I travel west – your image picks
Its endless way through my mind.
He wanted to go back to Mostovskoy and ask:
‘You didn’t ever know a Natasha Zadonskaya, did you? Is she still alive? And did you really walk over the same earth as her for all those decades?’
69
Keyze, a burglar from Hamburg who wore yellow leggings and a cream-coloured check jacket with outside pockets, was in a good mood at roll-call that evening. Mispronouncing the words, he sang quietly: ‘Kali zavtra voyna, yesli zavtra v pokhod . . .’
There was a good-humoured expression on his yellow, wrinkled face. He clapped the other prisoners on the back with a puffy, hairless, snow-white hand whose fingers were strong enough to strangle a horse. He didn’t think twice about killing; it was no more difficult than pulling out his knife in jest. He was always rather excited after he had killed someone, like a kitten that has been playing with a may-bug.
Most of the murders he committed were on the instructions of Sturmführer Drottenhahr, the director of the medical section of the eastern block. The most difficult part was carrying the corpses to the crematorium, but Keyze didn’t have to do this himself and no one would have dared ask him. Nor were people allowed to get so weak they had to be taken to the place of execution on stretchers; Drottenhahr knew his job.
Keyze never made rude remarks or hurried the people who were to be operated on; he never pushed them or hit them. Although he had climbed the two concrete steps more than four hundred times, he felt a real interest in his victims – an interest aroused by the mixture of horror, impatience, submissiveness and passionate curiosity with which they looked at their executioner.
Keyze could never understand why the very mundaneness of his job so appealed to him. There was nothing special about the special cell; it was just a stool, a grey stone floor, a drain, a tap, a hosepipe, and a writing desk with a notebook on it.
The operation itself was equally mundane. If he had to shoot someone, Keyze called it ‘emptying a coffee-bean into someone’s head’; if he had to give someone an injection of carbolic acid, he called it ‘a small dose of elixir’.
The whole mystery of human life seemed to lie in the coffee-bean or the elixir. Really this mystery was astonishingly simple.
Keyze’s brown eyes simply weren’t those of a human being; they seemed to be made of plastic or some yellowish-brown resin. When they took on an expression of merriment, they inspired terror – probably the same terror a fish feels when it swims up to a snag half-covered in sand and suddenly discovers that the dark mass has eyes, teeth and tentacles.
Keyze was well aware of his own superiority over the artists, revolutionaries, scholars, generals and members of religious sects in the barrack-huts. It wasn’t just a matter of the coffee-bean or the elixir; it was an innate feeling of superiority that brought him real joy.
Nor was it a matter of his huge physical strength, his ability to brush obstacles aside, to knock people off their feet or smash through steel with his bare hands. No, what he admired in himself were the complex enigmas of his own soul. There was something very special in his anger, something in the play of his moods that transcended logic. On one occasion a group of Russian prisoners picked out by the Gestapo was being taken to the special barracks; Keyze had asked them to sing some of their favourite songs.
Four Russians with swollen hands and sepulchral expressions struck up ‘Where Are You Now, My Suliko?’ Keyze listened sorrowfully, glancing now and again at the man with high cheekbones who was standing furthest away. He respectfully refrained from interrupting, but at the end of the song he told this man that since he hadn’t sung with the group he must now sing a solo. He looked at the dirty collar of his tunic and the remnants of his torn-off major’s tabs and said: ‘Verstehen Sie, Herr Major? Do you understand, swine?’
The man nodded. Keyze picked him up by the collar and gave him a little shake; he might have been shaking an alarm-clock that had gone wrong. The newly-arrived prisoner punched Keyze on the cheekbone and cursed him.
Everyone thought that would be the end of the prisoner. But instead of killing Major Yershov there and then, Keyze simply led him to a place in the corner, beside the window. It had been lying unoccupied, waiting for the appearance of a prisoner Keyze took a liking to. Later that day Keyze brought Yershov a hard-boiled goose-egg and said with a laugh: ‘Ihre Stimme wird schön!’fn1
From then on Yershov remained a favourite of Keyze’s. The other people in the barracks also treated him with respect; his unbending severity was tempered with gentleness and gaiety.
