2
The tale goes that Chuikov, who as I said was “literary,” happened to be studying the enemy troop dispositions on an evening between the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. Discovering some flaw in the German array, he smiled, showed the commissar, and recited this stanza from Marina Tsvetaeva: You can’t withstand me, for I’m everywhere / at dawn, beneath the earth, in breath, in bread! I’m omnipresent. That’s how I’ll win / your lips!
The commissar laughed. He liked Chuikov, admired his achievements, and saw no reason to report this weakness for an unwholesome poet (a suicide at that). A more germane concern was: How had Tsvetaeva infected him?
Elena Konstantinovskaya, so I’m told, happened to hear the I’ll win your lips! although once again, how seems to be the issue. In fact, what was she doing there at all? Granted, she was a professional translator; could she have been employed in the interrogation of captured Fascists? One can’t assume that her husband’s assignment had corrected itself to include her—spouses lived and worked apart in those war years. On the other hand, why not assume it? The husband, R. L. Karmen, did have power, which the phrase documentary cameraman understates, and he would have pulled any string for her. He would have had her sent for in a white Zis limousine.
3
Outside, steam ascended from the porridge on the massive wheeled stove. Two soldiers were shaving one another in a pan of dirty snow-water. The tank commander with the pet porcupine was dreaming an erotic dream about Elena Konstantinovskaya. Elena herself had almost finished verifying her translation of an intercepted message from Ninth German Panzer Division. Her husband was away, interviewing a woman from our Forty-sixth Guards Night Light Bomber Regiment; she would make a perfect heroine for a Sovkinozhurna newsreel, and he told her so, with his ingenuous crooked grin. The pilot giggled shyly. She was having the time of her life. Elena sealed translation, original and all her notes in an envelope, which she then signed across the flap, smoked a German cigarette, buttoned up her jacket, put on her fur hat, checked her hair, drew back the flap of her tent, and set out to deliver her work to a very friendly communications officer who insisted that Elena call her Natalya Kovalova, not Lieutenant Danchenko. Natalya Kovalova was of course a representative of “the organs,” so everybody shunned her. Undoubtedly she knew that Elena had been taken away back in 1936. Elena hated her.
Just as she passed General Chuikov’s tent, she heard a happy voice, obviously his, sing out: I’ll win your lips!
She had already met him several times. What she remembered most was his exhausted face.
4
We each had some special prize we were hoping to seize in Berlin. In Karmen’s case, it was the sleepwalker’s desk at the Reich Chancellery. It was supposed to be inlaid with Medusa’s head. He would have loved to put his feet up on it as he planned out films about our victory.—What he actually ended up with was a street sign for Unter den Linden. Doesn’t that say something about life?
(Truth to tell, in keeping with his profession he was fascinated by signs, and often collected them. One specimen he’d remark upon to the end of his career stood in the ruins of a village we were to liberate in 1944. The enemy would leave that sign with two arrows especially for him:
TO THE HOMELAND: ORSCHA-MINSK-WARSCHAU
and
TO THE FRONT: WJASMA-MOSHAISK-MOSKAU
It was a marker to be moved at will, as the enemy homeland moved. By the time Karmen added it to his collection, the Reich’s border had already shrunk back past Warsaw.)
The troops were dreaming of Nazi gold. They’d heard that it came from Jews’ teeth, but they didn’t care about that; they just wanted to get home alive and rich.
Chuikov, so I’m informed, dreamed of a week of nights with Elena in a lavish apartment, perhaps Göring’s or Ribbentrop’s. He was a surprisingly sentimental man. When Klavdia Sulzhenko sang “The Blue Kerchief,” he wept. His designs on Elena partook of this same romantic character. She was married, but why not? His orderly had laughingly reported finding a nurse’s fur-lined mitten on the floor of Karmen’s tent; that had been the day before E. E. K.’s arrival. Stocky, slab-faced and poorly educated, Chuikov had no particular illusions about his desirability; on the other hand, the prestige he’d earned at Stalingrad allowed him to help himself to a good many things he wanted.
As for Elena, she could almost see herself stroking Chuikov’s dark hair (he was only forty-three), but not quite, for she was really more interested in women than in new men, and she had no expectation of being in Berlin anyhow. That self-satisfied, catlike sensuality of hers, which in my opinion (Comrade Alexandrov speaking) is highly becoming in a woman, had lured any number of adventurers to heartbreak, but it could also make do quite well with itself. She had once made a remark which crushed her husband for a long time. But it was all his fault. Self-pityingly, and for exactly the same reason that decades after she’d divorced him he would return, whitehaired but still slim, to raise the cine-camera to his face in Toledo—he wanted to record every place he’d ever been with her!—he sometimes insisted on expressing his version of their past. It was one of his follies that there was an old Elena and a new Elena: the old one had been loving and ardent; the new one wasn’t. This comparison invariably exasperated Elena into an icy rage. And now he was talking on and on about the nights when they used to make love. Elena smiled, staring into space. In despair he described the deep connection which he could have sworn they’d shared at those moments. He wanted to know—he needed to know!—whether she’d felt it, too.
