Another Green World (8 page)

Some of the others had come along and now supported themselves as prostitutes. Ladoshka, declaring she had no energy for that kind of thing, taught herself tricks with cards. The most important of these, she confided to Butler one night outside Kiev, was to reveal the Two of Hearts and solemnly aver that the young soldier's beloved would remain faithful to him always. It was an easy trick to learn, though she found it harder to master the concomitant art of dispassion. When the boys' eyes filled with tears, Ladoshka (who had never been a mother) wanted to take them into her arms like babies. But that would have been unprofessional.

She was still asleep, snoring lightly, her face lost in a tangle of gold necklaces and black hair, when Butler slipped out of the tent and onto the hard barren ground at the outskirts of Rownje. All the little gifts from America—the coffee; the cigarettes; the costume jewelry, for Ladoshka; the novels by Steinbeck and Dos Passos, for Puak—had been handed out. All the necessary contacts had been made or reestablished, stories filed, toasts offered and drunk to. No needful thing remained undone. Ordinarily
Butler would have savored a few days' respite from the line. But this morning he felt anxious, unable to relax, like a farmer with one eye on the calendar, feeling winter edging up on him.

He walked toward the center of town, using the damaged cathedral as a reference point. The thought of winter—the fierce and unforgiving Russian version that was coming all too soon—fed his jittery mood. He tried to figure the day's date but could get no closer than the latter part of September. Or was it October already? But then, nobody relied on dates anymore. Time was reckoned by geography.
Outside Kiev. At the outskirts of Rownje.
It wasn't only Butler. He could remember a thousand conversations in which someone said, “I've known him since Vinnitsa.” Or, “He got killed some time ago, before Kharkov.” “First or second Kharkov?” “Third. When our side finally won.”

Didn't Wagner have something to say about this? In
Parsifal
, Butler thought.
Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.
You see, my son, here time becomes space. Something to do with the strange land of the Grail. But then, for Germans, that old dream of conquering the East was something of a Grail quest, wasn't it?

Here time becomes space.
Place-names floating in a sea of years—a notion more Buddhist than Marxist. And so was the manner in which cities, like transmigrating souls, shuffled off the mortal coil of names and populations and national affiliations only to be reincarnated in quite different forms. Thus Lodz, formerly of Poland, had been reborn as Litzmannstadt, East Prussia. Lwow, a Ukrainian rail center, became Lemberg in the German province of Galizien, identical except for its striking dearth of Jews. Brno, a Czech town noted for its university and its arms plant, became Brünn, in the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich presiding; and though its university was shut down, the arms plant was going strong.

Nations themselves were no more permanent: Poland, at present, did not exist. Its eastern provinces were part of the Soviet Union, its western half annexed by the Greater German Reich; the rump in between was called the Generalgouvernement, a land with no name and no future, by Hitler's personal decree.

And now the wheel of history was running in reverse. The ancient fortress-city of Königsberg had lately become Chojna. Soon Danzig would be Gdansk, and if things played out as Butler expected, Berlin itself would be known as Karl-Marx-Stadt, the bustling hub of a new Soviet Socialist Republic.

Reckoning time by cities, Butler was half a year past Dnepropetrovsk but probably still a few months short of Prague. He had always wanted to see Prague. He hoped there would be something left of it.

Cheered by anticipation, he rounded a corner onto the main avenue, where the rubble had been sufficiently bulldozed to allow the passage of an armored column while still permitting foot and motorbike and Cossack pony traffic along the berm. The scene resembled a bazaar. Black marketeers had set up their stalls next to open-air clinics where Red Army medical corpsmen treated the local populace for scurvy, skin rashes, gonorrhea, gunshot wounds, infestations of lice, infected lacerations, gangrene following kitchen-table amputations, broken noses, jaws and limbs, among other side effects of the recent German occupancy. On all sides, courtesans of many ethnic types brazenly plied their trade. Newly arrived conscripts gathered in huddles, their weapons and ammo belts dangling awkwardly from shoulders that looked too thin to hold them. Battle-weary veterans sat in the shelter of crumbled buildings, eyeing the whole scene with blank-faced indifference, dragging deeply on horrid
makhorka
cigarettes made from Turkish stems and leaf stalks rolled in brownish, fast-burning Russian newsprint.

