Well, if that’s not a soldier’s farewell, I don’t know what is, Alexander thought, going back to his quarters. He wanted to smoke and smoke again inside these prison walls, and he wanted a quiet room where he could remain composed and alone, and where he could nurse his wounded pride and think of how far he had come away from Krasnodar and from young Larissa, who had given him some of her sweetness right before she died, and from Comrade Svetlana Visselskaya, his mother’s friend, who had said to him, Alexander, your gifts are so abundant, don’t squander them. Well, Alexander thought, any minute now, one of the girls he had carelessly discarded was going to come by the barracks with a gun and blow his brains out and on his tombstone the epitaph would read, “Here lies Alexander, who couldn’t remember the name of any girl he had fucked.”
With a touch of self-hatred, he tried to look for sleep. It was three in the morning, June 22, 1941.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Railroad at Sinyavino Heights, 1943
ALEXANDER CALLEDOUSPENSKY INTOhis tent. “Lieutenant, what’s wrong with Sergeant Verenkov?”
“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”
“Well, just this morning, he brought me not only his coffee ration, but some of his gruel, too, though thankfully not all of it.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Lieutenant, why is Verenkov bringing me his gruel? Why is Sergeant Telikov offering me his French letters? Why would I require condoms from my sergeant? What’s going on here?”
“You’re our commanding officer, sir.”
“I did not command gruel. Nor French letters.”
“He wants to be nice.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“I’m going to get the truth out of you, Lieutenant.”
The rear of the base was a kilometer from Lake Ladoga and every morning Alexander walked to the lake to wash. In the early, still, tepid summer, the lake smelled like what it had turned into—a burial ground for thousands of Soviet men.
One morning he was returning from the lake as he passed the mess tent, and through the canvas he
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heard Ouspensky’s voice. Normally he would have just kept going, but he heard his own name mentioned in a conspiratorial tone. Alexander slowed down.
Ouspensky was talking to Sergeant Verenkov, a young political convict who had previously never been in the army, and Sergeant Telikov, who had been in the army for ten years and was a career sergeant.
Ouspensky was saying, “Sergeants, you stay away from our commander. Do not talk to him directly.
Don’t look him in the eye. You have something to ask him, ask me. And pass it down to all your men.
I’m here as your buffer.”
Alexander smiled.
“Do we need a buffer?” That was Telikov. He was a careful man.
“Oh,” said Ouspensky, “believe me. You need a buffer. Captain Belov acts like a reasonable man. He acts like a rational man, he acts like a patient man. But he will kill you with his bare hands if you’re not careful.”
Verenkov was skeptical. “Fuck off, you are full of shit.”
Ouspensky continued undaunted, but in a lower voice. “Do you know he ripped the arm off a supply runner named Dimitri Chernenko, ripped the arm right off its hinges! Left him with nothing but a bloodied stump. And that’s not even the worst of it. The severed arm didn’t kill him. But one punch in the face nearly killed him. One punch, Verenkov. Just think about that.”
Alexander laughed soundlessly. If only that had been true.
“And when Chernenko still would not die, our commander ordered his execution on the border with Finland, while he was still laid up in the hospital in Morozovo.”
“You’re fucking with us.”
“I’m telling you, he is not afraid of anything. Not of runners, not of the Germans, not of death, not even of the NKGB. Now listen carefully and don’t repeat this to anyone…” Ouspensky’s voice was down to a whisper. “When he was in a cell back in Morozovo, an interrogator came to see him—”
“Why was he arrested?”
“For being a double agent.”
“Fuck off!”
“It’s true.”
“A double agent for who?”
“I think the Japanese. It’s not important. Listen. An interrogator came to see him. Our commander was not armed, he had no weapons on him, but do you know what happened?”
“He killed the interrogator?”
“Sure as shit he killed the interrogator!”
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“How?”
“No one knows.”
“He punched him?”
“There wasn’t a mark on him.”
