Winter of the World (73 page)

‘I didn’t know you were so badly off,’ he said, feeling embarrassed. ‘You can always get a meal at our place, you know.’

‘Thank you. What brings you here?’

‘A question. What is isotope separation by gaseous diffusion?’

She stared at him. ‘Oh, my God – what’s happened?’

‘Nothing has happened. I’m simply trying to evaluate some dubious information.’

‘Are we building a fission bomb at last?’

Her reaction told him that the information from Frunze was probably sound. She had immediately understood the significance of what he’d said. ‘Please answer the question,’
Volodya said sternly. ‘Even though we’re friends, this is official business.’

‘Okay. Do you know what an isotope is?’

‘No.’

‘Some elements exist in slightly different forms. Carbon atoms, for example, always have six protons, but some have six neutrons and others have seven or eight. The different types are
isotopes, called carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14.’

‘Simple enough, even for a student of languages,’ Volodya said. ‘Why is it important?’

‘Uranium has two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. In natural uranium the two are mixed up. But only U-235 is explosive.’

‘So we need to separate them.’

‘Gaseous diffusion would be one way, theoretically. When a gas is diffused through a membrane, the lighter molecules pass through faster, so the emerging gas is richer in the lower
isotope. Of course I’ve never seen it done.’

Frunze’s report said that the British were building a gaseous diffusion plant in Wales, in the west of the United Kingdom. The Americans were also building one. ‘Would there be any
other purpose for such a plant?’

She shook her head. ‘Figure the odds,’ she said. ‘Anyone who prioritizes this kind of process in wartime is either going crazy or building a weapon.’

Volodya saw a car approach the barricade and begin to negotiate the zigzag passage. It was a KIM-10, a small two-door car designed for affluent families. It had a top speed of sixty miles per
hour, but this one was so overloaded it probably would not do forty.

A man in his sixties was at the wheel, wearing a hat and a Western-style cloth coat. Beside him was a young woman in a fur hat. The back seat of the car was piled with cardboard boxes. There was
a piano strapped precariously to the roof.

This was clearly a senior member of the ruling elite trying to get out of town with his wife, or mistress, and as many of his valuables as he could take; the kind of person Zoya assumed Volodya
to be, which was perhaps why she had declined to go out with him. He wondered if she might be revising her opinion of him.

One of the barricade volunteers moved a hedgehog in front of the KIM-10, and Volodya saw that there was going to be trouble.

The car inched forward until its bumper touched the hedgehog. Perhaps the driver thought he could nudge it out of the way. Several more women came closer to watch. The device was designed to
resist being pushed out of the way. Its legs dug into the ground, jamming, and it stuck fast. There was a sound of bending metal as the car’s front bumper deformed. The driver put it in
reverse and backed off.

He stuck his head out of the window and yelled: ‘Move that thing, right now!’ He sounded as if he was used to being obeyed.

The volunteer, a chunky middle-aged woman wearing a man’s checked cap, folded her arms. She shouted: ‘Move it yourself – deserter!’

The driver got out, red-faced with anger, and Volodya was surprised to recognize Colonel Bobrov, whom he had known in Spain. Bobrov had been famous for shooting his own men in the back of the
head if they retreated. ‘No mercy for cowards’ had been his slogan. At Belchite, Volodya had personally seen him kill three International Brigade troops for retreating when they ran out
of ammunition. Now Bobrov was in civilian clothes. Volodya wondered if he would shoot the woman who had blocked his way.

Bobrov walked to the front of the car and took hold of the hedgehog. It was heavier than he had expected, but with an effort he was able to drag it out of the way.

As he was walking back to his car, the woman in the cap replaced the hedgehog in front of the car.

The other volunteers were now crowding around, watching the confrontation, grinning and making jokes.

Bobrov walked up to the woman, taking from his coat pocket an identification card. ‘I am General Bobrov!’ he said. He must have been promoted since returning from Spain. ‘Let
me pass!’

‘You call yourself a soldier?’ the woman sneered. ‘Why aren’t you fighting?’

Bobrov flushed. He knew her contempt was justified. Volodya wondered if the brutal old soldier had been talked into fleeing by his younger wife.

