Snow Wolf (7 page)

Fighting from street to street and factory
to factory, holding out against the Germans in a siege that was to last for
over six months, crossing enemy lines at night in the mud and snow and
attacking their positions, the fighting so savage and close she was often near
enough to the enemy that she could hear their whispered voices in nearby
trenches. The shelling so heavy that every leaf fell from the trees in the city
and dogs drowned themselves in the Vol a rather than endure the horrendous
noise of battle that went on day and night.

Twice she was wounded and twice she was
decorated. In the battles that raged in pockets in and around Stalingrad the
killing was merciless.

On the fifth incursion behind the German
lines she was captured by a detachment of Ukrainian SS. After interrogation,
she was brutally raped.

Left for dead in a bomb crater, she had
lain there in the freezing cold, a terrible pain between her legs where the
five men had torn her flesh in their savage lust.

On the second morning she had woken to
the touch of snow on her face.

When she crawled up the gully she saw the
Ukrainians on the far side, the same men who had raped her, standing around a
lighted brazier, warming themselves and laughing.

Anna Grenko crawled back into the crater
and waited until darkness fell. There was a terrible rage in her heart, a need
for revenge, a livid urge to kill the men for what they had done to her. It
overwhelmed her and went beyond any instinct for survival. When she crawled out
again that night she found the Tokarev machine-pistol and the stick grenades on
the body of a fallen comrade.

She crawled back up the crater and over
toward the soldiers.

One of the men turned and saw her but
already it was too late. She saw the horror on the man's face as she unpinned
the grenades and lobbed them into the group, firing the Tokarev at the same
time, seeing the bodies dance in the light of the exploding flashes and hearing
the screams until all was silence again.

When the lines were overrun the next day,
she was found by her own troops lying in the crater, a pool of blood between
her legs. She spent three weeks in a field hospital in Stalingrad before being
called before a military tribunal and questioned ' not about the ordeal of her
rape, but about her capture by the Ukrainians and how she had allowed it to
happen.

For that indignity, and despite her
bravery, she received a month's sentence in a military prison.

It was to be the fifth year after the war
before Anna Grenko was to find any sort of personal happiness. Within two years
of the war's end Moscow's citizens had for life. The city seemed to awaken
after a long hibernation and took on an atmosphere of gaiety and abandon.
Apartment blocks and cafes, dance halls and beer halls sprang up in every
suburb, people wore fashionable clothes and bright colors, and in summer they
danced on hotel terraces to the latest popular music.

Anna Grenko found secretarial work in a
Moscow factory and with time on her hands she went to night school, and two
years later she began to take evening lectures in the Moscow Language
Institute. Although often asked out by men, she rarely accepted, and never
agreed to their invitations to their homes. Only once did Anna Grenko make an
exception.

One of the young lecturers she met was
Ivan Khorev.

He was only twenty-four and a slim, pale,
sensitive young man, but he was already an admired and popular poet and his
work had been published in several respected literary magazines.

One night after class he had asked Anna
out for a drink.

They went to a small open-air cafe on the
banks of the Moscow River. They ate zakuski and drank strong Georgian wine and
Ivan Khorev talked about poetry. When he recited her a poem by Pasternak she
thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. He listened quietly and
attentively to her opinions and didn't try to dismiss them. He had the ability
to poke fun at himself and he certainly didn't take his own literary reputation
unduly seriously. And he liked to laugh.

There was a band playing on the terrace,
a soft, sad waltz from before the war, and when he asked her to dance he didn't
try to touch or kiss her. Afterwards he walked her home, but instead of a
goodnight peck he formally shook her hand.

A week later he asked her to his parents'
home for dinner. After the meal they all sat up until the early hours, and when
she laughed at a joke his father made, Ivan Khorev smiled and said it was the
first time he had seen her happy.

She had lain in bed afterwards thinking
about him. His quiet assurance and his gentleness and his humor. His ability to
speak with authority on almost any topic, his sharp intelligence and his
sensitivity. His willingness to listen to her views and take them seriously. He
was a loner, too, like her, but a different kind of loner. His independence
came from a quiet selfconfidence, from a loving family background.

She fell in love and they married a month
after she graduated.

For their honeymoon they spent a week
together in a big wooden villa on the beach near Odessa, and every morning they
went swimming in the warm Black Sea and then ran back to the dacha to make
love.

At night he read her the poetry he had
written and told her endlessly that he loved her, that he had loved her from
the first day he saw her on campus, and when he saw the tears in the corners of
her eyes he pulled her close and held her tightly, When their first child was
born a year later, Anna Khorev found her life complete. It was a daughter and
they called her Sasha. They were allotted a small apartment off Lenin Prospect
where she and Ivan often took their baby for walks in nearby Gorky Park.

She never forgot the first walk they had
taken together as a family. She and Ivan and little Sasha. And the look of
pride on Ivan's face as he held their daughter in his arms. A man with a camera
had taken their photograph by a bandstand for fifty kopecks; the three of them
together, she and Ivan smiling, Sasha wrapped in a woolen cap and a white
blanket, her face fat and pink and healthy and her tiny lips hungry for milk.
She had kept the photograph on the mantelpiece in a silver frame and every day
she looked at it, as if to remind herself that her marriage and her happiness
were real.

But in that first warm summer of complete
joy she could never have imagined the pain that was to come.

