Europe Central (48 page)

It was as if Vlasov could not stop talking now. Strik-Strikfeldt gazed unwaveringly into his anguished eyes as he spoke of collectivization, purges, murders, arrests. The man was truly pitiful.

Well, my dear fellow, don’t worry, for we’ll be able to put everything to rights within a few months—or do you think that Stalin has any chance of escaping defeat?

Vlasov fitted his fingertips together and said: Two factors must entail our loss of the war: first, the unwillingness of Russians to defend our Bolshevik masters, and second, the inadequacy of a military leadership debilitated by interference from the commissars. That was what I wrote in my memorandum.

Yes, of course. I merely wanted to make sure you hadn’t changed your mind. You told Dürken that we haven’t conquered Russia as of yet—

Well, this Dürken—

Say no more. He just doesn’t realize . . .

12

Once, not too long ago, I was lying in the arms of a woman who’d explained that she still loved me but could no longer endure to go on in the dishonest, enervating, frightening, exhilarating and unspeakably sad way that we’d gone on. She, the one who for years had always clung to me, wheedling just a moment more and then a moment more in my embrace, now grew restless there on the bed. She’d already refused to make love with me one last time, because it would be too pitiful and she didn’t know how one ought to go about lovemaking for the last time. Should she put her all into it, or . . . ? Then I too agreed that doing that really would have been too sad. I kissed her once, desperately, then lay back with her still in my arms, her body, having determined that mine was now inimical, trying politely not to squirm away from mine.—But putting it this way is so unfair to her! She really did still love me, you see; it wasn’t that I bored her; it was simply that everything was over.—I wondered whether I should stop calling her darling now or next time we met. I knew that as soon as I stood up, everything really
would
be over forever. But she was still mine for another five minutes, and then another five minutes while she yawned and asked whether we ought to get up and take a drive or play a board game. And it had come to this point between Vlasov and his immaculateness. (She was always far more admirable, sincere, honest and decent than I.) Strik-Strikfeldt was explaining that under the secret direction of the Experimental Formation Center,
a Russian National People’s Army had already been formed!

13

Wilfried Karlovich, said the prisoner in a tone of almost childish eagerness, what did you really think of my memorandum? Was it clear? And has the German leadership made any comment?

Ah, said Strik-Strikfeldt. Well, it’s an admirable document, but, as drafted, too Russian. Shock tactics!

Do you know, laughed Vlasov irrelevantly, once I gave my parents-in-law a cow, and in consequence they got punished for being kulaks!

14

My friend, if you don’t mind me asking you, what are you doing with that spent cartridge?

It’s a souvenir, he replied in a suddenly lifeless voice.

May I have a look at it? Why, it’s a Geco, 7.65 millimeter. I’m told that the Führer himself carries a Walther pistol of that caliber. Good for close work, they say. Does it have some sort of sentimental value, or am I getting too personal?

Awkwardly stiff, roundfaced, his hair receding, Vlasov watched everyone through round heavy spectacles which gave him an impression of half-comical surprise. Even his mouth was round. Round buttons descended from the sharp triangular points of his collar. He said: It reminds me not to make any commitments I might later regret.

Hmm. Well, that’s a worthy goal, to be sure, remarked Strik-Strikfeldt in a tone of brooding alertness. I wonder if there’s something you’re trying to tell me? But no, you didn’t call attention to . . . Well, let me rephrase the question. Is there something that you disapprove of, or that perhaps worries you a trifle?

Vlasov was silent.

Strik-Strikfeldt sighed.—I beg your pardon if I’ve inadvertently offended you. Well, well, here it is, and may it bring you good luck.

Wilfried Karlovich, if I told you that I found this in a burned village, about ten days before my capture, would you understand me?

Of course. Now it’s quite clear. I’m sure you saw something regrettable. But
there was a reason
. . .

What reason? No, I—

When Stalin purged the officer corps, did you see what happened to the men who disappeared?

No.

And, you know, we never want to admit the invincibility of death. I myself, well, once I was at the front with some colleagues who’d become dear friends, not too far from here actually, in this same forest terrain, and partisans ambushed us—the spawn of Zoya herself! I was the only survivor. Well, well, Vlasov, I’m sure you’ve seen worse; the point is that even though they were both quite obviously, you know,
dead,
and I was even drenched with their—

Vlasov was staring at him.

