Europe Central (56 page)

By now the Red Army had occupied Silesia, the Americans were about to cross the Rhine; and Vlasov stood regarding the horizon with a twisted old face, heavily burdened by the horn-rimmed spectacles. His Russians nudged each other when they saw him, proudly infecting one another with the hope they craved more than hot soup:
There goes our general! They say he often gets the Führer’s ear . . .
—Munitions, maps, impossible orders, devoted counter-attackers silhouetted against snowy fields, these wouldn’t help him much. No matter what, he’d be compelled to withdraw into a shortened line.

He requested a copy of Guderian’s famous Panzer manual, but they told him that they wouldn’t be giving him any tanks, so . . . He said to them: Even under Bolshevism I was permitted to keep this book! and they shrugged.

From behind two machine-guns implanted in a heap of snowy mud, a Waffen-
-lieutenant wandered up to Vlasov’s men and said in hearing of Vlasov himself: Ha, ha! Now I’m glad we didn’t finish you off! It’s an honor, you know, to be permitted to fight for Germany.

On the night of 13-14.2.45, the British and the Americans burned thirty-five thousand people, mainly civilians, in an incendiary bombing raid in Dresden. This slightly bettered the Nazi achievement at Babi Yar, where only thirty-three thousand Jews had been machine-gunned. Goebbels proposed shooting one Allied prisoner for each victim. When somebody told Vlasov, he replied: Kroeger keeps filling up my glass and perhaps he thinks that’s how to manage me. He’s wrong. I can see and hear . . .

Not long after that he got his marching orders at last and set off, leading his ill-equipped men into the snow, while a tank-gun pointed overhead. He’d do what he could. They reminded him of his doomed Siberians in the Volkhov pocket, fighting Fascists with antitank rifles. (He came across two of his hungry men fighting over a rotten potato, and said to them: We can’t beat Stalin with open fingers, only with a clenched fist. Stick together, boys!—and they made up at once, gazing at him with awed faces.) Could he repeat his bygone achievement at the Battle of Moscow? Again and again he told the
handlers how his breakthrough echelon had thrown back the Fascist Army Group Center. They smirked nervously, warming their hands in their pockets; for even they could see that he was addressing the ghost of his integrity, who, pale and brown-eyed, had taught him how to feel.

Another Katyusha rocket illuminated the night with shards of terror, but this Vlasov was saying: Once Comrade Stalin himself gave me a division on its last legs. Well, when I got through with it, it won a competition!

(Where was it now? Hands and rags dangled down from the smoking pyre.)

They sent him to a zone of murderous impossibility. If he “used up” all his men, he could only have delayed the enemy for a few hours. He might as well have marched everybody to Auschwitz to get worked to death! From the girls’ school which was now his headquarters (Kroeger had already pinned up a poster of HITLER—THE LIBERATOR), he radioed the new commander of Army Group Vistula.

Frankly, Vlasov, I can’t understand why you Russians even want to fight. With the front going to hell, how can two divisions make any difference?

With all respect, that’s not the issue. We urgently require artillery support to—

The artillery’s not available. Why don’t you just attack in waves? You Russians are famous for, you know, overrunning positions through sheer—

Herr Colonel-General, the German cadets who tried that were all wiped out yesterday. Moreover, the river’s flooded, so our offensive front is limited to a hundred meters. Naturally, the enemy have trained their guns on that spot—

I really have to say that after all we’ve done for you, a bit more enthusiasm might . . . Do you have any proposal whatsoever?

Air support—

Out of the question. You’re living in the past, Vlasov. I order you to neutralize that bridgehead without further delay.

Colonel-General Heinrici, I’m not under your command.

Oho! Now it comes out! You see, I
knew
you were an unreliable element! Don’t think I won’t report this! So you refuse to acknowledge German authority?

According to the Prague Manifesto, we’re your formal allies. Our status is—

Toilet paper! The important thing is, will you do something about that Russian position or not?

