A Man Without Breath (10 page)

‘What about this place? Were there ever any executions around here? Of Jews? Of Russians, perhaps? And why is there a cross in the middle of the Katyn Wood?’

The woman never spoke at all, and Oleg Susanin’s answers were short and to the point, but I’ve questioned enough men in my time to know when someone is holding something back. Or lying.

‘He says that when NKVD had this house they were forbidden to come to Dnieper Castle for security reasons so they don’t know what went on here,’ said Peshkov.

‘There was a fence all the way around the land then,’ added Dyakov. ‘Since the Germans arrived, the fence has been broken down by soldiers foraging for firewood, but some of it is still there.’

‘Don’t be so rough with them,’ I told Peshkov. ‘They’re not accused of anything. Tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Peshkov translated again, and uncertainly the Susanins
both nodded a faint smile in my direction. But Peshkov remained contemptuous.

‘Take my word for it, boss,’ he said. ‘You have to speak roughly to these people or they won’t answer at all. The
babulya
is a real peasant, and the
starik
is a stupid
bulbash
who’s spent his whole life in fear of the Party. They’re still terrified the NKVD will come back – even after eighteen months of German occupation. As a matter of fact I’m a little surprised these two are still here. It goes without saying that if those
mudaks
ever do come back here these two will be Russian fertilizer. Know what I’m saying? Day one they’ll be shot just because they worked for you fellows. With all due respect to your colonel, about the only thing that’s kept them here are their beehives.’

‘Like Tolstoy, yes?’ Dyakov laughed loudly. ‘Still, it makes for a nice cup of tea, yes?’

‘Aren’t you afraid of what will happen if the NKVD comes back?’

Peshkov glanced at Dyakov and shrugged.

‘No sir,’ said Peshkov. ‘I don’t believe they are coming back.’

‘That is a matter of opinion,’ I said.

‘Me? I don’t have any beehives, boss.’ Dyakov grinned widely. ‘There’s nothing to keep Alok Dyakov here in Smolensk. No sir, when the shit starts coming up through the floor I’m going to Germany with the field marshal. If it was just being shot, I could live with that, if you know what I mean. But there’s plenty worse the NKVD can do to a man than put a tap in the back of your head. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’

‘What was the NKVD doing here?’ I asked the two Russians. ‘Here? In this house.’

‘I don’t know sir,’ said Peshkov. ‘Frankly it was better never to ask such questions. To mind one’s own business.’

‘It’s a nice house. With a cinema. What do you think they were doing? Watching
Battleship Potemkin
?
Alexander Nevsky
? You must have some idea, Dyakov. What’s your opinion?’

‘You want me to guess? I guess they were here getting drunk on vodka and watching movies, yes.’

I nodded. ‘Thank you. Thank you for your help. I am very grateful to you both.’

‘I am glad to have been of assistance,’ said Peshkov.

It was hard to know which of them was lying – Peshkov, Dyakov, or the Susanins – but I knew someone was. I had the proof of that in my own trouser pocket. Even as I nodded and smiled at the Russians, I had my hand around the button I had found in Katyn Wood.

When I went outside on my own to think things over, Dyakov followed me.

‘Peshkov speaks good German,’ I said. ‘Where did he learn?’

‘At university. Peshkov’s a very clever man. But me I learned German at a place called Terezin, in Czechoslovakia. When I was a boy I was prisoner of the Austrian army in 1915. I like Austrians. But I like Germans more. Austrians are not very friendly. After the war I was a schoolteacher. Is why NKVD arrested me.’

‘They arrested you because you were a schoolteacher?’

Dyakov laughed loudly. ‘I teach German, sir. That is fine in 1940 when Stalin and Hitler are friends. But when Germany attacks Russia, then NKVD think I am enemy and arrest me.’

‘Did they arrest Peshkov, too?’

Dyakov shrugged. ‘No, sir. But he wasn’t teaching German, sir. Before the war I believe he worked at the electricity power station, sir. I believe he learned to do this job in Germany.
With Siemens. Is very important job, so that could be why NKVD didn’t arrest him.’

‘Why isn’t Peshkov doing that job now?’

Dyakov grinned. ‘Because there’s no money to be made doing that. The Germans at Krasny Bor pay him very well, sir. Good money. Better than electricity worker. Besides there are Germans running electricity power station now. They don’t trust Russians to do this.’

