Tin Sky (39 page)

Provocation seldom failed. The surgeon’s reaction – officially on Weller’s account, but in fact self-defensive – was at the same time both admissible and curious. He had skeletons in his closet, and how. Lattmann’s latest titbits about him amounted to more than hearsay, and after the phone conversation with Mantau it was important for Bora to understand whether Platonov too
might coincidentally have died before his time. Murder is different to an error or an unintentional overdose, and he had to know.

When he opened the main door, a whiff of phenol tried to follow him outside. The lindens in the hospital garden, however, some of them precociously in bloom, would allow for no other aroma, so that Bora felt he was diving into the heady, honeyed scent. At the family place in Borna the ancient linden tree bloomed in June, its scent filtering day and night into the rooms. In his childhood the scent had heralded the summer holidays for him; ever since childhood it had meant slipping away to those same rooms with Dikta before their marriage.
She is made of love
. He surprised himself by humming a tune as he walked towards his parked vehicle.
From head to toe, just as the song says
.
There’s no denying it… Bless the linden trees that remind me of her.

He’d already started the engine before he changed his mind and made an about-face. He stepped down a shady path of upheaved gravel instead, towards the nameless grave where Platonov, husband and father to women who looked like the one Bora loved, had been buried. He spent ten or so minutes there, pondering things under the perfumed clusters of the old trees.

From Kharkov, the terrain between the villages of Beryozovoye and Babai rose and fell, deeply seamed by gullies and ravines. Mostly green, often treed, sometimes they opened up into stone quarries like pale wounds, invariably marked as
karyer
on the map. Bora, who always left on time when he had an appointment but was also always in haste, before long found himself blocked by a long convoy of Panzer IV and armoured half-tracks occupying most of the road. Overtaking them was out of the question. After steaming behind the slow-moving vehicles for the best part of ten minutes, he decided to turn around and try his luck down a lesser lane; from Lednoye, however, no more than a hundred metres behind him, another convoy was joining the main road.

This too was positioning and repositioning in view of the coming battle. Standing to be sandwiched between mastodons, Bora wished he’d known about the contretemps. Had the slope on both sides of the road not been so steep, he would have long since taken to the fields. As things were, the tail of the convoy behind him accelerated (if anything resembling high speed could be said of it) to join the head vehicles. So he had to bide his time at thirty kilometres per hour, smelling fumes and eating dust until the next turn-off or a spot where the left or right shoulder flattened out enough to be negotiated on four wheels.

Like the rails not far away, the road followed a rather long crest between
balkas
, no wider than the pavement. Small ponds shone far below. Huts, wooded areas, fences lay sparsely alongside them, at the foot of the grassy ravine or sat strewn along the opposite slope, unreachable by car. Overhead, two escort fighter planes from Rogany shuttled from one end of the convoy to the other.

In Bora’s memory, at one point the ridge did broaden out for maybe a hundred metres to the left of one driving south: enough to dare a pass and maybe hit the detour towards Rshavetz. Impatiently he counted the minutes and paid close attention to the slightest sign of a manoeuvring space opening for him to steer into. The margin of compact gravel remained narrow for what seemed to be an endless stretch of time, marked by the racket of steel tracks all around and by the skimming passage of the watchful aeroplanes. Eventually Bora saw the thirsty strip of land at the edge of the road inch wider, and grew hopeful.

Just then, the tank in front of him came to a dead stop. The driver of the SPW half-track behind him kept rolling, unaware. Bora had been in the process of attempting his hazardous getaway when the half-track’s armoured cowling ever so gently touched him, applying the pressure of seven tons against the rear of a vehicle one-tenth its weight. The small, sturdy frame
of the personnel carrier catapulted forward, its front tyres not carefully seeking the edge of the descent but heading straight into the void. Bora saw sky–horizon–earth tilt downwards before his eyes; negotiating the fall was impossible for the decisive seconds during which the vehicle spun out of control and then brusquely nosed downwards. A merry row of birches flashed into view; was gone. The impact against the escarpment risked flipping the vehicle sideways, although it bounced back and righted itself at once, and Bora kept his seat, more or less, by holding on to the steering wheel.

