Europe Central (86 page)

All the faces seem familiar, even those I never met: probably because we were all soldiers fighting for the common victory.

—V. Karpov, Hero of the Soviet Union, ca. 1987

1

V. I. Chuikov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, twice Hero of the Soviet Union, and not incidentally “the hero of Stalingrad,” writes surprisingly lyrical prose in his memoirs. Guderian, Paulus, Rokossovsky, Meretskov, even von Manstein—the other generals all fall short in this respect. Chuikov’s career is blemished by several failures, not least his incorrect deployment of Ninth Army during the Finnish War. But now that everything has ended, with the Fascists blotted out, Germany sundered into a pair of nearly harmless bookends, and the Finns, as it just happens, anxiously subservient to us, we can afford to praise his literary efforts. He takes time to mention
the black humped shapes, like camels on their knees, of dead enemy tanks.
He has a way of bringing alive for us Fediuninskii with his pencil-written order to take command of Forty-second Army—what was Forty-second Army then? nothing but skinny men, many of them without weapons and uniforms, who shivered as they crouched shoulder to shoulder—of showing us the human being within the ruthless Rokossovsky, whose prior arrest and rehabilitation were now state secrets; of leading us dangerously close to Zhukov’s pale, pouchy face (Zhukov was the one who eternally warned:
I’ll have you shot!
or
I’ll court-martial you!)
Less prominent individuals also get their due. A certain Russian woman whose initials are E. E. K. receives warm mention; Chuikov seems to have been especially captivated by her long black hair. From reliable third parties I’ve learned that their relationship was platonic, that indeed he never saw her except in a photograph; she seems to have been the wife of a documentary cameraman who was temporarily attached to his staff. Discretion prevents me from recording the cameraman’s name. The story goes that the cameraman, who succeeded in filming at extremely close range the first interrogation of the captured German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus, obtained his vantage point only through bribery: someone, we needn’t say who, gained possession of the photograph of the mysterious E. E. K., who was actually, so I’ve heard, rather plain. Not long after this episode, the cameraman and E .E. K. divorced. This tale may well be a fabrication, and I report it only for the sake of completeness. Certainly you won’t find any but the most elliptical allusion to it in Chuikov’s account, whose optimism, by the way, takes on an almost individualistic taint after the surrender of Paulus. About our massive offensives after Stalingrad he writes:
The spring was with us, but behind the enemy’s lines it was autumn.
Well, he was right about that! I’m happy to say that in spite of such embellishments his book never fails to hammer home the political lessons of the war, which we all know was foisted on us by the predatory interests of the international bourgeoisie. What you shouldn’t expect from this general is an overall strategic perspective. Europe, the Central Front, the Voronezh Front, with the Steppe Front as a strategic reserve, all these integers and quantities have already been tabulated for us in the equations of a far greater mathematician (of course I mean Comrade Stalin); nonetheless, Comrade Chuikov makes sure we remember what’s what. In particular,
this long delay in the opening of the second front causes us to understand the actions of our Western allies much more correctly than the way they’re represented in those soothing messages.

2

The tale goes that Chuikov, who as I said was “literary,” happened to be studying the enemy troop dispositions on an evening between the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. Discovering some flaw in the German array, he smiled, showed the commissar, and recited this stanza from Marina Tsvetaeva:
You can’t withstand me, for I’m everywhere / at dawn, beneath the earth, in breath, in bread! I’m omnipresent. That’s how I’ll win / your lips!

The commissar laughed. He liked Chuikov, admired his achievements, and saw no reason to report this weakness for an unwholesome poet (a suicide at that). A more germane concern was: How had Tsvetaeva infected him?

Elena Konstantinovskaya, so I’m told, happened to hear the
I’ll win your lips!
although once again, how seems to be the issue. In fact, what was she doing there at all? Granted, she was a professional translator; could she have been employed in the interrogation of captured Fascists? One can’t assume that her husband’s assignment had corrected itself to include her—spouses lived and worked apart in those war years. On the other hand, why not assume it? The husband, R. L. Karmen, did have power, which the phrase
documentary cameraman
understates, and he would have pulled any string for her. He would have had her sent for in a white Zis limousine.

3

Outside, steam ascended from the porridge on the massive wheeled stove. Two soldiers were shaving one another in a pan of dirty snow-water. The tank commander with the pet porcupine was dreaming an erotic dream about Elena Konstantinovskaya. Elena herself had almost finished verifying her translation of an intercepted message from Ninth German Panzer Division. Her husband was away, interviewing a woman from our Forty-sixth Guards Night Light Bomber Regiment; she would make a perfect heroine for a
Sovkinozhurna
newsreel, and he told her so, with his ingenuous crooked grin. The pilot giggled shyly. She was having the time of her life. Elena sealed translation, original and all her notes in an envelope, which she then signed across the flap, smoked a German cigarette, buttoned up her jacket, put on her fur hat, checked her hair, drew back the flap of her tent, and set out to deliver her work to a very friendly communications officer who insisted that Elena call her Natalya Kovalova, not Lieutenant Danchenko. Natalya Kovalova was of course a representative of “the organs,” so everybody shunned her. Undoubtedly she knew that Elena had been
taken away
back in 1936. Elena hated her.

Just as she passed General Chuikov’s tent, she heard a happy voice, obviously his, sing out:
I’ll win your lips!

