Authors: Ben Pastor
Bora knew that some of the murders dated to the last occupation of the area by German troops. It had been local
krest’yane
– farmers who hadn’t been killed, deported, or who hadn’t fled in two years of war – who reported the disappearance of this or that relative, a fact in itself that made it unlikely the missing had joined the partisans. In every case the woods, or the fields immediately around them, were the last places where the victims had been seen; and Krasny Yar was where their bodies were found by searchers.
It was true what he’d been told: the magnetic needle trembled and gyrated. Eventually Bora put the compass away. According to the non-com, the mutilated corpse was discovered about a kilometre into the wood from where he’d entered (“always leave the patch of firs to your right. The spot’s on the rise with the lightning-blasted tree, near the hollow”). It must be close to a kilometre now. The firs were there, dark green. No rise, no tree and no hollow yet in sight. Fallen branches snapped under his boots; a tangle of creepers which had grown rank since the snow melt shot up through the first cleft in the ice. Wet spots, spongy and treacherous, were betrayed by the capricious mosses around them. Bora bypassed them to regain the elfish trail. Common birds called from distant trees. The soldiers before him had advanced in a broken line; Bora’s expert eye read small signs in the bruised greenery showing how they had fanned out.
After a short time, in the thicket to his right, he spotted something moving, progressing against the dark of the ragged firs. Or not progressing, exactly: something that swayed, stealthily passing from one point to another. The Losukovka priest, he told himself, the one from Our Lady of the Resurrection of the Dead, Nitichenko. He’d come to pay his respects to Bora at his arrival in Merefa, because he now lived with his mother by the pilgrimage church in nearby Oseryanka.
Russian priests were specialists at recognizing the authority of the moment; and besides, it had been the German Army that had allowed him to reopen his Ukrainian rite church, and to say mass. “Poor among the poor, called to serve at a great distance from my parish church, in Ostroh and Staraya Kerkove, Krasnaya Polyana and Sloboda Solokov…” For no specific reason, Bora did not care for him. It was not surprising that he moved so cautiously. It was the clergy’s way in this country.
It is the attitude so many of us have in life,
Bora thought.
But not mine
. He didn’t want to give the priest the satisfaction of thinking he could spy unseen, but didn’t feel like calling his name out loud either. He kept an eye on the black shadow in the trees while he continued steadily to the slope where he’d just noticed the blasted tree. Split and torn through, it leant over one of those hollows found in wooded areas not far from rivers (the Udy bordered Krasny Yar to the north-west): a pit like the hole that leads to hell, a magic kingdom, or a treasure cave.
Thinking in mythical terms comes easy in a place like this
.
The rise sat in a blade of afternoon sun that cut through the foliage at a slant. Flies reeled in the light undisturbed; great clusters of them buzzed above the blood-soaked ground. Bora climbed the rise and slackened his pace. He chased the insects before reaching the edge of the hollow, but the flies hovered around him. In the snarl of grass and creepers, he noticed a coarse wooden button on the ground, which he picked up and pocketed. There were traces all around like those made by boars when they root for food, digging with their tusks in the dead leaves. They most likely pointed to a struggle at the time of the murder; or else they’d been left by the soldiers as they recovered the body or uselessly searched for the missing head. Where they’d hauled it out of the woods – an uncommon mercy there and then – the forest floor was equally discomposed.
The idea that a severed head lay somewhere near was strangely disquieting for one who’d driven fear into corners unreachable by reason. Not that Bora thought he ought to be
afraid. It was a near-superstitious disgust for the blind eye, the dead jaw, the symbolic meaning of a bloody skull separated from the torso.
In Khartoum, my great-grandfather’s head was exposed by the Mahdi’s followers for days. It was Great-grandmother Georgina who travelled there alone ten years later to demand the skull, still on display in the residence of Abd Allah. She took it along in her little Victorian trunk, under the admiring escort of the Mahdi’s successor, who – seeing his offer of a jewel refused – asked her to marry him, and was turned down.
