The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] (43 page)

Men die inside the citadel. Each bomb takes another and another. Ilya imagines the sparks are souls liberated and aloft. He marvels, in three years at war he has never once considered any man’s soul. He does not feel remorse at the enemy deaths, or the thousands on both sides that will follow in the morning when the infantry attacks. He doesn’t fear for his own life. No life concerns him.

But thoughts of God nag him. It’s the sixty again. It’s them. “What about us?” they ask Ilya in the explosions. Shut up, he answers. You were bound for death, either in the camps of Siberia or on the journey to your prisons. “No, it’s the way we were taken. Like animals.” And what of animals, Ilya retorts. What in your conduct lifted you above animals? Was it your torture of civilians, your rapes and pillaging, your death factories? “We were men, simple soldiers like you, Ilya Borisovich. Duty defined us, that’s all, not the acts of others you’ve heard about.” Shut up You paid for those acts, whether you did them or not. “Who made you the collector of that debt, Ilya? Was it God?” Shut up about God. He watched you be butchered. He didn’t care. “Ilya,
you
watched us butchered.
You
didn’t care.” Shut up!

“Ilyushka? Am I bothering you?”

Ilya starts at the voice. Misha lowers his binoculars.

“Ilya?”

“Misha. I ... sorry.”

“You told me to shut up.”

“I didn’t mean to say that.”

“You sounded like you meant it.”

Ilya says nothing. The citadel on the river continues to suffer.

“Ilya?”

“What?” His tone is annoyed.

“You’re shaking.”

Ilya flings an arm outside the blanket and stands. A breeze chills the back of his neck. He is sweating.

Behind him and Misha the rest of their platoon has gathered on the hillside. They are all wrapped under woolen blankets too, some on their sides trying to sleep, most watching the fireworks on the river. Ilya strides off among them.

“Tomorrow, Sergeant,” they say, “we’ll get them, right? German bastards. We’ll kill every one we get our hands on. We’ll give it to them. Tomorrow, Sergeant.” Ilya hears reverence in their voices, they worship what they’ve heard about Ilya Shokhin, his remarkable ability to take life.

He stomps past the tongues and huddled shapes. He walks until he finds a place under a tree where he cannot see the river. He sits on a jumble of roots and looks up through bare branches. In this moment the last bomb strikes the citadel, no more whines come from the sky. The throb of airplanes recedes to the east. The night seems to collapse like a boxer into its corner, gasping for breath, hurting for this quiet. No more, it says, no more. But Ilya knows the sun will bring more, the sun like the boxing bell will ring another round, and many more days’ suns will do the same. Don’t feel your body or your mind or you can’t go the distance. Just fight. Fight.

Ilya sits in this spot until morning. When the sun climbs he has a conclusion. He’s talked with the sixty, dozed some, and talked with them again. They have helped him come to a resolution.

God must take back the responsibility. He can’t trust man anymore to do it for him. God has to do the killing.

At first Ilya didn’t know what course to take. How to make God do anything? You can’t, after all. But Ilya has a talent. God gave it to him. So he’s going to use it to influence God. He’s going to steep himself in so much killing that God will have no choice but to admit that it’s madness. God will have to stop Ilya. And all the madness. If He chooses to let it continue, there will be no one left.

The breakfast wagons clatter over the hills before Ilya rises. In his gut is a driving appetite, his hunger is another surprise to him. For the first time in weeks he’s eager for the taste of greasy ham and wheat paste, mopped up with black bread, chased with steaming tea. Ilya stretches, his muscles are taut from the brisk night but he feels fine. He walks to the top of the hill; the citadel below waits in a bath of perfect orange light. A long shadow floats on the river behind the fortress, like a compass needle pointing west, in the direction of Berlin.

Ilya approaches a wagon and helps himself to an extra portion. The cook says nothing. Ilya sits where he can look over the citadel. Something of the prescience he attributes to Misha’s wound comes over him. Perhaps this is a bonus God throws into the bargain when you make some arrangement with Him, the way Misha has with darkness. Ilya can see the coming attack. Without knowing a reason, even chewing, he smiles.

For months the island citadel of Küstrin has been the anchor of a German corridor stretching eighty kilometers all the way from the Oder River to Berlin. Counterattacks out of the fortress have prevented Red forces from linking their bridgeheads on the west bank of the Oder. That corridor was closed three days ago, and the river citadel is now surrounded. Two days ago, on the twenty-seventh, German reinforcements tried to break into Küstrin from the south. Four divisions and supporting tanks made it as far as the outskirts, until Chuikov’s dug-in artillery slaughtered them in the open mucky ground along the riverbank. The German offensive was a fiasco and they withdrew, leaving a thousand bodies in the mud.

Sitting next to Misha’s nervous mouth last night, Ilya learned that the fortress dates to the sixteenth century. The citadel itself is a complex of works; a reinforced fortress sits in the middle of a web of outlying redoubts, pillboxes, and bunkers. The only links to the island are four dikes fanning out from the center, each of which is so narrow a single tank would fill the approach. The Germans have stacked defenses along these paths, piling on tiers of pillboxes, trenches, barbed wire, and minefields. Red units have gotten so close to these fortifications that exchanges of
Panzerfausts
and hand grenades go on day and night.

