by Ben Pastor
Little does she know. Far from being her “little soldier”, in a month I’ve been able to do most of the planning for the regiment, to be called Cavalry Regiment Gothland, bearing as its insignia the leaping horseman of my 1st Division (not the horse’s head like Regiments Middle and South), plus the clover leaf of its parent unit, the 161st ID. Out of the 27 officers slated to fill the commanding positions, I have thus far managed to pull together 18, from the many places where they ended up after our 1st Cavalry Division was disbanded late in ’41. Except for one, so far all readily expressed the willingness to come. The senior non-coms (Regimental Sergeant Major Nagel foremost among them; I’m ready to insist with Gen. von Groddeck – and even Field Marshal von Manstein – that his presence is imperative) are in the works. As for the troopers, I trust my officers will do a good job of recruiting. It’s inevitable that a number of locals will be necessary, both as scouts and interpreters; four of us officers speak Russian, although I’m the only one technically qualified as an interpreter. I pointed out to Lt. Colonel von Salomon that it is preferable to have ethnic Germans. If we fight under our byname for Ukraine, “Land of the Goths”, it is only right. The problem is, a good number of Russia’s Germans have been transferred to the Warthegau. Others have fought for the Soviets and were made prisoners: these I don’t trust and I’d rather do without. Cossacks are much prized, but I don’t particularly care for their methods. I am and remain a German cavalryman: swashbuckling, sabre-rattling and hard drinking aren’t what I’m looking for. Am I being difficult, at this stage of the war? Well, I may be difficult, but it is my regiment, and within reason it is at my discretion (and good judgement) that it must come into being.
Driving from the Bespalovka camp back to Merefa, Bora changed his mind about Krasny Yar, and decided to take a detour there. He travelled along a dirt lane, straight and white like a parting in the hair, between fields of new grass where larks sang and quails called out with their three notes, clear like water drops. Were it not for the skeletons of Soviet trucks and the cannibalized remains of other vehicles by the roadway, it would have seemed a peaceful landscape. Silos and low roofs, long metal sheds, stables and tractor shelters pointed to the presence of collective farms, mostly abandoned during the fighting at winter’s end. Only stray dogs lived there now, which German soldiers, depending on their mood, shot dead or took along as mascots. Occasionally, farm boys stared from behind the fences. Krasny Yar lay beyond, an unidentified spot on the horizon no road sign pointed to. Bora had driven past it when going elsewhere, without stopping.
When he arrived, the impression of dislike he’d had driving through earlier was confirmed. The destitute hamlet and the wooded patch where corpses had been turning up bore the same name, yet the place wasn’t beautiful – krasny – at all, and neither was it enough of a ravine to call it a yar. A piece of sloping ground at most, at the end of a dirt road passable only as far as a fork that diverged widely. On the left, the trail died amid the handful of crumbling huts. On the right hand, what trace there was had ceased to exist, ploughed by tanks that had left behind track marks as deep as graves. The edge of the woods bristled a couple of hundred metres beyond, where the earth rose into a weary swell and then sank.
Bora’s rugged personnel carrier could negotiate the tracts of even space remaining across the fields, but seeing German soldiers in the village, he stopped at the fork, and after surveying the edge of the wood through his field glasses, he left the vehicle and walked towards them. Infantrymen, which put him at ease. Here was where one could just as likely find men of the 161st ID or SS belonging to Das Reich, whose area of control extended behind the infantry sector and west to the city of Kharkov.
The infantrymen saluted. Two had taken off their summer tunics and were drinking from their canteens. Another was putting away a folding shovel. The non-com among them came closer. “Going into the Yar, Herr Major? Flies’ll eat you alive,” he commented drily. “We just buried another.”
Bora rolled down his shirtsleeves, buttoning the cuffs to reduce the surface available to insects. “Who was it this time?”
“An old Russki peasant as far as we can tell, Herr Major. The head was missing – badly chopped off, too.”
