Europe Central (88 page)

He sat with the commissar, getting drunk.—I remember what she used to do and what she won’t do now, he said.

The commissar slapped him on the back, poured him another glass, and said: Don’t let her get to you, Roman Lazarevich! As Comrade Stalin says,
feelings are women’s concern.
Is it true that you’ve been to Comrade Stalin’s dacha?

Last summer, said Karmen wearily. At Zubalovo.

You’re a very lucky man, Roman Lazarevich. And did Comrade Stalin drink with you?

No, but the light was on in his study.

So. Well, all the same, I don’t mind saying I envy you for that. By the way, what did Elena Evseyevna win her Red Star for?

Oh, bravery. She’s very brave, very honest. But at the same time . . .

Finally, to distract him, the commissar tried to inspire him with our forthcoming victory, which would surely occur by the beginning of 1944 at the latest—or would if our so-called “Allies” would only open the second front.

Sulkily, Karmen muttered that the Allies reminded him of Elena, who kept always saying
I understand
while making no move to do anything about the situation.

13

Then came Kursk, Maidanek, Bucharest, Poznan. Every bullet bounced off Karmen’s creased and oil-splotched fur-lined jacket.

Elena never got to Berlin of course; she never saw her former lover, Lina, not to mention the misty ruins and rusty steel beams along the Teltowkanal. Whatever became of her? Her story ended in the same soft secrecy as Barcelona used to hide in on nights that the Condor Legion was coming—all dark, except for little blue nightlights! That was the heart of Elena Konstantinovskaya.

As for the second front, by the time our Allies finally opened the second front, who cared? It’s true that they died by the thousands on the beaches of Normandie. But we’d already died by the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, it’s objectively clear that their only reason for invading France at that late date was to deny us total victory in Germany.

Subsequent to the Fascist capitulation, which is to say some three weeks after Chuikov had been named a Hero of the Soviet Union for the second time, we immediately expropriated all items of value in our sector—machine tools, wristwatches, window-sashes, and of course whichever women our Red Army men fancied (an incendiary shell usually brought them out of their cellars). We even took the street signs—why not? So it went, right through the first winter. In February 1946 a great wind blew through the rubble, after which one of us found a page of a letter lying in the snow, or perhaps it wasn’t a letter at all, just a sheet of paper with crazy Russian words on it, especially the name Elena written over and over—oh, it was so crazy!—and because he could not read, he brought it to Headquarters just in case it might be some anti-Soviet provocation. Comrade General Chuikov never saw it, of course. He was much too important for such trifles. But many of us did turn it through our scarred hands. Only our commissar was shrewd enough to recognize Roman Karmen’s writing. ‣

OPERATION CITADEL

The German method is really rooted in the German character, which—contrary to all the nonsense talked about “blind obedience”—has a strong streak of individuality and—possibly as part of its Germanic heritage—finds a certain pleasure in taking risks.

—Field-Marshal von Manstein (1958)

To be a German means to do a thing for its own sake.

—Concentration camp commandant (1933)

1

From beneath the filigreed gates of Prague, triple columns of us came marching, with our rifles pointing upward and our faces as hard as the eagles carved on the Moltke Bridge. From Berlin we came, passing through the Brandenburg Gate; behind us, the victory angel atop the Siegessäule cast golden light upon our helmets. (Have you ever seen her, with her great fluted axeheads of wing, her raised scepter, billowing dress, and outstretched garland, everything of gold? She’s our queen of eagles.) From Warsaw we also came, not so many as were needed, for an uprising had broken out in the Jewish ghetto and we had to neutralize that; nevertheless, some of us did come from Warsaw, others from Budapest and Bucharest; many came from reserve pools north and south by the front line; from everywhere in the Reich we came, and off we all went to Kursk. Goebbels had just introduced the slogan
Total war, the shortest war,
because death was coming back to us, singing in the East with the wailing voice of a Katyusha rocket. Our only hope lay in the sleepwalker, who’d already assumed full responsibility for the disaster at Stalingrad.

Grave as the loss of Sixth Army certainly is, said Field-Marshal von Manstein very carefully, lacing his fingers together, it still need not mean that the war in the East is irretrievably lost. We can force a stalemate even now—if we adapt to such a solution.

Whenever I consider this offensive, said the sleepwalker, not listening, my stomach turns over.

As for me, I felt uneasy, too, because even though we kept capturing them by the thousands and the tens of thousands, sending them back to the rear areas to be disposed of (at the military rifle range outside Dachau, we shot them in lots of five hundred), there were always more Russians! Everyone I knew had bad dreams. That enemy salient within which Marx and Engels had solved the national question, that salient at Kursk, how many Russians did
it
hide? We ourselves were fifty divisions, two tank brigades, three tank battalions, eight artillery gun battalions: nine hundred thousand men! But what’s any number, compared to infinity?

That’s why so few of us supported Operation Citadel. After all, we should have been easier on ourselves: it wasn’t our task to win; no one expected that of us. It was only our job to take the blame.

