However much it hurt Alexander to say her name, it must have hurt the man at the tree even more to hear it. He flinched, coiled up, bent his shaking head. “No, stop. It can’t be. Take your weapon. Shoot me.”
Alexander put down his Shpagin and inched his way to the man. “Pasha, oh my God, what the fuck have you been thinking? What are you doing?”
“Forget me,” said the man named Pasha Metanov. “You’re married to Tania? She’s all right then?”
“She’s gone,” said Alexander.
“She died?” He gasped.
“I don’t think so.” Alexander lowered his voice. “Gone from the Soviet Union.”
“I don’t understand. Gone where?”
“Pasha…”
“We got time. We got nothing but time. Tell me.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“She escaped through Finland.” Alexander spoke in a whisper. “I don’t know if she made it, if she’s safe, if she’s free. I know nothing. They arrested me, put me in charge of this penal battalion.”
“What about…my”—Pasha’s voice faltered—“family?”
Alexander shook his head.
“Did anyone make it?”
“No one,” Alexander breathed out.
The warrior fought his words. “My mother?”
“Leningrad took them all.”
Pasha was speechless for a few terrible moments, and then he cried.
Alexander’s head was lowered so far, the chin was on his chest.
An unconsoled Pasha said, “Why? You could’ve killed me, and I would have never known. I would have been all right. I thought they had evacuated, were safe. I thought they were in Molotov. I had comfort thinking of them alive. Why did you spare me? Can’t you see I have no interest in being spared?
Would I have joined the other side if I thought for a moment my life was worth saving? Who asked you to come along and save me?”
“No one,” said Alexander. “I didn’t ask you to come along either. I was ready to throw the grenade into your tent. You would’ve been dead, your troops annihilated by morning. Instead, I heard someone calling you by your rightful name. Why did I have to hear that? Ask yourself.” He paused. “Can I release you?”
“Yes,” said Pasha. “And I will tear out your heart with my bare hands.”
“If only I fucking had one,” said Alexander, getting up off the ground, and replacing the gag on Pasha’s mouth with a heavy hand.
Morning broke and with it came anger. Alexander didn’t understand as he watched Pasha sitting sullenly gagged and bound. He wished he had leisure to worry about it. At the moment it was raining, as if all other iniquities were not enough. They came to the mountains of Holy Cross to die, and now they were going to die wet.
Alexander offered Pasha some food. Pasha refused. A cigarette? Also a no.
“What about a bullet?”
Pasha wouldn’t even look at Alexander.
The enemy was quiet this morning. Alexander wasn’t surprised, and he knew Pasha wasn’t either. The commander of their unit had gone.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Alexander asked, taking the gag out of Pasha’s mouth.
“Why did you have to tell me about my family.” There was no inflection.
“You asked me.”
“You could have lied. You could have said they were all right.”
“You would have wanted that?”
“Yes. A thousand times yes. A small comfort to a dying man in the rain, I would have wanted that.”
Alexander wiped the rain off Pasha’s face.
Then he regrouped his men, and they all took their positions along the trees. After a morning smoke, they opened feeble fire that was not returned. In the woods the sound of war was too close. A meter away, a kilometer away, the canopy of the leaves, the denseness of the underbrush, the slight damp echo made the fire sound oppressively close. Fields were better, mines were better, tanks were better. This was the worst.
He had only nineteen men left. Nineteen men and a hostage that both sides wanted dead.
They stopped firing and sat under the trees. Alexander sat mutely next to Pasha. He had tried to get Gronin on the phone again, but the telephone was cutting out and he could hardly hear. His men were nearly out of ammunition.
Ouspensky came and whispered that they needed to kill the commander to make headway in the woods. Alexander said they would wait.
And through it all, it rained.
Hours went by before Pasha finally moved his head, gesturing for Alexander, who took off the gag.
“Maybe now a cigarette,” Pasha said.
Alexander handed Pasha a cigarette.
After taking a long satisfying drag, Pasha said, “How did you meet her anyway?”
“Fate brought us together,” Alexander replied. “On the first day of war, I was patrolling the streets and she was eating ice cream.”
“Just like her,” Pasha said. “She nods and then does what she wants. Her instructions were very clear: don’t dawdle; go and get food.” He glanced at Alexander. “That day was the last day I saw her. Saw my family.”
“I know.” With a hurting heart, Alexander said, “What am I going to do with you, Pasha Metanov, the brother of my wife?”
Pasha shrugged. “That’s your problem. Let me tell you about my men. I’ve got fifty of them in the
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
woods. Five commissioned lieutenants. Five sergeants. What do you think they’re going to do without me? They will never surrender. They will retreat just far enough to join up with the Wehrmacht motorized divisions protecting the western side of the mountains. You know how many troops are waiting there for you? Half a million. How far do you think your nineteen men are going to get? I know how the penal battalions work. No one will resupply you if they need the supplies themselves. What are you going to do?”
“My lieutenant thinks we should kill you.”
“He is right. I’m the commander of the last vestige of General Vlasov’s army. After I’m dead, there won’t be any of us left.”
