SS General (36 page)

Some time later the door was opened and a soldier came in bearing a bowl of some turgid and evil-smelling liquid.

"Pishcha!"
he said cheerfully. "Food!"

He raised the bowl to his lips and spat in it, then looked down at us and laughed. He seemed to be inviting us to laugh with him. The Russians certainly have a sense of humor.

"Fish soup," said the soldier, and he laughed again. He banged the bowl down on the floor, slopping most of the contents over the side. "Very good. You eat." He closed one eye in a clumsy wink. "You shot tomorrow," he promised.

He walked out, locking the door behind him. Gregor and I stared down at the fish soup with the great glistening glob floating on top.

"Somehow," I said, "I don't quite fancy it."

"I'd sooner have a spud," said Gregor, reaching out for one.

I lay on my back and thought of General Paulus. I wondered if he was eating fish soup, and if so, whether some verminous soldier had spat in it. I thought it unlikely. Even in defeat, General Paulus's table would be plentifully supplied.

The hours passed. We had no means of telling whether it was day or night, but we thought it must be day when they brought us another bowl of the fish soup. They had thought up a new refinement this time: they not only spilled the stuff on the floor, they forced us to go down on our knees and lick it up. Left alone with the unpalatable remainder, our hunger was by now such that we drained it to the last drop, only to find the corpse of a mouse lying at the bottom of the bowl. I flung it into the farthest corner of the cellar and tried to forget it had ever been there.

"Bloody swine!" said Gregor, shaking all over. "Filthy lousy swine--we could get food poisoning from eating that rotten stuff!"

"They're all the same," I shrugged. "Do you remember that time at Kiev when the SS lined up those women along the ditches and made them unpick the yellow stars from their clothes before they shot them?"

"So what?" grumbled Gregor. "That's hardly the same as putting mice in people's food, is it?"

"Why not?" I said. "It's just a refinement--people take pleasure from torturing other people."

"That was the SS, it's nothing to do with us."

"That's what you think," I said grimly. "What the SS does, it does in the name of Germany. And if we lose the war--" I nodded at him in the gloom. "If we lose the war, it'll be you and me that'll pay for it."

The door was suddenly thrown open and two NKVD men marched in. Without a word, they dragged us to our feet and up the steps. Had it not been for the green crosses they wore, they might almost have been our own SS moving in for the kill.

"Davai, davai!"

We were thrown into the back of a truck loaded with munitions, and we sat down on a couple of cases of grenades and wrapped our arms around ourselves. It had been damp and cold down in the cellar, and the frosty open air was putting the finishing touches to our chilled bones. Just before we drove off, another NKVD man appeared and held out an imperative hand.

"Give me all your valuables--watches, pens, lighters, rings, cigarette cases--" He snapped his fingers. "Anything like that, hand it over! You won't be needing finery at Kolyma."

Gregor and I had not a single valuable between us, they had long ago been lost or stolen. The man paused only to beat us into semiconsciousness and then closed the doors on us. They were all the same. Green cross or death's head, what difference did it make? I remembered a day when the SS had set fire to an old Jew's beard because he too had no valuables to hand over. Communist or Nazi, hammer and sickle or swastika, what difference did it make?

The truck moved slowly along the icy roads. Gregor and I eventually returned to life and crawled back onto our grenade boxes, where we sat shivering and complaining for mile after mile. At last we reached a town, fair-sized from what we could see of it, and were handed over, like a couple of parcels, to our new captors.

Toward evening we were taken for interrogation by a half-drunk lieutenant colonel of the NKVD, supported by a shapeless woman interpreter in the uniform of a captain. Gregor and I stood side by side and took it in turns to answer, like some ridiculous double act.

"Where have you come from?"

"Stalingrad," I said.

"Stalingrad? You take us for imbeciles? All Germans at Stalingrad were killed, it says so in
Pravda.
Try again, please! Where have you come from?"

"Stalingrad," said Gregor.

The captain swelled out her bosom and exchanged glances with the lieutenant colonel.

"That's quite impossible!" she snapped. "Stalingrad is over four hundred miles from here and we have patrols everywhere."