The patrol belonged to the 241st Reconnaissance Company of the 161st ID, newly strung out from north to south on a strip of land that ran with a slight elevation from north-west to south-east. The non-com showed Bora the fresh burial, and related the rumours about the “weird deaths” that circulated among the troops. “Comrades from other patrols report stuff disappearing around here. Shirts, socks, cans of boot grease, all in full daylight. And inside the Yar you orient yourself by dead reckoning, because compasses malfunction. The Russkis claim the place is haunted. Not that I believe any of this nonsense, Herr Major, ’cause the Russkis will try to spook us if they can’t do anything else. Fact is, the Russkis don’t like it at Krasny Yar either.”
“Tell me more about the man you buried.”
“Peasant clothes, barefooted, with the long hanging-out shirt they wear out here, hands tied behind his back with an old piece of wire, half rusted through. We could have left him where he was, but my sister’s a nun; I thought we ought to bury him even if he’s a Red.” The non-com gladly accepted a cigarette (Bora did not smoke these days, but carried a pack to offer occasionally). “In the rotten farms around here there’s just old folks and kids, Herr Major. The farm boys come begging, but the old cross themselves if you mention Krasny Yar. Some of us end up doing it on purpose, to see them react – it’s pretty funny. In the woods, nothing worth reporting other than the dead man. Coming back we saw one of the farm boys had followed us, and fired into the air to make him stay away. That scared him off, which is better than ending up dead, too. Seems the Russkis have been telling stories about this place for years. They go a long way to avoid it and have done so forever; the old folks say it was already this way when they were children.”
Bora glanced back at the line of trees. “I’m going in. Keep an eye on my vehicle, will you?”
“Yessir. We won’t be on our way for another hour and a half.”
“Good.” Bora checked his watch. “It’s 16.00 hours now; I’ll be back before 17.00.”
The non-com squashed the cigarette butt against the breech of his rifle. “By the way, sir, after the burial the priest trekked in there.”
“Which priest?”
“The batty one: the Russian.”
“Father Victor?”
“The one from Losukovka.”
“Victor Nitichenko, that’s him.” Bora turned, heading for the Yar.
The small woods rose up suddenly out of the grassy expanse. Here there were none, and there they were, trees that grew thick at once, disorderly as they’d surfaced from among the stumps of the old ones, cut years before. Bora had thus far kept away on purpose, pushing this place and the events that had occurred here to the edge of his mind, because he had other things to worry about. But Krasny Yar and the Krasny Yar dead did not quite go away; their presence remained perceptible.
“Keep straight ahead,” the non-com had indicated, even if “straight” in the woods does not mean much. In a few minutes, however, following what seemed to be a trail left by small animals – or by elves, if the woods had been enchanted – Bora realized that in fact he could almost walk in an unswerving line. Out east, as in the days of the German tribesmen and Romans battling at Teutoburg, forests were measured in hours, or days. Walking directly (not while reconnoitring, when the going was much slower), this was at most a couple of hours’ worth of woodland, yet within its boundaries had thus far died five – no, six people.
Bora knew that some of the murders dated to the last occupation of the area by German troops. It had been local krest’yane – farmers who hadn’t been killed, deported, or who hadn’t fled in two years of war – who reported the disappearance of this or that relative, a fact in itself that made it unlikely the missing had joined the partisans. In every case the wo
ods, or the fields immediately around them, were the last places where the victims had been seen; and Krasny Yar was where their bodies were found by searchers.
It was true what he’d been told: the magnetic needle trembled and gyrated. Eventually Bora put the compass away. According to the non-com, the mutilated corpse was discovered about a kilometre into the wood from where he’d entered (“always leave the patch of firs to your right. The spot’s on the rise with the lightning-blasted tree, near the hollow”). It must be close to a kilometre now. The firs were there, dark green. No rise, no tree and no hollow yet in sight. Fallen branches snapped under his boots; a tangle of creepers which had grown rank since the snow melt shot up through the first cleft in the ice. Wet spots, spongy and treacherous, were betrayed by the capricious mosses around them. Bora bypassed them to regain the elfish trail. Common birds called from distant trees. The soldiers before him had advanced in a broken line; Bora’s expert eye read small signs in the bruised greenery showing how they had fanned out.