“He choked him?”
“Not a mark on him, I tell you.”
“How, then? Poison?”
“Nothing!” Ouspensky said with excitement. “That’s the whole point! No one knows. But just remember—our commander is a man who can kill another in a tiny cell with nothing. Just by the sheer force of his will. So stay the fuck away from him. Because he eats runts like you for lunch.”
“Lieutenant!” Alexander walked into the tent.
Ouspensky, Verenkov, and Telikov jumped up. “Yes, sir.”
“Lieutenant, stop terrorizing our sergeants. I don’t like you telling lies about me. For the record, I am not a double agent for the Japanese. Is that clear?”
A pause. In shaky voices, “Yes, sir.”
“Now go back to your duties. All of you.”
“Yes, sir.”
They did not look at him as they hastily filed out. Alexander could barely keep the smile off his face.
After a few weeks, Alexander began to see a pattern: He would send two squads, three, a platoon, two platoons, fifty men to the railroad, and they would not come back. For those who did come back there were no bandages, no antibiotics, no blood, no morphine. The Germans were protected by the Sinyavino hills and the trees, but they had an unfettered view of the broken railroad. Still provisions had to get to Leningrad one way or another, the railroad had to be rebuilt one way or another, and Alexander had no choice but to send his men to the railroad.
Though the stretch that kept getting knocked out of order was always the same five kilometers, Alexander could not put his men on the railroad at any time of day, at any one-hundred-meter stretch of the broken rails without an instant barrage from the hills. It was June and the weather was mild. Every afternoon Alexander carried the casualties off the railroad tracks and onto the field behind the poplars where they were lowered into mass graves that were not even covered over by dirt. The graves had been dug by mines a few weeks before and the holes were not yet filled up with dead men. The entire area smelled of dug dirt, and fresh water, and fresh death.
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June 22, 1943 came and went. Two years since the start of war. Two years since the start of everything.
Orbeli and His Art, 1941
Alexander was woken up at four in the morning, after sleeping for barely an hour. His small consolation was that everyone else was also woken up, and told to go outside into the courtyard.
It was June 22, summer solstice, the longest day of the year, 1941. Sunday morning. Outside was pink dawn and light. Colonel Mikhail Stepanov addressed his garrison troops.
“About an hour ago, Hitler wiped out our Crimean naval fleet stationed in the Black Sea. Our planes, our ships and our men have been destroyed. His men are now on Soviet ground. He has also invaded our border from the Ukraine north through Prussia. Defense Minister Comrade Molotov is going to make an announcement at noon. It’s war.”
There was a rumble among the barely awake troops. Alexander stood silent. He wasn’t surprised; there had been talk of war for a long time among the Red Army officers, and there had been rumor
s about Hitler’s border fortifications since winter, but Alexander’s first thought about war was, “War! That will give me another chance for escape.”
Alexander kept himself awake with coffee and cigarettes as he listened for four hours to defense plans.
He was then assigned to patrolling Leningrad until six in the evening, at which time he had to be back at the barracks for sentry duty. He left the garrison gladly at eleven in the morning.
He strolled breezily through the Haymarket and down Nevsky Prospekt, where he broke up a fight between a woman and a much bigger man. The woman was hitting the man with her bag, screaming at him. It took Alexander a few minutes to figure out that the woman was upset with the man for trying to cut in line. “Doesn’t he know that war has started? What does the comrade think we’re all doing here?
He is not getting in front of me. I don’t care if the whole Red Army comes down here.”
Raising his eyebrows to the man, Alexander said, “You heard her. You’re not getting in front of her.”
Down by the Grand Elisey food store, he broke up a mêlée that included eight women who were all clawing at each other over a sausage that belonged to one woman, fell out of her bag and was quickly picked up by another. While this was going on, a third woman walked off with someone’s flour.
Alexander played King Solomon only briefly. He felt this was not his strength, arguing about sausage with eight irate women. He walked away, straight into another fight over who was getting on the bus first.