The pounding on the apartment door came
one Sunday morning at 2 A.M. Three men burst into the room and Ivan was dragged
outside to a waiting car. He had been accused of writing and publishing a poem
in a dissident magazine. For that crime he was banished to a penal colony in
Norylsk in northern Siberia for twenty-five years. Anna Khorev never saw her
husband again. A week later the men from the secret police came back.

She cried and screamed and kicked and
when they took her child she almost killed the men who dragged her to the car
waiting to take her to Lefortovo prison, but it did no good.

For her association with Ivan Khorev she
was sentenced to twenty years in Nicochka Penal Camp. Her child was to be
removed to a state orphanage where she would be brought up like a good
communist. She was never to see her daughter again and her right to parenthood
was revoked by the state.

She was taken straight to Moscow's Leningrad
Station and put on board a cattle truck with dozens of other prisoners. The
rain wound northward for five hundred miles. When it finally pulled into a
siding she and the other prisoners were driven farther west to a prison camp in
the middle of nowhere.

There was a blizzard blowing that night
and the icy gusts slashed at her face like a thousand razors. She was put in a
drafty, squalid wooden hut with five other special-category prisoners. Two were
blind and the others were prostitutes with syphilis. The remaining camp
prisoners were drunks and political offenders, destined to live out the rest of
their lives in the frozen wastes near the Arctic Circle. In the hundreds of
penal camps that dotted the Soviet Union, millions of men, women and children labored
in mines and rock quarries and makeshift factories. They worked from dawn until
dusk for nothing, until malnutrition, the freezing cold, disease or suicide
claimed their lives. When they died, a mechanical digger gouged out a pit in
the frozen ground and their bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave. No
headstone or marker to acknowledge they ever existed.

By the second month of her imprisonment
Anna Khorev felt she couldn't go on.

She was allowed no mail, except official
state correspondence, and no visitors. She worked from daylight to darkness,
and in the first weeks the despair and loneliness almost killed her. If she
slackened she was beaten mercilessly by the camp guards. Every day and night
her grief seemed overwhelming.

Sasha's face kept coming into her mind
and she thought she was going mad. In the sixth month she received a letter
from the penal camp information service in Moscow. It informed her that her
husband Ivan Khorev had died of natural causes and had been buried in Noryisk.
His personal belongings had been confiscated by the state and no further
communication on the matter was permitted.

She cried that night until her heart felt
it was going to explode with grief. She didn't eat her meager rations of black
bread and cabbage soup and within a week she was suffering the effects of
severe malnutrition. When she finally collapsed on her work detail she was
taken to the drafty wooden hut that served as the camp hospital. The slovenly
drunken doctor who visited once a week examined her with little interest and
when she still refused to eat she was marched to the camp commandant.

The commandant gave her a stern lecture
on his responsibility to his prisoners but she knew by the man's tone that he
didn't care if she lived or died.

When the telephone rang in another room
and he was called outside, Anna Khorev noticed the map on the wall.

Something took root in her mind because
she found hers elf staring at the map. It was a relief image of the surrounding
area, the terrain and border posts, the roads and little red and blue flags
marking military bases and civilian prison camps. She moved closer and stared
at the image intently for almost five minutes, burning every detail into her
mind.

When the commandant finally dismissed her
she went back to her barrack hut. She found a piece of charcoal in the metal
stove and redrew everything she could remember of the Map on the back of the
letter she had received informing her of Ivan's death. Every detail she could
recall; every road and river and little blue and red flag.

That evening she ate her first meal in
eight days.

And that night she made up her mind. She
knew she would never see her child again and that her life would never be the
same. But she wasn't going to die in the wasteland of the Arctic Circle and she
wasn't going to remain a prisoner.

The border toward Finland was a tortuous
landscape of thick forest and hills teeming with wolves and bears, glacial
ravines and wide frozen rivers. To attempt to escape across such territory in
winter would be suicidal. The most accessible crossings were guarded but that
was her best chance, even if just as dangerous. She didn't know what might lie
beyond the Finnish border but she knew that somehow she was going to escape.

There was a middle-aged camp officer she
had noticed, a rough and lustful man who took the risk of bedding the female
prisoners, trading extra food for sex. She had noticed the man watching her.
She knew by his leering grin that he wanted her body. She let it be known that
she was available.

The officer came to her after dark three
nights later. They met in a small woodshed at the rear of the camp. She timed
the day so the officer was off duty next morning.

She waited until he had undressed her and
when he had taken off his Coat and tunic and went to suck her breasts she drove
the six-inch metal blade deep into his back. It had taken her three weeks to
make the weapon in the hours after darkness, but only moments to use it. The
man was slow to die and tried to strangle her, but she dug the blade in again
and again until the floor was awash with blood.

Ten minutes later she had unlocked the
side gate with the man's keys and walked through into the freezing, snowy
night, wearing his bloodied uniform and coat and fur hat, carrying his pistol,
taking the narrow road through the birch forest. The sentry in the nearest
watchtower hadn't even bothered to challenge her. a Khorev had Within four
hours, frozen and exhausted, Ann finally reached the border with Finland.

She spoke with Massey for almost an hour.

He sat there listening quietly, nodding
his head in understanding when she faltered or the pain of her memories became
too much and she had to break off.

Every now and then she saw the shocked
reaction on his face as she told him her story, the look in his eyes that was
no longer detached, as if he suddenly understood the enormity of her pain and
why she had killed as she had.

When she finally finished he sat back and
looked at her with compassion, and she knew he believed she was telling him the
truth.