by Ben Pastor
It was typical counterespionage pragmatism. Out of Bentivegni would come neither appreciation for Bora’s care in safely removing the defector and tank from the Donets, nor an acknowledgement that Khan might have had a better chance at Gehlen’s FHO camp or in Berlin.
For half a minute, maybe, the officers stood face to face in the windswept space without speaking. Pools of sunlight opened and closed on the runway. Far off, fighter planes from the home squadron, inside the hangars for maintenance, revved their engines, making the sound of giant hornets. Looking into things meant the risk of a collision course with the Leibstandarte and the RSHA. Bora listened to the angry sound from the hangars. What was it von Salomon had said about the captain in Zaporozhye who crowded flies in a jar until they fed on one another?
Under the cloth visor of the “standard cap”, Bentivegni’s big-boned face had a disillusioned serenity about it. “Close down the special detention centre, Major, before someone else does it for us. And send the men back to divisional headquarters for reassignment. Lost for lost, after they commandeered Khan Tibyetsky from us… You wouldn’t have taken any drastic steps of your own accord, would you?”
The suspicion was as offensive as when Mantau had first thrown it at him a few hours earlier. Bora did not blink an eye.
“Naturally no, Herr Oberst.”
“Not because he was your relative, you understand. I had to ask.” It was a natural segue for Bentivegni to say, “As things are, it was expedient that you insisted on pushing Platonov off the edge. None of us at Headquarters expected to get a single word out of him.”
“I didn’t actually get a single word out of him,” Bora admitted, “but he did fill out a good portion of the questionnaire.”
“Did his women come?”
“They came.”
“Unless there’s something that can be got out of them – I leave it to your judgement, including the methods you might use – send them back quickly.”
“Yes, sir. Selina Platonova supposedly has a degree in electrical engineering. I’m having it checked out.”
Bentivegni nudged the knapsack at his feet with the side of his boot, just short of a moderate kick. “These Soviet women! They’re either engineers or physicians, or else they drive tractors. If it turns out she possesses useful knowledge, we’ll see that she’s employed where we need her skills. There’s also a daughter, isn’t there? Fine: both of them will be detained from now on. We can’t have them go out and tell the world their relative died in our hands. Yes, Major Bora. Well, you should have thought about it. Once they had been informed, their personal freedom was forfeited.”
In his anxiety to bring Platonov to collaborate, Bora had disregarded this possibility. Without showing it, he now felt sick. “It might be equally practical to send them to the Fatherland as labourers, Herr Oberst.”
“I’m surprised at your insistence. They’ll be detained.” Unhurriedly, Bentivegni’s glance migrated to the camera hanging from Bora’s neck. “I see you are still taking photographs,” he observed.
“Yes, sir.” Bora was hoping for a comment of some kind, but none was forthcoming.
“Tell the pilot to refuel quickly, Major. I leave within the hour.”
The rest of the day brought no improvement. It had all fallen into Bora’s hands after Bentivegni left the scene without saying what steps he would take in Zossen, if any, giving him carte blanche here. It came down to a slight stress on words: “Solve the problem, Major, and tidy up afterwards.” Whatever Mantau’s prohibition, Bora did drive from the Aerodrome to west Kharkov, by the RSHA prison on Seminary Boulevard. From the corner of the church across the street, he saw the bodies of the two babushkas, hanging from the wrought-iron balcony of an old house nearby. They resembled bundles of rags from where he stood. How many times had he seen improvised gallows set up, ever since Poland? Hanging was commonplace; all units resorted to it. The merciful officers limited executions to what was necessary – because, more often than not, the Soviets didn’t take prisoners either. The two women, conscripted to empty slop buckets and clean floors, had gone by a tug of the rope beyond fear, mercy, anger, ideology. Beyond innocence and guilt. Envying them sounded excessive, but Bora suspected there were worse fates than hanging oblivious from iron bars.