All the while, only a few feet away, a convoy of trucks rumbled through, waved along by a traffic control officer who called out vehicle ID numbers to an NCO jotting unhurriedly on a clipboard. The trucks were mostly American-made, interspersed with domestic models of varying types, some of impressive antiquity, along with the occasional tractor tugging a farm wagon, half a dozen horse-drawn carts and one noisy half-track manned by Mongolians in crisp parade dress. A supply run, Butler surmised, headed out to some depleted and shot-up field command. The long logistics tail that so often wags the fighting dog.

He waited for a break in traffic, then trotted over to where the old public library stood, a ruin among other ruins. Half a block off, he saw the helpful sergeant from Foreign Press Liaison standing at the edge of the road in conversation with a short man wearing a uniform Butler didn't recognize. The Russians had not shaken off their Petrine fondness for uniforms—tokens of class in a classless society.

The sergeant seemed to experience that telepathic tingle that comes from being watched; it took her a moment to find him in the crowd, then she smiled and pumped her arm. “Comrade Sammy!”

Butler raised a hand in greeting. She called again, but the words were lost in the growl of a passing truck.

“You've come just in time,” she said as he approached. The uniformed
man stood nearby, seemingly forgotten. “Transports are just leaving for your sector. All your parcels are loaded. Everything is arranged.”

Butler acknowledged this with a nod. Then he sensed that she expected something more, and he added, “Thank you, tovarich
.
The packages are important to me. I knew I could entrust them to you.”

This appeared to satisfy her. Still, it bothered Butler that his customary ease in such dealings—the effortless flow of compliments, the lighthearted flirting, the whole shtick—momentarily had failed him. Was it a symptom of having been too long at the front, or too long away from it?

“We have just made some tea,” the sergeant told him, unable to keep a note of hopefulness out of her voice. “If you would care to—”

“No. Thank you, I'm just …” Butler shrugged. He didn't know what he just was. He needed a change, but didn't know what kind. The thought of Ladoshka, tangled amid her bedclothes, filled him with unaccountable despondency. He barely remembered to say goodbye before turning back to the jostling, noisome, disorderly yet somehow purposeful street, crowded with comrades who didn't seem to care where they were going, so long as they'd find Germans to kill when they got there.

The other end of town was a tidier quarter where the devastation was less thorough and the Front's Operations Center had set up shop. Less of the black-market Mardi Gras here, more of the sober business of winning a war. Lower-grade officers scurried about on urgent assignments while their superiors clustered along sunny, well-swept patches of sidewalk swapping secrets and smoking
papirosi.

Butler thought of approaching one of these groups, introducing himself and conducting an impromptu interview—
Highly placed Red Army sources have told this reporter—
but as he was stepping into the street, a truck veered around a corner and nearly ended his journalistic career on the spot.

He yanked himself back, heart pounding at the near miss. The truck squealed to a stop. From the driver's-side window, a dozen meters up the road, a head emerged, surmounted by a crimson bandanna. Instead of making an apology, the man yelled: “Quick! Get into the truck! Comrade, hurry!”

The head disappeared. On the opposite side of the cab, the passenger door popped open. Butler was caught between anger and an instinct more fundamental to his character: curiosity. He circled to peer through the open door at the driver, who was gesturing frantically.

“Jump in now, or it will be too late!”

Butler placed the man's accent somewhere in the Caucasus. He boarded the truck, a late-model Lend-Lease Studebaker, and silently recorded this subtle indication of status: Studebakers were the most highly regarded of Yankee vehicles, for their tenacity in the awful mud of autumn and the truly unnavigable mud of spring. The driver hit the gas as soon as Butler's foot cleared the road, the door jerking shut from the force of acceleration.

“Thank you, comrade!” the man said, grinding through the gears.

Butler gave him a once-over. He was on the large side, though shorter and more heavily made than Butler. His hair was black under the bandanna, and he wore a swooping, Cossack-style mustache. His clothing comprised a motley of unmatched uniform parts. The topmost layer was a hard-worn, oft-mended infantryman's jacket. At his collar he wore a major's pin, and on his sleeve a patch identifying him as a sniper—a special decoration issued during the most vicious stage of the street fighting in Stalingrad, when the nation's attention had been seized by the daring exploits—some real, mostly imagined—of men and women scrabbling like rats through the burning, dying city, picking off Fascists one by one.

