by Ben Pastor
Stark showed him a typewritten sheet of names and patronymics, and rose to open the window. “I wish it’d rain; the mugginess is unbearable.” A view of the old factory beyond the gravelled area of machinery and stacked materiel became visible; the brick building where Bora had seen the Karabakh stallion stood etched against a thundery sky. “As you’ll judge from the first names, Major, they’re a younger lot than last time: Barrikada and Revolutsya aren’t anything they’d call females in the old days. You haven’t got anything against young washerwomen, have you?”
“Not at all. When may I send for them?”
“As soon as I inform Mantau – which is why I’d like to get hold of him.”
Bora returned the sheet. He’d actually looked for Avrora Glebovna’s name on the list, unsure whether it was because he wished it would be there, or else because he’d ask to remove it if it was.
Shaking his head, the commissioner placed a paperweight (it was actually a large pebble) on the sheet. “This being in effect still Army-administered Ukraine,” he continued, rocking in his swivel chair and staring at his desk, “I may have arrogated to myself a role that doesn’t belong to me, but I demanded that the two women executed last Friday be taken down from the improvised gallows. I never authorized that hanging, you know.”
It was the very thing Bora had thrown in Mantau’s face. He said, “A little kindness goes a long way, even in Russia.”
“Hm. Like it or not, nominally at least, the welfare of the population is within my purview.”
It remained to be seen – Bora was curious but did not ask – whether Stark had also protested against Mantau’s decision to carry out a reprisal without following protocol. Equally, Hans Kietz, who was Gestapo head in Kharkov, could have reported him. At any rate, if Mantau was sitting in the hot seat at the Vladimirskaya Street headquarters in Kiev at this time, he wasn’t about to shed tears over it. “There’s something else I’d like to discuss, Herr Gebietskommissar.”
Behind the desk, below Hitler’s photograph, a framed map of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine showed the general and regional districts, and a dotted line the prospective additions to the administration, including Kharkov and its region. Bora kept it in mind as he said, “I’m trying to locate a recently transferred Medical Service NCO. The name is Weller, Arnim Anton. These are his data. He’s hopefully en route from Kharkov to his next assignment, but it would help me to know where that is, since at Army Detachment Kempf headquarters they do not possess that information. I went as far as I could through military channels. Given that Poltava falls under Reichskommissariat Ukraine, I thought I might try the administrative procedure.”
Stark lifted his spectacles above his eyebrows, and peered closely at the card Bora had given him. “Is the man a friend? A relative?”
“No.”
“Is he meant for your unit, then?”
“Yes.”
Bora was lying, but Stark asked nothing else. Curbing inquisitiveness was second nature for all of them, even at the highest levels. He put down the card next to his telephone. “No promises, Major. As you know, there are thousands of men being redeployed at this time. I’ll see what can be done, and have you contacted should his name turn up.”
“I appreciate it, Herr Gebietskommissar. May I make a phone call from your assistant’s office?”
Stark said he could. “And try to get that authorization signed by today.”
The divisional headquarters update was that von Salomon had not yet come in to the office. When he arrived on Pletnevsky Lane, with thunder rumbling across the river and not a drop of rain under a sky still largely cloudless, the sound of conversation inside the second-floor flat told Bora he wasn’t about to barge into a tête-à-tête. In fact, the door opened on several officers having drinks, and not one but two ladies. The OT colonel, more annoyed than the first time, disclosed at last that von Salomon had taken a sleeping pill, and wouldn’t wake up before 6 or 7 p.m.
It effectively meant having to stay in Kharkov overnight. A disgruntled Bora walked the tranquil street back to Donski Avenue, where he’d left his vehicle by the bridge. Between banks of sloping earth, the Kharkov River carried bits of leaves on its unhurried current, a sign that somewhere to the north-east heavy rains had been falling. Mosquitoes gathered in dancing clouds above the water. One more month, and we’ll butcher one another between these stuccoed residences, across towns and villages, up and down this front. This quiet, this silence is like pausing for a moment before shooting oneself.
