Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  The division's intelligence man shook his head. “This cannot possibly be true.” He addressed himself to Krivon. “We're not depending only on information received from the front. We've sent out our own patrols, we've snatched a few tongues. The prisoners come in wearing Waffen-SS patches. Some of them are Hungarian. We know the Wehrmacht has no use for Hungarians—only the SS. Himmler slaps a tag on them that says ‘Ethnic German,’ then into the line they go.”

  The general acknowledged this with a smirk. He kept his eyes on Butler. “What do you have to say to this?”

  Butler thought quickly. He believed, as a guiding principle, you should always trust your intuition. But he guessed it didn't hurt to hedge your bets. With as much panache as he could scrape together, he said, “Comrade General, I think it is possible you are up against something very unusual. Something we may never have seen before.”

  A little smile came to the general's lips. The idea seemed to appeal to him. “And this is?”

  “An SS field officer who has read Clausewitz.”

  It was too much, finally, for the operations chief. A stocky colonel with a breastful of battle decorations, he shook his head and said, “You've given us your grand theories, comrade. Clausewitz—splendid! But you've never got around to telling us what in hell any of it means to us ordinary fighting men.”

  “That's quite simple,” said Butler. “Your forces are going over the wire. Soon you'll be swallowing territory like a thirsty man draining a canteen— only at some point, you'll feel a little scratch in your throat. And next thing you know you've got a viper in your belly.”

  “What percentage of that in there,” Seryoshka asked him later, in the politruk's yurt, “just as an approximation, would you say, was absolute horseshit?”

  The other men present laughed. Even the politruk, a generally humorless sort, monkish in his gray tunic, broke into a grin.

  Butler waited for them to have their fill. He toyed with the glass of vodka before him, rotating it carefully like a precision instrument. At last, professorially, he said, “I would not go above fifty. Sixty perhaps. Definitely no higher.”

  Seryoshka broke into fresh bellows of laughter, and the others joined in.

  “I meant what I said about the SS, though,” Butler added. Nobody cared by now; he was speaking mainly to himself.

  “God, that was a good show,” Seryoshka said, wiping his eye. “I wish you'd all been there.”

  The politruk nodded. At times you felt he wished to be human but his job prevented it. Most of the time you thought of him as a squid. “Comrade Sammy is an excellent speaker,” he allowed. “He is highly persuasive. Perhaps he will try his hand sometime at writing for the official journals.”

  The remark was typical, Butler thought: neither positive nor negative, it could have been a pat on the back or a knife in the kidney.

  After a while the other men in the room excused themselves, leaving only Butler, Seryoshka and the politruk. An ensuing silence was not uncomfortable—they were accustomed to one another's company by now—but nonetheless made Seryoshka restless. He stood up and paced a few steps, as far as the cramped interior of the tent allowed.

  “I wish I was out there myself,” he said, waving a hand roughly in the direction of the fighting, which had changed in the past hour to tank and infantry fire. “I hate sitting around, waiting. If they don't send orders down soon, I may think up something on my own. And you know that's all too likely to get us killed.”

  Now was the moment, perhaps, Butler thought, to rub the lamp and let the genie out. “I've got something for you,” he told the politruk. “It came yesterday, in a package of stuff from Moscow. Here, let me show you.”

  He crossed the tent and picked up his Astrakhan coat. From one of its many interior pockets he withdrew what appeared to be a thick square of brown boxboard. Across the top, like a scrolling red ribbon, was printed the well-known symbol of the Moskva State Recording Studio. He held it before him, advancing toward the politruk.

  “This is something for me?” The man didn't bother to mask the suspicion in his voice.

  “I hope you like it,” Butler said blandly.

