The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (44 page)

Ilya bounds out of the crater. The company shouts, “Urrah! Urrah!”

In ten steps Ilya leaps onto the top of the dike. Running one stride back, but at his side, is little Misha. Behind them, the fifty-man platoon screams their revenge, obviously terrified.

Ilya moves fast to distance himself from the clumping men at his back. Bullets reduce their number in the first twenty meters. He hears the sough of rounds, catches the soft clap of bullets hitting bone behind him. He leaps off the parapet into the wreckage of the first pillbox. Misha lands beside him, wild-eyed.

The stunned Germans manning the machine gun cannot swivel as fast as Ilya moves in from their left. He rises into the air as though winged. He ricochets off the busted masonry to crash down behind them and rip them with his own submachine gun. Misha stupidly runs right in front of their muzzle but they are dead before a finger can jerk. Ilya glares at him, then flashes into the debris.

He emerges again on the strip of dike leading to the citadel walls. The platoon has already taken cover in the rubble. Ilya alone, without hesitation, without yelling orders, turns and runs forward, headlong at the fortress. Misha shouts at the ducking platoon, “Go, go, go! With Ilya, dammit! Go!”

Ilya’s feet pound under him, his heart pounds throughout him, boots scrape and run behind. Voices and rifles and bullets are in full throat. Enemy blood, enemy metal and concrete, everything is mad and dashing about, running out of place, blood belongs inside men, bricks belong in neat walls, water should be flat and not coughed up in pillars. But the sky is a lovely gentle blue, the light is tempered and even, as though God maintains His home nicely, no matter what chaos of man rails below.

Ilya levels his submachine gun and fires bursts from the hip. He runs in a serpentine path over the dike, never letting enemy gunners draw a bead. He tosses grenades ahead, he swivels his own gun barrel left and right and straight, firing like three men, running behind his weapons like a hunter riding behind his hounds. He leaps down into craters and emerges at full tilt, his long footfalls land wherever there is heavy debris on the concrete surface, these are the spots where Ilya knows there are no unexploded mines. He pauses behind cover only enough to let the lagging platoon that advances in his footsteps close the gap, or to let Misha gather himself. There is no strategy in his head. Misha with a heaving chest continues to suggest, “You go round that way, I’ll take five men and go this way.” Ilya answers him with another wordless charge into the enemy guns. All Misha can do is mutter, “Shit,” and run behind.

In combat Ilya has always been quick and agile, even with his size and strength. He’s often battled calmly, other times—at Stalingrad—enraged. But he’s never fought with this kind of physical prowess. He leaps barbed obstacles, dodges bullets which seem to bend around him like light through a prism, he feels nothing of the wounds mounting on his legs and arms. His own gun silences every German who challenges him. His flung grenades fly through the smallest apertures in those remaining concrete casements. No fatigue mounts his back. No falter slows his legs.

There’s a way a man moves in open warfare, even the boldest man. When an enemy gunner sights along his barrel for this target, he sees a figure, a familiar sight, he’s shot at running men before. But when one comes who is totally without fear—not merely courageous but a man devoid of dread—he comes differently, oddly, with a rare force. This one is hard to predict, hardest of all to survive.

In his advance Ilya is not cruel, in the same manner he is not heroic. He kills those of the enemy who have been placed in front of him to kill. This is what he set out to do. He seems to run beside himself, outside his body. All effort and will are gone, he acts without need of them.

Eight minutes after the attack signal, Ilya reaches the thick fortress wall. He moves along it to spot where the wall has been shattered by the artillery. This gap is dead ground, where flanking fire cannot find him for the moment. Misha is behind him the whole way. He arrives looking flayed, his scar vibrant.

“Ah,” Misha huffs, his hands on his knees. “Ilya, what ... ? Ah, shit.”

Ilya can hear Misha no better than a man standing near a dynamo could hear him.

Within a minute the platoon catches up. There are only two dozen left. The rest lie out on the dike or float in the Oder. The survivors grit their teeth in exhaustion and pain. Ilya sees several bullet-riddled uniforms, almost every one of them has his own blood on his hands. The men are on their feet leaning against the bricks and looking at him with strange faces.

Awe.

Ilya picks out two soldiers who answer his eyes with a quaver. Then some alchemy strikes them under Ilya’s gaze and they become firm before him, resolute to go where he goes.

“Ready?” he asks.

The two nod.

“Everyone reload.”

All the soldiers put new clips into their rifles. Many hands tremble. Ilya shoves a new magazine into his PPSh. Spent clips fall to the ground.

When they are done, Ilya says, “Misha, follow with the rest. You understand?”

The little soldier spits once to clear his mouth. His eyes plead with Ilya for something small, some accommodation in this hell. He insists he be called, even now, “Sergeant Bakov.”

Ilya answers. “Then follow, Sergeant Bakov.”

The two chosen move close behind him. Ilya presses close to the wall. He raises his barrel beside his cheek. The metal has cooled to a fleshly warmth.

He nods his helmet, one, two ...

Together the three leap around the jutting bricks and into the gap.

Bullets peel the two men away from Ilya. They die in a second, in grunts, their alchemy completed. The Germans in the fortress yard have presighted a machine gun at the gap. Ilya feints right and dives left. A vein of bullets pulses inches from his waist. There’s nowhere to hide. He runs right at the enemy machine gun, no dodge, no confusion. He lowers his submachine gun and fires to empty his weapon, to empty himself through it. He screams to hasten the draining of himself into the battle.

