The Beast in the Red Forest (8 page)

In spite of the damage, Rovno still showed signs of life.

A woman with soot-smeared hands picked through a broken chest of drawers which had somehow found its way into the middle of the road. She plucked out neatly folded undershirts and handkerchiefs, laying some over her arm to take away. The rest, she folded up, dappling them with smoky fingerprints, and replaced inside the drawer.

In the next street, a boy wearing a pilot’s leather flying helmet walked past them. Around his neck, he carried a belt of machine-gun bullets, like the sash of an Orthodox priest.

On a wide boulevard which cut through the centre of the town, a group of soldiers huddled around the wreck of a German aircraft. They were sawing off pieces of the aluminium wings and melting the metal over a fire. Once the aluminium had liquefied, they poured it into a mould shaped like a spoon which they had carved into a brick. Over this, they set another brick and bound the two together with wire. They had a production line of bricks stacked along the sidewalk, and dozens of new-made spoons were cooling in a bucket of water.

The plane was a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190, although little remained of it now. The propeller blades had been sheared off, along with the entire tail section, which now lay at the other end of the street. Bare metal showed through its camouflage paint, whose hazy black and green ripples resembled the pattern on a mackerel’s back.

In the mangled cockpit, minus his flying helmet, sat the pilot, still strapped into his seat. His chin rested on his chest. His eyes were closed. He looked almost peaceful, except for the fragment of propeller, as long as a man’s arm, which protruded from his chest.

They walked on, stepping over wooden beams puffed and blackened by the fires which had carbonised them.

At last, they stopped outside a house whose front door had been blown away, leaving only shards of wood attached. Now a piece of burlap sack hung in its place.

Zolkin pulled aside the burlap and gestured down a staircase, which leaned drunkenly sideways as it descended into the darkness. From somewhere down below came the clattering of typewriters. ‘Colonel Andrich is down here.’

Leaving Zolkin to wait in his Jeep, Kirov descended the staircase. At the bottom, he entered a small room with a low ceiling where case upon case of rifles, grenades, land mines, canned rations and field telephones had been stacked against the walls.

In the centre of this room, two women faced each other across a single desk. They wore heavy, knee-length army-issue skirts and
gymnastiorka
tunics. The sound of tapping keys filled the air, punctuated by the rustle of carbon paper and the whiz and ping of the return arm being struck. Each was so absorbed in their work that they did not even glance up to see who had entered the room. The women smoked as they typed. Ash fell in amongst the keys.

‘I am looking for Colonel Andrich,’ announced Kirov.

Only now did the women look up.

‘Through there,’ said one, jerking her chin towards a narrow tunnel that had been dug through to the basement of the adjoining building, of which only a pile of wreckage existed above ground. Wires along the dimly-lit corridor were held up by bent spoons jammed into the bare earth roof.

At the end of this tunnel, Kirov emerged into a second basement where more munitions had been piled up in the corners. Some of these cases were open, revealing stacks of Mosin-Nagant rifles and PPSh sub-machine guns. Canvas slings twined around their polished wooden stocks like olive-coloured vines. Another box, made of zinc and lined with foil that had been torn away, contained hundreds of rounds of loose ammunition. The brass cartridges gleamed in the dim light of a candle burning on an upturned fuel drum in the centre of the room.

Kirov had never set eyes upon so much weaponry before. Mixing with the smell of dampness, gun oil, and new paint from the ammunition crates was the sharp musty odour of sweat, tobacco smoke and the marzipan reek of ammonite explosives.

Several men were also crammed into this space. The only one dressed in full military uniform was a Red Army officer, perched on a flimsy chair and swathed in a bandage which covered one side of his face. Blood had soaked through along the line of his jaw.

There were two others, each of them garbed in a mixture of military and civilian clothing. Straggly and unkempt beards ranged across their filthy, wind-burned cheeks.

Partisans, thought Kirov, fear and curiosity mingling in his mind as he studied the assortment of captured German boots, Russian canteens and civilian coats so patched and ragged they belonged more on scarecrows than on men. The partisans were festooned with weapons. Grenades, knives and pistols hung from their belts and cross-straps like grotesque ornaments.

