The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02]

by David L. Robbins

  Along the same wall where the Marshal stands, one of his generals thrusts aside the curtain of another window. This general turns to the others in the giant banquet room—Politburo members, military men and their wives, all pomaded and powdered, brass and lace. The general calls out to them, “Hear the bells!”

  The Marshal does not swivel around but keeps his back to their cheers for the new year, the kisses of men given first to their comrades on both cheeks, then to the women on lips, the bear hugs and handshakes. He turns only to the general near him looking out into the same inky Russia.

  He says, “Close the curtain, Comrade General.”

  The general hesitates only for a moment, in surprise. He lets go the curtain and it falls into place.

  “Yes, Comrade Stalin,” he says, inclining his forehead. “My apologies, Comrade.”

  The general makes his escape back to the arms of his fellows and women. Stalin continues to stare through the glass at nothing.

  He looks west, toward Poland. There he has his two generals, Zhukov and Koniev, his two studded fists, poised on the Vistula with a million men and ten thousand artillery pieces and twenty thousand tanks. Before the month is out, he will brandish those fists and pound the Germans first out of Poland, then into pulp in their own homeland. He will not unfurl those fists, will not wipe the blood off them, until he wipes them on Hitler’s shirt in Berlin.

  That’s the lair of the beast. That’s the trophy the world wants. Whoever captures Berlin wins the war.

  The English and the Americans long for the prestige of it. They’ve turned back a nasty winter offensive from Hitler. Their noses have been bloodied one more time. Plus, Hitler has stepped up his rocket bombings of London. All this will make them push back even harder, move even faster into Germany. Now they will believe even more that Berlin can be theirs.

  But Berlin belongs to Russia. By might. By sacrifice.

  He trusts none of his generals. The taking of Berlin is too vital to delegate control to anyone but himself. Stalin has taken control of the coordination of all three fronts involved in the assault on the German capital, First and Second Byelorussian and First Ukrainian.

  Nor does he trust that English bulldog Churchill or the cripple Roosevelt. No matter Churchill’s lengthy toasts or Roosevelt’s slavering courtship. They will do anything to take Berlin from Stalin.

  That is why anything is warranted to take it first.

  He holds back the curtain for a minute, breaking his own hard rule, staying apart from the revelers behind him. When he hears the party fade at his back, he lets the curtain relax, and turns. His boot heels click, he comes to attention at the window. With the report, all eyes are on him. Even the chattiest of them shuts up. Stalin stands like a rock, a chipped boulder, really. He knows how squat and ugly he is, with a face pockmarked by childhood smallpox, short forehead, squinty hazel eyes, only five feet four inches tall. Do any of these leaders and ladies rapt now before him know that the second and third toes on his left foot have grown together? He’s a grotesque little gnome, chiseled from a poor quarry. No, he thinks, they don’t anymore see Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the little Georgian bandit. They see only Stalin.

  Rightly so, he thinks. Rightly so.

  The Marshal casts his eyes over the pack, forty or so of them invited here to his dacha to celebrate the new year. They stand ramrod straight out of fear or respect, he’s not concerned which. Who are these suit fillers and dress curvers? All of them, even the women, are his creations. What power they wield they possess only in his name. The shoulder boards, the stiff shirts, boots and handbags, flesh and bone would end up crackling on a bonfire with a wave of his hand, and within hours some forty others would stand here gaping. Who are these newcomers to the new year of the Red victory? What have they done to stand here before Stalin and not be swept away? Nothing. There’s not one left who knows Stalin as less than a god, who has any claim at all to pity should his god turn on him. Not one of them with the bells ringing far away, full glass in hand, woman in tow, eyes stuck on Stalin, would hesitate to put a knife in Stalin’s back if he could get away with it. They want power. These are the ones Stalin is wary of. The ones who do not desire power, Stalin despises.

  But the power is Stalin’s alone, his right. None of these celebrants were there half a century ago to study with the boy Iosif, the seminary student of ten years. Who among them ran and hid with Koba, the revolutionary? Or shivered in exile with the hard young Stalin who never once left Russia, while others waited in Paris for the revolt to begin in St. Petersburg? Or as a political prisoner who made five escapes? Which of them sat at the right hand of Lenin himself, or battled the Whites at Tsaritsyn so fiercely that the city was named after him, Stalingrad? What man alive has branded his own name on the Revolution more than Stalin?

  These frippish fools know only Stalin, “man of steel.” They knew Lenin, but did they know the young fire-breather Vladimir Ulyanov, who took his nom de guerre from the river Lena in Siberia, where he was exiled? And you can bet they remember that bastard Trotsky, but do they recall him when he was that bastard Leon Bronshtein, the wire-haired Jew who adopted the name of one of his jailers? Trotsky died abroad, fearing for his life. And that loudmouth Lev Rozenfeld, who would have us call him Kamenev, ”man of stone.” Where is he now? Under a granite marker where Stalin put him years ago, after arrest and a very public trial and an admission of guilt. Stalin killed a few other birds with the stone Kamenev, flung him to fell Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky, and the rest who would deny Russia the leadership of Stalin.