No longer caring how this would end, Vlasov demanded: Could you at least supply us with ammunition?

Capture it from the enemy.

Without adequate support the operation is pointless. I request permission to withdraw my men to another front.

I’ll be obliged to speak to Himmler about this, Heinrici said curtly.

As you wish. Good day, Herr Colonel-General.

Heil Hitler!

The conversation terminated. Vlasov lit a cigarette. His deputy Zherebkov, whom he’d already ordered to seek an understanding with the Western Powers, exchanged with him a salvo of knowing bitter smiles.

Well, sir, what else can we expect?

Vlasov frowned.—Send in the regimental commanders. We’ll hear their assessment.

You don’t mean—

I’m going to telephone Himmler and tell him we’ll attack, but under protest. That’s the only way to save ourselves. You and Bunyachenko will take command. I’ll go to Berlin for a few days. When the attack fails, break it off and tell Himmler you can’t act again without my authority.

I understand.

Before the action, instruct the commanders privately to save as many of our men’s lives as possible. That can’t come from me, because I’m . . .

Yes, sir. And in Berlin will it still be possible to—

Actually, I’m not going to Berlin at all. I’ll be in Karlsbad visiting my wife.

On 13.4.45, the Russians conquered Vienna. Shortly after that, thanks to the convenient contraction of the front, he was able to see Heidi for the last time. She’d become even thinner, and much more dependent. In honor of his coming, she’d painted her lips as bright a red as the service colors of the Luftwaffe flak division, and her mother brought out hot water which was seasoned with real coffee. The two women kept praising him, for they believed that he’d performed another miracle of breaking out of Russian encirclement. He sat there stiffly, unwilling to pain them with the true case; fortunately they weren’t suspicious at all; they’d never read an untrue line in
Signal
magazine.—Don’t worry, her mother was saying. The Führer won’t allow the Russians to get us. He’ll gas us instead.—They drank schnapps together. Heidi’s mother wanted to know whether he had passed through Reichenhall when he came, for that was a very pretty, very
German
little town. When they raised glasses for the toast, Heidi’s hand began shaking. Vlasov cried out: Here’s to disappointed hopes! and then they drank in silence.

I suppose you lovebirds want to be alone, said his mother-in-law, while Heidi smiled mechanically, plucking at her wasted face. A concussion sounded far away. Vlasov gazed at the blackout curtain. The stuffy, shabby little kitchen constricted him so much that he could hardly breathe.

(Yes exactly—disappointed hopes! Just as the Führer himself, enslaved by positional illusions, had consistently refused to allow the Ostfront to contract under enemy pressure, and thereby permitted the Russians first to break through, then encircle many of his most crucial units, so Vlasov for his part had withheld from his various hopes the power of mobility. Faith masqueraded as reason; spearheads of circumstance isolated those static hopes of his, and the hopes perished.)

As soon as little Frauke fell asleep, his wife drew him into the bedroom. The love and need in her eyes made him feel ashamed. She’d remained as steadfast as the stars on his collar. Weeping softly, she begged him to impregnate her. She said: This may be my final chance to receive the Honor Cross of the German Mother.

(They heard her mother coughing on the other side of the wall.)

Five days later, Vlasov’s scouts found the little house in the Allgäu where his best friend’s family lay hiding. Peeking through the almost-curtained window, Frau Strik-Strikfeldt clapped a hand over her open mouth. She had thought them all safe-settled here at the heart of this last isle of German summer, where steep yellow-green meadows were shaded by evergreen forests. For years she’d vainly tried to persuade her husband not to mix himself up with Slavs. And now this. Smiling, our jolly old Balt emerged in the doorway. Fruitlessly he outstretched his hand. He swallowed. With a pettish laugh, he cried: How changeable fortune is! Sometimes a man can hardly catch his breath! Don’t think I’m indifferent to all you’ve suffered. (By the way, you need a shave.) What can we do when—speaking of which, I heard a splendid joke the other day.
Definition of cowardice: Leaving Berlin to volunteer for the Ostfront!
Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha!