She had already met him several times. What she remembered most was his exhausted face.

4

We each had some special prize we were hoping to seize in Berlin. In Karmen’s case, it was the sleepwalker’s desk at the Reich Chancellery. It was supposed to be inlaid with Medusa’s head. He would have loved to put his feet up on it as he planned out films about our victory.—What he actually ended up with was a street sign for Unter den Linden. Doesn’t that say something about life?

(Truth to tell, in keeping with his profession he was fascinated by signs, and often collected them. One specimen he’d remark upon to the end of his career stood in the ruins of a village we were to liberate in 1944. The enemy would leave that sign with two arrows especially for him:

TO THE HOMELAND: ORSCHA-MINSK-WARSCHAU

and

TO THE FRONT: WJASMA-MOSHAISK-MOSKAU

It was a marker to be moved at will, as the enemy homeland moved. By the time Karmen added it to his collection, the Reich’s border had already shrunk back past Warsaw.)

The troops were dreaming of Nazi gold. They’d heard that it came from Jews’ teeth, but they didn’t care about that; they just wanted to get home alive and rich.

Chuikov, so I’m informed, dreamed of a week of nights with Elena in a lavish apartment, perhaps Göring’s or Ribbentrop’s. He was a surprisingly sentimental man. When Klavdia Sulzhenko sang “The Blue Kerchief,” he wept. His designs on Elena partook of this same romantic character. She was married, but why not? His orderly had laughingly reported finding a nurse’s fur-lined mitten on the floor of Karmen’s tent; that had been the day before E. E. K.’s arrival. Stocky, slab-faced and poorly educated, Chuikov had no particular illusions about his desirability; on the other hand, the prestige he’d earned at Stalingrad allowed him to help himself to a good many things he wanted.

As for Elena, she could almost see herself stroking Chuikov’s dark hair (he was only forty-three), but not quite, for she was really more interested in women than in new men, and she had no expectation of being in Berlin anyhow. That self-satisfied, catlike sensuality of hers, which in my opinion (Comrade Alexandrov speaking) is highly becoming in a woman, had lured any number of adventurers to heartbreak, but it could also make do quite well with itself. She had once made a remark which crushed her husband for a long time. But it was all his fault. Self-pityingly, and for exactly the same reason that decades after she’d divorced him he would return, whitehaired but still slim, to raise the cine-camera to his face in Toledo—he wanted to record every place he’d ever been with her!—he sometimes insisted on expressing his version of their past. It was one of his follies that there was an old Elena and a new Elena: the old one had been loving and ardent; the new one wasn’t. This comparison invariably exasperated Elena into an icy rage. And now he was talking on and on about the nights when they used to make love. Elena smiled, staring into space. In despair he described the
deep connection
which he could have sworn they’d shared at those moments. He wanted to know—he needed to know!—whether she’d felt it, too.

I don’t want to hurt your feelings, replied Elena calmly.

But I need to know!

No. I’ve never felt what you describe. For me it’s just a bodily sensation.

But don’t you—

It’s just manipulation, said Elena indifferently.

5

On the next day, Roman Karmen and his wife were invited to dinner with Chuikov. The commissar was there; so was the tank commander who kept the pet porcupine. The porcupine was unfortunately absent.

Not everyone gets to dine in a general’s tent! But since a commander must occasionally show himself to his frontline troops, we have a high regard for cinema and its associated apparatchiks—R. L. Karmen, for instance. As a matter of fact, we liked this loyal Soviet artist. In peacetime he had recorded the inauguration of the very first blast furnace in our Soviet land—the great facility at Krasnogorsk.
There were tears in the men’s eyes when that first fiery stream of liquid metal came pouring out. Karmen was there and recorded it all on film.
He was sufficiently confident in himself to refrain from filming the official ceremony, his ostensible subject. Our verdict: highly effective. We’d been similarly impressed by Karmen’s incredible images of our silhouetted troops leaning forward, distorted like evening shadows or Rodchenko sculptures, black-on-white by the thousands as they swarmed to complete the ring and finish off Paulus in Operation Saturn.

As for the wife, she also made an impression. She wore the Order of the Red Star.

They all knew the brave cameraman Pogozelyi, so they talked about him. This led Karmen to tell the tale of the woman sniper at Stalingrad, in the Orlovka sector, to be precise, who’d taken a bullet to the heart, coughed, slowly raised her rifle and sighted through it, squeezed off one more shot (which, however, flew wild), and fell back stone dead. Was it true? Why shouldn’t it be true?—She had long dark hair like Elena, said her husband, and Elena can do anything.

Elena smiled and stared at the wall.

Whereas all the Fascists are cowards, said the commissar. You witnessed Paulus’s interrogation. How I wish I could have been there! Did he break down immediately?

Well, said Karmen thoughtfully, it’s true that when he lit a cigarette his hand was shaking.

That made the commissar happy; Roman Karmen always knew how to please us.

No one wanted to stop talking about Stalingrad. Our victory was less than a month old. With cheerful eagerness, Karmen told how it had been on that first cold night—oh, it was very, very cold!—when the German Fascists marched into captivity by the thousands.—You know, that crunching sound hovered in the air! he said with a smile. It reminded me of an enormous waterfall over the meadows of Privolskye. Did you have the same reaction, Comrade General?