Everyone marching with the company, mountain rangers and prisoners alike, crouched in momentary panic, looking to the left where a great geyser of snow had shot into the air. We slipped out of the tree’s shadow and walked unseen toward the ragged throng of Russians as the German officers began shouting orders, peering into the far woods with their field glasses, looking for snipers in the trees. We were so close to our captive countrymen: fifteen meters away, fourteen, thirteen, stepping softly, resisting the impulse to sprint the last short span. The Germans thought they saw movement in the distant bushes; there was a clamor of cries and directives, fingers pointing, soldiers dropping to their bellies, ready to fire from the prone position.
By the time they realized there were no enemies to the left, we had infiltrated from the right. A few of the prisoners noticed us joining in with them. They gave no sign of camaraderie or welcome. They didn’t seem surprised that four newcomers had joined their ranks; the captives, soldiers and civilians both, were so defeated they probably thought it was natural that Russians would emerge from the woods and secretly surrender to the enemy.
All of the prisoners were male, from young boys with missing teeth and frozen strands of snot clinging to their upper lips to old men with crooked backs and white stubble dusting their jaws. Vika had pulled her rabbit fur cap even lower; in her formless coveralls she looked enough like an adolescent boy that nobody glanced at her twice.
At least two of the Red Army men wore no boots, only their torn wool socks to keep their feet warm. The Germans considered a pair of Soviet-issue felt-lined leather boots a great prize, far warmer and more durable than their own footwear. The soldiers’ wool socks must have been soaked through with melted snow. When the temperature dropped and the socks froze, the two of them would have to walk with blocks of ice on their feet. I wondered how much farther they could go, how many kilometers, the numbness spreading from their toes to their calves to their knees. Their eyes were as dull and miserable as the eyes of the draft horses that dragged sledges through the snowy streets of Piter before the food ran out and the horses were slaughtered for their meat.
The Germans chattered in their own tongue. None of them seemed badly wounded by the fragmentation, though one young trooper with a thin red gash across his cheek had pulled off his glove so he could dab at the blood with his thumb and show it to his comrades, pleased with his first war wound.
“They think it was a land mine,” Kolya whispered. He squinted as he listened to the officers’ commands. “They must be Tyrolean. The accents are tricky. Yes, they’re saying it was a land mine.”
The orders from the officers trickled down to the troopers, who turned back to the meekly waiting prisoners and signaled with their rifles for the march to continue.
“Wait!” shouted one of the Russians, a thick-lipped civilian in his forties wearing a quilted down cap, the earflaps tied under his chin. “This man is a partisan!”
He pointed at Markov. Everyone else on the hillside had gone silent.
“He came to my house a month ago, stole all my potatoes, every bit of food in the place, said they needed it for the war! You hear? He is a partisan! He has killed many Germans!”
Markov stared at the civilian, his head cocked to one side like a fighting dog.
“Shut your mouth,” he said, keeping his voice low, his face bright red with anger.
“You don’t tell me what to do anymore! You don’t tell me what to do!”
A Leutnant stomped over, trailed by three troopers, shoving through the crowd of prisoners that had circled around Markov and his accuser.
“What is this?” he bellowed. He was clearly the translator for the company, speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent. He looked like a fat man who had recently lost all the fat, his broad cheeks deflated, the heavy skin hanging slack across the bones of his face.
The accuser stood there with his finger pointing, an overgrown child with his earflaps and his trembling lips, addressing the Leutnant but never looking away from Markov.
“He is a murderer, this man! He has murdered your people!”
Kolya opened his mouth to speak out in Markov’s defense, but Vika jabbed him in the belly with a sharp elbow and Kolya kept silent. I could see his hand digging into his overcoat pocket, readying the Tokarev in case it was needed.
Markov shook his head, a strange, ugly smile splitting his lips.
“I shit on your mother.”