The tall, pallid puppet seated itself before him on a concrete shard. It plucked a dandelion. Then it drew a tall bottle of schnapps from its rucksack. Resheathing the bottle without sharing it, it rose, and remarked with wooden formality: Germany has collapsed sooner than I expected.

But, my dear fellow, the Führer has promised that our “Wonder Weapons” will soon be ready . . .

Forgive me, Wilfried Karlovich, but I . . . Anyhow, there’s no use in having it out with you. I don’t blame anyone. What is it that Heidi always says?
The strongest survives.

(He remembered the way home: the barbed wire, the sentry, then the horseshoe barricades and truncated pyramids of sandbags on Smolensk Street, followed by the door which couldn’t quite close, the pitch-dark, icy stairs, the inner door, and beyond that a desperation clotted into darkness which in turn had frozen into grief and sickness where his other wife, his integrity, lay waiting.)

On 27.4.45, his comrade Zherebkhov urged him to flee to Spain by air, to work for the liberation movement in securer surroundings. Vlasov replied that he wished to share his soldiers’ fate.

After that, we find him in the midst of the Prague Uprising, issuing his commands on a scarcely audible field telephone. On 8.5.45, as skeletonized buildings became lyres for flames to play upon, the Czech National Council sent an urgent appeal to Vlasov’s troops, begging them to turn against the Fascists, but when he tried to negotiate asylum after the war, the Czechs replied that they could guarantee nothing. That very same day, accepting the entreaties of his soldiers, he turned his attention to the Anglo-American zone. (She was whispering: And then come home to me, Andrei . . . ) On 11.5.45 he demanded to be judged by the International Tribunal, not by any Soviet court. The following day the Red Army broke into his sector. Hanging his cartridge belt from a wrecked girder, Vlasov summoned the spurious protection of an American convoy en route to Bavaria. His hopes resembled corpses frozen with outstretched hands upon a plain of dirty melting snow.

38

And so one more time Vlasov found himself compelled to disband his encircled army and advise his men to break out in small groups. Some were lucky enough to reach the Americans and surrender to them. Vlasov, of course, was not.
³⁴
His stations of the cross remained thoroughly in keeping with the times: first the bridge with a British sentry on one side, a Soviet guard on the other, then the crossroads at the edge of the forest where light tanks and searchlights trained their malice on the “Fascist chaff”; next the barbed-wire compound, followed by the first interrogation in the lamplit tent (NKVD men crowding in to regard him as if he were a crocodile); the first beating; the chain of prisons, each link eastward of the last; the inspections, tortures, questions; the stifling windowless compartments of Black Marias which lurched down war-cratered roads; the murmur of Moscow traffic; finally, the Lubyanka cells. The very first thing they’d taken away was his memory-token (Geco, 7.65 millimeter). Punching him in the teeth, they upraised that German shell in triumph—literal proof that he was a murdering Hitlerite! Vlasov wiped his bloody mouth. All he wanted now was to get through the formalities.

A photograph of the Soviet military court in Moscow shows him to have become paler than ever after his year of “interrogation,” but unlike several of the other defendants whose nude heads bow abjectly, Vlasov stands defiant, his bony jaw clenched, his heavy spectacles (which will be removed on the day when all twelve men get hanged, heads nodding thoughtfully as they sway before the brick wall) occluding our understanding of his eyepits.
³⁵
Rubbing his bleached blank forehead, he was actually wondering whether some amalgam of planning and determination could save his colleagues. He thought not. Anyhow, he got distracted just then by the hostile testimony of his former commanding officer, K. A. Meretskov, who’d abandoned him (as he now believed) at Volkhov, and who’d never been able to give him any better talisman than that meaningless phrase
local superiority.