Group Portrait with Lady (25 page)

In order to obtain all this information from Pyotr Petrovich Bogakov, five favorable opportunities were needed: the Au. had to buy an infusion-bottle gallows because the one that had been at their disposal was sometimes put to its original use; he even invested in movie tickets so that he could send Belenko and Kitkin off to color movies of
Anna Karenina, War and Peace
, and
Doctor Zhivago
, and concert tickets so that they would not have to miss Mstislav Rostropovich.

It was at this point that the Au. found it opportune to trouble that exalted personage; suffice it to add that the name is one before which every German in every historical period between 1900 and 1970, and every Russian and Soviet functionary during the same era, would stand to attention, before which all doors to the Kremlin—probably even the modest door to Mao’s study (if it has not already done so), would to this day open wide. Leni has received the same promise that she also gave: never, never to divulge that name, not even under torture.

In order to induce a favorable mood in this person, and also to request, not with servility but with becoming modesty, the favor of possible future interviews, the Au. was obliged to travel some forty-five minutes by train in a—this much may be revealed—north-north-easterly direction, and to invest in flowers for the lady of the house and a leather-bound copy of
Eugene Onegin
for the husband; he drank several cups
of quite good tea (better than the nuns’, less good than Mrs. Hölthohne’s), discussed the weather, literature, and mentioned Leni’s precarious financial situation (from the wife’s suspicious question: “Who’s that?” and the husband’s ungracious reply: “Oh,
you
know, the woman who was in touch with Boris Lvovich during the war,” the Au. deduced that the lady suspected a liaison). Then came the moment when, inevitably, the weather, literature, and Leni ceased to form topics of conversation, and the husband, rather brusquely, one must say, and plainly enough, said: “Now Mimi, do you mind leaving us,” whereupon Mimi, now firmly convinced that the Au. was the conveyor of a billet-doux, left the room, her feelings visibly hurt.

Is it necessary to describe this personage? Mid-sixties, white-haired, not lacking in warmth but grave, in a drawing room roughly half the size of a school auditorium (say, in a school for six hundred students), over-looking the parklike grounds, English lawns, German trees, the youngest of these some hundred and sixty years old, beds of tearoses—and over it all, including the person’s face, even over the Picasso, the Chagall, the Warhol, and the Rauschenberg, over the Waldmüller, the Pechstein, the Purrmann—over it all, everything, a certain—the Au. takes the plunge!—poignancy. Here, too, T., W., S., and P.! No trace of L.?

“So you want to know whether this Bogakov—I’ll see that something’s done for him, by the way, don’t forget to give my secretary his name and address—has given you an accurate report. Well: I can only say, on the whole Yes. How that commissar in Boris’s camp found out about it, where he can have obtained his information” (shrug) “—but Bogakov’s report
as such
is correct.

“I got to know Boris’s father in Berlin between 1933 and 1941, and we became real friends. That wasn’t without its dangers, either, both for him and for me. In terms of world
politics and taking the long view of history, I still favor an alliance between the Soviet Union and Germany, believing as I do that a genuine, cordial alliance based on mutual trust would wipe even the—er—German Democratic Republic off the map.
We
, we are the ones the Soviet Union needs. But that’s all in the future. Well, in Berlin I was looked upon as red—I suppose I was, too, still am—and the only reason I am critical of the present West German Government’s East European policy is that I find it too weak, too weak-kneed. Well, back to Bogakov—what happened was that one day an envelope was handed to me in my Berlin office and in it was a slip of paper containing only this message: ‘Lev wants you to know B. has been taken prisoner by the Gers.’ No use trying to find out who had brought the letter—didn’t matter anyway, it’d been left with the porter downstairs.

