Batov nodded.
‘Can you prove it?’
He nodded again. ‘I have the proof. Enough proof for it to seem almost suspicious. But it is proof nonetheless. It is proof that cannot be questioned. Enyoperovezhempe geraenka.’
He glanced out of the window. ‘It’s stopped snowing,’ he said. ‘We could walk, I suppose. It’s not far to the hospital. Me, I walk there every day. But you Germans don’t much like walking. I’ve noticed that when you invade someone else’s country you do it at great speed, and in as many vehicles as you can. You Germans, with your cars and your autobahns. Yes, I should like to see those. Germany must be a beautiful country if people want to get from one place to another at such enormous speed. Here no one is ever in a hurry to go anywhere else in Russia. What would be the point? They know it’s just as shitty somewhere else as the place you are now.’ He grinned. ‘Are you too drunk to drive that car of yours?’
‘I’m too drunk to take proper care of a pretty girl, but I’m never too drunk to drive a car. And certainly not in Russia. If I hit someone or something I’m not likely to care very much. I’m a German, right? So fuck it. Besides, a bit of fresh air will sober me up in no time.’
‘Again spoken like a true Russian. We have plenty of fresh air in Russia. Much more than we need.’
‘That’s why we came,’ I said. ‘At least according to Hitler. We needed the space to breathe. That’s why we hanged those two German soldiers this morning. It’s all part of the master race’s master plan to extend our living space.’ I laughed. ‘I’m drunk. That’s the only reason why it seems funny, I suppose.’
‘In Russia that’s the only reason anything ever seems funny, my friend.’
We left the apartment and I drove us down to the hospital. Despite the fresh snow, with all the cracks and potholes the car had little trouble in gripping the road. I felt like I was bouncing around on the floor of the plane from Berlin.
‘Do you remember I told you about Lieutenant Rudakov and how he fell and cracked his head on the floor, while he was drunk?’ asked Batov.
‘Yes.’ I swerved to avoid a cart and a horse in the middle of the road. ‘I’m beginning to understand how he must have been feeling.’
‘The lieutenant suffered a depressed skull fracture. I was able to repair his skull, but not his brain. The pressure on his brain caused a haemorrhage, damaging delicate tissue – speech centres, mainly. That and the acute insult to his system that was the amount of alcohol consumed was enough to render him an invalid. Most of the time he’s little better than a marrow. Quite a decent-looking marrow actually, as he still has a few moments of lucidity.’
‘Christ, Batov, you don’t mean to say he’s alive – that he’s still here? In your hospital?’
‘Of course he’s still here. This is his home-town. Where better to care for him than the Smolensk State Medical Academy?’
The man in the wheelchair did not look like a man who had helped murder four or perhaps five thousand people, but then, as I’d learned from first-hand experience, few men do. There were men in SS police battalions with faces like Handel’s favourite choirboys, who could charm the birds from the trees. Sometimes, for murder to take place, murderers must be full of smiles.
Arkady Rudakov’s ears were of normal size, his forehead was as upright as a parlour piano, his eyes and nose were quite symmetrical and his arms were of the usual length and without any tattoos. He didn’t even drool in a way that might have been described as savage or atavistic, and after Batov’s description of an enlarged flea, bloated with blood, it was almost a disappointment to meet a handsome, open-faced little man of about thirty, with a full head of luxuriant dark hair, a smiling, feminine mouth, small hands and warm brown eyes. He looked like a tailor or a baker – someone who was good with people instead of someone who was merely good at killing them.
Rudakov’s voice was no less improbable. Every few seconds he would say the same thing: ‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba. U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’ He had a cartoonish sort of voice, as if his chest was never quite filled with enough breath to make a man’s full voice, or as if someone had tried to strangle him.
‘What does he keep saying?’ I asked Batov.
‘He says “Everything is all right, thank you”,’ said Batov. ‘Of course he’s not all right. Never will be again. But he thinks he is. Which is a small mercy, I suppose. At first when officers from the NKVD came to visit him they would ask if he was all right and he would make this answer. But it was soon evident that he didn’t tend to say much else.’ Batov shrugged. ‘It was a very Soviet answer, of course. Always when someone in Russia asks you how things are, you make this answer, because you never know who’s listening. Any other answer would be unpatriotic, of course. But even the blockheads of the NKVD realized that there was something seriously wrong with this fellow. That’s probably the only reason they left him here and alive, because they didn’t think he was likely to pose any kind of threat to them. I suspect if he’d been the gabby type they’d have taken him away and shot him.
‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’
I pulled a face. ‘I can see why they weren’t worried. With all due respect, Doctor Batov, I can’t see this fellow making much of a witness. Not one that would satisfy the ministry of propaganda, anyway.’
‘As I said, there are times when he’s quite lucid,’ said Batov. ‘It’s like a window in his mind opens and a whole load of fresh air and light flood in. During this time he is capable of conducting a conversation. Which is when he told me all about the murders in Katyn Wood. Curiously it’s the numbers he seems to remember. For example he told me that among the dead were a Polish admiral, two generals, twenty-four colonels, seventy-nine lieutenant colonels, two hundred and fifty-eight majors, six hundred and fifty-four captains, seventeen naval captains, three thousand five hundred sergeants and seven army chaplains – in all some four thousand one hundred and eighty-three men. Did I say five thousand? No, it’s just over four. These lucid periods never last long however, but because of what he says I thought it best to keep him here, in a locked room. For his protection. Not to mention my own. And most of the other people in this hospital. There are one or two nurses who share this secret. But only the ones I trust.’
We were in a private room on the uppermost floor of the hospital. There was a bed and an armchair and a radio – everything a man who was no longer in possession of his senses might have needed. On the wall was a picture of Stalin, which was enough to persuade me that I was probably the first German who’d been in there since the battle for Smolensk. Any self-respecting German would probably have smashed the glass, which might be why I chose to ignore it.
‘U me-nya vsyo v po-ryadke, spasiba.’
Batov regarded his patient kindly and leaning over him for a moment, stroked his cheek with the back of his hand.
‘Kak ska zhesh,’ Batov said gently to Rudakov. ‘Kak ska zhesh. Ti khoro shii drug.’
‘So much for wanting to kill him,’ I said.
‘You mean me?’ Batov shrugged. ‘What good would that do? Look at him. It would be like killing a child.’
‘If you’d been to school in Berlin, doctor, you’d know why that’s not always a bad idea.’ I lit a cigarette. ‘Some of the damn children I knew.’ The match caught the loon’s eyes like a hypnotist’s gold watch. Experimentally I moved it one way, the other way, and then flicked it onto his forehead, just to see if he was putting on a dumb show. If it was an act, his middle name must have been Stanislavski.