The focus of their attention was a large, bald man wearing a grey turtleneck sweater, who sat at the back of the room at a desk which had been cobbled together from a door torn off its hinges and balanced on two empty fuel drums. The man’s thick, dark eyebrows stood out sharply against his hairless face and his anvil-like hands lay flat upon the paper-strewn surface, as he if expected it all to be blown away by a sudden gust of wind. Beside the papers stood a candle in a wooden bowl and a civilian telephone, gleaming like a big, black toad upon the desk.

One by one, the men turned and stared at Kirov. The eyes of the partisans narrowed with contempt as they caught sight of the red bullion stars sewn to each of Kirov’s forearms, indicating his status as a commissar.

‘Colonel Andrich,’ said Kirov, addressing the wounded officer.

But it was not the officer who answered.

‘I am Colonel Andrich,’ said the man in the turtleneck sweater, ‘and you must be Major Kirov.’

Kirov slammed his heels together. ‘Comrade Colonel!’

‘I am quite busy at the moment,’ said Andrich, ‘so if you will excuse me, Commissar . . .’ Without waiting for an explanation from Kirov, the colonel turned his attention back to the partisans. ‘As I was saying, we can protect you.’

‘The only people we need protection from are yours!’ replied a tall and sinewy man, whose sheepskin jacket was held tightly about his middle by a leather belt whose buckle bore the insignia of an SS officer, grey eagle and swastika surrounded by the words, ‘Meine Ehre Heisst Treue’ – My Honour is Loyalty. ‘Who is speaking for us in Moscow? What about the Central Partisan Command?’

Andrich tried to reason with the man. ‘Comrade Lipko, I have already explained to you that Partisan Central Command was abolished last month. As far as Moscow is concerned, the question of what should happen to the partisans has already been decided.’

‘Not by us,’ said Lipko.

‘That’s why I’m here,’ Andrich’s voice was filled with exasperation. ‘Moscow has sent me as proof that you have not been forgotten. There is now a Central Staff of the Partisan Movement, with departments represented by the Army, the Party and by the NKVD. It’s all under the direction of Panteleimon Ponomarenko. He is an expert on partisan issues.’

‘Then why are we speaking to you?’

‘Do not forget that I was once a partisan. For two years, I fought alongside you, until I agreed to return to Moscow and meet with those who are now deciding your fate, and the fate of all partisans.’

‘That’s right,’ sneered the other partisan. He had a slightly upturned nose wedged into a square face and small, vicious eyes, like those of a wild boar Kirov had seen, gutted and hanging upside down outside the stable of his father’s tavern. ‘You went to Moscow, far from the guns of the enemy.’

To Kirov, it seemed that this conversation had already been going on for a long time, and also that it was getting nowhere. As if to confirm Kirov’s assessment, Andrich raised his fist and smashed it down on the desk. ‘But then I came back, Comrade Fedorchak! Because Moscow knew that you would only speak to someone who truly understood what you had lived through. And, for myself, I knew that we would need someone to speak for us, or else we’d face oblivion. Why else would I be here, in this basement full of bombs, instead of safe in Moscow?’

‘And when it is over,’ demanded Lipko, ‘and we have been disarmed or else are lying dead somewhere out in the forest, what will you do then?’

‘I will return to Moscow,’ replied Andrich, ‘to work with Central Staff. There, I will have direct contact with Comrade Stalin. Through me, he will hear your voices and will be aware of your concerns.’

‘Central Partisan Command!’ spat Fedorchak. ‘Or Central Staff of Partisan Movement! What’s the difference? Do you think that by changing your name, you can fool us into thinking that you are different people? You’re all the same. You always have been. It’s men like you who came here in the twenties, ordering the farms to be collectivised and telling us how bright the future looked. And how did that work out? Ten million dead from starvation! And if we did do what you’re asking? If we laid down our weapons and disbanded, what then?’

‘All partisans who are eligible would be immediately enlisted in the Red Army. They would receive uniforms, weapons, food and they would be paid.’

‘What does it mean to be eligible?’ asked Lipko. ‘Who are those you don’t consider eligible and what will happen to them?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ answered Fedorchak. ‘It’s what all of us here already know.’

‘And what is that?’ asked Andrich.

‘That former prisoners of war, who escaped from captivity and joined the partisans, are being sent straight to the Gulag. And the same thing goes for anyone who’s not already a member of the Communist Party.’

