Another Green World (16 page)

“Good morning, comrade,” Seryoshka said from across the musty little space. Dawn light streamed through crevices angled away from what, during the German tenancy, had been the front; since then the sides had changed and the light slits now faced the wrong direction, offering a glimpse of the Carpathians. Werewolf country. Nasty things crawled through the woods out there.

“What's happening?” Butler said groggily. “What is that shooting about?”

Seryoshka was bent over lacing his boots and probably had been awake for hours. Some nights he hardly slept, especially when a battle was in progress. Other times, he could hibernate for days. “A limited action, they say. Advance along a narrow front. Who knows? Maybe they're straightening the lines before the freeze. Or just keeping the Huns off balance. You know the sort of thing.”

Butler knew. Small-scale movements, which seldom affected the reconnaissance
battalion, had become standard Red Army procedure in this latter stage of the war. Now that the Germans were essentially non-mechanized, owing to lack of fuel and deteriorating equipment, Soviet commanders liked to keep things mobile along the sharp edge—obliging their foes continually to adjust their positions, burn a little more petrol, fire off a few more shells. Maintain the pressure, was the general idea; don't give the enemy time to catch his breath.
We can breathe during peacetime
, Zhukov's political officer, a man named Khrushchev, had famously said.
Today, we fight.

“Where are you off to?” asked Butler.

“To Division. Pay a call on our friends over there. Catch up on the news.”

Butler unwrapped himself from the bearskin. “Wait for me.”

If Front Headquarters was a floating city, then Division HQ was one of its smaller industrial suburbs. There was nothing to it, really, except for the offices of core divisional staff, housing for support troops, radio and encryption facilities, a maintenance shed, a galley and the usual comic opera of Red Army logistics, a production with more of Groucho Marx than Karl about it. The division commander was a one-star general, recently assigned, and Butler had yet to take his measure. Seryoshka's “friends” were on the operations side, field men kicked up to headquarters, not often happy to be there. A sturdy lot.

The pair of them crossed the encampment and stepped quietly into the command post, sited in what was left of a schoolhouse. You would expect such a place—the brain of the fighting organism—to be a scene of purposeful frenzy, but effective brains are not frenzied, and a working CP often falls, at the pitch of fighting, eerily quiet.

So it was this morning. From the hall where Butler and Seryoshka stood, you could look into the operations center, which reminded Butler— such places always did—of newsrooms he'd known. It was dominated by a huge table on which maps and manuals and field reports and decrypted dispatches were arranged in an order apparent only to the men who needed them. Around this, ordinary slate boards smudged with chalk provided a continually updated accounting of unit strength and disposition. Except for the uniforms, the scene might have been taken for a wearisome gathering of the Math Department at a grubby provincial college.

The senior staff was present en masse. The division commander sat immersed in paper at the head of the table, chewing a cigar and swearing
calmly under his breath. His ops deputy hunched beside him, grunting into a field telephone. The political officer sat opposite, doing nothing in particular; ostensibly an advisor, a helpful emissary of the Party, he provided by his mere presence a reminder of the stakes they were playing for. Heads were going to roll, if not Fascist then Red ones. The selection of heads on offer—the tank man, the infantry specialist, the logistics chief and so forth—sat in their designated spots, according to a seating arrangement standard throughout the Red Army. Sundry junior staff huddled near their bosses, while along the wall couriers stood at the ready to run dispatches or fetch more coffee. From an adjoining room you could hear a platoon of clerks aggressively engaged in the battle of the typewriter— one of the few theaters in which they were still outclassed by the enemy.

Cautiously, Seryoshka led them to a chart table just inside the door, where a trio of aides-de-camp quarreled
sotto voce
over a situation map. Preparing these entailed reconciling numerous, often conflicting status reports from subordinate commands engaged in battle, some of whom inevitably had gotten things wrong, while others, caught up in this and that, had not made contact for several hours. The present task was mostly finished; the only point in dispute being where to place a red block identifying a certain infantry formation. Either this side of the river or the other—it couldn't be both.

“Put the damn thing anywhere,” growled the captain in charge. “Flip a fucking coin. The comrade general is waiting.”