Brigade Commissar Osipov, one of the men who had sung ‘Suliko’, was furious with Yershov after the incident with Keyze. ‘A very tricky customer indeed!’ he said of him. Mostovskoy, on the other hand, soon christened him ‘the Master of Men’s Minds’.
Another man to dislike Yershov was Kotikov, a silent fellow who seemed to know everything about everyone. Kotikov was colourless; everything about him – his eyes, his lips, even his voice – was colourless. The lack of colour was so pronounced that it became a colour in its own right.
Keyze’s gaiety during roll-call that evening made the prisoners tense and frightened. They were always expecting something bad to happen; day and night their anxious premonitions waxed and waned.
Towards the end of roll-call eight kapos came into the special barracks. They wore ridiculous, clown-like peaked caps and a bright yellow band on their sleeves. You could tell from their faces that they didn’t fill their mess-tins from the general cauldron.
The man in command, König, was tall, fair-haired and handsome. He was dressed in a steel-coloured greatcoat with torn-off stripes; beneath it you could glimpse a pair of brilliantly polished boots that seemed almost white. A former SS officer, he had lost his commission and been imprisoned for various criminal offences. He was now head of the camp police.
‘Mütze ab!’ he shouted.fn2
The search began. With the trained, habitual movements of factory workers, the kapos tapped tables for hollow spaces, shook out rags, checked the seams of people’s clothes and looked inside saucepans . . . Sometimes, as a joke, they kneed a prisoner in the buttocks and said: ‘Your good health!’
Now and again they turned to König with something they had found: a note, a razor-blade, a pad of paper. With a wave of his glove, König let them know whether or not it was of interest. Meanwhile the prisoners remained standing in ranks.
Mostovskoy and Yershov were standing next to each other, glancing at König and Keyze. The faces of the two Germans looked as though they had been cast from metal.
Mostovskoy swayed on his feet; he felt dizzy. He pointed at Keyze and said: ‘A fine individual!’
‘A truly splendid Aryan,’ replied Yershov. Not wishing to be overheard by Chernetsov, he whispered: ‘But some of our lads aren’t much better.’
Keen to join in the conversation he couldn’t hear, Chernetsov said: ‘Every people has a sacred right to its own heroes, saints and villains.’
Mostovskoy turned towards Yershov, but what he said was also addressed to Chernetsov: ‘Of course we’ve got our share of scoundrels too, but still, there’s something unique about a German murderer.’
The search came to an end and the command was given to go to bed. The prisoners began to climb up onto the boards.
Mostovskoy lay down and stretched out his legs. Then he realized he hadn’t yet checked to see if his belongings were all in place. He sat up with a wheeze and began to go through them. At first he thought he must have lost his scarf or his gingham foot-cloths. In the end he found them, but his feeling of anxiety remained.
Yershov came over and said in an undertone: ‘Kapo Nedzelsky’s been gossiping. He says our block’s being split up. A few of us are being kept for further interrogation; the rest are being sent to general camps.’
‘What does it matter?’ asked Mostovskoy.
Yershov sat down.
‘Mikhail Sidorovic
h!’ he said in a very clear whisper.
Mostovskoy raised himself up on one elbow and looked at him.
‘I’ve been thinking about something important, Mikhail Sidorovich. I need to talk to you. If we’re going to die, I think we should do it in style.’
Yershov went on in a whisper. As he listened, Mostovskoy grew more and more excited. It was as though some magical wind was blowing on him.
‘Time is precious,’ said Yershov. ‘If the Germans ever take Stalingrad, then everyone will just sink back into apathy. You only have to look at someone like Kotikov to see that.’
Yershov’s plan was to form a military alliance of prisoners-of-war. He went through this plan point by point, as though he were reading from notes.