Down he went, quicker now than he could think (he wasn’t thinking at all; merely registering events with surprise), straight down, brakes useless, if not dangerous, on long grass and at that angle. The row of birches, white and tender green, seemed far away and yet within arm’s reach. Within seconds, stolid abandonment and the frantic need to intervene competed for Bora’s attention, too brief a time to make a difference to action or to the lack thereof. Papers he’d laid on the front seat went fluttering; anything loose flew its own way. By leaps, the personnel carrier careened downwards until it struck the bottom of the escarpment, where a deeper ditch marked the foot of the ravine. There it wedged itself front-first into the trench, rearing up and coming to a halt almost vertically. Bora bumped every part of his body that was in contact with any surface and leapt out, only to roll back inside the ditch. The right-hand door, stuck open, pinned him down, but not enough that he couldn’t wiggle and scramble out from under it.

His left elbow and both his knees bled profusely where the skin was bruised and torn. Bora realized he’d have spared himself injury had he not worn the summer uniform with shorts and rolled-up sleeves, but there’s no dressing for an accident. The little time it took him to get to his feet after creeping to safety made him furious.
As in Cracow
, he thought,
only worse
.
Dumb tanks. Of all the stupid ways
… On the ridge above, slowly proceeding, the two ends of the convoy had meanwhile reunited.
Faces were looking outside turrets and cabins in the rumble of engines; hands gestured, so it was likely they’d send for help before long. One of the fighter planes swept low over the crash site, like a big fly on spilt milk.

Bora glanced around. At least he knew exactly where he found himself on the map. It was a matter of no more than three to four kilometres to any one of several communities: the checkpoint at the turn-off to Artyomovka was probably where the drivers who’d seen him go down would leave word to have him picked up. He might as well wait here.

He limped back to the ditch and crawled in to retrieve his briefcase, stuck under the pedals; his sub-machine gun, maps, loose documents, cap and what few other things he carried lay scattered up and down the slope. His wristwatch, the glass on its face scratched but unbroken, read 9.51 a.m.

Looking at it, the personnel carrier did not appear particularly damaged; once straightened and hauled out, it would continue to do its job. The same was true of him, although his elbow and knees were beginning to hurt as the excitement of the moment subsided. Bora clambered the steep incline to recover what had fallen out and got lost. For close to ten minutes he searched the grass collecting odds and ends, while the tail of the convoy above rattled southwards and freed the road at last. The fighter planes followed. In the silence, a
cuckooshka
called mockingly from a tall pine; the birches caught a breath of wind and trembled from first to last. At the edge of the road, where Bora climbed and went to sit, the shoulder appeared bitten off where the rear wheels had briefly dragged as the vehicle left the ramp.

He was plastering a strip of bloody skin back onto the meagre flesh of his elbow when the explosion came. Directly below him, he saw his upended vehicle blow apart as if a rocket had centred it, a spectacular burst and report that crumpled him where he was in a reaction of self-defence. Metal and rubber, glass jetted in all directions; tyres and the front seat;
less recognizable elements of engine and chassis, a fiery dismemberment that shot some fragments sky-high while others struck the escarpment and the road like projectiles. Pipes and chunks of metal flew past, bounced next to him; bolts and twisted lumps whirled through the air. The steering wheel rained from above, and the heavy-treaded spare wheel that sat on the hood followed, soon to roll and tumble down the slope towards the birch line. Smoke and flames fanned up. Bora sat up, breathing in the acrid smell, and could think of nothing better than checking the time. It was 10 a.m. sharp, and a crater gaped where his vehicle had until that point stood planted in the ditch.

Five minutes later, from the direction of Artyomovka and Merefa, an ambulance and a staff car approached at a good clip. The first belonged to one of the army hospitals in Kharkov; the second had been sent from Gebietskommissar Stark’s
Kombinat,
where news of the accident must have been relayed by those at the checkpoint. Bora, who’d meanwhile circled what remained of his means of transportation and was just getting back to the road, paid scant attention to them. He said as little as he could, angry and overwrought to the extent that he felt no pain whatever when they disinfected and stitched his limbs. They kept posing dumb questions to judge if he was alert, until finally he blurted out in bad humour, “I’m fine. Get off me. All I need is a goddamn ride to Merefa.”

