The Beast in the Red Forest (16 page)

After dropping the girl off at her grandmother’s house, Malashenko did not return immediately to the safe house, as he had promised Pekkala he would do.

Instead, he made his way alone into the forest east of Rovno. Following trails used only by himself and wild dogs, Malashenko arrived at an old hunter’s cabin. The cabin stood at the edge of a muddy path once used by wood cutters but abandoned since the outbreak of the war. Three kilometres to the north, the path connected with the main road running out of Rovno, but it wasn’t even on the maps.

Before the war, the cabin had been the home of a gamekeeper named Pitoniak. The building had been well-constructed, with an overhanging roof, earth piled up waist deep around the logs which formed the walls, as well as a floor tiled with interlocking pieces of slate. The cabin’s inner walls had been insulated with old newspaper shellacked in place, and a potbellied stove kept it warm in wintertime.

Pitoniak had built the cabin with his own hands and the few people who knew of its existence, besides Pitoniak himself, had been killed off in the opening days of the German invasion. After the Germans took over in Rovno, he had simply continued with his duties, expecting at any moment to be relieved of his post by the occupying government. Instead, to Pitoniak’s astonishment, he continued to receive a monthly pay cheque, as well as his fuel and salt allotment, as if nothing had ever happened. For a while, it seemed as if Pitoniak’s luck might last throughout the war.

But it ran out one dreary February morning, when he encountered a small group of former Red Army soldiers who had escaped from German captivity and were now living in the forest. Their weapons had been fashioned in the manner of their ancestors, from sharpened stones and fire-hardened sticks and the gnarled fists of tree roots wrestled out of the black earth.

Pitoniak had been patrolling in a desolate valley, where he knew a pack of wild boar spent the winter. To get there and back was a full day’s walk from his cabin, but he was curious to see if the boar had produced any offspring that year. Pitoniak had set out before sunrise and arrived at the edge of the valley just before noon.

It was here that he ran into the soldiers.

There were only three of them and they were lost. They had been wandering in circles for days. Pitoniak gave them what little food he had brought with him – a small loaf of dense
chumatsky
bread, made from rye and wheat flour, and a fist-sized piece of
soloyna
bacon.

He offered to lead the men back to his cabin, and to put them in touch with a partisan Atrad under the command of Andrei Barabanschikov, which had begun forming in a remote area to the south of his cabin.

The soldiers agreed at once, and Pitoniak led them from the valley where they would soon have perished without his help.

Arriving at the cabin, Pitoniak built a fire in the potbellied stove.

The men stood by, hands held out towards the heat-hazed iron, faces blotched white with the beginnings of frostbite. They spat on the stove plates, watching their saliva crack and roll around like tiny fizzing pearls before it disappeared. When their clothing warmed, the men began to scratch themselves as dozens of cold-numbed lice came back to life.

Taking pity on these men, Pitoniak fed them
sapkhulis tsveni
stew made from deer kidneys, dill pickles and potatoes, which he had made for himself before he set out for the valley.

The soldiers wept with thanks.

After they had eaten, they sat naked by the stove, running candle flames up and down the seams of their shirts and trousers. The fires spat as lice eggs exploded in the heat.

When this was done, the soldiers bathed in an old wooden barrel filled with rainwater which stood behind his cabin.

As Pitoniak watched them set aside the filthy remnants of their uniforms and step out of their boots on to pale, trench-rotted feet, Pitoniak wondered if the Barabanschikovs would even take them in – three more mouths to feed and the men half dead as they were.

He was not the only one to have these thoughts.

That night, as the men lay sleeping, one of the soldiers rose to his feet, took up Pitoniak’s gun and shot the gamekeeper where he lay in his bunk. Then he turned the gun upon the other two men, killing them as well.

The name of this man was Vadim Ivanovich Malashenko.

After burying the bodies in a shallow grave, Malashenko made himself at home in the cabin. Over the next month, he steadily ate his way through Pitoniak’s food supply.

When Malashenko’s strength had finally returned, he set off in search of the Barabanschikov Atrad and it was not long before their paths crossed in the Red Forest.

