by Leo Kessler
In the summer of 1930, just after graduation, she accepted the invitation of a group of male students to accompany them on a climb in the Caucasus mountains. It was to be her job to take care of the ground organization of the climbs, preparing the routine pre-climb form with its details of the number of climbers, their target, estimated time-of-return, etc., and arranging the usual welcome ceremony-address by the local camp commandant, presentation of flowers for a successful climb and so on. In essence, she was going to have a rest after the long gruelling task of obtaining her Master of Sport degree.
But after the first week of inactivity and boredom, she had asked on sudden impulse, whether she could go along on a climb. Later, much later, she had reasoned that fate had willed her to go along to discover at whatever cost — a fall, an accident, even death — what made a puny mortal tackle the magnificent peaks of the majestic, silent mountains.
After that first climb, as rough, unprofessional and sometimes frightening as it was, she had seen the mountains no longer as remote sights which filled her with awe and affection. Instead, they had become the walls of enemy cities, the castles of the aristocracy, the fortresses of the reactionaries, the enemies of the Soviet State to be attacked and stormed. At that moment her sense of awe had vanished forever to be replaced by a violent, almost sexual, desire to conquer.
At the end of that climb, the senior student, who had been the leader of the climb, had spat out a mouthful of sunflower seeds, his bronzed face a mixture of awe and dislike, and said:
‘Roswitha, you have determination and talent. I think our mountains better look out with you around.’
‘Thank you, comrade,’ she had answered, pleased with herself, forgetting her bloody knees and aching shoulder muscles. ‘It was very instructive.’
‘But remember one thing, Roswitha,’ he had added softly, ‘the mountains have to be loved too.’
But Roswitha Mikhailovna had no longer been listening…
From 1930 onwards, she had spent every vacation tackling ever-new climbs, saving every penny of her teacher’s salary to travel all over the Soviet Union to her targets. The newspapers started to notice her. Pravda called her ‘the new Soviet Woman’. Trud said she was a ‘model for all our female comrades’. Her climbing motto: ‘Nada vitserapat’ — ‘never give in’ became famous throughout the Soviet Union.
By 1935 Roswitha Mikhailovna had become one of the Soviet Union’s best-known women, had been given a sinecure at Moscow University, and had even been granted the great honour of being received by Comrade Stalin himself, who publicly had awarded her the Order of the Red Star and privately remarked to his fellow Georgian Beria, head of the Secret Police, ‘Lavrenti Pavlovich, I could think of a better occupation for that particular piece of female flesh—’
‘Yes,’ the Secret Police Chief, who was known for his sexual exploits, had agreed: ‘On her back with her legs spread!’
‘Only with those muscles, I think she’d squeeze me to death!’ And the two old lechers had burst into ribald laughter.
But Roswitha Mikhailovna was no lesbian. Neither was she a blue-stocking. She liked men and she liked pretty clothes. She thought of herself as a feminist: a patriotic, loyal Russian, who owed everything to the Soviet State, which allowed her to do the thing she loved most, climb mountains; but who at the same time wanted herself to be seen as an example to the many millions of Russian women who had been downtrodden for centuries by men who had gone to bed on their honeymoon night, drunk, satiated from the attentions of the whores, and armed with a knout1 to tame the new bride.
Now she climbed, this amazing, ambitious woman, who had spent the last three months behind the German lines, risking her neck time and time again to help prevent the enemy breaking out of the Kuban valley into the Caucasus. The going was tough. It did not worry her. Over the mountain lay a coverlet of pale clouds, closely knit and swirling. The sun had vanished too and the rocks looked bluish and lifeless. She knew that snow was on the way. But neither the difficulty of the ascent nor the prospect of bad weather dismayed her, as she struggled ever upwards. She was going back to her friends, and that knowledge lent strength and purpose to her long elegant legs.
The wind rose. It whistled a dirge across the face of the rock. The dirty white clouds were directly above her now and they were becoming more leaden in appearance by the second. It started to snow: thin weak flakes at first, but swiftly growing in strength. She pulled down her goggles with a gloved hand, knowing instinctively they would be clogged up within minutes. Still she pressed on determinedly, hardly able to wait until she was with them again, feeling an almost sexual longing for them, but dismissing the feeling at once as perverse.