The odour of blood was imperceptible in the open, although there must have been plenty of it spilt. In the springtime grass, flies formed hairy knots, sucked what they still could from the soaked earth; dispersed by a sweep of Bora’s arm, they landed on him, but preferred the dead man’s blood. The non-com spoke of the Yar as being shunned, but Bora could have said that no place was off limits, much less safe from war in Ukraine; it would be worse in a few weeks, as it had been a few weeks earlier. The cycle of war around Kharkov had the inexorable nature of a pendulum. “The other bodies, who found those? Do we know?” he’d enquired.
The non-com had shrugged, puffing on his cigarette. “They say the priest found one. The others, sir, I wouldn’t know.”
I’ll have to send out Kostya to ask around
. At a prudent distance from him, the shadow to Bora’s right hesitated, hanging like a black tatter forgotten on the washing line.
“Victor Panteleievich!” Bora called finally. “Father Victor, come out.”
Nitichenko heard him, but did not react. Perhaps he was annoyed at having been discovered; perhaps he was afraid. Bora resorted to the usual gesture adopted when the locals did not listen to him, which was to unlatch his pistol holster. It was a calm movement, little more than a transfer of the right hand towards the left hip, but it usually had the desired result. The priest picked his steps through the trees, emerging into the open at the edge of the hollow. He saluted with exaggerated
humility, looking up and sideways as cats do when they study a rival before deciding whether to attack or turn tail.
Without staring directly at his feet, Bora noticed the priest had no shoes on. The first and last time they had met, Father Victor had been wearing calf-high boots that creaked at every step, most likely worn for the occasion. Perhaps he usually went barefoot; or else there were other reasons why he chose not to wear footwear that might give him away in this wood.
“
Povazhany
Major,” he said in a contrite tone, “I came to say a prayer for this poor Christian’s soul.”
“We don’t even know that he was a poor Christian,” Bora replied. “He could be a committed atheist, or a political commissar.” In Russian the word “Christian” merely referred to a peasant, but Bora was irritated by the priest’s attitude.
“Whoever he was,
povazhany
Major, he was dreadfully punished for his sins.”
“Oh yes? How do we even know that? That he was a sinner, I mean.”
“We’re all sinners before God.”
“That’s true. So he wasn’t one of your parishioners?”
Father Victor, wearing his long hair tied in a ruffled ponytail in the old manner, answered that he hadn’t seen the corpse close up and didn’t believe so; even if – he abjectly added – the number of those who came to hear mass even from far away had grown after the Germans’ return.
“Who told you there had been another murder in the woods?”
“I dreamt it at night, esteemed Major, as clear as a picture, just as I dreamt the other one; and that’s why I came here with the permission of your men” (those of the 241st Company were not at all Bora’s men) “as I did a year ago for that poor daughter of God with a cut throat.”
“And who was she?”
“A half-wit girl from the Kusnetzov farm, south of Schubino.”
Bora checked the time on his watch. “And the other bodies? In Merefa I heard of search parties organized to seek those
missing from nearby farms, and how they were all found here one way or another.”
The priest moodily raked the hair back over his ears, looking elsewhere. “This has been going on a long time – a long time. We don’t know how many died in all. Women, children… Those killed since the war started, I can show you where they were found. Even if in my dreams I’ve seen them moved, dragged elsewhere from where they died.”
“Moved by
whom
?”
“The dreams didn’t say,
povazhany
Major. But it is an unclean spirit that dwells in this wood, and has for a whole generation. Maybe more than a generation.”
Sure, sure, we need to hear this nonsense too.
Bora latched his pistol holster. “I want to take some photos. Show me where the other corpses were found, before it gets dark.”
Other times – ever since coming to Russia – he’d had to deal with superstitious priests, more gullible than the oldest among their followers. They filled people’s heads with tales and lies, they populated nature with angelic and diabolical forces worse than in the days of the tsars. They were myopic, bigoted and dangerous. On one occasion he’d reached the point – he who was otherwise so measured – of slapping a deacon for denouncing as a partisan dispatcher a poor farm girl who’d refused herself to him.
