Katastrophe, page 12
‘Where did you learn that, tovarish?’
‘Kolyma.’
‘You’re a fucking Vory?’
‘A journalist.’ Nehmann had lifted his mug in salute. ‘Is there a difference?’
Now, next day, they were eating again. Half a dozen tanks had stopped on the edge of a village, waiting for the refuelling bowser, and crews in their heavy padded suits were milling around in the thin sunshine, stamping warmth into their boots and nursing mugs of black tea. One of Nehmann’s crew had laid his hands on the heel of a cake, booty from one of the houses in the village, and had used a bayonet to carve it into thin slices. Nehmann, meanwhile, was washing his hands with wet moss and studying one of the other tanks. The enormous tracks were thick with mud from the overnight rain but what caught his attention was the slogan daubed in red paint across the side of the turret.
‘Berlog?’ he queried.
‘Berlog. The Belly of the Beast, tovarish. It means Berlin. Think of it as a warning. We’re on our way.’ He gestured towards the straggle of nearby houses. ‘These people need to know that.’
Another tanker had joined them. He shared the cramped turret with the commander and saw to the loading of the cannon.
‘But they’re so old, these Germans. And so rich, too. You should see some of these places. Why did they ever bother with Russia when they’ve got so much? What did we have that they didn’t? You should take a look. We’ll find somewhere nice for you this afternoon. Carpets, tovarish. Cattle in the fields. Wood for the fire. Wine in the cellar and a wife in bed. They’re on the road now, the ones who can still walk, but it fucking serves them right, that’s what I think.’
Nehmann didn’t blame them. On the road west, the refugees were everywhere, heads down, hauling little handcarts piled high with the pick of a lifetime’s possessions, some of the men wearing two coats. The women, especially, were visibly nervous, refusing to meet the gaze of strangers. At Nehmann’s request, the commander had stopped to let him talk to some of these people, impressed by his command of German. He’d taken one youngish woman aside, and managed to win her confidence, and it was quickly obvious that stories of rape and plunder were everywhere, word of mouth that went before these invading hordes. Whether or not his own crew had helped themselves along the way Nehmann didn’t know, and didn’t ask, but when they fired up the big engine again, and churned across the rain-soft tussock to get back on the road, the crew were like kids, driving madly around clusters of refugees, the commander blowing them kisses, oblivious to the older folk, muttering curses in their wake.
A little further down the road they’d caught sight of a long file of infantrymen in open-top trucks, the shock troops at the heart of this enormous army, and the commander had ordered the driver to slow right down as they growled past. Few of the men spared the tank even a glance. They must have come hundreds – maybe thousands – of kilometres, thought Nehmann, and it certainly showed. Greatcoats mended with shreds of old tarpaulin, boots re-soled with leather ripped from the seats of abandoned German tanks, grubby kids adopted as mascots. The kids, some absurdly young, danced on the back of the truck among the soldiers, their skinny chests criss-crossed with bandoliers of ammunition.
This patched-together People’s Army had been a joke in Berlin three years ago as the Wehrmacht swept east, but at Stalingrad – as Nehmann knew only too well – it had turned, and fought and brought hundreds of thousands of the Reich’s finest to their knees, and now, two long years later, the time had arrived for a settling of accounts. To be German, Nehmann thought, was already a misfortune. To be Prussian, invaded by this Mongol rabble, was often a death sentence.
Later, around noon, the tank stopped again, waved to a halt by an officer with four stars on his grey shoulder boards. A battered staff car was parked on the side of the road, and the young commander hauled himself out of the turret and dismounted for a brief conference. There were more staff officers beside the car. One of them had unfolded a map on the bonnet and the tank commander nodded as a gloved finger stabbed at a cluster of features ringed in red. Back aboard, the commander told Nehmann that they were heading for a place called Altdamm, up near Stettin. There, they would reinforce units already laying siege to the Germans. According to the staff officer, progress in the battle was exceeding expectations. Their efforts, if successful, would shield Marshal Zhukov’s right flank and Zhukov, he said with a grin, held the keys to Berlin.
