Butler looked up to find Puak smiling, though just perceptibly so. Perhaps he was amused by Ingo's epistolary style.
“So then,” he said after a long pause, “your friend doubts you.”
“He doubts, full stop. That's Ingo.”
Puak flexed the fingers of one hand. “Well. I suppose you must write back.”
Was this a thought or a command? “Yes, of course,” said Butler. “But telling him what, I wonder?”
Puak's mouth puckered in thought. “It is a curious thing. Your friend seems not to like you very much. Yet he considers you a man of honor. He believes you are concealing something, yet he asks you to, as he says, level with him. There are paradoxes here. But we are no strangers to paradox, are we? Especially where the human heart is concerned.”
Butler felt it an oblique compliment to be included in Puak's we. He nodded, uncertainly.
In a quick, catlike move, Puak stood up and took a step in Butler's direction. “These people are our partners. Our teammates. We are stepping onto the same field, from our different directions. We are chasing the same ball. The same rules govern our play—chief among them, that a bullet is the ultimate referee.”
In the faint glow of the paraffin lamp, Puak's eyes gleamed like onyx, and his skin had the dry, slightly roughened texture of handmade paper. He looked very old. A revered elder comrade; a man who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Lenin. Who had passed beyond any question of trust or allegiance, simply by having survived. Who now lived a pure, ascetic existence, devoid of ego, lacking even a name, his whole being and essence devoted to the Cause.
He raised a finger. “Let them know everything. Don't tell them. But let them come to understand.”
“Everything. You mean—”
“That the document in question, the memo signed by Heinrich Himmler, is more than a mere piece of evidence. That it is a decisive weapon in the coming struggle. That the Soviet Union intends to acquire it at all costs. That we are using the Americans just as we have used the partisans, as means to an end. That we do not care a damn about any of the people concerned. Not the Little Fox, not your Washington friends, not the local Underground chiefs. Not even ourselves as individuals.”
Butler frowned. “But we have to care a bit, don't we? At least enough to keep everyone alive until the operation is over. I mean, some of these people… Ingo Miller for instance. Isaac the Fox. They're kind of vital to pulling this off, aren't they?”
Puak stared straight into Butler's eyes and, with a smile of infinite compassion, shook his head. “It is not permitted to believe that. I'm sorry, but as Marxists we may not believe that any single human being matters so terribly much. All our science, our understanding of history, tells us otherwise. Life is an aggregate process. History is syncretic. Evolution does not occur at isolated locations but across the whole living field—and this remains true whether we are speaking of an organism or an entire society, a sociohistoric system. What matters is only the whole. Not the part. The body, not the cell. Humankind, not this or that ephemeral personality.”
He turned suddenly away, leaving behind a palpable silence. Butler felt awkward, having heard this deeply felt protestation of faith from an old man fully aware of his mortality, and straining for transcendence. He smiled. “I'm not sure how I feel myself about being an ephemeral personality.”
Puak nodded, his expression kind. “It gets easier with age, I suppose.” He moved back to his chair. “Now listen carefully. I will tell you how this thing must be done.”
* * *
A desiccating wind arrived overnight from the east, off the steppe, and did nothing to lighten Butler's pensive mood, nor did a ceiling of clouds the color of a battleship. He awoke tangled in garishly colored blankets in a tent that belonged to one Madame Ladoshka, a camp follower who passed herself off as a Gypsy and earned a respectable livelihood telling the fortunes of soldiers young enough to be her sons.
Butler happened to know she was a Jewess from Minsk, and that before the war she had been a stage actress. When German tanks appeared one morning in 1941, she gathered her few possessions and began walking east. But the Wehrmacht was also moving east, making for Smolensk, so Ladoshka turned south into the Pripet Marshes—a propitious turn, in most respects. Soon she found herself living in a community of partisans run on the principle of a kolkhoz, a collective farm. The chairman was an older man who'd fought with the Whites in the Civil War. He fell in love with Ladoshka and treated her tenderly until he was caught in an ambush by the SS, tortured for a couple of days, and left hanging at a crossroads. Ladoshka thus came into possession of his belongings, which chiefly amounted to a large round tent of the type used by Kurdish nomads. She had opened the tent to other women left stranded by the war. But a tentful of women in the middle of a swamp is not a long-term solution to life's problems, so when Marshal Rokossovsky's forces reached Mozyr in the great advance after Stalingrad, Ladoshka rolled up her household and joined the Red Army on its westward march.
Some of the others had come along and now supported themselves as prostitutes. Ladoshka, declaring she had no energy for that kind of thing, taught herself tricks with cards. The most important of these, she confided to Butler one night outside Kiev, was to reveal the Two of Hearts and solemnly aver that the young soldier's beloved would remain faithful to him always. It was an easy trick to learn, though she found it harder to master the concomitant art of dispassion. When the boys' eyes filled with tears, Ladoshka (who had never been a mother) wanted to take them into her arms like babies. But that would have been unprofessional.
