Yeremenko’s face was quite expressionless, although behind his calmness he was enraged by Golovanov’s intemperate lust, and his bullying nagging about Inge, and insulted by having been called britchik, which meant ‘little shaver’. He felt sorely tempted to call Katia, Golovanov’s wife, and let her know about her husband’s antics with Inge. The trouble was, he suspected that the KGB would not be particularly pleased if he were to do that, because they had spent years recruiting her for the express purpose of entertaining high-ranking Army officers. Through her, they could not only check on Golovanov’s continuing loyalty to the state and the Stavka, they could ensure that his natural pomposity did not inflate into delusions of military grandeur. It was still remembered in the KGB that Golovanov was a protege of the rebellious Rokossovskiy.
Yeremenko took off his sunglasses and peered across the airfield and told himself to be patient. There was a Siberian saying that the greatest patience brought the biggest bear.
Lieutenant-Colonel I.M. Gudkhov came smartly across the dry concrete of the runway, and saluted Golovanov and Yeremenko with a snap as brittle as somebody breaking a piece of crispbread.
‘We are honoured to have you here today, comrade marshal! You will see that we are in a state of complete readiness. If there were a war tomorrow, I would have only to click my fingers, and all of these aircraft would be scrambled and flying in eight minutes exactly.’
Golovanov smiled benignly, as if the idea of a war tomorrow was the furthest thing away from his mind. ‘Very good, colonel. Tell me something about these aeroplanes.’ He sounded utterly disinterested, which he was. As Gudkhov began talking, he said to Yeremenko, ‘Didn’t I see Koshevoy’s boy yesterday evening, at Wünsdorf? The one with the birthmark on his face?’
Gudkhov had to begin again. ‘These are all MiG-23s, comrade marshal. Single-seat, all-weather interceptor. Top speed, over 1,300 mph. Range 620 miles. All of these are fitted with a single 23mm cannon and four air-to-air missiles. The NATO code name for them is “Flogger-B”.’
‘NATO code name,’ sniffed Golovanov. He nodded to Gudkhov, and said, ‘Thank you, colonel. The Defence Council shall have a good report of you.’ Then he said to Yeremenko. ‘Let’s eat now, shall we? All this touring around has made me feel hungry.’
They walked back to the car. There was a sudden roar of turboprop engines from the An-12 transport, as it began to taxi ponderously away across the field. ‘NATO code name,’ Golovanov repeated. ‘Isn’t that something to make you laugh? But, you won’t forget about Inge, will you?’
Yeremenko shook his head. He couldn’t bring himself to say anything, for fear that he would lose his temper. Today, his temper was like dry ice, fuming but ineffective.
They ate at a small rastätte at Kloster Zinna, in a dark wooden room with a view of a dull back yard, and a row of fir trees. Golovanov had a small glass of dark beer and a plateful of pork and green beans. The beans were strangely bright on his plate, the same colour as a distant pasture seen before a thunderstorm. Yeremenko ate veal, which he prodded again and again with his fork until it was punctured all over.
Eventually, Yeremenko said, ‘What is it about Inge?’
‘You haven’t slept with her?’ asked Golovanov, sprinkling pepper on his pork.
Yeremenko shook his head. ‘No. And it seems very unwise for you to sleep with her just at the moment, the way things are.’
Golovanov used his knife and fork vigorously to cut a thick chunk of meat. ‘We may die, you know, in the weeks ahead. We have to think of that.’
‘That doesn’t mean—’
Golovanov levelled his knife at Yeremenko. ‘It means everything, my dear friend. It means that the things we do today, we may never have the opportunity of doing again, ever.’
Yeremenko was silent. Golovanov lowered his eyes back to his meal, and said, matter-of-factly, ‘It is very hard to explain to a man like you what a woman like Inge can do. She can exhilarate the mind, as well as the body. She is completely woman, in the way that a cat is completely cat. I have had experiences with Inge that have taken me beyond myself, beyond my years. When she is making love, she is dedicated to nothing but my pleasure, and she will do anything I ask, in any way, but still with fierce erotic pride. It is her pride that makes her so magnificent; her coldness; yet she will do whatever you ask of her, no matter how debasing it is.’