“You don’t look so brave now! You don’t look so hard! Sure, you’re the tough man when you’re stealing potatoes from common people, but now what are you? Eh? What are you?”
Markov snarled and snatched a small pistol from the pocket of his hunting vest. Burly as he was, he drew with the speed of an American gunslinger, raising the muzzle as his accuser stumbled backward and the prisoners gathered around dove out of the way.
The Germans were even faster. Before Markov could pull the trigger, a burst of automatic fire from the troopers’ MP40s punched a cluster of little holes through the front of his vest. He stumbled, frowning as if he’d forgotten an important name, and toppled backward, landing in the soft snow, wisps of down floating up from the perforated quilting of his vest.
The accuser stared down at Markov’s body. He must have known what his denunciation would lead to, but now that the act was done he seemed stunned by the outcome. The Leutnant considered him briefly, trying to decide whether to reward or punish the man. In the end he snatched up Markov’s pistol for a souvenir and walked away, leaving the whole mess behind. His young troopers followed behind him, glancing briefly at Markov’s body, wondering, perhaps, which one of them had fired the shot that actually killed him.
Soon the company was marching again. A change had been made, however. Six Russians now walked in the front, ten meters ahead of the closest Germans, serving as human minesweepers. Each step was a harrowing experience for them, waiting for the snapped tripwire, the sprung spring. It must have been tempting to run, but they wouldn’t have gotten three steps before the troopers gunned them down.
Nobody walked near Markov’s accuser. He was a man infected, a carrier of plague. He talked quietly to himself, a long and unheard argument, his eyes flashing left and right as he waited for reprisal.
I was a dozen men behind him, slogging through the slush between Vika and Kolya. If any of the prisoners spoke loudly enough for the Germans to hear, one of the troopers would snap,
“Halts Maul!”
Nobody needed a translator to understand the sentiment and the Russian in question would quickly shut his mouth, lower his head, and walk a little faster. Still, it was possible to carry on a conversation if you kept your voice very low and one eye on the guards.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” I murmured to Vika.
She kept walking without answering or acknowledging that she had heard me. I thought I might have offended her.
“He seemed like a good man,” I added. Both sentences were utterly banal, the kind of lazy sentiments you might use at the funeral of a distant relative you never really liked. I couldn’t blame her for ignoring me.
“He wasn’t,” she said at last. “But I liked him anyway.”
“That traitor ought to be dangling from a tree,” whispered Kolya, dipping his head so his voice wouldn’t carry. He glared at the back of the betrayer’s head. “I could break his neck with my bare hands. I know how to do it.”
“Leave it alone,” said Vika. “He doesn’t matter.”
“He mattered to Markov,” I said.
Vika glanced up at me and smiled. It wasn’t the cold carnivorous smile I had seen before. She seemed surprised by my comment, as if she had just heard a mongoloid whistle
Für Elise
without missing a note.
“Yes, he mattered to Markov. You’re a strange one.”
“Why?”
“He’s a twisty little devil,” said Kolya, giving me an affectionate punch in the kidney. “But he plays a nice game of chess.”
“Why am I a strange one?”
“Markov’s not important,” she said. “I’m not important. You’re not important. Winning the war, that’s the only important thing.”
“No,” I said, “I disagree. Markov was important. So am I and so are you. That’s why we have to win.”
Kolya raised his eyebrows, impressed that I was standing up to the little fanatic.
“I’m especially important,” he announced. “I’m writing the great novel of the twentieth century.”
“You two are half in love,” she said. “Do you know that?”
The grim procession of weary men had bogged down in front of us, the foot traffic stalled, confused prisoners trying to figure out why we weren’t moving anymore. One of the bootless Russian soldiers had stopped walking. Other men from his captured unit begged him to move, pleading and cursing. He shook his head, never saying a word, his feet rooted in the snow. A friend tried to shove him forward, but it was useless; he had chosen his spot. When the troopers rushed over, waving their submachine guns and hollering in their own language, the Red Army men reluctantly backed away from their doomed comrade. He smiled at the Germans and raised one hand in a mock Nazi salute. I looked away just in time.
