Good People (56 page)

The truth was he was saying nothing new, but as if in a nightmare he heard himself declaiming sentences from the past. These ignoramuses might be impressed, but he knew his motor was running on empty.

He wandered in circles around Germany. At the end of the year, on a dull winter day, he found himself in a village in the Saar district. Snow fell and melted. When he approached the church, some girls shouted at him, ‘Get out of here, you rotten ghost. We've heard enough fast-talkers from the city in old suits. Our men at the front would have killed you.'

To his astonishment he discovered he had already been in this village. Could he be blamed for not remembering? Red-tiled roofs, two-storey houses, little velvet lampshades, lawns, giant elms, an oak leaning over a muddy path, one or two taverns, fleeting welcome smiles, black nights—everything looked the same. It was possible that he would knock on Frau Gruner's door again.

The people's pride in victory was intertwined with their fear of defeat. He had no delusions—even if it took fifty years he knew how time eats away at the victors, how lethal its destructive power is, even during the exhilarating hours of glory, when it seems that life will always be like this. This awareness was imprinted in him. No one asked him whether he wanted it. To be means to sell your soul, with all you've got, each morning each day. He had no better definition of his life: to make your dreams big enough to let you escape the fear of extinction for a while. A clever man was a true believer in his life's work.

Where was he heading? He was sprawled in a chair on a balcony, cold winds whipped his face and he struggled to dismiss the question. Where was he heading? To places he had already been, where people were still waiting for him to scatter the fog he had left behind? How could he do that? The truth was that he himself was a cloud of fog that invited people in and then swallowed them up. Sometimes he observed himself from outside: what did others see? A grey cloud around the outline of a body and, on the edges, a black suitcase. A moment ago he was here and stunned everyone with his magniloquent performance. Now he was already far away, swallowed up on a train moving through a field among poplars and firs. Maybe he had gone north to the mountains that surrounded the village, and maybe he had turned around and retraced his steps.

BREST

JUNE 1941

Sasha woke up covered with hot dust. Her eyes stung with tears. Her breath was short. It was happening, and she mustn't lose time.

She rushed to put on her boots which for a month now she had been placing next to the door every night, and between them the jackknife. The roar of motors. A plane was diving outside the window, spitting fire. Chunks of plaster fell.

She ran down the steps into the street. Buildings and trees were burning, and fire was licking the grass. Loaded wagons lurched among a line of people snaking its way down the avenue. She leaped into the crowd, entirely focused on the distance between her and Kolya at the fortress. She climbed up onto a truck that had turned over. The driver was still in his seat with his charred hands on the wheel. Next to him lay a small, wrapped-up body; a little girl whose hair looked like a bundle of charred twigs gathered in a bow. Fragments of glass lacerated Sasha's bare arms, a deep breath shook her, the pain passed through her whole body as quick as mercury. Dizzy, Sasha leaped down and
raced forwards, clenching her fists to dull the burning. She turned right and went past the building where the map room was. A thin film of brown dust coated her. A curtain on the second floor was slightly open, the way she had left it.

…

In early June, on a fine morning, Maxim had come to visit. It was a holiday and the streets were flooded with young men who were celebrating their graduation from military school. When he got off the train, she brought him to the map room. He stood in astonishment in the middle of the room uttering curses, then started tearing up the large sheets of paper. They tore up the maps, the copies of them, the position papers and the letters she had exchanged with Thomas Heiselberg.

When he learned that she had corresponded with the German representative under a false name, he pushed her up against the wall and slapped her hard. She had paid some woman named Viktoria Sovlova on Devortsovaya Street to receive letters from her close friend in Lublin. The code was her aunt's illness: ‘My aunt's illness has got worse. No one is interested in her. Even those who love her are reconciled to her death—in all sincerity I don't know what to do.'

Maxim shouted that she was crazy. At last, she thought, he had learned to detest her. In all the years they had known each other, he raged, he had trusted her good judgment and now he found out that his wife was someone else altogether.