After a short time, in the thicket to his right, he spotted something moving, progressing against the dark of the ragged firs. Or not progressing, exactly: something that swayed, stealthily passing from one point to another. The Losukovka priest, he told himself, the one from Our Lady of the Resurrection of the Dead, Nitichenko. He’d come to pay his respects to Bora at his arrival in Merefa, because he now lived with his mother by the pilgrimage church in nearby Oseryanka.
Russian priests were specialists at recognizing the authority of the moment; and besides, it had been the German Army that had allowed him to reopen his Ukrainian rite church, and to say mass. “Poor among the poor, called to serve at a great distance from my parish church, in Ostroh and Staraya Kerkove, Krasnaya Polyana and Sloboda Solokov…” For no specific reason, Bora did not care for him. It was not surprising that he moved so cautiously. It was the clergy’s way in this country. It is the attitude so many of us have in life, Bora thought. But not mine. He didn’t want to give the priest the satisfaction of thinking he could spy unseen, but didn’t feel like calling his name out loud either. He kept an eye on the black shadow in the trees while he continued steadily to the slope where he’d just noticed the blasted tree. Split and torn through, it leant over one of those hollows found in wooded areas not far from rivers (the Udy bordered Krasny Yar to the north-west): a pit like the hole that leads to hell, a magic kingdom, or a treasure cave. Thinking in mythical terms comes easy in a place like this.
The rise sat in a blade of afternoon sun that cut through the foliage at a slant. Flies reeled in the light undisturbed; great clusters of them buzzed above the blood-soaked ground. Bora climbed the rise and slackened his pace. He chased the insects before reaching the edge of the hollow, but the flies hovered around him. In the snarl of grass and creepers, he noticed a coarse wooden button on the ground, which he picked up and pocketed. There were traces all around like those made by boars when they root for food, digging with their tusks in the dead leaves. They most likely pointed to a struggle at the time of the murder; or else they’d been left by the soldiers as they recovered the body or uselessly searched for the missing head. Where they’d hauled it out of the woods – an uncommon mercy there and then – the forest floor was equally discomposed.
The idea that a severed head lay somewhere near was strangely disquieting for one who’d driven fear into corners unreachable by reason. Not that Bora thought he ought to be afraid. It was a near-superstitious disgust for the blind eye, the dead jaw, the symbolic meaning of a bloody skull separated from the torso. In Khartoum, my great-grandfather’s head was exposed by the Mahdi’s followers for days. It was Great-grandmother Georgina who travelled there alone ten years later to demand the skull, still on display in the residence of Abd Allah. She took it along in her little Victorian trunk, under the admiring escort of the Mahdi’s successor, who – seeing his offer of a jewel refused – asked her to marry him, and was turned down.
The odour of blood was imperceptible in the open, although there must have been plenty of it spilt. In the springtime grass, flies formed hairy knots, sucked what they still could from the soaked earth; dispersed by a sweep of Bora’s arm, they landed on him, but preferred the dead man’s blood. The non-com spoke of the Yar as being shunned, but Bora could have said that no place was off limits, much less safe from war in Ukraine; it would be worse in a few weeks, as it had been a few weeks earlier. The cycle of war around Kharkov had the inexorable nature of a pendulum. “The other bodies, who found those? Do we know?” he’d enquired.
The non-com had shrugged, puffing on his cigarette. “They say the priest found one. The others, sir, I wouldn’t know.”
I’ll have to send out Kostya to ask around. At a prudent distance from him, the shadow to Bora’s right hesitated, hanging like a black tatter forgotten on the washing line.
“Victor Panteleievich!” Bora called finally. “Father Victor, come out.”