With time to burn, Bora drove to the west end of town, and went to have a bite at the eatery on Kubitsky Alley, not far from the RSHA prison. At a long table, SS and Leibstandarte officers – some about to finish their coffee, some standing and ready to leave – turned to look when he entered. Among them was the captain with a birthmark who’d threatened Bora the previous Saturday. Leaving the others behind, he walked haltingly towards the major’s place and tossed the dinner bill on his table. “Here. You Army folks owe us for giving you back Kharkov after you lost it.”
Blood rose to Bora’s head to the extent that he saw the room through a swimming veil. But he’d done his homework, and the urge to strike back was resisted in the time needed to collect himself. When the captain returned to his colleagues, he picked up the bill from his still-empty plate, folded it carefully, and with it in hand calmly stood up from his chair. Ignoring the tense waiters, he crossed the floor to the long table where the group was waiting to see what happened. A glance around to see who was highest in rank, a well-mannered nod in that direction, and the bill found its way on to the tablecloth, near the captain’s crumpled napkin.
“Forgive me; I believe this is yours. The Army takes no lessons from officers who got their injuries driving drunk from a Paris whorehouse. If the Sturmbannführer at the head of the table allows, however, even on this day of temporary setbacks I will toast Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler for their success in Kharkov during the month of March. Russian wine or German champagne?”
An incident had only been avoided because the Sturmbannführer had a sense of humour, and the restaurant did serve German champagne. Bora sat at his table until he was the only one left in the restaurant. It took that long for his agitation to settle. The waiter’s discreet cough, a mild reminder that they’d have to close soon, brought Taras Tarasov to Bora’s preoccupied mind, who less than ten hours earlier had stood before him with the bold claim of having murdered Khan Tibyetsky. Some days are endless, he told himself. You don’t get much done, but they go on forever.
At divisional headquarters, the paper-pushing lieutenant was apologetic. “It’ll have to be in the morning, Herr Major. Lieutenant Colonel von Salomon sent word he won’t be receiving tonight. And tomorrow it’ll have to be before 08.30, because the lieutenant colonel will be out of the office after that time.”
Bora gave up. He left a phone message for Stark to that effect, and although in a pinch lodgings could be had at headquarters, he decided to use his extra keys and go to the special detention centre on Mykolaivska, where as far as he knew things had been left how they were when they’d closed it up on Bentivegni’s orders. If the bed in Khan’s room (his own temporary room during overnight interrogations) was still in place, it beat an army camp bed or a colleague’s sofa any time.
Not only were the furnishings of Khan’s room untouched, electric power and water were still hooked up – a luxury that permitted Bora a welcome shower in the sultriness of the evening. With the change in the weather, the hallway and stairs smelt of dog hair, as if Mina were still guarding the place instead of sitting fat in a Kharkov barracks. The door to Khan’s room, smashed by rifle butts and nearly jerked off its hinges, leaned useless, but the bed – minus the sheets and pillowcase – could be comfortably laid on.
When Bora, freshly washed and shaved, switched on the bedside lamp, the wallpaper depicting factories and smokestacks came alive with its zigzag lines as it had for western engineers and businessmen of the past generation,
and for his remarkable relative until the week before. With the acute sensibility of his evening fever, he fancied he smelt one of Tibyetsky’s Soyuzie cigars, containing a fraction of the nicotine that was to kill him. And although he had no emotional reason to mourn him, Bora did feel sorry for the way he’d died, so far from his glorious exploits. He took the diary out of his briefcase and, sitting cross-legged on the mattress in his underwear, he prepared to put down on paper the tale old Tarasov had told him this morning, on the promise of being shot like a hero.
Thursday 13 May, evening, at the former special detention centre on Mykolaivska Street, the right place to summarize my strange meeting with Taras Lukjanovitch Tarasov, a rakhivnik and political commissar pensioned for health reasons after working at the FED camera factory and Zavod No.183, previously known as the Kharkov Comintern Locomotive Factory.
Despite his outlandish claim to assassination, the man no more killed Uncle Terry than I did. He is a staunch Soviet, and as such contiguous with those who possibly carried out the deed. Mostly, he has a foot in the grave (see below), and an immense amount of grudges. Our latest reprisals, the dubious reputation for mass shootings my Merefa schoolhouse enjoys, and especially the blasting of the accordions yesterday, have convinced him I am the man to give him a quick, glorious death. Which, in his mind, is preferable to dragging through the last stage of blood-spitting consumption.