Ahead, the machine gun is silenced. Ilya doesn’t slow to wonder at it. He slides to his belly and lifts his gun to cover the gap. He takes shots at scurrying Germans, knocks down two. Behind him comes Misha’s shout, “Urrah, Ilyushka! Urrah!” The platoon courses through, firing and bellowing his name. On top of the parapets, Red soldiers from the assault boats have climbed the walls with ropes and grappling hooks and now pour into the courtyard. Someone up there brandishes a crimson Soviet banner.

In minutes, the courtyard swarms with hand-to-hand fighting.
Panzerfausts
and grenades blow at close range, bullets knit back and forth across the yard. Ilya stays at the heart of the battle, dropping his gun to pick up another and another when each is spent. The combat quickly becomes savage. The point is soon passed where surrender is not an option; defenders and attackers alike fight in the passages, staircases, and courtyard not for country or leaders but for the unadorned human lust to kill an enemy. For an hour, every man in the ancient Prussian fortress is unleashed to further Ilya’s cause, to kill.

By noon the German garrison is overwhelmed. The trickery of the air bombardment last night and this morning worked; most of the enemy were caught outside the fortress when the Red infantry attacked over the dikes and across the river.

Ilya sits alone crumpled against a pillar when Misha finds him. The little man doesn’t have much of a body over which to spread such weariness and fright.

His voice is listless when he slides down another column to sit opposite Ilya.

“Well. We need a pew platoon again.”

Ilya says nothing. There are no words after this kind of fighting. Smoke is not a word, blood is not, and they are the only responses.

The two sit facing each other for a long while. Soldiers and officers walk about, marching off prisoners, collecting weapons and bodies, doing the aftermath of the struggle for the Küstrin citadel.

Ilya closes his eyes but opens them when he finds too much there. He leaves them open, preferring the world outside him, it’s less unsettling, even this world. He watches Misha and feels himself go blank.

After a time Misha looses a low chuckle. The sound is damaged, like a broken music box. Slowly he slides over from his post.

“Now, Ilyushka, don’t bite me.”

The little man skids close to look at Ilya’s wounds, all snips, nothing deep. Ilya doesn’t move under the scrutiny. Misha himself bears several bullet marks. When he’s satisfied that Ilya isn’t going to bleed to death propped against his pillar, he moves away.

Another crooked snicker escapes Misha.

“Well, I guess we’ll be lieutenants next.”

* * * *

SEVEN

March 30, 1945, 1:50
p.m.

Aboard the President’s train, the
Ferdinand Magellan

Approaching Warm Springs, Georgia

eside the train tracks citizens stand waving hankies and
flags and pink palms. A warm Good Friday afternoon puts them in shirtsleeves. These are farmers and small-town folk, the best believers in democracy, the givers of sons and daughters to the war, the poor and honest for whom Roosevelt has crusaded in all his four terms.

He is so tired, he must be careful not to let his forehead rest against the windowpane watching them flow past. Behind the people, fields of alfalfa and corn are still mostly crested dirt, little green tufts show where America’s wealth will grow under this sun. Peach trees blossom. Evergreens and oaks freshen their color. Nature keeps most of her promises. Roosevelt likes that thought.

He wants to be done. He wants to shake the constraints of office after thirteen years and keep some promises to himself, see how he could bloom as a natural man outside the presidency. His vigor will come back, he’s sure of it. He’s said this before, privately to his aides, that he’ll resign once the United Nations is operating. Let Truman take over, let power pass from the Hudson to the Missouri. But he’s never before spoken seriously of quitting; always he does it in jest or to cheer up Eleanor, or address his doctors’ concerns, every time he’s said he’ll toss in the towel he’s done it just to put a temporary stop to some irksome discussion of worry over his health. But now he thinks he might mean it. He just might want this over with.

The overnight ride down from Washington was restless. Roosevelt slept in fits on the train. He’d spent the previous four days in Hyde Park trying to restore himself. It didn’t work, he still feels weary. He stayed in the White House just for yesterday afternoon, enough to sign some cables to Churchill drafted by his staff and hold some luncheon meetings. Now he intends to rejuvenate with two weeks beside the ravine at the Little White House in Warm Springs. He’s got his stamp collection with him. He’ll take long country drives, he’ll watch the sun set over the mountain. He’ll hold a book in his lap so no one will bother him, and nap. Anna couldn’t come this time, her six-year-old boy got a last-minute gland infection. He asked Eleanor not to come, said he didn’t want to take her away from her important agendas—she’s never liked Georgia anyway, all the poverty and segregation, honeyed accents and Spanish moss. Instead, he has his two favorite female cousins along for company, so he’ll be pampered by women.

A mile outside the Warm Springs station the momentum of the train breaks. It’s the moment of anticipation in all journeys, when the trip slows to arrival. Roosevelt does not feel the accustomed tinge of pleasure. He wants the train to accelerate and keep going, not stop, not creep at this creaky, tippy speed. The ride was better, life was more of an even thing when it was lived faster. He doesn’t want to be in Warm Springs to heal. He wants to be a movie cowboy and climb out on the roof of the train cars, fight a villain, duck a coming tunnel. Roosevelt misses pace. He misses the coal shoveled into his belly, the resultant fire. He wants the train to charge on forever.