20
An hour before sunset the company halted beside a forbidding redbrick schoolhouse, one of the People’s Projects built during the second Five-Year Plan, the lead glass windows narrow as medieval embrasures. Two-foot-high bronze letters above the front door spelled out Lenin’s famous line: GIVE US THE CHILD FOR EIGHT YEARS AND IT WILL BE A BOLSHEVIK FOREVER. One of the Russophone invaders had scrawled a rejoinder in white paint that had dripped before the words had dried: GIVE US YOUR CHILDREN FOR EIGHT SECONDS AND THERE WILL BE NO MORE BOLSHEVIKS.
The Wehrmacht had seized the schoolhouse for use as a command center. Six Kübelwagens were parked near the entryway and a bareheaded trooper, his blond hair as short and yellow as a newborn chick’s, refueled one of them with a green steel jerrycan. He watched with no apparent interest as the company approached with its convoy of prisoners.
Officers gave orders, ranks broke, most of the Germans headed inside, already shrugging out of their heavy packs, gabbing with each other, loud and happy, ready for the showers (if the water was running) and a hot meal. The remainder of the Gebirgsjäger, a platoon of forty soldiers, irritated that they were still on duty, surly now with hunger and fatigue after a long day hiking through the endless Russian forest, prodded us along to the side of the building.
A German officer waited for us there, reclining in a folding chair, reading a newspaper while he smoked. He glanced up with an idle smile when we walked into view, happy to see us, as if we were friends he had invited over for supper. Setting aside his newspaper, he finally stood, nodding, inspecting our faces, the state of our clothing, the quality of our boots. He wore a gray Waffen-SS uniform with green cuffs on the sleeves, his gray overcoat hanging on the back of the folding chair. Vika, walking beside me, murmured, “Einsatzkommando.”
When we had been formed into rough lines, the Einsatzkommando dropped his cigarette into the snow and nodded at the Gebirgsjäger’s slack-skinned translator. They spoke together in confident Russian, as if showing off for their eavesdropping captives.
“How many?”
“Ninety-four. No, ninety-two.”
“Yes? And two who could not join us? Very good.”
The Einsatzkommando faced us, gazing from man to man, looking us in the eyes. He was a handsome man, his black field cap tilted back from his sunburned forehead, his delicate mustache giving him the air of a jazz singer.
“Don’t be afraid,” he told us. “I know you’ve been reading the propaganda. The Communists want you to think we’re barbarians, here to destroy you. But I’m looking at your faces and I see good, honest workmen and farmers. Is there even a single Bolshevik among you?”
No one raised his hand. The German smiled.
“I didn’t think so. You are smarter than that. You understand that Bolshevism is simply the most radical expression of the eternal Jewish quest for world domination.”
He looked over the blank faces of the Russian men arrayed before him and gave a good-humored shrug.
“But we don’t need the fancy talk. You understand the truth in your bones and that is what matters. There is no reason for conflict between our peoples. Both of us have a common enemy.”
He signaled to one of the troopers, who picked up a stack of newspapers from a wood pallet beside the folding chair and divvied them out to five of his fellow mountain rangers. They walked down the rows of prisoners, handing one newspaper to each Russian. My copy was
Komsomol’s Truth
; Vika and Kolya had
Red Star
.
“I understand this is a difficult concept to grasp, after so many years of propaganda. But believe this for the truth: the German victory will be a victory for the Russian people. If you don’t understand this now, you will understand it soon, and your children will grow up knowing it.”
The sinking sun made giants of our shadows. The Einsatz officer enjoyed the sound of his own words and the impression he made upon us. His Russian was technically perfect, though he made no attempt to hide his accent. I wondered where he had learned the language, if he’d been born in one of the Deutschvolk colonies in Melitopol or Bessarabia. He looked up at an ellipsis of three little clouds far above us in the silvering sky.
