Comrades of War (39 page)

‘Can’t be done, Herr Lieutenant,’ Porta yelled back. ‘Ivan doesn’t know how to build noiseless engines. They have to creak and bang.’ He took a turn with the heavy truck. The chains clattered over the burnt-down fire and the corpses. ‘Ivan Stinkonovich, this is Joseph Porta, Corporal by the Grace of God in Hitler’s defeated army!’

He put on the brakes. The chains made a squelching noise and clouds of earth flew about our ears. He put on the headlights, which again made the Lieutenant shout.

‘Turn out those lights, man, and I order you to shut your mouth!’

‘Herr Lieutenant, if I do as you say we won’t get very far. We’re no longer scared Germans but bold Ivans. We’ve won the war, thrashed the Nazis, chased them deep into Poland. We’ll soon be in Berlin which has real china toilets. So why drive in the dark and in silence,
Gospodin Leytenant
? Lots of light, oceans of light! Mother Russia is rejoicing! The victory is ours! The proletariat is mighty! Long live Daddy Stalin!
Yob tvoyemat
’!’

Lieutenant Ohlsen pointed a finger at his forehead and looked at the Old Man. He thought Porta must be insane.

Like one possessed he guided the heavy truck through the night. He and Tiny sat on the driver’s seat, dressed in Russian uniform coats and steel helmets.

Often we would pass by camps where the narrow road didn’t permit him to turn aside. He just speeded up the truck and raised his fist for the Red Front greeting, while bearded, wild-looking, half-uniformed men waved and yelled to us, swinging their weapons above their heads.

‘
Uraaa
Stalin! Long live the Red Army!’ partisans flushed with victory roared after what they took to be a Russian armored car.

‘To Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk!’ Porta yelled back. ‘Down with the
Germanski
! We’ll wash and crap in cans made of china in Berlin!’

‘Put away a can for us too, brother Gospodin,’ the partisans bellowed for good-bye.

Hour after hour the sound of clattering chains was heard as the truck rumbled through the big forest. When we halted during the day, the truck was camouflaged. It couldn’t be seen from a yard’s distance. Half of us stood guard behind machine guns and trench mortars, while the second half slept.

Somewhere deep within the forest a partisan unit under the command of a lieutenant from the Red Army were busy with some sort of court-martial. A young Russian woman, hailing from the Volga district, had fallen into their hands. To get board and lodging the girl had served as a kind of office help for a German regimental staff. Then the offensive started rolling. Chaos. Panic. She was forgotten more or less deliberately. There were plenty of girls wherever they went. The red braiding of the artillery officer has always appealed to girls. The last thing she saw in the village was a cloud of dust after the departing regimental staff.

Quickly she packed her few things in a couple of bags, slung them across her shoulder and set out on the roller conveyor. Around her, German soldiers were being bawled out and cursed by brutal MPs as they poured back from the front. She fell. She got up. She staggered. She wept. For a few miles she was allowed to hold on to a cavalryman’s stirrups. He was her countryman, a Cossack.

Finally the Cossack increased his speed. She couldn’t keep up with him any more. She stumbled and fell. The horse pranced. The Cossack swiped at her with his long
nagayka
, gave out a short ‘
Nichego!
’ and spat after her. He spurred his horse and galloped down the roller conveyor with the sunlight reflected in the red crown of his cap.

For a short stretch she rode with an infantry kitchen truck. Then she was chased off by a lieutenant.

Before she knew, the soldiers of her own country had popped up on the roller conveyor.

She ran into the forest to hide, though she had more enemies, and more dangerous ones, in the forest than among the army soldiers on the road.

For hours she sat in a thick brake, paralyzed with fear.

Early one morning she ran into the arms of two shaggybearded partisans. They dragged her before Lieutenant of the Guards Turyetza, chief of the partisan unit. He was a tall slim man, and had been the best in his class at the military academy in Omsk. At the age of fourteen he had denounced his mother for counter-revolutionary ideas. She was killed by a piece of falling rock in Sib-Chicago near Novosibirsk.

When Pyotr Turyetza was notified of his mother’s death by the head of his Komsomol unit, he just shrugged his shoulders and remarked: ‘She got what she deserved.’

He was intelligent, fanatical and quick to make a judgment.

When he saw Maria enter the camp between two of his men, he immediately noticed the Wehrmacht socks, the gray pullover with the green border, and the characteristic green scarf.

