Europe Central (87 page)

Chuikov nodded tolerantly, staring at Elena.

6

Roman Lazarevich, said the commissar, I’ve heard that last year you spoke at the Conference on American and British Cinema.

So I did, said Karmen. That would have been in August.

And what did our
Allies
have to say?

I’m sure you can imagine, said Karmen with a smile.

The cone of lamplight brought Chuikov’s decorations to a soft white sheen. I’ve heard it said that he was now one of Comrade Stalin’s favorite generals.—Please eat, he said.

As a matter of fact, aside from the tea and the bread it was all American food: G-rations, to be exact, which Lend-Lease had brought us. There was even American butter! And so the conversation naturally turned to various presents received from the Allies. They’d sent us hand-me-down Aerocobras and Spitfires; the Aerocobras weren’t so bad. Their tanks were useless, especially the kind the British gave us, which we called
tombs for seven brothers.
The jeeps were better than anything we could have imagined.

And didn’t you also film Churchill last year? asked the commissar.

Yes, at Vnukovo Airport. He and Harriman were in Moscow to negotiate the second front.

Elena laid her hand on his in proud encouragement, so he went on: I filmed him close up as he reviewed his honor guard.

What did Churchill say, Roman Lazarevich?

Oh, that he was
fully resolved to continue the struggle
. . . Then he raised his fingers in that
V-sign
of his.

Karmen’s ingenuous crooked grin had never seemed so charming as in that instant. Everybody burst out laughing at Churchill and the Allies.

7

The spring thaw was just beginning. We had straightened out our front, excepting the Kursk Salient, whose bulge ran favorably westward. When the snow had finished turning to mud, and the mud to dust, then our Southwestern and Southern Fronts were to liberate Slavyansk and Mariupol, thereby positioning us to destroy the German Fascist Army Group Center. But it was hard, so hard to shatter that German magic which turns villages into mud and corpses! Last month we’d liberated Kharkov, and now the Fascists had gotten it back again.

No, he’s
von
Paulus, the commissar was insisting. All of those people are.

Chuikov sat morose and weary. Elena drank her tea. It felt very late.

The commissar was acquainted with Boris Sher, who had been Karmen’s assistant cameraman at Stalingrad. They also both knew a woman named Ekaterina at Moscow Newsreel Studio. Neither Elena nor Chuikov knew her.

The most important thing is not to forget any detail, said Karmen. At Stalingrad I tried to remember everything—not simply to record it, but to remember it! And I know that once we get to Germany I’ll do the same.

In that case, be sure and remember the second front! replied the commissar with a horrid chuckle.

Startled, Karmen blinked. He seemed to see a frozen, grimacing corpse in the snow, with a dead tank on the horizon.

8

Chuikov, pale and ghastly with fatigue, asked his guests to excuse him; he had to take some rest.—In other words, he added, I’m fully resolved to continue the struggle!

Everybody laughed, and Karmen made that hilarious
V-sign.

9

A few days later, Karmen set out with a small detachment, including the tank commander who kept the pet porcupine, so that the remnant of a Panzer group which had been hiding in the woods amidst the shells of their own broken tanks—fifty men at most—could be captured and their capture recorded. Log barricades on those snowy Russian roads, frozen bodies, it was all old news. But Roman Karmen would make it significant. Moreover, he’d meet his deadline.

He’d been hoping to film Chuikov himself, but that individual seemed overtired. It would be easier to film the Front commander, Malinovsky, whom Karmen already knew from the defense of Madrid. And the commissar, who seemed exceptionally friendly, had promised to introduce him to one of Chuikov’s most photogenic subordinates: Major-General N. F. Batyuk, Seventy-ninth Guards Rifle Division.

He longed for Chuikov’s approval. He worshiped him, really. He’d dealt the Fascists an unyielding blow! Leaping, running at a crouch, Karmen would spend the war trying to live up to men such as Chuikov. Have you ever seen Dziga Vertov’s seven-reel declaration of love for the women of our Soviet military forces? Roman Karmen wanted to create something like that. And if he couldn’t make seven reels, he’d make one. Soon he’d begin work on his film “The Battle of Orlov.” (New T-34s swarm over the curving streetcar tracks, while civilians run between them; they’re all aimed for the front!) His newsreel from Operation Citadel would explain both in words and in a shockingly dangerous camera sequence how the enemy’s vast eight-wheeled “Ferdinand” tank-destroyers were effective at frontal assaults with their eighty-eight-millimeter gun, but vulnerable to being attacked from the side or swarmed by our Red infantry. He was one of us; he actually flew aerial missions against the enemy. He filmed; he released the bomb-release lever with his own hands.

The tank commander with the pet porcupine told him a story about something horrible which had happened in ’41, amidst the giant caltrops in the snow around Moscow, and Karmen pretended to listen as he stared ahead, remembering how Elena had told him in her soft voice of perfect gentleness: I can’t honestly say that I do feel any hope.—He couldn’t stop hearing that. And all the time she was so gentle with him; her gentleness was as unreal as the second front.—And so they came into the woods.

Combat! The gun lunged forward, replicating the flash of a concert pianists bow. Fascists in the round turrets popped their heads out; they were centaurs. The tank commander with the pet porcupine was almost killed, but we rescued him. Roman Karmen filmed it.

10

Meanwhile, Chuikov, gripping the corner of the map table between thumb and forefinger, kept thinking about Elena.

She came to him with a gramophone record of Shostakovich’s Opus 40, which Chuikov found mostly romantic and pleasant, although some passages of the third movement were beyond him.

What was it about her? He could have had one of the laughing, big-breasted nurses anytime he wanted . . .

