He offered to lead the men back to his cabin, and to put them in touch with a partisan Atrad under the command of Andrei Barabanschikov, which had begun forming in a remote area to the south of his cabin.
The soldiers agreed at once, and Pitoniak led them from the valley where they would soon have perished without his help.
Arriving at the cabin, Pitoniak built a fire in the potbellied stove.
The men stood by, hands held out towards the heat-hazed iron, faces blotched white with the beginnings of frostbite. They spat on the stove plates, watching their saliva crack and roll around like tiny fizzing pearls before it disappeared. When their clothing warmed, the men began to scratch themselves as dozens of cold-numbed lice came back to life.
Taking pity on these men, Pitoniak fed them sapkhulis tsveni stew made from deer kidneys, dill pickles and potatoes, which he had made for himself before he set out for the valley.
The soldiers wept with thanks.
After they had eaten, they sat naked by the stove, running candle flames up and down the seams of their shirts and trousers. The fires spat as lice eggs exploded in the heat.
When this was done, the soldiers bathed in an old wooden barrel filled with rainwater which stood behind his cabin.
As Pitoniak watched them set aside the filthy remnants of their uniforms and step out of their boots on to pale, trench-rotted feet, Pitoniak wondered if the Barabanschikovs would even take them in — three more mouths to feed and the men half dead as they were.
He was not the only one to have these thoughts.
That night, as the men lay sleeping, one of the soldiers rose to his feet, took up Pitoniak’s gun and shot the gamekeeper where he lay in his bunk. Then he turned the gun upon the other two men, killing them as well.
The name of this man was Vadim Ivanovich Malashenko.
After burying the bodies in a shallow grave, Malashenko made himself at home in the cabin. Over the next month, he steadily ate his way through Pitoniak’s food supply.
When Malashenko’s strength had finally returned, he set off in search of the Barabanschikov Atrad and it was not long before their paths crossed in the Red Forest.
Seeing that this former soldier had a gun and was not on his last legs, like so many others who had come to them, the Barabanschikovs accepted Malashenko into their ranks.
He had been with them ever since.
Malashenko never mentioned the cabin to the other partisans, but sometimes he went back there on his own. In the evenings, he would sit by the fire, staring at the newspapers on the walls. The shellac had aged with time, forming a yellowy glaze over the pages. The papers dated back to the 1920s and although Malashenko couldn’t read, the thousands of unfamiliar words transformed into a thing of beauty separate from their hidden meanings.
By the end of 1942, Malashenko had become convinced that the days of the Barabanschikov Atrad were numbered, along with all the other partisans in the region. Hidden among the trees, he had seen the SS death squads at work — trenches dug in the sandy soil and truckload after truckload of civilians, partisans and captured Red Army prisoners arriving at the place of execution. Stripped naked, they filed into the pits, huddled and obedient, where they were dispatched by men wearing leather aprons and carrying revolvers. It was the acceptance of their fate which haunted him, even more than the killings, of which he had already seen more than one man could properly encompass in his mind.
Malashenko knew that he would have to act now if he wanted to avoid ending up in a pit like those others but, at first, he had no idea how to proceed. After several days of pondering the situation, he came upon a solution which would allow him not only to survive but to prosper in this war.
It had been staring right at him, every time he walked into town.
Among the new occupiers of Rovno were men with big ideas, which only the privilege of rank could bring to life. He saw them in their finely tailored uniforms, gold rings winking on their fingers. He watched them sitting in the cafés, now open only to their own kind, laughing with beautiful women, whose shoulders had been draped with precious furs. As Malashenko passed by, staring with undisguised longing at their steaming cups of coffee and the fresh bread on their plates, they glanced at him and looked away again, as if he had been nothing more than a handful of leaves stirred up by a passing gust of wind. The disdain of these women only increased his admiration for the officers who owned them. For such men, Rovno was only a stepping stone, a place to be plundered of its wealth before setting off once more upon the road to greatness.
One person in particular had caught his eye; Otto Krug, director of the German Secret Field Police — the Geheime Feldpolizei — for Rovno and the surrounding district.
For a man like that, thought Malashenko, information is the source of power. And I have information.
But what to ask for in return? Cash was no good. When paying for food or clothes or tobacco, Malashenko could no more easily explain a wallet crammed with Reichsmarks than he could afford to let his partisan brothers know that he had been collaborating with the enemy. It had to be something that would not raise the suspicions of those who, like Malashenko himself, suspected the worst in everyone.
The answer came to him as he trudged through the forest one day, gathering mushrooms for the partisans’ communal cooking pot. It was a warm afternoon and perspiration trickled down his forehead, stinging his eyes and wetting his dusty lips. And suddenly Malashenko realised what he would ask for in payment. ‘Genius,’ he muttered, licking the sweat from his fingertips.
The answer was salt. He would trade information for salt. Throughout history, people had substituted salt for money. Even the Roman soldiers, whose isolated garrisons had once clung like limpets to this landscape, received salt as part of their salaries.
Salt had always been expensive, even before the war, but once the fighting began all available reserves had been snatched up by the military. Only those crafty enough to have hidden away their supplies could get their hands on it now. Malashenko might not have been rich. He might not have been the kind of man for whom salt was always within easy reach. But Malashenko was exactly the kind of individual who might have hidden his supply from the claws of government. That was a story even the most suspicious of his neighbours would believe.
These days, a person could buy anything with salt. From now on, that was exactly what he intended to do.
On his next visit to Rovno, Malashenko walked into the headquarters of the Secret Field Police, located in the former Hotel Novostav. With cap in hand and gaze lowered humbly to the floor, he stood before the desk of Otto Krug.
Krug was a giant of a man, with a boiled red face, wispy white hair and huge fists tucked into pale green doeskin gloves, like bunches of unripe bananas. He wore these gloves, even inside his office, due to a bad case of eczema that split his fingertips and left his knuckles raw. The condition had appeared shortly after his arrival in Rovno, and he blamed it entirely on the stresses of his new job.
As a result, Krug despised Rovno. He hated everything about it. Even before he arrived to take up his post, Krug had already begun scheming for promotion to one of the larger, more important cities of this soon-to-be conquered nation. Minsk perhaps. Or Kiev. Odessa. Stalingrad. In the wide scope of Krug’s ambition, even Moscow was not out of the question, provided he first took advantage of all the opportunities available to him here in Rovno.
When Malashenko explained that he was a trusted member of the elusive Barabanschikov Atrad, Krug pulled out a Luger pistol and laid it on the desk in front of him. ‘Why should I let you walk out of here alive?’ he asked.
With his eyes fixed on the gun, Malashenko explained what he was prepared to do.