‘Well,’ said Yeremenko, jabbing at his veal again. ‘I suppose she has a certain allure.’
‘You make it sound like a smell.’
‘Comrade marshal—’
‘Hush,’ said Golovanov, with his mouth full of cabbage. ‘For once just do what you’re told. This is not the time for moral speculation.’
Yeremenko sat back and irritably sipped his apfelsaft. He knew that he ought to keep his displeasure under control. After all, every general in the Army had his luxuries, his expensive dacha, his chauffeur-driven automobiles, his caviare, his nubile girls from the Army’s Central Sports Club. But all of these luxuries came at a price: the price of a precarious military existence, and the constant threat of purge. The last great purge of generals had been in 1960, when Krushchev had sacked 500 of them in one day. Such a purge could always happen again, particularly now that Operation Byliny was so close.
Yeremenko eschewed luxury; and believed that by so doing, he could eventually rise to the very top of the Army, and stay there. He told himself that he shouldn’t fret at Golovanov’s lust for Inge, especially when that lust made Golovanov so vulnerable. But, all the same, it crawled into Yeremenko’s bones.
*
That night, Golovanov went round to Inge’s house early. He was. driven this time by Colonel Chuykov. As Colonel Chuykov opened the door of the car for him, he said, ‘You should be careful, comrade marshal. You know how things are.’
Golovanov squinted at him out of slitted eyes. ‘Careful?’
‘A word of caution, that’s all. There are those who would like to see you retired, at the very least.’
Golovanov gripped Chuykov by the lapel. ‘I have lived for a long time, colonel. I intend to live for a great deal longer.’ He stared into Chuykov’s face for a very long time, with an expression that could have been irritation or anger or even murderous hostility. Those tiny deep-set eyes kept flickering from side to side as if Golovanov couldn’t decide whether to slap Chuykov playfully on the cheek or to have him liquidated.
‘Well, that’s just my opinion, comrade marshal,’ said Chuykov, cautiously.
‘Of course. I didn’t expect anything else. Tell me, do me a favour, when I have gone inside, go to each of the houses around here, knock at the door, and say that you are lost, and want some directions back to headquarters. Find out who answers the doors around here. You know what KGB look like.’
‘Comrade marshal, I don’t think that—’
Golovanov grasped his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. I was trying to frighten you. They are probably all KGB. But the point I am trying to make to you is that there are some things which are worth worrying about, and others which aren’t. I am not afraid of Siberia, comrade, nor am I afraid of death. Perhaps I am a little afraid of pain. I gave up political opinions years ago, as a deliberate decision. I wanted to survive for as long as possible, for the sake of myself, for the sake of my family, for the sake of my country. But I will never give up being myself. Once I have done that, I will have surrendered everything, and they might as well take me to Lubianka straight away and shoot me. Whatever it is that inspires you, my friend, you will learn the same thing yourself one day.’
Chuykov said nothing. He was embarrassed; but at the same time strangely moved. He watched Golovanov walk stolidly up the driveway towards Inge’s door and ring the bell. He decided it would be more discreet if he were to leave; and so he did. He executed a clumsy three-point turn in the Volvo which Yeremenko had arranged for him, and drove out of the housing estate, too quickly.
Inge opened the door wearing a white silk robe. Her white hair was wet an
d curly from the shower; her body was still wet so that her shoulders and her breasts clung translucently to the silk. She looked at Golovanov without surprise, and said, ‘Du bist früh gekommen.’
Golovanov said, ‘Everything which it was necessary for me to inspect has been inspected. And, well, perhaps I found that I couldn’t wait any longer.’
‘Come in,’ she said. He noticed that she glanced quickly out into the road before she closed the door. ‘I was washing my hair,’ she told him. ‘I didn’t have time to dry myself.’
