“That is not my view.”
“No, you had a choice. Of sorts.” He walked to the bookcase and pulled out a bound manuscript. He opened it at the first chapter. “Just read the beginning,” he said. “I’m going to bed. When you’ve read that first chapter come up and join me. Or not. As you choose. But choose, Lydochka.”
He laid the book on her lap and left the room.
She read.
On the night of my seventeenth birthday we crashed through the remnant of the SS Charlemagne Division opposite our sector and rode on the back of the self-propelled guns of a Guards Artillery Brigade into East Prussia.
That night we marched and fought until dawn and all around us in the darkness we could feel and hear the reality of Soviet power. The greatest Army that the world had ever seen was blasting its way into the heart of Fascist Germany. I, who could have been still at school, saw the dawn of my eighteenth year on the edge of a great plain with small neat townships among well-tended fields.
As I scooped my ration of balanda, the gruel issued at first light every day, Mischa Kropoyan, our sergeant commander, came back from company headquarters.
“Throw it away, lad,” he said, his thumb jerking contemptuously at my mess can. “Don’t waste your appetite on that muck.”
He was barely two years older than me but he had fought at Stalingrad and Kharkov and a whole string of grinding battles from 1943 on. He was a front-line soldier to his black-nailed fingertips, a wily Georgian if ever there was one who would scrounge and browbeat and steal for his own men. Me, he treated in an almost fatherly way, coaching me through the winter’s battles until I, too, gained that curious sixth sense for survival that makes a front-line soldier.
“Listen, Uncle,” I said, “I’ll throw this balanda if you can be sure we’ll get a bread ration today.”
He took me by the arm and drew me to the edge of the low escarpment. “See all those farms,” he pointed across the ordered plain before us, “in every one of them hams hang from the fire rafter. Bottles of schnapps cluster in polished cupboards. And hiding in the barns and cellars, women. All for us, Igor. Today, your Uncle promises you, will be the last day of your virginity.”
I supposed I blushed, because he clapped me on the shoulder and bellowed with laughter. “It’s official,” he said. “Whatever’s down there is all for us.”
“Official.” I thought of my straitlaced Soviet father, a collective farm foreman. The only Soviet official I had really known.
“In this life,” Mischa said, dropping his voice, “you have to learn to read between the lines. Listen, I have just been to company headquarters. Usual orders for the day’s advance, estimates of opposition, ammunition resupply schedules, all normal workaday stuff. Except one little item. Soviet military personnel entering former Reich territory are to have the right to send home one parcel of six kilos every month. Officers much more.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Six kilos of what?”
“Exactly, little brother,” Mischa grinned. “How long is it since you have owned six kilos of anything? Not since you put on a brown side cap and pinned a red star to the front. So the six kilos, Igor, can only come from down there, from those neat little villages. Of course in their wisdom our military authorities know it. And you can be sure they also know that there’s no way on earth to encourage a front soldier to take the ass of a pig and leave the ass of a woman.”
I was shocked because I believed Mischa was right. Those six-kilo parcels were an official license. What would my father have to say about that?
Yet if I was shocked I was also greedily excited. Looking down on those farms that morning I thought not of six kilos of dresses for my sisters or shoes or curtain cloth for my mother, or even smoked hams. I thought of the women huddled in the cellars, and Mischa’s promise. And I tossed the mess can of balanda into a bush as the company bugle blew the order to move forward.
We advanced all morning, our loudspeaker trucks up front with the infantry blaring sentimental German songs interspersed with demands for surrender from the pockets of German troops still fighting on. I never admitted it, of course, but I couldn’t help admiring the last-ditch bravery of the men of this beaten Army.
At a village called Regensmarck a new unit of shock infantry passed through our battalion and we received orders to consolidate on this line. Mischa nodded toward the single street of houses in front of us and winked. “As sergeant commander,” he said, “I’ve decided we’ll leaguer up in this village for tonight.”
A pair of T-34s rumbled through the village, shock troops fanning out protectively around them. From the shuttered houses there was no movement.
Mischa let the tanks reach the ridge beyond the village and motioned us forward. My legs were trembling. “Work through from house to house,” Mischa had said. “Any Fascist opposition gets the bullet. The rest…” he rolled his dark eyes, “is for us.”
I found myself with Loshkin and Krassansky, a pair of small leathery Siberians a dozen years older than me. We had circled round to the back of the village main street and broken into the garden of a larger house than most of the others.
“Cover me,” Krassansky said. And he ran forward to hurl two grenades in quick succession. Shattering the glass of a ground-floor window they exploded inside with a dull double crump. The kitchen door flew open. Perhaps it was already unlocked.
Loshkin and Krassansky disappeared through the smoking doorway. I followed.
I was in a large wall-papered kitchen, the walls scarred by the flash of the explosions, the lace curtains still smoldering.
A wooden dresser contained row after row of undamaged blue plates. A blue-enameled stove occupied one wall.
Upstairs I could hear Krassansky whooping with delight. I entered the hall as he came bounding down the stairs wrapped in an embroidered bedcover through the folds of which the barrel of his tommy gun poked. “Nobody up there,” he said. “But just take a look at the way Fascists live!”
Then from the cellar we heard Loshkin shout. “Women!” he yelled, “down here, you two.”
Krassansky leapt past me trailing the bedcover and disappeared down the cellar steps. For myself I hesitated.
I could hear the women pleading below. Behind me one of the lace curtains smoldered into flames. I tore it down and stamped it under my boot.
“Bukansky,” Loshkin called up the cellar steps. “Come and get a piece of this.”
I started down the stone steps. I was sweating; trembling, too. As if some fever was upon me, as indeed it was. From the darkness came the squeals of women. I strained my eyes. White legs thrashed beneath the heavy brown shapes of the two men.
A woman was standing beside me. Blond hair pulled back from her forehead. Heavy breasted under a white apron.
“Frau, komm,” my voice issued from between suddenly parched lips. I gestured to the darkness of a corner with the barrel of my Thompson.
She shook her head. “I’m an old woman,” she said in Russian. “I could be your mother.”
I am not a violent man. To this day I find it hard to believe the surge of anger that passed through me. I poked hard at her belly with the barrel of my machine gun. She rocked back against the wall.
“Over there,” I shouted.
“At least,” she said quietly, “let us go upstairs. Not here, in front of my daughters.”
To this day I don’t know what my answer might have been. Mischa’s voice bawling down the stairs has swept everything else from my memory. “Counterattack,” he yelled. “Panzer SS.”