The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (35 page)

He opens his eyes. He sits up with griping shoulders and hips. Overhead, a glowering sky is packed low, as though the gods are creeping closer under cover to watch what the Red Army does in the days before storming the gates of their enemy.

There is no remorse in the measly daylight. Not a shred of regret. For too long Ilya has chased these emotions from his door, kicked at them whenever they came around, and now when they might help he cannot summon them. He brings his eyes down from the clouds and stares straight into the dirt wall of his foxhole, the dank earth, the receptacle for all he has done.

Judge me, he thinks. Curse me.

Nothing.

The rattle of guns flies from the little town.

Again, Ilya feels nagged.

Out of his breast pocket he pulls a crudely made cigarette. Ilya’s not very good at rolling his own yet, his hands are very big for the delicate task and his fingers are almost always swollen. The cigarette unravels and spills some tobacco. He relicks the paper and sticks it shut. He fights it. The cigarette makes him cough. He doesn’t even know how to smoke the thing, but he stays with it through another hack. Lousy, he thinks, this is lousy.

He stands in the foxhole. The field around him is pitted with foxholes. He shoulders his submachine gun and clambers out of his hole. He stretches his back, rubs his bare pate, then walks. The field is empty, the whole company is in the town shooting. Ilya was left to sleep past dawn. Or Misha tried to wake him and caught an unconscious cuff for it, it’s happened before.

Ilya takes another puff and tosses the cigarette to the ground where it smolders pitifully, abandoned with still more life in it. He steps on it on his way into Stonsk.

In town he halts outside the remains of a hardware store. He perches on top of a barrel. It’s a tall wooden cask, his feet come off the ground. He wonders what was kept in the barrel at one time, he does not read Polish. Maybe nails, definitely something heavy. Ilya brings his knees up on top and bends them to his chest.

From his seat he watches a four-story building in the center of this small town being eaten away by bullets. The rounds are like locusts at wheat stalks, they chew mortar and bricks into dust, the building seems to steam. He lights another ragged cigarette. This first puff stays in his lungs and does not trouble his throat so badly. Behind his back, the wall of the shop is shell-pocked. He shifts to find a smoother place for his spine.

The firing at the building down the street is all wrong. The soldiers aim at the lower rows of windows. The bullets come from only one direction.

Ilya spits. He unlocks his legs and stands, the keg rocks behind him. He leaves his submachine gun leaning against the wall, he’ll be right back. He strides down the center of the street. Ilya advances almost into the firing line, to where he hears the bullets whisk the air. He waves his arms and the shooting stops. He cups his hands around his mouth.

“Misha!”

From a building up the street, the little man’s voice rises.

“What? Get back!”

“Come out here!”

No answer. Ilya sees the bristles of Russian guns sticking out of a dozen busted and blackened windows.

“Misha!”

“Yes, yes, all right!” Misha’s voice is irked. Ilya waits in the street, the filthy tang of cigarette smoke is on his tongue. He blames Misha for getting him started. In the lull, the building at Ilya’s back continues to crumble in chips, as though it knows its job and faithfully keeps at it even without bullets gnawing its skin.

Misha comes out of a doorway backward. He is issuing some orders before leaving. He is a platoon sergeant now, Ilya is too. They share command over fifty men. They were both promoted by Pushkov after the battle for the citadel, rewarded for Misha’s cleverness and Ilya’s fighting prowess. For their leadership. The battalion absorbed terrible losses at Posen. New men have been added to bolster the numbers back to full strength, sentenced to their company. But the men are raw. Some have been prisoners under the Germans for years, some are plain ignorant, almost all are angry and just want to rampage over the Oder River into Berlin and maul everything in their path. And so they will, but as an army. Misha and Ilya have been charged with helping train their company in this evacuated, ruined Polish border town.

The failure to deliver the German prisoners to the rear has never been mentioned. Not from the moment the guns stopped squalling on that lonesome crow-flown road, not from the second the last German head tipped over and stilled. Ilya turned around to watch them being mowed down. He hadn’t wanted to, but not watching seemed to take too much effort. It was easy to see. It is too easy to recall.

The gun smoke drifted away and the executioners said nothing, as though the smoke were the last evidence of those sixty German lives, and when it was cleansed by the wind the episode was cleansed too. The Red soldiers all shouldered their hot rifles and turned to the west, to return the way they’d come. The bodies were left in the road unburied. Ilya hung back, looking at the gray heap, sixty, a massive jumble. He tried to sense the life that had been spilled, the stories that would never happen, children unfathered, and that was the first moment the war became nothing. They were bodies and he had seen bodies. The good news was they were German bodies. That was all Ilya felt, the good news and nothing. A kilometer down the country road, Misha halted the men until Ilya caught up. Walking in silence, one of the men began to roll cigarettes, handing them out. Misha, who did not smoke either, reached for one. Ilya did too. Two weeks later, Misha smokes easily now.