He smiled icily. ‘Traitor!’ he hissed. He spat at her face and struck her with his fur cap. ‘What’s your name? What are you doing here? Where do you come from?’

His slap gave her courage. From deep down, the characteristic obstinacy of her race surged up. Her pretty eyes became narrow slits as she lapped up the blood streaming down her face. She screamed at the Lieutenant of the Guards.

‘I come from my mother’s womb, you oaf! And I’m running away from the Germanski. You who hide in the woods and kill from ambush don’t know maybe what’s happening on the highways and in the villages today!’

‘So this is how you want to play it, you slut.’ He called his second in command, Staff Sergeant Igor Poltonek, a little Kalmuck. A Cossack who didn’t give a rap what was his or what was coming to him, but always gave himself most. He clicked his heels before the Lieutenant and growled tersely:

‘At your service,
Gospodin Leytenant!
’

‘Take care of that bitch,’ the Lieutenant snarled at the bowlegged Cossack NCO, who grinned with satisfaction and secret understanding as he dragged the girl away.

They beat her. They broke two of her fingers. They petted her.

‘Marisha,’ Lieutenant Turyetza whispered. The pet name for Maria. ‘So you were going to spy on us for your German friends?’

‘
Nyet
,’ the girl moaned.

‘You were going to inform against us?’ the Lieutenant whispered, nearly twisting her neck out of joint. He grabbed hold of her breasts and squeezed till she screamed. ‘You’re a traitor, you’ve whored with Germanski.’ He gave her a kick.

They tore off all her clothes. They swung her over a branch, where she hung like a bow, while they cut little narrow gashes in her flesh and rubbed the wounds with salt.

They took her down again.

She said she had sold Russia. She had stabbed the Red Army in the back. She had derided Papa Stalin. She was a Vlassov traitor.

They forced her to drink vodka. They poured it over her face directly from the bottle. The Lieutenant shrugged his shoulders.

‘Do what you want with her.’ Then he left.

Igor Poltonek, the Kalmuck, flung himself on top of her. He whispered: ‘Marisha!’

When he was satisfied, he drew a swastika on her forehead with a red-hot nail.

They cut off all her hair and burned it on the fire. Then they spat at her and walked off.

When they set out at dawn they just left her lying there. When Turyetza asked Igor if she was dead, he lied and said ‘yes.’ He hoped she would die slowly in the damp forest, but she didn’t die. She was from the Volga, and people from the Volga region die hard.

When she woke up, there was only one thought in her throbbing burning head: She had to kill the Kalmuck before she died.

Sobbing, she staggered on her way. Instinctively she walked west.

Three days and nights later she was sitting on a windfall, wishing herself dead. The worst pains had gone. The burn on her forehead didn’t smart any more, but she was oppressed by an overwhelming, murderous fatigue.

She chewed sappy twigs to still her thirst, but chewing hurt. Her teeth had been knocked loose and the mouth was heavily swollen.

Suddenly she heard a snarl, and in the same moment a pair of fingers closed around her throat and pulled her back. Almost paralyzed with fright she stared into Tiny’s grimy bandit face beneath the Russian steel helmet.

‘A broad!’ he roared. ‘A broad with a mark on her skull!’

‘Ass!’ the Old Man hissed as he came crawling from the brush like a lizard, followed by the Legionnaire. ‘Why don’t you let go of the poor girl, you’re choking her!’

Tiny got up and helped Maria on her legs, but didn’t miss the chance of passing his large fist over her well-formed body, only half covered by the torn rags she had for clothes.

‘Holy Mother of Kazan,’ Tiny exclaimed. ‘What a sweetie!’ He winked at the Old Man and the Legionnaire. ‘Let’s cast dice who’ll be first to hop on her.’

‘Swine,’ the Old Man scolded. ‘She’ll be brought to Lieutenant Ohlsen.’

‘You can take her first,’ Tiny offered magnanimously. ‘I bet she’ll only be too glad if we do it to her.’

‘Shut up,’ the Old Man answered. ‘If you touch her I’ll shoot.’ He tipped his sub-machine gun.

Tiny pawed the girl like a chicken before its head is chopped off.

‘Holy Jesus, my whole front armor is getting hot,’ he groaned, all excited. ‘Really, Old Man, be a good pal and let poor Tiny have his hard-earned pleasure. Everybody is so mean to me. Remember mother’s letter – that bitch,’ he added.