In fact, on the way he asked that they stop at the
Kombinat
, to thank the district commissioner for the attention and to place a telephone call to Lieutenant Colonel von Salomon. Von Salomon was in low spirits and made much of the accident; even more of the loss of a vehicle “at a time like this, Major Bora”, as if it were Bora’s fault. Bora bit his tongue. Everything was beginning to ache in earnest: under the summer shirt his neck and shoulders felt bruised and sore. “I don’t believe this command will be in the position to supply you with another personnel carrier, Major. It will be unavoidable for you to rely
on one of the vehicles already assigned to Cavalry Regiment Gothland, or your own mount. Really, I am surprised at you, who I expect, above the others, to be clear-minded!”

It was difficult not to think that von Salomon would have felt exactly the same had Bora not survived the crash. From across the hallway Geko Stark, busy at his desk with an orderly pile of papers, raised his head enough to say, “Judging by your face, you met with no sympathy at headquarters.”

Bora deemed it prudent to keep to himself what he thought of the lieutenant colonel at this time. He gloomily put down the receiver. The ambulance driver, who happened to have been at the
Kombinat
picking up hospital supplies when the news of the crash was brought in, walked out of the office across from Stark’s with a large box in his arms. He gave Bora what Bora took to be the secretly amused stare of a low-ranker at a crestfallen officer. Bora could have kicked him. Stark didn’t help matters when he called out, dialling a number on his telephone, “Did you at least scrape together the kilo of butter you were looking for the other day?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.” It was a meagre satisfaction lying because he was in a contrary mood. Bora decided he’d asked for enough favours today, and chose to walk the handful of kilometres to the schoolhouse. As luck had it, Kostya was driving back from Yakovlevka on his droshky after having stolen an oil drum and fittings from God knows where. He overtook Bora less than two hundred metres from the
Kombinat
.

“
Yisouse
!
Povazhany
Major, what happened to you?”

Well, it beat limping along the road with a briefcase, a sub-machine gun and bandages everywhere. Bora threw everything in the carriage and climbed up next to his concerned orderly.

“What happened,
povazhany
Major? Where’s the car?”

“Oh, shut up, Kostya.”

MEREFA, 6.27 P.M.

That evening, it took four aspirins and a glass of Lattmann’s vodka for the fever to stop bothering him, if not to decrease. Kostya and the sentry were out at the edge of the field in the low sun, tinkering with the oil drum; the big-headed, big-footed draught horses grazed nearby. Inside the schoolhouse, Bora began his diary entry for the day.

On a day when I might have died, I’m writing under a reel of flies. My great-grandfather, the Field Marshal, told us about the flies in the letters he wrote during the Seven Weeks’ War against the Austrians, not to speak of the insects he met in the Cameroon when the Cameroon was German. Flies no doubt crowded around my Scottish great-grandfather’s severed head at Khartoum. It is so bad that cleanliness becomes an obsession with some of us, although others give up the struggle and simply live with the vermin. Horses shake their tails, whip their sides, hoof the ground and turn back their heads to bite at horseflies (
tabanum
or
tabanus
: I can’t recall the exact name in Latin). Men swat them with anything that will swat (folded newspaper, map, notebook, open hand…), catch them in their fist, trap them under a drinking glass or a cup, and finally ignore them.

From a great altitude we probably look like flies ourselves, on the great body of Russia. And God knows she is trying to shake us off, or squash us. I should know: I was one of the German flies caught on the flypaper, inside the choking trap that was Stalingrad. One of the handful of flies that got away. They say flies have ten thousand eyes, or composite eyes that amount to that much fragmentary (but immense) complementary vision. Don’t they see the hand coming down to smash them? And when hundreds, thousands of them are smashed all around, why do they keep circling?