They sent him back to the occupied territories in hopes of retaining some sort of ideological bridgehead. Their new slogan: humane and correct treatment. He was as pliable now as one of Buchenwald’s little “doll boys” who offer themselves to the Kapos in exchange for food. From the train, he thought he heard shooting and screaming. He got drunk then and muttered: Between the breasts of Zoya…
Excuse me, my dear friend, laughed Strik-Strikfeldt, but perhaps I shouldn’t report that comment to your wife!
In Kiev a man who’d been waiting in the lavatory whispered, in words as evenly spaced as the numbered silver standards of vanquished regiments: General Vlasov, I was a waiter at the big Nazi banquet this March. And I heard what the quartermaster said. He was quoting the Reich Commissioner of the Ukraine. I was so horrified that I memorized every word. General Vlasov, he said, and I swear this: Some people are disturbed that the population here may not necessarily eat enough. The population cannot ask for that. One merely has to keep in mind what our heroes at Stalingrad were forced to do without…
Vlasov smilingly clapped the man’s shoulder: But what can we do now? It’s too late. We have to go forward and perform our best, don’t you see? Because otherwise, everything we believe in would be endangered.
In Riga he saw a German private beating and kicking a Russian artist for being five minutes late to an agitprop meeting of the Vlasov Men. He sat watching; helplessly he rubbed his heavy eyes.
For the May Day celebrations at Pskov (which lies on the former Stalin Line), Vlasov appeared only when they menaced him. He’d been reliably informed that many more White Russians as well as Jews had been shot. He shaved; he cleaned his German boots. A standing ovation! Afterward, approaching the line of 
dignitaries, all of them with their hands in the pockets of their long grey cloaks, he found himself compelled to bow forward in order to grasp the barely extended hand of the -colonel, who smiled stiffly and said: You Russians are not soldiers as that word is usually employed. You are ideological enemies.—Vlasov shrugged. He hardly cared for his own life anymore, or so he supposed, the anguish of his lost love now failing into dormancy, but still viable like a virus, waiting for contact with the host, which was why that host, his integrity, had to smile gently and stay away, waiting patiently for his love for her to die. Off to another factory, to serve the workers hope instead of bread! Then, with true Germanic mobility, he continued back to Riga, the railroad tracks’ rank grass failing by a long shot to grapple with the grey summer sky; and here he had to meet with more workers and then with a delegation from the Orthodox Church. Justifying the existence of his still hypothetical Russian Liberation Army, he quoted the proverb A Russian can bear much which would kill a German. (Whenever he thought of Russia, unclean feelings afflicted him, like water and blood seeping out of mass graves.) In Luga the crowds broke through the police line as they were almost to do years later in Moscow when the American pianist Van Cliburn made his debut.
Do you wish to be German slaves? he dared to shout.
No!
Then fight at my side! Fight for a free Russia on equal terms with the Reich! Show the Germans what we can do!
The -men smiled in disgust. (Come to think of it, the Germans beside Vlasov were always smiling just a shade too broadly in the photographs.) In the aisle, a Waffen--captain and Strik-Strikfeldt were arguing in low voices. The Waffen--captain said: If one gave Vlasov’s army a flag—
We have!
… And his soldiers honors, one would have to treat them as comrades with natural human and political rights, and the national Russian idea would break through. Nothing could be less desirable to us than such a development.
Yes, yes, said Strik-Strikfeldt, smiling straight into the curtainlike, willow-like wings of the eagle on the Waffen--man’s tank battle badge, but, if you don’t mind my saying so, might it not be counterproductive to take absolutely everything from the population here?
Captain Strik-Strikfeldt, I’m not sure you appreciate the situation. Aren’t you aware that the Führer himself has already decreed that within ten years our eastern territories must be entirely German?
Indeed, my friend, I’ve been told of that, although I’ve never seen any—
Then don’t get above yourself.
(In enthusiastic corroboration of his thesis that the military situation could still be reversed, Vlasov was earnestly explaining: The problem of developing a tactical breakthrough into an operational breakthrough is only now being solved.)
Please excuse him, for he thinks in Russian. And, after all, from a strictly rational point of view—
I’ve read Vlasov’s manifesto. It’s a stinkingly rational manifesto, to be sure.
The audience was applauding Vlasov now, but afterwards the only person who came forward to speak with him was a functionary from the -Building Inspection Office for Russia. Strik-Strikfeldt, trying to improve his pet orator’s morale, said: My dear fellow, you’ve done for the occupied territories what Shostakovich did for the other side at Leningrad last year! What powerful propaganda!
My intention was not to make mere propaganda.
He seemed satisfied then, for they’d indulged him as they would have a little child, letting him get in the last word; but then they saw him sitting with his head in his hands. Strik-Strikfeldt ran to him: Is something wrong, old fellow?
Just a mild case of operational shock, he said with a broken laugh.
In the prisoner-of-war camps he addressed the senior block leaders, who wore black armbands. (Someone was playing the accordion.) He proposed to them that fighting imperialism might be better than hauling stones up quarry steps until they collapsed and were shot; better than being torn to pieces by -dogs, or being buried alive by trembling Jews who were then themselves buried alive; better than the experiments in the decompression chamber at Dachau (their blood didn’t boil until the altitude-equivalent was above seventy thousand feet). Soon he’d raised a million Vlasov Men, a million Russian soldiers fighting for Germany. He said to them: If we can help the Reich resist for another twelve to fifteen months, then we can build ourselves up into a power factor that the West won’t be able to forget.
Himmler got a transcript of his speech at Gatchina, the infamous one in which he dared to call the Germans “guests of the Russians.” The-Reichsführer was furious. He reported this treason directly to the Führer’s headquarters, in consequence of which the order went out to remand our Slav directly to a concentration camp. Meanwhile, the Vlasov Men were disbanded. Strik-Strikfeldt, who knew how to get around all obstacles in the most refined way, found his protégé a nice little villa on Kiebitzweg in Dahlem, not far from the Russian Liberation Army training camp.—Don’t tell him he’s actually under house arrest or he might feel a little trapped, he advised Heidi.
Are you sure it’s healthy for him to live in a fantasy?