Alexander decided to get away from Nevsky. It was worse than being in a war. In a war, at least you could take out your gun and shoot the enemy. He walked down to St. Isaac’s, to the statue of the Bronze Horseman where things were more peaceful. He stood for a few minutes, smoking, looking at the statue. It had been several weeks since he had checked on his book in the Leningrad library. Now that war had started, he thought it would be wise to get the book out and keep it with him; it would probably be safer. The libraries and the museums no doubt would be shipping their precious volumes out of Leningrad—just in case. As he smoked, Alexander tried to remember bits of the “Bronze Horseman”
poem he liked:And in the moonlight’s pallid glamor, rides high upon his charging brute, hand outstretched in echoing clamor, the Bronze Horseman in pursuit. Smiling at himself for remembering words he had not read in many years, lighting another cigarette, Alexander proceeded down the embankment, past the Admiralty Gardens, past the Palace Bridge, past the Hermitage Museum, where he walked past a tall man in a suit, hunched over the parapet, looking into the river. The man took out a cigarette and nodded to Alexander without smiling. Alexander nodded back and slowed down. The man said, “Have you got a
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light?”
Alexander stopped and took out his lighter. “Left my matches inside,” the man said quickly. “Thank you.” He extended his hand. “Josif Abgarovitch Orbeli,” he said, flicking the ashes out of his long, graying, unkempt beard.
“Lieutenant Alexander Belov.” They shook hands.
“Ah,” said Orbeli, looking into the river. “Lieutenant, is it true? War has started?”
“It’s true, citizen. Where did you hear?”
Without turning around, Orbeli pointed to the Hermitage. “At work; I’m the curator. So tell me honestly, what do you think? Will the Germans get to Leningrad?”
“Why not?” said Alexander. “They got to Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Poland. Europe is in Hitler’s hands. Where else is Hitler going to go? He can’t go to England.
He’s afraid of water. He had to come here. This was his plan all along. And he will come to Leningrad.”
With the Finns’ help, he wanted to add, but didn’t. The curator looked too upset.
“Oh,Bozhe moi ,” Orbeli said. “Oh,koshmar. What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen to my Hermitage? They’ll bomb it like they bombed London. There will be nothing left of our city, nothing left of our spires, our churches, our national monuments. There will be nothing left of our art,” he said in a breaking voice.
“St. Paul’s is still standing,” said Alexander, by way of comfort. “Westminster Abbey. Big Ben. London Bridge. The Germans couldn’t touch the British national monuments. Forty thousand Londoners are dead, though.”
“Yes, yes.” Orbeli waved him off impatiently. “People always die at war. But what about my art?”
Alexander stepped slightly away. “Well, we can’t evacuate St. Isaac’s Cathedral, or the Bronze Horseman statue. But we will evacuate our people. And we can evacuate your art.”
“Where can we possibly ship it?” Orbeli exclaimed in a high voice. “Who will look after it? Where will it be safe?”
“The art will have to take care of itself,” said Alexander. “Ship it anywhere, it doesn’t matter. It will be safer than in Leningrad.”
“My Tamerlane? Renoir? Rembrandt? Fabergé? My precious, priceless treasures. All of it, without me?”
Alexander tipped his cap lightly. “All of it will be safer somewhere else. And someday the war will be over. Good day, citizen.”
“Nothing good about this day,” Orbeli muttered, and turned to walk across the road to his museum.
Alexander, amused, continued down the Neva embankment, past the Winter Palace, past Moika Canal.
It was a Sunday afternoon in Leningrad, and here on the embankment everything was quiet, unlike the harried rabble that crowded on Nevsky where the lines in all the stores were out the door, people
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shoving and screaming obscenities at each other. There was no one here and Alexander liked it better.
He passed the Summer Garden, strolling down to Smolny monastery with a rifle on his shoulder.