Nitichenko heard him, but did not react. Perhaps he was annoyed at having been discovered; perhaps he was afraid. Bora resorted to the usual gesture adopted when the locals did not listen to him, which was to unlatch his pistol holster. It was a calm movement, little more than a transfer of the right hand towards the left hip, but it usually had the desired result. The priest picked his steps through the trees, emerging into the open at the edge of the hollow. He saluted with exaggerated humility, looking up and sideways as cats do when they study a rival before deciding whether to attack or turn tail.
Without staring directly at his feet, Bora noticed the priest had no shoes on. The first and last time they had met, Father Victor had been wearing calf-high boots that creaked at every step, most likely worn for the occasion. Perhaps he usually went barefoot; or else there were other reasons why he chose not to wear footwear that might give him away in this wood.
“Povazhany Major,” he said in a contrite tone, “I came to say a prayer for this poor Christian’s soul.”
“We don’t even know that he was a poor Christian,” Bora replied. “He could be a committed atheist, or a political commissar.” In Russian the word “Christian” merely referred to a peasant, but Bora was irritated by the priest’s attitude.
“Whoever he was, povazhany Major, he was dreadfully punished for his sins.”
“Oh yes? How do we even know that? That he was a sinner, I mean.”
“We’re all sinners before God.”
“That’s true. So he wasn’t one of your parishioners?”
Father Victor, wearing his long hair tied in a ruffled ponytail in the old manner, answered that he hadn’t seen the corpse close up and didn’t believe so; even if – he abjectly added – the number of those who came to hear mass even from far away had grown after the Germans’ return.
“Who told you there had been another murder in the woods?”
“I dreamt it at night, esteemed Major, as clear as a picture, just as I dreamt the other one; and that’s why I came here with the permission of your men” (those of the 241st Company were not at all Bora’s men) “as I did a year ago for that poor daughter of God with a cut throat.”
“And who was she?”
“A half-wit girl from the Kusnetzov farm, south of Schubino.”
Bora checked the time on his watch. “And the other bodies? In Merefa I heard of search parties organized to seek those missing from nearby farms, and how they were all found here one way or another.”
The priest moodily raked the hair back over his ears, looking elsewhere. “This has been going on a long time – a long time. We don’t know how many died in all. Women, children… Those killed since the war started, I can show you where they were found. Even if in my dreams I’ve seen them moved, dragged elsewhere from where they died.”
“Moved by whom?”
“The dreams didn’t say, povazhany Major. But it is an unclean spirit that dwells in this wood, and has for a whole generation. Maybe more than a generation.”
Sure, sure, we need to hear this nonsense t
oo. Bora latched his pistol holster. “I want to take some photos. Show me where the other corpses were found, before it gets dark.”
Other times – ever since coming to Russia – he’d had to deal with superstitious priests, more gullible than the oldest among their followers. They filled people’s heads with tales and lies, they populated nature with angelic and diabolical forces worse than in the days of the tsars. They were myopic, bigoted and dangerous. On one occasion he’d reached the point – he who was otherwise so measured – of slapping a deacon for denouncing as a partisan dispatcher a poor farm girl who’d refused herself to him.
TUESDAY 4 MAY, MEREFA
The following day, Bora had once more relegated Krasny Yar to the back of his mind. He had chores to do in Merefa and Kharkov. First, however, came a meeting with the 161st Division chief of operations, Lieutenant Colonel Benno von Salomon, who acted as liaison between the division and Bora’s cavalry regiment-in-progress. Von Salomon travelled often nowadays, and this morning he was in Merefa after conferring with District Commissioner Stark, whose office was just out of town.
Von Salomon, with his long bloodhound face and the slow, precise lawyer’s speech he carried over from civilian life, failed only on principle to formally grant Bora’s request, promising all the same that he’d get German “or at the most, ethnic German” troopers within a reasonable time. They briefly discussed how to procure cold bloods – mounts used to harsh climates – and whether some of Bora’s former colleagues might be interested in returning from the Panzer Corps to the cavalry. “Not that I expect it,” Bora admitted, “but personally, if I had to choose between a desk job in the armoured troops and front-line duty in a saddle, I’d have no doubts.”