Pushkov greeted them like new men. He called a meeting. He made a speech in front of the entire company, then promoted Ilya and Misha.

Ilya looks for signs of the sixty in the world. But there are none. He seems to carry the only bits of them left, those visions of them alive and the sound of gunfire he hears in everything.

The bandage is gone from Misha’s face. The stitches have been removed. A virulent red ridge runs across his cheek, below his ear to his neck. His left earlobe is gone. He looks like he has been in a fight with claws and teeth.

“Ilya, what,” the little man asks, approaching with quick and short steps, “what?”

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Up close, Ilya smells tobacco on the little man. He’s taking this smoking thing a bit far, Ilya thinks.

Misha makes an exasperated grunt. “I’m following the street-fighting manual.”

“The manual wasn’t at Stalingrad. I’m the manual, Misha.”

“Fine, yes. Then you take over. Fine.”

“I don’t want to. You’re a sergeant. You brought them out here this morning without me. I understand. I even approve. You train them.”

“But you want to embarrass me in front of the men.”

“No. I want you to train them properly so they won’t get either of us killed.”

Misha crosses his arms.

“Yes, Ilya. So tell me.”

“Concentrate your fire first at the top floor. That’s where the command staff will be set up. That’s where the artillery spotters are too. Snipers will be up high. These are the targets you have to prioritize before you storm a building.”

“All right. Even though the bulk of the defenders are on the ground floor.”

“Even though.”

“Yes. What else?”

“After that, concentrate on the middle floors. That’s where heavy machine guns will be bunkered. You don’t take them out before you rush, you’ll never make it.”

Misha’s eyes cast over Ilya’s head. He sees the attack in his head, adds in Ilya’s dictates and nods, seeing the wisdom.

Ilya continues: “Split up. Position your forces at three or four different angles to your target. If their mortars get your range you’ll lose your whole platoon.”

“All right.”

“When you storm the building, do it in waves with squads. Don’t commit everyone at once. Keep the defenders under pressure.”

Misha presses his lips and nods.

“That’s it. I’ll stay over here out of the way and watch. We can talk about it this afternoon when you’re done.”

“All right. Ilya?”

“What.”

“In front of the men. Please, don’t call me Misha. Sergeant Bakov. And I’ll call you Sergeant Shokhin. It’s better for discipline.”

“Fine.”

Misha smiles up at him. The budding scar appears to produce its own red grin.

“Ilyushka. We’re sergeants now. We’re on our way back. What do you think?”

Ilya takes this in. He glances beyond the little, newly minted sergeant to the building at the far corner, which Misha’s fifty men will destroy this morning with guns and mortars, explosives and handheld rockets, the captured
Panzerfausts.
That building will fall and the Russians will turn their backs and march away and the stories that might have come from the building will never occur. This will be repeated a hundred thousand or a million times until it is done to Berlin and the war ends. Ilya and Misha will stop a million histories from happening.

“Yes,” Ilya replies. He leaves Misha in the street to return to his barrel outside the hardware store.

“We’re on our way back!” Misha cheers.

Ilya lowers his eyes to his scuffling boots.

There is no way back, sergeants or not. That road is blocked by a pile of sixty corpses.

And the way ahead leads to nothing.

~ * ~

March 12, 1945,
1
:00
p.m.

Office of Dr. Gerhart von Westermann

Philharmonie, Berlin

no berliner wants to be noticed.

Nothing good comes from it. There is evil in the land, a multieyed spider that crouches at the center of a city-sized web. It notes any vibration in the strands and runs to it. Every Berliner stands as still as he can, hides when he must, trusts only in betrayal.

There is nothing threatening about Gerhart von Westermann. He is a quiet, roly-poly presence, like a sleeping child. But the BPO manager has summoned Lottie to his office this afternoon before the day’s performance, so she fears everything in the world right now; the attention, the heavy chair under her, the carpet, the big desk between her and the manager, the wavering candle flames that let them see each other with the thick blast curtains drawn. It’s just an office without electricity on a chilly day, but it feels to Lottie like a lair. Bleached bones on the floor could not make her more apprehensive.

What could von Westermann want? She’s been in this chair for ten seconds already and he hasn’t spoken. The man has knit his fingers over his rounded vest, his face rests on platters of chins, surveying her. Lottie wants words in the room, every ticking second seems a sentence to a worsening fate, but she will not speak first, it’s not her place. She perches on the edge of the chair and sits perfectly motionless. Perhaps he won’t say anything at all if she stays inert. Maybe he’s waiting for motion, to pounce. Lottie is very afraid.

The orchestra manager draws a deep breath, as though awakening.

“Charlotta, is it?”

“Yes, Herr von Westermann.”

“How are you? How are you faring?”

“Well enough, sir.”

“Things are tough, yes?”

“For everyone, sir. I get by.”

“You wear a tuxedo in the orchestra.”