‘And the hunting? Who taught you to hunt?’

‘My father was hunter, sir. He taught me to shoot.’ Dyakov grinned. ‘You see sir? I’ve had very good teachers. My father and the Austrians.’

Friday, March 12th 1943

I awoke thinking I must be back in the trenches, because there was a strong smell of something horrible in my nostrils. The smell was like a dead rat only worse, and I spent the next ten minutes sniffing the air in various areas of my room in the castle before finally I decided that the source of the stink was underneath my own bed. And it was only when I went down on my hands and knees to look that I remembered the frozen leather boot I had tossed on the floor the previous morning; except that the boot and whatever was still in the boot was now frozen no longer.

I took a deep breath, and at the same time I looked inside the leg of the boot, squeezing the toe. There were several hard objects inside it, the remains of a decayed foot to add to the colonel’s collection of bones on the floor of the cold storeroom downstairs. I had a good idea that the foot and the leg bones wrapped in the tarpaulin had belonged to the same man, because the boot had been chewed in several places, presumably by the wolf. But there was something else in the boot beside a dead Pole’s stinking foot, and gradually I peeled out of the leg a piece of oiled paper that must have been wrapped
around the dead man’s calf. At first I was inclined to believe that the Pole had simply tried to insulate his leg against the cold, much as I did with my own poorer-quality boots; but newspaper would have done for that – oiled paper was for preserving things, not keeping them warm.

I unfolded the paper as best I could, using the leg of the bed and a chair. It was folded in half and inside the fold were several typed sheets of onion-skin paper. But in spite of the oilskin paper, what was written was almost illegible, and it was clear it was going to require the resources of a laboratory to decipher what was written on these pages.

Until the ground thawed it was hard to see how I was going to make much more progress with this preliminary investigation, and it looked as if the button would have to be evidence enough. But I wasn’t happy about that. One button, an old boot and a few bones didn’t seem like much of a haul to take back to Berlin. I badly wanted to know what was written on the pages before I mentioned them to anyone. I wasn’t about to make myself or the bureau a sucker for some elaborate lie dreamed up by the propaganda ministry. All the same, I couldn’t help but think that if the Mahatma’s men had planted evidence of a massacre in Katyn Wood, they’d have made it a little more obvious and easy for someone like me to find.

I dressed and went downstairs to find some breakfast.

Colonel Ahrens looked pleased when I told him I had probably concluded my investigation and would be returning to Berlin just as soon as possible. He looked a lot less pleased when I told him that I had reached no firm conclusions.

‘At this stage I really can’t say if the bureau will want to take this any further. Sorry sir, but that’s just the way it is. I’ll be off the back of your collar just as soon as I can get on a plane home.’

‘You won’t get a flight out of here today. Saturday looks like a better bet. Or even Sunday. There will be plenty of planes arriving here tomorrow.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘The leader. He’s coming here, isn’t he?’

‘Yes. Look, I’ll telephone the airfield and arrange things for you. Until then you’re welcome to make use of the facilities here at the castle. There’s a shooting range if you care for that kind of thing. And there’s a movie in the theatre this afternoon and evening. All leave is cancelled from midnight tonight, so the movie has been brought forward. I’m afraid it’s
Jud Süss
. All we could get at short notice.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s not one of my favourites.’ I shrugged. ‘You know, maybe I’ll take a look at the local cathedral after all.’

‘Good idea,’ said the colonel. ‘I’ll lend you a car.’

‘Thank you, sir. And if you could give me a map of the city, I’d be grateful. From a distance it’s hard to tell one onion dome from another.’

*

I didn’t give a damn about the cathedral. I had no intention of looking at the place, or anything else for that matter, but I didn’t want Colonel Ahrens knowing that. Besides, I don’t believe in tourism during wartime, not any more. Sure, when I was stationed in Paris during 1940 I’d walked about a bit with a Baedeker and seen a few of the sights – Les Invalides, the Eiffel Tower – but that was Paris: you could always read a Frenchman in a way you couldn’t ever do with a Czech or an Ivan. I’d learned a bit of caution since then, and even in Prague I didn’t go abroad with the Baedeker very much. Not that there ever were any Baedekers written about Russia – what would have been the point? – but the principle holds good I think, as two examples might serve to illustrate.