‘How do you answer that?’ demanded Lipko.

Kirov glanced nervously around the room. From the looks on the faces of these partisans, it seemed to him that if the colonel didn’t provide them with a satisfactory answer, they would finish this conversation with gunfire.

For a moment, it appeared that Andrich was at a loss for words. But then he breathed in, slowly and deeply, and at last began to speak. ‘Not everyone’s motives in joining the partisans have been as clear and pure as yours. There are men who collaborated with the enemy, who are
still
collaborating, and who must now answer for their crimes. If you imagined it to be different, then you are simply being naive. And you are also being naive if you do not consider the alternative to what I’m offering. What do you think that Red Army Command is going to do? Allow heavily armed gangs to roam about freely in the newly reconquered territory? No! They are making you an offer to join them and if you turn them down, they are going to come in here and wipe you out. You can’t just turn around and vanish back into your secret lairs. They’ll burn your forests to the ground. In a matter of months, you’ll have nowhere left to hide.’

‘The Germans made the same threats back in 1941,’ remarked Fedorchak. ‘Now they’re gone and we’re still here. Maybe we’ll take our chances.’

‘The Fascists gave you no choice except to fight them or to fight against each other,’ explained Andrich, ‘but what I’m offering you is a way to not only survive but to be remembered as heroes in this wretched war. Victory is almost in sight. Why not share in the return of everything we have been fighting for?’

‘We did not fight so that everything could go back to the way it was before. We are fighting so that things might finally change. No more collective farms. No more forced conscription. No more arrests and executions simply to fill quotas set by Moscow. This whole countryside is one mass grave, and it’s not just our enemies who have done this.’ Now Fedorchak levelled a finger at Kirov. ‘It’s men like him as well.’

What have I walked into? wondered Kirov. The situation with these partisans is even worse than Comrade Stalin described.

‘What you want is what I want as well,’ Andrich pleaded with the men, ‘and I have faith that those things will come in time. But what matters right now is that we stay alive.’

For the first time, his words were not met with angry and sarcastic replies. The partisans seemed to be listening.

Taking advantage of this lull in the negotiations, Kirov removed the envelope, now wet and stained with water from the ditch, containing his letter of introduction from the Kremlin. He held it out towards Andrich, the once crisp rectangle sagging over the tips of his fingers. ‘Comrade Colonel, I have come directly from Moscow with instructions from Comrade Stalin.’

‘Can’t you see,’ Andrich said drily, ‘that I am already in the middle of following Comrade Stalin’s instructions?’

‘These are new instructions,’ answered Kirov.

Slowly Andrich reached out, took hold of the envelope and weighed the soggy paper in his hand. ‘Have you been swimming?’

Kirov opened his mouth to explain, but then thought better of it and said nothing.

Andrich opened the envelope, removed the letter it contained and glanced at it. ‘You’ve come all this way to search for one man, who may or may not be living with the partisans?’

‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’

‘In which Atrad does he serve?’

‘Atrad?’ asked Kirov.

‘That is the name we give to groups of partisans.’

‘The answer to your question, Colonel, is that I do not know.’

The colonel’s breath trailed out impatiently. ‘Do you know how many bands are out there in the forests and the swamps?’

‘No, Comrade Colonel.’

‘Neither do I.’ Andrich gestured at the partisans. ‘Or they.’ Now the dagger of his finger swung towards the officer in the chair. ‘Not even this man knows and he has just arrived here today as my new intelligence liaison.’

The wounded officer attempted to nod in agreement, but the gesture was halted by the bandage wrapped around his head.

‘But his intelligence is
useless
to me!’ said Andrich, his voice rising to a shout.

Kirov imagined that the officer must have been grateful, at that moment, for the bandage concealing his expression.

‘It is useless,’ the colonel went on, ‘because, like everyone else, he cannot tell me the number or location of the Atrads. In spite of this, Moscow has given me the task of negotiating with them. How can I negotiate, Comrade Major, if I don’t even know who I’m negotiating with?’ Without waiting for a reply, he went on. ‘As you just heard me explain, if all partisans do not come in willingly and begin the process of demilitarising, they will find themselves at war with the same people who are currently trying to save them from extinction. The men you see before you are those I was able to track down, but I can’t get that message to the others, can I, if I don’t know where they are? So you see my predicament, Major.’