The Redhunter (9 page)

Yes, Mom, I already told you I sent in the application form for Columbia. We’ll know in a couple of weeks. I got to go to
chow. Now, in case you forget the aphorisms of Dr. Johnson in the book you sent me, Johnson said, “I look upon it, that he
who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.”

All love from Harry

He could see her getting the letter and reading it in the hallway of the brownstone on the West Side. (Cold? Probably—heating
fuel was still rationed at home, he knew.) He felt a quite sudden, near-mutinous urge to go home, to leave this bloody, disheveled
Europe. But he could wait it out. He was scheduled for release in a matter of weeks. Maybe he’d be with his mother for … the
ides of March? Was he conceived on the ides of whenever it was, nine months before his birthday? It must have been very romantic,
the situation back then, Mom and Whoever it was who didn’t have a-zoo-spermia. Harry had committed the word to memory, but
had to spell it out for himself when, which granted wasn’t often, he thought to summon it up. He wondered where that took
place. Presumably not at Eighty-seventh Street.

Erik Chadinoff, M.D., Major, AUS, was thirteen years older than Harry Bontecou and enjoyed most about life at Camp Plattling
his late-hour chess sessions with the young lieutenant from New York. (“Never forget. I’m from New York too. In fact, Queens
is more authentically New York than Manhattan.”) They would begin at nine, or a little later if Major Chadinoff had heavy
duties at the hospital.

Whenever: Chadinoff would appear with energetic delight (“I shall have back at you after the last time”); they would sit in
the officers’
lounge, and Chadinoff would bring out of his pocket a medicine bottle, look quickly about him to ensure that the colonel wasn’t
sitting there staring at this little breach of rules (only beer was served in the BOQ), and pour out his liqueur, a dark Russian
concoction—“Riga balsam,” he called it—in which Chadinoff delighted. It was a drink served at home, he explained one night,
waiting for Harry to make his move. The elder Chadinoffs had arrived in New York in 1915 with their two-year-old son. “My
grandmother,” Chadinoff explained, stretching out his legs in an exaggerated gesture of fatalism about the length of time
Harry would take to make his move, “insisted that my parents leave the country before ‘that foolish Czar Nicholas conscripts
all the doctors in Russia and sends them west to fight against the Germans.’ ” Chadinoff’s father had enlisted in the army
when Congress declared war in 1917. Erik did not remember his father, who did not return from the war. He grew up in Queens.
His mother served the Queens Hospital as a nurse and tutored students at Queens College in Russian.

Erik remembered the earnest reading by his mother of all news reports from Russia. He spoke to his mother in Russian and,
when he could write, communicated with his grandmother—“I remember the photograph she sent on Easter 1921.” But when he was
nine, in 1922, his grandmother stopped writing. There was no explanation. Months later, his mother’s youngest brother had
written to say that the “authorities” had removed the senior Chadinoff lady from her house in the outskirts of Kiev. It wasn’t
known where she was taken. “She may very well be alive,” Uncle Alexis wrote. “We don’t ask questions about that kind of thing,
though there is no reason why you shouldn’t continue to write to her.” Erik’s mother did. At first the letters were returned,
Addressee Unknown;
after a while, they went unacknowledged or unreturned.

In high school during the American Depression, Erik attempted, but finally abandoned any hope of succeeding, to instruct his
classmates on the failed idealism of Communism. Most of the boys and girls in his class were unconcerned with Russia or its
ideology. But the few who were concerned, he told Harry, were enthusiastic about the great Soviet social experiment that would
teach the world how to avoid such capitalistic blights as the Depression they were now contending with. Erik’s frustration
led him to attempt a little poetry, first
in Russian, then in English. His instructor smiled when she read it and said he had a nice talent for verbal formulations,
but he must be careful not to permit himself to be obsessed on the matter of Communism. He had persisted, with Communism and
poetry.

Harry didn’t ask to see any of the poetry. He reasoned that if Erik wanted to show it to him, he would do so. Erik Chadinoff
was decisive in all matters—what medicine to prescribe, what knight to move, what U.S. foreign policy should be.

