Winter of the World

10

1941 (III)

In October the snow fell and melted, and the streets of Moscow were cold and wet. Volodya was searching in the store cupboard for his valenki, the traditional felt boots that warmed the feet of Muscovites in winter, when he was astonished to see six cases of vodka.

His parents were not great drinkers. They rarely took more than one small glass. Now and again his father went to one of Stalin’s long, boozy dinners with old comrades, and staggered in through the door in the early hours of the morning as drunk as a skunk. But in this house a bottle of vodka lasted a month or more.

Volodya went into the kitchen. His parents were having breakfast, canned sardines with black bread and tea. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘why do we have six years’ supply of vodka in the store cupboard?’

His father looked surprised.

Both men looked at Katerina, who blushed. Then she switched on the radio and turned the volume down to a low mutter. Did she suspect their apartment had concealed listening devices, Volodya wondered?

She spoke quietly but angrily. ‘What are you going to use for money when the Germans get here?’ she said. ‘We won’t belong to the privileged elite any longer. We’ll starve unless we can buy food on the black market. I’m too damn old to sell my body. Vodka will be better than gold.’

Volodya was shocked to hear his mother talking this way.

‘The Germans aren’t going to get here,’ his father said.

Volodya was not so sure. They were advancing again, closing the jaws of a pincer around Moscow. They had reached Kalinin in the north and Kaluga to the south, both cities only about a hundred miles away. Soviet casualties were unimaginably high. A month ago 800,000 Red Army troops had held the line, but only 90,000 were left, according to the estimates reaching Volodya’s desk. He said to his father: ‘Who the hell is going to stop them?’

‘Their supply lines are stretched. They’re unprepared for our winter weather. We will counter-attack when they’re weakened.’

‘So why are you moving the government out of Moscow?’

The bureaucracy was in the process of being transported two thousand miles east, to the city of Kuibyshev. The citizens of the capital had been unnerved by the sight of government clerks carrying boxes of files out of their office buildings and packing them into trucks.

‘That’s just a precaution,’ Grigori said. ‘Stalin is still here.’

‘There is a solution,’ Volodya argued. ‘We have hundreds of thousands of men in Siberia. We need them here as reinforcements.’

Grigori shook his head. ‘We can’t leave the east undefended. Japan is still a threat.’

‘Japan is not going to attack us – we know that!’ Volodya glanced at his mother. He knew he should not talk about secret intelligence in front of her, but he did anyway. ‘The Tokyo source that warned us – correctly – that the Germans were about to invade has now told us that the Japanese will not. Surely we’re not going to disbelieve him again!’

‘Evaluating intelligence is never easy.’

‘We don’t have a choice!’ Volodya said angrily. ‘We have twelve armies in reserve – a million men. If we deploy them, Moscow might survive. If we don’t, we’re finished.’

Grigori looked troubled. ‘Don’t speak like that, even in private.’

‘Why not? I’ll probably be dead soon anyway.’

His mother started to cry.

His father said: ‘Now look what you’ve done.’

Volodya left the room. Putting on his boots, he asked himself why he had shouted at his father and made his mother cry. He saw that it was because he now believed that Germany would defeat the Soviet Union. His mother’s stash of vodka to be used as currency during a Nazi occupation had forced him to confront the reality. We’re going to lose, he said to himself. The end of the Russian revolution is in sight.

He put on his coat and hat. Then he returned to the kitchen. He kissed his mother and embraced his father.

‘What’s this for?’ said his father. ‘You’re only going to work.’

‘It’s just in case we never meet again,’ Volodya said. Then he went out.

When he crossed the bridge into the city centre he found that all public transport had stopped. The metro was closed and there were no buses or trams.

It seemed there was nothing but bad news.

This morning’s bulletin from SovInformBuro, broadcast on the radio and from black-painted loudspeaker posts on street corners, had been uncharacteristically honest. ‘During the night of 14 to 15 October, the position on the Western Front became worse,’ it had said. ‘Large numbers of German tanks broke through our defences.’ Everyone knew that SovInformBuro always lied, so they assumed the real situation was even worse.

The city centre was clogged with refugees. They were pouring in from the west, with their possessions in handcarts, driving herds of skinny cows and filthy pigs and wet sheep through the streets, heading for the countryside east of Moscow, desperate to get as far away as possible from the advancing Germans.

Volodya tried to hitch a lift. There was not much civilian traffic in Moscow these days. Fuel was being saved for the endless military convoys driving around the Garden Ring orbital road. He was picked up by a new GAZ-64 jeep.

Looking from the open vehicle, he saw a good deal of bomb damage. Diplomats returning from England said this was nothing by comparison with the London Blitz, but Muscovites thought it was bad enough. Volodya passed several wrecked buildings and dozens of burned-out wooden houses.

Grigori, in charge of air raid defence, had mounted anti-aircraft guns on the tops of the tallest buildings, and launched barrage balloons to float below the snow clouds. His most bizarre decision had been to order the golden onion domes of the churches to be painted in camouflage green and brown. He had admitted to Volodya that this would make no difference to the accuracy – or otherwise – of the bombing but, he said, it gave citizens the feeling that they were being protected.

If the Germans won, and the Nazis ruled Moscow, then Volodya’s nephew and niece, the twin children of his sister, Anya, would be brought up not as patriotic Communists but as slavish Nazis, saluting Hitler. Russia would be like France, a country in servitude, perhaps partly ruled by an obedient pro-Fascist government that would round up Jews to be sent to concentration camps. It hardly bore thinking about. Volodya wanted a future in which the Soviet Union could free itself from the malign rule of Stalin and the brutality of the secret police and begin to build true Communism.

