Her hair was as dark as the lamp-wire on the pallid tent-wall.
11
Karmen had come back looking cheerful and pleased with himself; he had German tobacco for Elena and a pair of black Zeiss binoculars for the commissar. Moreover, on the way back he’d shot footage of another indomitable peasant grandmother in her ruined house, baking bread in a tin made from a piece of a German airplane’s wing. He took off his jacket; he hung up his grubby astrakhan hat. Then, his smile already becoming uncertain, he took a step toward her. But Elena was as silent as a steppe pony.
It did not do to transgress Elena’s silences. For instance, where had she been before they met in Spain? Her taciturnity about that contained within its snowy forests palisades and watchtowers, chains and gangways glimpsed through the gaps in its steel fences. Elena’s silences were warnings all the more fearful for their steadiness, I’d almost say tranquility. Oh, her beautiful face with its gentleness, its unmoving gentleness!
Once upon a time, R. L. Karmen, just back from filming a sports parade on Red Square—young women in lyotards hoisting giant Cyrillic letters over their shoulders, and overtopping them Comrade Stalin’s portrait (the women’s white shoes flashed when they marched; his lens had caught that)—took his wife to an art exhibition in Leningrad, not the retrospective of 1932, for he hadn’t even known Elena then; all the same, one artist who figured importantly on the walls, through the efforts of a certain Otto Nagel, was the woman whom he had photographed at the Belorussian-Baltic Station, hoping that her portrait would be published in Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia. Oh, yes, our hopes! All the same, he still admired this K. Kollwitz; even today he thought that her monumental group portraits might afford new ideas for camera angles. (An example from 1965: One of our Red Army men feeds a smiling little Russian girl in “The Great Patriotic War,” directed by R. L. Karmen.)
Elena had already gone over to a corner of the room to browse through the monographs. Karmen followed her. Just as he came up to her, he saw her gazing calmly and beautifully at a page which quoted the artist as saying: I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production. Karmen felt a sensation of such extreme pain that he could hardly speak. Elena was conscious of him, of course; she knew that he was reading what she was reading; but later on, years later, he suspected that she had been oblivious of his pain; for who are we to think ourselves of such interest to others, even to our spouses, that they can truly read us? At the time it seemed to him that she was perfectly aware of his feelings, whose existence must naturally have been unpleasant to her, and that she calmly continued to be exactly what she was, knowing that this hurt him, distantly sorry for that, but certain above all that her nature neither could nor should be changed. He admired her steadiness; he hated and adored her; meanwhile he longed for each of them to be what neither could be; and all this happened in an instant, as they stood side by side reading I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production. That was how she was. That was who she was. And there was nothing he could do to satisfy her need for women.
But it wasn’t that at all! He really imagined that he could accept her being with any and every woman she chose, if only she were also fully present with him. That was what tortured him.
And at that moment he’d believed that Elena wasn’t bisexual at all, that her professed desires for other women were simply a smokescreen for her feelings for Shostakovich.
But maybe even that he didn’t believe; it might have been interpolated later; all he knew was that he and Elena, who now diverged so greatly in their desires to make love that the topic was agonizing for both of them, were standing side by side, reading something which reminded them both of that difference. Then Elena walked outside to smoke a cigarette. He did not follow her. Most likely she’d forgotten the moment immediately.
He never forgot. He remembered it now in this tent at Sixty-second Army Headquarters. His wife’s silence brought it back.
Elena went outside to smoke. Karmen leaning on his elbow as he sat at his desk, still wearing his jacket, looking pale and weary, preparing the shooting script.
12
After Stalingrad, the system of dual command had supposedly been abolished to reward the army: No longer would commissars dog our every breath. Epaulettes were introduced; there was even talk of allowing the troops to edit their own frontline newspapers. All the same, anyone who thought that the commissars were no longer dangerous was an innocent. (For instance—Comrade Alexandrov inserts this—all I had to do was pick up the telephone and two SMERSH operatives would be right over.)