Seeing that this former soldier had a gun and was not on his last legs, like so many others who had come to them, the Barabanschikovs accepted Malashenko into their ranks.

He had been with them ever since.

Malashenko never mentioned the cabin to the other partisans, but sometimes he went back there on his own. In the evenings, he would sit by the fire, staring at the newspapers on the walls. The shellac had aged with time, forming a yellowy glaze over the pages. The papers dated back to the 1920s and although Malashenko couldn’t read, the thousands of unfamiliar words transformed into a thing of beauty separate from their hidden meanings.

By the end of 1942, Malashenko had become convinced that the days of the Barabanschikov Atrad were numbered, along with all the other partisans in the region. Hidden among the trees, he had seen the SS death squads at work – trenches dug in the sandy soil and truckload after truckload of civilians, partisans and captured Red Army prisoners arriving at the place of execution. Stripped naked, they filed into the pits, huddled and obedient, where they were dispatched by men wearing leather aprons and carrying revolvers. It was the acceptance of their fate which haunted him, even more than the killings, of which he had already seen more than one man could properly encompass in his mind.

Malashenko knew that he would have to act now if he wanted to avoid ending up in a pit like those others but, at first, he had no idea how to proceed. After several days of pondering the situation, he came upon a solution which would allow him not only to survive but to prosper in this war.

It had been staring right at him, every time he walked into town.

Among the new occupiers of Rovno were men with big ideas, which only the privilege of rank could bring to life. He saw them in their finely tailored uniforms, gold rings winking on their fingers. He watched them sitting in the cafés, now open only to their own kind, laughing with beautiful women, whose shoulders had been draped with precious furs. As Malashenko passed by, staring with undisguised longing at their steaming cups of coffee and the fresh bread on their plates, they glanced at him and looked away again, as if he had been nothing more than a handful of leaves stirred up by a passing gust of wind. The disdain of these women only increased his admiration for the officers who owned them. For such men, Rovno was only a stepping stone, a place to be plundered of its wealth before setting off once more upon the road to greatness.

One person in particular had caught his eye; Otto Krug, director of the German Secret Field Police – the Geheime Feldpolizei – for Rovno and the surrounding district.

For a man like that, thought Malashenko, information is the source of power. And I have information.

But what to ask for in return? Cash was no good. When paying for food or clothes or tobacco, Malashenko could no more easily explain a wallet crammed with Reichsmarks than he could afford to let his partisan brothers know that he had been collaborating with the enemy. It had to be something that would not raise the suspicions of those who, like Malashenko himself, suspected the worst in everyone.

The answer came to him as he trudged through the forest one day, gathering mushrooms for the partisans’ communal cooking pot. It was a warm afternoon and perspiration trickled down his forehead, stinging his eyes and wetting his dusty lips. And suddenly Malashenko realised what he would ask for in payment. ‘Genius,’ he muttered, licking the sweat from his fingertips.

The answer was salt. He would trade information for salt. Throughout history, people had substituted salt for money. Even the Roman soldiers, whose isolated garrisons had once clung like limpets to this landscape, received salt as part of their salaries.

Salt had always been expensive, even before the war, but once the fighting began all available reserves had been snatched up by the military. Only those crafty enough to have hidden away their supplies could get their hands on it now. Malashenko might not have been rich. He might not have been the kind of man for whom salt was always within easy reach. But Malashenko was exactly the kind of individual who might have hidden his supply from the claws of government. That was a story even the most suspicious of his neighbours would believe.

These days, a person could buy anything with salt. From now on, that was exactly what he intended to do.

On his next visit to Rovno, Malashenko walked into the headquarters of the Secret Field Police, located in the former Hotel Novostav. With cap in hand and gaze lowered humbly to the floor, he stood before the desk of Otto Krug.

Krug was a giant of a man, with a boiled red face, wispy white hair and huge fists tucked into pale green doeskin gloves, like bunches of unripe bananas. He wore these gloves, even inside his office, due to a bad case of eczema that split his fingertips and left his knuckles raw. The condition had appeared shortly after his arrival in Rovno, and he blamed it entirely on the stresses of his new job.