When Volodya reached the headquarters building at the Khodynka airfield, he found the air full of greyish flakes that were not snow but ash. Red Army Intelligence was burning its records to prevent them falling into enemy hands.

Shortly after he arrived, Colonel Lemitov came into his office. ‘You sent a memo to London about a German physicist called Wilhelm Frunze. That was a very smart move. It turned out to be a great lead. Well done.’

What does it matter, Volodya thought? The Panzers were only a hundred miles away. It was too late for spies to help. But he forced himself to concentrate. ‘Frunze, yes. I was at school with him in Berlin.’

‘London contacted him and he is willing to talk. They met at a safe house.’ As Lemitov talked, he fiddled with his wristwatch. It was unusual for him to fidget. He was clearly tense. Everyone was tense.

Volodya said nothing. Obviously some information had come out of the meeting, otherwise Lemitov would not be talking about it.

‘London say that Frunze was wary at first, and suspected our man of belonging to the British secret police,’ Lemitov said with a smile. ‘In fact, after the initial meeting he went to Kensington Palace Gardens and knocked on the door of our embassy and demanded confirmation that our man was genuine!’

Volodya smiled. ‘A real amateur.’

‘Exactly,’ said Lemitov. ‘A disinformation decoy wouldn’t do anything so stupid.’

The Soviet Union was not finished yet, not quite; so Volodya had to carry on as if Willi Frunze mattered. ‘What did he give us, sir?’

‘He says he and his fellow scientists are collaborating with the Americans to make a super-bomb.’

Volodya, startled, recalled what Zoya Vorotsyntsev had told him. This confirmed her worst fears.

Lemitov went on: ‘There’s a problem with the information.’

‘What?’

‘We’ve translated it, but we still can’t understand a word.’ Lemitov handed Volodya a sheaf of typewritten sheets.

Volodya read a heading aloud. ‘Isotope separation by gaseous diffusion.’

‘You see what I mean.’

‘I did languages at university, not physics.’

‘But you once mentioned a physicist you know.’ Lemitov smiled. ‘A gorgeous blonde who declined to go to a movie with you, if I remember.’

Volodya blushed. He had told Kamen about Zoya, and Kamen must have repeated the gossip. The trouble with having a spy for a boss was that he knew everything. ‘She’s a family friend. She told me about an explosive process called fission. Do you want me to question her?’

‘Unofficially and informally. I don’t want to make a big thing of this until I understand it. Frunze may be a crackpot, and he could make us look foolish. Find out what the reports are about, and whether Frunze is making scientific sense. If he’s genuine, can the British and Americans really make a super-bomb? And the Germans too?’

‘I haven’t seen Zoya for two or three months.’

Lemitov shrugged. It did not really matter how well Volodya knew Zoya. In the Soviet Union, answering questions put by the authorities was never optional.

‘I’ll track her down.’

Lemitov nodded. ‘Do it today.’ He went out.

Volodya frowned thoughtfully. Zoya was sure the Americans were making a super-bomb, and she had been convincing enough to persuade Grigori to mention it to Stalin, but Stalin had scorned the idea. Now a spy in England was saying what Zoya had said. It looked as if she had been right. And Stalin had been wrong – again.

The leaders of the Soviet Union had a dangerous tendency to deny the truth of bad news. Only last week, an air reconnaissance mission had spotted German armoured vehicles just eighty miles from Moscow. The General Staff had refused to believe it until the sighting had been confirmed twice. Then they had ordered the reporting air officer to be arrested and tortured by the NKVD for ‘provocation’.

It was difficult to think long term when the Germans were so close, but the possibility of a bomb that could flatten Moscow could not be disregarded, even at this moment of extreme peril. If the Soviets beat the Germans, they might afterwards be attacked by Britain and America: something similar had happened after the 1914–18 war. Would the USSR find itself helpless against a capitalist-imperialist super-bomb?

Volodya detailed his assistant, Lieutenant Belov, to find out where Zoya was.

While waiting for the address Volodya studied Frunze’s reports, in the original English and in translation, memorizing what seemed to be key phrases, as he could not take the papers out of the building. At the end of an hour he understood enough to ask further questions.

Belov discovered that Zoya was not at the university, nor at the nearby apartment building for scientists. However, the building administrator told him that all the younger residents had been requested to help with the construction of new inner defences for the city, and gave him the location where Zoya was working.

Volodya put on his coat and went out.

He felt excited, but he was not sure whether that was on account of Zoya or the super-bomb. Maybe both.

He was able to get an army ZIS and driver.

Passing the Kazan station – for trains to the east – he saw what looked like a full-blown riot. It seemed that people could not get into the station, let alone board the trains. Affluent men and women were struggling to reach the entrance doors with their children and pets and suitcases and trunks. Volodya was shocked to see some of them punching and kicking one another shamelessly. A few policemen looked on, helpless: it would have taken an army to impose order.

Military drivers were normally taciturn, but this one was moved to comment. ‘Fucking cowards,’ he said. ‘Running away, leaving us to fight the Nazis. Look at them, in their fur fucking coats.’

Volodya was surprised. Criticism of the ruling elite was dangerous. Such remarks could cause a man to be denounced. Then he would spend a week or two in the basement of the NKVD’s headquarters in Lubyanka Square. He might come out crippled for life.