He took her hand and kissed her. She smelled of shampoo. He said, ‘You must despise me sometimes.’
‘Why?’ she said, combing out her hair, walking across the room, turning her head as she saw herself in the mirror.
‘I am always intruding on your life without any notice, without any explanation.’
‘You are too soft for a marshal of the Soviet Union,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘Believe me, I am not soft.’
She reached the opposite side of the living-room; and stood in the last slanted light of evening, looking so beautiful that this moment should have been frozen cryogenically, to be preserved for five thousand years, while scholars and archaeologists peered through the frost and wondered what on earth they could do with a tall, perfectly-proportioned Rhein-maiden, and a squat frog of a Russian marshal, solidified forever in the only instant that had any real meaning for either of them.
Because from this point onwards, their relationship would change, and twist, and Golovanov would suddenly discover that he was not the man he thought himself to be. Just as Inge, perhaps, would discover that she was quite a different woman.
They drank vodka together as the sky grew dark outside. They played Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev. Inge’s hair dried in rags of blonde; she sat beside Golovanov on the sofa wearing nothing at all but white patterned stockings, smoking papirosi, talking every now and then about her childhood in Bavaria, cross-legged, her large breasts patterned with pale-blue veins, her vulva parted to reveal those inner lips as pale and pink as confectioner’s sugar.
‘Yeremenko will make the arrangements for you to come with me to Haldensleben tomorrow,’ said Golovanov.
Her pale eyes flickered. She smoked, but said nothing.
‘So far, I have no instructions, except to take you there, and then to call a certain number in Magdeburg. I suppose you know that there might be some risk.’
‘This is a dangerous world, Timofey, for all of us. You are just as much at risk as I am. Supposing they discover what you have done?’
Golovanov pouted in that peculiarly Russian way of his, so that he looked like a petulant boxer-dog. ‘Don’t you think that I have lived with risks of this kind for long enough? I know what I’m doing; and Yeremenko isn’t so fierce. I have dealt with his kind before.’
‘And the KGB?’
He touched her bare thigh, sliding his hand all the way from her knee to the concavity just beside her exposed mound of Venus. He wished very much that his life had been different, that the world had been different, that he had been born somewhere else, in another time, in another identity. Sometimes the burden of being both a man and a marshal of the Soviet Union was just too much.
Later, they went into the bedroom. It was dark, mirrored, modern, hushed. Golovanov knew there were microphones. He tugged off his shirt, then sat down on the edge of the bed and took off his socks and his trousers. Inge waited for him, her white skin gleaming in the darkness like the skin of an ice-maiden, or the tooth of a shark. He climbed on to the bed on all fours, approaching her with his head bowed. She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his chin, his shoulders. Then, as he crouched above her like a bear, she slid downwards, kissing his chest, and his stomach, and running her sharp fingernails lightly down his naked sides so that he shivered. At last she reached his hard, corded penis, and took it between her lips, and gently sucked it and licked it. He said something muffled, deep down in his throat. She said, ‘Shall I bite you?’
They made love, slowly and reflectively, as if this might be the very last time. His dark red penis slid glistening in and out of her pale and swollen vulva. It made a sound like discreet kisses in the dark. Eventually he turned her over on to her stomach, her hips lifted up, and he knelt behind her and buried his face between the cheeks of her bottom, his tongue-tip exploring first the wrinkled tightness of her anus, and then plunging deep into her liquid vagina. It was oddly ritualistic; his face was anointed with her juices. Prokofiev, in the other room, reached a pompous, stalking crescendo.
She brought Golovanov to a climax with her hand. His semen fell through the darkness in loops and splashes, pattering on to her breasts. Again he said something indistinct, almost as if he were speaking another language. She held him close to her, they shared his stickiness. She kissed his ear. She said, ‘Hush, Timofey,’ as if he might be frightened, either of the dark or of his destiny.
‘Russia,’ he said, in the tone of voice which a serious son might have used, if he had found his father with a prostitute.