At the corner of Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin Alexander paused briefly. A few blocks to the right of the river, Tauride Park stretched pleasantly down the street and he quite liked walking past it in the summer.
But Smolny and its grounds straight ahead might have some problems, some crowds in need of control.
Which way to go? To go straight to Smolny and then circle around the Tauride Park or to walk along the park road and then circle around to the monastery?
He lit a cigarette and stood for a few seconds, looking at his watch.
He had a bit of time. What was the rush, anyway? Any crowd problems would still be there in a half-hour just as well as in fifteen minutes. He was only one man; he couldn’t be everywhere at once.
Alexander turned right and walked down Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin.
The street was deserted, and the trees were rustling in the summer wind. He was thinking about Barrington. He remembered the woods by Barrington. He and Teddy used to lie down in the woods and listen to the trees swaying above them. He liked the sound.
He heard another sound. A soft sound, of someone singing.
It was very faint. Alexander looked down the street and saw no one.
Alexander looked across the street and saw a girl on a bench.
The first thing he noticed was a mass of light, long blonde hair covering the girl’s face and the second thing he noticed was her white dress with red roses. Covered by a leafy canopy of forest-green trees, she sat on a bench like a white flurry, her golden hair, her white dress, her blood-red roses. She was eating ice cream and softly singing to herself in between the licks of the cone. Alexander recognized the tune.
She was singing “We’ll Meet Again in Lvov, My Love and I”—a current popular song. She somehow managed to sing, to lick her ice cream, to bounce her bare leg, her foot gussied up with a red sandal, and to pull the hair back from her face. All at once. She was oblivious not just to Alexander standing across the street dumbly staring at her, but also to the war, to the world, to all the things that guided Leningraders on this Sunday. In the moment she was in, she had herself and h
er lustrous hair and her magnificent dress and her ice cream and her soft voice. She was in a world Alexander had never seen, swimming on the moon in a sea of tranquility. He could not move from the spot on the pavement.
And he still could not move from that spot on the pavement, from seeing her for the first time. That’s where he was to this day, knowing that had he walked straight ahead instead of making a right, he would be living a different life. Had he walked by her even at the moment of seeing her. He could have been provident, he did not have to cross the street. He could have gaped at her and gone on, couldn’t he?
But on that sunlit Sunday, Alexander knew nothing, thought nothing, imagined nothing. He forgot Dimitri and war and the Soviet Union and escape plans, and even America, and crossed the street for Tatiana Metanova.
Later he watched her hands gesticulating as she spoke. Her fingers were slender and well formed. Her nails were meticulous. He asked her why she kept them so spotless and she replied that she had once known a girl with dirty fingernails. The girl had been much trouble. She had never forgotten it.
“Do you think she was trouble because of the dirty fingernails?”
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“I’m almost sure of it.”
Alexander wanted her spotless hands on him.
He was afraid she was too young for his man’s gaze, much less for his man’s hands.
“Where do you live, Tania?”
“On a street called Fifth Soviet. Do you know where that is?”
He patrolled that area. “It’s near Grechesky Prospect. There’s a church nearby.”
“Yes, it’s right across the street,” she said.
“Though I think church is a strong word for that building. It’s a document storage facility.”
She laughed. “Yes,” she said, bubbling. “It’s aSoviet church.”
The simple time with her on Sunday was so markedly brief.
All his time with her was markedly brief, encircled by war wagons, by his mother and father, by his false name, by Dimitri’s perceived power over his humanity, by Dasha, oh that Dasha! Surrounded by Slonko and Nikolai Ouspensky, assailed by the Soviet Union from all sides. He had to learn how to live, not remember, not hear the never-ending echoes that those one hundred minutes alone with her kept thundering into him. One bus ride with her, when he had her all to himself, sitting on the seat next to her, walking across one Field of Mars by her side, one glimpse into what might have been, one flare of an inflamed heart and the consequence? Eternity in Soviet Russia.