TUESDAY 4 MAY, MEREFA
The following day, Bora had once more relegated Krasny Yar to the back of his mind. He had chores to do in Merefa and Kharkov. First, however, came a meeting with the 161st Division chief of operations, Lieutenant Colonel Benno von Salomon, who acted as liaison between the division and Bora’s cavalry regiment-in-progress. Von Salomon travelled often nowadays, and this morning he was in Merefa after conferring
with District Commissioner Stark, whose office was just out of town.
Von Salomon, with his long bloodhound face and the slow, precise lawyer’s speech he carried over from civilian life, failed only on principle to formally grant Bora’s request, promising all the same that he’d get German “or at the most, ethnic German” troopers within a reasonable time. They briefly discussed how to procure cold bloods – mounts used to harsh climates – and whether some of Bora’s former colleagues might be interested in returning from the Panzer Corps to the cavalry. “Not that I expect it,” Bora admitted, “but personally, if I had to choose between a desk job in the armoured troops and front-line duty in a saddle, I’d have no doubts.”
“It doesn’t mean their commanders will release them.”
“They will as soon as they see the Field Marshal’s signature, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
More numbers followed, estimates, the minutiae of an organizational plan. Von Salomon read Bora’s typewritten notes with his face low, underscoring every line in pencil as if to impress words and ciphers in his memory. “Good,” he said at last, smoothing the pages on the teacher’s desk, all that Bora had to offer as a drawing table. “I’m glad
you,
at least, are keeping your lucidity. It’s not universal, you know. We all cope with the size and scope of what’s around us as best we can.”
“Yes, sir.”
There’s always a moment when the narrow door of formality between colleagues opens a crack more to reveal a space where a few liberties – if not exactly familiarity – are allowed. Von Salomon had already created this space by remarking on Bora’s lucidity. Later, putting away his pencil in a monogrammed leather case, he added in a low voice, “Just think, it was reported to me that a certain colonel in an artillery regiment demands that all his officers be born under the zodiacal sign Leo. ‘The sign of conquerors,’ he says. And a dear friend, whom I do not identify by name out of respect, has been collecting hair clippings from
his fallen soldiers in an album, arranged by colour. I’m afraid he has filled more than one volume by now.” The leather case found the breast pocket, slipped inside it. “You’re aware that in the first winter on this front… well, in that first winter all sorts of things happened. Before Moscow we built a fence with the bodies of Russians run over by tanks: they and their long coats had turned flat and stiff like cardboard cut-outs. We used them as road signs, too. So you will appreciate it if these days I tell you how it reassures me to deal with a young man who has kept his right mind.”
“I am grateful to the colonel.”
Von Salomon had already remarked upon Bora’s impeccability in a complimentary way at their first meeting, an unusual show of approval for a higher officer. “Impeccable” meaning in fact “unlikely to sin”, it was about as far as any of them felt (or were) at this time of their warring lives. But Bora was not deluded; von Salomon referred to appearance and comportment. He did make a point of keeping up the appearance of a German officer, if nothing else. The stiff upper lip (“Stoicism”, Dikta called it, in her less spiteful moments) was a family trait. He’d thought a little less of the lieutenant colonel after the compliment. Not because he didn’t appreciate it, but because he was sure he did not deserve it.
“In your own way, Major, those of you who kept their lucidity are impregnable fortresses.”
Ein feste Burg
… It was Luther’s hymn about God as inviolable citadel. As a Lutheran, von Salomon was surely not ignorant of Bora’s descent from the reformer’s wife, even though he might not know that the landed Boras from Bora (or Borna) itself had remained Catholic with the stubbornness of Saxons who do not give in to anyone, not even other Saxons. Whatever the case, it was excessive praise, and Bora said so.
The lieutenant colonel shook his balding head. “No, no, allow me. I speak from experience; I met my demons in the winter of ’41. If you haven’t been told – and I’d rather you heard it
directly from me – I was repatriated in the winter of ’41 after a serious nervous breakdown. They sent me first to Bad Pyrmont, then to Sommerfeld, closer to home. It was just exhaustion, not insanity. As you can see, I have recovered perfectly.”