Looking smug, as though he personally were responsible for the collapse of German resistance, a peach-faced lieutenant affixed the unit in question to the farther bank. The captain nodded curtly and the map was rushed over to the big table, where the assembled officers pounced on it like so many night editors when a hot dispatch comes off the wire.

“Someone explain to me, please,” General Krivon said loudly, with a thump on the table, “what the hell is going on out there. This makes no sense at all.”

An anxious look crossed the captain's face, but his commander's dissatisfaction seemed to concern something larger than the map per se. The whole damned operation, for example.

“Something's gone wrong, hasn't it?” said Butler.

Seryoshka made a quick motion—
Keep quiet—
though nobody at the big table seemed to have heard. The captain, a pal of Seryoshka's from somewhere, whispered, “What makes you say that?”

Butler shrugged. “I've been hearing artillery all morning. Why hasn't it stopped by now? What are they shooting at?”

The captain took on a shrewd look, seeming to suspect Butler of being privy to closely guarded secrets. In a cautious voice he said, “The fire-control reports are inconclusive. It would appear the targets have been knocked out. But then—you know how it is. Until definite information is received…”

Butler considered this, trying to connect it with the vague unease that had troubled him all morning. Ideas swirled in his mind, barely out of reach, known facts and wild conjectures mingling chaotically. It was like the moment when, upon sitting down to write a story, you reach into a maelstrom of words and fish out the perfect lead. Suddenly, it's there.

“The reports are inconclusive, you said. You mean you've had no reports at all. Not for a while now. Your forward fire-control observers are out of contact. Is that it?”

The captain's lips tightened; he seemed to be resisting an urge to respond.

“Don't you see what this means?” said Butler.

He must have spoken too loudly, because in the subsequent silence he heard his own words ringing across the room. Abashed, he looked around to see the whole operations staff staring back at him. General Krivon— flicking cigar ash on the floor—said with teeth-grating courtesy, “What does this mean, comrade? I would dearly love to know.”

Butler had spent time enough with the Red Army to understand that at moments like this you didn't try to be diplomatic. The old man got enough diplomacy from his underlings. He was asking you, ordering you, to answer in plain words.

“This means you're in deep shit, Comrade General.”

Into the vacuum of shock, Butler moved a step toward the command table. He knew he was playing a role—Gogol's
yurodivy
, the village fool, speaking truths no one else dares even to think—and that having taken it up he must now play it wholeheartedly. In the same cocksure manner he went on, “This means the Germans have taken out your forward observers. They've blinded you. And there is only one way they could have done that.”

Krivon glanced at his operations chief, who was glaring at Butler with a distinctly carnivorous avidity. “And how is this, pray tell us?” the general asked, his voice mocking. He played his own role quite well.

Butler took another step.

“The only way to take out forward observation posts—unless you make some incredibly lucky mortar shots—is to send assault teams through the line. They have to move fast, they can't get bogged down in the fighting,
and they have to make their kills silently. Your observers have probably had their throats cut. Now your guns are shooting at nothing, at empty woods. The German forces have shifted position, but you can't tell where. And there's something else.”

Now he had everyone's attention. They might not believe what he was saying—probably they hadn't decided—but they were damned well listening.

The general made a hand gesture, a sign of impatience: Very well, get on with it.

“You're not facing the SS, no matter what front intelligence tells you. That's a Wehrmacht man, over there. Classically trained. Old-school. Generalstab, more than likely. This sort of ruthless finesse, this bloody-minded coolness—you don't get that with the SS. You get the newer model tanks, and formations manned at nominal strength. You get tenacity in defense, fighting to the last bullet, dying in the foxhole. And you might, at worst, get a competent commander—as opposed to some Nazi brute chosen for political reliability. But you don't get military keenness. You don't have to worry about the enemy reading your mind. And that, Comrade General, is what you've got to worry about right now.”

The division's intelligence man shook his head. “This cannot possibly be true.” He addressed himself to Krivon. “We're not depending only on information received from the front. We've sent out our own patrols, we've snatched a few tongues. The prisoners come in wearing Waffen-SS patches. Some of them are Hungarian. We know the Wehrmacht has no use for Hungarians—only the SS. Himmler slaps a tag on them that says ‘Ethnic German,’ then into the line they go.”