He returned to Merefa at sundown after disbanding the crew of the special detention centre (they took Mina along) and returning the keys to divisional command – minus a set he kept for himself for future reference. The sentry and a frightened Kostya told him that panzer officers from Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had stopped by and asked for the povazhany Major. Bora, who always took along maps, documents and other papers he wanted to keep private, grew steadily angrier and also very worried. They hadn’t gone as far as opening his trunk, but before leaving they’d used Kostya’s hens for target practice. There was chicken blood all over the school yard; Kostya was fighting back tears over his dead pets.
They could make his life very hard from now on; Bentivegni and District Commissioner Stark were both right in that. A measure of protection came from what Bora knew or could find out about his adversaries, or from selective collaboration. He meant to keep as a last resort the old boys’ network of commanders who were his stepfather’s friends, from Generals Bock and Kesselring to Field Marshal Manstein.
9.32 p.m., Merefa.
Unpleasant day. The choice of a moderate adjective helps. Rereading my Russian entries, I see how on many occasions I merely wrote the letter A (for anguish) on certain days. There’s a point when remarking on things would be too much, and remaining silent far too little. How does this day fare, in the continuum from excellent to dismal? Unpleasant is a polite word my parents use at home for anything ranging from a flowerbed ruined by heavy rain to the Great War. And so, yes, it was an unpleasant day.
Gobbled some aspirin to keep the fever down, all the more since I’m looking to a series of less than pleasant days in the near future.
Colonel Bentivegni was as good as his word, and by noon he was heading back for Berlin, having as sole consolation prize a carbon copy of Platonov’s questionnaire and my notes on the irrelevant conversations I had with Khan–Uncle Terry. Poor Uncle Terry: what an inglorious end – and I do not yet know what exactly killed him, how, who is responsible and where his body might lie. Bentivegni doesn’t exclude a move by RSHA to deprive us of a first-rate coup that would have improved the Abwehr’s standing in the Führer’s eyes. The assassination would have been carried out against Leibstandarte’s interest in pumping a star tank commander all they could. But we do snarl at one another; we do crazily feed on one another.
When Avrora Glebovna and I left Hospital 169 last night, someone was shouting at the top of his voice on one of the wards. War’s a fucking ballerina was the most intelligible sentence, repeated over and over. She covered her ears to avoid listening. From her, not one word on the moments she spent before seeing her father’s body – not to me. Tomorrow I have a choice: either I tell them they’re off to a detention camp, or I send them off without telling them. I haven’t yet decided what it’ll be.
All afternoon, I drove from one medical point to another, from hospitals to army morgues. Khan’s body is nowhere to be found – or else they’re not telling me. Came back low on fuel (although the only positive thing of my additional task is that I am to be allowed all the fuel I want), nearly ready to draw my horns in and eat humble pie with the Oberstarzt at Hospital 169. He could be useful in locating the corpse, so I must prepare myself to come down a peg or two and give him what he’ll undoubtedly ask for in exchange. If I choose to believe what Weller told me about him, Mayr is recovering from jaundice and suffers from debilitating neuralgia attacks. In Stalingrad army surgeons would do anything to lay their hands on morphine for their patients – or themselves, what do I know? I saw some aberrant behaviour there towards the end. Had I wanted to answer Terry when he asked me if any of ours had gone mad, I could have described a chamber of horrors.
Enough. Th
e regiment’s accoutrements are coming in, good home-built material, plus some excellent tackle from heterogeneous sources: Polish saddles and harnesses from four years ago (where did we keep them all this time?), Russian equipment (including M-40 and M-41 mortars and 4-A radios that average 150 km in reception), which makes up for its simplicity with its ruggedness. Speaking of which, I asked my officers to break with cavalry tradition enough to switch from P08s to P38s. As handguns go, they’re less fiddly, and preferable to Lugers in these extreme climates. I switched as far back as Poland, although in those days it was seen as heretical eccentricity.
In the mail, a letter from the celebrated writer Dr Ernst Jünger, whom I met in Probstheida at my grandparents’ home eight years ago and with whom I have been corresponding intermittently. This was sent in September, when our hopes were still up. I’m sure it can wait a little more before I answer it. I have toed the line all day, and now I deserve to open Dikta’s letter.
He’d read in novels and seen in movies how unanticipated news can cause people to drop the letter they are reading. It seemed like a cheap dramatic device, but Bora did exactly that with the contents of his wife’s envelope, and then stood staring at it without picking it up.
