The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (76 page)

“Yours, Ilya. And a thousand times this. All right? Now leave me the fuck alone. I liked you better when you never talked.”

Ilya answers slowly.

“It’s not mine.”

“Oh!” Misha throws up his hands. “What did you think, Lieutenant? That every one of those bodies you made was going to stand up, dust himself off, and go about his business when the war was over? Did you believe all these buildings we shot up were going to be like new when we were done with them? Look at what we did, man! Look! And what about the men, Ilya? Do you think they can get to the end of a war without any damage to themselves? Just because you did?”

Misha takes a step as if to walk on and be done with his tirade. Ilya holds his ground, what he has done under every onslaught. Misha stops and turns. His voice is milder.

“Ilyushka, every man wants war to end. You’re not special, you know. Everyone hates it. But you. You’re the only one in millions who thought he could personally make it stop. I watched you. You never fought for Stalin. You didn’t even fight against the Germans. You were in a battle with war itself. Who do you think you are? Tell me the truth. Do you really have some idea that it’s up to you to figure all this out? To lead us to the end?”

The answer is yes. Ilya does not say it.

Misha spits. “You think you’re so fucking special. Who knows, maybe you are.”

This does not call for an answer. He’s kept this little man alive. Misha should think that is special.

“Well, this is the end you led us to.”

Misha approaches. He pokes his reedy finger into Ilya’s chest.

“You, Ilya Shokhin. God of war. You’ve done everything in your power to make it worse. And you’ve got some weird kind of power, I’ve seen it. Everybody gets killed on both sides and you run right through it. You figure there’s got to be some stopping point and you’re the one who can take us to it.”

Misha throws both flat palms at his own breast. The gesture is comic, mimicking a frantic man patting himself for bullet holes.

“And me? Following you every damn step of the way. I never could figure out why I’m not dead too. I ought to be.”

Misha’s finger goes to the sky. The Reichstag battle is up there in fumes and fury.

“But now I know. It’s so I could be here today to tell you. That’s been my job all along. The little sergeant. My friend, listen to me. If you’ve learned nothing else in the last four years, remember this. There is no stopping point. War doesn’t end.”

Misha lowers his finger to Berlin.

“It just becomes this.”

Misha drops his hand with a slap to his thigh. He seems angry when he mutters again, “Who do you think you are?”

Misha walks off.

Ilya stays still. He winces.

Is that true?

Is this the conclusion to his search for answers?

That he’s been that transparent? A fool? Self-styled god of war?

Mulling profound thoughts. Stargazing, weighing morals on his own scale.

Even praying like an equal to heaven, making bargains.

Killing and destroying, all the while giving them different names. Why? In order to bear them? Make them palatable, part of a greater good?

Making war to end war.

Misha says this can’t be done.

Is he right?

The little man has gone a block ahead. Ilya follows.

Misha stalks down the middle of the street. From behind he doesn’t seem to Ilya so small anymore. There’s no battle to make Misha bend and scurry. The man walks upright through the city and people with some confidence and swinging arms.

Ilya tails him around a corner, into a smaller street where there is less wreckage. Here are undamaged homes and shops. Fewer Russian soldiers prowl this lane; the men seem to prefer the larger lanes where they can congregate and harass the Germans in numbers. Misha stops at the lip of a deep crater in the road. Ilya halts farther back. Misha stands looking down, until a woman emerges hauling a metal bucket sloshing water. Climbing out from the pit, she keeps her eyes on her feet, turning away from the Russian sergeant staring at her. The woman wears a long overcoat that is too heavy for the spring weather, men’s pants, high mud boots, and a kerchief over her hair. Misha lets her get far ahead of him, then moves. Ilya stays to the rear. Passing the hole, he sees in the bottom a broken water main.

The woman leads them three blocks on. Ilya can’t tell if she’s aware there are two soldiers in her wake; she walks awkwardly with the bucket but seems to hurry. Misha is not furtive but casual, he strolls.

She lugs the bucket to a row of stone-faced homes. There’s been fighting on this street, some of the houses bear the marks. She enters a door in the center of the block. Misha advances to the foot of her steps and pulls up. He considers the dark door.

Standing at the foot of the steps, Misha rolls up the sleeves of his coat. One by one, he peels the pilfered wristwatches from his arms. He drops them, two dozen or more, on the sidewalk.

Ilya arrives beside him.

“Go away, Ilyushka.”

“No.”

“I don’t need your company.”

He could order Misha away from this door. He is an officer. But the little man has run through as much hell as Ilya has. He won’t give Misha any more orders.

Ilya says, “That’s a first.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Perhaps I need yours.”

Misha nods, turning his eyes to the door. There’s a bullet hole in the center panel. The little man appears to see through the door, through the time directly ahead of them, what will happen inside that door and time, the way he can look at a map and predict how an attack will fare.

“Well then,” Misha says.

He climbs the steps and knocks on the door.