  Those men knew both Lenin and Stalin in the early days. They too were coauthors of the Bolshevik uprising. They held power of their own making. But they spoke of things regarding Stalin that history has proven to be lies. They dared consider that they and not Stalin might be the true interpreters of Lenin, that they were the brightest lamps for Russia’s path. History has proven them wrong. Look around now. They are gone, all of them, with their families and everything they touched. Steel proved stronger than the river, the stone, the prison keeper. History is Stalin’s courtyard, while their names are dust on the bricks. How many? Dozens, hundreds, thousands, Stalin does not keep tabs like some Arbat merchant of the goods that have gone through his hands, no one calls Stalin to account.

  He notes the Moscow bells have stopped.

  He does not know how long he has stood like this, rigid, staring over the crowd’s head, hating ghosts in the air. A minute, perhaps a second. When did the bells stop? It seems to him that even time does his bidding. He relaxes his eyes, widening the sockets. He takes a breath and runs two fingers over his moustache.

  The young ambassador to the United States, Andrei Gromyko, lifts his glass.

  “Comrade Marshal,” he says. “It would be an honor to have you make the first toast to the new year.”

  Stalin thinks he will do so and that he will watch a bit more closely this upstart politico who lifts his glass first.

  Stalin steps forward from the window. “Bring me a glass.”

  When his hand is full, he raises the drink in toast. Stalin is a teetotaler. But for the beginning of this year of victory, he will drink vodka. His hand in the air is still below the chins of many in the room. The rest of the glasses go up, and just for a flash Stalin fights his claustrophobia; his eyes are so far below all the crystal hoisted and packed above his head, he senses he is beneath a shining and crowding weight, like the surface of a sunlit lake.

  He takes a step backward. This relieves him; he speaks.

  “In a matter of days, the mighty Red forces gathered on the Vistula River will strike the first blow toward the heart of the German beast. In 1945 we will put an end to this senseless and horrible war to defeat fascism. In the years we have fought the Hitlerites, we have lost over twenty-five million soldiers and civilians. That is more than ten Russians for every meter of land between Moscow and Berlin.”

  Stalin watches the faces grow somber. A few of the glasses wave
r in the air. He lets the moment hang; some boots shuffle. He has invited the millions of war ghosts into the room where everyone can see them. These legions of Russian dead join the spirits which only he sees, overwhelming them into anonymity. Now Stalin feels comfortable.

  “There is not a single Soviet citizen who has gone untouched by this war. Every man and woman in the ranks, every factory worker, every farmer, has a score to settle. Our soldiers will fight from what they have suffered. They will fight from what they have witnessed and from what they have lost. Atrocities scar every village and city the Germans have touched. Have no fear that we are about to win. Have no fear of Hitler. I give you my word we will wipe our asses in Berlin soon in the new year.”

  Men in the crowd smile at Stalin’s coarseness. The women titter behind gloved hands.

  “To the victorious Red Army! Na zdrovya!”

  Glasses are turned bottoms to the ceiling, all of them. Stalin watches elbows and swallows and satisfied gasps. When they are done, his own glass still full, he makes a private toast.

  I will take Berlin. The cost is of no concern. Whatever it is, we’ve already paid most of it.

  He drinks. The gathering applauds.

  “Budenny!” Stalin yawps. “Did you bring your damned accordion?”

  A spry old marshal of the Red Army puts up his hands. “Yes, Comrade Stalin, of course. You know I can’t come to a party without it. I always get sent home to bring it back.”

  “Then play us a polka. Let’s dance to some German music!”

  The military man hurries to a corner and returns, strapping on his weathered accordion. He stamps his boot four times to set the tempo, and launches into a rousing Prussian tune. Couples set down their glasses and partner up. In moments the room is swirling, stamping with gaiety. Budenny, the former cavalry officer, is quite the catalyst. Stalin sidles out of the way.

  The accordion renders waltzes, folk songs, ballads. Stalin fetches his English Dunhill pipe from his place at the head table. From a pouch he pours another bowlful of shredded Herzegovina Flor cigarettes and lights up. He paces the room through clouds of blue smoke, enjoying the dancers, savoring his pipe and his separateness. He has reduced his need for human relationships to almost nothing. He has seen two wives die. First, beloved Kato in their youth, from disease. Then the traitorous Nadezhda, who committed suicide in 1932 after arguing with him over politics. Yakov, son of his first marriage, an artillery commander who surrendered to the Germans— a coward, only cowards surrender. Vasili, a sniveler. Daughter Svetlana, acid-tongued like her mother, estranged. Stalin, the vozhd, the supremo, cannot afford the normal human luxuries of emotion or values. He must have steel cords where others have nerves. How can he dote on one, or two, or twenty, when he must envision and guard the future for hundreds of millions? He cannot want for himself when an entire nation is told every day, “Stalin is thinking of us.”

  He wonders, What could be lonelier?

  Stalin watches his guests grow drunker with the dancing. Marshal Budenny has made himself quite popular tonight.