‘ . . . The imposition of discipline and solidarity on all Soviet citizens in the camp. The expulsion of traitors. Sabotage. The setting-up of action committees among the Polish, French, Yugoslav and Czech prisoners . . .’
He glanced up at the dim light and said: ‘There are some of our own men in the munitions factory. They trust me. We can start hoarding arms. Then we can widen our horizons. Three-men cells. An alliance with the German underground. The use of terror against traitors. Our final goal – a general uprising, a united free Europe.’
‘A united free Europe! Oh Yershov, Yershov . . .’
‘I’m not just talking. I mean business.’
‘Well then,’ said Mostovskoy, ‘you can count on me.’ He shook his head and repeated, ‘A free Europe . . . Now we’ve even got our own section of the Communist International here in the camp . . . With two members, one of them not even a Communist.’
‘With your knowledge of English, French and German we’ll be able to make thousands of contacts,’ said Yershov. ‘What price your Comintern now? “Prisoners of the world unite!”’
Looking at Yershov, Mostovskoy pronounced a phrase he thought he had forgotten long ago: ‘The Will of the People!’ He felt quite surprised at himself.
‘We’ll have to talk to Osipov and Colonel Zlatokrylets,’ Yershov went on. ‘Osipov’s an important figure. But he doesn’t like me – you must talk to him yourself. And I’ll talk to the Colonel today. That makes four of us.’
Footnotes
fn1 ‘This will make your voice beautiful!’
fn2 ‘Caps off!’
70
Day and night Yershov mulled over his plans for an underground movement embracing the whole of Germany. He worked out a system of communications between the various organizations and learned the name of each different camp together with its railway station. He would have to devise a secret code. And the organizers would need to be able to move freely from camp to camp – he would have to find a way of getting the clerks to include their names in the transport-lists.
His soul was inspired by a great vision. The work of thousands of underground agitators and heroic saboteurs would culminate in an armed take-over of the camps. The men involved in the uprising would need to capture the camp anti-aircraft guns and convert them to weapons that could be used against tanks and infantry. He would have to pick out the prisoners who had experience of anti-aircraft guns and form them into gun-crews.
Major Yershov knew what camp life was like; he was aware of the power of fear, bribery and the desire for a full stomach. He had seen how many people had exchanged honest soldiers’ tunics for the epaulettes and light-blue overcoats of Vlasov’s volunteers. He had seen apathy, betrayal and grovelling obsequiousness. He had seen people’s horror at the horrors inflicted on them. He had seen them petrified with fear before the officers of the dreaded SS.
Yes, ambitious though he was, he was no mere dreamer. During the black days of the German blitzkrieg he had been able to rally men whose stomachs were distended with hunger; his boldness and enthusiasm had been a source of encouragement to all his comrades. He was a man whose contempt for violence was passionate and unextinguishable.
Everyone could feel the bright warmth that emanated from Yershov. It was the same simple, necessary warmth that comes from a birch log in a Russian stove. It was this good-hearted warmth – not just the power of his intellect and his fearlessness – that had made him the acknowledged leader of the Soviet officers in the camp.
He had long known that Mostovskoy was the first person he would reveal his plans to . . . Now, more than ever before in the thirty-three years of his life, he had a sense of his own strength. Here he was, lying on the bedboards and gazing up at the rough planks of the ceiling. He felt as though he were looking up at the lid of a coffin, his heart still beating . . .
His life before the war had been difficult. His father, a peasant in the oblast of Voronezh, had been dispossessed in 1930 after being denounced as a kulak. At that time Yershov had been doing his military service.
He had refused to break with his father. He was turned down by the Military Academy – even though he had passed the entrance exams with the grade ‘excellent’. After graduating from military school with considerable difficulty, he was posted to a district recruiting office. Meanwhile his father and the rest of his family had been deported to the Northern Urals. Yershov applied for leave and set off to visit them. From Sverdlovsk he travelled two hundred kilometres on the narrow-gauge railway. On either side of the line were vast expanses of bog and forest, together with stacks of dressed timber, barbed wire, barrack-huts, dug-outs and tall watch-towers that looked like toadstools on giant legs. The train was delayed twice – a posse of guards was searching for an escaped prisoner. During the night they waited in a passing-loop for a train coming from the opposite direction. Yershov was unable to sleep for the whistles of sentries and the barking of OGPU dogs – close to the station was a large camp.