‘I call you a traitor,’ said the volunteer in the cap. ‘Trying to run away with your piano and your young tart.’ Then she knocked his hat off.

Volodya was flabbergasted. He had never seen such defiance of authority in the Soviet Union. Back in Berlin, before the Nazis came to power, he had been surprised by the sight of ordinary
Germans fearlessly arguing with police officers; but it did not happen here.

The crowd of women cheered.

Bobrov still had short-cropped white hair all over his head. He looked at his hat as it rolled across the wet road. He took one step in pursuit, then thought better of it.

Volodya was not tempted to intervene. There was nothing he could do against the mob, and anyway he had no sympathy for Bobrov. It seemed just that Bobrov should be treated with the brutality he
had always shown to others.

Another volunteer, an older woman wrapped in a filthy blanket, opened the car’s trunk. ‘Look at all this!’ she said. The trunk was full of leather luggage. She pulled out a
suitcase and thumbed its catches. The lid came open, and the contents fell out: lacy underwear, linen petticoats and nightdresses, silk stockings and camisoles, all obviously made in the West,
finer than anything ordinary Russian women ever saw, let alone bought. The filmy garments dropped into the filthy slush of the street and stuck there like petals on a dunghill.

Some of the women started to pick them up. Others seized more suitcases. Bobrov ran to the back of his car and started to shove the women away. This was turning very nasty, Volodya thought.
Bobrov probably carried a gun, and he would draw it any second now. But then the woman in the blanket lifted a spade and hit Bobrov hard over the head. A woman who could dig a trench with a spade
was no weakling, and the blow made a sickeningly loud thud as it connected. The general fell to the ground, and the woman kicked him.

The young mistress got out of the car.

The woman in the cap shouted: ‘Coming to help us dig?’ and the others laughed.

The general’s girlfriend, who looked about thirty, put her head down and walked back along the road the way the car had come. The volunteer in the checked cap shoved her, but she dodged
between the hedgehogs and started to run. The volunteer ran after her. The mistress was wearing tan suede shoes with a high heel, and she slipped in the wet and fell down. Her fur hat came off. She
struggled to her feet and started to run again. The volunteer went after the hat, letting the mistress go.

All the suitcases now lay open around the abandoned car. The workers pulled the boxes from the back seat and turned them upside down, emptying the contents on to the road. Cutlery spilled out,
china broke, and glassware smashed. Embroidered bedsheets and white towels were dragged through the slush. A dozen pretty pairs of shoes were scattered across the tarmac.

Bobrov got to his knees and tried to stand. The woman in the blanket hit him with the spade again. Bobrov collapsed on the ground. She unbuttoned Bobrov’s fine wool coat and tried to pull
it off him. Bobrov struggled, resisting. The woman became furious and hit Bobrov again and again until he lay still, his cropped white head covered with blood. Then she discarded her old blanket
and put Bobrov’s coat on.

Volodya walked across to Bobrov’s unmoving body. The eyes stared lifelessly. Volodya knelt down and checked for breathing, a heartbeat or a pulse. There was none. The man was dead.

‘No mercy for cowards,’ Volodya said; but he closed Bobrov’s eyes.

Some of the women unstrapped the piano. The instrument slid off the car roof and hit the ground with a discordant clang. They began gleefully to smash it up with picks and shovels. Others were
quarrelling over the scattered valuables, snatching up the cutlery, bundling the bedsheets, tearing the fine underwear as they struggled for possession. Fights broke out. A china teapot came flying
through the air and just missed Zoya’s head.

Volodya hurried back to her. ‘This is developing into a full-scale riot,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an army car and a driver. I’ll get you out of here.’

She hesitated only for a second. ‘Thanks,’ she said; and they ran to the car, jumped in, and drove away.

(ii)

Erik von Ulrich’s faith in the Führer was vindicated by the invasion of the Soviet Union. As the German armies raced across the vastness of Russia, sweeping the
Red Army aside like chaff, Erik rejoiced in the strategic brilliance of the leader to whom he had given his allegiance.