Tarasov’s unsustainable self-accusation faded the moment I assured him that his political allegiance and Soviet Badge would suffice to have him shot. Despite two years of war in his homeland, he has a fairly romantic vision of execution, of which I decided to disabuse him. I should know: on armed patrol we take no prisoners; when attacked by partisans, we hang them. I then proceeded (am I not a black soul?) to cultivate his venom regarding Khan Tibyetsky, against the promise to duly have him shot in three days’ time. “Unless,” I said, “you come before then with hat in hand to tell me you have changed your mind.”
After a long conversation interspersed with his sick cough, I began to perceive how wrong I may have been in seeing coincidences where there were none. Things and people seldom happen to be in the same place at the same time. Perhaps Khan had a reason for defecting where he did, for insisting on detention in Kharkov, for smiling when he heard of Platonov’s death, and for not wanting to die at all (Mantau is right in this). Platonov might have had something other than a military reason for flying over this region with detailed maps, and perhaps for offering to bribe me. And not even Tarasov coming to me was a coincidence, since it was my request for information on Krasny Yar that first prompted him.
The role of the Yar, this patch of woodland I regarded as an accessory to the great events, emerges as potentially pivotal. Still obscure, but central somehow. Eye of the storm, middle of the labyrinth. If only I could kick myself for not letting Platonov articulate his offer to bribe me, instead of coming within a whisker of shooting him dead.
Summing up, Tarasov described Khan’s exploits during the Bolshevik Revolution, and although it is difficult to picture this pencil-necked accountant as a firebrand, he sounds as though he really was there. Either that, or he’s memorized the small volume of memoirs, From the Baltic to Mongolia, that Khan authored circa 1938, a copy of which I myself picked up in Moscow shortly before the war. But Tarasov added details I wasn’t aware of, details that smack of truth and go to prove that sometimes, in our blessed arrogance as information-gatherers, we don’t see the forest for the trees. Literally.
Example: Khan and Platonov knew each other as far back as 1919. Khan’s memoirs having been published during the Purge, he’d go out of his way to avoid mentioning a colleague presently in disgrace, if ever his ego allowed him to make room for others. Tarasov brought up Platonov (whom he believes alive and free) merely because he was part of the same close group of revolutionary fighters.
Less surprising (but I didn’t know this either), Khan and Platonov operated in the Kharkov Oblast in 1920–1, against the same Nestor Makhno whose men reportedly raped and killed young girls at Krasny Yar. Indeed, the two comrades were engaged against Ukrainian anarchists, under the command of the mythical Red Army founder Mikhail Frunze, then commander of the Southern Front. They fought a fierce guerrilla war in the Voronezh–Kharkov area until Makhno, defeated and badly wounded, had to retreat and flee abroad. Tarasov at this time worked as an accountant for the printers of K Svetu (“Towards the Light”, a Cheka-backed publication) in Kharkov, and moonlighted at the Free Brotherhood Bookshop, which the Bolsheviks used as a trap to lure and capture Makhnovists.
Out in the field, it was a matter of ambushes and violent reprisals, with mutual pleasantries such as cutting off and stuffing one’s genital organs into one’s mouth, burning one another’s farms and fields, kidnapping, et cetera. If only half of it is true, the lot of them deserve to be strung up by the neck. As expected, many Ukrainians took advantage of ideology to get even with neighbours they had a quarrel with: the usual civil war scenario. I saw it in Spain with my own eyes.
The really interesting part comes now, because Krasny Yar has a role in it. Tarasov repeated the bad press about Makhno, and told me that once the Bolsheviks had stormed the woods (where some of the anarchists had their lair), Khan and Platonov set up a makeshift command there. The occupation lasted a month, during which they lived off the land. Then Platonov suddenly left the Yar, following a furious disagreement with Khan that created a rift in the group. More about this later. What puzzles me is that the two were once again good comrades by the time the Purge came about. As is known, Platonov quickly rose in rank and became a protégé of fabled revolutionary hero Tukhachevsky (the wrong horse, in view of the later Purge), while Khan apparently played second fiddle.
