Good People (39 page)

‘Remember!' Thomas shouted after him. If only he dared push Hermann down the stairs. ‘Our story has only one ending.'

‘Now you're the thug,' Hermann taunted over his shoulder. ‘Doesn't a cultured man like you despise us?'

‘I've always been one,' Thomas shouted. ‘Every man has a limit, you know, and once you go past it, we're all thugs.'

BREST

OCTOBER 1940

The rust-coloured spires of the fortress disappeared behind the grove of trees. Cold breezes stirred the reeds and grasses on the riverbank, where birds and butterflies hovered, and the entire landscape was tranquil. Her boots sank into the moist earth and withered leaves crackled. Sasha breathed in the fragrance of the grass and the moss with pleasure. The trunks that leaned over the river were reflected in it like huge railway sleepers. Yellow leaves fell, and she reached out to catch and crumble them into tiny flakes that clung to her skin. She walked to the edge of the grove, where the vista opened up to reveal scraps of the plain, dotted with black tree skeletons, visible everywhere during the winter.

It began to drizzle, the plain widened and the canopy of clouds curved over it like a grey dome. The gloom that had departed while she was walking in the grove pressed down on her once again. She remembered her dreams of the past few days. In each of them something of Vlada and Kolya appeared—the twins were using a knife and a
hoe to split the thigh of a large bird that looked like Stepan Kristoforovich, and Mother scolded them: You're supposed to hold a thigh in your hand; Podolsky and Reznikov were gnawing the wooden screen in the twins' room; Circassians were dressed in officers' coats like Vlada's, punctured with bullet holes.

Ahead of her, black smoke rose behind barbed-wire fences. She rubbed her face with her gloved hands; her feet were mired in the claggy soil. ‘The bog is cruel, sucking down terrified people first…' her grandfather used to say of his ancestors who had disappeared in the swamps of Saint Petersburg. She stopped, listened to her own heavy breathing and tried to restrain her imagination. It was just mud. It came in a multitude of forms: as black muck, as puddles from which mounds of moss or disintegrating leaves poked out and as grey heaps that looked soft and smooth like fur hats, but concealed a swampy layer. As she stepped, the gluey droppings clung to her feet.

She was assailed by her memories of the past few weeks: Belorussian villages slipping past the train window—Baranovichi, Kobryn and perhaps Molodechno too—huge expanses of earth, galloping horses, mules with their heads down and tails dragging being whipped by wagon drivers, massed prisoners digging a canal with gloved hands. ‘This is a mighty national project,' shouted zealous officers still in their teens, ‘joining the Dnieper Basin to the Bug, and we will finish it at any cost!' They stood on the banks, and all around them was a motley crowd of shrivelled bodies wallowing in mud, the horizon dotted with wagons and scattered brown specks of humanity. Now Grandfather's stories became real: endless swamps, people crammed together in them like potatoes in a field. That was how Saint Petersburg was built. Were Mother and Father digging a canal in the mud now? For a moment she lost her balance, glanced around, but the grass and the reeds and the birds had already disappeared.

A young officer leaned on a barrel, smoking. When she drew near he threw his cigarette away and stood up. ‘Comrade Weissberg. I am Lieutenant Grigorian,' he said in broken Russian.

‘Hello, Lieutenant.'

They walked over a wobbly wooden bridge. A truck was bogged ten metres below them. They stepped off the bridge and back into the mud. She could feel its weight clinging to her boots. They passed by piles of garbage with its stench of rotten food, torn leggings, burnt tyre rubber, machine parts wrapped in canvas. On the side were latrines full of sludge. Motor oil fumes rose from two flimsy wooden barracks that were certain to collapse on the first day of winter.

Muddy silhouettes leaned over nearby, shovels in their hands. Around them were red cannon barrels, the only patches of colour on the plain—a group of soldiers in woollen coats. Soup spoons were thrust in their coat belts next to their bayonets. They shouted, pounded on their comrades' backs, trampled the mud, spattered more mud. Why was it that every time she saw a bunch of boys or young men she looked for Maxim Podolsky?

Some of them were cursing two soldiers who were running after a pair of rabbits trapped in a small yard enclosed by a tangle of barbed wire. The two swayed in the mud like drunks, plunging their bayonets into the ground, trying to pull them out to the shouts of their comrades. At last one of them stabbed his bayonet into the belly of one of the rabbits. He stood up and with a lazy, flamboyant gesture twirled the bayonet with the speared rabbit on it above his head, dwarfing the soldiers around him, a statue rising from the plain. Dark red stained his fair hair, dribbled down onto his muddy forehead and then darkened his face to his lips.

Applause, whistles and curses filled the air. The other soldier stabbed the second rabbit in the head and stood next to his friend. The bodies of the rabbits twitched. There was blood everywhere. The soldiers bowed to the cheering crowd. The bayonets and rabbits bowed with them. Soldiers in the vicinity stopped digging and walked across. Their faces were the colour of the plain, and only the white circles of their eyes suggested there was a man behind the mud.

The rabbits would provide each soldier with a piece of meat the size of a matchbox, Sasha calculated.

‘They're very hungry,' said Grigorian.

‘That's no reason to behave like savages,' said Sasha.

Grigorian seemed to be in two minds about how to respond, but then said nothing. In Belorussia, in its miserable cities, tiny villages and army camps, everybody—aside from other NKVD—kept quiet when she spoke to them.

‘Lieutenant Grigorian, is there something you want to tell me?'

‘Sometimes the soldiers work for weeks without any meat.'

‘I'll make sure the relevant authorities know.'

‘The soldiers will appreciate your help.'

‘I very much hope that the office of Comrade Lev Mekhlis will view it with the same appreciation,' she said and realised her tone of light friendliness conveyed a threat, the legacy of Stepan Kristoforovich.