Volodya had an unnerving sense that the rigid system of hierarchy and deference that sustained Soviet Communism was beginning to weaken and disintegrate.

They found the barricade party just where the building administrator had predicted. Volodya got out of the car, told the driver to wait, and studied the work.

A main road was strewn with anti-tank ‘hedgehogs’. A hedgehog consisted of three pieces of steel railway track, each a yard long, welded together at their centres, forming an asterisk that stood on three feet and stuck three arms up. Apparently they wreaked havoc with caterpillar tracks.

Behind the hedgehog field an anti-tank ditch was being dug with pickaxes and shovels, and beyond that a sandbag wall was going up, with gaps for defenders to shoot through. A narrow zigzag path had been left between the obstacles so that the road could continue to be used by Muscovites until the Germans arrived.

Almost all the workers digging and building were women.

Volodya found Zoya beside a sand mountain, filling sacks with a shovel. For a minute he watched her from a distance. She wore a dirty coat, woollen mittens and felt boots. Her blonde hair was pulled back and covered with a colourless rag tied under her chin. Her face was smeared with mud, but she still looked sexy. She wielded the shovel in a steady rhythm, working efficiently. Then the supervisor blew a whistle and work stopped.

Zoya sat on a stack of sandbags and took from her coat pocket a small packet wrapped in newspaper. Volodya sat beside her and said: ‘You could have got exemption from this work.’

‘It’s my city,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t I help to defend it?’

‘So you’re not fleeing to the east.’

‘I’m not running away from the motherfucking Nazis.’

Her vehemence surprised him. ‘Plenty of people are.’

‘I know. I thought you’d be long gone.’

‘You have a low opinion of me. You think I belong to a selfish elite.’

She shrugged. ‘Those who are able to save themselves generally do.’

‘Well, you’re wrong. All my family are still here in Moscow.’

‘Perhaps I misjudged you. Would you like a pancake?’ She opened her packet to reveal four pale-coloured patties wrapped in cabbage leaves. ‘Try one.’

He accepted and took a bite. It was not very tasty. ‘What is it?’

‘Potato peelings. You can get a bucketful free at the back door of any Party canteen or officers’ mess. You mince them small in the kitchen grinder, boil them until they’re soft, mix them with a little flour and milk, add salt if you’ve got any, and fry them in lard.’

‘I didn’t know you were so badly off,’ he said, feeling embarrassed. ‘You can always get a meal at our place, you know.’

‘Thank you. What brings you here?’

‘A question. What is isotope separation by gaseous diffusion?’

She stared at him. ‘Oh, my God – what’s happened?’

‘Nothing has happened. I’m simply trying to evaluate some dubious information.’

‘Are we building a fission bomb at last?’

Her reaction told him that the information from Frunze was probably sound. She had immediately understood the significance of what he’d said. ‘Please answer the question,’ Volodya said sternly. ‘Even though we’re friends, this is official business.’

‘Okay. Do you know what an isotope is?’

‘No.’

‘Some elements exist in slightly different forms. Carbon atoms, for example, always have six protons, but some have six neutrons and others have seven or eight. The different types are isotopes, called carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14.’

‘Simple enough, even for a student of languages,’ Volodya said. ‘Why is it important?’

‘Uranium has two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. In natural uranium the two are mixed up. But only U-235 is explosive.’

‘So we need to separate them.’

‘Gaseous diffusion would be one way, theoretically. When a gas is diffused through a membrane, the lighter molecules pass through faster, so the emerging gas is richer in the lower isotope. Of course I’ve never seen it done.’

Frunze’s report said that the British were building a gaseous diffusion plant in Wales, in the west of the United Kingdom. The Americans were also building one. ‘Would there be any other purpose for such a plant?’

She shook her head. ‘Figure the odds,’ she said. ‘Anyone who prioritizes this kind of process in wartime is either going crazy or building a weapon.’

Volodya saw a car approach the barricade and begin to negotiate the zigzag passage. It was a KIM-10, a small two-door car designed for affluent families. It had a top speed of sixty miles per hour, but this one was so overloaded it probably would not do forty.

A man in his sixties was at the wheel, wearing a hat and a Western-style cloth coat. Beside him was a young woman in a fur hat. The back seat of the car was piled with cardboard boxes. There was a piano strapped precariously to the roof.

This was clearly a senior member of the ruling elite trying to get out of town with his wife, or mistress, and as many of his valuables as he could take; the kind of person Zoya assumed Volodya to be, which was perhaps why she had declined to go out with him. He wondered if she might be revising her opinion of him.

One of the barricade volunteers moved a hedgehog in front of the KIM-10, and Volodya saw that there was going to be trouble.

The car inched forward until its bumper touched the hedgehog. Perhaps the driver thought he could nudge it out of the way. Several more women came closer to watch. The device was designed to resist being pushed out of the way. Its legs dug into the ground, jamming, and it stuck fast. There was a sound of bending metal as the car’s front bumper deformed. The driver put it in reverse and backed off.

He stuck his head out of the window and yelled: ‘Move that thing, right now!’ He sounded as if he was used to being obeyed.

The volunteer, a chunky middle-aged woman wearing a man’s checked cap, folded her arms. She shouted: ‘Move it yourself – deserter!’

The driver got out, red-faced with anger, and Volodya was surprised to recognize Colonel Bobrov, whom he had known in Spain. Bobrov had been famous for shooting his own men in the back of the head if they retreated. ‘No mercy for cowards’ had been his slogan. At Belchite, Volodya had personally seen him kill three International Brigade troops for retreating when they ran out of ammunition. Now Bobrov was in civilian clothes. Volodya wondered if he would shoot the woman who had blocked his way.