And so perhaps the commissar was merely feeling bilious, or perhaps he was playing politics, but he was the one who told Karmen that his wife had visited Comrade General Chuikov, and there’d been music.
Karmen and the commissar were two men of the same breed. Their function was identical: to mobilize, encourage, strengthen, hearten. To do that, they had to portray things as they ought to be. And sometimes this made them very tired. We should not be surprised that they understood each other.
Where was Elena? Oh, she was over in Natalya Kovalova’s tent, translating something to do with thePanzer Division “Adolf Hitler,” something top secret. And Karmen thought: Very possibly she prefers Natalya Kovalova.
He sat with the commissar, getting drunk.—I remember what she used to do and what she won’t do now, he said.
The commissar slapped him on the back, poured him another glass, and said: Don’t let her get to you, Roman Lazarevich! As Comrade Stalin says, feelings are women’s concern. Is it true that you’ve been to Comrade Stalin’s dacha?
Last summer, said Karmen wearily. At Zubalovo.
You’re a very lucky man, Roman Lazarevich. And did Comrade Stalin drink with you?
No, but the light was on in his study.
So. Well, all the same, I don’t mind saying I envy you for that. By the way, what did Elena Evseyevna win her Red Star for?
Oh, bravery. She’s very brave, very honest. But at the same time . . .
Finally, to distract him, the commissar tried to inspire him with our forthcoming victory, which would surely occur by the beginning of 1944 at the latest—or would if our so-called “Allies” would only open the second front.
Sulkily, Karmen muttered that the Allies reminded him of Elena, who kept always saying I understand while making no move to do anything about the situation.
13
Then came Kursk, Maidanek, Bucharest, Poznan. Every bullet bounced off Karmen’s creased and oil-splotched fur-lined jacket.
Elena never got to Berlin of course; she never saw her former lover, Lina, not to mention the misty ruins and rusty steel beams along the Teltowkanal. Whatever became of her? Her story ended in the same soft secrecy as Barcelona used to hide in on nights that the Condor Legion was coming—all dark, except for little blue nightlights! That was the heart of Elena Konstantinovskaya.
As for the second front, by the time our Allies finally opened the second front, who cared? It’s true that they died by the thousands on the beaches of Normandie. But we’d already died by the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, it’s objectively clear that their only reason for invading France at that late date was to deny us total victory in Germany.
Subsequent to the Fascist capitulation, which is to say some three weeks after Chuikov had been named a Hero of the Soviet Union for the second time, we immediately expropriated all items of value in our sector—machine tools, wristwatches, window-sashes, and of course whichever women our Red Army men fancied (an incendiary shell usually brought them out of their cellars). We even took the street signs—why not? So it went, right through the first winter. In February 1946 a great wind blew through the rubble, after which one of us found a page of a letter lying in the snow, or perhaps it wasn’t a letter at all, just a sheet of paper with crazy Russian words on it, especially the name Elena written over and over—oh, it was so crazy!—and because he could not read, he brought it to Headqua
rters just in case it might be some anti-Soviet provocation. Comrade General Chuikov never saw it, of course. He was much too important for such trifles. But many of us did turn it through our scarred hands. Only our commissar was shrewd enough to recognize Roman Karmen’s writing. ‣
OPERATION CITADEL
The German method is really rooted in the German character, which—contrary to all the nonsense talked about “blind obedience”—has a strong streak of individuality and—possibly as part of its Germanic heritage—finds a certain pleasure in taking risks.
—Field-Marshal von Manstein (1958)
To be a German means to do a thing for its own sake.
—Concentration camp commandant (1933)
1
From beneath the filigreed gates of Prague, triple columns of us came marching, with our rifles pointing upward and our faces as hard as the eagles carved on the Moltke Bridge. From Berlin we came, passing through the Brandenburg Gate; behind us, the victory angel atop the Siegessäule cast golden light upon our helmets. (Have you ever seen her, with her great fluted axeheads of wing, her raised scepter, billowing dress, and outstretched garland, everything of gold? She’s our queen of eagles.) From Warsaw we also came, not so many as were needed, for an uprising had broken out in the Jewish ghetto and we had to neutralize that; nevertheless, some of us did come from Warsaw, others from Budapest and Bucharest; many came from reserve pools north and south by the front line; from everywhere in the Reich we came, and off we all went to Kursk. Goebbels had just introduced the slogan Total war, the shortest war, because death was coming back to us, singing in the East with the wailing voice of a Katyusha rocket. Our only hope lay in the sleepwalker, who’d already assumed full responsibility for the disaster at Stalingrad.