I don’t want to hurt your feelings, replied Elena calmly.
But I need to know!
No. I’ve never felt what you describe. For me it’s just a bodily sensation.
But don’t you—
It’s just manipulation, said Elena indifferently.
5
On the next day, Roman Karmen and his wife were invited to dinner with Chuikov. The commissar was there; so was the tank commander who kept the pet porcupine. The porcupine was unfortunately absent.
Not everyone gets to dine in a general’s tent! But since a commander must occasionally show himself to his frontline troops, we have a high regard for cinema and its associated apparatchiks—R. L. Karmen, for instance. As a matter of fact, we liked this loyal Soviet artist. In peacetime he had recorded the inauguration of the very first blast furnace in our Soviet land—the great facility at Krasnogorsk. There were tears in the men’s eyes when that first fiery stream of liquid metal came pouring out. Karmen was there and recorded it all on film. He was sufficiently confident in himself to refrain from filming the official ceremony, his ostensible subject. Our verdict: highly effective. We’d been similarly impressed by Karmen’s incredible images of our silhouetted troops leaning forward, distorted like evening shadows or Rodchenko sculptures, black-on-white by the thousands as they swarmed to complete the ring and finish off Paulus in Operation Saturn.
As for the wife, she also made an impression. She wore the Order of the Red Star.
They all knew the brave cameraman Pogozelyi, so they talked about him. This led Karmen to tell the tale of the woman sniper at Stalingrad, in the Orlovka sector, to be precise, who’d taken a bullet to the heart, coughed, slowly raised her rifle and sighted through it, squeezed off one more shot (which, however, flew wild), and fell back stone dead. Was it true? Why shouldn’t it be true?—She had long dark hair like Elena, said her husband, and Elena can do anything.
Elena smiled and stared at the wall.
Whereas all the Fascists are cowards, said the commissar. You witnessed Paulus’s interrogation. How I wish I could have been there! Did he break down immediately?
Well, said Karmen thoughtfully, it’s true that when he lit a cigarette his hand was shaking.
That made the commissar happy; Roman Karmen always knew how to please us.
No one wanted to stop talking about Stalingrad. Our victory was less than a month old. With cheerful eagerness, Karmen told how it had been on th
at first cold night—oh, it was very, very cold!—when the German Fascists marched into captivity by the thousands.—You know, that crunching sound hovered in the air! he said with a smile. It reminded me of an enormous waterfall over the meadows of Privolskye. Did you have the same reaction, Comrade General?
Chuikov nodded tolerantly, staring at Elena.
6
Roman Lazarevich, said the commissar, I’ve heard that last year you spoke at the Conference on American and British Cinema.
So I did, said Karmen. That would have been in August.
And what did our Allies have to say?
I’m sure you can imagine, said Karmen with a smile.
The cone of lamplight brought Chuikov’s decorations to a soft white sheen. I’ve heard it said that he was now one of Comrade Stalin’s favorite generals.—Please eat, he said.
As a matter of fact, aside from the tea and the bread it was all American food: G-rations, to be exact, which Lend-Lease had brought us. There was even American butter! And so the conversation naturally turned to various presents received from the Allies. They’d sent us hand-me-down Aerocobras and Spitfires; the Aerocobras weren’t so bad. Their tanks were useless, especially the kind the British gave us, which we called tombs for seven brothers. The jeeps were better than anything we could have imagined.
And didn’t you also film Churchill last year? asked the commissar.
Yes, at Vnukovo Airport. He and Harriman were in Moscow to negotiate the second front.
Elena laid her hand on his in proud encouragement, so he went on: I filmed him close up as he reviewed his honor guard.
What did Churchill say, Roman Lazarevich?
Oh, that he was fully resolved to continue the struggle . . . Then he raised his fingers in that V-sign of his.
Karmen’s ingenuous crooked grin had never seemed so charming as in that instant. Everybody burst out laughing at Churchill and the Allies.
7
The spring thaw was just beginning. We had straightened out our front, excepting the Kursk Salient, whose bulge ran favorably westward. When the snow had finished turning to mud, and the mud to dust, then our Southwestern and Southern Fronts were to liberate Slavyansk and Mariupol, thereby positioning us to destroy the German Fascist Army Group Center. But it was hard, so hard to shatter that German magic which turns villages into mud and corpses! Last month we’d liberated Kharkov, and now the Fascists had gotten it back again.
No, he’s von Paulus, the commissar was insisting. All of those people are.
Chuikov sat morose and weary. Elena drank her tea. It felt very late.