Bobrov walked to the front of the car and took hold of the hedgehog. It was heavier than he had expected, but with an effort he was able to drag it out of the way.

As he was walking back to his car, the woman in the cap replaced the hedgehog in front of the car.

The other volunteers were now crowding around, watching the confrontation, grinning and making jokes.

Bobrov walked up to the woman, taking from his coat pocket an identification card. ‘I am General Bobrov!’ he said. He must have been promoted since returning from Spain. ‘Let me pass!’

‘You call yourself a soldier?’ the woman sneered. ‘Why aren’t you fighting?’

Bobrov flushed. He knew her contempt was justified. Volodya wondered if the brutal old soldier had been talked into fleeing by his younger wife.

‘I call you a traitor,’ said the volunteer in the cap. ‘Trying to run away with your piano and your young tart.’ Then she knocked his hat off.

Volodya was flabbergasted. He had never seen such defiance of authority in the Soviet Union. Back in Berlin, before the Nazis came to power, he had been surprised by the sight of ordinary Germans fearlessly arguing with police officers; but it did not happen here.

The crowd of women cheered.

Bobrov still had short-cropped white hair all over his head. He looked at his hat as it rolled across the wet road. He took one step in pursuit, then thought better of it.

Volodya was not tempted to intervene. There was nothing he could do against the mob, and anyway he had no sympathy for Bobrov. It seemed just that Bobrov should be treated with the brutality he had always shown to others.

Another volunteer, an older woman wrapped in a filthy blanket, opened the car’s trunk. ‘Look at all this!’ she said. The trunk was full of leather luggage. She pulled out a suitcase and thumbed its catches. The lid came open, and the contents fell out: lacy underwear, linen petticoats and nightdresses, silk stockings and camisoles, all obviously made in the West, finer than anything ordinary Russian women ever saw, let alone bought. The filmy garments dropped into the filthy slush of the street and stuck there like petals on a dunghill.

Some of the women started to pick them up. Others seized more suitcases. Bobrov ran to the back of his car and started to shove the women away. This was turning very nasty, Volodya thought. Bobrov probably carried a gun, and he would draw it any second now. But then the woman in the blanket lifted a spade and hit Bobrov hard over the head. A woman who could dig a trench with a spade was no weakling, and the blow made a sickeningly loud thud as it connected. The general fell to the ground, and the woman kicked him.

The young mistress got out of the car.

The woman in the cap shouted: ‘Coming to help us dig?’ and the others laughed.

The general’s girlfriend, who looked about thirty, put her head down and walked back along the road the way the car had come. The volunteer in the checked cap shoved her, but she dodged between the hedgehogs and started to run. The volunteer ran after her. The mistress was wearing tan suede shoes with a high heel, and she slipped in the wet and fell down. Her fur hat came off. She struggled to her feet and started to run again. The volunteer went after the hat, letting the mistress go.

All the suitcases now lay open around the abandoned car. The workers pulled the boxes from the back seat and turned them upside down, emptying the contents on to the road. Cutlery spilled out, china broke, and glassware smashed. Embroidered bedsheets and white towels were dragged through the slush. A dozen pretty pairs of shoes were scattered across the tarmac.

Bobrov got to his knees and tried to stand. The woman in the blanket hit him with the spade again. Bobrov collapsed on the ground. She unbuttoned Bobrov’s fine wool coat and tried to pull it off him. Bobrov struggled, resisting. The woman became furious and hit Bobrov again and again until he lay still, his cropped white head covered with blood. Then she discarded her old blanket and put Bobrov’s coat on.

Volodya walked across to Bobrov’s unmoving body. The eyes stared lifelessly. Volodya knelt down and checked for breathing, a heartbeat or a pulse. There was none. The man was dead.

‘No mercy for cowards,’ Volodya said; but he closed Bobrov’s eyes.

Some of the women unstrapped the piano. The instrument slid off the car roof and hit the ground with a discordant clang. They began gleefully to smash it up with picks and shovels. Others were quarrelling over the scattered valuables, snatching up the cutlery, bundling the bedsheets, tearing the fine underwear as they struggled for possession. Fights broke out. A china teapot came flying through the air and just missed Zoya’s head.

Volodya hurried back to her. ‘This is developing into a full-scale riot,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an army car and a driver. I’ll get you out of here.’

She hesitated only for a second. ‘Thanks,’ she said; and they ran to the car, jumped in, and drove away.

(ii)

Erik von Ulrich’s faith in the Führer was vindicated by the invasion of the Soviet Union. As the German armies raced across the vastness of Russia, sweeping the Red Army aside like chaff, Erik rejoiced in the strategic brilliance of the leader to whom he had given his allegiance.

Not that it was easy. During rainy October the countryside had been a mud bath: they called it the rasputitsa, the time of no roads. Erik’s ambulance had ploughed through a quagmire. A wave of mud built up in front of the vehicle, gradually slowing it, until he and Hermann had to get out and clear it away with shovels before they could drive any farther. It was the same for the entire German army, and the dash for Moscow had slowed to a crawl. Furthermore, the swamped roads meant that supply trucks never caught up. The army was low on ammunition, fuel and food, and Erik’s unit was dangerously short of drugs and other medical necessities.