As a result, Krug despised Rovno. He hated everything about it. Even before he arrived to take up his post, Krug had already begun scheming for promotion to one of the larger, more important cities of this soon-to-be conquered nation. Minsk perhaps. Or Kiev. Odessa. Stalingrad. In the wide scope of Krug’s ambition, even Moscow was not out of the question, provided he first took advantage of all the opportunities available to him here in Rovno.

When Malashenko explained that he was a trusted member of the elusive Barabanschikov Atrad, Krug pulled out a Luger pistol and laid it on the desk in front of him. ‘Why should I let you walk out of here alive?’ he asked.

With his eyes fixed on the gun, Malashenko explained what he was prepared to do.

Without moving the Luger from the desk, Krug brought out a bottle of apricot brandy, poured a measure into a glass and slid it across the table to the dishevelled little man. Then he sat back, gloved fist gripped around the neck of the bottle.

Malashenko poured it down his throat and the soft sweetness of the fruit was so perfectly contained within the glassy liquid that he could almost feel the downy softness of the apricot’s skin against his lips.

‘Assuming I can use this information,’ said Krug, ‘what do you want in return?’

When Malashenko named the manner of his payment, Krug had to stop himself from laughing out loud at his good fortune. Whole warehouses of salt were no more than a requisition slip away.

Krug slid the bottle across to Malashenko. ‘Help yourself,’ he said.

The men shook hands before they parted company, the Chief of Secret Field Police towering over the diminutive Malashenko.

Soon afterwards, the salt began to flow.

In brown, moisture-proof half-kilo bags, Malashenko marked his own path to prosperity. He hid this newfound wealth in a secret underground chamber, dry and lined with stones, which he had constructed in the woods behind Pitoniak’s cabin.

Whenever Malashenko learned of anything which he thought might be of interest to Krug, he found some excuse to visit Rovno and then paid a visit to the Geheime Feldpolizei.

In order to be able to leave the Atrad’s hiding place in the forest and visit Rovno on a regular basis, Malashenko established himself as a courier to the hospital in town. Although wounded partisans could not be brought to the hospital, which was constantly being watched by the German authorities, sympathetic Russians who worked there could still smuggle out medicine to the Atrads. Occasionally, doctors or nurses could be persuaded to make visits to the Atrads. Malashenko acted as a courier for both the medicine and the doctors, who would be blindfolded and led down as many winding trails as possible on their way to the hiding place, so as not to be able to repeat the journey on their own. Once they arrived at the Atrad, the doctors would perform surgeries in the most primitive conditions imaginable. But it was better than nothing at all.

Part of Malashenko’s agreement with Krug was that he would continue to carry out his duties as a courier, even though the German authorities were well aware of what he was doing. Krug considered the stolen medical supplies and the occasional doctor visit a small price to pay, compared to the information Malashenko supplied about partisans in the region.

As a result of Malashenko’s information, numerous Atrads were wiped out.

The Barabanschikovs, however, remained untouched. Malashenko credited this to his value as an informant, but that was only partly true.

The local anti-partisan troops had found the Barabanschikovs so elusive that Krug decided it would be easier just to leave them alone for now, and to focus on easier targets. Krug had long since realised that the war against the partisans could only be won in stages, and not in one all-out attack. The day would come when Krug would focus all of his resources on destroying the Barabanschikovs. For now, however, Krug had good reason to leave them in peace.

Malashenko always delivered his information in person to Krug, not trusting any intermediary or other form of communication, since he could neither read nor write. He entered the Feldpolizei headquarters through a tunnel which ran from a bakery across the road directly into the basement of the old hotel. Krug had ordered the tunnel to be built, not as a means of conveying informants into the building, but as a means of his own escape if the headquarters ever came under attack.

The amount of salt Krug paid out varied, depending on the value of the information, but Malashenko never had cause to complain. No matter how trivial the news, Krug never turned him away. He even handed over an extra bag of salt at Christmas.