“Now you can imagine how upset I was. I had developed a real affection for that intelligent, quiet, introspective boy whom I’d met a number of times—perhaps ten or twelve—in his father’s apartment. I had given him the poems of Georg Trakl, the collected works of Hölderlin, suggested he read Kafka—I think I may claim to be one of the first readers, if not the first, of
The Country Doctor
, I had asked my mother to give it to me for Christmas in 1920 when I was fourteen. So now I discovered that this boy, who had always seemed such an introspective type, pretty much of a daydreamer, was in Germany as a Soviet prisoner of war. Do you suppose” (here, although not the object of so much as a hostile glance, he became downright militantly defensive, indeed aggressive), “do you suppose I didn’t know what went on in those camps? Do you suppose I remained blind and deaf and unfeeling?” (All things the Au. had never maintained.) “Do you imagine” (here the voice became almost virulent!) “that I approved of all that? And here” (now the voice piano to pianissimo) “at last I had a chance to do something about it. But where was the boy?
How many millions or at least hundreds of thousands of Soviet prisoners did we have at that time? Had he even been shot or wounded at the time he was captured? Just you try searching for a Boris Lvovich Koltovsky among all those” (the voice swelling again to truculence!). “I found him, but I tell you” (threatening gesture toward the
totally
innocent Au.), “I found him with the help of my SCA and SCAF friends” (Supreme Command of the Army, Supreme Command of the Armed Forces. Au.) “—I found him. Where? Working in a quarry, not exactly in a concentration camp but under concentration-camp conditions. Do you know what it means to work in a quarry?” (Having in fact at one time worked for three weeks in a quarry, the Au. found the implication that he did
not
know what it means to work in a quarry—to put it mildly—a bit much, especially since he was given no chance to reply.) “A death sentence, that’s what it means. And have you ever tried to get someone out of a Nazi camp for Soviet prisoners of war?” (Reproach in the voice unjustified since, although the Au. has never tried, nor even been in the position of trying, to get anyone out of anywhere, he has had a few opportunities not to take prisoners in the first place or to let them run away, which in fact he did.)

“Well, even I needed four solid months to do anything effective for the boy. He was moved from one ghastly camp with a mortality rate of 1 : 1, first to a less ghastly camp with a mortality rate of 1 : 1.5, from the less ghastly camp to a merely terrible camp, mortality rate 1 : 2.5, from the terrible camp to a less terrible camp with a mortality rate of 1 : 3.5—and although this meant he was already in a camp that was way better than the overall average mortality rate, he was then shifted to a camp that may be regarded as relatively normal. Mortality rate extremely good: 1 : 5.8, and that’s where I had him transferred because one of my best friends, Erich von Kahm, whom I had gone to school with and who had lost an arm, a leg, and an eye at Stalingrad, was the commandant
of the Stalag” (Stalag? Stammlager—base camp. Au.) “where Boris now was; and do you imagine Erich von Kahm could have made that decision on his own?” (The Au. imagined nothing, his sole desire being for factual information.) “No indeed! Party bigwigs had to be roped in, one of them bribed—with a gas range for his mistress, gasoline coupons for a hundred gallons, and three hundred French cigarettes, if you want to know exactly” (the Au. did want to know exactly), “and finally this Party bigwig had to find another Party joker, that fellow Pelzer, who could be more or less given orders that Boris was to be handled circumspectly—but then there was the senior garrison officer who had to approve the daily guard for Boris, and that man, a Colonel Huberti, old school, conservative, humane, but cautious because the SS had tried several times to get him on grounds of ‘misplaced humanitarian treatment,’ this Colonel Huberti had to be shown a certificate to the effect that Boris’s work at the nursery was war-essential or ‘of high intelligence value,’ and now came a coincidence, or stroke of luck or, if you wish” (the Au. did not wish. Au.), “the hand of Providence. This Pelzer had once been a member of the Communist Party and had taken on a former woman comrade whose husband—or was it her lover, anyway free love or something—had fled to France with some top-secret documents, so Boris, totally ignorant, like Pelzer and that Communist woman, of what was going on, was officially detailed, as they say in their jargon, to watch this woman—and this was confirmed to me in turn by someone I knew in the ‘Foreign Armies Eastern Europe’ department—and the most important thing of all was to keep my own part in it a secret too, otherwise I would have achieved the very opposite: the SS would have become interested in Boris. How difficult do you imagine” (again the Au. imagined nothing. Au.) “it was to do something really worthwhile for a boy like that—and after July 20 things tightened up still more; the Party bigwig
wanted more bribes—it hung by a thread. Who was there left to care about the fate of the Soviet Engineer Lieutenant Boris Lvovich Koltovsky?”