“I do love this country. Beautiful land.” He lowered his head and gave another apologetic shrug. “All this talk, you are thinking, but we are still fighting a war, aren’t we? The truth is, my friends, we need you. Each of you will serve the cause. In your hands you hold copies of your illustrious regime’s printed lies. You know how honest these papers are! They told you this war would never happen, and here we are! They told you the Germans would be expelled by August, but tell me”—and here he gave a stage shiver—“does it feel like August to you? But never mind that, never mind. Each of you will read aloud one paragraph. Those we judge literate will come with us to Vyborg, where I can promise you three meals a day while you translate documents for the provisional government. Working in a heated building! Those who fail, well . . . The work will be a little rougher. I have never been to the steel mills in Estonia, but I hear they can be dangerous places. Still, we’ll give you better grub than whatever slop the Red Army was handing out—and I will not even try to guess what you civilians have been eating these past few months.”
Some of the older peasants groaned and shook their heads, making eye contact with one another, exchanging shrugs. The Einsatzkommando nodded to the Gebirgsjäger translator and within seconds the two Germans began testing the prisoners. They needed to hear only a few sentences to judge the Russians’ literacy. I looked at my copy of
Pravda
. Atop the lead article was a bold-faced exhortation from Stalin himself. COMPATRIOTS! COMRADES! ETERNAL GLORY TO THE HEROES WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES FOR FREEDOM AND THE HAPPINESS OF OUR NATION!
The old peasants shrugged and handed their copies back to the Germans without looking at the text. Many of the younger men from the collectives struggled to form a few words. These prisoners took the test seriously, frowning as they tried to decipher the letters. The Germans laughed kindly at the mistakes, slapping the illiterates on their shoulders, joking with them.
“You never bothered with the books, did you? Too busy chasing the girls, eh?”
Soon the prisoners relaxed and shouted at their friends on the other end of the line. They laughed along with their captors when they stuttered out the words. A few made up their own articles, pretending to read while inventing accounts of battles outside Moscow or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, doing a passable job of imitating the reporting style they’d heard on the radio. The Germans seemed to enjoy the ruse; both sides knew nobody was fooled.
The Germans asked each failure to step to the left. The first few men to stand there looked embarrassed about their public humiliation, but they cheered up as the ranks of the unlettered grew.
“Ah, Sasha, you too? I thought you were the bright one!”
“Look at him squirming over there in front of the officer! Come on, come on, it’s the steel mills with us! What, you thought you might get the office job? What a joker; look at him, still at it!”
“Old Edik, you think you can walk all the way to Estonia? Eh? Come on, cheer up, we’ll give you a hand!”
The men who could read wanted to impress the Germans. They recited the lines like actors delivering monologues. Many of them kept going after they were told to stop, giving little flourishes to the bigger words, demonstrating their ease with the vocabulary. They stepped to the right, proud and beaming, nodding to their educated fellows, pleased with how the day had gone. Vyborg wasn’t so far, and working in a heated building with three meals a day was a better deal than sitting in a trench all night waiting for the mortars to drop.
Kolya rolled his eyes, watching the literates congratulate each other. “Look at them,” he muttered under his breath. “They want a prize because they can read the newspaper. And look how condescending those Fritzes are. Maybe I’ll give them the first chapter of
Eugene Onegin
. Think that would impress them? Sixty stanzas,
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat.
They think they’re the only culture in Europe? They really want to match Goethe and Heine against Pushkin and Tolstoy? I’ll give them music. It’s closer than they think, but I’ll give them music. And philosophy. But literature? No, I think not.”
The black-capped Einsaztkommando was only two men down the line from Kolya, who stood to my left. I felt a gloved hand squeezing my right hand and I turned to see Vika, her pale face tilted up toward mine, her fierce eyes unblinking even through the slanting rays of sunlight. She had taken my hand to alert me of something, but she did not let go as quickly as she might have—or at least this is what I told myself. I could make her love me. Why not? So what if her general attitude toward me was bored disgust?