At the end of the game one Saturday night, Major Chadinoff asked Harry if he would like to meet with one of the prisoners.
“Dmitri Usalov is in the hospital, pneumonia. We’ll lick it, thanks to penicillin. But he’s weak and needs four or five days
of beefing up. What’s special about Dmitri is that his mother is—was?—he doesn’t know whether she’s alive—English. His father
married her in Copenhagen. She was with the Red Cross, her parents with the foreign service. Usalov was on a Russian freighter
that stalled there for over a month during the Russian Revolution—the captain kept getting conflicting instructions from the
shipping line and from Soviet headquarters. He met her, they fell in love, got married by the captain, who was frustrated
not knowing what to do. Anyway, they sailed eventually on back to Leningrad and went back to Usalov’s home near Kiev, where
Dmitri was brought up, speaking English, of course, to his mother. How he ended up at Plattling is a story you might want
to hear—from him.”

Harry met Dmitri on the Sunday and after an hour said he had better leave. “Major Chadinoff will court-martial me if I stay
any longer. He said you have to rest. You have to ‘rest heavily,’ was how he put it.”

Dmitri laughed weakly, his bright teeth shining in his bearded face. “Will you come again? I have so much liked talking with
you.”

“Yes, I can be here on Tuesday. Before I go, when last did you hear from your family?”

“Not since February 1942. Four years ago. On my eighteenth birthday. That was the day I became eligible for the Soviet draft
and that was two weeks before the Nazis came. In a little wallet sewn by my mother inside my winter coat I had one hundred
twenty British pounds. That would have been more than enough to board a freighter from Odessa to Egypt and Egypt to London,
and I had the
letter to my mother’s sister in Sussex. But I told you what happened.” Dmitri closed his eyes, and Harry left, resolved to
go back on Tuesday.

He met with Chadinoff for Monday night chess. “He is technically a traitor, right?”

“Yes. He was eighteen, should have stayed in Kiev, should have been captured by the invading Nazis, and if he had survived
the Nazis, should have gone into the Soviet army to be killed for Stalin. Instead, he got to Odessa, which was blockaded,
and then weaved westward, was thrown into a camp by Romanian Nazis, escaped, worked his way through Poland and now was dodging
the Red army, and finally he lands in Stuttgart, where the Nazis use him as an interpreter. He escapes from them and: ends
up in the warm embrace of the Allies here at Plattling. All we intend to do, after I cure him from pneumonia, is send him
back to Russia so he can be shot or sent to one of those glacial camps—why do I save him from pneumonia now when he will someday
soon, thanks to Western diplomacy, die of the cold in Siberia?”

Harry visited with his prisoner-patient on Tuesday, as promised, and again on Saturday before Usalov’s dismissal from the
hospital. Dmitri was three years older than Harry, but his voice was from another world, the world of Europe, the cradle of
political death plots against human beings on a truly massive scale. Harry had known now for the first time, really, someone
who had experienced both the great demonic worlds of the century. And was now to be packaged and shipped back to the eastern
division.

Late that night in February, Chadinoff was less than decisive in his movements. Reporting to the lounge as had been arranged
that morning, Harry sat down at the usual table in the long room with a bar at the corner, a half dozen card tables, and service-model
couches and chairs, mostly lit by one thoughtlessly unfocused incandescent light in the middle of the room. Chadinoff walked
in, passed by the other card tables and through the thick cigarette smoke. He leaned over to Harry. “I must speak with you.
In private. Can you follow me to my quarters?”

Chadinoff led Harry out through the cold, down the roadway to the hospital ward, and into the warmth of his office. He opened
his cigarette pack and without thinking extended it to Harry.

“No thanks, Erik.”

“Yes, of course. I remember—you don’t smoke.” He lit his own cigarette and began to talk in high agitation.

“I have seen the orders. They are for two days from now. For February twenty-fifth. We are ordered to round up our Russians,
take them to the Bavarian forest beyond Zwiesel, in trucks, and put them in train cars that will be there waiting to take
them to Moscow.”

“But what about the ‘apparatus of delay’?”

“Diplomatic efforts to save the refugees—I insist that is what they are, refugees, not deserters—have failed. Have ended.
They are refugees just as my father was—a preemptive refugee, you could call it. The orders call for us to stuff them into
trains as if they were German Jews being handled by the Nazis.