She was still asleep, snoring lightly, her face lost in a tangle of gold necklaces and black hair, when Butler slipped out of the tent and onto the hard barren ground at the outskirts of Rownje. All the little gifts from America—the coffee; the cigarettes; the costume jewelry, for Ladoshka; the novels by Steinbeck and Dos Passos, for Puak—had been handed out. All the necessary contacts had been made or reestablished, stories filed, toasts offered and drunk to. No needful thing remained undone. Ordinarily Butler would have savored a few days' respite from the line. But this morning he felt anxious, unable to relax, like a farmer with one eye on the calendar, feeling winter edging up on him.
He walked toward the center of town, using the damaged cathedral as a reference point. The thought of winter—the fierce and unforgiving Russian version that was coming all too soon—fed his jittery mood. He tried to figure the day's date but could get no closer than the latter part of September. Or was it October already? But then, nobody relied on dates anymore. Time was reckoned by geography. Outside Kiev. At the outskirts of Rownje. It wasn't only Butler. He could remember a thousand conversations in which someone said, “I've known him since Vinnitsa.” Or, “He got killed some time ago, before Kharkov.” “First or second Kharkov?” “Third. When our side finally won.”
Didn't Wagner have something to say about this? In Parsifal, Butler thought. Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit. You see, my son, here time becomes space. Something to do with the strange land of the Grail. But then, for Germans, that old dream of conquering the East was something of a Grail quest, wasn't it?
Here time becomes space. Place-names floating in a sea of years—a notion more Buddhist than Marxist. And so was the manner in which cities, like transmigrating souls, shuffled off the mortal coil of names and populations and national affiliations only to be reincarnated in quite different forms. Thus Lodz, formerly of Poland, had been reborn as Litzmannstadt, East Prussia. Lwow, a Ukrainian rail center, became Lemberg in the German province of Galizien, identical except for its striking dearth of Jews. Brno, a Czech town noted for its university and its arms plant, became Brünn, in the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich presiding; and though its university was shut down, the arms plant was going strong.
Nations themselves were no more permanent: Poland, at present, did not exist. Its eastern provinces were part of the Soviet Union, its western half annexed by
the Greater German Reich; the rump in between was called the Generalgouvernement, a land with no name and no future, by Hitler's personal decree.
And now the wheel of history was running in reverse. The ancient fortress-city of Königsberg had lately become Chojna. Soon Danzig would be Gdansk, and if things played out as Butler expected, Berlin itself would be known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, the bustling hub of a new Soviet Socialist Republic.
Reckoning time by cities, Butler was half a year past Dnepropetrovsk but probably still a few months short of Prague. He had always wanted to see Prague. He hoped there would be something left of it.
Cheered by anticipation, he rounded a corner onto the main avenue, where the rubble had been sufficiently bulldozed to allow the passage of an armored column while still permitting foot and motorbike and Cossack pony traffic along the berm. The scene resembled a bazaar. Black marketeers had set up their stalls next to open-air clinics where Red Army medical corpsmen treated the local populace for scurvy, skin rashes, gonorrhea, gunshot wounds, infestations of lice, infected lacerations, gangrene following kitchen-table amputations, broken noses, jaws and limbs, among other side effects of the recent German occupancy. On all sides, courtesans of many ethnic types brazenly plied their trade. Newly arrived conscripts gathered in huddles, their weapons and ammo belts dangling awkwardly from shoulders that looked too thin to hold them. Battle-weary veterans sat in the shelter of crumbled buildings, eyeing the whole scene with blank-faced indifference, dragging deeply on horrid makhorka cigarettes made from Turkish stems and leaf stalks rolled in brownish, fast-burning Russian newsprint.
All the while, only a few feet away, a convoy of trucks rumbled through, waved along by a traffic control officer who called out vehicle ID numbers to an NCO jotting unhurriedly on a clipboard. The trucks were mostly American-made, interspersed with domestic models of varying types, some of impressive antiquity, along with the occasional tractor tugging a farm wagon, half a dozen horse-drawn carts and one noisy half-track manned by Mongolians in crisp parade dress. A supply run, Butler surmised, headed out to some depleted and shot-up field command. The long logistics tail that so often wags the fighting dog.
He waited for a break in traffic, then trotted over to where the old public library stood, a ruin among other ruins. Half a block off, he saw the helpful sergeant from Foreign Press Liaison standing at the edge of the road in conversation with a short man wearing a uniform Butler didn't recognize. The Russians had not shaken off their Petrine fondness for uniforms—tokens of class in a classless society.
The sergeant seemed to experience that telepathic tingle that comes from being watched; it took her a moment to find him in the crowd, then she smiled and pumped her arm. “Comrade Sammy!”
Butler raised a hand in greeting. She called again, but the words were lost in the growl of a passing truck.
“You've come just in time,” she said as he approached. The uniformed man stood nearby, seemingly forgotten. “Transports are just leaving for your sector. All your parcels are loaded. Everything is arranged.”
Butler acknowledged this with a nod. Then he sensed that she expected something more, and he added, “Thank you, tovarich. The packages are important to me. I knew I could entrust them to you.”
This appeared to satisfy her. Still, it bothered Butler that his customary ease in such dealings—the effortless flow of compliments, the lighthearted flirting, the whole shtick—momentarily had failed him. Was it a symptom of having been too long at the front, or too long away from it?