On the road again, the tank dipping and rolling beneath him, Nehmann clung on. He was beginning to tire of the journey, the constant tacking left and right to avoid abandoned vehicles and columns of refugees, and now the added curse of a freezing rain that came sheeting out of a towering bank of clouds to the north. The commander thought they’d make the outskirts of Altdamm by nightfall, and Nehmann, his face turned away from the icy needles blowing across the sodden fields, hoped he was right, but then the engine began to cough beneath his feet, and they were slowing to pull off the road.
The loader, who doubled as the tank’s mechanic, struggled out of the turret and gestured for Nehmann to get off the engine casing. He lifted a panel, peered inside, glanced up at the commander and pulled a face, but the commander was already staring down the road behind them. Nehmann half turned to follow his pointing finger and found himself looking at a long column of assorted vehicles that must, he thought, be the main body of this force: big much-dented Studebaker cars and hefty Dodge trucks hauling enormous howitzers, both gifted by the Americans, farm tractors towing light field guns, and then a second echelon of huddled troops in horse-drawn carts and panje wagons. This, to Nehmann, was the carnival of his dreams, proof that nothing would stand in the way of the Red Army’s wrath, but then, minutes later at the very end of the column, came a detachment of Cossack cavalrymen on their shaggy little ponies.
They were dressed like pirates, enveloped in their sheepskins and big fur hats. They wore heavy moustaches, and sat erect on their pygmy mounts, ignoring the rain, and every man had loot strapped to his saddle. As they clattered past, Nehmann lost count of the carefully rolled carpets, the plundered clocks and vases, the precious keepsakes looted from estate after enemy estate. One man had even managed to lay hands on a sizeable chicken. Attached to the saddle by a length of cord around its feet, it was still alive, its weary little wings flapping against the piebald flanks of the pony. Watching them disappear up the road, Nehmann could only think of the Vory he’d got to know in the Kolyma camps. It was the Soviet genius to enlist people like this – their fierceness, their inbred criminality – and unleash them on the hated enemy. For the Germans, he concluded, the war was nearly over.
*
Dusk found Nehmann on the banks of the River Oder. The loader had fixed the engine and now his new comrades, along with dozens of other crews, were crowded around a tall, intense-looking figure who reminded Nehmann of a priest he’d known back in the Caucasus. This, he’d just been told, was a politruki, one of the political commissars who accompanied the front-line troops and made sure they marched in step with the implacable demands of the Revolution. The politruki had planted a small red flag on the edge of the river’s embankment, and now he was listing the crimes these men had come to avenge. The list went on and on, a dizzying tally of abuse from theft to rape, dozens of casual or deliberate acts of cruelty that demanded retribution, and he used his big hands to conjure visions of deflowered daughters and bereaved mothers back in the wreckage of the homeland.
Nehmann was a connoisseur when it came to oratory like this. At Berlin venues big and small, he’d watched Goebbels do something similar much earlier in the war, lighting a fire in the hearts of his watching audience until the speech ended in the thunder of stamping boots and a forest of extended arms and the roar of Heil Hitler repeated again and again. The politruki had a similar talent for arousing anger, and provoking revenge. It was an accomplished performance, and Nehmann watched the faces in the half-darkness, the men nodding, occasionally whispering to each other, shifting their weight from foot to foot, ever more eager to move on and tear the enemy limb from limb. At the end of his little speech, the politruki asked for men who’d so far neglected to join the Communist Party to step forward. A handful did so, visibly ashamed, and Nehmann watched as the politruki produced a pen and a sheaf of membership forms. Every man signed up.
Nehmann’s tank crew, as it turned out, were too late to the battle. Next morning, the show was over, and Nehmann watched column after column of beaten Germans filing past the wet riverside meadows where dozens of vehicles – tanks, trucks, panje wagons – had spent the night. According to the tank commander, these prisoners would be shipped east on cattle trucks already laden with the loot parcels allotted to each Soviet trooper. The prisoners, like the loot, would be processed through the huge railway junction at Kursk, and Nehmann wondered how many of them would survive the long journey east to appear in ragged marching order on Moscow streets, themselves the booty of war.