Only after recognizing the patch could Butler identify the object on the seat next to him, strapped carefully in place as if it were a third passenger. Just longer than a baseball bat, it was padded with rags and stuffed into a leather satchel shaped like a slender, battered golf bag. Clearly a cherished personal possession, and Butler could guess what.

The driver caught him looking. His mouth curled in what might pass for a smile. “I'm called Seryoshka.”

Butler nodded: a nom de guerre, he thought. “I'm Sammy. I'm a journalist—a war correspondent.”

The man's hard stare was, perhaps, a commentary on Butler's accent.

“What's the rush?” Butler asked.

“You'll see.”

The truck slowed. By now they had retraced Butler's own route and were nearing the Orthodox cathedral.

“See that man up there?” said Seryoshka.

“The one in the Uncle Joe suit?”

This drew a chuckle. Stalin, like Hitler, was famous for his modesty in personal attire. The thin fellow by the road ahead wore a simple, unmarked gray tunic over black trousers, exactly the sort of man-of-the-people costume preferred by those who were anything but.

Seryoshka chuckled. “That's my politruk
.”
He pronounced the slang term for a political officer with distaste—the only way, Butler supposed, of
pronouncing it. “We've been reassigned together, the two of us. Old comrades, you know?” He eased the truck to a halt, abeam of the officer in question.

“Ah, Comrade Major,” said the
politruk
, smiling cheerlessly, showing large and well-tended teeth. He glanced at his watch. “I was wondering when you would come.”

“Unavoidable delay, comrade,” said Seryoshka. “There's been a change in plans. I've been assigned to escort this foreign reporter. A Westerner, writes for the most important papers.
New York Post, Chicago Star.
A real VIP. Doesn't speak a word of Russian. Needs a full-time minder.”

“I see.” The man looked doubtful. But whatever his doubts may have been, he wasn't eager to voice them in front of a Western journalist.

“I checked at the dispatch office,” Seryoshka went on, “and they say there's another truck headed out later. Sometime after three. Wait here, they said.”

The
politruk
narrowed his eyes. Butler supposed such men always suspect they're being lied to. Seryoshka gave him a big grin, and he responded by waving him off, resignedly. Seryoshka had won a round, but the fight would continue.

“Ha!” he exulted, once they were safely away. “That was a good one. You have my gratitude, comrade. Look in the map box there, you'll find something to celebrate with. Which way are you headed? I can drop you, if you like. There's plenty of petrol.”

“Right up to the line,” Butler told him.

“Yes?” Seryoshka eyed him with new interest, taking his eyes for what seemed an imprudently long time off the pitted, washed-out road. “Which part of the line?”

“The sharp edge,” said Butler. For some reason, he felt compelled to prove himself to this hardened survivor of Stalingrad, with his sniper's rifle cradled in the seat between them. “Special Reconnaissance Company, 104th Guards Division.”

Seryoshka gave a loud, unexpected laugh. “So that's the sharp edge, is it? That's good. That's very good.”

Butler couldn't decide what to make of this boisterous Cossack. He just sat there, waiting, as the truck bounced crazily along. Soon Rownje was behind them. Ahead lay an empty and devastated countryside—and beyond that, destiny in all its dark splendor.

“Perhaps you can tell me, comrade,” said Seryoshka, breaking a long interval of silence, “what ‘special reconnaissance’ means. I've been wondering for a while now.”

“You have? Might I ask why?”

The Cossack offered him a wry, side-of-the-mouth smile. “It's my new assignment. Me and that asshole back there, we're both headed up to join this unit of yours. This Special Reconnaissance Company. I have been given to understand…”

Butler noted the shift to more formal, academy-grade locution. Seryoshka held his gaze, and there was no mistaking the intelligence in that open, unblinking stare.

“… that something interesting is about to happen in your sector. Some unusual operation. I was told nothing definite. Only that my particular talents—that's how they put it,
your particular talents—
might be useful there. I wonder what you can tell me about that.”