  Of course he would damn well like it. To feel otherwise would be tantamount to treason. Butler had just handed him a newly pressed recording of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 7, the Leningrad. It was a famous work, the artistic embodiment of the Great Patriotic War. Legend held—and in this case Butler believed the legend might be true—that the first three movements had been written as it were on location, during the siege of Peter's capital. Hitler himself had ordered that the city be reduced by starvation rather than direct assault: an unspeakable calamity that claimed a million lives. Shostakovich could have gotten out—his fame would've won him a seat on an aircraft fleeing the encirclement—but chose instead to stay and share the fate of his fellow citizens. He spent the early months of the siege as a volunteer firefighter, rushing from one bombed-out site to another, working on the symphonic score in his spare time. Finally in midwinter, enfeebled by hunger, he acceded to Stalin's order to pack up and go.

  The magnificent work, completed in some godforsaken industrial town east of the Urals, was said to depict thematically the glorious defense of the “City on the Neva” against the Fascist hordes. It had special meaning for Butler, too; he'd gotten good American ink—the Chicago Trib, among others—for his review of the premiere performance at the Bolshoi in March of ‘42. The recording he'd just placed in the politruk's hands was made only a couple of months ago, after the final lifting of the siege, by the Leningrad Philharmonic itself, the very orchestra Shostakovich had had in mind. As patriotic icons go, this was right up there with Alexander Nevsky.

  The politruk raised his eyes to meet Butler's. He was a shrewd fellow— they usually were, in his line of work—and from his expression two things were apparent. One, he understood what Butler had given him. A career apparatchik, he knew the symbolic status of the Leningrad and could guess how tricky it must have been to obtain a copy. For this reason he would be wondering now what motives lay behind such a gift—surely something more than uncomplicated generosity.

  Two—all doubts aside—he was touched, deeply and truly. What Russian would not have been? The man's expression softened, his gaze taking on something of that famous sentimentality. Turning away, he placed But-ler's gift reverentially on an ammo crate, then reached underneath to pull out a bottle of fiery pepper vodka—the good stuff, such as the Chairman himself was said to enjoy. “Please join me, gentlemen,” he said, filling their glasses. “Now we shall listen to this noble piece of music.”

  Butler eased back into his chair while a phonograph was wound and the needle carefully lowered. He let a few minutes pass while the symphony got off to its lyrical, unhurried start. Seryoshka was watching him—interested, waiting—but Butler declined to return the look. These days, paranoia came to him easily and naturally. War was Tolstoyan, yes— and this one was spiked with a strong dose of Kafka.

  A second round was poured, a toast offered by the politruk to the citizens of Leningrad, and after that no one spoke for a while. The orchestra quieted down; a folkish little melody made the rounds of the upper winds. In his Tribune piece, Butler had noted the striking serenity of this opening movement—a marvel, when you thought about what was actually happening while Shostakovich toiled away. Shells were landing in the square outside the Winter Palace, a few blocks from the composer's apartment; miraculously, they failed to crack the domes or knock Peter off his horse. Fires were breaking out at all hours, fists pounding the door, people running around in terror. Then time began to slow, the food supply trickled down, winter crept over the city and the great hunger set in. The starving shuffled like zombies, going home to scrape off the wallpaper, using the paste for soup stock. Before long, people began lying down in the street to die—a civic-minded gesture, saving another hungry soul the bother of dragging your corpse down from the flat. Thinking about all that while listening to this wonderful, lilt
ing, purely serene and unruffled melody…it made you wonder if artists of Shostakovich's caliber were altogether sane.

  “This part here,” Seryoshka said, “this part with the drums—that's the German panzers rumbling over the steppe. At first they're quiet, then they get louder till you can't hear the flutes anymore. I think the woodwinds are the peasants, working out in the wheat fields—good humble folk overwhelmed by the tides of war. Something like that.”

  The others nodded without replying. They'd heard it before, and other narratives as well—every trumpet call, each boom of a timpanum, was said to signify this cruel blow or that daring counterstroke. And by the third movement you had snow on the roof at the Kirov, the German guns fallen quiet, tanks frozen in place and babushkas dragging corpses on chil-dren's sleds up the wide, empty promenade beside the river.