Tarasov is firmly on Platonov’s side. From all I heard, however, I wonder if Platonov was callously stepping on his friend’s toes to get ahead, or if Khan had to support him because Platonov knew something about him that could cost him dearly. In light of this, it’d make sense if he eventually trumped up the charges against Platonov: it didn’t take much in those days. But why wouldn’t Platonov spill the beans when he was tried by Stalin? He could have helped his case, had he been able to accuse Khan of anything. At the very least, they’d both have ended up in the Lubyanka. But he didn’t talk.
Now I take all this with a grain of salt, but according to Tarasov, throughout the ’20s Khan was often in Kharkov, owing to his interest in the Komintern Locomotive (later Tractor) Factory, where tanks were first built in 1928. Tarasov was then an accountant at the factory. Khan enjoyed a good stipend and all kinds of bourgeois privileges, including a dacha back in Moscow with servants and a private car. In town, he frequented the best of post-revolutionary society, including artists and the new intelligentsia. Platonov visited too, occasionally, but he stuck to army-related business and his lifestyle was much more sober. Enterprising fellow that he always was, after Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) opened up Russia to foreign concessions, Khan used the Komintern Factory as a base to strike semi-private deals with European and American technicians and businessmen who came to advise or to grub (Tarasov’s expression) for Russia’s natural resources, including ore from Krivoy Rog and coal from Lugansk.
So far, it’s all information I can use: if Tarasov is an example, the long-standing grudge against Khan’s lifestyle could well have exploded into ideological hatred after he defected to the enemy. What’s more, both the local Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian nationalists had excellent reasons to assassinate him.
One last detail: during the NEP years, at least once every summer Khan visited Krasny Yar. How does Tarasov know? His family lived in Schubino at the time, within walking distance of the woods. The excursions could have been made to reminisce about the Red October glory days, but I doubt it. Tarasov himself doesn’t know. Then, one fine day in the mid-1920s, it was Gleb Platonov who arrived without Khan at Krasny Yar, in the company of a stranger. Given the bad name the Yar already had, the locals were curious ab
out this and the other tours, but it ended there. The stranger remains unidentified; the motive for his trip to Krasny Yar also. Tarasov is convinced that Khan (and perhaps also Platonov, I might add) profited during or right after the guerrilla war against Makhno. This is what incenses him to this day. When asked why he didn’t act on his suspicions, he gave no answer. It seems obvious he was afraid: brilliant career officers pulled much more weight than a former comrade who’d gone back to book-keeping.
Back to my initial observation: is it purely for military reasons that Platonov was flying a plane in this area when he crash-landed, and is it by accident that Khan crossed the Donets no more than twenty kilometres from Krasny Yar? What is – or was – in those woods that lured the two officers back here through the years? Are the deaths there in any way related? Too bad the date of the last visit by one or the other, or both, is unknown! I will not build hypotheses on shaky premises, but I am intrigued. How intrigued? Enough to secure an updated map of the mined sections of the woods, and plan a trip to Krasny Yar myself.
Meanwhile, time permitting, I will follow up on Khan’s NEP years’ frequentation of famous theatre performers, stars of the Kharkov opera and the handful of well-heeled foreigners in town, including some Americans. The seemingly auxiliary titbit gives me in fact a precious clue, thanks to which, if I know how to go about it, I might find out much more than I expected. As Bruno Lattmann says, I should no longer delay my visit to Larisa Malinovskaya.
7
FRIDAY 14 MAY, FORMER ABWEHR SPECIAL DETENTION CENTRE IN KHARKOV
At half past midnight, Bora had just fallen asleep. What awoke him was the clicking open of the street door, four floors down. Heard despite the distance, not imagined, it roused him completely so that he went from deep dreamless slumber to a state of lucid alert. Darkness was unbroken in the building. Outside, sheet lightning briefly drew the rectangle of the window grille high on the wall, against a night sky where clouds scudded in front of the stars. On the opposite side of the room, Bora perceived – dark on dark – the crooked rim of the damaged door open on the hallway.