They stuffed all the scraps of paper in an iron box and burned them. Then they burned the ashes. After the Germans attacked, anyone connected to or friendly with them would be condemned as an enemy of the people and executed! Even during war the good old machine would work. People would be arrested, graves would be dug, just as before, but the pace would be accelerated.

Maxim stomped on the ashes and asked whether any other papers remained. Tears choked her throat. A few miniature copies of the parade maps were buried in her mattress. She didn't dare tell him.
Every time she heard a knock on the neighbours' doors, she still hoped it would be representatives from Foreign Affairs who needed her documents to prepare for the parade. She strained to remember whether there was anything in her office cabinet, but her brain was a mist. She recited instructions to herself: now stand, now sit and now drink water.

Maxim suspected that she was indifferent to his fate and wouldn't lift a finger to save him. It wasn't true. It was just that his efforts to hold on to life were too complex. She was amazed she had once made these detailed calculations, designed intricate plans. At night, in bed, she learned that her husband was visiting Brest for another reason: he had heard that Comrade Nikita Mikhailovich Kropotkin was planning his revenge against Sasha for some little episode. Yesterday Maxim had met him and was informed that she had dared to threaten Comrade Kropotkin, her direct superior who nonetheless refused to reveal the circumstances of the incident.

Fortunately, Comrade Kropotkin was a decent and reasonable man. He understood that a gratuitous struggle would harm them all, and they reached a satisfactory agreement.

‘What agreement?'

‘A satisfactory one.'

‘An agreement that I'm to leave the district?'

‘Are you crazy?' he hissed. ‘I understand that you want to stay here and greet the Germans. A good husband allows his wife to fulfil her dreams.'

After he took off her clothes and sat her down on top of him, then they lay hugging each other, and he declared that it was fine if she wanted to stay. He wouldn't leave Brest without her.

He knew it was a lie. Two days later he was summoned to Leningrad.

‘I risked my life when I married you. I did everything I could to save you, and in return you doomed us both,' he reproached her at the station. ‘You no longer have the will to live. That's your right.'

To leave her there, on the front line, without guilt or shame, he had to believe she was beyond remedy.

He didn't kiss her, just held her hand and looked in her eyes, as though searching for a remote spark of love. She didn't doubt his courage. If he believed they had any hope, he would have taken enormous risks to stay with her. He was pale, twirling his moustache as though indifferent. ‘When you return to Leningrad, we'll talk about our marriage,' he said. ‘Maybe we'll see things differently.' He held her but didn't pull her close. ‘Maybe we can see things differently.'

A week later Nikita Mikhailovich summoned her. ‘At the end of June you're leaving the district and returning to Leningrad.'

She wasn't surprised to hear that he had made this arrangement with Maxim, who had lied to her. Again.

…

The wife of a city official passed her, pushing a wheelbarrow with two or three children in it, curled up like foetuses, a mess of faces and hair, closed eyes, a blue sweater, girls' underpants, pink arms, stretched legs. She turned to Sasha and asked her to push the wheelbarrow for her, ‘Just for a minute or two', she had no more strength.

Sasha didn't answer. The distance between her and Kolya remained a vast desert that couldn't be crossed. How much death there was in the chasm of time between them.

A plane dived and she heard the whistle of the bombs. Everybody lay down. The official's wife put her body over the wheelbarrow, and Sasha started to run. She ran down alone and prayed that the people lying down wouldn't get up. Behind her machine-gun fire chattered, screams could be heard, weak moans. She could smell burned skin. A huge brown mushroom of dust—apparently pulverised bricks—spread above her and hid the avenue. Everything was silent, dislocating her senses. Her imagination roamed through the fortress, painting Kolya with the pallor of death, wherever he was: in the meeting room in the winter palace, at the end of the bridge over the river, beneath the tunnel that led to the Kholmsk Gate. She struggled against weakness, twisted her body as though fighting off a ghost and kept running. Maybe he
was alive, maybe he was only wounded, there was no certainty he was dead, if she could find him she would get them out of there.