  You had to wonder, though. What would this music have sounded like in Peoria? It had been broadcast, Butler had heard, over the radio, Toscanini pinch-hitting for Samosud, the NBC Orchestra for the Bolshoi. And yet, though every note in the score might be the same, could such a performance have any meaning, any power, over there? Folks in Peoria had barely heard of Leningrad. They knew next to nothing about the German assault or the Russians' heroic stand before the city gates; all this had happened the summer before Pearl Harbor, while the Yankees were steaming toward another World Series win and the nation was enjoying its long isolationist nap. The Leningrad, in its majestic unfolding, could evoke for them no landscape of moon-white marble façades, nor the black waters of Lake Ladoga, nor the sky stretching unbroken to the Arctic.

  Glancing surreptitiously, Butler found his comrades sunk into misty-eyed absorption. One of the pleasures of going to a concert in Russia was to watch how the audience responded. And they did respond, like no other people in the world, even the Germans. They would bow their heads and sob, or open their mouths in delight, or crane their necks in breathless anticipation, as if expecting the Firebird to come whooshing down from the chandeliers. The day Russian composers discover irony, Butler thought, will be the end of the world.

  Movement four began. The weakest, in Butler's opinion. Shosti must have hated that tractor town in the east. “It was rye,” he said quietly.

  The other two men stared at him as though he had spoken in Japanese.

  “It was rye in those fields, where the peasants were working. They don't grow wheat around Leningrad.”

  Seryoshka shook his head and grinned. “You know a bit of everything, don't you, my friend?”

  “Only a bit.” He knew one thing: now was the moment, if ever. “I have a proposition to make. To both of you.”

  Out of the phonograph, the string section galloped like the Tsar's cavalry. The politruk lowered his eyelids, but it was too late for cynicism now.

  “I want to get into the action over there,” said Butler. He nodded westward, where the sound of fighting could be heard behind the gathering finale. “To see the war like nobody else ever has—nobody on either side. But I need your help. It could be a good thing for all of us.”

  Seryoshka stared at him, a wary interest in his deep Georgian eyes. The politruk waited with his fingers knitted.

  “We're not far from the Carpathian Mountains,” said Butler. “That's wild country—the Huns have never properly conquered it. No one has. Those hills around the Moravian Pass have sheltered renegades and rebels and deserters for so long, you've got third-generation outlaws in there. And now you've got partisans, ours and everybody else's. You've got escapees from the prison camps. You've got soldiers from the Czech and Polish armies who wouldn't surrender in thirty-nine and have been fighting ever since. And of course you've got the damned Germans, shooting everyone not in feldgrau. Hell, by this time they may be shooting each other. I want to get in there. I want to hook up with the Underground— the Red formations, they're the dominant force now—and get their story.”

  He made a bracket with his hands, framing an imaginary scene, like Zanuck briefing a cinematographer.

  “Here you've got this clandestine Red Army, supported by a secret proletarian society. By some stroke of providence, they've survived the Fascist occupation. They've taken terrible losses, unspeakable losses, but they haven't been knocked out. They've kept up the fight, they've attacked supply dumps and rail lines and raided armories and who knows what all else. They've struck the Nazis at every tender spot. They've surely targeted local collaborators—we've got to be honest about this—as well as the Germans. But in doing so they've forced the enemy to hold units back from the line, to police the whole rear area. That's weakened the front, which in turn has hastened the Soviet victory.”

  He slapped the table. “Think of it! Behind every partisan there's a story. Real human drama. A husband who's seen his family shot. A girl who fled from a slave-labor camp. A Red Army man, caught behind enemy lines, bravely carrying on the struggle. Somebody has got to go in there and meet those people and tell those stories. And whoever does it first is going to be”— barely nipping off the word famous, which one would leap for in a room full of Americans—” a hero. A genuine hero of the Revolution.”