Relatively enlightened as to how difficult it was even for Mr. Exalted to do something for a Soviet prisoner of war, back again to Bogakov, armed with pickles and two tickets to
Ryan’s Daughter
. Bogakov, who has meanwhile been supplied with rubber tubing from a hookah, clamped over the cigarette mouthpiece and thus enabling him to smoke “salubriously” because now he can hold the rubber tubing in his twisted hand (“Like this I don’t have to keep fishing for the mouthpiece with puckered lips”), got quite carried away in his expansiveness and did not hesitate to mention intimate, indeed highly intimate, details concerning Boris.

“Now,” in Bogakov’s words, “there’d been no need for that martinet Viktor Genrikhovich to point out to him the historical unliklihood of his salubrious fate. What made the boy more uneasy than anything else was that manifest but invisible hand that moved him from camp to camp and finally to this nursery which, in addition to all its other advantages, had this one: it was warm, heated at all times, and in the winter of ’43–’44 that was far from insalubrious. And when he finally found out, from my whispering it to him,
who
was shifting him around, he was a long way from being reassured, and for a time even suspected that dear girl, thinking she’d been sent there and paid by that person. And there was another thing that was a real ordeal for that boy’s truly unearthly sensibility: the eternal firing going on near his otherwise most salubrious place of work. I’m not implying, not in the least, that the boy was ungrateful, no, far from it—he was overjoyed, but there it was: that eternal firing got on his nerves.”

Here it must be borne in mind that, in late 1943 and early 1944, the burial of all categories of German dead represented a constant challenge: not merely to cemetery custodians, wreath-makers, priests, grandiloquent lord mayors, regional Party leaders, regimental commanders, schoolteachers, buddies, factory foremen—the soldiers of the guard battalion detailed to fire the salute had to be perpetually banging away at the sky. Depending on the number of victims, manner of death, rank, and function, between seven in the morning and six at night the main cemetery resounded with continuous banging. (Grundtsch’s statement, quoted verbatim as follows:)

“It usually sounded as if the cemetery was a maneuver area or at least a rifle range. Obviously a salvo’s supposed to sound like a
single
shot—in 1917 I was a sergeant myself and sometimes in command of a salvo party—but this wishful thinking rarely came off, it sounded like a fusillade, or as if they were trying out a new machine gun. And the bombs falling at intervals and antiaircraft guns banging away wasn’t in the least amusing for people with sensitive ears, and sometimes when we opened the window and stuck out our noses we could actually smell it: gun smoke, even though it did come from blanks.”

If the Au. may for once be permitted to comment, he would like to point out that probably from time to time young soldiers with little firing practice were assigned to salvo duty, and these men must have found it strange to fire over the heads of priests, mourners, officers, and Party bigwigs—and this may have made them nervous, for which it is to be hoped no one will blame them. We can be sure that many a T. flowed there, much W. was to be seen, P. was apparent, scarcely one of the bereaved remained steadfast in the self-confidence of his Being, and no doubt the P. so conspicuous on many a face, together
with the prospect of one day being themselves buried to the accompaniment of a salvo, had anything but a reassuring effect on the soldiers. Proud grief was by no means always so proud, every day at the cemetery hundreds, if not thousands, of conjunctiva were active, brainstems could no longer be checked, for many a person present may have felt himself affected in his supreme life-assets.