Grave as the loss of Sixth Army certainly is, said Field-Marshal von Manstein very carefully, lacing his fingers together, it still need not mean that the war in the East is irretrievably lost. We can force a stalemate even now—if we adapt to such a solution.
Whenever I consider this offensive, said the sleepwalker, not listening, my stomach turns over.
As for me, I felt uneasy, too, because even though we kept capturing them by the thousands and the tens of thousands, sending them back to the rear areas to be disposed of (at the military rifle range outside Dachau, we shot them in lots of five hundred), there were always more Russians! Everyone I knew had bad dreams. That enemy salient within which Marx and Engels had solved the national question, that salient at Kursk, how many Russians did it hide? We ourselves were fifty divisions, two tank brigades, three tank battalions, eight artillery gun battalions: nine hundred thousand men! But what’s any number, compared to infinity?
That’s why so few of us supported Operation Citadel. After all, we should have been easier on ourselves: it wasn’t our task to win; no one expected that of us. It was only our job to take the blame.
The day we unsealed our orders the sun was lemon yellow, like the armband of a Waffen-signals man. We came with our horses, tanks and motorcycles on the muddy roads; we assembled, waiting to hear the latest bad news. The smell of enemy wheat put us in mind of summer. Maybe the sleepwalker had dreamed up some way to reorganize our Kampfgruppen. Or could the V-weapons be ready at last? Rüdiger, who was from my home town, didn’t think so. Sometimes he sat beside me in our trench, rereading last month’s Signal magazine and shaking his head while I made sure that all my wires were nicely wound on their spools. The only feature he ever approved of was the double-page spread on Lisca Malbran. But what good would she have been in a trench? That was what Dancwart wanted to know. As you can imagine, Rüdiger had an answer. He’d seen her in “Young Heart,” which is a politically reliable E-film. He would have done anything to see her in “Between Two Fires,” but that film came and went while we marked months in the slaughter-field. Well, well; we were out of the trenches now; we’d reached jumpoff position, and the sleepwalker’s long-range guns peered over our tents.—It’ll be hot tomorrow, remarked our Rüdiger, shaking his head.—Then we invoked our bitter German idealism, such as it was, and came to attention, Achtung! Stillgestanden! The orders, which contained the words total and unparalleled, warned that the Red Army had deployed against us fifteen hundred antitank mines and seventeen hundred antipersonnel mines per kilometer of front, not to mention one point three million men. So now we knew exactly how large infinity was. In short, we must anticipate substantial counterattacks. Never mind. The new Tiger tanks would save us.
That was when the old war cripple came in from nowhere, begging to fight beside us; he remembered the days of horse-drawn guns under snowy trees—lost days, the days of ’41! It was summer now; we’d bought summer at the price of Sixth Army and four allied formations, not to mention the various lands we’d gained in 1942—all turned to ice! Well, so what? It was still summer.