“How do you know?” asked Alexander. “I hear the Vlasovites are running amok in Romania, raping the Romanian women.”
“What does that have to do with me? I’m in Poland.”
Alexander sat defeated with his hands on his legs. “What happened to you? Your family would have liked to know.”
“Don’t tell me anymore about my family,” Pasha said, his voice catching.
“Your mother and father were torn up after you vanished.”
“Mama was always so emotional,” Pasha said and started to cry. “I thought it was kinder that way. Not to know. Suspect the worst. This is all slow death anyway.”
Alexander didn’t know if it was kinder. “Tania went to your camp in Dohotino looking for you.”
“She’s a fool,” he said, his voice full of weeping affection.
Alexander moved a little closer. “The camp was abandoned, and then she moved on to Luga days before the Luga line fell to the Germans. She wanted to make her way to Novgorod to find you. She was told that’s where the Dohotino camp members were sent.”
“We were sent…” Pasha shook his head and laughed miserably. “God looks after Tania in mysterious ways. Always has. Had she gone to Novgorod, she would have died for sure, and I was never even close to Novgorod. The closest I got to Novgorod was passing Lake Ilmen in a train that the Germans blew up just south of the lake.”
“Lake Ilmen?”
Neither man could look at the other. “She told you about that lake?”
“She’s told me everything,” said Alexander.
Pasha smiled. “We spent our childhood on that lake. She was the queen of Lake Ilmen. So, she came looking for me? She was always something, my sister. If anyone could have
found me, it would have been her.”
“Yes. But it turns out thatI found you.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“Yes, in fucking Poland! I wasn’t in Novgorod. The Nazis blew up our train and with dead bodies piled house-high, they set us on fire. Me and my friend Volodya were the only ones who survived. We scrambled our way out of the compost heap and tried to find our own troops but of course the entire countryside belonged to the Germans by then. Volodya had broken his leg in camp weeks before. We couldn’t get very far. We were taken prisoner in hours. The Germans had no use for Volodya. They shot him dead.” He shook his head. “I’m glad his mother didn’t know. Did you know his mother? Nina Iglenko?”
“I knew his mother. She wheedled food from Tania for the two sons that remained with her.”
“What happened to them?”
“Leningrad took them all.” Alexander lowered his head another notch. In a moment, his head was going to be in the mud he was sitting in.
Alexander wanted to talk to Pasha about the Vlasovites but couldn’t find the words. How to express that never before had a million soldiers turned away from their own army and joined the side of the hated enemy on their own soil against their own people. Spies yes, double spies, individual traitors, yes. But a million soldiers?
All Alexander could manage was, “Pasha,what were you thinking?”
“What was I thinking? About what? Have you not heard what happened in the Ukraine, how Stalin abandoned his own men to the Germans there?”
“I’ve heard it all,” Alexander said tiredly. “I have been fighting for the Red Army since 1937. I’ve heard everything. I know about everything. Every decree, every law, every edict.”
“Don’t you know that our great commander made being taken prisoner a crime against the Motherland?”
“Of course I know. And the POW’s family gets no bread.”
“That’s right. But know this: Stalin’s own son was taken prisoner by the Nazis.”
“Yes.”
“And when Stalin learned of this, and saw the potential ironic conflict, do you know what he did?”
“The lore is that he disowned his son,” said Alexander, drawing his helmet tighter over his ears.
“The lore is correct. I know because I heard from the German SS that he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, and there he died in the execution pit.”
“Yes.”
“His own son! What hope is there for me?”
“None for any of us,” said Alexander, “except this: Stalin doesn’t know who we are. That might help us.
Save us.”
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
“He knows whoI am.”
Alexander feared Stalin might know who he was, too. Foreign espionage in his officer ranks. His eyes bore into Pasha’s face. “All of this put together and heaped on top of all the dead Chinese in 1937
cannot equal fighting on the side of the enemy against your own people. I think the army calls it high treason. What do you think they will do to you when they catch you, Pasha?”
Pasha wanted to wave his hands with emotion; he struggled against the ropes and whirled his head from side to side. “The same thing they would do to me if I were returned to them a prisoner of war,” he said at last. “And don’t sit there and judge me. You don’t know me. You don’t know my life.”
“Tell me.” Alexander moved closer. They were huddled near the same tree, their backs to the silent line of battle.
“The Germans put me into a camp at Minsk for that first winter of 1941 to ’42. There were sixty thousand in our camp, and they couldn’t feed us, nor did they want to. They couldn’t cover us, or clothe us, or heal us. And our own leaders made sure that extra help wouldn’t be coming from the Red Cross.
We certainly wouldn’t be receiving any parcels of food from home, or letters perhaps, or blankets.
Nothing. When Stalin was asked by Hitler about reciprocity for the German prisoners, Stalin replied that he didn’t know what Hitler was talking about, because he wassure there were no Soviet prisoners, since no Soviet soldier would ever be so unpatriotic as to surrender to the fucking Germans, and then added that he certainly wasn’t interested in unilateral rights of parcel just for the Germans. And so Hitler said, right, that’s just fine with us. There were sixty thousand of us in that camp, I tell you, and at the end of that winter eleven thousand remained. Much more manageable, wouldn’t you agree?”