As she ploughed through the snow, her agile mind ran over the events of the last few days. She had hated killing Sergei, but it was better that one should suffer death than thousands. A careless word on his part might well have revealed their presence in the mountains. He had to go. For it was certain that the Germans would send another patrol into the mountains, if only to discover what had happened at Chursuk; and it was not too difficult to reason that that patrol might press on further to continue their attempt to find a route through the mountains down into the great plain below. Once the Germans discovered just how weak the Russian defences were, they would cross the mountains in their thousands into the Caucasus beyond. Until Comrade Stalin was ready for them — and she was sure that he would heed her warning — she had to hold the mountains. Thus she pushed on, her mind full of the problems of defence.
‘Stoi?’ the high-pitched challenge came from the middle of nowhere, echoing and re-echoing around the circle of mountain peaks.
Roswitha Mikhailovna halted. She whipped off her goggles and narrowing her eyes against the flying snowflakes, peered around in the grey gloom. She could see nothing. She licked her snow-dry cracked lips. ‘Where are you?’ she called, high and harsh.
‘Stoi?’ the voice demanded again.
Now she located it. It came from beneath a snow-heavy over hang to her right. She swung round and called happily, ‘Better not shout too loud. Or you’ll have that lot of snow down upon you.’
‘It’s you!’ the voice was no longer harsh.
‘Who did you expect — Hitler?’ she said in high good humour.
‘Boshe Moi!’ A white-clad bulky figure clad in a snowsuit detached itself from the cover of the overhang and waddled with difficulty across the fresh snow, slinging a rifle as it did so.
Roswitha waited there, her arms outspread.
The other flung back the fur hood. A round youthful face, full of strength and character, under the carefully plucked dark eyebrows, came into view. ‘Lydia!’ Roswitha cried happily and embraced the other woman joyfully, kissing her time and time again in the Russian fashion. At last she was back with her own kind again.
Note
1. Russian whip.
THREE
It was the next morning.
Roswitha stood at the entrance to the caves surveying the terrain below, her keen gaze sweeping the smooth gleaming white surface of the mountains, checking for the enemy, but at the same time enjoying the view. How beautiful the great curved sweep of the valley was, cradled in the embrace of the high mountains and falling away gently to the south!
She turned and stared at the mountain, gleaming pink and pure in the dawn light. One day, she promised herself, she would conquer it too. Those twin peaks would be hers. A warm feeling swept through her body, as she visualized surmounting those peaks which looked so like the breasts of some proud young virgin, as yet unconquered by the importuning male. The next moment she dismissed the feeling, as decadent and unworthy of a feminist, who did not succumb to the foolishness of the general run of womanhood. Taking a deep breath of pure mountain air, she thrust back the canvas cover to the main entrance to the cave system and for an instant surveyed her still sleeping troop, their bodies wrapped in their heavy down sleeping bags, which rose and fell rhythmically as the women enjoyed the
last moments of their time free of war.
She smiled, her face full of compassion and pride. They had laughed at her in Moscow when she had offered them her militia unit back in July 1941. What good were women, they had asked contemptuously, save as nurses, or perhaps snipers? ‘Give me and my girls a chance,’ she had pleaded. In the end, grateful for anyone capable of carrying and firing a rifle, they had; and she had proved just what her girls could do. On the coldest night of the year in January 1942, when sentries froze to death at their post, she and her girls had climbed the ramparts of the German-held fortress outside beleaguered Leningrad, slaughtered the divisional commander and his staff who were billeted there, and escaped without a single casualty.