There was no letter, no text at all, save “To Martin” and Dikta’s signature on the photograph. Taken at Magdalena Ziemke’s famous studio in Dresden, where actresses and top party officials had their pictures taken, it portrayed her completely nude.
In a suffused light (the artist’s trademark glow), Dikta crouched in a three-quarter pose with her chin on her hand, the ash-blonde knot of her hair nearly undone, wisps from it seemingly ablaze in stunning black and white contrast. Neck, breasts, nipples were crispness itself, and there was a powdery mist where lines swelled into curves. In the smooth, twisted pose a tendril of blondeness flickered in the shade of her thighs, but so that the viewer had to search for it and become an accomplice. She was looking elsewhere, to an invisible point at the lower left corner of the image’s scalloped edge, yet something in her lids and eyelashes seemed on the verge of a trembling upward motion, so that she’d look straight at him; and it’d be unbearable. In the shade of her thighs that blonde mark – more than glimpsed, less than seen – guarded the tender petal of her sex, subtly lit from somewhere so that it, too, glowed like a white flame.
Bora didn’t know how to react other than physically: a desperate automatism that mortified him at being aroused by his wife, as if it were base and indecent. Of all the arguments Dikta had used to keep him from going back to Russia, this was the cruellest. As if he didn’t know what he was giving up. What does she think, what does she expect: that I should masturbate in front of it? You can’t do anything else with a photo like this. It’s what it’s for. She wants my desire to regress, for me not to have another object of affection if not herself. Why? I have no other object of affection besides her.
This was the last straw after a hopeless day. Angrily Bora swept the portrait off the floor and shoved it inside his diary so that he’d be screened from it, protected somehow. It was what Platonov had tried to do by flipping his women’s photograph upside down. And he, Bora, had heartlessly returned it face up.
The diary’s tough canvas-bound cover, worn at the corners and stained, was now all that separated him from those neat and muted forms, marvellous where light and flesh and golden-fleece became one. In yesterday’s dream Dikta had knelt on the bed with nothing but a garter belt on, lovingly taking his clothes off in a similar glorious glow.
I will not open it again to look at the picture inside. I will not.
But of course he did.
5
SATURDAY 8 MAY
In the morning, Bora felt drunk. There was no apparent reason for it; it wasn’t imputable to alcohol, and he hadn’t taken anything stronger than aspirin the night before. Instead, for the first time in quite a while, he’d had a wet dream: little surprise there. It hadn’t soiled the camp bed only because he’d gone to sleep with his uniform on. And I haven’t even masturbated for it, he thought irritably. The need to wash his underwear and riding breeches brought to mind the babushkas, dead and alive, Stark’s promise to get him “five more” if necessary, and the entire bungle of Khan’s death, Platonov’s women, Mantau and his SS colleagues. Well, Kostya is a married man: if I soak my clothes and let him take it from there, he’ll handle it just fine. I’d be more embarrassed to have an old woman touch my mess. Last night he’d slipped Dikta’s photograph back inside the envelope it had come in and resealed it by pasting a strip of glued paper along the cut edge. The envelope now lay at the bottom of his trunk, although he didn’t plan on leaving it behind whenever he travelled away from the command post.
If last night his wretchedness had failed to abate his desire, this morning something close to self-righteous resentment in him tried to fight back. Why in God’s name did she make things so difficult for him? Without any fuss or complication, his brother’s girl had let him marry her, make her pregnant, and now sent photos upon which she described herself to her husband as “fat Duckie” (Duckie being her nickname, and the birth expected in late June). Peter showed them to everyone, ecstatic as he’d been ecstatic about the full moon seen through the telescope when they were boys at Trakhenen.
Not Dikta’s way at all, Bora knew. Her seductive image had nothing to do with child-bearing. Deep down, Dikta with a child was unimaginable, even for him. He was unable to say whether he would even like it, given the times they were living in. He said he would, but it was a statement expected of a young National Socialist husband. And although before Stalingrad his anxious mother had resorted to writing “Dikta doesn’t feel well” – an obvious hint at a possible pregnancy, as if the prospect would make him more prudent, or eager for a transfer away from Russia – Dikta had never confirmed it. And if he hadn’t impregnated her before Stalingrad (when he’d been sure he had), or in Prague a few weeks ago – No.