*
At mid-morning, in what Nehmann sensed was a Red Army ritual, the tank crews were taken by truck to view the battlefield. Days of artillery bombardment had levelled many of the town’s buildings, yet the spire of a church still penetrated the blanket of dusty, acrid smoke that hung over everything like a grey wash on a canvas that had never quite worked. Corpses lay everywhere, some human, some animal, mainly horses. Many had been hideously disfigured by bursting shells or falling masonry, and Nehmann watched the tankmen as they drifted from body to body with a curiously detached interest in what they were seeing.
Whether this was indifference, Nehmann didn’t know. Sights like these, he told himself, must be all too familiar after years of ceaseless combat. He himself, at Stalingrad, had become immune to the flesh-and-blood consequences of high explosive. But then one man had paused and crouched briefly beside the body of an officer before removing a watch from his wrist, and after that many others took a livelier interest in what might be on offer.
Back beside the tank, Nehmann was saying his goodbyes to the men who’d so briefly become his comrades-in-arms. He’d made contact with the NKVD Major who was to ease his passage over the river and into Germany. Already, he’d changed into the serge trousers and rough flannel shirt liberated from one of the houses in the ruined city. With a heavy greatcoat on top and a pair of worn galoshes, he could melt into the flood of refugees fleeing west. With his fluent German and his quick wit, he knew he could survive any of the roadside checks the next few days might have in store for him. He even had money, a handful of soiled Reichsmark notes that might, if the trains were still running, buy him a rail ticket.
One after another, he pumped the extended hands of the crew. In their very different ways, they were all curious to know what he was up to but every question sparked nothing but a shrug, and a slow smile, and the promise that he’d be the first to Berlin. There, God willing, they’d all meet again and it would be Nehmann’s pleasure to lay hands on something decent to drink. The war was on its deathbed, he said. With luck, they’d all survive it.
At this point, the commander announced that he’d a small present he’d like to give to his crew’s favourite Georgian. He dug in the pocket of his padded suit and produced a small twist of the cotton waste the crew used to keep their weapons clean.
Nehmann looked at it, perplexed. In the palm of his hand, it weighed nothing.
‘Inside,’ the commander nodded at the little parcel.
Nehmann unwrapped it and found himself looking at a five-pointed star. It must have been cut from a flattened tin. The scissorwork was faultless, with a hole fashioned at the top, but he could see a smear of what might have been borscht on one side.
Nehmann looked up at the commander. He was genuinely moved and said so.
‘Wear it.’ The commander produced a thin length of cord. ‘It will keep you safe.’
Nehmann nodded, threading the cord through the hole and securing it with a knot before slipping it over his head. Inside his shirt, nestled against his skinny chest, it already felt familiar.
One of the watching crew, the youngest, was nursing another present.
‘It’s German,’ he said, ‘from Wehrmacht headquarters in the town. I got five of them, one each.’ It was a one-piece undergarment in thick cotton. It looked brand new, and when he held it out against Nehmann’s slight frame it looked a perfect fit. ‘Wear it,’ he was grinning. ‘Keep yourself warm.’
Nehmann said he was grateful. Christmas, he thought. A little late but more than welcome. Looking at the faces, grinning, expectant, he knew he owed them a present in return. He dug in his bag, not knowing what might come to hand, then his fingers closed around the book. The kilometres they’d travelled together had taken a little of the lustre off the scarlet leather cover but it still weighed heavy in his hand. Nehmann offered it to the commander.
‘For when you run out of vodka,’ he said. ‘On cold nights.’
The commander stared at the title, then his fingers explored the embossed gold title.
‘War and Peace?’ He showed the book to the rest of the crew. Then came a stir of movement as the loader clambered down from the tank. He’d been working on the engine again and his palms were filthy with grime and oil. He spared Nehmann a farewell handshake, but then winked at his mates and pulled up his sleeve to reveal his bare arm.
Five watches. All of them German.