  With sweat gathering on his brow, Butler wondered if he should spell out for them exactly what sort of hero he was talking about. He was thinking, and he wanted his listeners to think, the politruk especially, of those young propaganda officers who'd broken the news—manufactured it, some would argue—of the Stalingrad snipers. Or for that matter the imaginative soul who did the flack work for Shostakovich. Butler would've given short odds that the no. 7 wasn't called Leningrad before the Ministry of Culture got hold of it.

  “Such a story,” said the politruk at last, “might be inspirational. Were it not for certain obstacles. Chief among them, the German army. Which, if I am not mistaken, unfortunately stands between ourselves and the partisans whose stories you wish to tell.”

  Seryoshka gave a grunt of amusement. He must have known Butler would have a ready answer.

  Like a stage magician reaching into his hat, Butler dipped once more into the folds of his coat and pulled out an outdated situation map he'd nicked off the floor of the operations center. Moving the vodka glasses aside, he unfolded this on top of the ammo crate. It showed the territory between the Pripet Marshes and the Parczew Forest in Poland, as far south as Vinnitsa—most of which, according to the map, still lay in German hands.

  “Last summer,” Butler said, “when the Red Army hadn't yet reached the Dnieper, a lieutenant colonel named Kovpak led a small armed reconnaissance force over the line right here”— tapping at a town called Konotop— “then crossed the river, slipped right through the enemy rear, breached the Dniester eighty kilometers on, and made it all the way to here.” His finger came firmly to rest on Delatyn. “Which is a long fucking haul. En route, he destroyed several German targets and freed a number of your people being held by the Gestapo. Made it back home alive, and won a medal for his trouble. Two medals—Rokossovsky personally pinned them on his chest. I was there, I wrote a piece about it.”

  “I may have read that,” said Seryoshka, fingering his mustache.

  Butler didn't doubt it.

  “Let me understand you, Comrade Sammy.” The politruk stared down at the map, the better to conceal his thoughts. “You propose that an element of our forces should be dispatched on an exceedingly risky mission, the goal of which is to obtain a story for you?”

  “Not just for me. And that's not the only point. We could carry in supplies and reinforcements for the partisans.”

  “That is already being done, by parachute.”

  “And we could bring some of the partisans out. Not many—not the key leadership. But interesting people, sympathetic people. Mothers, children. People who can give testimony of Fascist cruelty. Poles awaiting their Red Army liberators. Jews who—”

  The politruk raised a hand, a quick and subtle gesture. “It is not the attitude of the leadership,” he said primly, “to give special attention to any particular religious or
cultural group. This goes against the spirit of Socialist unity.”

  “That's fine—but you can see what I'm talking about. The potential here. Not just for us, not just for today. For history.”

  The politruk turned thoughtfully to Seryoshka. There was no sign the two men despised each other. “What do you say about this?”

  Seryoshka ran his finger through his thick black hair, making a show of deliberation that was, Butler felt sure, entirely feigned. “I think,” he began finally—but then the flap of the tent rustled open.

  A young lieutenant stood there, flushed and panting. “There is a general alert, comrades. Excuse me, but the general has ordered everyone to prepare for combat. Our battalion is going into the line as soon as we can mobilize. I was sent to inform you.” Belatedly, he came to attention and offered a salute.

  Seryoshka snapped off a quick return. “What is the situation? To what mission are we being assigned?”

  The lieutenant stammered. “I—I am sorry, Comrade Major. I was not informed of these things. There has been an enemy counterattack, this is all I know. Our advancing forces were trapped at the river bend. Heavy casualties, they are saying.”

  Seryoshka did a most surprising thing then. He laughed, loud and heartily. “You were right, my friend!” Slapping Butler on the shoulder, hard enough to cause pain. “Not for the first time. And I'll wager not for the last.” To the lieutenant he said, “All right, go get yourself ready. We'll be right behind you.”