So Erik had at first rejoiced when the frost had set in at the beginning of November. The freeze seemed a blessing, making the roads hard again and allowing the ambulance to move at normal speed. But Erik shivered in his summer coat and cotton underwear – winter uniforms had not yet arrived from Germany. Nor had the low-temperature lubricants needed to keep the engine of his ambulance operating – and the engines of all the army’s trucks, tanks and artillery. While on the road, Erik got up every two hours in the night to start his engine and run it for five minutes, the only way to keep the oil from congealing and the coolant from freezing solid. Even then he cautiously lit a fire under the vehicle every morning an hour before moving off.

Hundreds of vehicles broke down and were abandoned. The planes of the Luftwaffe, left outside all night on makeshift airfields, froze solid and refused to start, and air cover for the troops simply disappeared.

Despite all that, the Russians were retreating. They fought hard, but they were always pushed back. Erik’s unit stopped continually to clear away Russian bodies, and the frozen dead stacked by the roadside made a grisly embankment. Relentlessly, remorselessly, the German army was closing in on Moscow.

Soon, Erik felt sure, he would see Panzers majestically rolling across Red Square, while swastika banners fluttered jubilantly from the towers of the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the temperature was minus ten degrees Centigrade, and falling.

Erik’s field hospital unit was in a small town beside a frozen canal, surrounded by spruce forest. Erik did not know the name of the place. The Russians often destroyed everything as they retreated, but this town had survived more or less intact. It had a modern hospital, which the Germans had taken over. Dr Weiss had briskly instructed the local doctors to send their patients home, regardless of condition.

Now Erik studied a frostbite patient, a boy of about eighteen. The skin of his face was a waxy yellow, and frozen hard to the touch. When Erik and Hermann cut away the flimsy summer uniform, they saw that his arms and legs were covered with purple blisters. His torn and broken boots had been stuffed with newspaper in a pathetic attempt to keep out the cold. When Erik took them off he smelled the characteristic rotting stink of gangrene.

Nevertheless, he thought they might yet save the boy from amputation.

They knew what to do. They were treating more men for frostbite than for combat wounds.

He filled a bathtub, then he and Hermann Braun lowered the patient into the warm water.

Erik studied the body as it thawed. He saw the black colour of gangrene on one foot and the toes of the other.

When the water began to cool they took him out, patted him dry, put him in a bed and covered him with blankets. Then they surrounded him with hot stones wrapped in towels.

The patient was conscious and alert. He said: ‘Am I going to lose my foot?’

‘That’s up to the doctor,’ Erik said automatically. ‘We’re just orderlies.’

‘But you see a lot of patients,’ he persisted. ‘What’s your best guess?’

‘I think you might be all right,’ Erik said. If not, he knew what would happen. On the foot less badly affected, Weiss would amputate the toes, cutting them off with a big pair of clippers like bolt cutters. The other leg would be amputated below the knee.

Weiss came a few minutes later and examined the boy’s feet. ‘Prepare the patient for amputation,’ he said brusquely.

Erik was desolate. Another strong young man was going to spend the rest of his life a cripple. What a shame.

But the patient saw it differently. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I won’t have to fight any more.’

As they got the boy ready for surgery, Erik reflected that the patient was one of many who persisted in a defeatist attitude – his own family among them. He thought a lot about his late father, and felt deep rage mingled with his grief and loss. The old man would not have joined in with the majority and celebrated the triumph of the Third Reich, he thought bitterly. He would have complained about something, questioned the Führer’s judgement, undermined the morale of the armed forces. Why had he had to be such a rebel? Why had he been so attached to the outdated ideology of democracy? Freedom had done nothing for Germany, whereas Fascism had saved the country!

He was angry with his father, yet hot tears came to his eyes when he thought about how he had died. Erik had at first denied that the Gestapo had killed him, but he soon realized it was probably true. They were not Sunday School teachers: they beat people who told wicked lies about the government. Father had persisted in asking whether the government was killing handicapped children. He had been foolish to listen to his English wife and his over-emotional daughter. Erik loved them, which made it all the more painful to him that they were so misguided and obstinate.

While on leave in Berlin, Erik had gone to see Hermann’s father, the man who had first revealed the exciting Nazi philosophy to him when he and Hermann were boys. Herr Braun was in the SS now. Erik said he had met a man in a bar who claimed the government killed disabled people in special hospitals. ‘It is true that the handicapped are a costly drag on the forward march to the new Germany,’ Herr Braun had said to Erik. ‘The race must be purified, by repressing Jews and other degenerate types, and preventing mixed marriages that produce mongrel people. But euthanasia has never been Nazi policy. We are determined, tough, even brutal sometimes, but we do not murder people. That is a Communist lie.’

Father’s accusations had been wrong. Still Erik wept sometimes.

Fortunately, he was frantically busy. There was always a morning rush of patients, mostly men injured the day before. Then there was a short lull before the first new casualties of the day. When Weiss had operated on the frostbitten boy, he and Erik and Hermann took a mid-morning break in the cramped staff room.

Hermann looked up from a newspaper. ‘In Berlin they’re saying we’ve already won!’ he exclaimed. ‘They ought to come here and see for themselves.’

Dr Weiss spoke with his usual cynicism. ‘The Führer made a most interesting speech at the Sportpalast,’ he said. ‘He spoke of the bestial inferiority of the Russians. I find that reassuring. I had the impression that the Russians were the toughest fighters we have yet come across. They have fought longer and harder than the Poles, the Belgians, the Dutch, the French, or the British. They may be underequipped and badly led and half starved, but they come running at our machine guns, waving their obsolete rifles, as if they don’t care whether they live or die. I’m glad to hear that this is no more than a sign of their bestiality. I was beginning to fear that they might be courageous and patriotic.’