Ilya expects they’ll be made to wait, even to pound on the door, but the woman in the man’s clothes opens it soon. She puts her head in the open doorway. The kerchief is gone. Her hair is flaxen and there are hints of gray. She is not as young as her body made her seem carrying the water bucket. Her face is creased and thin, veiled with weariness, and striking.

“Ja?”
she asks.

Misha greets her calmly. Ilya does not know what he says but there is courtesy in Misha’s voice, and there is want, like a door-to-door vendor.

“Ja,”
she says,
“komm.”

She pulls open the door and turns away. Before going in, Misha looks at Ilya with approval.

The house is in disarray. It has been ransacked. Drawers are emptied on the floor, the contents of closets tossed into piles. Furniture has been ripped by knives and the stuffing yanked out. Pictures are knocked from the walls.

In the hallway, a skinny teenage boy hangs a photograph back on a hook. He is listless, he doesn’t turn to look at the armed Russian soldiers in his house. His blond hair is pruned close, an inmate’s cut.

Misha speaks to the woman. She replies with a sardonic chortle. He answers her.

He interprets to Ilya, “I told her I was tired. She said I ought to sit down. I told her I wanted to lie down.”

The woman puts a hand on the newel post and hauls herself onto the first stair, to head to the upper floor. She says again,
“Ja, komm.
“The words seem not spoken but drained like oil out of her mouth.

Misha follows two steps behind. Halfway up the stairs the woman stops. She points at Ilya and speaks.

Misha says, “She wants you too. Both of us.”

Ilya shakes his head. He doesn’t want to be here. But he doesn’t know where else to go. There’s no more battle for him. This is the world that’s left, what he’s led them to.

He’ll stay downstairs. He’s in this house, there are answers here. He doesn’t need to be in the same bed as Misha and this woman. He’s here. Maybe that will suffice.

The woman hurries down the stairs. A renewed vigor infuses her step. She lays a hand on Ilya’s wrist. She smiles; the lines in her face are deep. She says,
“Ja, komm. Komm mit uns.”

Ilya takes back his arm. “No.
Nein.
Misha, tell her.”

From the stairwell Misha speaks. The German on his tongue sounds imperious.

Misha says, “I told her to be patient. I want to be first.”

The woman laughs now. She speaks.

Misha says, ”She said I won’t be the first. Not by a dozen. Well, Ilyushka, we take what we can find, eh? Come along,
Frau!’

The woman stays in front of Ilya. He towers over her, twice as wide, threatening and foreign in this house, but the woman seems inured to everything that he is. She glances to the boy in the hall, who now stands watching, listening. She must be his mother. She brings her gaze back to Ilya; she changes for those moments looking into his eyes, seeming to ask from him something she does not require of Misha. More than mercy, as though there is a thread of kindredness she has spotted. She wants Ilya to understand.

She says,
“Bitte. Komm.”

Ilya says nothing, frozen in front of her. This woman’s face conveys to him an entirely separate war, one fought from this house. It teems on her cheeks and in her home like it does throughout Berlin. There is tragedy and suffering here to equal anything on the battlefield, all of it a different type from his, as though war is bragging to Ilya how many ways it can strike. But Ilya has no room for her war inside him, he has no desire to carry more load than is strapped to him already, the war he’s fought is abundant enough.

She asks too much.

“Misha, take her. Go on.”

The little sergeant comes down the steps. He lays hands on the woman and tows her onto the steps. Disappearing up the stairwell, she pulls her eyes from Ilya’s. She lays them on her son.

Her daughter.

Ilya sees it now. He sees everything in this house more clearly after looking for seconds through the mother’s eyes. The girl. Chopped, dressed, disguised. That’s why the mother wanted both soldiers upstairs with her. To protect the girl.

Ilya walks to her in the hall. She does not back away. She turns to face him, blocking the hall and, yes, she has a girl’s figure. Scrawnier than the mother, she is more beautiful, even with such stubbly hair. The beauty is her youth, and something else. The mother has courage, certainly; both women have it. Ilya knows bravery at an instant. But the mother’s courage is a wrapping to contain something else. Fear, perhaps. There is something hidden. This girl is not so frightened as the mother. She doesn’t ask for anything. She glares at Ilya’s approach.

She stops him with an outstretched hand to his chest. He could push her over with a stride. She finishes setting the photograph on the wall. It’s an old picture of a young man in uniform, from the previous German World War.

She walks by him in the hall, grabbing his big wrist. Her fingers are stronger than Ilya expects from a woman, she almost encircles his wrist. She leads him out of the hall. He notes a scab on the back of her cropped head. She guides him into the front room, a parlor. The sofa has been gutted. Some idiot soldiers came looting with knives. Ilya imagines what else these women have given at knifepoint.

In the center of the room, on a bloodred carpet, she releases him. Without a word, her eyes downcast, she hooks one heel behind the other to slide out of her boots. Ilya watches the girl set them aside. She unbuttons her pants. They are too big for her, they collapse from her waist into a pool at her feet. She steps out of them.