Honestly, I don’t know how that far-faring cripple got through without movement orders. But, come to think of it, we weren’t even calling up fifty-year-olds yet, because Operation Citadel would set everything right. He was an old, old man, maybe seventy or more, blind in one eye, but he traveled fast on his crutch. When I think back on it now, it’s like a dream. And why did he choose us in particular? I was in Ninth Army, Forty-seventh Panzer Corps, Ninth Panzer Division, which by then was hardly winning any prizes. We were all of us as gaunt as antitank rounds in our field-grey cloaks and hats, our striped belts pulled tight, our grey helmets transforming our heads into bullets. We were hungry and sullen, doing little without direct orders, knowing that we would leave another forest of neat crosses here, with helmets hanging on some of them, and triangular roofs over a very few, all destined to be wrenched out of the mud once the Slavs took over. Even Private Volker, who’d sedulously tried to improve his mind by sightseeing in the various uncanny places we went, cranked up no enthusiasm for Kursk, which is noted primarily for its State Bank and the palaces of the Romodanov boyars. I remember how at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa he used to peer into every cottage before we torched it, hopeful to see evidence of anything beyond what we politely referred to as a certain form of existence. Rüdiger used to tell him: There’s no point. What could a Red possibly have that one of us would want? Even their Natashas are hideous! Do you want to see German beauty? Here’s my daughter’s photograph . . .—But Rüdiger didn’t understand. Volker wasn’t a souvenir hunter; he shared few qualities with Corporal Dancwart, who once crammed an entire tank full of embroidered peasant blouses. Volker—why am I talking about Volker? He’s dead. The last time I saw him get excited was months before Operation Citadel, when a direct hit from a Katyusha sent up our ammunition dump in beautiful fireworks. The boy often entertained me. His guidebook devoted two chapters to Moscow. The second chapter was all churches, so given what I know about Reds I can promise you that it was out of date; a couple of lines would have exhausted that topic after Stalin took over! Well, what’s the difference? Going to church won’t save you. Volker wanted to set foot in Saint Basil’s Cathedral not to be saved, but because its dome reminded him of a painted wooden top which he and his brother used to play with. That brother caught a bullet in the throat at Sebastapol. He died for our Reich. Did Volker want to pay back any Slavs for that? In my opinion, that wouldn’t have accorded with his nature; he was more interested in music. Once he remarked that he would have liked to be at the siege of Leningrad, just to hear Shostakovich’s new symphony! Such idealists aren’t long for this world. By the way, he was a very brave man, and in hand-to-hand combat the Reds avoided him; they feared his face. It’s a pity he never visited Moscow, which enjoys many amenities, so I’ve heard; Rüdiger spoke incorrectly; their Natashas aren’t trollish at all. And the Kremlin is adorned with red glass stars; I’d take one home if I could find the right sort for my Christmas tree. So why not Moscow? As soon as we’d tied off the salient and clanked into Kursk, no doubt we’d get there, because with the destruction of the Central Front and the Voronezh Front, only the Steppe Front and an infinite num
ber of other Fronts would stand in our way.
Now I wonder if Dancwart wasn’t correct. At least he got something; those embroidered blouses transformed themselves into schnapps, cigarettes and new Natashas (P-girls and U-maidens, I should say). But he bored me. His favorite proverb was: Keep riding until daybreak. And now Volker bored me, too. All he longed for was to get wounded again, as who didn’t?
Not this cripple! He wanted to be a hero. Can you imagine? In our national poem, when second-sighted Hagen warns Gunther not to ride to the country of the Huns, they name him a coward, so he angrily insists on sharing their doom. My psychoanalyst would call that compensation. The sleepwalker would call it a noble sacrifice. It might have been either or both, because the cripple was now informing us: You might not know it to look at me, but I was accepted into Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland!
Rüdiger shook his head, Gernot was as silent as a Russian civilian, while Dancwart, who’d once had a Slavic wife but did the right thing, looked up from the raw potato he was cutting rotten spots out of, and with genuine amazement inquired: Why in the world should we care?
Anyhow, chuckled the cripple, here I am. I’ve been fighting for Germany ever since we Aryanized the Hermann Tietz department store. Here we go again!
I remembered him then.—How’s your wife? I said.
He started wiping his eye then, and we got disgusted.
I was a telephonist; I sat there cranking my grey box. Operation Citadel was Operation Suicide, and I sincerely tried to warn him of that fact. Consider the enemy salient—half the size of England! They should have taken my discouragements into account when I came before the Denazification Court, but there’s another tale. Yes, I tried to weaken Hitler’s army—I was practically a member of the Resistance!—for I told the old man: Watch out for those T-34 wolfpacks!
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