The day we unsealed our orders the sun was lemon yellow, like the armband of a Waffen-
signals man. We came with our horses, tanks and motorcycles on the muddy roads; we assembled, waiting to hear the latest bad news. The smell of enemy wheat put us in mind of summer. Maybe the sleepwalker had dreamed up some way to reorganize our Kampfgruppen. Or could the V-weapons be ready at last? Rüdiger, who was from my home town, didn’t think so. Sometimes he sat beside me in our trench, rereading last month’s
Signal
magazine and shaking his head while I made sure that all my wires were nicely wound on their spools. The only feature he ever approved of was the double-page spread on Lisca Malbran. But what good would
she
have been in a trench? That was what Dancwart wanted to know. As you can imagine, Rüdiger had an answer. He’d seen her in “Young Heart,” which is a politically reliable E-film. He would have done anything to see her in “Between Two Fires,” but that film came and went while we marked months in the slaughter-field. Well, well; we were out of the trenches now; we’d reached jumpoff position, and the sleepwalker’s long-range guns peered over our tents.—It’ll be hot tomorrow, remarked our Rüdiger, shaking his head.—Then we invoked our bitter German idealism, such as it was, and came to attention,
Achtung! Stillgestanden!
The orders, which contained the words
total
and
unparalleled,
warned that the Red Army had deployed against us fifteen hundred antitank mines and seventeen hundred antipersonnel mines per kilometer of front, not to mention one point three million men. So now we knew exactly how large infinity was. In short, we must anticipate substantial counterattacks. Never mind. The new Tiger tanks would save us.

That was when the old war cripple came in from nowhere, begging to fight beside us; he remembered the days of horse-drawn guns under snowy trees—lost days, the days of ’41! It was summer now; we’d bought summer at the price of Sixth Army and four allied formations, not to mention the various lands we’d gained in 1942—all turned to ice! Well, so what? It was still summer.

Honestly, I don’t know how that far-faring cripple got through without movement orders. But, come to think of it, we weren’t even calling up fifty-year-olds yet, because Operation Citadel would set everything right. He was an old, old man, maybe seventy or more, blind in one eye, but he traveled fast on his crutch. When I think back on it now, it’s like a dream. And why did he choose us in particular? I was in Ninth Army, Forty-seventh Panzer Corps, Ninth Panzer Division, which by then was hardly winning any prizes. We were all of us as gaunt as antitank rounds in our field-grey cloaks and hats, our striped belts pulled tight, our grey helmets transforming our heads into bullets. We were hungry and sullen, doing little without direct orders, knowing that we would leave another forest of neat crosses here, with helmets hanging on some of them, and triangular roofs over a very few, all destined to be wrenched out of the mud once the Slavs took over. Even Private Volker, who’d sedulously tried to improve his mind by sightseeing in the various uncanny places we went, cranked up no enthusiasm for Kursk, which is noted primarily for its State Bank and the palaces of the Romodanov boyars. I remember how at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa he used to peer into every cottage before we torched it, hopeful to see evidence of anything beyond what we politely referred to as
a certain form of existence.
Rüdiger used to tell him: There’s no point. What could a Red possibly have that one of us would want? Even their Natashas are hideous! Do you want to see German beauty? Here’s my daughter’s photograph . . .—But Rüdiger didn’t understand. Volker wasn’t a souvenir hunter; he shared few qualities with Corporal Dancwart, who once crammed an entire tank full of embroidered peasant blouses. Volker—why am I talking about Volker? He’s dead. The last time I saw him get excited was months before Operation Citadel, when a direct hit from a Katyusha sent up our ammunition dump in beautiful fireworks. The boy often entertained me. His guidebook devoted two chapters to Moscow. The second chapter was all churches, so given what I know about Reds I can promise you that it was out of date; a couple of lines would have exhausted that topic after Stalin took over! Well, what’s the difference? Going to church won’t save you. Volker wanted to set foot in Saint Basil’s Cathedral not to be saved, but because its dome reminded him of a painted wooden top which he and his brother used to play with. That brother caught a bullet in the throat at Sebastapol. He died for our Reich. Did Volker want to pay back any Slavs for that? In my opinion, that wouldn’t have accorded with his nature; he was more interested in music. Once he remarked that he would have liked to be at the siege of Leningrad, just to hear Shostakovich’s new symphony! Such idealists aren’t long for this world. By the way, he was a very brave man, and in hand-to-hand combat the Reds avoided him; they feared his face. It’s a pity he never visited Moscow, which enjoys many amenities, so I’ve heard; Rüdiger spoke incorrectly; their Natashas aren’t trollish at all. And the Kremlin is adorned with red glass stars; I’d take one home if I could find the right sort for my Christmas tree. So why not Moscow? As soon as we’d tied off the salient and clanked into Kursk, no doubt we’d get there, because with the destruction of the Central Front and the Voronezh Front, only the Steppe Front and an infinite number of other Fronts would stand in our way.

Now I wonder if Dancwart wasn’t correct. At least he got something; those embroidered blouses transformed themselves into schnapps, cigarettes and new Natashas (P-girls and U-maidens, I should say). But he bored me. His favorite proverb was:
Keep riding until daybreak.
And now Volker bored me, too. All he longed for was to get wounded again, as who didn’t?

Not this cripple! He wanted to be a hero. Can you imagine? In our national poem, when second-sighted Hagen warns Gunther not to ride to the country of the Huns, they name him a coward, so he angrily insists on sharing their doom. My psychoanalyst would call that compensation. The sleepwalker would call it a noble sacrifice. It might have been either or both, because the cripple was now informing us: You might not know it to look at me, but I was accepted into Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland!