Eugene Ganin. An eye for an eye

A NOVEL CH. 1,2,3,4,16,19
*******
Translated from the Russian by Maria Amadei Ashot
*************************************************
Table of Contents


1...........Bubi
2...........Magda
3...........The Fortress
4...........The Scythe Strikes Stone
5...........The Amber Lands of Joy
6...........The Merry-Go-Round over Europe
7...........Olga Chekhov’s Watch
8...........A Ball of Bloody Wishes
9...........An Georgian Adventurer
10.........An Austrian Artist
11.........An English Schemer
12.........A Japanese Surprise
13.........The Little House of Health
14.........With Songs, over Dead Bodies
15.........Angels in the Sky
16.........A Child’s Wooden Pistol
17.........Blood for an Aryan
18.........Neda
19.........The Flavor of Human Flesh
20.........Head to Head
21.........The Agony of Berlin
22.........The Victors’ Hangover
23.........Payback for a Dream
24.........Love Like Death.
25.........One Final Attack.

Eugene Ganin
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
Translated from the original Russian by M.A. Ashot


“Never forget that we are that breed, that race, that people, that knighthood, to which come those who heed the call of their bloodlines and which they leave only upon death. For centuries, a single purpose confronted our fair-haired race: to inherit lawful dominion over this world. For centuries, this race of ours lived up to the summons to bring happiness, culture and order into the world.”



Heinrich Himmler, Imperial Minister of the Interior of Germany’s Third Reich
Excerpt from a speech delivered in the Berlin Aviators’ Building, in 1942.

***


Chapter 1
BUBI


Erich’s heart was pounding wildly from the enormous, all-consuming happiness that engulfed him. He was a pilot! Such a short, glib magical word it was – and it opened up before him, in the glorious time of his youth, the indescribable joy of soaring freely above the earth. Frozen in the correct pose within the monolithic line of a military formation of freshly-minted graduates of the aviators’ academy, precisely lined up on the cement strip of the military Berlin – Gatow airfield, Erich Beck felt it for the first time, deeply felt it with all his heart: he was one of Great Germany’s flying knights. The mystical dimension had merged with reality. Henceforth, he has every right proudly to wear the chevrons, shoulder boards, regimental insignia, rakish hat and splendid, impeccable uniform of an officer of the invincible Luftwaffe. These strong, young, elegant, fair-haired Aryans all around him, with their unmistakably, vividly Nordic chiseled faces, were the fighter pilots whose mission it was to eradicate the enemies of the Third Reich; with incandescent eyes, as if on fire, they hung upon every word of the orders issued by Reichsmarschall Hermann Gearing, Commander-in-chief of the Reich’s airborne forces, in which he bestowed upon each one of them their very first military rank, that of Lieutenant, and appointed them to permanent service within the combat squadrons. It was the summer of 1939. As soon as they heard the command, “At ease!” ring out, these grown up boy children broke out of their exquisitely precise ranks and, like so
many young unbroken mustangs, began to leap about, neighing and braying and whooping loudly in their own specific voices; they embraced, congratulating each other with their commencement day; they hurled their hats wildly up into the air, as if they might be able to land them on the sparse clouds of the idyllic German sky. Not a single one of them yet imagined that very soon, even before fully coming of age, he would be shot down out of the sky over France, drowned in the English Channel, or burnt to a crisp in remote, chilly Russia…

Erich Beck was born in the German colony of Zindao, in a city of Protestant churches, and of residences built in the neo-Gothic style of the 19th century.
His father was a doctor of the central military hospital. Naturally, he took personal charge of his own child’s delivery. Elisa, herself an aviatrix, an athlete, a great beauty – the epitome of German womanhood, in fact – brought their son into this world with ease, with speed, with efficacy. His father joyfully caught the newborn Aryan as he emerged, smacking him promptly on his bottom: the infant gave a piercing shriek in response. Otto showed the son to his mother. Elisabeth, gave a slightly pained smile through her tears, and whispered:
 “Oh, my God! My baby, my little, tiny, precious boy, Bubi!” And so, even though his father named the son Erich, Bubi, the endearment his mother had bestowed, gradually became the one by which he was known, albeit unofficially. In fact, it became for all time the name by which their bonny boy would be known to the world: his nom de guerre, his combat alias. When Hitler came to power, the family of Otto von Beck returned to Berlin. Not far from Stuttgart, Elisabeth organized a club of glider plane enthusiasts. Next to it, they built an imposing home for themselves. When Erich turned ten, his mother took him out for his first flight. As it turned out, the canvas-and-plywood bird drifted into the front of a gathering storm. The motor-free glider plane was tossed around from side to side, like a tiny leaf. Erich was being pushed back against his mother by the force of the turbulence. Rain drummed harshly against the vibrating wings of the glider. Outside the cramped little cabin, the wind whistled, boomed, howled. The flying sailboat spun madly, whipped around in a kind of mystical dance. With considerable effort, his mother was able to guide the glider out of the danger zone: the picturesque curve of the Neckar River swam into view beneath the wing; there was Castle Rosenstein, and then the celebrated vineyards of the Baden-Württemberg country. Elisabeth’s hands were shaking as she brought the glider down.
“Were you frightened?” She asked her son. “Will you fly again?”
“Absolutely, mother! I loved flying in the storm.”
“Ah, you’re just like me, then!” she remarked. And blessing him with the sign of the cross, she kissed her precious only Bubi, her adored firstborn, on his forehead.

At sixteen, Erich passed the test that certified him as the youngest ever glider flight instructor in all of Germany. At twenty, he flew off to join the 10th training regiment of the Luftwaffe, situated near Koenigsberg, in Prussia. And so his long warrior’s journey began, and with it an awareness that he had been granted the happy privilege of being born an Aryan – a uebermensch, above mere
humans: a member of a chosen race of mystical authorities that transcended even God.


Ursula was fifteen when she first saw a glider plane in flight. She would usually travel from Weisssach to Stuttgart for the summers, to be with her grandmother. Encircled with flowers from all sides, her grandmother’s old mansion was situated in the quiet suburb known as Stuttgart Weindorf. This so-called wine village was the ancestral home of Ursula’s forebears. Her maternal grandfather, Johann Winterbach, was a renowned vintner, and a fabulous chef known for his Schwabian specialties. Her maternal grandmother, Martha Mueller, had danced in her youth in the Weissenhof cabaret, but later she found employment as a tour guide for the Schiller Museum. Granny would often take Ursula around to see the sights of this resort town. Once, while strolling along the river, they wandered onto the local glider plane airfield. Suddenly, a small snub-nosed plane without any propeller took off without making a sound, catapulted upwards by its rubber cable and winch, and soared over the waters of the Neckar. The air currents billowing over the river’s surface carried it aloft; it circled smoothly and immediately landed. The glass canopy was thrown back: two young pilots stepped out onto the meadow. One of them made his good-byes and left; the other stayed behind. Driven by her curiosity, Ursula walked up to the blond youth:
“Aren’t you afraid to fly?”
“No, of course not,” the glider pilot answered. “Would you like to go up?”
Ursula’s heart skipped a beat: a pair of beautiful grey eyes gazed out at her
with warm encouragement. “And who are you?”
“Me? I’m Erich Beck, glider flight instructor…” He spread his arms out wide in a straight line, and mimicking a bird’s flight, circled the pretty young girl in a mischievously deliberate way.
“And I’m Fraulein Ursula Mueller. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance…” She really was pleased. She was more than pleased. She had fallen in love with Erich
the instant she saw him: it was love at first sight. “Come again tomorrow. We’ll begin by my taking you up into the air as a passenger.”
“I’ll be sure to come, without fail, Erich.”

To fall in love – head over heels in love – at first sight, at fifteen, is more alarming than accidentally swallowing a toad whole: can’t sleep, can’t sit still, can’t lie in bed, can’t speak coherently, don’t feel like saying anything, can’t read, plus you’re queasy… And can’t get the sight, the sense of it, out of your mind… He was all she could think of. In the morning, over breakfast, grandmother Martha took a good close look at Ursula and said:

“I daresay, precious, you haven’t actually gone and fallen for yesterday’s flying boy, now have you?”
“What a preposterous idea! Whatever on earth for?”
“Oh, Ursula! You know what the say: love is blind, and often unkind! Girls have
been known to throw their hearts away on all manner of troublemakers!”
“Troublemakers don’t fly! Erich’s a pilot!” Outraged at the slur, the young granddaughter retreated back into her room.

She reappeared some twenty minutes later, wearing a stylish dress of brilliant, snowy white, with a cream-colored beret perched jauntily on her head, at a steep angle to her ear. She paused at the door and brusquely announced: “I’m off to see my flying troublemaker.”

Erich was waiting for her by the glider. As befitted a young aristocrat with a von in his name, the seventeen year old Erich von Beck kissed the dainty hand of Fraulein Mueller:
“To begin, Ursula, you must familiarize yourself with the theoretical elements of glider flight. Please follow me into our classroom.”
“Excellent! But surely you might address me by the informal pronoun, and I you?
After all, we aren’t old people, are we…?”
“Oh, yes, by all means!” von Beck gladly acquiesced.

In the training hall, where the demonstration gliders were set up, Erich installed the young girl in the pilot’s seat, boldly dropping into the place right next to hers. With the well-chosen phrases of a seasoned instructor, Erich began to explain the mechanics of the motor-less flying machine. He tried as much as possible to use the lower register of his vocal range. The young Fraeulein, her cognition clouded over by the intensity of the novel experience,
her magnificent eyes wide open, tried as hard as she might to comprehend every word coming out of her teacher’s lips; nevertheless, she struggled to grasp the purpose of all those steering devices, handles, clocks, buttons, cables, cords, gears, pulleys that poked out at her from every corner of the small, see-through enclosure that was the cabin. Her teacher, carried away, accidentally touched the student’s hand. She started, but did not move it away. Ursula’s face lit up with the dreamy half-smile of a maturing young woman who had already experienced, if only in her girlish dreams,
the yearnings of erotic desire. Her lovely bare leg, exposed by a chance movement of the hem of her white dress, brushed up, entirely unintentionally, against the pilot’s hard muscular one. They both reacted at once, as if a charge had been set off inside them. “Feels as if we’re about to dive and crash…” muttered Erich. Sitting in the compressed space of the glider, almost pressed together cheek-to-cheek, they were both overcome with such an enormous, synchronized wave of mutual passionate love for each other, that Erich, unable to restrain himself, kissed the soft, round, tenderly swollen bud of her blushing earlobe. Ursula pulled away by a micron or two, and asked:
“Are we going to be flying today?”
His lips were parched. The grey eyes had darkened:
“We will! Of course we will!”
“Thank you!”

Ursi bent closer to his face and kissed the semi-parted lips. Her head spun. She was ready to give him everything she had: her heart, her soul, her body, her destiny, her life… And he, then and there, wanted immediately to enter completely into every atom of her being. His hand settled onto the firm swell of her breasts – and just then he heard the familiar cadence of his strict mother’s
footfalls. Instantly Erich was outside the glider cabin. Ursula, her head at a studious angle, concentrated on looking innocent by moving an inquisitive fingertip over the instrument panel, back and forth, bock and forth…
“What are you up to here?” asked Erich’s mother, sternly.
“Look! We have a new flight student… Fraeulein Ursula Mueller.”
“I see,” Elisabeth remarked, ironically. “When did she materialize?”
“Yesterday.” Erich overcame his initial embarrassment. “We are having our first lesson today.”
“Understood! Fraeulein, I must ask you to come see me later to fill out the
necessary paperwork. My name is Elisa. I am the Director of this Glider Plane Club. I trust that our flight instructor, Erich von Beck, who is my son, will turn you into a first-class pilot. How old are you, young lady?”
“I’m fifteen, Frau Elisa.”
“Well, it’s not too late, but by your age I had been flying for three years. I will expect you tomorrow, then.”

Elisabeth executed a precise turn counter-clockwise, military style, and vanished down one of the long corridors of the hangar. Ursula clung even closer to Erich.
“So, are we going to fly up into the sky today?” Ursula gazed searchingly up
into her teacher’s eyes.
“Come on!”
“One moment!” Ursi looked around, making sure no one was left in the hangar, and
then rapidly kissed her instructor on the cheek.



Has there ever been a mother who did not feel concern when she first discovered that her son had fallen in love, as men will? The future mother-in-law, whom nature endows with an innate conviction that her offspring appear only so that she might shower her own maternal love upon them, and make them participants in her own joys, slowly but certainly becomes consumed by a subconscious fear of losing, forever, that life which she conceived in bliss, brought forth in agony, that dearest, closest, most cherished, most purely loved “ Baby Bubi.” Borne by the waves of maternal love, Darling Mummy then applies all the means at her disposal to ‘rescue’ her young son from the machinations of that other woman, ‘the outsider,’ who competes with her for influence over the future of her little boy. Naturally enough, she is not opposed to her son marrying. She wishes only the best for him; she desires his happiness – yet, knowing as she does from her own personal experience as a woman the enormous power of love, she attempts to defer her baby’s’ serious’ erotic liaisons to a time when his formation and education shall have been completed. In such cases, all mothers give voice to essentially the same sentiments that Elisabeth, as mother, spoke to Erich, her son, after Ursula’s first outing in the glider, in the glorious heavens of love:

“I understand you, my son! I have no objections to your choice. But you must also understand that you are at an age when your career is only beginning to take shape. Your future depends on it. You have a vast potential as a gifted pilot, an ace! Yes, love and family mean happiness and serenity in one’s home, but only when that home is financially secure. And the financial security of a family is forged with the hands of a man. You are a man, Erich! You are German, you are Aryan: that says it all! You must master the gift of sacrificing your present in order to build a greater, brighter tomorrow! The present vanishes in an instant. It consumes and destroys fools: those who do not know how to wait patiently.”
At some point in their lives, all children want to resemble their parents. Erich was no exception. The son emulated his mother, Elisabeth Reinecke. She had become infected with a predilection for aviation as a little girl, when a traveling street circus paid a visit to her own little town of Hirschberg. The circus brought roaring airplanes, instead of the usual elephants and hippos. All
of Germany was flying high. Aviation was the future. Air shows were being organized all over, on just about any empty field: acrobatic circus-pilots were performing daredevil feats, amazing stunts of reckless precision flight. Painted and decorated in colorful hues, with sirens blaring, the airplanes and their soundless, bat-like companions, the gliders, performed fantastic somersaults in
the skies. Their pilots would climb out onto the wings of biplanes and drink champagne straight out of the bottle; or they would wave calmly out of their cabins to a spellbound crowd, as their silently plunging gliders would suddenly dive under the spans of mock-bridges. A flying German knight, in full armor, took to the skies, eliciting rapturous cries from the adoring females present. In a tiny, agile plane, he buzzed low over the ground, well below the level of the bleachers, rocking the wings of his machine as he went; then, climbing straight up, he executed a complex knot maneuver and, rolling over, grazed the field upside down with the tip of his wing, using a special hook to snatch up from the ground a scarlet lady’s handkerchief – the emblem of chivalric love and
devotion. Topping it all came the moment when Elisabeth Reinecke herself, now madam von Beck, a pilot of the highest order, began repeating this identical stunt and others like it, her ten-year old son sitting on the lap of his flying mother as she guided the military high-speed monoplane. She had become Germany’s top flying ace.



Early the next morning, as soon as Erich had taken his new student up into the air on the two-seated training glider, Gruenau Baby, the door that led to the study of Otto von Beck – Erich’s father and Elisabeth’s husband – burst open with a resonant thump: the eyes of the venerable distinguished professor of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Berlin beheld his wife, Elisabeth, in a
state of heaving fury. The professor even leaped from his armchair:
“Ella, what’s happened? You’re unrecognizable!”
“It’s just dreadful! Can you imagine? Our son’s in love!”
“Did he survive?”
“Don’t tease, Otto!” Elisa collapsed onto the sofa. “A serious love affair at
his age will deal a fatal blow to his future! Don’t you understand? He’s a pilot
from God!”
“But I thought he was from me…”
Otto smiled and made himself comfortable next to his wife. “What’s to be upset about? So he’s in love! At seventeen, that is only natural… Our young boy is responding to the activation of his male hormones; he’s a true, full-blooded Aryan. He already needs a woman. Sex is good for the health; it will only make him stronger!”
“What woman? She’s all of fifteen! A girl! She’ll shatter his life! They love each other; it’s Romeo and Juliet all over again. I saw it yesterday…”
“Well, in that case, we need to think of something.”
“I propose that we urgently sell my gliding school here in Stuttgart, and also our house, and move to Berlin. That way you won’t have to make all those trips between your university and my glider flight school. All the more so, since my own teacher, Wolf Hirtom agreed to help get our Erich admitted to the Berlin Luftwaffe Academy, and General Ernst Udet is simply enthralled with our son’s piloting talent. On top of that, I’ve been offered an interesting position at the Dornier Company, as First Test Pilot for their new airships.”
“Well, clearly, since one of Germany’s heroes, the idol of our youth has seen fit to praise our son’s talent, then that must be what we should do.”
“God, Otto! How I do love you!”


Ursula nearly died in flight. No, not from fear. From the pleasure of it. She felt like a bird brimming over with love. The glider circled soundlessly in loops over the vine-covered slopes. She wanted to sing, and sang out in a full-throated voice:

Give me a rose to show how much you care:
Tie to the stem a lock of golden hair;
Surely tomorrow you’ll feel blue,
But then will come a love that’s new,
For you, Lilli Marlene –
For you, Lilli Marlene!

Sitting in the pilot’s seat, Bubi began to sing along in unison with Ursula. Pilots commonly like to sing while airborne. But in this particular flight, he experienced for the first time a surging tide of infinite bliss. He was ready to fulfill her every command…. Instead of singing, “For you, Lilli Marlene…” he all but shouted out: “For you, Ursu Mueller!”
Rolling across the lawn of the airfield, the glider obediently came to a standstill next to the waiting Elisabeth, and meekly lowered the left wing to the ground.
“Hallo, Mutti!” Erich called out cheerily, as he helped Ursula jump out of the cramped little cabin.
“How was the flight?”
“Wonderful! A beautiful flight! Like a fairy tale!” Ursula answered, the words rushing in a torrent. “It’s such a pity that I have to go back home to Berlin, to Mama.”
Erich turned white:
“But what about me?”
“Ah, but you must come visit me…”

Elisabeth nearly jumped for joy:
“Well, it’s not meant to be, then. And what are your plans for the future? You
are studying to be what?”
“A doctor.”
“Oh! My father’s a doctor,” said Erich, trying to inject himself into the
conversation.
“As for you, my flying son, I have a bit of pleasant news for you personally…”
“I have no secrets from Ursula. Go ahead, say it!”
“But you must hold on to the wing first, so you don’t fall over!”
“I’m holding on!”
“You, being the winner of the glider flight competitions, have received a
telegram from General Wolf Hirtom, congratulating you on your enrolment into the
highest level of training for the Luftwaffe fighter squadrons. Congratulations,
my son! Your dream is coming true.”
Erich was at a loss: “So many powerful emotions, all in one day! It’s
impossible!”

His eyes welled up with tears. Ursula stood on tiptoe so as to reach his lips with her own: “Congratulations! See you again soon! Until we meet in Berlin!” Her head tilted at a stubborn angle, Fraeulein Mueller, the glider pilot that was not to be, almost raced back to her grandmother’s house, so that she might leave Stuttgart this very day, on the evening train for Berlin. A single thought danced incessantly through her mind, in a constant refrain: “Ah, but I will be his wife, wait and see! And he will be MY husband! He will! He will! He will!”

***










Chapter Two
MAGDA


Berlin: the Navel of the Planet

We won’t let German freedom
Go barefoot through the streets.
We’ll give her foul-weather stockings
And boots that protect her feet.
We’ll deck her out in plush velvet
To keep her head warm in the fall,
With a hat that covers her ears up
So she can’t feel the wind at all.

“The Great Promise,” by Heinrich Heine,
after a translation into Russian by Samuel Marshak.

* * *

Berlin would not have been Berlin, had it not, from time to time, aspired to regard itself as the proverbial bellybutton of the planet.
“But what on earth is a planet’s bellybutton?” a reader might ask.
Allow me to reply as a political wag might, use a suitably nimble tongue:
“The navel – or bellybutton -- of the planet is the Reich, as the umbilical cord of global power.”
It was Friederich the Great who first conceived of the modern principles underlying the idea of power as a nourishing umbilicus. Friend to Voltaire, a crowned soldier, the flautist of Sans-Saucy, who loved Bach and perhaps men more than women; poet, prose writer, philosopher, orator, actor; feisty combative field marshal who could keep his great boots on for days on end; devotee of liberty and of the whip, who managed to combine French insouciance with German precision, and who readily transmuted artists, poets, painters into military machines – as well as vice versa. His influence upon Berlin, and consequently upon all of Germany, extended even into her cumbersome speech patterns: Versailles’ famous guttural, unrolled R, once it had bounced off his affected tongue, installed itself forevermore in the Berlin dialect, thereby imparting to the people of Berlin an abundance of charm, of refined overeducated coarseness, that could not be adequately conveyed with any other inflection. Friederich’s great, testicular egg of German grandeur yielded a hatchling, a century later: the Prussian Otto von Bismarck; and then, in the twentieth, out of the Kaiser’s considerably smaller generative contribution came forth the National Socialist Austrian dauber, Adolph Schicklgrueber, better known under the more self-effacing surname he adopted, as Hitler. Ideas about Nation teetered and danced, and so did Berlin itself. If Paris and St. Petersburg, however, were perpetually sick to retching from revolutions, Berlin and London, on the other hand, between the pleasant little cups of coffee under the linden trees of Under den Linden Strasse, and the downing of pints or bottles in a London pub, remained decadently stable. The myriad bodies of Europe’s young men that had been interred in tidy rows within the European soil, under their diminutive white cement markers, had had enough time to decay and become forgotten skeletons; while those who had made it back to their own front doors, only half-dead, poisoned with pyrites, stabbed through with bayonets, shot through with bullets, torn apart by shrapnel and flying parts, with legs or arms lopped off, with broken vertebrae, with genitalia that would never work again, smiling dumbly took up heroin, drowned themselves in vodkas, shoved their heads
in nooses, shot themselves dead to finish the job, swallowed rat poisons, and jumped, jumped, jumped from every tall bridge and Eiffel Tower.

Berlin, after the First World War, was drinking itself to death, reveling in its abject poverty, in its gangrenous hopelessness. The young cinema replaced bread and butter. Spiritual and physical masturbation was all the rage. The riotous feasting in time of pestilence had begun. The age of romantic love had ground to a halt. A bacchanal of self-indulgence through sexual fantasy and
experimentation was unleashed. Lesbianism and homosexuality emerged out of the alleys, entryways and parks, to be celebrated in the pages of full-color magazines, in the villas of tycoons, bankers, gangsters, grafters of every variety; it ensconced itself in the boudoirs of beauties, and in the getaway cottages of writers, artists, directors… The cult of fast living and suicide
attained the respectability of a school of philosophical thought. The dreams of a golden age remained on the silver screens, on the stages of theatres, in countless cabarets and casinos, in their roulette wheels and their games… Gradually, life in Berlin turned into scenes from a street theatre: the people rushed to complete the requisite costume change, as they donned red, black, brown, white uniform shirts and ties; as they quickly painted over the grey walls of their houses with red swastikas, with hammers and sickles, with six-pointed stars, with five-pointed stars; as they pasted up flyers, posters, slogans, portraits of fuehrer on their utility poles; or ran around, chanting and shouting as they brandished the anarchists’ flag, buck naked, terrorizing little old ladies who might have stepped out of the poetic tales of Schiller, Goethe, Heine. Business meetings were conducted in brothels.
Theatre actresses and film stars became the wives of the political beau monde. The average Berlin burgher drank his Bavarian beer, cursed, and suffered from an unquenchable thirst for order, for clean streets, for clean people, for a pure life, for a pure race:
“So what did we fight for? Look at ‘me all, everywhere, no end in sight! Where
do they come from?”

A woman makes a man not only in the explicit physical sense; she shapes him with her beauty, her kindness, her tenderness, her nurturing care, her love, her sexiness – and with one other mysterious, inexplicable emanation that poets can only describe as a kind of sunstroke. Just this ability to strike below the belt was a trait of Johanna Maria Magdalena Behrend, or Magda for short. Wherever Magda might enter, in whatever society she should appear, men became smitten; women dropped their purses, and surrounding objects lost their appeal. The graceful blonde with a lissome body, with intelligent hazel eyes, she instantly won over everyone she came across. She had a superb mastery of German, French and English; dressed at great cost with exquisite taste; knew how to refrain from comment as she hung upon every word of a speaker, and had an innate, natural gift for acting, and beautifully articulated speech. With a talent for improvisation, she could give short, vivid speeches full of profound meaning. The cherished dream of her youth, which she kept safely in the secret hiding places of her soul, was to find a famous, wealthy genius, marry him, and then to
mother a brood of adorable brilliant children to his delight. She herself had been illegitimately conceived in the womb of a beautiful twenty-year old serving woman, Augusta Behrend. The cause of her birth, the
engineer Oscar Rietschell, transfixed by the perfection of the tiny newborn, soon married her mother and made her an honest woman. Rietschell moved to Belgium to pursue his career interests. Magda was placed in an exclusive strict convent school near Brussels. She was an excellent student, who mastered her subjects with ease, with pleasure, in the process developing a strong will, poise, determination, and the ability to know how to teach her independently. It was here, within the convent walls that Magda first conceived of the notion of searching for and finding the genius of her dreams. By the time Magda completed her convent studies, her mother was getting married again, this time to her very first lover, Richard Friedlaender. Her stepfather adopted Magda; she was issued a new passport, with her new Jewish surname: Magda Friedlaender. But Fraeulein Friedlander continued her search for a wealthy genius for personal use.
The veracity of that ancient folk saying, “ The right hunter will summon forth the right game,” was confirmed.

One winter, already as a student of a boarding college for young ladies in Holzhausen, Magda was traveling in a train going from Goslar to Berlin. At some station, an imposing gentleman whose bearing and demeanor bespoke good breeding stepped into the small compartment for two of the better class of carriage, in which she rode:
“May I?” said the hushed-thunder bass that belonged to the gentleman standing in
the doorway.
“Yes, please, come in!” Magda tore herself away from her book and lifted up her
radiant gaze to the face of the gentleman with the velvet voice. That gentleman,
try as he might, could not for the life of him conceal his overwhelming pleasure
and surprise.
“Guenther Quandt! I am Guenther Quandt!”
It was Magda’s turn to be astonished: “Wha-a-… Wha-a-a-t, what did you say?
Quandt? That Quandt?”
“What do you mean, ‘that Quandt’?”
“Well, you know, the one that ranks next to Rockefeller, Krup, Rothschild,
Morgan? The millionaire?”
“Quite possibly!” smiled Guenther. “I am a capitalist, as they are! I make
Germany wealthy!”
Suddenly, Magda raised her leg and lifting up the hem of her skirt a little,
showed the gentleman the sole of her stylish, well-made winter boot. The sole of
the boot bore the distinctive embossed imprint of the QUANDT brand of footwear.
“Is that you?”
“It is!”

Five days later, Guenther Quandt – the wealthiest leather goods manufacturing proprietor in all of Germany—proposed to Magda. The very next Sunday they celebrated their engagement. It was her very first prize catch. She had found the genius of capitalism – and no mean genius at that: a multimillionaire of a genius.
Very, very quickly, she began to cover the traces of her past: she changed the new, Jewish surname for her own father’s, Rietschell; she converted from Catholicism to Protestantism; she gave her capitalist a son and heir, Harold.
But having given birth to her firstborn, Magda found herself the mother of six children at once: Guenther had two sons from a first marriage, and another three boys who were the sons of his deceased friend, whom he had adopted. At all of nineteen, Magda was instantly transformed into the mother of a large family. Moreover, as a prisoner in a gilded cage, possessing millions in her husband’s pockets, she could not spend any of portions of that fortune! The dream of her youth had turned out to be a trap, fools’ gold, nothing else! The millionaire, as it turned out, was a wretched miser. To make matters worse, he was dreary, tiresome, a dreadful bore. Guenther was her father’s age; his body contained every possible ailment described the medical encyclopedia. Right in the very first act of the Berlin Opera, he would be snoring! Oh, the horror of it! Her hopes for an interesting social life were dashed into bits. Consumed with regret, she would wander for hours on end through the many rooms of the ancient old palace that was their home; with increasing frequency, she chose to retire for the night to a bedroom other than her husband’s.

Consolation came quite unexpectedly, in the form of a new love. Rather, the love was not new: it was her first. It originated in her first innocent experience with infatuation, as a thirteen-year old girl enamored of the fifteen-year old Victor Arlasaroff. At that time, Magdalena was still a pupil of the Werner von Siemens School in Berlin. This private gymnasium was a prestigious institution.
She shared one of its desks with a merry, prattling Jewish girl called Lisa. During recess, they would race upstairs to the third floor, to visit the boys, including Victor, Lisa’s brother. Magdalena fell for him straight away. Victor had been born in distant, scary Russia, in the small provincial city of Rovno, in the family of a rabbi. The entire Arlasaroff family had made a hasty escape from the Russian Empire during the pogroms against Jews, traveling first to Koenigsberg, and then to Berlin.


Victor was a brilliant student who earned perfect marks, and a handsome boy besides. He started a Zionist youth organization at the school. Her love for Victor quite naturally drew Magda into the ranks of youthful militant champions for a free and sovereign Jewish homeland in Palestine. She removed her Catholic cross from around her neck and replaced it with a gold star of David; she sang Jewish songs with glee, and attended synagogue; she went on hikes and field trips as part of the Zionist youth marches, sleeping in haystacks, and experiencing, for the first time – perfumed by the heady scents of freshly mowed grasses mingled with wildflowers – the tender sweetness of first kisses.

Strolling with Vitya, their arms wrapped around each other, along a beach on the Baltic Sea, she listened with enormous sympathy and understanding to his every patriotic word:
“I am not a German. I am a Jew, and I am infinitely proud of that fact. I think about Palestine constantly! I love you Magda, but I also love the homeland of my ancestors, our historic motherland, Israel! I cannot give up either my love for you, or my love for my people! So why don’t we just take the plunge, and move to Israel as soon as we finish up school here!”

Magda, gazing with worshipful eyes at Vitya from Rovno, meekly nodded her consent:
“Yes! We’ll take the plunge! Of course we will! We’ll go to Israel! We’ll fight there together against those accused English!”

All the memories came flooding back as soon as she picked up the telephone and suddenly found herself hearing Victor’s familiar voice:
“May I speak with Magda Friedlaender?”
“You may speak with Magda Quandt.”
“You’re married?”
“Yes!”
“I dream of meeting you, Mrs. Quandt.”
“Tell me where to meet you, Victor, and I will be there.”
“The Hotel Adlon, on Unter den Linden.”
“You can expect me to be there in one hour.”

Only the rarest if sovereign women, and certainly not all empresses and queens, born in the harmonious interplay of beauty and intelligence, having received the best of educations, living in possession of all the attributes of power, have known and possessed in a physical reality the magical force of erotic magnetism. In recent history, the first ones to have mastered the art of controlling and directing that power have been film and television actresses. But only the most intelligent, the most passionate and the most exceptional beauties in their own right have been endowed with that enchanting, mysterious ability to captivate powerful and intelligent men from the very first look. It was that very mysterious charm that the enchantress Magda possessed and commanded utterly. Over the forty-four years of her life, Johanna Maria Magdalena, out-of-wedlock daughter of a common Berlin house wench, lived under five different surnames: Behrend, Friedlaender, Rietschell, Quandt, Goebbels; she gave birth to seven children: one son and six daughters; she practiced five different religions in turn: Catholicism, Protestantism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hitlerism; she was a millionaires, a Zionist, a Nazi; she was the mistress of Victor Arlasaroff, one of the founding fathers of Israel – and of Herbert Hoover, nephew to the American President – and of Adolph Hitler, supreme Nazi leader, Reichskanzler of Germany’s Third Reich.

At the end of her life, she became a murderess. With her own hands, she poisoned her six adorable little daughters, flesh of her own flesh: Helga, Hilda, Helmut, Hoelde, Hedda, Haide. And then she killed herself. When they sifted the ashes of her corpse, in the pile of charred bones they found a shapeless little chunk of blackened gold – the Fuehrer’s own personal party insignia, their private emblem of eternal allegiance to each other, the last gift of the last enamored devil – and, naturally enough, the first symbol of their eternal allegiance in the zigzagged course of their capricious love. It was the only reminder left to confirm that the pile of filthy soot belonged to the first lady of Nazi Germany. Naturally enough, two years before her wedding to Berlin’s own Gauleiter, Joseph Goebbels, Magda could not foresee the tragedy of her own destiny. But she could always predict when new amorous delights would be appearing on the horizon. These premonitions of sexual luxury to come all but worked wonders with her, by all accounts: her gait acquired the sensuous cadence of a serpent’s mesmerizing journey; her eyes, full of deception, gave off voluptuous sparks; the mysterious smile of the Gioconda began to play upon her lips; her body seemed to overflow with intense erotic desire, yet, at the same time, it expressed the complete and irrevocable impossibility of being easily attained, that is the hallmark of the easy conquest.

Victor awaited her in a state of heightened sexual excitement. Fourteen years had passed since their last chaste kisses, but he could not forget the magnetic effect she had had on his responsive, susceptible youthful masculinity. Even the mere recollection of her instantly caused him to become visibly aroused to a degree that was indecent. He had married long before. His daughter was six now. He lived in Palestine and had taken a new name, Haim. Officially, he was in Berlin for an international conference where he was representing the Mapai Party, on business pertaining to
the Zionist movement, and traveling under a British diplomatic passport; but unofficially, in reality, he was being summoned back to the city of his youth by the love call, inaudible to others, of the enchanting Magda. He believed in the certainty of her coming. He stood on the sidewalk of the avenue, scrutinizing every passing expensive automobile, and carefully shielding the protruding fly
of his fashionable narrow trousers with a newspaper. He missed seeing her red Mercedes approach. The luxury motorcar rolled right past him to the entrance, and drew up to a stop right in front of the crystal doors of the Hotel Adlon. She waved to him, her hand sheathed to the elbow in a white glove. Forgetting all about his diplomatic status, Victor came racing towards the car like a schoolboy, and courteously opened her door. He was burning up with impatience. She took note of his Levantine susceptibility, and held out her hand for him to kiss, according to the custom. As he bowed over it, he noticed a small note held out between her fingers. Without a word, she turned, the wide hem of her sweeping sky-blue dress swaying, and walked straight towards the entrance of the
swanky hotel, known the world over for its stratospheric prices. With shaking hands, Victor opened the note and read: “No. 235.”He waited for a short time, and then flew inside, like a bullet, heading
straight for the second floor. She was already waiting for him. The door was ajar. He came charging in without knocking, and a moment later they were breathlessly entwined in a dizzying French kiss. Carefully, he began to remove her dress. She did not resist.


An aging jealous husband, even if he does not see it, will inevitably smell the faithlessness of a young wife. For some time, Guenther had not felt the yielding softness of Magda’s lips. She applied them to his own with the same degree of interest and pressure that women usually exhibit when touching their lips to the foreheads of the corpses of the elderly. This alarmed him: he began sniffing around her.
Then, one evening, as he kissed Magda on the back of her head, he detected the scent of expensive cigars. He did not smoke; neither did Magda, ever. A furious rage came over him:
“Exactly who have you been fucking with?”
“I went to see my father.”
“Which one? The Jew or the Belgian?”
Magda couldn’t think of a riposte. She jumped up, acting outraged, and fled to her half of the house. It was perfectly clear to her that the divorce was inevitable.Guenther walked into her bedroom, deflated, and hunched over:
“Never mind, then!
Friday we sail for New York! Pack your things!”
“What? Where?” Magda asked, surprised.
“To the United States. We’ll talk once we get back. I have a number of important trade agreements to sign with some American companies. The tickets are already booked.”

The ocean voyage aboard the snowy white luxury liner Bremen dampened the heat of the Quandts’ domestic discord, somewhat. Guenther had underestimated the feminine cunning of his wife, however. In the grip of jealousy’s fever, raging, he had vowed that upon their return he would “cast out the faithless wife, drive her out into the streets without any financial support: “I’ll leave you standing in the clothes on your back!”
But it was not to be quite so simple to divorce the soon-to-be ‘darling of the Third Reich.’ Proud, distinguished, well-bred he might be, but he had not stumbled upon some brainless beauty…

The millionaire Quandt had a multitude of villas and estates. In one such love nest, she had discovered, hidden away in the tycoon’s writing desk, a collection of pornographic photo postcards from his youth. They immortalized the sexual escapades of Guenther in every conceivable genre and style. Magda brought these piquant snapshots with her on board the Bremen.

The ship was just passing the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World when Frau Quandt nonchalantly unlocked her personal sac de voyage and produced, seemingly without malice aforethought, a large, thick photo album bound in crocodile leather, revealing, as she opened it up before the very nose of her astounded husband, the peccadilloes of his riotous amorous heyday.
“There! See? Now, look, and don’t say a word: just listen closely, my darling!”
“That was a long time ago. It has no legal effect whatsoever!”
“You think not? Dozens of reporters from the free press will be waiting for us
at the New York pier. I’ll just give them these photos! Think anyone’ll still be
interested in doing business with such a filthy German aristocrat?”
“All right, you’ve made your point! You’re a real devil in a skirt! I’ll buy
that from you! How much money do you want for it? I’ll make a check out right
here and now! Tell me how much you want for it, in marks!”
“Oh, no, dear. I don’t ask. I demand what is rightfully mine, but not now. When
we get back to Germany. I can’t live with you like this anymore. I will petition
the courts for a divorce. And I only request, please, right here, that you stop
making scenes, stop throwing these jealous fits. In the United States of
America, I intend to lead the life of a free woman! So you just stay out of my
Way!”

One of the wealthiest men in all of Germany was afraid of becoming embroiled in a huge public scandal. “The German leather king,” Guenther Quandt agreed to give Magda back her freedom, plus an excellent financial settlement that would assure her comfort: 4000 Reichmarks each and every month for as long as she lived; a magnificent apartment to be bought for her in the center of Berlin; defrayal of all their son’s educational expenses; complete medical insurance; and the right
for Frau Quandt to enter into any other marital union of her own free will, as she might please.
Husband and wife set foot on American soil satisfied with the terms of the agreement they had entered into. The personal interests of each side were safe. The incomparable Magda flitted over New York like a glittering butterfly capable of discerning, from a passing glance, the hidden physical, financial, emotional potency of the famous males she encountered. Yet again she turned on, full blast, her magical erotic magnetism of aristocratic promiscuity while projecting the outward appearance of unassailability. The monumental success in America of her fellow countrywoman, Marlene Dietrich, consumed her with envy. Now that she had left Quandt, Magda embarked on a dedicated search for personal happiness among the ranks of the elite of the United States of America. “USA! Oh, what a vast, rich, as yet untilled field of male potential this is, for a German woman such as I am!” mused Magda, and smiled dreamily.


Across the silky surface of the waters of New York Harbor, like so many sacred scarab beetles, the Port Authority tugboats whistled, chugged, blew steam, and churned the water, maneuvering, as if it were some precious ball of dung, the gigantic white-as-snow ship that had been named after the city famous for its minstrels, Bremen. Other historians, it is true, aver that the ocean liner had
acquired the baggage of this name, renowned the whole over, in honor of the superb beer that originates in the same municipality. Whichever version one might lean to, everywhere in the luxurious restaurants of the ship, the hearing of its passengers was pandered to by its extraordinary musicians, while in its staterooms, suites and lounges the distinctively-shaped bottles of its bright German lager never ever ran out. The tugboats continued to fuss anxiously around the enormous twin-stacked liner, struggling to haul up its carcass to the cement piers of the New York Ship
Terminal by means of heavy thick steel cables. The passengers prepared to disembark on American soil, as they checked and rechecked the condition and safety of their baggage, their passports, and the banknotes in their billfolds, the obligatory visas and entry documents, medical certificates…
The luxury class deck was uncrowned. Very Important Persons are different from the common man: their movements are unhurried; their speech hushed; their affairs in order. There is a general lack of agitation in their midst. The personnel that serves their needs – the cabin stewards, secretaries, dressers, valets, guards – stand by, watching trolleys laden with luggage, ready to
respond instantly even to the barely perceptible turn of a lady’s, or gentlemen, head. In his business travel, Guenther was accompanied by his personal secretary, Fritz Cross; as for Magda, she was getting by with just one of the ship’s stewardesses to assist her.

Many passengers had already caught sight of the familiar faces of family or friends, amongst the colorful crowd awaiting the arrival of the ship – but Magda had yet even to appear on the deck. Guenther turned his head to his secretary in annoyance:
“Hans, wo ist die Meine?”
“Einen Moment, bitte!” reacted the secretary, and rushed to her stateroom.
He was just preparing to knock on her polished-lacquer door, when Magdalena appeared upon its threshold.
Fritz did not immediately recognize Frau Quandt.
“Was its das?” Caught by surprise, his arms flew outward in a gesture of
disbelief. “Unmoeglich!”

An improbably beautiful woman stood in the doorway leading to the stateroom.
“Yes, undoubtedly, it must be Magda… But something about her bears a striking
resemblance to someone else, someone everyone recognizes instantly. But whom?”
All at once it came to Fritz:
“Wait, that’s Marlene Dietrich!”

The stunning woman was not immediately recognized by her own husband, either. But he was careful not to give any indication of that fact.


Just before she sailed from Hamburg for New York, Frau Quandt went to see a new film everyone was talking about, Blonde Women, starring Marlene Dietrich as “Lola.”
Thereafter, The Blue Angel left such a powerful impression on Magda, that she decided:
“I will conquer America as myself, as I – Magdalena. But I will dress like Marlene!”
For a woman of her aristocratic circles, who knew her own worth, there was no possibility of simply putting on any kind of look – of decking herself out in the bits and pieces of some fashion or other that had caught her fancy. But an opportunity did present itself: the ocean voyage was sufficiently long, and the mammoth bowels of the Bremen contained an unbelievable number of restaurants, bars, cafes, musical lounges with or without dancing, cinemas, shops, as well as a considerable library with a comfortable reading lounge. This last feature in particular attracted
Magda’s attention. She began by perusing magazines and periodicals which featured photos with their news reports. She was looking for a suitable shot of Marlene. It was not such an easy image to locate. And yet, as the saying goes: “They, who seek, also find!” Eureka! There it was, precisely what she wanted: Marlene, in a frivolous pose, wearing a beige suit, with a trendy hat perched sideways; in a shirt with French cuffs; the cuffs joined by gold cufflinks. And then, the most amazing element of all! A black scarf of soft satin with tiny white polka dots. It was this scarf, so casually thrown about the neck, which gave the whole look its specifically tender German charm! Without a second thought, Magda headed for the ship’s couture salon and commissioned a copy of Marlene’s outfit. Within four days, the Dietrich remake had been made to order expertly tailored to Magdalena’s figure. But she was adept at keeping the secrets of her own choices and actions.


At last the mighty hydraulic lifts had drawn the Bremen to its mooring. Broad gangways were lowered from the giant’s deck to the terra firma of the ‘New World.’ A Marine brass band, the maws of their Sousaphones blazing in the son, struck up God bless America.

From the mountains, to the prairies,
To the oceans, white with foam:
God bless America,
My home, sweet home!

Pandemonium had been unleashed. Joyful eyes overflowed with tears at long-awaited reunions. The terminal rang with the din of names in each and every language of the world being shouted at the top of the lungs. Hugs, slaps on the back, hearty handshakes, spontaneous snatches of song – the whole of it most nearly resembled one vast, festive Brazilian carnival. The raucous din, the
extraordinary roar and uncontrollable self-expression of the multinational, colorful crowd amazed Magdalena:
“So many inferior people here!” she remarked to herself in wonder. “I’m not
going to have an easy time of it here.”
Mr. and Mrs. Quandt were met by representatives of the German consulate. Ceremony and officiousness was the order of the day: flowers, bows, gallant assistance getting seated in the diplomatic automobile:
“Willkommen! Bienvenus! Welcome to America!”

Everyone took particular note of Frau Quandt. The ambassador himself leaned closer to the tycoon, speaking softly into his ear:
“You have an absolutely staggering wife!”
“Oh, yes, she staggered me all right, absolutely, just this morning!” came Guenther’s sad reply.



Slowly but surely these two German women began their lightning-force intervention in the American scene. Marlene triumphed. Magda retreated. Both of them were at first glance mistaken for angels. Then, later, in the awareness of many they gradually underwent a transformation into the iconic figure of the Nordic vamp.
All manner of contradictory legends, rumors and gossip always shrouded their names. Common to both was their deliberate, determined, adamant, independent, conceited, assiduous shaping of their own image, eliciting by turn love and respect, or enmity and hatred. For millions of people, leach became an unattainable, mystical idol. But the differences between them rested only in the secrets of their distinctive feminine personalities. Magdalena worshipped men devoutly, and believed in them, as if they were gods. Marlene only believed in volcanic explosive passion, without regard for gender, time or space. They were born in the same year. Their doting parents had chosen for their precious daughters the same double name, Maria Magdalene – in honor of the great woman saint who was an eminent disciple of Jesus Christ. Yet they both chose to cast off the faith of their ancestors. Dietrich consciously combined her two Christian names, Maria and Magdalene, into a single word, arriving at: Marlene. The Communists of Germany insisted that Marlene had concocted her star’s name out of the names of Communism’s two fuehrers, Marx and Lenin. But, all jesting and conjecture aside, the life and death of these two charming women demonstrates that their souls had yielded to the vise-like grip of the occult: Marlene was enthralled with the cabbalas, while Magdalena submitted to Satanism. The one would live 91 years; the other, would be burned to ashes at 44. They were first destined to meet and become acquainted at a diplomatic reception given at the White House by the thirty-first President of the United States of America, Herbert Clark Hoover. But for now, flanked by an impressive escort of police on motorcycles, the limousine of Mr. Quandt, the German multimillionaire, having torn through Manhattan with sirens blaring, was gentling up to the entrance of the Commodore Hotel. Its monumental, antiquated building, with skyscrapers towering over it from all sides, stood as a reminder to its guests
that New York City, the capital of the world, had been founded by Europeans.
“The Commodore, a commercial hotel for businessmen and conventioneers that never captured the loyalties of New Yorkers as a meeting place. It was perfectly located, but regarded as harmless and pedestrian inside.”
They moved into the Royal Suite.
Guenther left straight away to see about his business, while Magda decided go for a little stroll on the East Side. In contrast to Das Vaterland, here everything happened on the run: eating, drinking, lovemaking, marrying, fighting, raping, killing, thieving; steering the business of democracy and
collapsing from cardiac arrests, from diabetes, quickly, instantaneously and irreversibly. But what was strangest of all was that the educated European inevitably succumbed to the rhythms of this cosmopolitan city, and almost imperceptibly adopted them as his own, falling in love with its vistas; developing an acceptance of its frustrations, humor, infrequent tears; emulating the style, mannerisms and character of its inhabitants.

Looking over her shoulder, Magda regained her composure and crossed the street, using the pedestrian overpass that lead towards signs reading GRAND CENTRAL STATION and AIRLINE TERMINALS.
Happenstance, having brought her thus far, seemed to be suggesting she seek her fortune in sunny California. Stumbling across the Office of Buffalo Central – the ticketing bureau for one of the biggest railway stations on the globe, she perused the timetables for trains bound in a direction. A clerk immediately approached:
“May I help you?”
“I am interested in the train for Los Angeles.”
“Oh, yes! A most comfortable journey, indeed, with only one change of trains in San Francisco. Our special Empire State Express will be departing this coming Monday, at 2:10 p.m., from the city of Buffalo. If you like, we will be happy to take you personally directly to the train station at Buffalo Service. Would you like to purchase your tickets right now?”
“Please!”
“You’re certainly welcome!”


Magda booked her train ticket and paid for the special private limousine service that would deliver her to the Buffalo terminal. She then went straight back to the Royal Suite, also known as the Deluxe King Rooms at the Commodore Hotel. As soon as she had shut the door, the phone rang. It was Guenther on the line:
“Good day, Ma! The President of the German Imperial Bank, Jalmar Schacht, arrives in the US tomorrow. The White House is hosting an official state dinner with the entire diplomatic corps. Since we aren’t divorced yet, I’m asking you, my dear, that you attend this reception with me and play the part of my loving and devoted wife.”
“For our Great Germany, darling, I’m ready to do anything!”
“Please don’t mock! This is serious.”
“And I’ve made up my mind to visit Los Angeles, to see my Aunt Rosalie, who lives there. I’ve booked a ticket for Monday on the Western Express!”
“Now that’s just great. I’m quite fed up with you, you know!”
“Don’t be such a boor, husband! We’re part of the diplomatic corps now, remember?”

****


Chapter Three
THE FORTRESS
       
       How are you able to look at the Neva?
How are you able to tread on her spans?
There’s a reason I’m known as a griever
Ever since having passed through your hands.

Sharp as blades are the wings of black angels
The Last Judgement approaches apace
And the sweet blooming berries of bonfires
In the snow, like red roses, shall blaze.
Anna Akhmatova



Leaning so as to rest his back against the massive stone walls of Peter-Paul Fortress, an enraptured Valerie savored the elegiac panorama of the Winter Palace. The dark waters of the Neva River rounded the jutting point of Basil’s Island and moved on in their headlong course, a keen reminder of life’s swiftly coursing brevity. The May summertime of Leningrad in 1936 had yet to heat up under the rays of Russia’s northern sun, doling out warmth like a miser: the city’s centrally located strip of beach around the Fortress was still bereft of the multitudes that would flock to it later, to strip and sunbathe.
Valery Rogozhin loved coming here on his days off, to bask for a bit in the sun, and compose poetry. He had dreamt of becoming a poet, and instead he had become a fighter pilot. In the 19th century, it had been the poets who had scanned the heavens; in the 20th, the heavens were scanned by pilots.
His love of poetry had been quite literally instilled in him by his mother, a schoolteacher whose subject was Russian Literature. He had no memories of his father; that father had been lost on one of the battlefields of the first world war, missing in action. Mother never said anything about him, nothing at all; once, only, she had mentioned that he had been a military man, and that his ultimate fate was a complete mystery to her. Not long after, Mother had married for the second time, and Valery acquired a stepfather: an officer of the NKVD charged with conducting investigations into enemies of the state. And it was he who had enrolled his stepson in the aviation club: “ The land of the Soviets needs warriors, not whiners!”
From the very first time, having soared up into the clouds on a training plane, the young poet turned into a true flight enthusiast. He loved the skies; he wanted to fly on and on, endlessly. Composing rhymes fell by the wayside, as a conscious choice on his part. Enrolling in the Communist Youth League, or Komsomol, he embraced the infectious ideology of Lenin and Stalin wholeheartedly, along with everyone else. At the Komsomol meetings, cherry-cheeked ‘ proletarian’ orators would gleefully extol the verses of Demyan the Pauper, or Vladimir Mayakovsky, even as they proposed that “ the books of the bourgeois, Pushkin, should be drowned in the saccharine tears of the enemies of the people.” Along with everyone else, Comrade Valery Rogozin marched along the avenues brandishing red flags and the portraits of international Communist leaders, and demanded at interminable rallies for the “capitalist scum who were the mangy dogs of global imperialism to be crushed.” He adopted with the pure fervor of religious faith an unwavering belief in the victory of a worldwide proletarian revolution: “ Down with diplomatic babytalk! Down with decadent romanticism! Long live Communist youth! Long live the global Communist Revolution for peace, freedom, equality and brotherhood! Let us fan the flames of a worldwide conflagration, in the name of peace, truth, justice, and the happiness of workers and of peasants! Long live the Father of the nations, the great Leader of the oppressed peoples, Comrade Stalin!”
Valera believed in all these contagious slogans and was prepared at any moment to deliver up his own life, heroically, for the sacred ideas of Communism. Although, truthfully, in a tiny secret corner of his consciousness, a doubt stirred timidly:
“But why should we drown the beautiful poetry of Pushkin in the name of the beautiful ideas of worldwide happiness?”
And in fact the matter was settled instantaneously, thanks to a single absolutely brilliant pronouncement by the genius Leader:
“ Pushkin is the Poet of the People! Their champion!”
In a heartbeat, without further official fuss, it became possible again to buy and to own, even in the home, volumes of poetry by Russia’s greatest poet; to read them, to declaim them in public readings, even before large audiences. The same voices that had just been slinging all manner of filth at Pushkin now made up the solid ranks of Pushkin scholars, lifted his portrait high above their own heads, and set about committing his celebrated verse novel, Evgeny Onegin, to memory – in its entirety.
Valery’s heart was relieved. Now he could fuse the romance of literature with the romance of being a fighter pilot.

On a strip of sand between the fortress wall and the Neva, wearing only a swimsuit, Lubushka sat all alone on a small collapsible beach chair, holding a slender volume of poems by her favorite poetess, Anna Akhmatova, She had just turned 19. A student of the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad University, she wanted above all to excel academically, and to love. Being a young girl of strict moral principles, she would not allow herself to fall in love with a man except within the context of marriage; going out with random young men who happened to approach her on a city street was entirely out of the question. Her classmates from the faculty did not attract the young girl’s interest, given that they were virtually all near-sighted and in appearance physically underdeveloped. Having been brought up in a strict, intellectual family of petersburgians, conservatory professors, Lyuba sought solace from the flood of passionate longing natural for her age by taking solitary strolls amidst the abundance of ravishing venues afforded by the Northern Palmyra. Understandably, just as every healthy, beautiful young woman in her coming of age, she dreamt that “ someday, by chance, would come the accidental meeting with her one and only, adored, incomparable prince. He wouldn’t have to arrive mounted on a white steed. The main thing was for him to be intelligent, strong, brave, a loving husband – without harmful habits.”
Lyubov Vasilyevna Zaitseva – Lyubushka, for short – possessed the famous ‘second sight.’ Needless to say, she did not have a fifth eye [?] capable of filling in for an x-ray machine, but even so, she could feel the looks men gave her as she passed, even with the back of her head. Sunning herself on the beach in the very heart of Leningrad, she had spent more than an hour already observing a handsome, well-built young man she had glimpsed out of the corner of one eye. He had been standing all this time in his trunks by the very wall of Peter-Paul Fortress; she was trying with all her might, using her “woman’s fifth eye” to force him to look her way. But for some reason the fifth eye wasn’t working. There were few people out that day on the Neva beach. She, separated from the young man by some thirty metres, sat, got up, walked up and down the edge of the riverbank, waded into the water, making a pretense of contemplating going swimming, but all in vain. He seemed blind to her presence. Every so often, he would bend down to where his belongings were spread out, pick up a little notebook, and jot something down. At other times, his dreamy gaze would drift over to the other side of the Neva, wandering from the Rastrelli landmarks to the Hermitage, and from the steeply arched bridge immortalized in ‘The Queen of Spades’ back. No sooner had she glimpsed Valery, than the thoughts of the chaste young lady began to spin at the furious speed of a propeller on a fighter plane at take-off:
“ Just what do I have to do to get him to take even the slightest notice?”
The temperamental Lyubov Vasilyevna found herself becoming angry:
“ What an insensitive clod! Well, go on! Come on over here already!”
But he remained unperturbed and unaware. Moreover, he picked up his book and immersed himself in the contents, so that even his head was no longer to be seen.
“ Clod!”
When it comes to her most intimate feelings, any woman always keeps her own counsel. If a particular man won’t rise to the bait, the lady will rapidly change tactics.
Lyuba jumped up from her folding beach chair and flung herself headlong into the river. The water scalded her athlete’s body with its intense icy burn; she shrieked briefly and went under, head and all. Valery looked up. He thought the young girl was drowning. Instantly he rushed to her aid. Seconds later, he was by her side. Unceremoniously, even roughly, he flipped her onto her back and grabbing her firmly under the chin with both hands, towed her back to shore. The first interaction with his future wife had been managed to both parties’ satisfaction.




Mutual love at first sight brought about radical changes in the lives of Valery and Lyubasha. Their lifetimes were now forever divided into before and after the day at the beach by Peter-Paul Fortress. There was a modest wedding in the autumn, and then, in December of 1937, Valery was assigned to a new service post in the city of Petrozavodsk. Lyuba exercised her prerogatives as a married student to transfer into the external diploma program of the University, and left with her husband so that they could have a normal family life. In keeping with custom, nine months later their son, Oleg, was born. The newlyweds could not get enough of their son. Not all women, and not always right away, come around to the realization that their true happiness is to be found in motherhood, when everything else takes second place to her child. This new, all-consuming parental love for the infant at times destroys erotic love, but more often than not it delivers utterly new, powerful feelings of joy both to soul and to body, especially in the woman’s case. Lyubasha bloomed. The garrison life of the wife of a fighter pilot did not seem burdensome to her. Naturally enough, the Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk could not compare to Leningrad – Russia’s second capital city – and yet the small, modest city on the shores of Lake Onega was exceptionally beautiful in its expanses of sky and water, its primeval quiet, its fragrant forests, the splendours of the environs with their wonders of nature, and the light-hearted character and kindness of its populace.
For some reason, Valery and Lyubasha had envisioned this city as some kind of dank accumulation of dozens of industrial smokestacks belching black smoke into the pristine heavens, round the clock. In reality, Petrozavodsk turned out to be a tidy, cozy town, with everything they needed to work and live in comfort. The people of Karelia were strikingly gracious and courteous, in an unusually delicate, well-mannered way, that had been all but lost by denizens of the modern megalopolis.
They were particularly awed by the tiny island of Kizhi, that seemed almost out of place amongst the skerries of the lake. An exquisite thrill came over them both when, pressing closely against each other as they stood on the uppermost deck of an old paddle-wheel steamship, they suddenly beheld, illuminated by the reflections of the summer sun in the never-ending mirror of limpid water, like some startling revelation one would expect from a fairy tale, the twenty-two perfectly hewn wooden domes of the Church of the Transfiguration.
“ God, how I love it here. It’s a heavenly place! Even though, my darling husband, I would find heaven anywhere with you, even in a tent, in any corner of this earth!”
“ I feel good here, too,” Valery replied to his wife. “Look, look, over there! To the right, just follow the railing! Look at that gorgeousness: that’s Ivanov’s Island!”

If they could only have guessed that in just two years, on 27 September 1941, Lyubasha would meet her death on that beautiful island! The enemy was already closing in on Petrozavodsk. Valery was fighting battles in the skies over Old Ladoga, while Lyubasha and their four year old son, Oleg, together with other wives of the Russian fighter pilots of the Besovetsky Aviation Combat Regiment, were being evacuated on the last ship, in an attempt to get them to safety on the opposite side of the lake, as yet unoccupied by the foe. By some strange mythic coincidence, it happened to be the very same steamship that they had sailed on, a thousand years before the war, when they had first caught sight of that wondrous island.

The Messerschmidts had arrived.
The mothers put life vests on their children. The steamship was crammed full of refugees and the most seriously wounded troops. There weren’t enough life preservers and boats for all the passengers. Everyone prayed, even the Communists. But the airplanes were deaf to their prayers. Tracer fire pierced the captain’s bridge: the ship’s engines fell silent.
The second plane took careful aim and dropped its payload. The bomb hit hard: bodies rained down into the waters from the decks.
Lyubasha, wounded, used every last ounce of strength to push her son towards the shores of the island. It was a miracle that she managed it, somehow dragged Oleg onto the sandy beach and collapsed next to him, dying. For a long, long time, Oleg sat next to his dead mother, tugging at her flaxen hair from time to time:
“ Mummy! Mummy, stop sleeping! I’m scared!”


Your fir-covered slopes like tresses
Frame the borderlands’ plain landscape.
Make us welcome, O lovely Suomi,
In the necklace of your limpid lakes!

Our tanks crush wide paths in the timberland,
While our planes in the clouds circle high,
And the low slanting rays of the autumn sun
Light our bayonets on fire.

(Red Army song)

* * *

O Finland, O Finland!
Ivan is back for more!

(Army of Finland song)


THE SCYTHE STRIKES STONE
Chapter 4

In 1939, the most ferocious bloodletting in the entire history of the human race began. It opened modestly, like an act in a rather trivial vaudeville, with the principal artists of the war (its instigators) changing costumes against the background bravura music of regimental bands and ministers of propaganda. By that time, the leading parts in this worldwide touring extravaganza, Guns Beat Butter , had all been assigned. They belonged to Hitler, Churchill, Stalin. Granted, this ‘titanic trio’ that so relished its unprecedented impact on the destinies of a billion human beings wherever they might be found on the face of this small earth arrived on History’s world stage merely as the performers of this ‘Deathly Symphony.’ Its actual creators remain to this day hidden beneath tight-fitting masks of secrecy. They alone commissioned the music of War, which was then composed by others, and subsequently performed by others still: the fuehrers, premiers, ministers, democrats, liberals, admirals, bankers, mafiosi, and other decent but exceedingly cocky and selfish men.

Over time, the ‘Trio of Principal Players in World War Two’ expanded to include Roosevelt, De Gaulle, Mannerheim, and numerous others. Hitler, Churchill, Stalin rapidly morphed into the conductors of the big gun cannonades, or bombing raids and tank battles. Human life meant nothing to them. They only took note of, and rejoiced at, the deaths of enemies.

* * *

In the personal study of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (formerly Dzhugashvili, and also known as Koba, the Proprietor, the priest manqué, the poet that wasn’t, the militant terrorist) an atmosphere of uncontrollable alarm hung like a permanent fixture, as palpable as the heavily shuttered windows. Everything in the space was functional, purposeful, modest, even ascetically so: the homey aroma of pipe tobacco; the serene tones of the antique grandfather clocks; the sparkle of the water in the crystal decanter that stood waiting on the writing desk; the two telephones standing on the side table: a hand cranked model as well as a formal black ‘Adera’ phone. Under the large portrait of Karl Marx stood a simple armchair such as might be part of a dining room set; meanwhile, the man himself, the ‘Father of the Nations’ greeted his visitors with his customary congeniality, standing in the middle of the thick Afghan rug that had been lain in the center of the floor, absorbing the sound of footfalls and thus resulting in a sinister silence. It was specifically this silence in Stalin’s study, his soundless footsteps, the muted raspy voice of a habitual smoker, the unhurried speech with its Georgian accent, the pockmarks scarring his face, the greenish keenly watchful eyes that forced even battle-hardened generals who had calmly faced down death time after time in the theatre of war, into a stupor of fear and submissiveness. To be sure, all of these visitors knew about the murderous power of his red pencil, permanently on duty in the charming little glass of ‘the Teacher’s’ spacious desk. This red pencil was always at the ready, leaping into his right hand at will, in order to delete the last name of any person whatsoever with a single sweeping movement, and its invariably terse command: “Shoot!’
Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was an altogether different kind of human being. Prime Minister of Great Britain, conservative, Minister of War and the Navy, liberal, historian, author, aristocrat, officer, hard drinker and basically the quintessential fat man, with the permanent Havana cigar in his mouth, the Armenian cognac in the pocket flask, lover of salty tales and excelling at barbed wit.
On a particular occasion, Churchill was visiting Moscow as a guest of Uncle Joe. That was how Churchill invariably referred to Stalin, behind his back.
It was wartime. Russians were getting by as well as they could on meagre rations, but in the Kremlin’s tsarist era halls, Churchill, the cherished English friend, was being fêted in style. Crystal chandeliers glittered gloriously over banquet tables that were groaning under the weight of every conceivable kind of delicacy procured for the evening, to satisfy the Proprietor’s lavish Georgian customs of hospitality. Every possible kind of bottle and decanter was here: vodkas, cognacs, juices and liquid refreshments of all types. Roast suckling pigs, kids, lamb, stuffed turkeys decorated the tables, side by side with record-breaking fish, salmons, trout, sturgeon, red and black caviar, artistically surrounded by ice cream cakes alternating with vases containing flowers, grapes, and mountains of fruit. English ales had been set out on separate little tables draped in snowy linens. When, to the sounds of the Kremlin’s own military orchestra, the doors of the banquet hall swept wide open, and the heavyset Churchill beheld all this gastronomic magnificence, he turned to Stalin, and, smiling broadly, raised two fingers in his signature “Victory!” salute.
“You are quite the master of surprise on a global scale, Your Excellency! It would be difficult to resist such an onslaught of tactical banquet supremacy!”
Stalin, stroking his moustache smugly, turned to his interpreter.
“I trust, and I hope, Mr. Prime Minister, that you, and following your example President Roosevelt also – that England and America both – will not remain beholden to us for much longer, but will finally open up the long-awaited second front in Europe, against the ravenous Hitler?”
“Goes without saying,” answered Churchill, pouring himself the first shot of Russian vodka. “We’ll just have toss off our little drinks here, have ourselves a little bite to eat, and open up the second front without any further ado, just as quickly as it takes our valiant Anglo-American troops to cross the English Channel.”
“I do believe that this time you mean what you say, word for word, Mr Churchill, Winston, my friend!” replied Uncle Joe, smiling into his whiskers. “Please, be my guest!”

The Anglo-Russian revels in the Kremlin began to unfold at breakneck speed. The toasts were endless, effusive and unrelenting. Glasses after glasses would be refilled the moment they had been tossed down. Stalin’s aide-de-camp hovered anxiously behind his leader’s back, terrified to dissuade him from what had long before become one drink too many… Winston, who loved to jest, had instigated a drinking competition with Uncle Joe: who could consume more alcohol, the English soldier or the Russian revolutionary? Stalin matched Churchill, one for one.
The leader of the proletariat drank the hard-drinking aristocrat under the table, figuratively speaking. When the English peer, having met his match, was finally being carried forth from the banquet hall to the imperial bedchamber of the tsars, on the arms of four British marines from his embassy’s security battalion, Stalin’s aide-de-camp finally meekly touched the leader’s elbow, ever so lightly:
“May I offer some assistance, Comrade Stalin?”
“Don’t you dare! Never fear, General, I’ll never sell out Russia, drinking! That fat Churchill? He’ll be done to a turn tomorrow, during our negotiations; I’ll have him sizzling in my frying pan, like a proper piece of cod! A victory for Russia is worth the occasional night of hard drinking! It wouldn’t be much of a sin to sacrifice some of our livers in exchange for a victory over the enemy!”

And so they partied on till dawn. All the assembled guests were pleased: drunk and stuffed to the gills, as if, just outside the Kremlin’s walls, rivers of human blood were not being spilled; cities were not being obliterated; the cries of the dying, the groans of the wounded, the weeping of the devastated were not rending the air far and wide. It was as if in the former capital of Saint Petersburg, now known as Leningrad, and under blockade, people driven mad by famine had not resorted to eating each other; as if the crematoria of German concentration camps were not belching smoke day and night as human beings were being burnt in them, like so much kindling; as if the political prisoners of the GULag were not freezing to death in the Siberian wastelands; as if the women and children of English London and German Dresden were not dying under the ruins of their blown up houses; as if hospital ships carrying the sick and wounded were not sinking under the icy waves from the torpedoes of Admiral Dennitz’s submarine fleet; as if millions of Chinese were not being infected with deadly anthrax by the Japanese; as if, one hundred metres beyond the walls of the Kremlin’s banquet hall, starving thugs were not murdering children just so they could steal their bread rations cards. War knows nothing of sufficiency.

Long before that historic banquet, in between greater concerns, hollow pronouncements about peace, at first mildly, but then, gradually with increasing aplomb, the soundtrack of wartime began to tune up. Spain provided the note, and the instrument, for the concert pitch. The war in Spain was only formally known as a localized fratricidal rumble; in reality, it was an international test run for a big multinational confrontation between a number of world powers, involving aviation and the latest in munitions technology. Germany was training its pilots. The Russians were testing the tactical endurance of their armoured vehicles. America was gaining precious expertise in the sale of armaments. And France, like the youthful belle of the ball, was having a great time through it all, partying, busy living and giddy with the songs of the unforgettable Edith Piaf. Somewhere in the back of their minds, they could sense impending doom draw ever nearer, but each true scion of France, knowing and loving the miniature Edith, recognizing him or herself in her chansons, took these threats a little less seriously, and drifted into a state of complacency, whenever she could be heard to sing:

«Non! Rien de rien ...
Non ! Je ne regrette rien,
Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait,
Ni le mal,
Tout ça m'est bien égal!»

No! None of that!…
I regret none of that!
Not the good, and not the bad –
It’s all the same, and so what?

Edith Piaf personified France. Just as France had, she had lived through all the military catastrophes; had attempted suicide several times; had fallen in love, over and over and over again, endlessly; had been unfaithful, yet again – and never ever gave up hope in finding her ordinary, basic human happiness: ‘No! None of that…’
And perhaps therein lay the reason why the three conductors of the looming Second World War -- Hitler, Churchill and Stalin – assigned the fate of France, in the first phase of their war, the superfluous role of the extra. General Franco’s secret radio signal, ‘Clear skies over Spain,’ summoning the army against its Republic, turned into a travesty of prophecy: the clear skies over Spain were instantly darkened with smoke rising from explosions and fires – smoke that quickly spread across the entire Romantic skyline of Mother Europe. Lighter-than-air heavenly angels were replaced by heavy bombers. The Symphony of the Second World War began to be performed by a chorus numbering in the millions of voices of humans dying beneath the thunderous downpour of bombs and shells.


***


If you come across someone about to topple over, give them a shove.

F. Nietzsche, the Anti-Christian


Chapter 16
A CHILD’ WOODEN PISTOL


Being the oldest brother, Vasilii crafted a child’s plaything for his little cousin, six year-old Evgeny – a little wooden pistol. Before the war, such toy munitions would have been used to fire green peas exclusively, but in the summer of 1942, the little pistol was only good for shooting tiny pebbles, because Concentration Camp No. 8 of the chain of Ilyinsk Finnish concentration camps created for the ethnic Russian civilian population of Karelia and situated along the banks of the lovely Olonka River, had completely run out of peas and grain; all that remained for food were the sickly-colored nettles that hid under the snow, rotting potatoes the frost had withered, and the beetroot mess of the
camp’s starvation rations. The operating assumption was that Hitler’s swift triumph over the USSR would immediately lead to the automatic transfer of Karelia into the holdings of Great Finland. In accordance with the Finno-Germanic treaty, all the ruesses would be deported to the Siberian tundra, to the rump territories of Ruessland, where they would gradually become extinct via natural attrition under the effects of the elements. Thus, from the earliest days of the war, an intensive programme of Finnization was undertaken across these ancient Slavic lands, spearheaded by the stirring motto: Finland for the Finns alone.
The ethnic Russian inhabitants of Karelia were driven en masse behind barbed wire enclosures. The peaceful life of the recent past seemed some distant fairy tale: it felt as if a hundred years had passed – although in fact it had been a matter of just a few months, of the previous year, before the war – since the large Panin clan had enjoyed a serene, expansive existence in its ancestral hamlet, Uslanka. It was a settlement, some would say a village, with a distinctly feminine aura, coquettishly resting upon the crest of a hillside fronting a broad curve of the legendary Svier River; Matushka-Svier (“Mother Svier”), they called this river of bounty: and it had been there since long before the time of Peter and the great reforms. Eight imposing wooden homesteads, with intricately carved white shuttered window frames, gazed humbly out through pristine panes upon the steamships and barges that plied the waters below, solemnly wending their way from the capital city of St. Petersburg – across the Ladoga – into the Onega, and back. One longed to believe that this tiny hamlet that all the world had forgotten ever even existed had been infused, once and forever, with the unassuming Grace of the north.

It was a different kind of life entirely, on the other shore. A small town, Vazhiny, boiled over with bustle and noise there: it had land council meetings, church services, schoolwork for children; its administration issued resolutions and directives; its general store bought and sold; its marketplace was in perpetual uproar. In the evenings, the married women would sit in neat rows on log benches warmed by the day’s sun, and sing sweet, drawn-out melodies. The street artists would call out the quaint popular ditties, accompanying themselves on button-boxes with the measured clatter of wooden spoons adding percussion; their womenfolk would stamp their heels hard on the springy grass, casting passionate glances sidelong at the musicians; and sometimes, they would succumb to impulse and fight for the affections of these lasses, like prancing cockerels, only with fists. When spring came, the lads and lasses would frolic in the haylofts, and by the autumn there would be weddings amongst them. That was the way of life in Vazhiny – but in Uslanka, a magnificent tranquil beauty always reigned, giving steady, uninterrupted rise to new, flaxen-haired lives in every season. In spring and fall, the young ones would travel by boat to school; in winter they would make the trip over the ice, covered in sheepskins, racing in horse-drawn sleighs to chip away at “the granite of knowledge,” as it was called. In the summers, the wild Uslanka forest beckoned, with its mushrooms and berries longing to be picked.

They skinned their backsides raw galloping over the fields on unsaddled horses. They fed crows from the palms of their hands. They played gorodki, lapta, skalki, and, naturally enough, up to their knees in the swift, transparent waters of the chilly Svier, they fished until blue, until their teeth would ring with chattering. Imperceptibly, the youngsters grew up and moved to Peter (as the Imperial capital would be forever called). There, they entered the ranks of the urban professionals, with never a look back to their earlier life in the country, as peasants. In the middle of the hamlet – at the uppermost spot on the hill overlooking the bend in the river – stood, majestically, the two-storied wooden home of the Panin family. It was the classic Russian country estate with the bright main room for receiving guests, with four broad windows across the front; with the sloping façade leading to the upper storey, for storing hay for the winter; with dry cellars and dark, insulated pantries; ringed by an enclosed garden of flower beds; redolent with the fragrance of hay, freshly-baked bread, roasted mushrooms and all kinds of preserves cooked up by Baba Anna. The tranquility of Uslanka was made perfect by the distant interpleading of the muted bells of cows out at pasture, and birdsong.

Behind the Panin homestead loomed the black denseness of the Karelian forest, replete with cuckoos, squirrels and plump game birds. Puzzling footpaths, laid down by who knows whom, would force vacationing city slickers into confused peregrinations through the woods. The fauna, unacquainted with fear, filled the environs with all kinds of mysterious rustling, the hooting of screech-owls, the knocking of woodpeckers and nocturnal calls. At the very edge of the forest, lost in a high thicket, a smallish lake shone brightly, tantalizingly, complete with its own ancient steam-bath cabin. Winding like a ribbon of serpentine, a mysterious horse path shimmied away into
the gloaming of a stand of birches. No one who had ever lived in this forest had ever, ever fought a war with anyone. It was said that a Wood-Spirit lived there, as well as the legendary Sivka-Burka, the Wise & Magical Mare of fairy tales.


The war reached Uslanka twenty-four hours late. The inhabitants of the hamlet had lived for centuries using the light of a lit, thin wand of wood after dark. There were no telephones, no electricity. Newspapers arrived a week after the date. No one crossed to this side of the Svier unless they had good cause. Somewhere else bridges were already being blown up; cities were burning; streams of blood were beginning to gush – but in Uslanka, it was still a time of pre-war peace: quiet, calm, serene. Only on Monday, that 23rd of June in 1941, did Dmitri Ivanovich Panin take his small boat out at daybreak, crossing early to the other side, to Vazhiny, on matters relating to the collective farm, only to turn right around and come straight back, a dreadful sight of worry and
consternation. Passing by his house, he hobbled directly to Uslanka’s fire alarm bell – actually, it was big iron wheel from an old-model tractor, that had been suspended suitably at the meeting ground – and immediately began to beat a tocsin, furiously, calling all the people to a village meeting. They rushed in to the summons:

“Where’s the fire? What’s burning?”
“Worse than fire. War! The German’s trying to get on top of us again!”
Grimly
Dmitri Ivanovich relayed his news to the entire collective farm. Lives ground to a halt. It took some time to round up all the men of mobilisation age. The women quickly threw together a communal feast. After abundant libations punctuated with tearful words of encouragement and parting; after speeches proclaiming that ‘Holy Russia can always count on her own Russian muzhik to leave hisplough and come to her defense,’ the reserve soldiers quickly packed their modest field rucksacks in the early morning, and left in the designated military wagons for the Podporozhye (the area that lay beyond the river’s rapids), to the assigned mobilization point, from which they would never return home.
All that remained in the village were the young ‘uns, the women and Dmitri Ivanovich Panin in charge. Back in the first German war, Ivanovich had taken a ball of shrapnel in the knee: a painful little present from the Kaiser, lodging permanently under his kneecap. Needless to say, no one was asking him to the war. Instead, the new world war herself came quickly up to his own front door.




It was a week later – 29 June 1941 – that two fighter planes came roaring at them along the river. They flew low, brazenly, just above the surface of the water. German warplanes. On the wings of the wasp-like bodies of the rapier-nosed fighters, the Teutonic crosses and swastikas were vividly emblazoned, vain beauties showing off. Even the faces of the pilots could be clearly seen. Their helmets covered with tightly wound black fabric turned every which way, as if mounted on swivelling hinges. All the village boys came spilling out onto the sloping hillside overlooking the Svier. And why wouldn’t they?
 Never before in their lives had they seen real fighter planes. Their curious eyes gleamed with joy. The cross-marked warriors soared up into the sky, vertically, like candles; they rolled over their wings, swooped down and raced along the river. The lead pilot waved at the boys. But as they reached the vast meadow, the warplanes’ sirens began to howl in a vile way; they banked their wings sharply, as if standing on edge, veered suddenly at a sharp angle and, twin vultures, headed straight for the main artery to Vazhiny. A green military one-and-a-half ton truck was running like mad along the shoreline road, a great trail of dust following in its wake. The mischievous lights of gunfire started up dancing beneath the warplanes’ wings: Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta… A fiery tracer slammed
into the light truck. The vehicle careened wildly along the road, missed the turn and went flying over a drainage ditch, as if heading into the clouds. Then the heavy engine dragged it back down to earth; the truck’s hood scraped against the cliffside; it somersaulted in the air and fell, stone-like, into the shallow waters of the Svier along its banks. The wheels were still spinning madly, scattering drops of spray in every direction, when the wounded Red Army soldier leaped clear and immediately began to climb up the slope, clambering eagerly toward the paved roadway. Flailing wildly with his arms, his legs sinking into the loosely packed river sand, he made no progress at all. One of the airplanes made a sweeping and deliberate turn, approaching with precision from the wooded side: under its wings, the bright little flames of the machine guns jumped up and down. The truck driver was literally sliced in two by the tracer fire. A lump of bloodied flesh rolled back down towards the semi-submerged truck.

Dmitri Ivanovich leaped out from under the ground, and bellowed at the shell-shocked boys with all his might:
“In the cellar with you, you little bastards! Brainless whelps! Come on! Run for it! Run! Save yourselves! Quick! Quick!”
The boys vanished from the slope, as if the wind had carried them away.

Seven minor sons had come to take shelter under the protective wing of Dmitri Panin, each one younger than the next. His own mother, Grandmother (babushka) Anna, was there; his wife, Katerina with her nursling, Lyusenka; Haritina, the wife of his younger brother, Peter, with their five-year-old son, Evgeny, from Leningrad. The war instantly bonded all the inhabitants of Uslanka. Every pre-war disagreement was forgotten. At the general village meeting, they all agreed:
“We evacuate together on the last steamboat out.”

They loaded up the boats with all their worldly goods, clothes and provisions; then, throwing the remaining fuel pallets onto the shore, they sat down, prepared to wait patiently for the paddle-wheel steamboat, the Ivan Turgenev.Early the next morning, they could hear the distant rhythmic splashing of the antique steamboat’s paddle as it came down the river. The beautiful white Ivan Turgenev was moving along at top speed. Quickly they boarded their boats, but the ship never slowed for them. Its steam engine was operating at maximum capacity.

A long, low blast of the horn came over the water from the Ivan Turgenev. The captain appeared on the bridge, a megaphone in his hand:“I can’t take you. The ship’s overloaded! There’s no more room!”
Every inch of deck space was studded with people’s heads. They leaned against each other everywhere, holding on for dear life. There were many children. Stretchers with the wounded had been hoisted up to the roof of the captain’s bridge. Many more people were crammed into the suspended lifeboats.
“Don’t come any closer! The wake of my ship will capsize your boats!” shouted the captain into the megaphone, hoarsely. “I am overloaded! There is nothing I can do about it!”

The women began to weep and keen – and then the children started crying. Dmitri
Ivanovich ordered the boats back to shore.

The day of the evacuation was a day of tender sunshine, warm and bright. Sadly Haritina watched hope sail away towards the Onega.
“What will become of us?”

But before the Turgenev had even made it past the bend that skirted the great green meadow, that same familiar pair of German warplanes could be heard screaming across the sky. This time, they began dumping their bombs on the steamboat. The Ivan Turgenev had neither cannon, nor machine guns. There was no one, nothing, to prevent the planes from taking careful aim at the ship with their bombs. One bomb dropped right into the smokestack of the vessel. The Turgenev was lifted out of the water and broken in two. Black smoke rose in a tall column. The water around the boat began to boil. The bow and the stern of the ship tipped straight up towards the sky and then instantly vanished beneath the waters. It was as if the boat had never even existed. An odd collection of bundles, benches, suitcases, life preserver rings, splintered wood from the lifeboats floated down the river. But no heads of any human passengers ever appeared on the surface. The whirlpools had sucked every living being down into the depths.

One minute later, and in the very same spot where the steamboat had just been passing, out of the depths of the river there appeared huge greasy bubbles rising to the surface; the grey silt and muck from the riverbed churned; bits of rubbish floated up; unneeded life vests floated, in irregular circles, amidst the white bellies of dead fish. The twin fighters made their victory swoop, circling vulture-like over the watery graves and then, rocking back comfortably on their wings, disappeared in the direction of Finland.

The Svier slowly bore away the evidence of the crime. It seemed as if the people who had been sailing past had never even been born, had never lived. Nothing was left to feel happy about: not the sun; not the pristine water; not the fresh, crisp air. For a long time to come, bitterness coloured over the vivid beauty of the natural landscape into the monochromatic hue of grief. Mama was shivering. Babushka Anna kept blessing herself with the sign of the cross. The village was downcast; a hush came over us. Only Dmitri Ivanovich carried on, issuing his directives in a commanding tone of voice:
“We must urgently leave for the taiga, to the logging station. We can wait it out there. I’ll give you one hour to pack! We have just the one mare. We’ll load up the wagon with the littlest ones, provisions, the hens in baskets, warm clothes… Tie the cows up by the horns with a single rope and attach it to the wagon. Take only the most essential things. We’ll wait it out at the logging station. When the shooting quiets down a bit, that’s when we’ll come home. Maybe by then the Red Army will have chased the Finns and Hun back out, give them a proper licking to boot. There’s no way we can stay here. They’ll bomb us into bits, just like the Ivan Turgenev. We should be grateful to the captain, Pavel Feodorovich Napryakhin, for refusing to take us aboard. Saved our lives, he did.
The whole river, this Svier of ours, loved him. A treasure of a man, a heart of gold! Everybody knew him. He was our sole connecting thread, our only link between this wilderness and Peter, the big world out there. And now that thread’s been broken. Peace to your mortal remains, captain! Peace to all these slaughtered innocents! Let us pray for the souls of those who perished here!”
There were prayers.
Then there was silence.

“And where do we go from here?” the women started up, all of a sudden. “If our men don’t come back soon? What then? Are we going to be guerrillas in the forest, with our babies in our arms?”

“I’m not God, women! I don’t know. All I know is we need to survive somehow! We need to save our young ‘uns, any which way we can! How many youngsters do we have in our Uslanka? Why, forty one souls, count ‘em! Five at the breast, ten too small for school, and the rest of them all old enough to get into serious mischief. Each one of them needs looking after, a sharp pair of eyes. And how many grown-ups do we have left? Fifteen! And that’s not even counting me, a lame
cripple. And each one of us is going to have death chasing after us, day and night. Peace won’t becoming back soon. We have to save our children! Because, if they die, who’ll be lifting Russia out of the ashes when this is over?”

An hour later the hamlet was empty of people.
The village force, comprising one horsepower, hastily made its way into the narrow birch-lined trail of the forest clearing.It was drifting into oblivion, that caravan consisting of a single wagon and six
cows tied together by their horns with a single rope. They were bound for oblivion themselves, that chain of women on foot with children in their arms. They hurried to hide from big troubles under the crowns of their beloved forest.

On the third day of their forest life, a troop of German cyclists dropped by for a visit. Zhenya was petrified with fear.Back in Leningrad, he had seen plenty of pictures posted on virtually all the houses of 12 Red Army Street, just across from house number 7, where they lived. The window of the bakery where Zhenya liked to pop in for Tula spice-cakes featured a large colored picture depicting a German soldier in a helmet with horns, with the face of a monster, his tusks rending the flesh of a little Russian boy. The sleeves of his uniform had been rolled up. The hirsute arms were drenched in blood up to the elbow. Zhenya, recognizing himself in the boy, was overcome with horror: the same fair hair, the same grey eyes, the same kind of shirt and the same short pants. Forgetting all about his Tula pastry, he rushed headlong back to the entry way leading into his house. His mother greeted him with a reproach:
“Where did the devils take you this time? What’s wrong with you? You’re white as a sheet! What happened?”
“Nothing, Mommy!”
“Nothing? Well, that’s good, my son! Tomorrow we’re leaving for the country, to stay with babushka Anna for a while – to get away from the war.”
But as it turned out that they had come closer to the war than ever. And there they were now, right in front of him: living-breathing Germans, the real thing, come riding into their camp on bicycles!
Zhenya was expecting to see terrifying monsters; instead, he saw cheerfully upbeat, good-looking young men in smart military uniforms. It was quite obvious that these Germans were not planning to make a meal of any of them. Their helmets hung loosely from the handlebars of their bikes. They smiled pleasantly, and laughed.
Zhenya meekly appeared from behind his mother’s back. One of the soldiers, wearing an iron cross on his military shirt, squatted down in front of him and held out a small bar of chocolate wrapped in gold-colored paper:
“Bitte!”
“Danke!” answered Zhenya’s mother on his behalf. The German said something else, rapid-fire, but Zhenya understood not a word. The soldier stroked the Russian boy’s head affectionately, and then pointed to his own unkempt hair. The hair on both heads was the same color. Zhenya smiled at the German and put the candy in his mouth. The German carefully perched the child on the frame of his bike and gave him a gingerly ride around the clearing. Everyone smiled in a friendly way.

The officer in charge of the reconnaissance troop led Dmitri Ivanovich aside and ordered him, in broken Russian:
“Go back to your village! Home, zurueck! Verstehen?”
The soldiers donned their helmets; checked their weapons; waved, and then cycled off deeper into the Russian forest, in the direction of Leningrad.

Barely three days had passed, yet the village was already unrecognizable. Only two houses of the original eight remained relatively intact: the Panins’ and the Kiselyovs’, that was also the community general store. The remaining six homesteads had all been dismantled log by log and converted into rafts for making ferries. The Panin homestead had been looted and turned into a ruin. The old wooden steam-bath by the pond had been burnt down. All the windows in the house had been smashed. The great white carved shutters and awnings, the oak doors had all been torn from their hinges. Everywhere there were scattered the shards of babushka’s clay pots, pitchers and crockery. Down from eviscerated featherbeds and pillows floated in the air like a cloud of white snow. No one was allowed into the houses. Babushka Anna, the palms of her hands on her cheeks, could not tear away her eyes, full of tears and sorrow, from the devastation of the Panin family seat – an estate founded a century earlier by

Dmitri Ivanovich’s own great-grandfather, an officer exiled for supporting the Decembrists, married to a Frenchwoman who had fled to Russia from the tyranny of the French revolutionaries.
The cows and the mare were requisitioned. They were only allowed to take along whatever they could carry in baskets and in small knapsacks over the shoulder. The people of Uslanka showed no emotion. There were no tears. They marched them onto a ferry and transported them over to Vazhino. Its populace had already been taken away. Instead, there were many Finnish soldiers: digging trenches, setting up defenses, erecting dots, dzots, barricades; they slept, ate, played, produced tinny melodies on small harmonicas. The Uslanka clan was quickly divided up between three Russian vehicles captured as war trophies. The Finnish sergeant
counted up the women and children prisoners and gave the order to the drivers to go. Mama had barely enough time to persuade the driver to put Zhenya up front. The sergeant took the wheel of the first truck himself, and the column set out over the road, pockmarked by exploded shells, and now a military highway. It was a lazy progress, taking pains to go around bumps and potholes. Mounds of burnt-out tanks, weapons and vehicles filled the cuvettes along the way. From time to time they passed the hulks of shot down planes. Everywhere around they saw the corpses of Red Army soldiers in unnatural poses as death had taken them. Their faces had already turned black. Silently, the women peered into the faces of the dead, trying to make out the features of their own husbands, sons, and kin. A light breeze played with the white sheets of orders, letters, leaflets, maps and staff cards. The sweetish odor of decomposing flesh mixed with exhaust fumes wafted through the air. Well-fed feral dogs ambled through the trees.

In late June, 1941, the Wehrmacht’s efreitor Hans Park, together with his entire regiment, prepared for deployment to the Eastern front. Because his birthday was coming up, the commander of his unit granted him three days’ leave to see his parents, in Dresden. He was turning 20. Hans clicked his heels, saluting, and immediately left for his boyhood home. He rang up his fiancée, Elsa, and invited her to his birthday party. Hans’s father and mother were professors at the conservatory of music. Mama was an opera singer, Papa a concert pianist.
A luxurious chocolate cake decorated with lit candles greeted Hans and Elsa when they walked in. Mischievous Hans blew out the candles in one breath. His father sat down at the grand piano and began playing Wagner. Everyone applauded and took turns kissing Hans.
The kiss with Elsa went on for a time. A tear rolled down her cheek. Hans hugged her close and whispered in her ear: “Wait for me! I’ll be back! You just wait with all your might…”
Later, they drank champagne, toasting Hans, his parents, Elsa, love, a German victory, and the wisdom of Hitler.
“Don’t be concerned for me!” began Hans’s farewell speech. “I will return from the East victorious, safe and sound! This war will be over before the autumn begins. Russia is a colossus teetering on clay feet. One touch and it will topple over. We shall smash Bolshevism! And once again I will be playing my favorite Schumann on this grand piano.”
When father and son were finally alone, Karl embraced Hans and said, quietly:
“God grant that the Russian bullet with your name on it flies past you and misses, my son! I have been in Russia. I know this country and her people. Once, I played Tschaikowsky before the Russian Czar Nicholas. His wife, the Czarina, was German. The Emperor himself spoke better German than our own beloved Fuehrer. The audience in St. Petersburg was magnificent, warm and welcoming. Oh, what a beautiful, wealthy city it was, St. Petersburg. A brave, courageous people. You don’t know the Russians. You will be liberating them from the Bolshevism of the Jews. You will not have an easy time of it, my boy.”Before he left, Mama gave Hans a gift: a warm knit sweater to wear under his uniform, woollen socks and winter g loves:
“Russian winters can be severe. Maybe you will find these useful. I am giving them to you just in case!”

The regiment was being deployed to the East via Norway and Finland. On the border with the USSR, they transferred the forces onto enormous armoured transport vehicles on caterpillar tractor tracks and rushed them into battle. Their orders were to reach the offensive frontier, annihilate the enemy and arrive at the right bank of the Svier. Thereafter, based on the circumstances of combat, to force the river and cross over. Their goal: the total siege of Boslhevism’s cradle, the city of St. Petersburg.

The road wound its way through the dense and beautiful Karelian forest. The heavy behemoth-like vehicles slowed down as they approached a wooden bridge. The field officer in charge of traffic twirled his stick, indicating when the road was open for movement. Hans was seated next to the driver and had a clear view of the huge carcasses of the camouflaged vehicles crawling along before them. The first armored transport vehicle started over the bridge; its front wheel rolled onto a wide, loose plank: instantly, the plank shot up, almost vertical.
“Mein Gott! What is that?!” Hans saw a Russian soldier nailed to the bridge’s plank with a single three-sided bayonet. The driver laughed, imitating a Berlin radio host:
“And here’s a Russian sentry on duty, saluting our valiant German forces!
Achtung! Achtung! Look, we have exclusive access to a unique specimen of
butterfly from the Russian collection of rarities! Nicely mounted! And our
valiant German soldiers…”
“Were there fierce battles here?” Hans interrupted him.
“In some parts. There’s no continuous front here. The battle lines of the Russian front pass even through the outhouses. You think you’re going to take a crap, but don’t even think of taking your finger off your automatic pistol! A Russian will even spend hours up to his neck in shit, just to take you out when your guard’s down.”
“Who did this?” asked Hans, shouting to drown out the roar of the motor.
“Oh, it’s just a joke of the front line troops. The usual kind of soldiers’
pranks. You’ll see much more dramatic things in the Russian war. They don’t
fight by the rules here, you know. Barbarians!”
The armoured vehicles of the German infantry continued to roll on, with the same deliberate slowness they used in war games. Carefully they crossed over the wooden bridge, and with each new vehicle that crossed, the Russian sentry appeared, then fell back down.Park stared at the Russian without blinking. He managed to make out some of his features: one of his eyes was open, the other obscured by a clot of blood. The mouth was slightly open. A silent shriek of pain had frozen on his bloodied lips. The closely-shaved neck was covered with fine blond stubble. The face was waxen. He looks my age, he thought. He looks like a German. A Russian triple-shaft gun wastied on to his hand. The trademark Budenny hat with its red cloth star had been affixed to his head at a slant. Once dead, a soldier is no longer the enemy. Still, it was a chilling sight, the
corpse mounted on a plank with a single bayonet.Hans continued to focus on the face of the Russian sentry, receding into the distance. His driver only watched the road:

“Go on, feast your eyes! Get used to it, wormfood! This is no picnic we’re heading for: it’s war against the Russians! Russia isn’t France, you know: you won’t be getting coffee and there won’t be girls for hire to while away the idle hours. It isn’t even like Poland! There’s no heroic cavalry here, charging tanks with swords drawn. Here, you’ll see soldiers diving under tanks with armfuls of grenades, even without any orders. Here, they fight all day, all night, using anything at all. They run out of ordnance, and fight with their fists, their feet, their teeth; with gun butts and helmets. They’ll get roaring drunk on schnapps and swarm your machine guns like locusts, armed only with trench shovels. They aren’t even human. They’re dumb swine. There are thousands of them all around you here, dead and rotting. Goebbels was right to say: ‘When the enemy won’t surrender, he must be destroyed!’ As soon as you meet them in battle, once one of these stinking Ivans kills one of your comrades, you will discover for yourself how much joy there is to get out of every dead Russian. The good Russians are the dead ones.”

Finally, the plank with the sentry flipped up for the last of the vehicles to cross: the red star on the Budenny cap flashed by and disappeared.
“Auf wiedersehen, russische schweine!” muttered the driver.



The armoured transport vehicle slowed down, passing by the captured trophy trucks that had moved to the shoulder and stopped, yielding the road. A jaunty Finnish flag jutted out over the flanks of each passing vehicle. Their hoods were marked with the white chalk designs of the Suomi swastika. Russian women filled the backs of the trucks, sitting on their bundles. Some of them had
nursing infants asleep in their laps, wrapped in baby blankets. “Where are they being taken?” asked Hans.
“Oh, the devil knows!” muttered the driver in reply. “Maybe to a soap factory. Or maybe they’re just being taken out of the combat zone.”

Hans noticed a small Russian boy sitting next to the driver in the second truck. The boy, his eyes wide and staring, watched the column of German armor with a curious and inquisitive gaze.
“God! Children here! In the midst of all this horror!”

For a moment, Hans contemplated the impossible: what if someday, sometime, Russian soldierscame marching into the Vaterland! War’s capricious hammer-pendulum might after all swing in any direction.
“Oh, no! That can never happen! I believe in Germany! I believe in the wisdom of our leader! I believe in the strength and the intelligence of our people. The Aryan race is invincible. No one will ever defeat the German soldier!”Hans finally regained his composure an jour later, when his column was gaily rolling along a straight highway to the sounds of cannon fire. The Eastern front
was advancing to meet him at the rate of rolling tanks. A nauseating anxiety began to gnaw at hisheart. He couldn’t help imagining himself nailed to some plank by a three-sided Russian bayonet, and shuddered: a desire to live came over him, with a force he had never known before:

“What a great good it is, to sit quietly at home, seated in front of the old family concert grand, to draw forth the magical sounds of Schumann from this cherished instrument. Schumann also visited Russia. They loved classical music in Russia. Robert Schumann played his music in St. Petersburg. Oh, this mysterious St. Petersburg! Here it is, right near me here, just across the Ladoga, an arm’slength away! Soon we will be there! And I, a simple German officer of the Third Reich, willbe able to play Wagner’s triumphal music in the famous columned hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. Such a magnificent dream is worth fighting for, and living for! Everything is going along perfectly, kamrad!”

But Hans’s rosy fantasies evaporated as soon as he heard the orders being transmitted over the radio by his regimental commander:
“ Achtung! The regiment is entering a zone of potential combat with the enemy. Check and ready your weapons for battle! Check the explosives in the grenades! Increase the distance between vehicles! Bypass the entrenched firing positions of the enemy! Do not engage in prolonged combat! Engineers: mine the side roads. Defuse the mines on approaching bridges and hold them! Use fire-launchers against dots, dzots, firing positions! No prisoners! Be the first to fire, do not hold back! Our mission is to capture the city of Podporozhye! Gott mit uns! Forward!”

The engines of the war machines roared into life. Storming fighters appeared in the sky overhead. The infantry troops deployed on foot. They moved carefully through the forest, stretched out into a line, ready to unleash a whirlwind of fire at any moment. They advanced guardedly, under cover of tanks. To the left of the roadway, the young officer saw the corpses of Russian soldiers, strewn chaotically through the sparse firs. Among them, a slain girl caught his eye. Next to her corpse, a Finnish soldier squatted on his heels, staring sorrowfully at the exposed youthful breasts. A burnt-out tank stood in a fork of the road. The Russian defender was halfway out of the turret. He hadbeen burned alive, but had not raised his arms in surrender; his gun was still in his hands. The Red Army soldier looked like some kind of surreal black statue, imbued with symbolism and evocative of an unyielding, unbroken will. Hans felt a chill of fear at the sight. It was not fear forhis life, however. He felt, rather, as if the music of peace, that music of Schubert’s that had been the one absolute in his formation, and that sang constantly in his soul, had suddenly died. Hans began to feel within himself the birth of a savage beast.

Like many six-year-old boys, Zhenya loved to play at war under Mama’s table: he adored lead soldiers, toy weapons, little play tanks, guns, airplanes. Only now, here, on a forest road in wartime he was actually seeing, for the first time, in front of him, real armored vehicles. Enraptured, he gazed upon the roaring, screeching playthings of the grownup world, and envied them their ‘real-life, flesh-and-blood’ soldiers, seated in actual drivable tanks. But when the lead vehicle in thecolumn rode onto the bridge and its right front wheel caused the bloodied Russian soldier to flip into view, Zhenya shrieked wildly from the horror. Fear dwells outside our consciousness. For the first time in his life, he had seen a dead human being.

Even ants fear death.The reality of death terrified Zhenya. The games of childhood had ended. The
fear of eternal darkness pierced all of his small body. Right then and there, he had been transformed into an adult. War ages even children.In the back of the light truck, the womenfolk of Uslanka also began to wail and to keen:

“Aiyee! Look, isn’t that Vanya Klyukvin from Vazhiny!” Babushka Anna sobbed out loud. “Vanyusha!”
“Yea… ah-ah-ah-ah!” the other captive women joined in, sobbing and howling.
“And poor Nyura! Nyura, his Ma! Nyura, from the Vazhiny parish, where is she now, his mother? Oh, my dearies! Does she know her precious boy is here? Here! Do you see what they do to them, these monsters! These anti-Christs! These godless ones! Desecrating the dead!”


They passed Selga. They left behind Olonets. An hour later, the column turned into a country road headed towards the Olonka River.
“Looks like we’re headed for the fishing camp at Ilyinsk,” thought Panin. “In my younger days, used to be I’d catch koreshka here with nets, and pike, too, with a fly. Ah, those were some good pike we had here back then.”
The concentration camp was already operational and ready to receive civilian prisoners; the barbed wire had been hung; machine guns poked out from the watch towers; the camp beds had been erected and the graves dug, as well.
“Now what? How are we supposed to manage here? Well, all that’s left is just to survive! What else is there? All the people here are our own kind, Russians. Cramped, but friendly, even through the barracks are already full to bursting with prisoners…”Room was made for the new arrivals. Quietly, calmly they exchanged what unreliable rumors they had come across. They divided up the sleeping space as best they could. Looking around, they noticed that the window frames had been boarded up solid, but there were no bars on them. “Who needs bars here? Where can you run to, with babies yet? There’s the treacherous cold Ladoga in front of you, and impassable swamplands behind you.”In the barracks, though, there are big Russian stoves, intact and warm. The sourly acrid smells of children’s potties are bearable – at least it’s your own family’s stink! All will work itself out, all will be well. Strange though it may seem, the large massing of people was accepted calmly by the prisoners. The women immediately set about washing the floors, sweeping out the cobwebs, clearing out debris. They fired up the stoves, producing cast iron pots, crockery, dishware, spoons and cups from their knapsacks; they unwrapped their bundles of provisions, opened up their baskets with vegetables and mushrooms; procured pot-holders from somewhere, and went down to the river for clean water.
And then came the aroma of fresh borshch, mushrooms sautéed with onions and roasted potatoes. The kids, having been the first to sample babushka’s treats on their empty stomachs, now led by their curiosity, scrambled all over the camp, exploring it; while lively pre-war smiles appeared on the adults’ faces: We’ll live again, wait and see! Where hasn’t our girl been missed! Russians will sing cheerful songs even in their own graves, provided there was drink there and food to chase it with. It won’t be the first time that we Russians have to survive captivity! Even before the war, that wasn’t really freedom, but we still lived! We sang songs, we danced, we loved, and we made children.

After two weeks of camp life, once all the produce brought from home had been consumed. It became clear, then, that the large Panin clan could not hope to survive the winter of 1941 on camp rations alone. The spectre of death by starvation loomed. Babushka Anna stocked up on herbs, brewed teas and potions out of evergreens to keep scurvy at bay; Dmitri Ivanovich organized search teams to look for hidden stores of food, being certain that the prudent local fisherfolk, forced to abandon their homes in haste, had as a matter of course buried some of their supplies. He assembled all his boys – including little Zhenya – and issued them each a rifle ramrod, seeing as there were plenty of these lying around. As he distributed the thin steel rods, he gave his orders:

“Look for the buried treasures everywhere: in old garden plots, in little storage shacks, in abandoned pigpens and chicken coops. The autumn rains have passed; the soil is soft. Poke the ramrods in at an angle. If you feel something hard there, come and get me, straight away. Don’t go digging around by yourselves: you might hit a mine. When you want me to come with you, make it quiet, no fuss. No one must know about what we find. It’s our own great big family secret! Not a word to anyone, not even a half-word! Everybody understand? Any questions?”

All the children nodded their heads up and down in concert. There were no questions. Their hunger was a constant presence. And hunger can be an excellent teacher. Everyone did exactly as the patriarch told.
The first treasure trove – a barrel of salted fish – was unearthed by eight-year-old Shurik. It had been buried in a sand dune. Vasili took up hunting curious squirrels with a slingshot, and became proficient at catching voles with improvised mouse-traps he put together. Big Zhenya dug up a fishing net somewhere and was constantly catching small fry in the Olonka: minnows, spiny
fish…
They would dry them in the stove for reserves. Little Zhenya found a cavalry saddle in a woodshed. The saddle was almost new, from czarist times, ancien regime, of the kind an officer might own.

In that hungry winter of 1941, they ate that saddle: carved it up into narrow strips, soaked them in water, ran them through the meatgrinder. The resulting mince was mixed with flour ground out of nettles, and shaped into tiny ovals. Granny Anna fried up these camp ‘delicacies’ in fish oil she somehow managed to extract out of the fish Big Zhenya caught, while heating them. The children gobbled up the ‘horsemeat cutlets’ with great relish: they smacked their lips with delight, licking their fingers; at night they dreamt of their grandmother’s pre-war sweet-cheese pastries, of rye bread with milk, of fresh carrots from the kitchen garden, of jacket potatoes drizzled with sour cream and scrambled eggs. But the more they raved about delicious cooking, the hungrier they felt.

Many of the prisoners of Camp No. 8 began to exhibit signs of dystrophy. Mass starvation began. The camp cemetery rapidly began to fill, small mounds of earth marking the graves. Dmitri Ivanovich set about whittling crosses.
One day, a great sadness came over Little Zhenya: despondent, he stared out the window at the barbed wire, at the watch tower with its guard, and sighed.
“What are you sad about, my son?” asked Mama.
“Remember, last summer, before all these wars, when we were still living in Uslanka with Papa, at the summerhouse, and Baba Anna was always forcing me to eat fresh bread with butter?”
“Of course I remember,” Mama smiled. “You would even go hide from your granny, in the hayloft.”
“Such a stupid fool I was then, Mama! Granny would give me this great big hunk of bread, still warm from the oven, and all over it she would spread butter straight out of the churn…And what would I do? I’d lick off all the butter, and then take the bread slices and chuck them behind the chest in the bedroom. I’d throw away the bread! Think of it, Mama! Because if I could only get behind that chest right now, and pull out all that bread I threw away, I could eat it, right now. I’d eat it all. I’d even give you a bite, Mamochka.”

Mama put her arms around her little boy and silently wept.

Mama-Inna (Haritina) was madly in love with Papa, her husband.No sooner had Zhenya been born, than her love doubled again. Peter insisted that Inna leave her job as a nursery school teacher and devote herself entirely to their son. Petya made good money at the factory where traditional musical
instruments were manufactured; they lived in a large room of a communal flat and, quite a rarity for the times, was fully able to support a family. Peter Ivanovich had graduated with distinction from the academy of forest management and worked productively as chief of the department of wood preparation for manufacturing, so essential to the making of guitars, mandolins and balalaikas.
And he himself played both the guitar and the mandolin, respectably well.He had met Inna somehow by chance, at a party. She could sing the old Russian romances very well, and the young engineer accompanied her splendidly on his guitar. They would often be invited to attend family celebrations together, as a result. The famous romance that began, ‘Our campfire shines brightly…’ had come to mean so much to both of them, that he proposed.It was a modest wedding. The longed-for pregnancy was not long in coming. As soon as Zhenya started kicking in his mother’s belly, Peter would pick up his guitar, sit down next to his wife, and together they would sing:

My campfire shines bright,
Sparks vanish in flight;
No one sees us in the darkness
At the bridge we’ll meet tonight!

Peter and Haritina wanted a son so utterly, that God heard them: nine months after the wedding, Evgeny was born. Her professional training in child development helped Inna bring up her boy. She
followed the precepts of the science strictly, yet administered them with great doses of motherly love. At an early age, the boy started talking, then singing, drawing, daydreaming. Mama would frequently take Zhenulya out for walks in the fresh air, to play in playgrounds; she took him out on skis and in a sled. Anything she did for her son, she considered to be her most important work. In the evenings and on weekends, Zhenya belonged to his father. Father and son were friends. Peter conversed with him as he would have with an adult. Sometimes Inna reproached him for this:

“Petya, you’re spoiling him! You must be more stern! You’re his father!”
“Love can’t spoil a child,” Peter would answer, embracing his wife. “We’ll give
him a sister for a present, in a year or two, and after that, God willing, a
little brother. Zhenya will take on the duties of the eldest brother, you’ll
see.”
“And I’m all for that!” Inna would whisper, coquettishly, clinging to her
husband.

One time, in the year before the war, the mother’s parents invited their friends, family and in-laws to a New Year’s Eve party. Inna was busy in the kitchen with babushka Anna, while Papa set the festive table, arranging the plates, shot glasses, wine glasses, wines and vodkas, cold hors d’oeuvres, and the seating plan. In the place of honor at the head of the table he put a special armchair, for babushka Anna. She had come to visit Petrusha, her favorite son, in order to see her grandson for the first time. This grandson wanted to help the grownups. But the grownups told him to play with his toys instead. Zhenya had no desire to be a child.
Mama and Grandmama were making frequent trips back and forth from the kitchen into the main room, ferrying steaming dishes and all kinds of delicacies from the stove to the table. Everyone had forgotten about Zhenya. Zhenya, meanwhile, had taken his seat in the place of honor at the head of the table, and clutched at the tablecloth with both little fists. Children love to be the center of attention. His mother tried to move him to another chair.
“This is where your grandmother will be sitting, Zhenyusya!”
The son remained adamant, and silent. Mama decided to apply force:
“Enough of this nonsense! Get out of this chair!”

Zhenyusya did not simply start to cry – he began to sob with particularly great effect.
His father came running at the first sounds of his distress:
“What happened?”
“See for yourself! Evgeny has taken over the place of honor where our guests should sit, and won’t budge from the spot!”
“Leave Zhenya be!” said the father, losing his temper. “My son is the guest of
greatest honor in my house!”
“Absolutely right!” piped in Babushka Anna, joining the fray. “It doesn’t matter
where I sit: it’s not as if I’ll get any younger for it!”

The guests began to laugh.
Magnanimously, they let Evgeny stay put and turned their attention to the tradition of making New Year’s toasts instead. Zhenya was inundated with presents; naturally enough, he could not sit still in his place of honor for very long. Within minutes of the scene, he had forgotten all about his tantrum and had visited every single lap available, in turn. And babushka Anna was seated in her place of honor, after all.

In the spring, his parents brought five-year-old Evgeny to stay with his grandmother in the country, at their summerhouse. The village lads immediately took their guest from the big city to the barnyard, to show him the sights and the local news. These key events unfolded on the broad sloping incline made of logs that led to the second-story hayloft of the Panin homestead. It was to this precise spot that the very latest news of all was used to flying in: it was a young pet raven. The children had picked him up as a hatchling in a field, that spring. The young bird had an injured wing. Most likely it had tumbled badly from its nest.
The youngsters had nursed the baby raven back into full form, helped him and freed him once he was strong again. The grateful bird had not forgotten his carers. All they needed to do was hold out their hands, with the palms cupped together into a kind of little boat, and put some seeds there – instantly he would arrive, out of nowhere it seemed, almost as if he fell out of the sky.
Fearlessly he perched on the tips of their fingers. One by one, businesslike, he would consume the seeds, and fly away.

The children decided to introduce their big city guest, Zhenya, to this living young raven they had made a pet of.Yevgeny closed his eyes. He cupped his hands as instructed into a little boat, and extended his arms. As soon as his fingertips felt the touch of the bird’s tiny talons, his eyes opened of their own accord: a young raven sat, perched, on the very tips of his fingers, his head swivelling back and forth. With great dignity and composure, he pecked intermittently at the seeds. Evgeny was afraid to breathe, to move in any way. As soon as he had finished feasting, the young raven turned his tail to Evgeny’s face, lifted his feathers and… plop, plop!… deposited a little pile of droppings right into Zhenya’s upturned palms.

The lads fell over laughing. Zhenya burst into bitter tears and walked carefully to his Mama, his arms still outstretched. She came running out into the yard at the sound of her son’s distress.
“What happened, sunshine?”
“Look!” sobbed Zhenya, holding out his palms, which were filled with bird droppings.
“But why did you bring it here to me?”
“Well, who was I to take it to? Why did he have to poop in my hands?”
“Who?”
“The little raven!”
“Oh, but that’s for luck, my boy! A baby raven is just a small bird, not very smart, and you’re a big boy already! You don’t poop in people’s hands anymore, now do you? You know how to talk even! Here, let me wipe your little palms clean. You see! Isn’t that nice now? That little raven hasn’t learned human language yet, so he was speaking to you in his own bird’s way.
Don’t cry, Zhenya! It was just his way of saying thank you! Remember, son, there’s ancient folk wisdom amongst our people: a bird’s droppings, if they fall on your head, or into your hands, are a good omen, a sign of presents to come, of good fortune!”

From inside their concentration camp, the episode with the young raven seemed some distant silly fancy to both Inna, the mother, and Evgeny, the son. By February of 1942, after all the secret stores of food had been consumed, Dmitri Ivanovich realized that death by starvation lay in wait for his clan. Each day, several prisoners succumbed to the famine. The camp population was melting away. The Finns were not in any way troubled by this situation. Panin urgently convened a meeting the adult members of the family.

“If we don’t find some way of getting more food, we’ll all perish. The children will be the first ones to die. They lose fat faster than grownups.”
“You have a plan, don’t you, son?” asked babushka Anna.

“In the buffer zone of the camp, where the camp’s guards live, next to the soldiers’ mess, there’s a hole where they dump the food waste.”
“But how can we reach it?” asked Inna, joining in. “The guards in the watch towers will mow down the children with machine gun fire, in a heartbeat.”
“They won’t notice the littlest ones.”
Babushka Anna leaped to her feet. “You can’t possibly be thinking of sending our babies out to a certain death?”
“Calm down, Ma! We haven’t any other choice. It won’t be a certain death, either. Only the smallest ones will be able to sneak across under the barbed wire at night, at any rate: Sasha, Tolya and your Zhenya, Haritina. They’re skinny lads, agile, quick-witted. All the Finnish guards will see will be your typical little snow mounds. It’ll never even occur to them that it’s children. And we have no choice.”

Everyone sorrowfully agreed. The women stitched together white robes out of bed sheets, for camouflage. Shedding copious tears, mama Inna dressed her six-year-old for his deadly nocturnal mission. Once again, Dmitri Ivanovich repeated his instructions to his infiltrating force.


The boys got as far as the barbed wire uneventfully. One by one, they crawled under the fence to the longed for hole. It was not a long wait. The door to the mess hall opened and the orderly on duty brought out two buckets of waste to dump. Under the beam of the searchlight, they felt a delicious vapor rise from the spot. The soldier quickly left the chill air to go back into the warmth.

The searchlight blinked off. Instantly, the boys flung themselves at the aromatic waste. Quickly they filled their pouches with the remains of the soldiers’ evening meal. They hooked the straps
over their shoulders and crawled back towards camp.Zhenya was in the lead. Then came Shurik. Tolya was bringing up the rear. A terrible fear of darkness drove little Zhenya to go as fast as he could. They were almost back in the camp itself when he lost his nerve: he jumped up and began to run – and at that very second, slipped into a large funnel shaped drain, its sides covered in ice. He tried to climb out, but couldn’t: his body kept rolling back to the bottom along the icy walls of the hole. The terror and embarrassment of his situation made Zhenya cry. Suddenly he heard Tolik whispering in the darkness:

“Zhek, catch my strap! Hold on! We’ll haul you out of there!”
The searchlight burst into action and all three flung themselves into the bottom of the trap.Tolik took out his pocket knife and began carving grips into the walls of the icy prison.



The children were late.
The adults sat waiting, in chilling expectation of bursts of machine-gun fire. But all was calm.
The young providers arrived, overheated and exuberant. Their fear had evaporated. They told their tale with gusto, tripping over each other in their excitement, interrupting the narrative with all the gory details.
Their happiness knew no bounds. Little Zhenya felt himself a true hero. And the family found itself supplied with soldiers’ leftovers: pieces of bread, potatoes, broken crackers and wafers, the remains of vegetables and even pork bones with bits of meat on them. On many another occasion, the boy-infiltrators made their risky journey to the other side of the barbed wire, and the hole where the food waste got dumped. Each time, their expeditions ended safely, without shots fired.

When the white nights began, in the spring, these forays for provisions became even more dangerous. But by then the main feat had been achieved: the Panin clan had survived without losing a single member to starvation. Both famine and disease had passed by their children altogether.
In the spring, mama Inna stepped outside the barracks one evening, to get some fresh air. The brightly lit nights of the North had extended the limits of day beyond the confines of the established curfew. At the behest of the camp’s commandant, Captain Laakso, all the watches and clocks owned by the prisoners had been confiscated. It seemed to Inna that she still had quite a long time to be out, before curfew arrived. Strolling along the shores of the Olonka, she thought wistfully about the happy times before the war.

Walking back to the barracks, she did not notice a sergeant of the camp’s guards, Louri Virtanen, leering shamelessly at her from the back. The Russians had their own name for him: “Koira,” which they derived from the Finnish word for ‘hound.’ They called him that because he was well-known for his bitter hatred of all the ruesses.
Back in the winter campaign, he had sustained a concussion from a Russian shell. His health status caused him to be transferred from the 13th infantry regiment to a guard unit in the rear. In 1939, his fiancée had perished in Helsinki, under the rubble of a house destroyed by a bomb from a Russian bomb transporter.
He joined the Schuetzkor and enlisted as a volunteer for the war front. He was convinced that the Russians were exclusively to blame for all his personal sorrows. He did not take offense at being nicknamed Koira. In fact, he took pride in it, explaining to anyone who would listen that he was “a true Finnish guard dog, prepared to give up his life for Finland, his motherland, at any moment.” In the concentration camp, Koira sported his personal Schuetzkor uniform with flair. He was proud of the special emblem on the uniform’s sleeve; the distinctive badge of Finnish Karelia figured prominently on his officer’s sash. The sergeant was thoroughly steeped in such an intense hatred for all Russians, that he was fully capable of coolly shooting to death any ruess who
annoyed him, for any reason, without regard for age or sex.

Stalking Russian women was the shellshocked sergeant’s favorite pastime. Curfew violations were the ideal pretext. He found himself sexually aroused by sneaking up on young women and prickingtheir breasts with the sharp tip of his bayonet, whether in a kind of teasing play or in explicit threat, they could not tell. For some time he had been watching the city girl from Leningrad, Haritina, with lust written in his eyes.
A glance at his watch established that Madame la ruesse had been grossly violating the established curfew for a full ten minutes now! His face glowed with delighted anticipation:
“Perfect!”
The sergeant took a mental note of the circumstance. “Madame is brazenly trampling upon camp laws!”
Koira touched Inna’s back with the tip of his bayonet.
“Halt! Hands up! You have transg-ruess-ed the rules of order! Now I will have to teach you some discipline, rue-ssy.”

Inna raised her arms high and slowly turned to face Koira. With a crooked leer, the sergeant attempted to use his bayonet tip to undo the top button of her bodice. All at once, Inna grasped the sharp bayonet blade with both hands and moved the carabine’s barrel to the side. With the reflexive reaction of a seasoned soldier, he yanked the bayonet knife from between Inna’s palms: blood
dripped to the ground. Koira took a step back and – exactly as trained – smashed Inna across the side of the head with the butt of his weapon. It had not been a powerful blow, but it knocked Inna out. She fell. Koira stared at the carabine’s butt in dumb stupefaction. He walked off to the wall of the barracks and spent a long time relieving himself against it.

Dmitri Ivanovich, his face contorted with hatred, had watched the entire scene, helplessly. Koira knocked on his window and motioned several times beckoningly with his hand, inviting him to come out into the open air and remove the body of the curfew violator who had shamelessly broken the law. Dmitri and Katerina rushed headlong out of the barracks. Carefully they lifted up Haritina and carried her into their abode.

Zhenya rushed about his mother’s insensate body in a frenzy, his searching looks fixed on the face of Dmitri Ivanovich: “Mama hasn’t died, has she? She’ll get better, won’t she? Mama, mummy, mummykins! Please don’t die, I beg of you! Please don’t die! Mama Inna! What’s wrong? How will I live without you, my Mama, my Mamochka…”

Mama Inna was just thirty years old then. She was young, strong, beautiful; she loved to dance, to sing, to laugh, to play at life…. Zhenya thought that his mother had died. But she survived.
A week later, she regained consciousness and slowly began to improve. Zhenya never left her side for a moment. He tried to make her laugh and constantly stroked her hair.

The young son decided to exact vengeance upon his mother’s tormentor: he decided to kill Koira. He talked Vasili into making him a little wooden pistol.Vasili was sixteen. The lad had hands of gold. He would carve doves, spoons, shot glasses, drinking cups, plates from wood; he could craft amazing boxes with secret compartments and hidden locks; he made whistles and wooden flutes to play on, and even whittled out a special little chair for his baby sister Lyudmila’s night-time potty. To carve out a little wooden pistol for Zhenya was a bit of passing fun for Vasili. Three days later, Evgeny’s ‘weapon’ was ready. It was perfect in every way: the children’s toy fired little pebbles with all the force of a rubber band stretched tight. Evgeny was pleased. The little rock projectile
would fly three to four metres.

Zhenya decided to carry out his plan of vengeance on a summer Sunday. That day, a group of children from Camp No. 8 had been given permission to visit Camp No. 9, which held the civilian prisoners of war from Vazhiny – relatives and friends of the Uslanka folk. Sergeant Louri Virtanen was ordered to accompany the underage visitors as their guard. Koira carefully tallied up the child prisoners, slung his carabine over his shoulder and gave the order to head out.
Babushka Anna walked at the head of the column of children. Zhenya marched next to Koira. Hidden in the pocket of his little boy’s pants he had the toy wooden pistol. His small palm gripped the handle tightly.

They had marched some two hundred metres beyond the gates of their camp when Koira ordered the children to stop: he wanted to refresh himself with a swig of vodka from his flask. For Evgeny, the moment of vengeance had arrived. Koira unscrewed the cap of the flask and, tossing his head back, poured a dose of hard liquour into his throat.
Evgeny took out his wooden pistol and took aim at the heart of the Finnish sergeant.
Koira tilted his head back down and began to screw the cap back onto the flask. And that was when he saw the small Russian boy, his left eye closed, aiming right at his heart with a gun made of wood.
At first, as the alcohol rushed to his head, the sergeant could not comprehend what he was seeing. Zhenya released the rubber band with his little thumb, and called out in a loud voice:
“Bang!”
A tiny pebble came shooting out of the little pistol’s barrel and struck the Finn’s uniform. Koira went white. He realized that this Russian child was not playing at war. He was fighting a battle that, to him, was genuine. The boy wanted him dead! The sergeant recognized as a certainty that, sooner or later, this little ruessy boy would succeed in killing him.

Koira went berserk. The kid had turned into his mortal enemy. The kid was a real, living, breathing Russian soldier. The vodka, now thoroughly mixed with his surging blood, attacked his brain. Shaking with hatred, he approached Evgeny. He snatched the little wooden weapon from the boy’s hand. He flung the ‘munition’ to the ground and proceeded to stomp on it furiously with his heavy boots, reducing it to splinters. Yanking his carabine from his shoulder, he readied it with a jerk and shoved a cartridge roughly into the chamber. Zhenya understood he was about to be slaughtered. He set off running wildly back towards the camp, towards his mother, Inna. The sergeant raised the rifle and took aim at the fleeing boy’s back.
Babushka Anna threw herself like a fury at Koira. She hung upon the rifle barrel, trying to force it away from the direction her grandson had taken:

“Don’t you shoot him, you bastard! Shoot me instead! God is watching!” shrieked Anna, in a high, shrill, piercing cry, mixing Russian, Swedish, Finnish words.
“Don’t stain your soul with such a terrible crime! Don’t murder a child! He’s an innocent child! Don’t kill him!”

Koira was trying to kick her away with his legs, but Anna continued to grab at his boots, to pull on his sash, doing anything she could to keep him from aiming properly.
“Stop! You already killed my son, Peter. Now you want to kill my grandson. And over what? Over a toy pistol? I won’t let you! Kill me instead! Kill me! I’ve lived my life already! Spare that child! God is watching!”

Zhenya tripped and fell. Koira lowered his gun. The intoxication had passed as suddenly as it had come over him. To kill a child does not come easily, even in war.

The children, frightened out of their wits, had formed a silent huddle. Once again, the soldier raised his flask to his lips. Anna rushed towards her grandson. She turned him over, face up. He was unconscious. The eyes had rolled back into his head. His short pants were wet from both front and back. The grandmother lifted him up into her arms and ran, as quickly as she could, carrying him back to their concentration camp. The sergeant motioned again with his hand, signalling to the children, and the column of captive ruesses began to march again, this time heading back home, to
their own camp. Koira walked unsteadily, stumbling, and behind him, single-file, like ducklings following a duck, the Russian prisoner children marched in halting step.

A year later, Vasili did finally ambush Koira at a time when the prison camp guards had been forced into a hasty retreat. He shot Koira dead – from a proper metal pistol, this time, that he had spent almost two years assembling in secret. Koira had taken a moment’s break to duck into a stand of trees on the banks of the Olonka, from a great urge to go. He had just dropped his pants and squatted down under a pine tree, when Vasya’s bullet found the back of his head – for Aunt Inna, for little Zhenya, for all the sadistic abuse he had heaped on all the rue-sses. With a strong shove from his legs, Vasili sent the corpse of the Finnish sergeant tumbling off the bluff, into the swift waters of the pristine Olonka.

Anastasia Panina imagined the German to be somewhere out there, far beyond the horizon. The newspapers, radio and party bosses all insisted that the fascist invaders would soon be crushed; victory would be ours, with minimal bloodshed, and on foreign soil. But for almost three weeks now, Hitler’s insatiable Moloch of war, having stretched out over six thousand kilometres of the German-Soviet front, from the White Sea all the way to the Black, had been mercilessly swallowing up the lives of millions of human beings. That short, blunt, vivid, terrifying syllable, “War!” had come down from the pages of newspapers, periodicals and books, and entered the reality of quotidinal existence, bringing upheaval into the destinies of many generations of humans all over the entire planet.

At 3:30 in the morning, on Sunday, 22 June 1941, the peaceful life of citizens of the Soviet Union came to an end: Russia was suddenly attacked by five and a half million Huns. With amiable equanimity, the European West drove the steamroller of death towards the Russian East, seeking to expand its lebensraum, its room to live. For Europe had begun to struggle breathing, as it confronted the rapidly contracting plots of land left open to cultivation. Industry was booming in every which direction, leaving no space available to serve the mundane household needs of the population. Europe no longer fit into the strict boundaries of its national frontiers. The only direction in which it could expand was Eastward.

Over the course of all the centuries when Rus existed, the Europeans could never quite accept that the vast wealthy holdings of the Russian Czars had not instead fallen to them. And even though, through all those ages, Russia never wavered in seeking to absorb into itself the culture and mentality of Europe, over and over again the West would try to push her back, as far as possible, into Asia.
The Western world lived in perpetual paranoia about a strong and self-sufficient Russia, striving always to contain, inhibit and prevent any manifestation of her imperialist prerogatives.
The successful social reforms of Alexander the Second, and the economic reorganization launched during the reign of his son, Alexander the Third, ushered in a shaky political equilibrium between Russia and Europe, by the dawn of the 20th century. Now, the collective consciousness of society searched for new philosophical ideas that might be used to bring about a complete, universal
transformation of the whole world. The spectre of Communism became reality.The gist of the ideaturned out to be starkly simplistic:
“We must destroy everything, in order to successfully improve it.” In practical terms, the ideology of Karl Marx, with its serial, color-coded revolutions pitting class against class – and with itssequentially numbered World Wars – had arrived.

Czars and Emperors were replaced by Fuehrers and dictators. A new era of behind-the-scenes puppetmasters and manipulated tyrants began. A new, secret political force was born, uniquely adept at taking on any ideology whatsoever, for the higher cause of global economic dominion. Naturally enough, the fascist scythe of Hitler clashed against the bolshevist
rock of Stalin.

England – the world’s aging Empire – did everything it could, overtly and covertly, to ensure that Nazism and Communism became locked in suicidal combat. And yet, all the countries of Europe longed to live grandly. The English precept, Divide, and in conquest make certain you are democratic in how you suck the blood of nations – a concept used to ensnare nations in bitter local wars – had turned the whole world into one great meat-grinder of war, of war between Hitler and Stalin.
Certain of their own utter righteousness, the soldiers of Italy, Romania, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia formed ranks under the banners of Hitler’s swastika. They were joined there, with great fanfare, by the divisions and regiments of Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Czechia, Serbia, Albania, Sweden, Poland, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, under
their own national standards. The nations of Europe made haste to bite off their own particular slices of the Russian pie at Hitler’s triumphal feast designed to carve up the riches of the lands of Russia. Forward: Drang nach Osten! The push to the East!

Oceans of grief lay before them. Niagaras of tears. Everests of cadavers. Pompeiis of cities turned to ashen ruins. Wastelands of villages…And everywhere: corpses, corpses, corpses.
Shattered destinies and plans. Devastated hopes and dreams. Friendship, tenderness, affection, love trampled into bestial degradation…Just four steps to Death…
Cowardice, treachery, cannibalism: ‘What’s the difference? There’s a war going on! Grab what you can from life, whatever you can take away this instant!
For, tomorrow, that might be your corpse in the grave of the unknown soldier.’ The philosophy of war liberates personality from its conscience. Formally, Europe began its crusade against Russia under the leadership of Germany, with the stated purpose: ‘To annihilate Russia as the keeper of Slavic Civilization, of Orthodox Christianity, of Russian culture and the Russian language. Whatever Russian population remained at the end of the campaign was to be Germanicized; the uncooperative ones to be driven back behind the Urals – into the Siberian taiga, so that the lands ofancient Russia might be populated by the Aryan nations of ‘civilized Europe’ and conditions might thereby facilitate the complete, irreversible extinction of the Slavic Civilization.

Thus, the Russian people found itself on the threshold of utter destruction. The natural longing of any nation would simply be to survive, by any means possible, to make it out of that meat-grinder alive. And it had not been the first time that Europe had cornered Russia, forcing it to the brink of no return. In accordance with the German strategic plan code-named ‘Barbarossa’ (so named in honor of the bloodthirsty sovereign of the ‘Holy Roman Empire,’ Friederich the First Barbarossa, scion of the German Hohenstaufen dynasty, who had reigned in 1152-1190), it was the intention to take Russia off the map completely, both literally and figuratively, once and for all. The German language would replace Russian. A huge artificial lake would replace the capital city of Moscow. Even the right to live within their own ancestral homeland would be denied the present inhabitants.

What was perceived to be a nation in name only would be easily brought to a state of moral degradation. Abolish medical institutions…
Such plans had been gestating for some time in certain parts of Europe. One of the earliest full-blown attempts to subjugate Muscovy by annexing it to the European Empire was Napoleon’s. A second such attempt was launched by the Prussian Kaiser, Wilhelm the Second Hohenzollern. And now, the Fuehrer:
Reichskanzler of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, an Austrian who was only granted German nationality in 1932.
It was 1941 now, and he too had decided he must have Russian blood to drink. The definitive date for attacking the USSR was determined by a prognosis of German economic analysts. Early in 1941, a report was placed on the desk of the Fuehrer. It summarized succinctly the conclusions of German scientists:
“ The grain reserves of Germany shall be depleted by autumn. The next harvest will not be able to provide for the consumption needs of the winter of 1942-1943.”
Hitler had an attack of hysteria. “What is the meaning of this? That my German people, the master race, will go hungry? We shall get our bread from Ukraine! The Russian colossus on its clay feet shall fall into the dust before us this very year! Gott mit uns!”

On the 1st of May, 1941, the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, signed a secret decree:


“For the commanding staff only:
1. The Barbarossa timetable:
Barbarossa commences on 22 June.
2. The overall mission: The armed masses of the Russian army present in its western parts are to be annihilated in bold operations with deep thrusts of armoured divisions. It is imperative to prevent the retreat of any combat-capable units into the vast hinterlands of Russia. Then, by means of
rapid advance, it is required to reach the line from beyond which Russian aviation will no longer be capable of launching attacks on German territory. The ultimate goal of the operation is to create a physical barrier between Asiatic Russia along the general line Arkhangelsk – Volga. Thereby, should it become necessary, it will be possible to paralyze by means of aviation the last industrialized sector left available to Russia, in the Urals. Ukraine shall be taken from Russia and shall be annexed to the German lands with the rights of a Protectorate. Before initiating a global frontal attack on England for the purpose of instituting a New World Order and the complete extermination of the world’s Jews, Germany obtains unimpeded and unlimited access to Russian
oilfields, and is able to make use of the incalculable reserves of mineral resources available in Russia to advance the interests of German industry.

The entire upper echelon of Germany’s National Socialist Party was experiencing an intoxicating euphoria. And why not? Swift victory in the East boded great benefits for Germany. Adolf envisioned the future as radiantly happy, bright, opulently rich:

“Reason dictates that we move rapidly and forcefully Eastward, into Russia. Now we shall possess inexhaustible supplies of timber, limitless reserves of steel, the world’s biggest magnesium mines, Oil! Oil! Oil, the chief asset of the most advanced nations. But Russia is full of everything, in abundance! Without question, it is the wealthiest land on the planet. But, unlike the Germans, the Slavs have no knowledge of how to manage their riches. They are a lazy tribe of drunks. Onlyconsider the iron ore deposits in Kerch! Most important of all the raw materials available in Russia, however, are the physical beings themselves! By their very nature, Russians are slaves. Today, as never before, for the good of the Reich, we require uncomplaining human automatons. The civilization of Europe shall benefit from the Germanization of the entire world. We have only three rivals to contend with: England, America and Russia. They will not themselves willingly raise the white flag of capitulation. Our plan for the conquest of these countries has two principal directions: The first is military pressure. The second: subversive activity by the fifth column, acting from within. I am certain: the rightness of the idea of National-Socialism shall triumph without delay! Our ideas bring us world supremacy and the universal flourishing of nations. Ukraine shall be the breadbasket of Europe. Whoever is the master of Ukraine shall never know hunger in his own land. The foundation of the glorious future of the Vaterland, and of all European nations, gathered together into a single united European body under the leadership of Germany,
resides in the wealth of the lands of Russia. Without the riches hidden away in the depths of Siberia, Europe shall rapidly grow poor. We, the National-Socialists, cannot allow such a travesty! Russians are by their very nature swine. God did not create the earth just for them alone! Why did the Russians seize and possess those lands which by rights were intended for us as well?
I am prepared to restore the balance of justice with an unsurpassed fortitude of will! I will embrace the most extreme of measures in order to transform Germany into the world’s wealthiest, most prosperous nation. We have everything we need to achieve the complete success of the ideas of
National-Socialism! We have:

Excellent state organization.
The finest industry and science in the world.
Remarkable universities and academic institutions.
An educated farmer.
A united governing party.
The precisely-functioning Gestapo network, protecting our people from the
subversive campaigns of internal foes.
The racial purity of the German nation.
A work ethic, discipline, science, art, literature.
A magnificent courageous army, armed by the very latest of scientific
Achievements.
German resolve, willpower, fortitude, persistence in the achievement of stated
goals.

I shall fulfil my historic mission: Russian raw materials shall supply a historically unprecedented surge in Saxon productivity and advancement. All for Germany! All in the name of Germany! Germany, Germany above all!I know: the Russian will defend himself wherever he has been told to stand, until the bitter end, until the last man has fallen. Well, wonderful! Excellent! The German soldier is smarter, more athletic, better armed than Russia’s untrained, inadequate peasant. The fewer Russians there are, the more of us Germans there will be! Let the Russian die a heroic death under the tracks of our mighty tanks of General Guderian! Germany cannot be defeated!
Once we have tamed Russia, we will easily dispatch England. We shall strangle Britain, our eternal mortal enemy, with a blockade by sea. Our submarine fleet shall sink everything and everyone sailing towards that patch of land. They have forced us into a Second World Campaign. They shall pay dearly for their global games. America is far away. Once England has been defeated, the States will strive to appease us and seek our friendship. And we have many friends of like mind in America, besides. Soon, Nazism shall take power in its own right, in the USA! There, theyunderstand all too well the evil of myths of racial equality. As in our own lands, racial segregation has been the law of the land for many years. The world confederacy of the Jews must be completely crushed! They are the source of evil. We shall deport the black-skinned ones back to Africa. The Russians shall forget their nation ever existed. We shall make Russia a land of sober, dutiful workers serving the interests of Germany, that the master Aryan race might flourish forever!And that will be when we begin preparing for the ultimate stage in our struggle: for the construction of an ideal German order in the whole world – a world in which we, the Germans, shall by rights assume our proper place as leaders of the perfect global civilization. We will bring paradise down upon earth! We shall purge the earth and purify it, cleansing it from the presence of inferior peoples. I sense myself as a Creator, a master gardener of a vast garden in bloom, that is this Earth. We shall establish Peace on Earth, definitively and irrevocably! The light of Aryan reason shall triumph across the entire planet! Victory shall be ours! Gott mit uns!”

The principal burden of a swift march on Moscow had been bestowed by the Fuehrer upon the rapid strike force that bore the code name Zentrum. The ancient lands of the Smolensk region found themselves on the razor’s edge of the aggressive, murderous penetrating line of attack. The Fuehrer was already daydreaming about the triumphal march of victorious SS forces across Moscow’s Red Square.
The Wehrmacht is executing his Directive No. 21 with precision and dedication.

On 4 July, the German forces had arrived at the upper reaches of the Dnieper River. By this time, they had already slain a third of a million Russian people, and taken another three hundred thousand Red Army soldiers prisoner. Three thousand operating Soviet tanks and two thousand heavy artillery pieces had been forced to turn their guns on their own city of Smolensk. The prisoners of war, young Komsomol as well as Communists, were being forced at gunpoint to repair
bomb-damaged roads, and then to use them to bring battle ordnance and fuel supplies to their own captured armor, from the munitions depots that had been prepared within the forestland for the Red Army’s use. Soviet munitions were being used to butcher Soviet troops.

The thunder of cannon drew ever closer to Baba Nastya’s log house.
In the Smolensk region, in Davydkovo, a small village that stood at a distance from the main roads, the window panes were beginning to crack already from the constant cannonade of tank battles. At night, along the western sky, the red glow of fires flared alarmingly. The night before, a travelling cinema show came to their collective farm, “Communism’s Shining Path.” The ran the newsreels showing the victorious Red Army:

“Soviet tanks charge across rivers at great speed, raising columns of water into the air, and breaching the enemy’s positions on the other side, mow down forests of mast-quality pines effortlessly; the artillery fires into the sky; handsome young daredevil pilots challenge enemy bombers in their fighter planes with the red stars; warriors in crisp new uniforms fearlessly race into battle, to attack the foe. The optimistic song, If war begins tomorrow… plays thunderously
everywhere…”

They always loved it, in Davydovka, when the cinema rolled into town. But this time the women and kids sat in silence, hugging each other close. None of the pre-war men remained in the village: they had all gone to ‘the second world meat-grinder.’ They had feasted and drunk their fill on a Monday; that night they had given their lawful wives a final workout; and on Tuesday they were gone. And then began the lonely, drawn out nights of interminable solitude and heartache for the women…

“How are we to live here in the country without any men, good people?”
The people knew nothing of exemptions to service. Baba Nastya had heard about armoured tanks, but not about waivers or exemptions. And she had only seen the tanks at the picture show. A single solitary male remained in the village, the old Vas-Vasych: the head, the boss, the threat, the advocate, the member of the Communist Bolshevik Party – a great aficionado of strong drink and discourse on the subject of international affairs.

Baba Nastya’s one and only son had also left for the front.
Grigory was the village heartthrob and the bright young buck: he played the accordion, he drove the tractor. Girls could not tear their eyes away. His father had been killed, it seemed, just the day before, in the Finnish campaign – and all of good Nastya’s unspent love instantly transferred over onto her only son.
“Where is he now? How is he?”

Doubled over, Baba Nastya mechanically applied her sickle to the rye she was harvesting, her mind consumed with anxious thoughts about her Grishulka:

“Is he alive? Not a line, not a rumor, not a hint of any kind of news. Tankist! Tank personnel! God grant the tank might keep him safe…! The armour’s strong and our tanks are swift…” (The words of the song reassured her.)

What Nastya did not know was that the Red Army tanks quickly went through all their shells, and the fuel got burned before they had even reached the front. The German pilots didn’t even need to waste their bombs on the Russian fuel trucks: all it took was a single machine gun round at the truck, and several more Russian tanks would be forced to grind to a halt. That turned the tank personnel into infantry. And there wasn’t much they could do, in terms of waging war, with a single officer’s pistol for a weapon.

“But my Grishulya is with the tank forces! And why on earth, if we may ask, do the German hordes come climbing up on top of us again, for the second time in a century? What, are they tired of living? Looking to have a drink of our precious blood?”

Suddenly, she heard the hoarse voice of the chief of the Communist Party for their village, Vas-Vasych, behind her:
“Greetings, women! I’m calling a break! I’ll be conducting a political information briefing here for you!”

The women sat down in a semi-circle in front of the party boss they called ‘the Chatterbox.’ They spread tablecloths, made themselves comfortable, brought out their pitchers of milk; they set out oval slices of boiled potatoes, and boiled eggs; they cut thick slices of rye bread, served up fresh cucumbers and carrots, poured portions of salt onto the tablecloth, unsealed the pitchers of milk and
prepared to listen to news from the front.

“You tell us the good news about the war, Vas, and we’ll save time and eat while we listen,” the women asked their ‘pedagogue.’
The Party boss stood proudly before them; smoothing his smock with two fingers as he adjusted his belt, he cleared his throat and began:

“All kinds of diversionary rumours are being spread around our village by spies, making wild claims that the German is right on top of us, and already here, even not far from these parts, taking up fortified positions in the next village over. On behalf of the Bolsheviks, I declare to you: these are all vile fabrications, lies completely without foundation, and nothing more than enemy
propaganda! Yesterday I came back from Zagorye. At the District Committee meeting, they gave us all the latest details on the situation at the front: ‘Our valiant Red Army, under the leadership of the wise comrade Stalin, is ferociously and relentlessly whipping the goddamned German invaders on all fronts. We’re battering all of their divisions, you know, front, back and sideways! There! Comrade Stalin personally decreed that the enemy will be defeated and victory will be ours,brothers and sisters! Comrade Stalin wouldn’t lie to the people! So that’s how it is, women! So you can just take it from the horse’s mouth, and, you know, keep on doing your work, nice and steady and without panic. Don’t you go biting at any provocations! Don’t you go rumour-spreading any rumours! Or listening to ‘em! Everything for the front! Everything for the victory! The front needs bread! A soldier at the front can’t do without bread, any more than a man in peacetime can do without a woman! Understood?”

The womenfolk all burst out laughing:
“If our men didn’t drink more spirits than a horse does water, we’d have the enemy fleeing for their lives in no time! And we’d be having more babies, too, if it weren’t for that cursed moonshine. Then we’d really show the Germans our stuff! We should have our men putting away more bacon and less vodka! Then we’d all be knocked up, all the time. Who’s going to be knocking us up now? Who’s going to be making our babies with us? Neither Rus itself, nor we women, can survive without our menfolk…”

The Chatterbox raised his hand to impose order:
“Enough kidding around, women! Your men will be back soon, and they’ll bring victory home! They’ll be back before you know it, it’s a sure thing… Back with their beauties, and setting off earthquakes in the haylofts! For a fact! But now, seriously, here are the very latest news I have from the war front…”The women munched away, acting as if they were paying close attention to the political information. Nastya had turned to the side and, distracted, watched
the road which wound across the fields. Her father had left along that road. In the Finnish war, her husband had left down that road in a wagon. And now her own son, Grisha, had been taken away down that road in a military truck. Her only child had gone off to war; gone beyond
those woods was the love and the light of her life as a mother, as well as her secret hope for grandchildren. Ah, the last hope for the joy of old age, carried away into the storm:

“Will he come back? Yes, of course, my son will come back! Young men like Grigory – such good young men – can’t be killed! God wouldn’t allow such a sin and would never forgive anyone for it. Where are you, my darling son? Are you alive? Alive! He’ll be back, and then he’ll marry Maria Semyonova from Prechistoye! Hadn’t she given him good reason – even before the war – to go running across the fields to see her, barefoot, as far as five versts! And then they’d start making grandsons and granddaughters. How well we will live, how richly!”

Those were the thoughts of Baba Nastya, who was only half-listening to Vas-Vasych, as she scrutinized the perspective of her native highway with the heartache of a mother missing her reason for living. Suddenly, she saw a group of motorcyclists race out of the woods. They were
tearing along the road at great speed, raising clouds of dust behind them, disappearing and then reappearing on the highway; diving into the golden sea of the fields of grain, and then resurfacing again on the roadway that ran along the fields. Finally, they came flying out onto the straightaway and came bearing down at them – at the Russian women seated around their white tablecloth. Baba
Nastya began to make out the unfamiliar military uniform.

“Is that a German? That’s right: a German! A real one. Ours don’t go that fast on motorcycles. Vas-Vasych! –” she interrupted the Party chairman in a calm voice – “You’re telling us the news just as sweetly as if you were telling fairy tales. Good! So that means…the German is still far away from us here, over beyond that horizon?”


“Don’t you doubt it, Nastya! The enemy won’t be coming here, curse him forever!
We won’t be letting that viper into the USSR! The Party has spoken and that’s how it will be!”

“Then why don’t you have a look at that highway, Vasili? Look behind you, Comrade Chairman! Who’s that over there, kicking up clouds of dust – over there! – among our fields!? In our breadbasket! Open your eyes wide, Comrade Party

Boss! Enough of your chatterboxing! Look carefully: who’s that over there behind your back, making all that noise with their motors?

The Chatterbox turned around, looked into the distance, and his mouth agape from amazement, all of a sudden toppled over onto the ground. He leapt up like a jackrabbit and dove into the rye fields that stood there, as thick as a wall; he zigzagged into the sea of grain, got down on all fours and disappeared. Only the quivering of the rye stalks marked the path of his flight.
Nobody ever saw or heard of him again, anywhere. War is a dark, murky business, choked with smoke: a man can vanish without a trace, and there won’t even be a grave left to mark the time and place of his passing.


The women did not budge from the spots they had made comfortable. They sat in silence, motionless. The motorcyclists in steel helmets, with short automatic weapons slung around their necks, in their dusty uniforms with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, in their enormous protective goggles that obscured most of the face – causing them to resemble some fantastic, unheard of fish – came racing up right to the spot where the women sat, fixed to the spot with wonder and disbelief. The cavalcade slowed up a bit as they approached the Russian Frauen in their white kerchiefs.
The reconnaissance unit waved to the women in a friendly way and then turned their bikes in the direction of Davydkovo, their motors revving up to a shameless roar.

“Who would have thought? They even know all our roads, just as if they had just rolled back into their own hometowns.”

Baba Nastya covered her cheeks with her palms. Then, arms akimbo, with a certain quiet rage, she spoke:
“So, Comrade Stalin, is that how it is? ‘We’ll destroy our enemy on foreign soil?’ And here they are, right at Smolensk, all over us! Well, how do you do, then? Real moving pictures, real Germans! And where’s that Red Army of ours then? Where are our tanks, where are our gallant heroes, our falcons in the sky, our brave little soldier boys? Where’s my Grisha?”

From the unexpectedness of it all, the women hadn’t had time to be frightened. Some were still struggling to swallow the food that seemed to stick in their throats. Nastya was the first one to regain her bearings:
“Well, then, women! Eat up, drink up! Let’s finish the day’s work! We’ve got a situation here! The Party boss skipped out on us. Stalin’s sun has set – Hitler’s here.”
The women quickly cleared their tablecloth and ran pell-mell back towards their houses.


Peace and quiet was the order of the day in Davydkovo. The German motorcycle patrol roared through without stopping, at breakneck speed, past the unnaturally silent houses; the road took them straight onto the great Smolensk highway. This was the very same highway previously travelled by a certain Frenchman, also in a hurry to reach to Moscow, albeit on horseback. He was Napoleon, and some had also imputed greatness to his name. In the houses, everything remained in its usual place and way: the children, the old folks, the food. The chickens and the geese carried on with their existence in the farmyards and kitchen gardens.

It had not yet sunk in that the Germans had already moved in. On July 17, a funny-looking man with a beard and a distinctly ancien regime demeanor came rolling into Davydkovo. It was said that he had flown in straight from Berlin. During the Czar’s reign, he had been the overseer for a wealthy landowner. The landowner’s name was Andrei Vysatsky. The story went that he had been executed during the Revolution, and that the peasants had burnt down his estate. They thought they remembered him being either a Count, or a Prince of some kind.

The newcomer introduced himself as the former general manager of the estate, Nikodim Ivanovich Sosnovsky. He ordered everyone to assemble near the collective farm administration building. He clambered up onto a buggy and announced:“By order of theGerman High Command, I have been appointed starosta (‘warden’) of your village. Yesterday, the valiant German army purged the city of Smolensk of its Jewish Bolshevik contagion. The remnants of Stalin’s army have been surrounded, driven into the lowlands and pushed back against the Sozh River. By the tens of thousands, Red Army soldiers are joining the German side. The war will be over by this autumn and all the peasants shall receive land for their own private use. But until that happens, we are not going to disband the collective farms, until total victory over Bolshevism has been achieved.
Tomorrow, all the residents are to go out into the fields to work, as usual. Arbeit macht frei! Toil makes us free! The German army needs bread. Who is Anastasia Panina?
“Here I am!” Baba Nastya called out.
“You will lead the brigade, that means you are the Gruppenfuehrerin! We leave for the fields at five in the morning! Understood?”
“What’s to understand?” replied Nastya loudly, for all of them.
“A change of government means a change of brooms.” But inside, she was thinking
 “Horseradish is no sweeter than plain radishes! Stalin-Hitler! Hitler-Stalin! Two boots make a matched set! The only way to tell them apart is by the size of their whiskers.”

They toiled heroically (as it was called, meaning into utter prostration), just as they had under the Communists, all the way through July.
They brought in the rye, the wheat, the oats, the flax. It was an excellent harvest. Nikodim, the starosta, was given some kind of medal from the Germans. His wife came from Germany to stay with him. She was an ordinary Russian country peasant, by the looks of it, but she put on airs and played the exotic foreign Frau to ridiculous effect. They began to repair the abandoned church; plans were made to rebuild the manor house in its former place.

In early August, the tank personnel from the SS division called “Death’s Head” arrived in Davydkovo, to for some rest in the quiet of the gorgeous Russian forest. These were young men, well-built, handsome to behold. The starosta instructed Nastya to prepare a proper Russian banya (steam-bath) for them:
“They’re getting ready for the victory parade in Red Square! Our liberators! You do your utmost, Nastya! Show these Germans our Russian hospitality! Do you remember our Prince Vysatsky?”

“And what if I do… I was a little child then…” Nastya fibbed. “But I’ll get the banya ready for our unexpected murderers.”
“You just keep that sharp little tongue of yours well behind your teeth!” the starosta recommended. “No one bothers to sort out the jokes in wartime.”Baba Nastya said nothing, and just nodded.

She brought in the birch firewood, fetched the water from the pristine river, prepared the fanning switches to be used during the steaming ritual, heated the stones used to make the steam until they were as red as rocks can be, and then invited the Germans in to the bath-house, using hand gestures.
“They’re killers, not liberators,” whispered Anastasia through tightly clenched teeth.
“See those black skulls and bones they’ve decked themselves out in? Part of their uniforms! They’re anti-Christs, that’s what they are! They’re the Devil’s spawn, being that they wear skulls in their buttonholes…May you all croak in that bath-house. My precious Grisha, he’s a tank officer, too; maybe you’ve already roasted him alive, and now they come here, they want to be all nice and clean, purified, trying to wash the blood of my son off their filthy souls.”

The soldiers were guffawing, babbling on in their own tongue, but were in no hurry to strip naked; they cast inquisitive sidelong glances at the Russian woman who was standing at the entry to the bath-house as if waiting for something.The starosta leaped forward.

“What’s the matter, woman: haven’t you ever seen naked men before?”
“I’ve seen ‘em.”
“So skedaddle out of here. These are civilized lads, you know; they’re shy; they aren’t about to disrobe in the presence of an unknown woman. What’re you standing here for?”
“I’ve seen our kind of men, but have I ever seen Germans?”
“Oh, you backward country bumpkin! Go take a hike already! All men are the same;
they’ve all got their sausages hanging exactly the same way between their legs.
Or didn’t you know that?”
“And so what if I want to make sure?”
“Make sure of what? What is it you want to make sure of?”
“Well, what if they’ve got something else hanging there, something different from our kind? Maybe they have different equipment to make their killing kind with?
Look at ‘em, they’ve got all those devil’s symbols screwed on all over their uniforms, all those skulls and bones! They’re devils, not men! People say the devils are all sex-less, that they’re ass-munchers…”

“You’re the village idiot, Nastya, you know that? How on earth have you ever heard of pederasts out here?”
“From old goats like yourself, who else? I want to see whatever it is those devils use to make themselves their devils’ offspring…”

Starosta Nikodim flew into a vicious rage:
“Lucky for you they don’t understand a word of Russian. You ought to be taken right up against the wall and shot for what you’ve just said, Anastasia! Get out of here, you stupid uneducated peasant!”

Nastya slammed the door with malicious force and went to tend to her cow – to give her a little extra hay. Nikodim called after her:
“After their bath, the boys would love some of that Russian milk to drink, and more of that fine butter from Vologoda, with white bread…”

The Germans’ mood changed on the 10th of September, 1941. That was when the soon-to-be famous Katyusha was first brought into battle, against the “Death’s Head” division. The Russians had new tanks to fight with, the TU-34.
Divisions consisting of from Siberia were deployed to the front line, just east of Smolensk. Guerrillas organized in the rear. Bridges, railways, vehicles on the road began blowing up. The Germans began to know the oppressive fear of taking a bullet to the back of the head in the unlikeliest of environments: in an outhouse; by the well; in a seductive corner of the woods; by the banks of a beautiful, peaceful stream.
The land on which the Fritzes stood began to burn under their very feet.
The Wehrmacht’s frontline newspapers began featuring pieces filled with complaints to the effect that “the Russians are waging war in a manner that goes against all the rules of civilized conflict. These Scythians have gone as far as to reconnoitre the locations of our camp kitchens and field outhouses, serving soldiers and officers alike, and they are given to shooting at these types of peaceful facilities. Only a barbarian could be capable of killing people during these natural interludes in their civilized existence.”

The Russians were not reading the Germans’ newspapers, and continued their bombing of German outhouses, kitchens, canteens, field brothels and pleasure areas intended for the rest and relief of the war-worn Aryan warriors. Increasingly, the Russians were counterattacking. “For the Motherland! For Stalin!” rang the battle-cry of the Red Army forces as they leaped from their
trenches. But once locked in hand-to-hand combat, face to face with their foe, they forgot about Stalin, they forgot about the Motherland. The battlefield would be engulfed in one great, terrifying din of men gone hoarse with rage, raining down foul curses, howling and roaring like the beasts they had become; the sickening muffled crunch of blows as rifle-butts met steel helmets; fountains of blood gushing and gurgling from severed jugulars, from arteries pierced by the field shovels of engineers. Teeth, jaws, hands, knives, bayonets were used to rend and maim the flesh of other men, whom they had never met before this day, with adamant ferocity; hands, belts, leg-bindings, straps were used to suffocate and strangle – and then they would themselves expire, atop the
piled up bodies they had just helped slay. Bullets and shrapnel from grenades transformed the faces of men into a bloody, gory mess. Artillery shells could not distinguish between sides; they burst in the midst of clusters of fighting soldiers, taking some from both sides, so that the torn parts of soldiers’ bodies could be seen hanging indiscriminately even on the highest pine trees.
Hand-to-hand combat against Russian troops is more terrible than the worst hell of afterlife ever conceived of by a Western mind. Over the wretched bundles of enemies physically interlaced in an agonizing struggle to the death, the piercing smells of blood and gunpowder and excrement and schnapps and vodka hung suspended, blended into one dense emanation.

The air was quivering from the thunder of shots fired at close range; eardrums burst; the cries, the shrieks of pain and supplications of the dying rose to the
heavens. And over all this vast, foul, reeking hell on earth, a single heart-rending vowel overruled every other sound, all by itself, in an ejaculation without end:
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

The Germans could not endure the brutal bloodbath Russian hand-to-hand combat, up close and personal, with no holds barred; they pulled back to defensive positions. There, the justly celebrated rapid-fire Katysha drenched them in a deluge of flames. The Blitzkrieg was not going according to plan. The invasion had hit a bottleneck. Lost without a trace, the respectable, even stylish polish of the German troops. Hungry, filthy, infested with lice, exhausted, the troops of the front began taking their anger and frustration out on the village populace. Each country girl now seemed to them to be a guerrilla fighter. The boys were all spies and saboteurs. The so-called Germano-European civilization was beginning to reveal its true colors, increasingly taking on the features of a pack of wolves consumed with hatred for all human life.

Once, Baba Nastya, out searching for a missing nanny goat, wandered up closer to the German positions than they tolerated. A vigilant sentry deftly dealt her a blow to the head with the butt of his gun. It had not been a very strong blow, but Anastasia Panova [sic – Panina?] gave voice to all her pent-up rage:
‘ You can’t beat us, anyway. You won’t win. We’ll stick in your craw like a bone. Maybe one of these Fritzes has already killed my Grisha! Maybe some other Hans, or another Adolf, will shoot another ten of our Ivans dead, but still, my Grisha – or some other Ivan, Nikolai, Fyodor, some unknown soldier, whom God will spare from your German bullets, is bound to bury you, Adolf, in our Russian soil, like it or not. We never asked you here, you know: so don’t go tramping in other peoples’ gardens; stay back home, with your mamselle, your Frau in your nice rich German land; drink your beer; make yourself some Kinder in your eiderdown beds…
But, no, you just had to come this way, you goddamned Fritz; you just had to try Russian on! You want it all, don’t you – and you want us to hand it over to you! Woman! Chicken! Milk! Suck! Bum! Gimme! Gimme! Come on! Well, who asked you here? Who makes you slam Russian women on the head with your gun?
Stop raping our daughters! Stop killing our sons! You’ll never win; you’ll never conquer us! We’re Russian, we’re used to hardships and war. We’re survivors, and we have unimaginable endurance; we’ll outlast all of you. And you’ll never drive the faith out of us! And what about you, then? You’re weak, next to us. You can’t drink like we can. You can’t go out into the freezing Russian night to do your business – you need a heated outhouses, even in a war zone! You should try it sometime, German boy, urinating in the freezing air of Russia! Your manhood will fall right off, like an icicle in the springtime. Your rumps are so soft, so tender, you pricks! You’re used to your nice asphalt roads, and your racing motors – and here there’s no such thing as a straight road… You’ll sink in the Russian mud. You’ll fall asleep in a twisted heap in our snowdrifts. You’ll get lost in our forests. You’ll be knee-high in clay on the highways. And then, in the cities, you’ll be stranded in the middle of a raging firestorm! Oh, it’ll be warm then, but there’ll be no cover left to shelter in, once the winter comes…
And then you’ll meet our Siberians! Fists the size of bricks! When one of them smacks you in the ear, the other ear lands in Berlin! Oh, you’ll have your fill here, you civilized European, of blood mixed with shit in equal parts!
We’ll solve our own personal problems all by our own selves, thank you very much! Don’t you go teaching us how to live, when you don’t even speak our language! Don’t come telling us how to be! We’ve got our own ways here! Sit there quietly in your Europe! Don’t go riding around our Russia in your tanks! Our normal life here, that we’re used to, will be the death of you… You won’t make it back from our Russian fields! We’ve got enough birches to make crosses for all of you. Just you remember that, you goddamned Adolf!”




O Finland, how wistful,
And yet how splendid thy spaces!
Gold and steel gleams
The water of thy azure lakes!

Z. Topelius
“A Summer Day in Kangasala”








Captain Panin lay flat on his belly. His head was resting against the swell of a hillock overgrown with moss. “Where am I? What’s happened to me?”
Slowly, he opened his left eye. Something soft and damp was pressing against the other one. Theleft eye saw an amazing berry, similar to a raspberry: large, creased leaves fanned out in various directions from the berry heart itself.
The orange-hued fruit quivered on its long stem leg, as if seeking to acquaint itself with the eye of the human. Great big flame-colored forest ants crawled all over the leaves of grass, the leaves and along the berry’s stem; and there were other tiny bugs and beetles as well; flies swarmed; bees buzzed away – just as if there were no war. Silence and calm were everywhere. For an instant, a
dragonfly hung suspended in the air, right next to him; and then, suddenly deciding to veer off, it vanished.
“Everything’s flying away, flying away, somewhere. But where?”
A ladybug landed comfortably on the berry.
“God, why does it hurt so much in my back, there, under my right shoulder blade? What is that?”

Panin pushed down against the swampy soil with both arms, hard; he raised himself up with considerable effort; he squatted. His head shook. Excruciating pain pierced his body. With a groan, he fell over onto his left side: he kept swimming in and out of consciousness. His head felt detached from the rest of his trunk:
“Why is everything spinning? The forests sounds disappear, then reappear…”

With a huge effort of will, he finally opened both eyes:
“What’s that berry, some raspberry variety?
Ah! That’s moroshka! Karelian moroshka! My favorite berry! Sugary sweet… with that unique subtle tartness. Mama used to make such wonderful preserves from these orange berries! And Grandmother’s moroshka compote with dinner…But who am I? And why have I forgotten my name? What do they call me?”

Painfully he shifted back onto his stomach and with his left hand he tried to reach over to the right side of the back. His hand closed around some kind of handle.
“Oh, my God! That’s the handle of a Finnish knife stuck in my back! I’m wounded? When? Where?
In combat. That’s right, yes! In combat, probably! Go on, remember! Your name is… Nikolai Panin, commander of a reconnaissance unit of the Blatic Sea infantry marines. It’s July of 1944. The Karelian isthmus. We are advancing on Vuoslami. I’m twenty-five years old. Before the war, I was a graduate student of the University of Leningrad. A philologist. My friends call me Nikolai, Kolya, Kolyan. I’m a philologist, language scholar – a military interpreter. I can think and speak inthree languages: Russian, German, Finnish.
I’m a Captain of the Reconnaissance Forces [State Intelligence Directorate]. I have a wife, Katyusha, and a son, Yura, also called Zhora… He’s two already! A little man! Why does it hurt so much?
How is it that I can remember everything that came before, but whatever happened today, yesterday has vanished into oblivion…
Look, there’s the sun in the sky: it dims, it brightens… Why, where am I falling all
the time, all the time? Why is it suddenly so dark? Is it night now?”

Nicholas lost consciousness.He regained it deep in the darkness of the night. The moon hung suspended in the dusky sky, like a field rocket used for illumation; the shadow of the earth had taken a bite out of it. He was shaking from the chill of fever, but gradually his consciousness cleared up: he could remember. He remembered that his recon team of seven men had moved soundlessly along the shores of the Vuoksa. The combat mission was to obtain – at any price – information about the enemy relative to the vicinity of the coming operations of the Red Army and the Baltic Fleet on the Karelian front. The mission goal was to capture talkers – Finnish and German soldiers and officers. The orders were terse and precise: objective intelligence must be gathered by any means necessary; any information gained about the combat readiness of the foe was to be backed by documentary evidence, reinforced by visual observations and the accounts of prisoners. The talkers were not to be brought back across the front. Any information obtained was to be immediately transmitted via encrypted radio communications, in German, back to he command post headquarters for the front. A special combat task of the unit was to identify the targets for attack by the naval aviation of the Baltic Fleet, and the warships themselves. The specified length of the reconnaissance mission was ten days. Captain Panin, disguised in the field uniform of a Finnish lieutenant, was charged with the task to beat the facts out of his captives at
all cost – to ascertain the condition of the deployed troops, about the situation and condition of the reserve and heavy artillery; about the fuel depots; about the boundaries of minefields. The intelligence data he collected he was to transmit immediately via radio; as for the talkers, after interrogation with prejudice, they were to be disposed of quietly, without resorting to bullets: by drowning them in swamps. Above all, don’t allow yourself to be taken prisoner.
“Leave no traces!” the Reconnaissance Colonel instructed them, in his final exhortation to the group.
“Bury everything meticulously: your wastes, your rubbish, the corpses.”
The colonel said nothing about their own corpses. It was clear enough without further emphasis that they were to bury their own every bit as thoroughly, and in the same place – in the Karelian bogs.

All the details of the battle came back to him.
It had been dawn when they had walked into that magnificent, tranquil forest. It was hard to imagine that amongst these tall pines, perfect for building masts; amongst the lush firs, the brilliant white birches; the fantastic, massive granite formations richly carpeted in velvety moss – amongst all these magical fragrances – a deadly hunt was taking place, in which men stalked men. It was hard to believe that death was lurking behind every pure stream, at every bend of the winding trail in this fairy-tale forest.
Out of the blue, as the unit moved out into the meadow, they were fired at. The radio specialist was killed instantly. The lads raced back to take cover under the dense fir growth. They hunkered down. They assumed a defensive circle position. The first thing to do was to ascertain the numerical strength of the enemy; only then could they make any kind of combat decision. Clearly, neither side had expected to come across the other. The adversaries had forced each other’s hands, exposing themselves in the process.

“Most likely they’re recon, like we are. Since they’re lying low,” reflected the Captain,
“There can’t be too many of them. A small detachment, just as we are.”

It was not a large forest. It was obvious that whoever would be the first to emerge in the open spaces along the picturesque shoreline of the Vuoksa would be immediately destroyed. They had to get out of there. They couldn’t just lie around in the thick grass. But how to get out?
The forest was a temporary sanctuary, an oasis, but it was also a death trap for both the Finns and the Russians. There was only one way out: a fight to the finish, in these very woods. The exhilarating expanse of the open field, the beckoning freedom of the meadow, were turning out to be nothing other than life’s end. Naturally, no one wanted to wait for the end to arrive. Combat was
inevitable. An hour went by. Both sides understood perfectly that the smallest movement afforded an excellent target for a sniper. Using his naval binoculars, the Captain discovered that there were also about seven men on the other side:

“Although, my radio man perished. That leaves us with six Russian infantry marines against seven Finnish front line soldiers. Whoever outwaits his enemy, wins.”

The Finns were the first to attack:
 “They must have been given orders to destroy any recon units from our infantry marines. No commander worth his salt would tolerate enemy intelligence operatives in his rear.”
Being well familiar with the Finns’ combat tactics in the forest, the Captain assumed they would already have mounted their cuckoos – snipers – high in the trees of all the possible escape routes available to his team. The cuckoo tactic was purely Finnish in origin – a death trap for Russia’s Ivans. Panin believed they would have at least three cuckoo callers perched in ambush, while a minimum of four Finns on foot would be busy trying to squeeze the six remaining Russians into the line of sniper fire of the ‘forest songbirds.’ A solid concept!
The battle formula was roughly taking shape: the two recon teams would not coexist in the same forest. Of course, it was also necessary to remember that ‘In war, combat never unfolds according to plan, nor according to regulations.’

“How can we outwit them?” Feverishly, the Captain went over all the possible tactical variants of the battle. “Do we feign a rapid retreat back into the depths of the woods?
But how?
While we ‘feign retreat,’ we are forced to cross the cuckoos’ line of fire…They’ve figured out that we’re recon: we’ll be avoiding direct confrontations. Do we force them to pursue us? We’re the ones who have entered their territory, not the other way around. Should we try to hold them back by stretching out our line?
Or change positions?
 But how?

The solution: to force them into hand-to-hand combat, preferably without gunshots and explosions. We go around the meadow and capture their trenches: we turn it around, so we’re on the offensive, not retreating. We cover our traces.”
Sivokhin, his second in command (and starshina), agreed.
Armed with a sniper’s rifle, the Captain crawled over to the left flank, while the other men, dashing from spot to spot in short bursts, made a highly visible run for the denser part of the woods. The Finns opened up out of their machine guns. Ours did not return fire. Panin watched as the arms of one of his soldiers jerked suddenly, flying up into the air, just before he fell onto his back:
“Killed?”

Ducking their heads down, weaving and half-crouching, four Finns raced across the open meadow towards the dead man… Starshina Sivokhin coolly brought them back down to earth with two bullets. The others hunkered down.
“The main thing is to grab a talker and their papers!” the Captain reminded himself, as if giving an order.