The exploit had occasioned sensational headlines in the Soviet Press. But it had been nothing in comparison with her girls’ bold attempt to break through the German Volga front by scaling the heights and assassinating the commander of the German Sixth Army. That attempt had failed. But it had made the Fritzes so insecure that they had begun to see partisans everywhere. Stalin himself had ordered the girls to be paraded through Moscow, and to be received and heaped with decorations at the Kremlin. The legend of the ‘Red Ravens’, as the popular press called them due to their myriad decorations, had been born. Now no one, even the most anti-feminist general in the Stavka, dare denigrate her girls. The Red Ravens were a unit to be reckoned with, even if they did wear skirts when they were not in line. As Stalin himself had told the Russian people, ‘Wherever the front is the hottest, comrades, you will find my bold and beautiful Red Ravens.’ It had been high praise indeed, and Roswitha Mikhailovna was determined to live up to it.
Taking out her whistle, she blew three shrill blasts. The girls awoke at once like the veterans they were, who knew that in an emergency immediate obedience to a command might well mean the difference between life and death. Leaping out of their sleeping bags, already fully clad save for their mountaineering boots, they stood stiffly to attention, staring rigidly to the front, as if they were standing on some home-front parade ground, waiting to be inspected by Marshal Voroshilov himself.1
She smiled and snapped, ‘Stand at ease, comrades — and good morning.’
‘Good morning, Comrade Captain,’ they answered.
We will have a conference in—’ she checked her cheap wrist watch — ‘exactly thirty minutes. There are things I need to explain to you.’ She smiled at the dark-haired Lydia, who had welcomed her the day before and joked, ‘And for goodness sake, Lydia, let your hair down. At the moment you look like — er — one of those.’
Lydia flushed and the others laughed. They all knew what ‘those’ were. After all, most of the hardline anti-feminists of the Stavka thought that this was what the Red Ravens were all about. Giggling they set about preparing the morning soup and tea.
They crowded around her in the main gallery of the cave system, their young handsome bodies shapeless in their thick, heavily wadded jackets and coarse serge mountain pants. To Roswitha waiting to brief them, they looked no different than their male comrades of the Red Army. Naturally they would fight and die like the men, but they could not be ordered to do things like their male comrades. They had to have their orders explained to them.
‘Comrades,’ she commenced, ‘I have been on a long and not very pleasant mission. Like you, living under these hard conditions, I would like a rest. I would like to ensure you have a rest too.’
‘No, no,’ they protested as loyal as ever. ‘We need no rest. We will perform our duty however tired and cold we may be.’
‘Thank you, comrades,’ she said, visibly moved, knowing how hard their lives had been these last six weeks in the high mountains. ‘I knew I could rely upon you — no, more, that Mother Russia could rely upon you — at this grave hour, when everything is balanced on a knife’s edge.’
Sergeant Lanya Lermintov, a raw-boned woman in her early thirties, whose jet-black hair was cropped as short as any soldier’s and who before the war had been — like most of the Red Ravens — one of Russia’s best amateur rock-climbers, spat in the dust of the cave and growled: ‘Comrade Captain, I’ll stay up here till hell freezes, if it will let me get my paws on a Fritz.’ She raised her hard, calloused, ham-like hands. ‘And I can promise you, it won’t be a night of love I’ll offer him.’ She spat contemptuously once again.
The others laughed and Roswitha joined in dutifully. Sergeant Lermintov was always good for a joke or the apt comment which could defuse any potentially explosive situation. ‘Yes, I could well imagine you would have other things in mind than the — er procreation of the species.’
Again the girls laughed, and Roswitha told herself what a happy crowd they were, working together as a team, without the usual bickering of the average woman living in close proximity with another female, where the unauthorized borrowing of a simple hairpin might lead to a major quarrel complete with slanging match and hair-pulling. Her Red Ravens were not like that. One day the whole of womanhood might well be like them, freed from the domestic silliness of the average woman’s life.
‘Now, comrades, it is clear that we are very thin on the ground,’ she went on. ‘But you all know why. Our male comrades are needed for the fighting front and our generals — or some of them — have not seen the danger to our rear presented by the mountains. Good. So,’ she shrugged, ‘it is up to us to stop a whole German mountain corps — fifty Red Ravens against twenty thousand Fritzes.’