As always, Weiss pretended to agree with the Führer, while meaning the opposite. Hermann just looked confused, but Erik understood and was infuriated. ‘Whatever the Russians may be, they’re losing,’ he said. ‘We’re forty miles from Moscow. The Führer has been proved right.’

‘And he is much smarter than Napoléon,’ said Dr Weiss.

‘In Napoléon’s time nothing could move faster than a horse,’ said Erik. ‘Today we have motor vehicles and wireless telegraphy. Modern communications have enabled us to succeed where Napoléon failed.’

‘Or they will have, when we take Moscow.’

‘Which we will do in a few days, if not hours. You can hardly doubt that!’

‘Can I not? I believe some of our own generals have suggested we halt where we are and build a defence line. We could secure our positions, resupply over the winter, and go back on the offensive when the spring comes.’

‘That sounds to me like treacherous cowardice!’ Erik said hotly.

‘You are right – you must be, because that is exactly what Berlin told the generals, I understand. Headquarters people obviously have a better perspective than the men on the front line.’

‘We have almost wiped out the Red Army!’

‘But Stalin seems to produce more armies from nowhere, like a magician. At the beginning of this campaign we thought he had two hundred divisions. Now we think he has more than three hundred. Where did he find another hundred divisions?’

‘The Führer’s judgement will be proved right – again.’

‘Of course it will, Erik.’

‘He has never yet been wrong!’

‘A man thought he could fly, so he jumped off the top of a ten-storey building, and as he fell past the fifth floor, flapping his arms uselessly in the air, he was heard to say: So far, so good.’

A soldier rushed into the staff room. ‘There’s been an accident,’ he said. ‘At the quarry north of the town. A collision, three vehicles. Some SS officers are injured.’

The SS, or Schutzstaffel, had originally been Hitler’s personal guard, and now formed a powerful elite. Erik admired their superb discipline, their ultra-smart uniforms, and their specially close relationship with Hitler.

‘We’ll send an ambulance,’ said Weiss.

The soldier said: ‘It’s the Einsatzgruppe, the Special Group.’

Erik had heard of the Special Groups, vaguely. They followed the army into conquered territory and rounded up troublemakers and potential saboteurs such as Communists. They were probably setting up a prison camp outside the town.

‘How many hurt?’ asked Weiss.

‘Six or seven. They’re still getting people out of the cars.’

‘Okay. Braun and von Ulrich, you go.’

Erik was pleased. He would be glad to rub shoulders with the Führer’s most fervent supporters, even happier if he could be of service to them.

The soldier handed him a message slip with directions.

Erik and Hermann gulped their tea, stubbed their cigarettes, and left the room. Erik put on a fur coat he had taken from a dead Russian officer, but left it open to show his uniform. They hurried down to the garage, and Hermann drove the ambulance out into the street. Erik read out the directions, peering through a light snowfall.

The road led out of town and snaked through the forest. They passed several buses and trucks coming the other way. The snow on the road was packed hard, and Hermann could not go fast on the glossy surface. Erik could easily imagine how there had been a collision.

It was the afternoon of the short day. At this time of year, daylight began at ten and ended at five. A grey light came through the snow clouds. The tall pine trees crowding in on either side darkened the road further. Erik felt as if he were in one of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, following the path into the deep wood where evil lurked.

They looked out for a turning to the left, and found it guarded by a soldier who pointed the way. They bumped along a treacherous path between the trees until they were waved down by a second guard, who said: ‘Don’t go faster than walking pace. That’s how the crash happened.’

A minute later they came upon the accident. Three damaged vehicles stood as if welded together: a bus, a jeep and a Mercedes limousine with snow chains on the tyres. Erik and Hermann jumped out of their ambulance.

The bus was empty. There were three men on the ground, perhaps the occupants of the jeep. Several soldiers gathered around the car sandwiched between the other two vehicles, apparently trying to get the people out of it.

Erik heard a volley of rifle fire, and wondered for a moment who was shooting, but he put the thought aside and concentrated on the job.

He and Hermann went from one man to the next, assessing the gravity of the injuries. Of the three people on the ground one was dead, another had a broken arm, and the third appeared to be no worse than bruised. In the car, one man had bled to death, another was unconscious, and a third was screaming.

Erik gave the screamer a shot of morphine. When the drug took effect, he and Hermann were able to get the patient out of the car and into the ambulance. With him out of the way, the soldiers could begin to free the unconscious man, who was trapped by the deformed bodywork of the Mercedes. The man had a head injury that was going to kill him anyway, Erik thought, but he did not tell them that. He turned his attention to the men from the jeep. Hermann put a splint on the broken arm, and Erik walked the bruised man to the ambulance and sat him inside.

He returned to the Mercedes. ‘We’ll have him out in five to ten minutes,’ said a captain. ‘Just hold on.’

‘Okay,’ said Erik.

He heard shooting again, and walked a little farther into the forest, curious about what the Special Group might be doing here. The snow on the ground between the trees was heavily trodden and littered with cigarette ends, apple cores, discarded newspapers and other litter, as if a factory outing had passed this way.

He entered a clearing where lorries and buses were parked. A lot of people had been brought here. Some buses were leaving, skirting the accident; another arrived as Erik passed through. Beyond the car park, he came upon a hundred or so Russians of all ages, apparently prisoners, though many had suitcases, boxes and sacks that they clutched as if guarding precious possessions. One man held a violin. A little girl with a doll caught Erik’s eye, and he felt in his guts a sensation of sick foreboding.

