Field Gray (26 page)

“I still don’t understand.”

“I chalked him out for it. Metelmann. Framed him, so that he could take the bath out.”

Mrugowski stopped and stared at me with horror. “You mean he didn’t kill Gebhardt?”

“Oh, he killed him all right. I’m almost sure of that. But proving it is something else. Especially in this place. Anyway, I don’t much care. Metelmann was a point. A lousy informer, and we’re well rid of him.”

“I do not like your methods, Captain Gunther.”

“You wanted a detective from the Alex, Colonel, and that’s what you got. You think those bastards always play fair? By the book? Rules of evidence? Think again. Berlin cops have planted more evidence than the ancient Egyptians. This is how it works, sir. Real police work isn’t some gentleman detective writing notes on a starched shirt-cuff with a silver pencil. That was the old days, when the grass was greener and it only snowed on Christmas Eve. You make the suspect, not the punishment, fit the crime, see? It was always thus. But more especially here. Here most of all. That Major Savostin isn’t the laughing policeman. He’s from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I just hope you didn’t sell me too hard to that coldhearted bastard, because I tell you this. It’s not Lieutenant Metelmann I’m worried about, it’s me. I’ve been useful to Savostin. He likes that. The next time he gets cold hands, he’s liable to treat me like a pair of gloves.”

K
onrad Metelmann was taken away by the Blues the same day and life at Krasno-Armeesk resumed its awful, gray, unrelentingly brutal routine. Or at least I thought it did until it was pointed out to me by another
pleni
that I was receiving double rations in the canteen. People always noticed things like that. At first none of my comrades seemed to mind, as everyone was now aware that I had uncovered an informer and saved twenty-five of us from a show trial in Stalingrad. But memories are short, especially in a Soviet labor camp, and as winter arrived and my preferment continued—not just more food, but warmer clothes, too—I began to encounter some resentment among the other German prisoners. It was Ivan Yefremovich Pospelov who explained what was happening:

“I’ve seen this before,” he said. “And I’m afraid it will end badly unless you can do something about it. The Blues have picked you out for the Astoria treatment. Like the hotel? Better food, better clothes, and in case you hadn’t noticed, less work.”

“I’m working,” I said. “Like anyone else.”

“You think so? When was the last time a Blue shouted at you to hurry up? Or called you a German pig?”

“Now you come to mention it, they have been rather more polite of late.”

“Eventually, the other
pleni
s will forget what you did for them and remember only that you are preferred by the Blues. And they’ll conclude that there’s more to it than meets the eye. That you’re giving the Blues something else in return.”

“But that’s nonsense.”

“I know it. You know it. But do they know it? In six months from now you’ll be an anti-fascist agent in their eyes, whether you are or not. That’s what the Russians are gambling on. That as you are shunned by your own people you have no choice but to come over to them. Even if that doesn’t happen one day, you’ll have an accident. A bank will give way for no apparent reason and you’ll be buried alive. But your rescue will come too late. And if you are rescued, then you’ll have no choice but to take Gebhardt’s place. That is, if you want to stay alive. You’re one of them, my friend. A Blue. You just don’t know it yet.”

I knew Pospelov was right. Pospelov knew everything about life at K.A. He ought to have done. He’d been there since Stalin’s Great Purge. As the music teacher to the family of a senior Soviet politician arrested and executed in 1937, Pospelov had received a twenty-year sentence—a simple case of guilt by association. But for good measure the NKVD—as the MVD was then called—had broken his hands with a hammer to make sure that he could never again play the piano.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“For sure you can’t beat them.”

“You can’t mean that I should join them, surely?”

Pospelov shrugged. “It’s odd where a crooked path will sometimes take you. Besides, most of them are just us with blue shoulder boards.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Then you will have to watch out for yourself, with all three eyes, and by the way, don’t ever yawn.”

“There must be something I can do, Ivan Yefremovich. I can share some of my food, can’t I? Give my warmer clothing to another man?”