‘Many enemies, much honour,’ Lydia said. She was proud of her classical education at the University of Moscow and was given to quotes from the half-dozen languages she spoke. ‘German expression,’ she added for their enlightenment.
‘Agreed,’ Roswitha said. ‘But we must realize our weaknesses. We cannot do everything with the handful of people available. We have to take certain calculated risks.’
‘Such as?’ one of the girls asked.
‘Such as this.’ Swiftly and expertly she did a quick sketch in the frozen dust of the cave’s floor. ‘Here — the pass,’ she said. ‘Here — Elbrus House. Through the pass everyone trying to cross the mountains must come, and from the House the whole range can be covered, at least at this time of the year. Now, my plan is that we leave a small group of Red Ravens at the pass. The rest of the unit should take up position at Elbrus House ready to move to any hot spot.’
‘How many at the pass?’ Sergeant Lermintov asked.
‘We can’t afford more than a dozen.’
‘Far too few,’ the sergeant growled in her deep voice.
‘Couldn’t hold the pass against a determined Fritz attack. Request permission to volunteer for command of that particular group?’
Roswitha shook her head, half amused, half moved by the big woman’s offer. ‘All right, Sergeant, it’s yours.’
‘Do I have your permission too to pick my own people, Comrade Captain?’
‘You do.’
Sergeant Lermintov looked across at the pretty dark Lydia, knowingly. Hurriedly Roswitha shook her head and pushed on. ‘Now, as Sergeant Lermintov has just said, we cannot hold the pass against any serious Fritz attack with a dozen Red Ravens. For that reason, while you slept I asked for air.’
‘Air?’ they echoed.
She beamed at them, a warm feeling flooding her body as she did so. ‘Yes, the Stavka has promised me a permanent patrol over the pass — one whole squadron of Stormoviks.’
‘Stormoviks,’ Sergeant Lermintov cried excitedly, ‘that’ll make the Fritzes shit their breeches…’
The Red Ravens broke down at the words and giggled like a lot of silly schoolgirls. It was the last time that most of them would giggle in this lifetime.
Note
1. Commander-in-Chief, Red Army.
FOUR
‘Rata, sir!’ Meier, at the head of the long column toiling upwards through the snow towards the pass, yelled urgently.
‘Everyone down!’ Stuermer ordered.
On all sides the mountaineers, their weariness for
gotten now in the urgency of this moment, flung themselves into the snow, as the sound of the little spotter plane’s engine grew ever louder.
Crouched behind a rock, gloved hand shading his face so that its whiteness didn’t give his position away, Colonel Stuermer followed the progress of the little wooden biplane as it curved leisurely over the pass and started to level out. On the sledges the wounded stirred uneasily at the new noise and he called sharply, ‘Remain where you are — there is no danger!’
The Rata had levelled out. Now it was coming in from the east, trailing a black shadow behind it over the gleaming surface of the snow. It took its time and Stuermer could guess what the pilot, a dark blob behind the gleaming egg of the cockpit perspex, was doing: he was looking to left and right, searching the white carpet of snow — for them!
He caught his breath involuntarily, and froze. The Rata, its engine sounding like some ancient sewing machine, was flying straight down the trail from the pass. Now everything depended on the men of Edelweiss remaining perfectly still. In their white snowsuits they would be hard to see, especially from a moving object. With a bit of luck they would get away with it.
The noise of the engine grew ever louder. The Rata was almost above them now. Lying everywhere in the snow, the mountaineers tensed, their faces pressed into the snow, their hearts pounding furiously. And then the spotter plane was above them and Sergeant Hackebeil, who had been badly wounded in the head during the attack on the barn and who had been barely coherent since then, had staggered from his sledge, trailing bandages behind, crying weakly, ‘They’re gonna bomb us… The bastards are going to bomb us…’
‘Get that man!’ Stuermer yelled.
Jap was up and running. Diving low, he tackled the crazily staggering NCO and flung him to the ground, holding him there till his struggling, protesting body grew limp again, while the sound of the Rata’s motor grew fainter as it disappeared behind a peak.