As I was saying, the point is that I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I hadn’t rushed them to the field hospital, just in case. But they were
dead, dead, dead.
But what if they weren’t? So I understand your position perfectly, my dear fellow, because it’s so difficult to believe in death. So you can’t be
sure
that Stalin’s actually committed atrocities, whereas what you saw when you picked up this bullet—well, what exactly did you see?

Nothing important, said Vlasov in a strangled voice. A few corpses—

Listen to me. You’ve assured me that you believe in rationalism. There’s always a reasonable explanation. You don’t know who killed those people or why. Now I’m going to tell you something. This is top secret, so if it ever gets out that you heard it here, it’s the concentration camp for me. But I’m trusting you. When our forces entered Poland, the
casus belli
was an attack by Poles upon a German radio station at the border. Well, that attack was faked. The propaganda organs supplied the bullets, the uniforms and the bodies. They were
dead.
But how and why they died, and who they were, well, death doesn’t always play a straight hand—

I know that, Wilfried Karlovich.

Good. Just give everyone the benefit of the doubt. That’s all I ask. Don’t be hindered by unverifiable assumptions. I grant that thousands of Russian prisoners may have died from hunger and cold. But let me assure you, my dear General Vlasov, that our own soldiers froze to death on hospital trains last winter! Just consider the conditions under which both of our armies must fight! If anything, the suffering we share should bring us together . . .

Vlasov longed for Strik-Strikfeldt to think well of him. They had to trust one another. Here was Vlasov’s chance to fight for something he believed in. (Where he came from, one was free to choose: Death at the hands of Fascists, or death in our execution cellars.) He couldn’t demand too many conditions. When he expressed uneasiness about the way that so many Russians were being treated, his new friend replied: Some of that might well be true. But I swear to you, the Führer’s a flexible man. We can persuade him to change his mind.

Vlasov was easily led to assume that Strik-Strikfeldt would never have said such words had they not been authorized at the highest level. In fact, the latter belonged to the category of what Khrushchev privately called “temporary people”—rich and powerful serfs whom their master could cast into the pit at any moment. (Khrushchev, of course, was talking about the minions of Stalin. In our Greater Germany, no such perils exist.)

In fact, many of us disagree with Berlin on a number of important points! And I want you to think about that, General Vlasov. If I were a Russian and I announced that I disagreed with Moscow, what do you think would happen to me?

And so his scruples were crushed by concentric attack.

That evening, the musically talented inmates organized a serenade for Vlasov, on balalaikas provided by the Germans.

15

He dreamed that once again he was standing over the massacred peasant women in the burnt weeds where the Geco cartridges glittered, but this time he understood enough to bend down and gently cleanse the blood from their faces with a black scarf dipped in the river; and as soon as he had done this he realized that the blood wasn’t even theirs; unwounded, immaculate, they opened their eyes, sat up and kissed his lips in turn.

16

Summoning him back to the commandant’s office, Second Lieutenant Dürken invited him to sign a propaganda leaflet calling upon Soviet troops to surrender.

Vlasov replied: As a soldier, I cannot ask other soldiers to stop doing their duty.

Then we’ll take out the part asking them to desert, Dürken replied eagerly.

Vlasov signed.

On 10.9.42, just as General Paulus’s Sixth Army began to run into trouble at Stalingrad, the Germans dropped leaflets on the Red Army, inviting them to desert. These leaflets bore Vlasov’s name.

17

On 17.9.42, thanks to a word from Second Lieutenant Dürken, the Fascists installed him in the Department of Propaganda on Viktoriastrasse, Berlin. (Reader, think of them as the mechanized corps of the third echelon, meant to exploit breakthroughs.)—You may feel a bit fettered here in the Old Reich, Strik-Strikfeldt had warned him. There’s more legalism here than in the occupied territories—more obstructionism, I should say. As for the men in the office, I don’t really know them that well. If you have any problems, just ring me up, old fellow. I won’t desert you . . .

When will I meet Hitler?