“They’ll simply find other ways to show you favor. Or they’ll try to persecute those that you help. You must really have impressed that MVD major, Gunther.” He sighed and looked up at the gray-white sky and sniffed the air. “Any day now it will snow. The work will be tougher then. If you’re going to do anything, it would be best to do it before the snow, when days and tempers are shorter and the Blues hate us more for keeping them outside. In a way, they’re prisoners just like we are. You’ve got to remember that.”

“You’d see the good in a pack of wolves, Pospelov.”

“Perhaps. However, your example is a useful one, my friend. If you wish to stop the wolves from licking your hand, you will have to bite one of them.”

Pospelov’s advice was hardly welcome. Assaulting one of the guards was a serious offense—almost too serious to contemplate. And yet I didn’t doubt what he had told me: If the Ivans kept on giving me special treatment, I was going to meet with a fatal accident at the hands of my comrades. Many of these were ruthless Nazis and loathsome to me, but they were still my fellow countrymen, and faced with the choice of keeping faith with them or joining the Bolsheviks to save my own skin, I quickly formed the conclusion that I’d already stayed alive for longer than I might otherwise have expected and that maybe I had no choice at all. I hated the Bolsheviks as much as I hated the Nazis; under the circumstances, perhaps more than I hated the Nazis. The MVD was just the Gestapo with three Cyrillic letters, and I’d had enough of everything to do with the whole apparatus of state security to last me a lifetime.

Clear in my mind what I had to do, and in full view of almost every
pleni
in the half-excavated canal, I walked up to Sergeant Degermenkoy and stood right in front of him. I took the cigarette from the mouth in his astonished-looking face and puffed it happily for a moment. I discovered I didn’t have the guts to hit him but managed to find it in me to knock the blue-banded cap off his ugly tree stump of a head.

It was the first and only time I heard laughter at K.A. And it was the last thing I heard for a while. I was waving to the other
pleni
s when something hit me hard on the side of my head—perhaps the stock of Degermenkoy’s machine gun—and probably more than once. My legs gave way and the hard, cold ground seemed to swallow me up as if I’d been water from the Volga. The black earth enveloped me, filling my nostrils, mouth, and ears, and then collapsed altogether, and I fell into the dreadful place that the Great Stalin and the rest of his murderous Red gang had prepared for me in their socialist republic. And as I fell into that endless, deep pit they stood and waved at me with gloved hands from the top of Lenin’s mausoleum, while all around me there were people applauding my disappearance, laughing at their own good fortune, and throwing flowers after me.

I
suppose I should have been used to it. After all, I was accustomed to visiting prisons. As a cop, I’d been in and out of the cement to interview suspects and take statements from others. From time to time I’d even found myself on the wrong side of the Judas hole: once in 1934, when I’d irritated the Potsdam police chief; and again in 1936, when Heydrich had sent me into Dachau as an undercover agent to gain the trust of a small-time criminal. Dachau had been bad, but not as bad as Krasno-Armeesk, and certainly not as bad as the place I was in now. It wasn’t that the place was dirty or anything; the food was good, and they even let me have a shower and some cigarettes. So what was it that bothered me? I suppose it was the fact that I was on my own for the first time since leaving Berlin in 1944. I’d been sharing quarters with one or more Germans for almost two years, and now, all of a sudden, there was only myself to talk to. The guards said nothing. I spoke to them in Russian and they ignored me. The sense of being separated from my comrades, of being cut off, began to grow and, with each day that passed, became a little worse. At the same time, I had an awful feeling of being walled in—again, this was probably a corollary of having spent so much of the last six months outside. Just as the sheer size of Russia had once left me feeling overwhelmed, it was the very smallness of my windowless cell—three paces long and half as wide—that began to weigh on me. Each minute of my day seemed to last forever. Had I really lived for as long as I had with so little to show for it in the way of thoughts and memories? With all that I had done I might reasonably have expected to have occupied myself for hours with a remembrance of things past. Not a bit of it. It was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope. My past felt wholly insignificant, almost invisible. As for the future, the days that lay ahead of me seemed as vast and empty as the steppes themselves. But the worst feeling of all was when I thought of my wife; just thinking of her at our little apartment in Berlin, supposing it was still standing, could reduce me to tears. Probably she thought I was dead. I might as well have been dead. I was buried in a tomb. And all that remained was for me to die.