Alexander mutely nodded.
“In the spring I escaped and made my way on rivers down to the Ukraine, where I was promptly seized by the Germans again, and this time put not in a POW camp, but in a work camp. I thought that was illegal, to make prisoners work, but apparently it’s not illegal to do anything to Soviet soldiers or refugees. So the work camp was full of Ukrainian Jews, and then I noticed that they were disappearing en masse. I didn’t think they were all escaping to join the partisan movement. I found out for sure when they made us non Jews dig out massive holes in the summer of 1942, and then cover up the thousands of bodies with dirt. I knew I was not safe for long. I didn’t think the Germans had any special affinity for the Russian man. They hated Jews the most, but the Russians weren’t too far behind, and Red Army men seemed to breed a special kind of hostility. They didn’t just want to kill us, they wanted to destroy us, to break our bodies, first, then our spirits, then set us on fire. I had enough of it, and escaped that summer of 1942, and that’s when I, plundering through the countryside, hoping to make my way to Greece, was picked up by a band of men fighting for Voronov who fought for Andrei Vlasov of the ROA, the Russian Liberation Army. I knew my fate. I joined.”
“Oh, Pasha.” Alexander stood up.
“You think my sister would prefer that I die at the hands of Hitler or at the hands of Comrade Stalin? I went with Vlasov—the man who promised me life. Stalin said I would die. Hitler said I would die. Hitler, who treats dogs better than the Soviet POWs.”
“Hitler loves dogs. He prefers dogs to children.”
“Hitler, Stalin, they offered me the same thing. Only General Vlasov stood up for my life. And I wanted
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
to give it to him.”
Slamming a magazine upward into his machine gun, Alexander said, “So where is this Vlasov when you need him? He thought he was helping the Nazis, except the Fascists and the Communists and the Americans all seem to have one thing in common. They all despise traitors.” Alexander took out his army knife from his boot and bent over Pasha, who flinched. Looking at him with surprise, Alexander shrugged and cut the ropes that tied Pasha’s hands. “Andrei Vlasov was captured by the Germans, spent time in their prison and was finally turned over to the Soviets. You’ve been fighting on the side of Vlasov who’s been a nonentity in this war for years. His glory days are over.”
Pasha stood up, groaned under his compressed and aching body being in one position for too long, and said, “My glory days are over, too.”
They stared at each other. Compact Pasha reminded Alexander of Georgi Vasilievich Metanov, Tatiana’s father. Pasha looked up and said, “We’re a fine pair. I command what’s left of Vlasov’s men, a nearly extinct breed. My battalion is first on the line of defense because the Germans want us all to be annihilated by our own people. And you are being sent in to kill me, commanding a penal battalion full of convicts who can’t fight, can’t shoot, and have no arms.” He smiled. “What are you going to tell my sister when you see her in heaven? That you killed her brother in the heat of battle?”
“Pasha Metanov,” said Alexander, motioning him to come, “whatever I was put on this earth to do, I’m almost sure it was not to killyou . Now come. We’ve got to put an end to this senselessness. You’re going to tell your men to lay down their arms.”
“Didn’t you hear what I told you? My men
will never surrender to the NKGB. Besides, do you have any idea what’s ahead for you if you continue onward?”
“Yes. The Germans will get trounced. Maybe not by us on this fucking hill, but everywhere else. Have you heard about the second front? Have you heard about Patton? We’re going to meet the Americans on the Oder river near Berlin. That’s what’s ahead. If Hitler had any sense he would surrender and spare Germany an unconditional humiliation for the second time this century and maybe save a few million lives in the process.”
“Does Hitler seem like the kind of man who would unconditionally surrender? Or care about saving one life, or a million? If he’s going down, he’s going down dragging the whole world with him.”
“He’s certainly doing that,” said Alexander, and was about to whistle for Ouspensky when Pasha put his hand on Alexander to stop him.
“Wait,” Pasha said. “Let’s think this through for a minute, shall we?”
They sat down on a log and lit their cigarettes. “Alexander,” said Pasha, “you’ve really done it by not killing me.”
“I have, haven’t I?” Alexander smoked. “One way or another we need to figure it out immediately. Or you and I won’t have any men left to command.”
Pasha was quiet. “And then just you and me in the woods?” he asked.
Alexander glanced at him. What was he saying?
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
Leaning in, Pasha said, “I will have my men surrender if you will guarantee not to give them up to the NKGB.”
“What do you propose I do with them?”
“Absorb us into your unit. We have arms, we have shells, we have grenades, mortars, carbines.”
“I was going to take your weapons no matter what, Pasha. That’s what the vanquished do—they surrender their weapons. But your men? Are they going to switch and fight for the other side now?”
“They will do what I tell them to do.”
“How can they do it?”
“What do you suggest? Dispersing?”
“Dispersing? Disbanding? Do you know what that’s called? Desertion.”