10
That same day, late in the afternoon, Wilhelm Schultz took the tram to Stockholm’s Central Station. Diski, his NKVD contact, was waiting on the concourse just metres away from the gated entry to Platform Seven. He was carrying a black leather briefcase of a kind Schultz had seen in offices in the Lubyanka, and he looked tense. In the grey dusk, Schultz could see the long snake of unlit carriages that would take him south to Malmö. Instructions for the rendezvous had been delivered by a voice he didn’t recognise on a Stockholm telephone number Diski had given him in Moscow.
Now, the Russian led him to the nearby kiosk where two women were dispensing hot drinks to a thin line of waiting passengers. Diski bought two glasses of Gloog, a hot, spiced mulled wine that Schultz had first sampled only the day before, peering at the unfamiliar banknote before he handed it over. Then he motioned Schultz across to an empty space away from a flood of travellers getting off a train that had just arrived.
Schultz asked him how long he’d been in Stockholm, but the answer was already obvious. Diski couldn’t take his eyes off the swirl of passengers on the concourse. These people, thought Schultz, had zoo appeal if you’d just survived another Russian winter. They were foreign, exotic, well fed, nicely turned out. Strangers acknowledged strangers, even exchanged smiles. Couples made physical contact, held hands, kissed hello. No one stole a glance over their shoulders, and the street outside was bright with lights. Moscow belonged on a very different planet.
‘You came today?’ Schultz asked.
‘This afternoon. The boat from Riga.’ He tapped his watch. ‘It leaves again at midnight.’
‘You’re not coming to Malmö?’
‘No.’
Schultz was confused. Back in Moscow, the plan had been for Diski to accompany him south, perhaps even into Germany itself. From the Baltic coast, it was barely four hundred kilometres to Berlin. There, Schultz was under instructions to revive his intelligence contacts in the Abwehr and test rumours that the Nazi leadership was beginning to fragment in the scramble to fend off a catastrophic defeat. Diski spoke perfect German and could validate whatever conversations Schultz might be part of. The Kremlin trusted no one.
‘You’re telling me I’m on my own?’
‘Yes.’
‘To do what?’
Diski was frowning. When he was especially nervous, he always had a cigarette between his fingers. Now, grinding the remains of the old one into the concourse, he was already lighting another.
‘Tell me about Dahlerus,’ he said.
Schultz did his best. There was no point lying because the Big House had a presence everywhere, especially in neutral capitals like this, and he was near certain that his every move had been monitored.
‘I talked to his wife,’ Schultz said. ‘That’s the best I could do. Dahlerus wants the fighting to stop. He’s a businessman. Peace means profits. Of course he’ll talk to Himmler, if that might be useful.’
‘And Bernadotte?’
‘He’s having conversations already. Schellenberg will grease the way. That’s how Himmler works. There’s another thing. Himmler runs the concentration camps, always has. Back in ’42, when I was still in the Reich, the SS had already locked up hundreds of thousands, millions if you’re counting the Jews. That gives him something to put on the negotiating table, which is why he’s talking to Bernadotte. He runs the Red Cross here. He has a stake in this game, and he has contacts in London and Washington. He wants to see those camps empty, and only Himmler can make that happen.’
‘You know that? You’ve talked to Bernadotte?’
‘No. But that’s the way it is. People like Himmler are desperate. You Russians are kicking the door in and they’re shitting themselves.’
‘You think he’d talk to us?’
‘I think he’d talk to anyone. It’s human nature. You don’t have to be a spy to understand any of this.’
Diski raised an eyebrow, and then checked his watch before extracting a biggish envelope from the briefcase.
‘Your train leaves in half an hour.’ He nodded towards the platform. ‘You’ll be met at the station in Malmö. Our people there will drive you to an airfield. Things are changing fast in Berlin. Himmler was summoned to the Chancellery several days ago. Hitler is furious about the mess he’s making on the front line. It was his idea to give Himmler command of an Army Group and he’s turned out to be hopeless. This reflects badly on that Führer of yours, which is something that must never happen, and we gather that Himmler has gone to pieces. He’s left Berlin for the SS sanatorium in Hohenlychen. You may know of it.’