Grigorian did not reply. The young Caucasian officer, who had been transferred to Brest from the Twelfth Army (in the NKVD they now sarcastically called it the ‘Army of the Caucasus'), had probably never heard of Lev Mekhlis. They walked over to a cluster of soldiers who were casually heading for the wooden huts. Grigorian stopped, thrust his fingers into his belt, and hummed a melody. She was tempted to rebuke him: You know why I'm here. Take me to Nikolai. But his surprised look, as if something obvious had escaped her eyes, stopped her. In her work she had learned that, if you're groping in the dark, unable to apply any logic to your feeling, you keep a courteous silence. Grigorian was following the same principle. She almost laughed.

The image of the soldier waving the rabbit flashed in her mind. She removed the backdrop, the other soldiers, the rifles and the uniforms from the picture, and just when she seemed to understand she heard Grigorian call out the name of Private Nikolai Weissberg. Out of the cluster slipped one of the soldiers. The end of his bayonet oozed with a tiny rabbit eye. A patch of muddy blood bloomed on his pale cheek.

She said to herself: When I saw you before, you weren't exactly Nikolai.

Grigorian walked over to him and took the rifle from his hands. Nikolai's gaze followed the bayonet as it moved away. She came up to
him, stripping off her gloves, and when he turned around to her she breathed in the odour of grease that clung to his uniform, the smell of the sweat that she once knew, but which now reminded her of the sweat of the men who gathered in front of the bulletin board on the second floor of the offices. The surprise left his face, his jaws locked and there was a chill in his eyes, as though he was defying her: Look at the time that has passed and now lies between us; forget about gestures that belong to another time.

She was determined to ignore his silent demand, and felt a flicker of contempt: did he think there was any other way? Her cold fingers fluttered on his face. He didn't move. In his childhood he used to hum a tune to the rhythm of her fingers. For two years she had been picturing how she would caress his face, and sometimes he appeared in her nightmares as one of several skeletons, all of which she was caressing with a do-re-mi. The fresh blood on his cheek warmed her frozen fingers. Her eyes stopped there. Strands of rabbit fur, which looked like unravelled stitches, clung to his skin. Without a word, or changing the movement of her fingers, she removed them: her smile concealed the disgust.

He hadn't changed so much after all. He'd grown a little taller, his shoulders were broader, his stance was balanced, his shaven head emphasised his black eyes that now looked too large. His tiny wisps of beard looked artificial, like make-up. She could draw something similar on her own chin.

‘How did you injure your hand?' he asked. The childish tone, yearning for her affection, was absent from his voice.

‘An accident in the office,' she answered.

‘Vlada died in Finland.'

‘I know.'

‘He fought there.'

‘I heard he fought well.' She hadn't intended to lie. It was a ready-made sentence that flew out of her mouth without her intervention.

‘I met someone who was there for a few weeks. He said that all his comrades were buried in the snow, their tongues and eyes were
gouged out. The dogs preyed on the rest.'

She said nothing.

‘Did you know that he and Seryozha torched Brodsky's apartment then?' Nikolai said.

‘I suspected it was them.'

‘Did he deserve it?'

‘No more than them all, and no less.'

‘And Mother and Father?' he asked.

‘They're in Siberia.'

‘Alive?'

‘As of July, yes,' she said.

‘Did you get any letters from them?'

‘They aren't allowed to send letters. I heard from other sources.'

‘It's interesting that you're NKVD now.' There was no tone of defiance, just stiff resignation to the facts.

Every fluid memory of the past two years froze at the sight of him standing there. He stroked his soup spoon, as if he only wanted her to clear out—maybe they would save a cube of rabbit for him. Everything that was once between them seemed to have happened in another life—the nights when they had lain side by side in her bed, sorting the shadows on the ceiling and mocking Vlada and Father (never Mother), and imagining the handsome engineer from Paris who would marry her and adopt Kolya—all those luminous pictures now seemed like such a wonder that she could only doubt them. Strange how things that were happening now gripped you and attached you to them, and not only you but everything you once were. Every sentence she wanted to say was emptied of meaning, because this soldier wasn't the object of her longings.

Are you your body? she wanted to ask.

And are you
your
body, his defiant eyes answered.

‘You're very close to the border,' she said.

‘The headquarters of their Panzer division is about eight kilometres from here,' he answered. ‘Just across the river, where those groves are, there.' He pointed at the darkening horizon where abundant
copper treetops swayed. ‘That's the front line of the Wehrmacht.'

‘Really very close,' she whispered, repeating the sentence that Maxim had murmured when he visited her in Brest. They had stood, hugging each other, and looked at the Bug River. Maxim talked obsessively of all kinds of rumours circulating in the Foreign Office—the discussions in Bucharest about the Danube had failed, and, even worse, Molotov's visit to Berlin had ended in fiasco. He knew this from an authoritative source. ‘Oh, you move in such enviably informed circles, Maxim Adamovich,' she said, and pinched his nose.

‘It's hard to be well liked,' he agreed, and they both laughed.

His friends in army intelligence said that the Germans had already transferred around eighty infantry divisions to the border area, as well as mechanised and armoured divisions. They were paving roads, building railway lines, preparing airstrips. ‘My dear,' he said. ‘It deeply disturbs me that you're in the city closest to the border. They're right across the river.'

He looked at his watch and called out distances, the time needed to build bridgeheads, to cross the river, and wrote down in his notebook the speed of the German Panzers on various surfaces. At last he announced that if there were an attack they would reach Brest within forty-five minutes.

‘Exactly,' Nikolai now hissed. ‘We're one of the forts closest to the border. On a clear day, I could show you their foxholes and the cannons and Panzers. Our intelligence doesn't believe that those Panzers are their heaviest tanks. They might be hiding the really heavy model.'