We only had twenty miles to go but Timoshenko interrupted the journey twice to get out and relieve himself by the side of the road.
He was in boisterous high spirits but I clung to the handholds inside the car and winced in terror at his misjudgment of curves and his lead-footed recklessness.
By the mercy of his Slavic gods he delivered us intact into the village of Bykovskiy, not too many miles above Yalta. My appointment was with a man called Vassily Bukov whose letter to me in care of Gazeta Sebastopol identified him as a postal official who had served in wartime as batman and orderly to General Tyulenev, who had commanded the Trans-Caucasus front against the Germans in 1942-1943. I had high hopes for the interview; a general’s batman is as good as a prime minister’s butler for providing the kind of human glimpses of key leaders that can make the difference between a dull story and an exciting one.
I had made the appointment by telegram and it had been confirmed the same way; I had suggested the time and Bukov’s reply had named the place—his flat in a communal boardinghouse on the square opposite the railway station in Bykovskiy.
We had no trouble finding the place although when he attempted to park the car Timoshenko bumped right up onto the curb and threw a scare into two small boys who were playing there.
Bukov had been watching for our arrival. He greeted us at the main entrance—introduced himself, shook hands and led us upstairs to his bed-sitting room. He looked about forty-five but he must have been at least fifty to have served in the army beginning in 1941, as he said he had. A spare man, ascetic features, short grey hair shaped into a widow’s peak. He wore a high-neck sweater and a pair of slacks that seemed much better tailored than most Russian clothes. He would not have been out of place in the same costume on the Riviera: he had the appearance of self-confidence and self-assuredness that you would expect of a tycoon or an aristocrat. My expectations began to drop the moment I set eyes on him. He looked the type who would stick to formal history and refuse to reveal any personal touches about the general whom he had served.
Bukov waved us to chairs. His room was archaically spacious, a Czarist anachronism of heavy carved moldings and a stone hearth on which a wood fire blazed. The furniture was old, steady, simple; with its row of windows and its high ceiling the room seemed underfurnished. He had no carpet and there was only one table which evidently he used for dining; it was near the back corner where there was a small stove and sink. An old desk with many scars squatted beside the corner window opposite. The panes allowed a good view of the rolling farm country that began immediately behind the boardinghouse.
The first hour was desultory; the conversation was the ordinary thing—he asked me about myself and my work, he gave a shorthand sort of self-summation (lifelong bachelor, son of a tailor, not much of a reader but a great lover of music—he had a Gramophone and a surprising collection of recordings and his radio looked first-rate and expensive) and he asked me how I was enjoying my visit to the Crimea. The only remarkable thing I noticed was that he did not ask me very many questions about America.
I eased him toward the war and General Tyulenev and he followed my lead without resistance. Speaking slowly, selecting the dry phrases with care, he discussed the Caucasian, Ukrainian and Crimean campaigns from a semi-scholarly viewpoint more characteristic of a strategist than of an orderly. He spoke excellent Russian with a neutral Moscow accent; his vocabulary was formal. He said he came originally from Smolensk. I have said his reminiscences were on a grand strategic scale but they were enriched by many dramatic, if impersonal, details.
Thus, in the late summer of 1942 the Germans had been massed for an armored attack toward Grozny, and Tyulenev had learned through his intelligence branch that the German assault was to be determined and massive: the Wehrmacht had orders to break all the way through the Caucasus, on into the Middle East and on down all the way to Egypt to link up with Rommel. Tyulenev’s job was to halt that blitz in its tracks, and to accomplish that purpose he mobilized nearly one hundred thousand civilians onto twenty-four-hour-a-day shifts to build antitank ditches and fortifications across the line of German advance ahead of Grozny.
Because he didn’t use his own troops for these construction jobs, Tyulenev was able to muster a big enough fighting army to stop the Germans cold at their Mozdok bridgehead. They never went farther; winter came, and after that the Germans were on the defensive.
I had known all this before but Bukov gave me a number of details I hadn’t seen. For instance the tank traps were devised by Tyulenev himself and were far more effective than the ones prescribed by regulations that dated back to the First War. They consisted of trenches dug across the roads and then covered with plywood or thin sheet metal and a thin layer of gravel. The bottoms of the trenches were mined. The Germans found it much harder to avoid a concealed trench than to maneuver through an ordinary field of pit-type tank traps; they lost hundreds of tanks in Tyulenev’s mined trenches.
Bukov had quite a bit of that sort of thing. It was interesting but it didn’t provide the personal glances I preferred. Nevertheless I did my best to pump him and we were still at it three hours after my arrival.
In the meantime Bukov had been a good host. He had been an officer’s gentleman; he kept a neat home and served us little tea snacks cut into exact squares—bread and caviar and cheese—and he kept our glasses filled with beer. He kept the fire roaring and smoked a strong pipe of Russian tobacco; I thought it was the heat and smoke and the beer that put poor Timoshenko to sleep. He spent a while politely trying to smile and pay attention but he kept nodding and presently he dropped off, sliding to one side in his chair. He hung there with his head lolling, supported on the arm of the chair, the fingertips of his right hand trailing the floor. Bukov smiled briefly in his direction and went right ahead with whatever he had been saying.
It had begun to drizzle in the middle of the afternoon but that didn’t deter Bukov from rising to his feet and suggesting we go outside for a stroll and a breath of air. I needed a reprieve from the smoky stale heat of the room and I got up to go with him but I do recall making some remark about the rain; Bukov said it didn’t matter. He had an umbrella and we walked through the town square under it, and along the pavement beside the railway track. Bukov kept talking steadily, a stream of wartime reminiscence; I stopped to make an occasional note and he waited patiently, his umbrella shielding my notebook from the rain.
Then we were past the edge of the village with the last house behind us and Bukov said abruptly, “Are you. carrying a listening device?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? Do you mind if we look?”
I stiffened but he waggled his free hand impatiently. “I have some things to say to you that shouldn’t be overheard. Shall we make sure?”
“Do you mean to search me?”
His cool eyes appraised me. I wasn’t afraid; it was more indignation.
Then he said, “Suppose I mention the name Nikki.”
“How did you …?”
“Let’s be sure of our privacy first, shall we?” He nodded toward my clothing and now curiosity had replaced my indignation and I turned my pockets out for him. He didn’t rifle anything, he just glanced at my possessions and then he moved up close to me and asked me to hold the umbrella while he had a look at the buttons on my various garments. “Sometimes they sew a button on your coat when you don’t know about it.”
“I doubt they’d bother in my case. I’m not a spy.”