Bogakov: “Suspicion of the girl didn’t last long, of course, a day or two, and after she’d laid her hand on him, and it’d happened to him[??], well—I mean, you know what sometimes happens to men when they haven’t had a woman for a long time and don’t lay their own hand—right, right: that’s what happened to him when the girl merely laid her hand on his hand, at the table where she took her wreaths. Right. That’s how it was. He told me all about it, and though it’d happened to him a few times before, of course, only in dreams though, and never when he was awake, he was bewildered and filled with elation at how salubrious it was. I tell you, that boy was naive, he’d had a puritanical upbringing, and this business we call sexuality—he hadn’t a clue. And now something came to light that I can only tell you provided you promise on your word of honor” (which he did! Au.) “that that girl will never get to hear of it” (The Au. is convinced that actually it would be all right for Leni to hear of it, she would not be embarrassed, most likely she would be glad to know about it. Au.) “—the boy had never visited with a woman.” (Upon the Au. raising his eyebrows in astonishment, he went on:) “Yes, that’s what I’ve always called it: visiting with a woman. Mind you, he didn’t exactly want to know how it’s done, he already knew there are certain physical conditions, of a salubrious nature, so to speak, that make it fairly clear where, in certain states of
stimulation, you want to put what, when you love a woman and want to visit with her. Well, that much he did know, only—there was one detail—damn it all, I really loved that boy, if you want to know” (the Au. did want to know. Au.), “he saved my life, without him I’d have starved to death, never made it … without his trust in me too. Who could he talk to, damn it all! I was everything to him, father, brother, friend—and I used to lie there at night in tears, I was that scared, when he actually did have an affair with the girl. I warned him, I told him: ‘O.K., it’s all right to risk your own neck if you’re so crazy about her—but how about hers? Just think for a moment of the risk she’s running—she can’t get out of it by saying you forced her or raped her, nobody’s going to believe that under the circumstances. Be reasonable!’ ‘Reasonable,’ he said. ‘If you could see her you wouldn’t be talking about reason, and if I talked to her about reason—she’d laugh in my face. She knows the risk I’m running, and she knows I know the risk she’s running—but she won’t be told that we should be reasonable. She doesn’t want to die any more than I do, she wants to live—and she wants us to visit with each other as often as we can’—an expression he’d got from me, I admit. Then when I met her later and got to know her quite well, I realized that ‘reason’ had been a stupid word to use. No, but there’d been something else that had caused the boy a lot of anguish. As a little lad of two or three, during the civil war, his mother had hidden him in a village in Galicia, in the home of a woman friend, and this friend had a Jewish grandmother who took the boy when the friend was shot, and it seems that for a couple of years he toddled around the village with the Jewish kids, then that grandma died too and some other grandma took the kid, and by that time there was no one left who knew exactly where he came from. And one day this grandma discovers that little Boris hasn’t been circumcised yet, and naturally she thinks the grandma who died has overlooked this and she just goes ahead and has it
done—so, he was circumcised. I nearly had a fit. I asked him, I said, ‘Boris, you know I’m not a man of prejudice but tell me: are you a Yid or not?’ And he swore to me: ‘No, I’m not, if I were I’d say so.’ Well, I must say he didn’t have the faintest suggestion of a Jewish accent—but that was bad news all right, for there were enough anti-Semites in our camp who would’ve teased him or even denounced him to the Germans. I asked him: ‘How did you get by when they examined you and so forth, I mean, get by with your, well, let’s say, altered foreskin?’ And he told me he’d had a friend, a medical student in Moscow, who realized how dangerous this could be for him, and the friend temporarily sewed it on again with a piece of catgut, a very neat job but damn painful, before he had to go into the army, and it held till—well, until he kept getting so stimulated, and then the stitches gave way, came off. So what he wanted to know was whether women—and so on. Well, that was all the more reason for me to weep tears and sweat blood at night: not that about women—I don’t know anything about that, what women and whether they notice—no, but that Viktor Genrikhovich was such a rabid anti-Semite, and there were a few others who would’ve denounced him to the Germans out of envy and suspicion: and then—well, the benefactor didn’t exist who could’ve saved him then. That would’ve been the end of all the things that had been so salubrious.”