The general acknowledged this with a smirk. He kept his eyes on Butler. “What do you have to say to this?”

Butler thought quickly. He believed, as a guiding principle, you should always trust your intuition. But he guessed it didn't hurt to hedge your bets. With as much panache as he could scrape together, he said, “Comrade General, I think it is possible you are up against something very unusual. Something we may never have seen before.”

A little smile came to the general's lips. The idea seemed to appeal to him. “And this is?”

“An SS field officer who has read Clausewitz.”

It was too much, finally, for the operations chief. A stocky colonel with a breastful of battle decorations, he shook his head and said, “You've given us your grand theories, comrade. Clausewitz—splendid! But you've never
got around to telling us what in hell any of it means to us ordinary fighting men.”

“That's quite simple,” said Butler. “Your forces are going over the wire. Soon you'll be swallowing territory like a thirsty man draining a canteen— only at some point, you'll feel a little scratch in your throat. And next thing you know you've got a viper in your belly.”

“What percentage of that in there,” Seryoshka asked him later, in the
politruk'
s yurt, “just as an approximation, would you say, was absolute horseshit?”

The other men present laughed. Even the
politruk
, a generally humorless sort, monkish in his gray tunic, broke into a grin.

Butler waited for them to have their fill. He toyed with the glass of vodka before him, rotating it carefully like a precision instrument. At last, professorially, he said, “I would not go above fifty. Sixty perhaps. Definitely no higher.”

Seryoshka broke into fresh bellows of laughter, and the others joined in.

“I meant what I said about the SS, though,” Butler added. Nobody cared by now; he was speaking mainly to himself.

“God, that was a good show,” Seryoshka said, wiping his eye. “I wish you'd all been there.”

The
politruk
nodded. At times you felt he wished to be human but his job prevented it. Most of the time you thought of him as a squid. “Comrade Sammy is an excellent speaker,” he allowed. “He is highly persuasive. Perhaps he will try his hand sometime at writing for the official journals.”

The remark was typical, Butler thought: neither positive nor negative, it could have been a pat on the back or a knife in the kidney.

After a while the other men in the room excused themselves, leaving only Butler, Seryoshka and the
politruk.
An ensuing silence was not uncomfortable—they were accustomed to one another's company by now—but nonetheless made Seryoshka restless. He stood up and paced a few steps, as far as the cramped interior of the tent allowed.

“I wish I was out there myself,” he said, waving a hand roughly in the direction of the fighting, which had changed in the past hour to tank and infantry fire. “I hate sitting around, waiting. If they don't send orders down soon, I may think up something on my own. And you know that's all too likely to get us killed.”

Now was the moment, perhaps, Butler thought, to rub the lamp and let
the genie out. “I've got something for you,” he told the
politruk. “
It came yesterday, in a package of stuff from Moscow. Here, let me show you.”

He crossed the tent and picked up his Astrakhan coat. From one of its many interior pockets he withdrew what appeared to be a thick square of brown boxboard. Across the top, like a scrolling red ribbon, was printed the well-known symbol of the Moskva State Recording Studio. He held it before him, advancing toward the
politruk.

“This is something for me?” The man didn't bother to mask the suspicion in his voice.

“I hope you like it,” Butler said blandly.

Of course he would damn well like it. To feel otherwise would be tantamount to treason. Butler had just handed him a newly pressed recording of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 7, the
Leningrad.
It was a famous work, the artistic embodiment of the Great Patriotic War. Legend held—and in this case Butler believed the legend might be true—that the first three movements had been written as it were on location, during the siege of Peter's capital. Hitler himself had ordered that the city be reduced by starvation rather than direct assault: an unspeakable calamity that claimed a million lives. Shostakovich could have gotten out—his fame would've won him a seat on an aircraft fleeing the encirclement—but chose instead to stay and share the fate of his fellow citizens. He spent the early months of the siege as a volunteer firefighter, rushing from one bombed-out site to another, working on the symphonic score in his spare time. Finally in midwinter, enfeebled by hunger, he acceded to Stalin's order to pack up and go.