There in his secret world, which resembled one of those stove-warmed boxes on sleds which keep our wounded alive on the way from the front line to the dressing station, she might possibly have given herself to him, but her effect on him made him uneasy; he couldn’t take her all in at once; just as the weak glare of the hanging lamp illuminates the center of the map, our immediate battle zone, more than it does the corners, so he perceived and experienced her, wanting to know her entirely, but only one man had ever been able to do that. There’s something about her, he kept thinking, but he didn’t know what it was.

He was only lonely and tired; that’s all. He almost never got to rest! Stalingrad had failed to break his health, but even now he desired sleep more than anything. And soon the ground would have thawed sufficiently to resume serious operations. Von Manstein had deflected our spearheads from the Dnieper and recaptured Kharkov; we’d have to rectify that. On 17 July, he’d take part in the Izyum-Barvenkov operation to assist our Voronezh Front’s southern flank against the German Fascist Operation Citadel.

He asked her how she won her Order of the Red Star, and she smiled with her red, red lips, lit a cigarette and said: It’s a secret. He liked that. She asked him about his own Order of the Red Star, and he said: I won it on the second front! She smiled again. She reached for another cigarette, and he leaned forward to light it for her. And that was all that happened between them.

Her hair was as dark as the lamp-wire on the pallid tent-wall.

11

Karmen had come back looking cheerful and pleased with himself; he had German tobacco for Elena and a pair of black Zeiss binoculars for the commissar. Moreover, on the way back he’d shot footage of another indomitable peasant grandmother in her ruined house, baking bread in a tin made from a piece of a German airplane’s wing. He took off his jacket; he hung up his grubby astrakhan hat. Then, his smile already becoming uncertain, he took a step toward her. But Elena was as silent as a steppe pony.

It did not do to transgress Elena’s silences. For instance, where had she been before they met in Spain? Her taciturnity about that contained within its snowy forests palisades and watchtowers, chains and gangways glimpsed through the gaps in its steel fences. Elena’s silences were warnings all the more fearful for their steadiness, I’d almost say tranquility. Oh, her beautiful face with its gentleness, its unmoving gentleness!

Once upon a time, R. L. Karmen, just back from filming a sports parade on Red Square—young women in lyotards hoisting giant Cyrillic letters over their shoulders, and overtopping them Comrade Stalin’s portrait (the women’s white shoes flashed when they marched; his lens had caught that)—took his wife to an art exhibition in Leningrad, not the retrospective of 1932, for he hadn’t even known Elena then; all the same, one artist who figured importantly on the walls, through the efforts of a certain Otto Nagel, was the woman whom he had photographed at the Belorussian-Baltic Station, hoping that her portrait would be published in
Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia.
Oh, yes, our hopes! All the same, he still admired this K. Kollwitz; even today he thought that her monumental group portraits might afford new ideas for camera angles. (An example from 1965: One of our Red Army men feeds a smiling little Russian girl in “The Great Patriotic War,” directed by R. L. Karmen.)

Elena had already gone over to a corner of the room to browse through the monographs. Karmen followed her. Just as he came up to her, he saw her gazing calmly and beautifully at a page which quoted the artist as saying:
I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production.
Karmen felt a sensation of such extreme pain that he could hardly speak. Elena was conscious of him, of course; she knew that he was reading what she was reading; but later on, years later, he suspected that she had been oblivious of his pain; for who are we to think ourselves of such interest to others, even to our spouses, that they can truly read us? At the time it seemed to him that she was perfectly aware of his feelings, whose existence must naturally have been unpleasant to her, and that she calmly continued to be exactly what she was, knowing that this hurt him, distantly sorry for that, but certain above all that her nature neither could nor should be changed. He admired her steadiness; he hated and adored her; meanwhile he longed for each of them to be what neither could be; and all this happened in an instant, as they stood side by side reading
I believe that bisexuality is almost a necessary factor in artistic production.
That was how she was. That was
who
she was. And there was nothing he could do to satisfy her need for women.

But it wasn’t that at all! He really imagined that he could accept her being with any and every woman she chose, if only she were also fully present with him. That was what tortured him.

And at that moment he’d believed that Elena wasn’t bisexual at all, that her professed desires for other women were simply a smokescreen for her feelings for Shostakovich.

But maybe even that he didn’t believe; it might have been interpolated later; all he knew was that he and Elena, who now diverged so greatly in their desires to make love that the topic was agonizing for both of them, were standing side by side, reading something which reminded them both of that difference. Then Elena walked outside to smoke a cigarette. He did not follow her. Most likely she’d forgotten the moment immediately.

He never forgot. He remembered it now in this tent at Sixty-second Army Headquarters. His wife’s silence brought it back.

Elena went outside to smoke. Karmen leaning on his elbow as he sat at his desk, still wearing his jacket, looking pale and weary, preparing the shooting script.

12

After Stalingrad, the system of dual command had supposedly been abolished to reward the army: No longer would commissars dog our every breath. Epaulettes were introduced; there was even talk of allowing the troops to edit their own frontline newspapers. All the same, anyone who thought that the commissars were no longer dangerous was an innocent. (For instance—Comrade Alexandrov inserts this—all I had to do was pick up the telephone and two SMERSH operatives would be right over.)

And so perhaps the commissar was merely feeling bilious, or perhaps he was playing politics, but he was the one who told Karmen that his wife had visited Comrade General Chuikov, and there’d been music.

Karmen and the commissar were two men of the same breed. Their function was identical: to mobilize, encourage, strengthen, hearten. To do that, they had to portray things as they ought to be. And sometimes this made them very tired. We should not be surprised that they understood each other.

Where was Elena? Oh, she was over in Natalya Kovalova’s tent, translating something to do with the
Panzer Division “Adolf Hitler,” something top secret. And Karmen thought: Very possibly she prefers Natalya Kovalova.