It took Yershov over two days to reach the end of the line. He had a lieutenant’s tabs on his collar and his documents were in order; nevertheless, each time they were checked, he expected to be packed off to a camp with the words: ‘Come on, get your things together.’ It was as though even the air in this region had barbed wire round it.
He travelled the next seventy kilometres in the back of a lorry; once again there were bogs on either side of the road. The lorry belonged to the OGPU farm where Yershov’s father was working. It was jammed with deported workers being sent to fell trees. Yershov questioned them, but they were afraid of his uniform and answered only in monosyllables.
Towards evening the lorry reached a small village squeezed in between the edge of the forest and the edge of the bog. Yershov was to remember the gentle calm of that sunset in the Northern wastes. In the evening light the huts looked quite black, as though they had been boiled in pitch.
When he entered the dug-out, bringing with him the evening light, he was met by the smell of poverty, by miserable food, miserable clothes and miserable bedding, by a warm, suffocating dampness that was filled with smoke.
Then his father emerged from the darkness. The expression on his thin face, in his handsome eyes, was indescribable.
He flung his thin arms around his son’s neck. There was such pain in this plea for help, such trust, that Yershov could find only one response: he burst into tears.
Soon afterwards they visited three graves. Yershov’s mother had died during the first winter, his elder sister Anyuta during the second winter, and Marusya during the third.
Here, in this world of camps, the cemeteries and villages merged together. The same moss grew on the walls of wooden huts, on the sides of dug-outs, on the grave-mounds and on the tussocks in the bogs. Yershov’s mother and sisters would remain for ever beneath this sky – through dry winter frosts, through wet autumns when the soil of the cemetery swells as the dark bog encroaches.
Father and son stood there in silence, side by side. Then the father glanced up at his son and spread his hands helplessly as though to say: ‘May I be pardoned by both the living and the dead. I failed to save the people I loved.’
That night his father told his story. He spoke calmly and quietly. What he described coul
d only be spoken about quietly; it could never be conveyed by tears or screams.
On a small box covered with newspaper stood some food and a half-litre of vodka Yershov had brought as a present. The old man talked while his son sat beside him and listened. He talked about hunger, about people from the village who’d died, about old women who had gone mad, about children whose bodies had grown lighter than a chicken or a balalaika.
He described their fifty-day journey, in winter, in a cattle-wagon with a leaking roof; day after day, the dead had travelled on alongside the living. They had continued the journey on foot, the women carrying their children in their arms. Yershov’s mother had been delirious with fever. They had been taken to the middle of the forest where there wasn’t a single hut or dug-out; in the depths of winter they had begun a new life, building camp-fires, making beds out of spruce-branches, melting snow in saucepans, burying their dead . . .
‘The will of Stalin,’ he said without the least trace of anger or resentment. He spoke as simple people speak about a force of destiny, a force that knows no weakness or hesitation.
Yershov returned from leave and sent a petition to Kalinin, begging him to act with supreme, unprecedented mercy, to pardon an innocent old man and allow him to come and live with his son. Before his letter even reached Moscow, Yershov was summoned before the authorities; he had been denounced for making his journey to the Urals.
After being discharged from the army, he went to work on a building-site. He wanted to save some money and then join his father. Very soon, however, he received a letter from the Urals informing him of his father’s death.
On the second day of the war, Lieutenant Yershov was called up.
During the battle for Roslavl his battalion commander was killed; Yershov took command. He rallied his men, launched a counterattack, won back the ford and secured the withdrawal of the heavy artillery belonging to the General Staff reserves.
Life and Fate Page 39