The commissar was acquainted with Boris Sher, who had been Karmen’s assistant cameraman at Stalingrad. They also both knew a woman named Ekaterina at Moscow Newsreel Studio. Neither Elena nor Chuikov knew her.
The most important thing is not to forget any detail, said Karmen. At Stalingrad I tried to remember everything—not simply to record it, but to remember it! And I know that once we get to Germany I’ll do the same.
In that case, be sure and remember the second front! replied the commissar with a horrid chuckle.
Startled, Karmen blinked. He seemed to see a frozen, grimacing corpse in the snow, with a dead tank on the horizon.
8
Chuikov, pale and ghastly with fatigue, asked his guests to excuse him; he had to take some rest.—In other words, he added, I’m fully resolved to continue the struggle!
Everybody laughed, and Karmen made that hilarious V-sign.
9
A few days later, Karmen set out with a small detachment, including the tank commander who kept the pet porcupine, so that the remnant of a Panzer group which had been hiding in the woods amidst the shells of their own broken tanks—fifty men at most—could be captured and their capture recorded. Log barricades on those snowy Russian roads, frozen bodies, it was all old news. But Roman Karmen would make it significant. Moreover, he’d meet his deadline.
He’d been hoping to film Chuikov himself, but that individual seemed overtired. It would be easier to film the Front commander, Malinovsky, whom Karmen already knew from the defense of Madrid. And the commissar, who seemed exceptionally friendly, had promised to introduce him to one of Chuikov’s most photogenic subordinates: Major-General N. F. Batyuk, Seventy-ninth Guards Rifle Division.
He longed for Chuikov’s approval. He worshiped him, really. He’d dealt the Fascists an unyielding blow! Leaping, running at a crouch, Karmen would spend the war trying to live up to men such as Chuikov. Have you ever seen Dziga Vertov’s seven-reel declaration of love for the women of our Soviet military forces? Roman Karmen wanted to create something like that. And if he couldn’t make seven reels, he’d make one. Soon he’d begin work on his film “The Battle of Orlov.” (New T-34s swarm over the curving streetcar tracks, while civilians run between them; they’re all aimed for the front!) His newsreel from Operation Citadel would explain both in words and in a shockingly dangerous camera sequence how the enemy’s vast eight-wheeled “Ferdinand” tank-destroyers were effective at frontal assaults with their eighty-eight-millimeter gun, but vulnerable to being attacked from the side or swarmed by our Red infantry. He was one of us; he actually flew aerial missions against the enemy. He filmed; he released the bomb-release lever with his own hands.
The tank commander with the pet porcupine told him a story about something horrible which had happened in ’41, amidst the giant caltrops in the snow around Moscow, and Karmen pretended to listen as he stared ahead, remembering how Elena had told him in her soft voice of perfect gentleness: I can’t honestly say that I do feel any hope.—He couldn’t stop hearing that. And all the time she was so gentle with him; her gentleness was as unreal as the second front.—And so they came into the woods.
Combat! The gun lunged forward, replicating the flash of a concert pianists bow. Fascists in the round turrets popped their heads out; they were centaurs. The tank commander with the pet porcupine was almost killed, but we rescued him. Roman Karmen filmed it.
10
Meanwhile, Chuikov, gripping the corner of the map table between thumb and forefinger, kept thinking about Elena.
She came to him with a gramophone record of Shostakovich’s Opus 40, which Chuikov found mostly romantic and pleasant, although some passages of the third movement were beyond him.
What was it about her? He could have had one of the laughing, big-breasted nurses anytime he wanted . . .
There in his secret world, which resembled one of those stove-warmed boxes on sleds which keep our wounded alive on the way from the front line to the dressing station, she might possibly have given herself to him, but her effect on him made him uneasy; he couldn’t take her all in at once; just as the weak glare of the hanging lamp illuminates the center of the map, our immediate battle zone, more than it does the corners, so he perceived and experienced her, wanting to know her entirely, but only one man had ever been able to do that. There’s something about her, he kept thinking, but he didn’t know what it was.
He was only lonely and tired; that’s all. He almost never got to rest! Stalingrad had failed to break his health, but even now he desired sleep more than anything. And soon the ground would have thawed sufficiently to resume serious operations. Von Manstein had deflected our spearheads from the Dnieper and recaptured Kharkov; we’d have to rectify that. On 17 July, he’d take part in the Izyum-Barvenkov operation to assist our Voronezh Front’s southern flank against the German Fascist Operation Citadel.
He asked her how she won her Order of the Red Star, and she smiled with her red, red lips, lit a cigarette and said: It’s a secret. He liked that. She asked him about his own Order of the Red Star, and he said: I won it on the second front! She smiled again. She reached for another cigarette, and he leaned forward to light it for her. And that was all that happened between them.
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