Inge lay in the darkness, stroking his face, touching those brambly eyebrows of his, feeling his heart pounding against his ribs. ‘All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.’ Golovanov had taught her those words, from Tolstoy.
He left her the next morning just after six. It was raining again, and he hurried to the car with his coat-collar pulled up, neither turning nor waving. He would be taken by Mi-24 helicopter to Haldensleben, where he would have lunch with the divisional commanders of the 20th Guard Army, which consisted of one tank and four motor-rifle divisions. Inge would arrive later, by car, as unobtrusively as possible. Overcast and wet weather was forecast. There was still no signal from the Stavka that any diplomatic progress had been made in Copenhagen, although it was now official that the United States had approved the preparatory stages of GRINGO, and that the British would shortly be mounting Cornflower.
Golovanov ate a breakfast of frankfurters and tomatoes at the mess at Zossen-Wünsdorf, while Chuykov and Grechko briefed him on the day’s schedule. There were messages from the Commander-in-Chief of the Far Eastern Stretegic Direction at Khabarovsk, from the Czechoslovakian HQ in Milovice, and from the Northern Group of Forces at Legnica. Most of them were irritable queries about how long their forces would have to be kept in a high state of readiness, since the psychological tension and the physiological strain were both becoming critical. Men needed their sleep: they also needed feeding. Keeping an entire strategic direction at fever-pitch was an expensive and harrowing business, both for the troops and for their commanders. If something didn’t happen soon, the armies would pass the peak of readiness, and rousing them back up to it again would be arduous and difficult.
Chuykov said, ‘It appears that only agreement with Cuba is delaying us now. Otherwise Byliny is completely ready to go.’
Golovanov spooned four spoonfuls of sugar into his glass of kyefia, soured milk, and stirred it. ‘We must be patient, that’s all. The success of Byliny depends on complete diplomatic agreement all round. And, there is the future to consider, once Byliny has been successfully accomplished.’
Chuykov said, ‘I understand that we are to be joined in Haldensleben by a personal friend of yours, comrade marshal.’ His voice was wary. Given Golovanov’s reputation, it needed to be.
Golovanov wiped kyefia from his mouth with his checked napkin. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Comrade Yeremenko, sir.’
Golovanov drummed his fat fingers on the table, a disapproving blurt of noise. ‘I would of course have briefed you later,’ he said. ‘But, since you know already, yes, Inge is joining me in Haldensleben.’
Grechko said, ‘She is to stay at the Sachsen Hotel, so I believe.’
‘So,’ said Golovanov. He was annoyed that Yeremenko had taken his aides into his confidence, although he knew very well that it made administrative sense. ‘The Sachsen Hotel, hmh?’
He said very little more;
except to dictate a reply to the commander of the Central Group of Forces at Milovice, telling him in quite explicit military prose to stop whining and wait for further instructions without complaint. Then he finished his soured milk, gathered his briefcase and his baton, and led the way out to the helicopter landing area at the rear of the headquarters building. The rain had eased off for a while, but the silver humpbacked Mi-24 helicopter was still beaded with droplets. Its rotors lazily turned, and its engine made a noise like a vacuum-cleaner along the corridor of a Russian hotel. Although it was only being used to carry Marshal Golovanov from Zossen-Wünsdorf to Haldensleben, it was fully armed, with a four-barrelled 12.7mm machine-gun in the nose, and two pods under its stubby wings armed with 57mm rockets. From the moment that the preparations for Operation Byliny had been announced, the Soviet Army had technically been at war.
Yeremenko was not joining Golovanov on this particular visit: he had too many administrative duties, including the repositioning of the 4th Guard Tank Army and the preparation of the Baltic Fleet, which had been giving him some considerable headaches. While it was comparatively easy to pretend that the Soviet ground forces were involved in nothing more threatening than annual exercises, it was more difficult to deploy the fleet without immediately arousing the suspicions of Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark, all of whom became instantly clamorous whenever a Soviet submarine ventured into their territorial waters.
Sacrifice Page 16