I managed to mark the passing time on the porcelain tile walls with my own excrement. And in this way I noted the passing of four months. Meanwhile, I put on some weight. I even got my smoker’s cough back. Monotony dulled my thinking. I lay on the plank bed with its sackcloth mattress and stared at the caged lightbulb above the door, wondering how long they gave you for knocking a Blue’s hat off. Given the immensity of Pospelov’s crime and punishment, I came to the conclusion that I might expect anything between six months and twenty-five years. I tried to find in me something of his fortitude and optimism, but it was no good: I couldn’t help recalling something else he had said, a joke he made once, only with each passing day it felt less and less like a joke and more like a prediction:

“The first ten years are always the hardest,” he’d said.

I was haunted by that remark.

Most of the time, I hung on to the certainty that before I was sentenced there would have to be a trial. Pospelov said there was always a trial of sorts. But when the trial came, it was over before I knew it.

They came and took me when I least expected it. One minute I was eating my breakfast, the next I was in a large room being fingerprinted and photographed by a little bearded man with a big box range-finder camera. On top of the polished wooden box was a little spirit level—a bubble of air in a yellow liquid that resembled the photographer’s watery, dead eyes. I asked him several questions in my best, most subservient Russian, but the only words he used were “Turn to the side” and “Stand still, please.” The “please” was nice.

After that I expected to be taken back to my cell. Instead, I was steered up a flight of stairs and into a small tribunal room. There was a Soviet flag, a window, a large hero wall featuring the terrible trio of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, and, up on a stage, a table behind which were sitting three MVD officers, none of whom I recognized. The senior officer, who was seated in the middle of this troika, asked me if I required a translator, a question that was translated by a translator—another MVD officer. I said I didn’t, but the translator stayed anyway and translated, badly, everything that was said to or about me from then on. Including the indictment against me, which was read out by the prosecutor, a reasonable-looking woman who was also an MVD officer. She was the first woman I’d seen since the march out of Königsberg, and I could hardly keep my eyes off her.

“Bernhard Gunther,” she said in a tremulous voice. Was she nervous? Was this her first case? “You are charged—”

“Wait a minute,” I said in Russian. “Don’t I get a lawyer to defend me?”

“Can you afford to pay for one?” asked the chairman.

“I had some money when I left the camp at Krasno-Armeesk,” I said. “While I was being brought here, it disappeared.”

“Are you suggesting it was stolen?”

“Yes.”

The three judges conferred for a moment. Then the chairman said: “You should have said this before. I’m afraid these proceedings may not be delayed while your allegations are investigated. We shall proceed. Comrade Lieutenant?”

The prosecutor continued to read out the charge: “That you willfully and with malice aforethought assaulted a guard from Voinapleni camp number three, at Krasno-Armeesk, contrary to martial law; that you stole a cigarette from the same guard at camp number three, which is also against martial law; and that you committed these actions with the intent of fomenting a mutiny among the other prisoners at camp three, also contrary to martial law. These are all crimes against Comrade Stalin and the peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

I knew I was in trouble now. If I hadn’t realized it before, I realized it now: Knocking a man’s hat off was one thing; mutiny was something else. Mutiny wasn’t the kind of charge to be dismissed lightly.

“Do you have anything you wish to say in your defense?” said the chairman.

I waited politely for the translator to finish and made my defense. I admitted the assault and the theft of the cigarette. Then, almost as an afterthought, I added: “There was certainly no intention of fomenting a mutiny, sir.”

The chairman nodded, wrote something on a piece of paper—probably a reminder to buy some cigarettes and vodka on his way home that night—and looked expectantly at the prosecutor.

In most circumstances, I like a woman in uniform. The trouble was, this one didn’t seem to like me. We’d never met before, and yet she seemed to know everything about me: the very wicked thought processes that had motivated me to cause the mutiny; my devotion to the cause of Adolf Hitler and Nazism; the pleasure I had taken in the perfidious attack upon the Soviet Union in June 1941; my important part in the collective guilt of all Germans in the murders of millions of innocent Russians; and, not happy with this, that I’d intended to incite the other
pleni
s at camp three to murder many more.