  “Semyon,” he calls to the musical marshal. “Rest your hands for a moment. I want to see your feet in action.”

  Budenny halts his playing. Sweat breaks on his brow from an hour of the accordion’s buttons and keys. The dancers freeze like figurines.

  Stalin walks to the gramophone. No one else in the room moves. He picks out a disk and slides it beneath the needle. The dancers lower their arms, no longer porcelain dolls but uneasy humans. Out of the gramophone bell emerges a scratchy ditty, a balalaika plucks a fast-paced folk melody along with a clarinet, drums, and a wailing violin.

  Stalin approaches Budenny. He puts his arms out to relieve the old man of the accordion.

  “Dance for me, Semyon. The Gopak. I have seen you do it, you’re magnificent.”

  “Comrade”—the marshal raises his palms in defense—”not in many years.”

  Stalin sets the accordion on the ground.

  “And many years from now, you will say that you did it tonight. Dance, Semyon. To victory.”

  Stalin steps back. He claps his hands to the music. The crowd joins him now and they form a rousing circle around Semyon Budenny, a seventy-three-year-old marshal of the Red Army. The gray warrior squats on his haunches, crosses his arms, and kicks out his heels in the classic Cossack dance.

  Budenny dances with fervor. He begins rickety but soon limbers and is impressive for his age. The others shout “Urrah!” and clap in time to the music. Stalin studies Budenny’s face. The dancing marshal keeps a pleasant smile. Stalin knows that Budenny is in great pain.

  ~ * ~

  * * *

  January 1, 1945, 0115 hours

  Magnuszew bridgehead

  West bank of the Vistula River

  Poland

  the soldier behind ilya tumbles into a hole.

  Ilya, on his stomach and elbows in the freezing dirt, hangs his chin to his chest while the little private he brought with him tries to clamber out without making more noise than he made going in.

  When they are again side by side on their bellies in the dark, Ilya sighs.

  He whispers, “Misha. You move like a blind cow.”

  “That wasn’t my fault.”

  Ilya sighs again. He resumes his crawl forward. Misha follows, mumbling.

  “You pushed me in.”

  “I did not. The ground gave way under you.”

  “You did too shove me. You’re twice my size. You don’t realize sometimes. You didn’t leave me enough room to get by the lip of that crater.”

  “Well, then, move me out of the way. It’ll make less of a racket.”

  Misha huffs. “Sure. Move Ilya Shokhin. Me and who else?”

  Ilya grins. He is proud of his size, the attention it draws from the others. Two meters tall, two hundred and forty pounds, he has shoulders square and wide, an expansive chest, and arms white and big as birch trees. His thighs are the girth of bomb casings. He knows he has a merry face where blue eyes preside over a kind, upturned mouth. For a fierce countenance he shaves his head clean.

  “Almost there, I think.”

  Ilya halts their slither to get his bearings. Winter-naked trees rise all around. Between every trunk there is a tank, a T-34; there must be a hundred silhouettes he can make out from where he and Misha lie in the starless gloom. The tanks are silent, turrets elevated like saluting troops, all pointing west toward the German lines. Behind these tanks there are a thousand more, and behind them rows of artillery pieces by the ten thousands arranged backward by caliber. Men and machines, everywhere—two full armies, half of another—crammed into this fourteen-mile-wide bridgehead which Zhukov captured on the west bank of the Vistula in August. Another two tank armies are lined up behind them on the east bank of the river. South of Zhukov’s force, there is another, larger bridgehead on the river, where there is massed another battle group just as big under Koniev.

  In days or weeks, Ilya thinks, the signal will come. This gigantic, pent-up hammer will strike west into Poland, then pulverize all the way to Berlin. Nothing will stop us.

  Once this battle starts, I will get it all back. More. There are a million men around me. But I will be noticed.

  I will be cleansed.

  Through the trees Ilya catches a glimmer of lantern light dimmed by the thick canvas of a tent. It is a strange sallow glow, a mushroom of light on a forest floor covered by sleeping metal beasts. Officers, Ilya thinks. Only they will have a lantern lit this time of the morning. Only officers will be up this late gathered around a bottle and a deck of cards and letters scribbled for home. Ilya knows. The regular foot soldiers aren’t drinking right now; they’re resting, if they can find the comfort under a tarpaulin or in a hole to do so. When the cold sun is overhead the lowly Ivans have too many artillery pieces to camouflage, roads to grade, tons and tons of food, ammo, and fuel to lug forward, privies to empty, garbage to bury. Fortifications must be built and trenches dug in case the enemy in the da
rk decides to go on the offensive first. The railway tracks through eastern Poland are the wrong gauge, they have to be widened for Russian supply trains. Wreckage from the frequent German artillery barrages must be repaired or hauled away. Field trips are taken to the fetid death camp in Majdanek, liberated by the Red Army last July, where political commissars drive home even harder the point that the Germans are monsters. No, those men inside the warm tent have their feet up. Ilya begins to crawl toward them. Officers. He knows this because four months ago he was one of them.