Misha told him that back in February, a regiment of the Fifth Shock Army actually penetrated the citadel’s outer defenses. The official news agency
Sovinform
reported that Küstrin had fallen, and the mistaken victory was greeted with cannon salvos in Moscow. Word has it that General Zhukov was mightily embarrassed. He has instructed Chuikov’s Eighth Guards that the error must be corrected this morning.

On his hillside, Ilya finishes breakfast. The gusto with which he greeted the dawn and the food have seeped out of him with the eating and the rising sun. The citadel on the glistening waters beckons him. The day’s battle rages inside him already, before the first shot is fired. This is not fear. He feels a grip much colder than fear. It’s knowledge that he shouldn’t possess: that he will not die today, that God is not going to be so easily moved.

Ilya walks down to rejoin his platoon. Every step in their direction stiffens him as though he walks through ice, until he is ice. Misha greets him with irritation and a glowing scar.

“Where have you been?”

Ilya doesn’t want to speak. Language is human. On the cusp of combat and until it is done, he wills himself to be, to accept, something else.

“Handle the men,” he says. “Follow me, Sergeant.”

Misha cocks his head at Ilya’s flat tone. Ilya looks over the platoon, fifty craven men and snivelers, he thinks. No loss if they die too.

Misha steps back and holds out a hand to Ilya, pointing at him like an exhibit.

“Men,” the little one says, “here is the best fighter in the whole Red Army. I know. I’ve fought beside him. Now you heard what he said. Follow Sergeant Shokhin, right down the Germans’ goddam throats. What do you think?”

The platoon shouts, “Urrah!”

Ilya puts the sun to his back and walks to the staging area. The platoon and Misha mingle their long shadows with his, but he is, he thinks, alone.

Their punishment company has drawn the assignment of leading the charge across the easternmost dike to storm the fortress. Ilya and Misha’s platoon will form the company vanguard. There won’t be enough room for more than three men abreast to run the two hundred meters along the top of the dike. The rest of the division will attack from boats across the river.

Ilya checks his watch: 0825 hours. The staging area for their company is a big crater in the riverbank road. Thirty meters away stands the concrete foot of their assigned dike. One hundred and fifty soldiers and officers gather in and behind the depression. Cigarettes are passed to and fro, a few vodka bottles that survived the night chart their own course through the men. Ilya stares across the water at the fortress. The enemy garrison in there waits for him.

Why are the Germans still here? Why haven’t they slipped out in one of the nights and run back to their lines? They stay in Küstrin for a single reason: to hold back the Ivans, the Asiatic barbarians. Brave men, these soldiers of the citadel, sacrificing themselves to stall the Reds and give more time for refugees to throng into Berlin. Just as well, Ilya thinks. Corral them all. Today we take these Germans on their island. Later, in their capital, we’ll see the rest.

Minutes pass around the crater. Attempts to talk with Ilya only anger him. He snarls at the first few who try to touch him, the rest he ignores. He decides he hates everything. Not just man and machines but the river, the trees and hills, the sky, the stones of the fortress, they’re all accomplices, aren’t they? Brave men. Fah! What is brave? To take ground and kill, or stand your ground and be killed. Stupidity. He wants to change his course from what he decided last night and this dawn, he wants to drop his weapons and walk away, to be the first real brave man.

But he’ll convince no one like that. The armies around him and God alike will think he’s simply lost his nerve. Gone weak.

No. He must become the thing he despises. To defy God you must be a god. Ilya will reap so many lives, undo so much of His work, that He will have to pay attention. Only then, Ilya will rest.

At 0845 the air force returns and bombs the heart of the citadel just as Misha predicted. For an hour the fortress is slammed, continuing to drive the enemy garrison outward into their field defenses. Again Misha chooses the spot beside Ilya to watch the bombardment; again he issues a running commentary. Ilya has learned that Misha calms himself with the sound of his own voice. Ilya makes no response. He can barely hear the little motoring mouth. Inside him, the sixty hold out their arms, they accept a great deal and hold it in trust for Ilya. He takes them things: the
whompmg
bombs, Misha’s yak, crawling time, his own fading humanity. The sixty enfold whatever Ilya brings them, he bears gifts to them from life. They nod slowly, waver like seaweed, and Ilya moves on lighter.

At 1000 hours, the last bomb falls, the planes wane from the sky. A minute of heavy silence settles in the crater around Ilya. The men tense at his back.

Misha tells them, “Not yet. Stay loose.”

He is right. The banks on both sides of the Oder vent a sudden and powerful noise. Three huge artillery pieces, 203mm howitzers with shells as big as butter churns, have been fanned out and positioned at point-blank range, no more than four hundred meters from the citadel’s fortifications. The rounds from these guns strike their targets almost the moment they’re out of the barrels. Concrete dugouts and pillboxes are ripped apart in deafening explosions, reduced to rubble and steel bars. Stones the size of men are flung up and into the river, Ilya thinks some of them are men.

At 1030 hours two divisions and one full regiment, almost twenty thousand men, began to creep from all sides into the river in assault boats. At 1040 a yellow alert flare scorches across the morning.

Ilya rises. The platoon crowds at his back.

Misha appears at Ilya’s elbow. His brows are just below Ilya’s great shoulder.

“Sergeant Shokhin?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be right here. Today, I mean. Right here. All right?”

Talking is an effort for Ilya, as it would be for a corpse. He looks away from the little man when he says, “All right. Stay next to me.”

“Thank you, Ilya.”

The red flare of attack sears a high, arcing scratch over the morning.