“Now, Harry—”Erik’s voice was hoarse, and he punctuated his talk with deep inhalations from his cigarette—“this is a moment
of great moral weight. There are two alternative roles I have considered for myself—just hear me out: I am not enlisting you,
conscripting you, but I want you to know how
I
am thinking of it.

“The first alternative—one way of doing it: Major Erik Chadinoff, on Thursday morning, reports to HQ—regimental headquarters—that
he is ill. His illness is of a kind he knows how to treat himself, and therefore he will not be reporting to the sickroom
or here to the hospital.

“But that would mean I would be out of action until my health improved. Until Operation Keelhaul is completed.”

“They call that malingering, right?”

“That is the word for it. A court-martial offense. Then there is Alternative Two, the other way of doing it: Major Erik Chadinoff,
on Thursday morning, reports that he declines to be a part of Operation Keelhaul, that he considers the forcible repatriation
of Russian refugees to be a war crime. He will remain in his quarters and await whatever consequences of his insubordination
his superiors or the military court consider appropriate.”

Harry bit his lip. “Oh, my God, Erik. You can’t do that—”

“Hang on, Harry. I have looked at the Military Code of Justice. It is of course very stern on what I propose to do. But there
is a graver offense than individual insubordination. It is the stimulation of mutiny by others. What I have not yet decided
is whether to post a
copy of my communication on the bulletin board, with an invitation to other officers to cosign it with me.”

Harry leaned back and closed his eyes. He waited, and then, “What is it you want from me, Erik?”

Chadinoff ground out his cigarette. There was a hint of a resolute smile on his face. “I explicitly decline to urge you to
join me in this action. But I want you to know what I will do, either the first step I mentioned, which would be cowardly,
or the second. Is there another way to protest this surrender to Stalin?”

Major Chadinoff stood. His hand began a forward motion, as if to shake Harry’s hand. He thought better of it. Instead there
was a little wave of his hand. “Good-bye, Harry.”

Harry went to his own quarters. He slept fitfully. The following morning the orders were given. The next day, Operation Keelhaul
would go forward.

“My hands are stained,” Harry wrote to his mother on Saturday night, sixty-four hours (he counted) since the 0330 beginning
after midnight on Thursday. He did not disguise his feelings and, at age nineteen, he didn’t flinch from the theatrical metaphor.

Harry Bontecou had been given a jeep. A sergeant was seated alongside, two enlisted men behind, operating the recording device
that fed into the loudspeaker. “It’s Russian you’re listening to,” Major Simcock had explained. “It’s just to tell them they
will be moved to another camp.”

“Another camp where?” Harry asked.

“Oh. West Germany.”

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Cooper was in charge of the operation. He convened the company commanders and the platoon leaders
at five on Wednesday afternoon. They got their orders and assembled at 0300 on Thursday. A tank battalion was in formation
at the other end of the hill on the east end of Plattling. At 0515 it was still dark. Harry ordered his four squad leaders
toward the refugee barracks he had been assigned to. Someone in the squad directly ahead of Harry made a noise. He could hear
now, at some remove, the purr of tanks on the move. A second later, the sound of
the tanks and the brilliance of their searchlights roused the entire camp.

Companies A, B, and C sent 180 armed soldiers through the camp gate to their preset stations, encircling the barracks individually
and comprehensively. Slipping out of his hut, one Russian saw the column of American tanks approaching with their searchlights.
Harry spotted him and detached a soldier to approach him and give him instructions. The GIs were wearing heavy-duty rubber-soled
shoes; at the gateway there was a whispered pause while they took up the long riot clubs issued to them. They had been warned
to expect violent resistance. The soldiers divided into separate companies and moved stealthily through the shadows to the
dormitory huts. Harry banged open the door of Barracks CIO. Inside there was darkness and confusion. Light came in through
the windows from perimeter searchlights. The crouching silhouettes dodged and wove about. Harry shone the beam of his light,
scanning the room. The soldiers from his platoon filed in. Two GIs were assigned to every bed.

Suddenly, at Harry’s nod to the communications corporal, who relayed the signal, the stillness was broken. There was a shrieking
blast of a whistle. Those who were still asleep woke. “They looked all around, as if it was a nightmare,” Harry wrote to his
mother.