“You don’t read,” she informed me with that practiced whisper, too quiet for anyone else to hear. She kept watching me to make sure I understood. For once in my life, I didn’t need an explanation.
The Einsatzkommando, as patient and benevolent as a professor, stood listening to the Red Army man beside Kolya.
“Soon, Europe will fly the great flag of freedom for the nations—”
“Good.”
“—and peace between the nations.”
“Good, good. To the right.”
I elbowed Kolya’s arm. He glanced at me, impatient, ready to show this patronizing Fascist the real face of Russian letters. I shook my head once. The Einsatzkommando walked up to him. There was no chance to say anything. All I could do was stare into Kolya’s eyes and hope he understood.
“Ah, here’s a fine-looking man of the steppes. Have a bit of the Don Cossack in you?”
Kolya stood straight. He was taller than the Einsatz man and for a few seconds he looked down at the German without opening his mouth.
“I wouldn’t know. Born and bred in Piter.”
“Beautiful city. Seems a shame calling it Leningrad. Ugly name, isn’t it? I mean aside from all the politics. Just seems wrong to me. Saint Petersburg, that’s a name that resonates. All the history! I’ve been there, you know. Moscow, too. Expect I’ll visit them again before too long. Now, show me what you can do.”
Kolya held up the newspaper and studied the print. He took a deep breath, opened his mouth to begin—and laughed, shaking his head, offering the newspaper to the German.
“I can’t even fake it, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize! Shoulders like yours would be wasted at a desk. Good man, you’ll be fine.”
Kolya nodded, smiling at the officer like a handsome idiot. He was supposed to join the group of illiterates, but he lingered next to me, his hands in his pockets.
“I want to see if my friend can do any better,” he said.
“Well, he can’t do any worse,” said the Einsatzkommando with a smile of his own. He stepped in front of me and looked me over. “How old are you? Fifteen?”
I nodded. I didn’t know if it was safer to be fifteen or seventeen; I lied on instinct.
“Where were your grandparents from?”
“Moscow.”
“All four of them?”
“Yes.” I was lying automatically now, not even thinking about the words before I said them. “My parents met there.”
“You don’t look Russian to me. If I had to guess, I’d say you were a Jew.”
“We call him that all the time,” said Kolya, ruffling my hair and grinning. “Our little Jew! Makes him crazy. But look at that nose! If I didn’t know his family, I’d swear he was a Yid.”
“There are Jews with small noses,” said the German, “and Gentiles with large ones. We can’t be careless with our assumptions. I saw a Jewess in Warsaw a few months ago, her hair was blonder than yours.”
He gestured at Kolya’s bare head, smiled, and winked.
“And it wasn’t dyed. You understand?”
“I do,” said Kolya, smiling back.
“Don’t be too worried,” the German told me. “You’re young, still. We all had our awkward years. So tell me, are you any better than your friend here?”
I looked down at the newspaper in my hand.
“I know this says
Stalin
.” I pointed to the word. “And
comrade
?”
“Yes, well that’s a start.”
He gave me an avuncular smile, patted my cheek, and took the paper. I thought he might have felt bad for saying I looked like a Jew.
“Very good. You’ll keep your friend here company in Estonia. A few months of hard work never hurt anyone. This will all be over soon. And you,” he added, moving down to Vika, the last in the line. “Another child. What do you have for me?”
Vika shrugged and shook her head, never looking up, offering the unread paper to the Einsatzkommando.
“Right, another victory for the Bolshevik education system. Good, all three of you to the left.”
We joined the group of grinning illiterates. One of them had worked in a steel mill before and the others were gathered around him, listening to him describe the terrible heat and the danger in handling molten metal. Markov’s betrayer stood just outside this circle, rubbing his bare hands to keep them warm, ignored by everyone.