Lying in the dense grass, he pulled off his camouflage coat, revealing the field uniform of a Finnish lieutenant, and began to crawl towards the enemy side of the meadow, carefully keeping his eyes trained the place where the survivors must be lying in wait. Once he had reached the shade of a birch grove, he got up and began crossing to the Finnish positions, in short dashes. Suddenly, a
soldier jumped out of the thicket. Startled by the sight of an unfamiliar officer, the soldier gaped, his mouth open.
“What brings you here, Lieutenant? Headquarters sent you?”
“Headquarters!
What’s going on here?
We’re your reinforcements,” the Captain
answered, in Finnish.
 “Report on the situation!”
“Your accent is unusual…”

The soldier began to raise his gun to his shoulder.But Panin was faster than the naïve young soldier: the blade of the Captain’s Finnish knife flashed in the light. The knife sliced into the victim’s throat up to its very hilt. Without thinking, the Finn reflexively grabbed the knife with both hands…
The carabine fell onto a cranberry bush. Captain Panin looked around: no one had noticed him killing the soldier. Hiding no longer, he dashed out into the field and ran for the spot where the other two of the attackers were hunkered down.

“Get down! Get down! There’s a Russian sniper there!” warned one of them, rising to his knees and waving at him.
The Captain hunkered down.
“Stay there! We’re coming to you! Careful! There’s a Russian sniper right beside you!”

A few moments later, the low brush parted, and two young soldiers’ faces appeared in the grass. They wondered if there wasn’t something suspicious about the appearance of the phoney infantry lieutenant, because they rapidly released the safeties of their automatic weapons. And this time again the Captain was faster than his opponents: two precise shots to the face from two meters –
practically at point blank range – instantly killed his two coevals, whom he had just seen for the first and last time in his life. Instantly, the stillness of eternity came over the bodies of the two young men, surrounded by the riotous glory of the incomparable Karelian landscape. In that instant, Nikolai felt neither malice, nor pity, nor fear. It was his job. Searching the bodies with business-like efficiency, he removed their papers, orders, maps and weapons:

“This is a field made for feasting. We should be making mothers out of our young beauties here, not killing each other,” came the involuntary thought. “How many decent young lads have I killed in this war? And for what? How am I to live with such a heavy burden?
Who am I now? A professional assassin? A Russian ex-intellectual?”

An overpowering indifference to everything came over him, then and there.Nausea rose towards his throat. The perception of life and the perception of death were level with each other. He got up to his full height and began to trudge towards the agreed-upon meeting place where the rest of his team would be.

“Strange, no one is shooting!
Where did everyone go?”

Just then the Captain saw, unexpectedly, a tidy heap of Finnish rucksacks, packed with food. He helped himself to some crackers, sausage, cheese, boiled potatoes, chocolate; he sat down under a tree, exhausted, and taking small sips of vodka from a flask, began to wait for his men. “Only the cuckoos are left. But we won’t go towards them. We’ve won the battle. We’ve cleared the road to
the Vuoksa shore. But how many of my men are left?”

Weaving, staggering, limping on both legs, Sivokhin, the starshina, emerged from the brush.
“Sivokha! You’re alive!” The Captain got up and walked towards him. Sivokhin did not recognize his Captain Panin. He was rocking back and forth, staring dumbly at the Finnish uniform of his commanding officer… His eyes were clouding over; his gaze fixed on Panin’s Finnish getup.
Slowly, Sivokhin began to raise his automatic rifle.
“Halt, Vasilyevich! It’s me… Don’t you recognize me? It’s me, your commander!
It’s me, Panin!”

“Aaaah!” groaned the starshina, and toppled over.
His blood gurgled in his throat; the Captain struggled to make sense of the starshina’s hoarsely uttered phrases: “I’m the only one left, the fuckers… Bastards! Cuckoos got all our boys... The whores! I’m pretty sure we got all of them, too, though… Friend… Nikolai…”

Sivokhin was trying to say something else, too, but soon could speak no more. Grieving, the Captain closed his eyes. Out of the entire unit, he was the only survivor, the commanding officer. There’s nothing worse for a commander than to be the only survivor of a mission: “Mission failure. The entire team gave their lives. No talkers captured. No bombing targets revealed, motherfucker! You’re no commander, you’re shit, Captain Panin! What now? Go where? Court martial?
Punitive battalion? A bullet to the ear? Life over?”

Drawing himself up to his full height, he got up and went over the entire battlefield. He stood silently over the corpses of the slain enemies; removed their documents and maps; bade a silent farewell to his fallen comrades; found his discarded camouflage coat, put it on with some effort, and then moved forward again in the direction of the front line: “I must at least take back the captured papers, documents and maps, without fail!”

When he was just about to exit the forest, something small, alive and breathing loudly jumped from a tree onto his back, as might a cat. The Captain felt something sharp dig in under his right shoulder blade. A shrieking pain pierced his flesh, as if he had been given an electric shock. Reflexively tossing aside the load that had fallen on top of his back, the Captain turned sharply: on the ground at his feet he saw, like a small turtle that had been flipped over, the supine form of a very young Finnish boy-soldier.

Just a boy! His eyes were filled with fear. He is babbling something rapid-fire in the Karelian idiom, sticking his peasant’s hands out, palms up, with their fingers splayed out.

“You son of a bitch! You reptile! You killed me!” Panin shouted at him, in Russian, forgetting altogether about his fluency in Finnish. With the last of the strength he could muster, he yanked the trophy signal-rocket flare gun from its canvas holster, and, cursing foully, unloaded it into the kid. Hissing, the signal rocket skewered him in the gut: scattering multi-colored sparks, it bore the soldier-boy away, into the bushes. He leaped to his feet, howling piteously, fell again, and leapt up again. Bengal lights spun wildly, and sizzled, in his torn open belly. Finally, the rocket nailed the boy through his back to the trunk of a pine. Croaking incoherently, he slowly slid down towards the ground, which was covered with pinecones. He was still alive. Next to him, the scarlet-hued berries of Karelian moroshka gleamed strikingly like drops of blood.

“Oh, you no-good fool of a cuckoo! You stupid little brat, why did you have to jump on me? You could have stayed up there, in the top of the pine tree, nice and quiet… You could have let me make it home… You’d be alive, and I’d be alive, we’d both still be here, living and breathing, you idiot!” Nikolai could feel himself drifting off to sleep.

“I’m really tired…”
The Captain woke up in the middle of the night.
“Yes! Evidently, God has sentenced us to depart from our mortal flesh in the midst of this gorgeous beauty…”
Kolya already knew he was waking to his last morning on earth.
“Why did we kill each other? We could have been friends. We could have come over to visit each other. We could have sung songs together. We could have lived, and lived, and raised kids side by side… Hah!”

The morning came.
The day began. The sky remained sunlit, studded with divine clouds. Death drew nearer. There was no need to hurry anymore. God was right there, by his side.

Kolya had always loved to make out some fantastic shapes and figures in the masses of clouds: “There’s an elephant! And there’s a royal castle! And over here you have a cow with horns grazing in mountains of clouds! And there’s Mephistopheles, with horns!” He would see faces, masks, profiles, white airy flowers, devils, women, men, coaches, ships, steam locomotives, all in turn,
taking shape across the heavens, and then disappearing…The pain had left his body. His soul rested. It was making peace with itself before its eternal sleep. The Captain crawled up close to the moroshka and, smiling, his eyes full of tears, tenderly picked a berry with his lips…
He felt its familiar sweetly tart flavour in his mouth: “And so it ends! Finita la commedia! Sleep, sleep…”

He closed his eyes: a succession of faces appeared, one after another. His baby son, legs kicking; his wife – with sadness in her eyes – kissing him for a long, long time; his scowling father shaking his finger in disapproval; his mother, smiling tenderly; friends running away across an open field; a crowd of strangers walking by; a bucket of blood going down a well full of dark water; smoking coming back in reverse through a stove chimney… Nikolai Panin stepping onto the porch of his parents’ home…
There was no fear of death. There was only regret, that he had lived so little… And of his short life, two-three long years at the front. What had he seen? His hand had grown used to killing others before they could kill him. He had never envisioned his own death. And now, here it was! Death had arrived. Reality was dissolving as his consciousness began to flicker out… Eternity was slowing down the ticking hands on the clock… He began to see visions: he caught glimpses of girls, young women, women… And then, all at once, there he was, covering it all up, shoving it aside and taking over, that soundlessly dancing boy in the uniform of a Finnish soldier: the burning rocket is still lit in his belly; soundlessly it whirls on, scattering showers of sparks, of festive fireworks, while the child-soldier keeps laughing away…

The boy jumps around merrily, now making the funny steps of the popular Finnish folk dance, polkis; he grabs Kolya by the hand, attempting to drag him, pointing upwards into the blue haze of the northern sky:
“Get up! Get up, my friend! God’s tired of waiting for us!”
Someone’s otherworldly voice, from far away, is reading a poem by Tegengren:


My soul is kin to a dust-mote
That clings to the wings of a moth,
To a dewdrop, transparent, untainted,
In a blossom’s open mouth.
I race with the rebel whirlwind,
I shriek with the grief of a bird:
I am earth:
I, earthly ashes,
To ashes seek to return!

Unexpectedly, Nikolai felt himself to be weightless. Effortlessly, cheerfully he soared high above the universe.
“How strange, all the same, to see one’s self from a distance, to see the mortal remains of the deceased flesh lying upon the ground: the head is poking up oddly against a hillock, wwhile the rest of him is standing nearby. Next to him, the berries of Karelian moroshka are nodding at him with their heads, shedding their pure, transparent dew upon the ground:
“Good-bye, Nikolai, good-bye! We’re the tears of the North…”
“How perfect! The Karelian moroshka can speak!”

But the Finnish soldier boy is tugging at Kolya’s hand. Like two friends, spinning in a weightless dance, they are borne aloft at great speed, embracing like two siblings, inside an infinite black pipe towards some bright shining drop of light, far away – to the start of a new life, perhaps, but yet a different life, one filled with eternal peace, solace, and love.What bliss begins, when war is left behind!


The bitter smoky summer of 1944 enveloped Karelia in its shroud.A young soldier, seventeen or so, wearing enormous, beat up shoes over the standard canvas leg and foot wrappings, in a formerly white uniform shirt shot full of holes, that had been handed down repeatedly from one slain comrade to another, darted relentlessly between the white tents of a military field hospital, leaping wildly to and fro like a hare on a mission. A dented, dirty helmet that had seen and connected with bullets and shrapnel kept trying to slide off the boyish shaven head and onto his animated grey eyes. He pushed it back with one hand, while the other grabbed at the sleeves of passing nurses and field medics, as he bombarded them in turn with his urgent question, speaking rapid-fire and accentuating the vowels in the manner of his countrymen:

“Have you seen Masha Sokolova? Where’s Masha Sokolova? We’re from the same village. We were seatmates in school! Masha, Masha Sokolova, where are you?”
“Over here, Shurik!”
A tall, comely girl emerged from one of the housing tents.

The Russian North never skimped on beauty or tenderness, when it brought forth the unique beings that are the young girls and women of the woodland communities. Long meandering hunts for mushrooms in the dense forests; warm, steamy milk frothing with freshness; grandmother’s sweet cheese pastries to complement that milk; all the luscious berries in the world; slumber in haylofts; the songs of the long evenings; the mischievous tingling frost; the indescribably pure and luxurious air of the forest – all these elements combined to instil the women of the Russian north with a rare, radiant, untainted beauty; and endowed them with their unsurpassed health, a kind, easygoing nature, and a loving, affectionate heart. Masha Sokolova was no exception. Everything about her exuded solace, cheer, encouragement: and she was beautiful to behold. The military uniform emphasized the feminine charms of her body: the neatly pressed uniform shirt, cinched at the waist with a belt; the navy blue, form-fitting skirt; the tall, trim boots with their canvas tops; the short haircut all made soldier Sokolova look more like a dancer from a song and dance unit sent to
entertain the troops, than a worn-out field nurse at the front.


He rushed at her and collapsed at her feet, on his knees:
“Maaa – shaaa! Sweetie, sweetheart! Light of my life! I found you, oh, my darling girl!”

“What’s the matter, Shurik? Get up! Come on, is that really you? You’re embarrassing me,” Masha whispered.
 “Don’t go acting all crazy! You’ll turn me into a laughing-stock!”

“So let them! You listen to me! Hear me out! There’s a war on! I only have two hours! Understand? We’re going into battle today, crossing the Svier, to the other side, you know…” Shurik waved in the direction of the river.
“I might not make it back alive. Can’t we just go inside your tent together, you and me?
Can’t we just be together I’ve loved you all my life, since I was just a kid!

All those times I was just afraid even to go up to you. Funny, isn’t it?
See, now I’m not scared anymore. There’s a war, what’s to be scared of?
Me… You know, I’m ashamed to tell the other lads, I’ve never even been with any girls yet.
See, I might die like this, get killed, and never even know, what it is that the other men fight over, even stab each other for. In wartime, it’s those crazy bullets we have to worry about, not how love works, not how we’re afraid of being alone with a girl…”

“But I love you, too, Sasha, more than life itself! You know that! Come on, get up! Come on, let’s go, come on in, I’ll take you inside my tent!”

Maria bent low over Shurik. With motherly care, she slid her arms under his and lifted him up onto his feet. He pressed hard against the palms of her hands, and nearly shouted with relief:

“Oh, what an idea! Goodness! So you love me, too? And is this what war does?
God, what joy! You were always my dream, the impossible, unattainable dream, the girl I couldn’t possibly hope for! If it weren’t for this war, you would have walked straight past me, probably wouldn’t even have paused to spit in my direction. You’re so beautiful! It was my dream to marry you! And if they don’t kill me today, I swear, I’ll marry you, I will! Will you marry me?”
“I’m already marrying you, my love…”


Their eyes filled with tears. Maria pressed up against him with her whole body, choking back tears, covering his wet face in a flurry of kisses:
“I’m your wife from now on, Sasha: your wife! That’s my heart telling you!”
“And I’m you husband, Masha! I feel it! I know it, I know God meant for us to be
together!”
“Come on, Sasha! Let’s go! Come on! You’ll live, you’ll make it back… I’m your true love, your soulmate! I’ll be yours forever. Come on, come to me, my love. Let me comfort you, like your true lawful wife, let me hold you, caress you, kiss you all over! Only, I beg of you, in God’s name, darling, come back alive from the battle. I’ll be waiting for you right here, with all the love inside
me…”

Maria snuck Alexander into her tent. Her girlfriends considerately left them alone, went off a little ways from the ‘connubial tent’ and stood watch, a kind of honor guard of women keeping outsiders away. None of the other soldiers or officers were allowed to wander into the vicinity og the field shrine to love:

“Mashka’s only allowed two hours with her husband from the advance forces, who got leave to see her before the big push!” was what they told their comrades who came strolling by. The men understood, and quietly envious, made a sad detour away from the ‘love station.’

In the morning, at dawn, Alexander landed on the other side of the Svier, on the banks held by the foe, as part of the storming battalion of the infantry marine of the Lake Ladoga flotilla. Not all the marines made it across the flood meadow and as far as the edge of the woods. They were mowed down dead, their bodies slamming into their native earth, with machine gun crossfire from enemy positions; they were shredded with shrapnel from mortars; their feet were blasted off with anti-personnel mines – but they had yearned so long for the welcome counteroffensive that would drive them further into their lands, reclaiming their place all along the Karelian front, that even the fear of death could not diminish the force of their assault. Sasha raced into the woods alive, even unscathed. The thirst for freedom was greater, mightier than death. It was his own childhood woods.
He had come here often before the war, with Masha, to pick mushrooms or berries. Combat in the forest turned into hand-to-hand fighting. Everything became chaotic: no one knew who was where, who was who – enemy, or friend. Shells and mines from both sides, your own, the others’, walloped the tall trunks of the mast-length pines, exploding over the heads of the soldiers; in the trenches, in the woods, men who had never met before ferociously tore at each other’s flesh, rending their counterparts asunder, turning bodies no different from their own into bloodied piles of human flesh, using knives, bayonets, their own teeth and jaws; heads were bashed in and skulls cracked with rifle butts; noses were smashed and eyes knocked out with fists and boots and bits of metal; throats were sliced through with small field shovels, as they drowned in blood and strangled curses in one huge explosion of enraged and savage hatred.He fought as if in a dream. At some point, he lost his hearing and all sense of fear: a large mine went off very near. He was saved from certain death by having, seconds before, tripped over the corpse of a German soldier, and rolled headlong down a steep incline into a well-like ravine. He worked like a robot that was out of control, spinning like a top, miraculously dodging bullets and bayonets. Mechanically, without thinking, he kept on shooting at everything that moved; kept on throwing grenades, for a few minutes more, until another mine went off right next to him. Shurik went flying up, his body spinning around itself several times in the air, and then came slamming back down into the ground. He could not feel any part of himself; stunned, deaf, blind, concussed, Sasha kept trying for some reason to jump up again, to run, until a fragment of shirt-front grenade blew open his chest….

The back of his head rested on the trunk of a charred pine tree. His eyes were wide open: unseeing, they stared up at their own familiar northern sky. The grey irises were imbued with the look of his first and last and only love, now permanently etched.

A week later, the field post brought Maria Sokolova the death notice.
The postman averted his eyes as he handed her the small envelope, without a word. The envelope contained a photo of her taken before the war. On the other side of the photograph, Alexander had written, in his own hand: “This is my wife. I love you, Maria!”

Dark traces of blood stained the picture. Her face almost black with emotion, Sokolova charged into the secure command most of the hospital chief:
“Comrade lieutenant colonel of the medical service!” Her voice trembled.
 “I’ve lost, I’ve lost my fiancé, that is to say, my husband. Here’s the death notice. We didn’t have time to get the marriage registered before he died. Help me get it registered!”


The lieutenant colonel had already been informed of Shurik’s visit, and also of his death:
“That’s impossible, Masha. Go, my dear girl, have a good cry, rest a bit, drink some vodka. Thereare no city halls at the front where we can hold weddings, solemnize marriages. Here, bullets rule. How can you expect me handle weddings, marriage licenses?
I had ten combat officers die on my operating table today. All of them were young, healthy men. They had their whole lives in front of them! And how many others lost arms, legs, feet today? I’ve stopped counting.
They crossed the Svier under fire. There was nowhere to retreat, no cover. Who was luckier – the ones who died or the ones who survived with wounds? I have no idea. Go, Mashenka, go sleep a while. Go cry your heart out! It’s good for you, crying over it, my dear girl… I have a daughter, just like you… You know… Well, and she died of starvation in Leningrad, because of the blockade – and here I am, still here, amputating the legs, the arms, the hands, the feet of healthy young men…”

Stumbling, staggering, as if in a fog, Maria barely made it to her tent, and collapsed into her bunk. She found the flask with the medicinal alcohol in the space under her mattress. It burned her throat; she downed what remained in one gulp: the leavings of her wedding celebration. Her head began to swim. Her body still remembered the intensity of Alexander’s passionate lovemaking…All at once, Sokolova began to keen and wail like a common peasant woman, like one of the crones from her village, uttering visceral lamentations that sprang up from somewhere deep within… It was the way all her ancestresses had mourned, all her long-gone foremothers, and her grandmothers, losing their men, their lovers, their sweethearts, their husbands, their friends, their sons in Russia’s interminable successive world wars:“Granddad was killed in the first great war; Father died in the Finnish campaign… And now Sasha, here… My darling! When will all these deaths finally come to an end?”


Maria leaped to her feet; she paced frantically back and forth along the narrow aisles of the hospital tent, like some beautiful captured lynx in its prison cage; her whole body shook and once more she collapsed into her soldier’s blanket, trying to stifle her own voice with her shirt, with a towel, even her fist – just to be able to stop, somehow, to quell that unstoppable torrent of ancient, primeval, eternal sorrow that had come crashing down all about her, and could never be contained.

***
Chapter 19
THE FLAVOR OF HUMAN FLESH


That evening, Dresden fell into a disquieting hush, even as it plunged deeper and deeper into the artificial darkness created by the deliberate black-out orders. Every glimmer of light was to be shuttered, masked, hidden away from view. At sunset, a black foreboding of death’s imminence flooded the streets, the dwellings, the very souls of the populace. Even the birds had given up on
their exuberant songfests. Only the softly whispered prayers in the churches remained as a final refuge of an as yet unvanquished hope. At midnight, the nocturnal city that for centuries had been perfumed by the peaceable fragrance of gardens and of parks, suddenly shuddered into fear, hearing the sky throb with the distant drone of hundreds of airplane engines belonging to massive bombers:

“But maybe they’ll fly on, to another place?”

But the ferocious roar of the planes intensified as they relentlessly drew near, causing the citizens to stare with worry at the fragile structures of the cellars of the elegant, ancient houses. Too worried to cry, children pressed tightly against their mothers. All at once, the bursts of defensive anti-aircraft fire came, and they seemed louder, and more embarrassingly desperate and futile, than anyone could have anticipated. The power failed. Carbide lamps were lit. The cherished tiny tongues of flame provided by wax candles quivered timidly within the protective enclosure of the cupped palms of the condemned. Suffering human beings, their heads tilted back and turned upwards, stared hard in silence at the ceilings of the cellars and bomb shelters.

“Lord, send Death elsewhere!”

A tiny child began to cry. The first huge high-explosive bomb hit with a resounding, muffled thud. Immediately, what seemed like an endless succession of explosions hammered the ground like a thunderous drum roll. It seemed as if some invisible Someone, in a paroxysm of rage, was using with an gigantic sledgehammer to pound away at the roofs of those historic homes, gloating as he
pulverized the beauty of history into dust and ashes. A carpet of fire insatiably consumed the past, enveloping it in the annihilating furnace of war. As the warplanes drew closer to the government buildings, to Hitler’s own state chancery, the howl of the massed English bomber engines, merging with the continuous thunder of the anti-aircraft guns, the crackling bursts of rapid-fire Oerlikons, the screech of sirens, was now accompanied by the raucous din of splintering wooden beams, of timber and panelling ignited in the monumental conflagration, and by the ringing of shattering glass as windows were blown out. Hellfire rained down from the skies. Clouds of powdered brick and cement swelled into billowing cascades of dense burning soot, racing wildly along the vacant
streets, covering the pavement, the squares, the parks, the bridges, the abandoned buses and tramways, the orphaned private automobiles, and the ruins of houses in a thick layer of greyness and oblivion. The formerly green trees of the boulevards had been stripped of every vestige of life, having been turned into the stark, blackened skeletons of prehistoric dinosaurs. Carbon monoxide fumes, mixed with the scents of heavy soot, had displaced oxygen. Collapsed walls blocked roadways. Those who were still alive envied the dead. Somewhere nearby, an animal screamed in agony: it was a human person still alive although charred to the bone. The bomb blasts drew closer. Ursula clutched her one year-old Walter tightly to her breast, praying aloud:

“Lord Jesus Christ, our only hope, calling upon Thy love and Thy mercy,
 for the salvation of the soul and body of my innocent son Walter…
Save us, O Lord, from all manner of evil, grant us this day salvation and peace…
I know you are with us here, now, Lord…
You will come to us, you will take away this terror…
Do something for us, please…”

God did not hear Ursula’s prayer.
A many-ton bomb bulging with high-explosive ordnance easily pierced all five stories of the ancient house and burst right in the midst of the crowd of women and children as they knelt, praying. Instantly, the blast converted all the bodies into ash. But still the English planes came coming at Dresden, wave after wave. After the heaviest bombs came the so-called fire-sticks, the incendiary bombs, and then yet another wave, of mid-sized shells intended to shower anyone still present with explosive fragments. Next, a swiftly moving tide of yet more warplanes showered the ruins of the city with masses of smaller bomblets, containing white phosphorus. By this time, even the stones were in flames.
Wrapping up the parade of death, in a kind of grand finale to the proceedings, came the fighter planes, buzzing low overhead, strafing fire engines and any individual feeling civilians in sight, those pathetic human forms that darted about like cockroaches in the sea of fire and smoke.