Heinz Seldte was a lieutenant in a police battalion I knew from the Alex in the early Thirties; I helped get him a leg up into Kripo. He was one of the first Germans into the city of Kiev in September 1941, and on a quiet summer’s afternoon he decided to go and look at the city’s Duma building on Khreshchatyk, which is the main street – apparently it was a big deal, with a spire and a statue of the archangel Michael, the patron saint of Kiev. What he didn’t know – what nobody knew – was that the retreating Red Army had booby-trapped the whole fucking street with dynamite, which they exploded with radio-controlled fuses from over four hundred kilometres away. The historic buildings of Khreshchatyk – the Germans renamed the ruins Eichhornstrasse – were never seen again; nor was Heinz Seldte.

Victor Lungwitz was a waiter from the Adlon Hotel. He waited tables because he couldn’t make a living at being an artist. He joined an SS Panzer Division in 1939 and was sent to Belarus as part of Operation Barbarossa. When he was off-duty he liked drawing churches, of which Minsk has almost as many as Smolensk. One day he went to look at some old church on the edge of town. It was called the Red Church, which ought to have put him on his guard. They found Victor’s drawing but no sign of him. A few days later a mutilated body was found in some marshland nearby. It took them a while to identify poor Victor: the partisans had cut almost everything off his head – his nose, his lips, his eyelids, his ears – before cutting off his genitals and letting him bleed to death.

When you fight a war with a Baedeker you don’t always know what you’re going to see.

In the colonel’s draughty little Tatra I drove east along the Vitebsk highway with Smolensk in front of me and the Dnieper River on my right. For most of the way the road ran between
two railway lines, and as I passed Arsenalstrasse and a cemetery on my left I saw the main station; it was a huge icing-cake of a place with four square corner towers and an enormous archway entrance. Like a lot of buildings in Smolensk it was painted green, and either green meant something significant in that part of Russia or green was the only colour of paint they’d had in the stores the last time anyone had thought of carrying out some building maintenance. Russia being Russia, I tended to subscribe to the second explanation.

A little further down the road, I stopped to consult my map and then turned south down Bruckenstrasse, which sounded promising given that I needed to find a bridge to cross the river.

According to the map the west and east bridges were destroyed, and that left three in the middle or, if you were a Russian, a log-raft passenger ferry that resembled something from my time at a boys’ summer camp on Rügen Island. On the north bank of the river I slowed the car as I came in sight of the local Kremlin – a fortress enclosing the centre of the ancient city of Smolensk. On a hilltop, behind the castellated red-brick walls built by Boris Godunov, stood the city’s cathedral with its distinctive pepper-pot domes and tall white walls, and looking to my eyes as ugly as an outsized wood-burning stove. At least now I could say that I’d seen it.

I showed my papers to the military police guards at the checkpoint on the Peter and Paul bridge, asked for directions to the German Kommandatura, and was directed to go south on Hauptstrasse.

‘You can’t miss it, sir,’ said the bridge sentry. ‘It’s opposite Sparkassenstrasse. If you find yourself on Magazinstrasse, you’ll have gone too far.’

‘Are all Smolensk street names in German?’

‘Of course. Makes it a lot easier to get around, don’t you think?’

‘It certainly does if you’re German,’ I said.

‘Isn’t that what it’s all about, sir?’ The sentry grinned. ‘We’re trying to make it as much like home as possible.’

‘That’ll be the day.’

I drove on, and in the shadow of the Kremlin wall on my right, I went along Hauptstrasse until I saw what was obviously the Kommandatura – a grey stone building with a pillared portico and several Nazi Party flags. An extensive series of German street pointers had been erected in the square in front of this building – many of them on a broken Soviet tank – but the general effect was not one of clarity of direction but confusion; a sentry stood in the middle of the pointers to help Germans make sense of their own signs. The red of the flags on the Kommandatura added an almost welcome splash of colour in a city that was as grey and green as a dead elephant. Underneath the flags a dozen or so soldiers were watching a boy, riding bareback on a spavined white horse, perform a few tricks with the nag. From time to time they would toss a few coins onto the cobbled street, where they were collected by an old man wearing a white cap and jacket who might have been some relation to the boy or possibly the horse. Seeing me, two of the soldiers came over as I pulled up and saluted.