The prisoners were being guarded by local policemen armed with truncheons. Clearly the Special Group had collaborators for whatever they were doing. The policemen looked at him, noted the German army uniform visible beneath the unbuttoned coat, and said nothing.

As he walked by, a well-dressed Russian prisoner spoke to him in German. ‘Sir, I am the director of the tyre factory in this town. I have never believed in Communism, but only paid lip service, as all managers had to. I can help you – I know where everything is. Please take me away from here.’

Erik ignored him and walked in the direction of the shooting.

He came upon the quarry. It was a large, irregular hole in the ground, its edge fringed by tall spruce trees like guardsmen in dark-green uniforms laden with snow. At one end a long slope led into the pit. As he watched, a dozen prisoners began to walk down, two by two, marshalled by soldiers, into the shadowed valley.

Erik noticed three women and a boy of about eleven among them. Was their prison camp somewhere in that quarry? But they were no longer carrying luggage. Snow fell on their bare heads like a benison.

Erik spoke to an SS sergeant standing nearby. ‘Who are these prisoners, Sarge?’

‘Communists,’ said the man. ‘From the town. Political commissars, and so on.’

‘What, even that little boy?’

‘Jews, too,’ said the sergeant.

‘Well, what are they, Communists or Jews?’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘It’s not the same thing.’

‘Balls. Most Communists are Jews. Most Jews are Communists. Don’t you know anything?’

The tyre factory director who had spoken to Erik seemed to be neither, he thought.

The prisoners reached the rocky floor of the quarry. Until this moment they had shuffled along like sheep in a herd, not speaking or looking around, but now they became animated, pointing at something on the ground. Peering through the snowflakes, Erik saw what looked like bodies scattered among the rocks, snow dusting their garments.

For the first time Erik noticed twelve riflemen standing on the lip of the ravine, among the trees. Twelve prisoners, twelve riflemen: he realized what was happening here, and incredulity mixed with horror rose like bile inside him.

They raised their guns and aimed at the prisoners.

‘No,’ Erik said. ‘No, you can’t.’ Nobody heard him.

A woman prisoner screamed. Erik saw her grab the eleven-year-old boy and clasp him to herself, as if her arms around him could stop bullets. She seemed to be his mother.

An officer said: ‘Fire.’

The rifles cracked. The prisoners staggered and fell. The noise dislodged a little snow from the pines, and it fell on the riflemen, a sprinkling of pure white.

Erik saw the boy and his mother drop, still locked together in an embrace. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh, no!’

The sergeant looked at him. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said irritably. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

‘Medical orderly,’ said Erik, without taking his eyes off the dread scene in the pit.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I brought an ambulance for the officers hurt in the collision.’ Erik saw that another twelve prisoners were already being marched down the slope into the quarry. ‘Oh, God, my father was right,’ he moaned. ‘We’re murdering people.’

‘Stop whining and fuck off back to your ambulance.’

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ said Erik.

(iii)

At the end of November Volodya asked for a transfer to a fighting unit. His intelligence work no longer seemed important: the Red Army did not need spies in Berlin to discover the intentions of a German army that was already on the outskirts of Moscow. And he wanted to fight for his city.

His misgivings about the government came to seem trivial. Stalin’s stupidity, the brutishness of the secret police, the way nothing in the Soviet Union worked the way it was supposed to work – all that faded away. He felt nothing but a blazing need to repel the invader who threatened to bring violence, rape, starvation and death to his mother, his sister, the twins Dimka and Tania, and Zoya.

He was sharply aware that if everyone thought that way he would have no spies. His German informants were people who had decided that patriotism and loyalty were outweighed by the terrible wickedness of the Nazis. He was grateful to them for their courage and the stern morality that drove them. But he felt differently.

So did many of the younger men in Red Army Intelligence, and a small company of them joined a rifle battalion at the beginning of December. Volodya kissed his parents, wrote a note to Zoya saying he hoped to survive to see her again, and moved into barracks.

At long last, Stalin brought reinforcements from the east to Moscow. Thirteen Siberian divisions were deployed against the ever-nearer Germans. On their way to the front line some of them stopped briefly in Moscow, and Muscovites on the streets stared at them in their white padded coats and warm sheepskin boots, with their skis and goggles and hardy steppe ponies. They arrived in time for the Russian counter-attack.

This was the Red Army’s last chance. Time and time again, in the last five months, the Soviet Union had hurled hundreds of thousands of men at the invaders. Each time the Germans had paused, dealt with the attack, and continued their relentless advance. But if this attempt failed there would be no more. The Germans would have Moscow; and when they had Moscow they would have the USSR. And then his mother would be trading vodka for black-market milk for Dimka and Tania.

On the fourth day of December the Soviet forces moved out of the city to the north, west and south and took up their positions for the last effort. They went without lights, to avoid alerting the enemy. They were not allowed to have fires or smoke tobacco.

That evening the front line was visited by NKVD agents. Volodya did not see his rodent-faced brother-in-law Ilya Dvorkin, who must have been among them. A pair he did not recognize came to the bivouac where Volodya and a dozen men were cleaning their rifles. Have you heard anyone criticizing the government? they asked. What do the fellows say about Comrade Stalin? Who among your comrades questions the wisdom of the army’s strategy and tactics?

Volodya was incredulous. What did it matter at this point? In the next few days Moscow would be saved or lost. Who cared if soldiers bitched about their officers? He cut the questioning short, saying that he and his men were under a rule of silence, and he had orders to shoot anyone who broke it, but – he added recklessly – he would let the secret policemen off if they left immediately.