Not that it was easy. During rainy October the countryside had been a mud bath: they called it the
rasputitsa
, the time of no roads. Erik’s ambulance had ploughed through a
quagmire. A wave of mud built up in front of the vehicle, gradually slowing it, until he and Hermann had to get out and clear it away with shovels before they could drive any farther. It was the
same for the entire German army, and the dash for Moscow had slowed to a crawl. Furthermore, the swamped roads meant that supply trucks never caught up. The army was low on ammunition, fuel and
food, and Erik’s unit was dangerously short of drugs and other medical necessities.

So Erik had at first rejoiced when the frost had set in at the beginning of November. The freeze seemed a blessing, making the roads hard again and allowing the ambulance to move at normal
speed. But Erik shivered in his summer coat and cotton underwear – winter uniforms had not yet arrived from Germany. Nor had the low-temperature lubricants needed to keep the engine of his
ambulance operating – and the engines of all the army’s trucks, tanks and artillery. While on the road, Erik got up every two hours in the night to start his engine and run it for five
minutes, the only way to keep the oil from congealing and the coolant from freezing solid. Even then he cautiously lit a fire under the vehicle every morning an hour before moving off.

Hundreds of vehicles broke down and were abandoned. The planes of the Luftwaffe, left outside all night on makeshift airfields, froze solid and refused to start, and air cover for the troops
simply disappeared.

Despite all that, the Russians were retreating. They fought hard, but they were always pushed back. Erik’s unit stopped continually to clear away Russian bodies, and the frozen dead
stacked by the roadside made a grisly embankment. Relentlessly, remorselessly, the German army was closing in on Moscow.

Soon, Erik felt sure, he would see Panzers majestically rolling across Red Square, while swastika banners fluttered jubilantly from the towers of the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the temperature was minus ten degrees Centigrade, and falling.

Erik’s field hospital unit was in a small town beside a frozen canal, surrounded by spruce forest. Erik did not know the name of the place. The Russians often destroyed everything as they
retreated, but this town had survived more or less intact. It had a modern hospital, which the Germans had taken over. Dr Weiss had briskly instructed the local doctors to send their patients home,
regardless of condition.

Now Erik studied a frostbite patient, a boy of about eighteen. The skin of his face was a waxy yellow, and frozen hard to the touch. When Erik and Hermann cut away the flimsy summer uniform,
they saw that his arms and legs were covered with purple blisters. His torn and broken boots had been stuffed with newspaper in a pathetic attempt to keep out the cold. When Erik took them off he
smelled the characteristic rotting stink of gangrene.

Nevertheless, he thought they might yet save the boy from amputation.

They knew what to do. They were treating more men for frostbite than for combat wounds.

He filled a bathtub, then he and Hermann Braun lowered the patient into the warm water.

Erik studied the body as it thawed. He saw the black colour of gangrene on one foot and the toes of the other.

When the water began to cool they took him out, patted him dry, put him in a bed and covered him with blankets. Then they surrounded him with hot stones wrapped in towels.

The patient was conscious and alert. He said: ‘Am I going to lose my foot?’

‘That’s up to the doctor,’ Erik said automatically. ‘We’re just orderlies.’

‘But you see a lot of patients,’ he persisted. ‘What’s your best guess?’

‘I think you might be all right,’ Erik said. If not, he knew what would happen. On the foot less badly affected, Weiss would amputate the toes, cutting them off with a big pair of
clippers like bolt cutters. The other leg would be amputated below the knee.

Weiss came a few minutes later and examined the boy’s feet. ‘Prepare the patient for amputation,’ he said brusquely.

Erik was desolate. Another strong young man was going to spend the rest of his life a cripple. What a shame.

But the patient saw it differently. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I won’t have to fight any more.’

As they got the boy ready for surgery, Erik reflected that the patient was one of many who persisted in a defeatist attitude – his own family among them. He thought a lot about his late
father, and felt deep rage mingled with his grief and loss. The old man would not have joined in with the majority and celebrated the triumph of the Third Reich, he thought bitterly. He would have
complained about something, questioned the Führer’s judgement, undermined the morale of the armed forces. Why had he had to be such a rebel? Why had he been so attached to the outdated
ideology of democracy? Freedom had done nothing for Germany, whereas Fascism had saved the country!