‘You won’t touch her,’ the Old Man decided. ‘She has to be questioned by Lieutenant Ohlsen.’

‘Fine,’ Tiny cheered up, ‘then let’s have a preliminary investigation. Like the cops when they pick up someone, to soften him up for the big grill.’

‘No tricks now, Tiny. Just forward march!’

When they were well into the spruce forest Tiny suddenly yelled:

‘
Yob tvoyemat’!
’

Maria shrieked hysterically. The Old Man whirled around, horrified.

‘The whore has no panties on. I’ve just checked.’ Turning to the girl he laughed: ‘Will you play
Moy lyubimets
, play love with Tiny?’

‘Cut out that filth!’ the Old Man fumed, swiping at Tiny’s hand with his sub-machine gun. ‘Her gang, the partisans, may be right by, and you can think of something like that!’

Covered by the Old Man’s sub-machine gun they marched into camp.

Porta whistled long and suggestively when he noticed Maria in her tattered clothes and Tiny’s lustful face. But before he could say his mind, Tiny trumpeted:

‘What a nice little piece of furniture, collapsible and all. And she has no panties on! Her ass grins gaily under her rags like on a sow in heat on its way to the boar. A real hot piece. Just my size.’

Lieutenant Ohlsen sprang up. He faced the Old Man. ‘What have you done to her?’

The Old Man looked at him with unwavering blue eyes. He didn’t answer.

Lieutenant Ohlsen felt embarrassed. ‘Forgive me, Beier. Naturally nothing happened, since you were there.’ He held out a fumbling hand to the Old Man, who accepted and squeezed it with a wry smile.

The girl was questioned.

First they threatened her. But the swastika branded on her forehead spoke a plain enough language. There was no ground for doubting her story.

She related jerkily. It took her an hour and a half to finish.

‘Where are the partisans now?’ Lieutenant Ohlsen asked.

Maria pointed east, into the forest, ‘
V lyesu
.’

‘Are there many?’ the Old Man asked.

‘
Da
,’ Maria nodded. ‘You get away quick.
Davay, davay! Nix nemma!
No sleep!’

‘No,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen said. ‘Let’s get out!’

The girl got a seat between Porta and Tiny. A Russian infantry cap was pushed over her forehead. With her slanted eyes she looked exactly like a young Caucasian soldier.

Julius Heide handed her a sub-machine gun.

As she felt the cold steel in her hands, she gave an evil grin.

‘I take revenge. Shoot dead the Kalmuck Igor. Only I that do,’ she said in broken German.

Porta shrugged his shoulders.

‘He’s the last one you should want to meet, my girl, especially now when you’re with us. You would die very slow. It would take you at least two weeks.’

Hour after hour we pushed ahead on the narrow forest road. At every halt Maria told us what had happened to her. She told us things that made us see red.

Lieutenant Ohlsen interrupted her story again and again and urged us on. He had become quite a different man since the offensive had rolled over us. He urged us on without rest.

‘His neck is itching for a medal,’ Porta grumbled.

But it wasn’t true. Lieutenant Ohlsen had no desire to be a hero.

‘His hustling drives me insane,’ Julius Heide growled. ‘The only explanation is that he’s eager to get some tin around his neck.’

In the midst of our grumbling conversation Lieutenant Ohlsen came over and threw himself down beside us. As if he’d heard what we’d been talking about, he said:

‘You’re probably thinking I aim to be a hero, that I’m running after tin. I’m not, only I want to get away from this vile forest. Only two things drive me on: homesickness and the desire to survive.’ He pulled out his wallet from his breast pocket and handed us a snapshot. ‘That’s Inge and Gunni. My wife and my boy. He is seven. I haven’t seen him for three years.’ He spat. ‘So you see it is pure selfishness which makes me hustle you. No one ever gets away from this damn country by himself.’

We sat silent for a moment. He seemed to expect us to say something.

Heide hummed quite softly:

Long is the way back to our homeland,

So long, so long, so long . . .

‘I can use you, as you can use me,’ Lieutenant Ohlsen went on. ‘We can choose. To croak as slaves in this country’s endless
taigas
or help each other get home. No high-falutin words about fighting for the Führer and for Greater Germany. All we want is to go home. To die in this rotten forest is far too senseless.’

Porta glanced up.

‘I guess all of us want to live! We do and so do our opposite numbers on the other side, and yet damn few of us will.’