That worked, but Volodya had no doubt that the NKVD was undermining the morale of the troops all along the line.

On Friday 5 December in the evening the Russian artillery thundered into action. Next morning at dawn, Volodya and his battalion moved off in a blizzard. Their orders were to take a small town on the far side of a canal.

Volodya ignored orders to attack the German defences frontally – that was the old-fashioned Russian tactic, and this was no moment to stick obstinately to wrong-headed ideas. With his company of a hundred men he went upstream and crossed the ice to the north of the town, then moved in on the Germans’ flank. He could hear the crash and roar of battle off to his left, so he knew he was behind the enemy’s front line.

Volodya was almost blinded by the blizzard. The occasional blaze of gunfire lit up the clouds for a moment, but at ground level visibility was only a few yards. However, he thought optimistically, that would help the Russians creep up on the Germans and take them by surprise.

It was viciously cold, down to minus 35 Centigrade in places; and while this was bad for both sides, it was worse for the Germans, who lacked cold-weather supplies.

Somewhat to his surprise Volodya found that the normally efficient Germans had not consolidated their line. There were no trenches, no anti-tank ditches, no dugouts. Their front was no more than a series of strongpoints. It was easy to slip through the gaps into the town and look for soft targets: barracks and canteens and ammunition dumps.

His men shot three sentries to take a soccer field in which were parked fifty tanks. Could it be so easy, Volodya wondered? Was the force that had conquered half Russia now depleted and spent?

The corpses of Soviet soldiers, killed in previous skirmishes and left to freeze where they had died, were without their boots and coats, which had presumably been taken by shivering Germans.

The streets of the town were littered with abandoned vehicles – empty trucks with open doors, snow-covered tanks with cold engines, and jeeps with their bonnet lids propped up as if to show that mechanics had tried to fix them but had given up in despair.

Crossing a main road, Volodya heard a car engine and made out, through the snowfall, a pair of headlights approaching on his left. At first he assumed it was a Soviet vehicle that had pushed through the German lines. Then he and his group were fired on, and he yelled at them to take cover. The car turned out to be a Kubelwagen, a Volkswagen jeep with the spare wheel on the hood in front. It had an air-cooled engine, which was why it had not frozen up. It rattled past them at top speed, the Germans firing from their seats.

Volodya was so surprised that he forgot to fire back. Why was a vehicle full of armed Germans driving away from the battle?

He took his company across the road. He had expected that by now they would be fighting their way from house to house, but they met little opposition. The buildings of the occupied town were locked up, shuttered, dark. Any Russians inside were hiding under their beds, if they had any sense.

More cars came along the road, and Volodya decided that officers must be fleeing the battlefield. He detailed a section with a Degtyarev DP-28 light machine gun to take cover in a café and fire on them. He did not want them to live to kill Russians tomorrow.

Just off the main road he spotted a low brick building with bright lights behind skimpy curtains. Creeping past a sentry who could not see far in the snowstorm, he was able to peer in and discern officers inside. He guessed he was looking at a battalion headquarters.

He gave whispered instructions to his sergeants. They shot out the windows then tossed grenades through. A few Germans came out with their hands on their heads. A minute later, Volodya had taken the building.

He heard a new noise. He listened, frowning in puzzlement. More than anything else, it sounded like a football crowd. He stepped out of the headquarters building. The sound was coming from the front line, and it was growing louder.

There was a rattle of machine-gun fire then, a hundred yards away on the main road, a truck slewed sideways and careered off the road into a brick wall, then burst into flames – hit, presumably, by the DP-28 Volodya had deployed. Two more vehicles followed immediately behind it and escaped.

Volodya ran to the café. The machine gun stood on its bipod on a dining table. This model was nicknamed Record Player because of the disc-shaped magazine that sat atop the barrel. The men were enjoying themselves. ‘It’s like shooting pigeons in the yard, sir!’ said a gunner. ‘Easy!’ One of the men had raided the kitchen and found a big canister of ice cream, miraculously unspoiled, and they were taking turns to scoff it.

Volodya looked out through the smashed window of the café. He saw another vehicle coming, a jeep he thought, and behind it some men running. As they got nearer he recognized German uniforms. More followed behind, dozens, perhaps hundreds. They were responsible for the football-crowd sound.

The gunner trained the barrel on the oncoming car, but Volodya put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Wait,’ he said.

He stared into the blizzard, making his eyes sting. All he could see was more vehicles and more running men, plus a few horses.

A soldier raised a rifle. ‘Don’t shoot,’ Volodya said. The crowd came closer. ‘We can’t stop this lot – we’d be overrun in a minute,’ he said. ‘Let them pass. Take cover.’ The men lay down. The gunner lifted the DP-28 off the table. Volodya sat on the floor and peered over the windowsill.

The noise rose to a roar. The leading men drew level with the café and passed. They were running, stumbling and limping. Some carried rifles, most seemed to have lost their weapons; some had coats and hats, others nothing but their uniform tunics. Many were wounded. Volodya saw a man with a bandaged head fall down, crawl a few yards, and collapse. No one took any notice. A cavalryman on horseback trampled an infantryman and galloped on, heedless. Jeeps and staff cars drove dangerously through the crowd, skidding on the ice, honking madly and scattering men to both sides.

It was a rout, Volodya realized. They went by in their thousands. It was a stampede. They were on the run.

At last, the Germans were in retreat.