“We have just made some tea,” the sergeant told him, unable to keep a note of hopefulness out of her voice. “If you would care to—”
“No. Thank you, I'm just …” Butler shrugged. He didn't know what he just was. He needed a change, but didn't know what kind. The thought of Ladoshka, tangled amid her bedclothes, filled him with unaccountable despondency. He barely remembered to say goodbye before turning back to the jostling, noisome, disorderly yet somehow purposeful street, crowded with comrades who didn't seem to care where they were going, so long as they'd find Germans to kill when they got there.
The other end of town was a tidier quarter where the devastation was less thorough and the Front's Operations Center had set up shop. Less of the black-market Mardi Gras here, more of the sober business of winning a war. Lower-grade officers scurried about on urgent assignments while their superiors clustered along sunny, well-swept patches of sidewalk swapping secrets and smoking papirosi.
Butler thought of approaching one of these groups, introducing himself and conducting an impromptu interview—Highly placed Red Army sources have told this reporter—but as he was stepping into the street, a truck veered around a corner and nearly ended his journalistic career on the spot.
He yanked himself back, heart pounding at the near miss. The truck squealed to a stop. From the driver's-side window, a dozen meters up the road, a head emerged, surmounted by a crimson bandanna. Instead of making an apology, the man yelled: “Quick! Get into the truck! Comrade, hurry!”
The head disappeared. On the opposite side of the cab, the passenger door popped open. Butler was caught between anger and an instinct more fundamental to his character: curiosity. He circled to peer through the open door at the driver, who was gesturing frantically.
“Jump in now, or it will be too late!”
Butler placed the man's accent somewhere in the Caucasus. He boarded the truck, a late-model Lend-Lease Studebaker, and silently recorded this subtle indication of status: Studebakers were the most highly regarded of Yankee vehicles, for their tenacity in the awful mud of autumn and the truly unnavigable mud of spring. The driver hit the gas as soon as Butler's foot cleared the road, the door jerking shut from the force of acceleration.
“Thank you, comrade!” the man said, grinding through the gears.
Butler gave him a once-over. He was on the large side, though shorter and more heavily made than Butler. His hair was black under the bandanna, and he wore a swooping, Cossack-style mustache. His clothing comprised a motley of unmatched uniform parts. The topmost layer was a hard-worn, oft-mended infantryman's jacket. At his collar he wore a major's pin, and on his sleeve a patch identifying him as a sniper—a special decoration issued during the most vicious stage of the street fighting in Stalingrad, when the nation's attention had been seized by the daring exploits—some real, mostly imagined—of men and women scrabbling like rats through the burning, dying city, picking off Fascists one by one.
Only after recognizing the patch could Butler identify the object on the seat next to him, strapped carefully in place as if it were a third passenger. Just longer than a baseball bat, it was padded with rags and stuffed into a leather satchel shaped like a slender, battered golf bag. Clearly a cherished personal possession, and Butler could guess what.
The driver caught him looking. His mouth curled in what might pass for a smile. “I'm called Seryoshka.”
Butler nodded: a nom de guerre, he thought. “I'm Sammy. I'm a journalist—a war correspondent.”
The man's hard stare was, perhaps, a commentary on Butler's accent.
“What's the rush?” Butler asked.
“You'll see.”
The truck slowed. By now they had retraced Butler's own route and were nearing the Orthodox cathedral.
“See that man up there?” said Seryoshka.
“The one in the Uncle Joe suit?”
This drew a chuckle. Stalin, like Hitler, was famous for his modesty in personal attire. The thin fellow by the road ahead wore a simple, unmarked gray tunic over black trousers, exactly the sort of man-of-the-people costume preferred by those who were anything but.
Seryoshka chuckled. “That's my politruk.” He pronounced the slang term for a political officer with distaste—the only way, Butler supposed, of pronouncing it. “We've been reassigned together, the two of us. Old comrades, you know?” He eased the truck to a halt, abeam of the officer in question.
“Ah, Comrade Major,” said the politruk,
smiling cheerlessly, showing large and well-tended teeth. He glanced at his watch. “I was wondering when you would come.”
“Unavoidable delay, comrade,” said Seryoshka. “There's been a change in plans. I've been assigned to escort this foreign reporter. A Westerner, writes for the most important papers. New York Post, Chicago Star. A real VIP. Doesn't speak a word of Russian. Needs a full-time minder.”
“I see.” The man looked doubtful. But whatever his doubts may have been, he wasn't eager to voice them in front of a Western journalist.
“I checked at the dispatch office,” Seryoshka went on, “and they say there's another truck headed out later. Sometime after three. Wait here, they said.”
The politruk narrowed his eyes. Butler supposed such men always suspect they're being lied to. Seryoshka gave him a big grin, and he responded by waving him off, resignedly. Seryoshka had won a round, but the fight would continue.
“Ha!” he exulted, once they were safely away. “That was a good one. You have my gratitude, comrade. Look in the map box there, you'll find something to celebrate with. Which way are you headed? I can drop you, if you like. There's plenty of petrol.”
Another Green World Page 6