Oh, right now he’s busy trying to decide how quickly our Tiger tanks ought to be fitted with the new eighty-eight-millimeter cannons—

Vlasov’s new offices were brightly lit, if windowless, and the administration gave him plenty of liquor. On the wall glared the face of HITLER—THE LIBERATOR. Sometimes there were hilarious drinking parties with the secretaries, who almost seemed to have been selected for their voluptuousness (if I may be permitted to employ that word to describe creatures of the Slavic racial type). Sitting back on a faded green sofa, he smiled a little awkwardly while a drunken Cossack poet whose parents had been shot by the Bolsheviks back in ’21 declaimed strophes pertaining to
this antipodal realm / where summer burns eternal.
(You’re quite the relativist, but I don’t blame you! laughed a lieutenant-general who hailed from the coldest part of Siberia.) A German girl was desperately kissing a Russian girl in the corner.—Well, let them all take their pleasure where they can, thought Vlasov with an impersonally pitying affection. Soon enough they’ll be fighting for their lives.—Perhaps because he himself had become a little drunk, they reminded him of the mahorka-smoking troops he’d commanded during the battle of Moscow. Bivouacking under the snow (for the Fascists had burned down all the peasant huts), they too got tipsy, sang songs
(I’m warm in this freezing bunker / thanks to your love’s eternal flame!
)
,
played chess, crushed lice, cleaned their weapons and prepared to die. At those times Vlasov found his war stories much in demand. Pouting, a typist named Olenka demanded to know why he hadn’t saved his Chinese Order of the Golden Dragon for her.—I would have worn it around my neck, Andrei Andreyevich, I really really would. And do you know what else? Every night I would have
kissed
it . . .—Vlasov chuckled and pinched her, his face relaxing into goodnatured ugliness.

It was on this very same green sofa that in company with a certain M. A. Zykov (soon to be liquidated on account of his Jewish antecedents) Vlasov wrote the famous Smolensk Declaration, which begins:
Friends and brothers!
BOLSHEVISM IS THE ENEMY OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE
.
Their colleagues toasted them with vodka and then again with schnapps. It was signed on 27.12.42 and published on 13.1.43, one day after having been approved by the Führer. Although it was meant for the Red Army, Reich Minister Rosenberg arranged for it to fall on the occupied territories, where, in Strik-Strikfeldt’s words,
one could come across grey wraiths who subsisted on corpses and tree-bark.

By then the Germans had already lost the strategic initiative. Rommel was in trouble at El Alamein; then came the landing in French North Africa; Stalingrad was encircled.—Even the Führer kept saying now: The Russians will break through somehow. They always do.—As the Barons of the East began to perceive an alarmingly fluid operational situation, they cast about for a way to redirect policy. Maybe their fiefdoms could still be saved, if somebody like Vlasov . . .

And so Vlasov felt that he had somewhat reestablished himself in the world (or, if you prefer, that he’d stabilized his defensive front). This new life offered no “security,” it’s true, but nobody had been secure under Comrade Stalin, either. Nor had he stained his conscience in any way. To be sure, all of our decisions, even self-destructive ones, contain opportunistic elements; but really the safest, most comfortable thing would have been to ensconce himself in that office on Viktoriastrasse and sign leaflets dictated by his German masters. He refused to do that. He wanted to fight for the liberation of Russia. And so the propaganda officers, promising him an imminent escape from this pleasant limbo, photographed Vlasov in his new regalia, raising his right hand in a sort of Indian salute, with smiling German officers at his side as he paced down the wall of imaginary volunteers.

Listening to Liszt on the gramophone in his new quarters at the Russian Court Hotel, he continued to believe in a German victory, if only because any other kind would have such evil consequences for his dreams. (What
were
his dreams? He lay down, his feet hanging off the edge of the bed, and dreamed that his wife was embracing him, but she was a six-armed monster with a face of brass and she was choking him and he could not break free. He woke up gasping, and for the remainder of the night lay staring up at the ceiling in infinite bewilderment and distress.) Europe was becoming (to appropriate Guderian’s words)
a fortress of unlimited breadth and depth,
and there was no reason why that fortress could not thwart any breakthrough. The disaster at Stalingrad gave him pause, but in the end he merely thought it all the more urgent to return to the front line and apply his talents, instead of signing his name to other people’s propaganda. His colleagues kept invoking the Führer with such reassuring conviction that the forthcoming meeting would obviously settle everything. And Strik-Strikfeldt rang him up again with the news that he’d now obtained the support of a powerful faction in the Supreme Command . . .