which consciousness is removed so far from the actual that the reality only impinges as an incoherent nightmare.