No, no. Making love to his wife was an end in itself, and as such not sterile, not needing to create life. His impractical, confident longing was that they would both remain forever young, forever at the height of vigour, fit to pour themselves into each other incomparably, out of a ferocious existential joy of doing it. He didn’t need to be reminded of this by the photo Dikta had sent him via her mother’s lover.
The seminal fluid that had seeped through the army cloth had had time to dry; still it left a telltale halo. Bora looked out of the door to see if Kostya was around. He wasn’t, and the sentry sat half-turned, rolling himself a cigarette. He decided he’d walk past the schoolyard, beyond the graves and the fence, where a small canal brimmed with water after the rain. There he could bathe with his breeches on, and effect a first laundering.
The canal banks had been cleared of mines when they’d first arrived in the area; but still, one never knew. Bora stepped with brisk carelessness, taking off his army shirt. The downpour had made the mud black and very soft; slippery once he had removed his boots on the incline to enter the cloudy water. The early hour, glass-like, crisp, made objects near and far visible in detail. Wherever Kostya had gone, he’d be back soon; noise would come from engines and whatever else functioned in the Ukrainian countryside these days; but at the moment silence was priceless.
Cold and lazy, the current reached to his waist. In both directions, the narrow ribbon of water ran on, reflecting the brilliant turquoise of the May sky. In his groggy state of mind, the impression was of standing in a flow of liquid air. Cupping his hands, Bora leaned forward to scrub his face and neck. Suspended particles of diluted soil tasted slightly bitter on his tongue; fine grit met his teeth. The leather sheath of his ID tag, dangling from a braided cord around his neck, grew dark with dampness; his grey braces formed two floating loops at his sides. Cold water awakened his skin through the soaking cloth. How far away now were the summarily executed babushkas, never to know the texture of his man-dirty uniform in the wash. How far Platonov’s body at Hospital 169, Khan’s unobtainable bo
dy, the tank safely in the Field Marshal’s headquarters, Mantau, the Karabakh horse, the slaughtered hens, Dikta’s thighs, the dead at Krasny Yar…
When, still bent at the waist, Bora tilted his head to rub his neck, his eye met the square edge of a wood-cased Russian mine sticking out of the mud along the bank. Rain had partially exposed it, like a strange geometric tongue or insane deadly mushroom. He found himself entirely indifferent to its presence. Oh well, we’ll take it out sometime, he thought without the least alarm. It belongs there, after all. He was no longer used to landscapes free from the marks of war, and risk made life worth biting into.
In March, leaving the hospital in Prague, the intact state of the city had taken him aback. Houses, palaces, towers, belfries still standing appeared artificial to his eyes; there was something of a theatre backdrop or movie set in the flawlessness of the ancient skyline. Free of rubble, the streets gaped, empty. Out of place were the windows with intact panes, each of their frames in its rightful place. Bora recalled how he had looked around, trying not to act surprised, although he had furtively grazed the corner of a sound wall, the solid surface of a portal, to verify its reality. His wonder had only lasted minutes. But in the handful of minutes Bora had imagined the fall of the city – not of that city: of any city – according to the rules of war. And so the Gunpowder Tower began to crumble from the top down and fell apart one cornerstone at a time, a blackened gold angel at a time; the cathedral on Hradschin Hill dissolved like a termite hill under a violent rain. Streets filled with debris, recreating the familiar obstacle course, the known, claustrophobic sense of impediment.
Only then had he been able to accept Prague still untouched, with the proviso that it would not stay so forever: knowing this comforted him. Dikta, walking at his side, had noticed nothing. She hugged his arm with her whole perfumed, haughty self: ultimately unreachable, for all that she was about to be mightily possessed. The woman present and unattainable, bliss prolonged through time. Even his wife’s absolute beauty, her physical perfection, their peerless carnal rapport had for a moment been acceptable to him only in view of their end. Only that which ends is precious, he’d thought, and had stopped to kiss her in the street.