For a few minutes that seemed like an eternity, she ran blindly in the swirl of dust until it settled a little, and at the end of the avenue she could see a column of refugees moving along Pioneer Street towards Moscow Street.

She ran faster and pushed through the tangle of people. She was already close. Figures were bending over plane wreckage and tore hunks of aluminium from the wings. Suddenly, through the smoke, the fortress rose up.

Fire raged above it, explosion after explosion, and in her imagination each bomb pierced his body anew. To her right, from the edge of the field, soldiers in dusty uniforms emerged. She joined them, and together they ran towards the citadel. These men, who looked as if they had risen from the dead, encouraged her. Her body was flooded with lightness and life, his life. Was it an illusion? Could such complete awareness be a lie?

The soldiers knocked on the gate of the citadel again and again. No one opened. She shrieked and banged on it. The minutes passed. She lost the clarity in which she had heard him breathing. She felt pain from the pieces of glass in her arms. She had already lost sensation in her hands, which were still pounding on the gate.

A bearded officer with two barefoot soldiers by his side approached her, raised his rifle and shoved the barrel into her face. For a moment she thought it was all over, and a moan of happiness formed in her throat—she had never understood those who clung to life. He cursed in Ukrainian, wrapped the stock in a rag and hit her in the face. The earth beneath her shoulders was a mound burning like coals.

‘I'll burn you along with your wife and children,' she provoked in Ukrainian and gaped at the rifle like a girl looking at a magic wand.

He aimed it at her. One of his escorts approached and placed his bare foot on her lips. ‘She's crazy,' he shouted to the bearded officer. ‘Don't shoot, don't shoot.'

A shrill girl's voice shouted in Russian, ‘Kill the whore! She's NKVD.'

The soldier pressed his foot against her mouth. She tasted dirt and gravel, blood and pain, a tooth breaking. She felt with her tongue and didn't find the tooth. Maybe she'd swallowed it. The earth resounded with thudding earth thrown into the air by a bomb. Death and life had been snatched from her control. The gate was locked. A stubborn voice wheedled, tempting her to faint.

The gate moved. She came to: now to get in. The bearded officer talked to someone. A group of soldiers raced out. ‘The telephones are dead. It's a rat-trap here,' the escapees shouted. ‘Withdraw to Kobrin!' ‘Kobrin?' the bearded officer shouted. ‘You can barricade yourselves in here. Outside you're running right into death.'

A perplexed silence enveloped the two small camps. They were trying to understand: where was the trap? Where was life, and where was death?

The soldiers saw the wall of German artillery that was spitting fire. Some of them turned around and began to trample those in front to get back into the citadel. Shells exploded, the earth spun beneath her and a curtain of raging fire spread before them. She felt for the jackknife in her sock, drew it and with a single movement brought it down the back of the soldier's leg. He shook his leg as though trying to chase away a mosquito. She rolled out from under him and spat out dirt and blood.

The soldier leaned over her. He looked like an officer she had danced with the day before in the park, a man in a fine uniform who spoke with a slight accent. Was he Baltic? Then she realised he was German. ‘So when are you attacking?' She tightened her grip on his shoulder. ‘I won't give you away. Just tell me the secret.' The officer angrily told her she was a madwoman and asked someone else to dance.

About two hours later, at midnight, Nikita Mikhailovich came to the door of her house and asked her to join him. He had promised Comrade Podolsky that he would evacuate her if there was an attack,
and he was a man of his word.

She mocked him: ‘Don't you understand? Your little schemes won't change anything. I won't stay alive for a second after Kolya. The excuses for not dying are all used up. Besides, why are you clearing out, Nikita Mikhailovich? Are you in a panic? For months you've been swearing to everyone that the Germans won't dare fight on two fronts, and that the army is not anticipating an attack. Where's the TASS story that you were waving around, as though your mother had written it, condemning talk about war and saying that the Western press was sowing discord between Germany and the Soviet Union? Where's the parade you placed in my hands?'

Nikita Mikhailovich had no time for explanations. His wife and children were waiting in the car. He wasn't running away but going to Kobrin to organise the counterattack.