This time Gregor and I exchanged glances.

"I can't help that," I said. "We've still come from Stalingrad. Maybe
Pravda
made a mistake."

She turned on me, whip in hand, and sent the thong lashing across my face. "Speak when you're spoken to! Enough of your lies!"

She cracked her whip again, lit a cigarette and stuck it between her thick red lips. To say she had no sex appeal at all would have been an understatement. She was scarcely even humanoid, let alone female. She stepped back a pace and stood appraising us. The lieutenant colonel spoke, and she relayed it to us.

"So! You persist you were at Stalingrad! Which division?"

"The 16th Panzer."

"Who was your commanding officer?"

"Lieutenant General Angern."

"Rubbish! You're talking rubbish!"

She turned and muttered at the lieutenant colonel, who heaved himself up, staggered around the desk and prodded me hard in the stomach with the butt of his revolver. I wondered why they seemed to dislike me so much more than Gregor.

"Liar!" he shouted.

"We know you're spies," the captain goaded us. "Why not admit straight away that you never were at Stalingrad? Why not admit that you are Fascist agents?"

Gregor let his head droop to one side. "Because we've come from Stalingrad," he mumbled.

"So--very well! Stick to your lies! We shall unmask you as we go along. Where was your division fighting, at Stalingrad?"

"Which army does the 16th Panzer Division belong to?"

"Who were the Russian troops opposing you?"

"Who was their commanding officer?"

"Give me again the name of your own commanding officer!"

The questions went on, rapped out one after another, tossed back and forth in translation from the captain to the lieutenant colonel, who both seemed increasingly uneasy at the accuracy of all our answers.

"This is not possible!" shouted the captain at last; and to my secret satisfaction she lashed out with her whip at Gregor. "How could you come all the way from Stalingrad? The NKVD have arrested all the Fascist pigs who managed to break through our lines! No one was able to escape! How did you manage it?"

"We were part of a combat group led by an SS general," explained Gregor, very patiently, for the ninth or tenth time.

The lieutenant colonel gave a furious roar and reached out for his bottle of vodka. I could quite understand his displeasure. If Gregor and I had indeed come all the way from Stalingrad, then it meant that certain officials and certain officers--including, more than likely, himself--were in for a rough passage. When Moscow came to hear of the inefficiency which had allowed a group of German soldiers to slip through the net, there was bound to be a general inquiry and a consequent reshuffling of ranks, with a number of immediate transfers to the front line.

"What happened to the rest of you?" asked the captain sullenly.

"We're the only two left," said Gregor. He waved a vague hand in the direction of the windows. "The others are somewhere out there, on the steppe. You'll find them soon enough when the snow melts."

"You mean they died?"

"That's about the size of it."

"Where? How?"

"On the Don, on the Shchir--" Gregor shrugged. "We ran out of food, we didn't have any winter clothing or medication. Men got sick with typhoid and dysentery. Some of them got frostbite."

The captain nodded as she translated this to the lieutenant colonel. She seemed satisfied with the answer.

"Of course, you couldn't hope to survive a Russian winter," she scoffed. "You should have stayed at Stalingrad with the rest of your troops. You've had a long journey all for nothing."

"That's all right," I said, risking another punch in the face. "We enjoyed it."

She gave me a repulsive smile. "All good things come to an end. You are now under arrest and regarded as criminals. You crossed our borders with intent to kill, and for that you can be shot. Even if you are spared the ultimate penalty, the least you can expect is twenty-five years' hard labor."

They made us sign our names to a document declaring that we had attacked the Soviet Union. Being in the uniform of German soldiers, we could scarcely deny it. Tomorrow, the captain informed us, we would be photographed and have our fingerprints taken. We should then be recognized officially as criminals.

"Nice to think we shall have some sort of status," I remarked to Gregor.

Gregor made no reply. He seemed temporarily to have lost all interest in life.

We were taken outside and thrown into the back of an American jeep. Next to the driver was an ancient sergeant with World War I medals on his chest. We were guarded by a corporal, who sat with his MPI across his knees and a cigarette stuck between his lips. It was not the usual cheap
machorka,
all smoke, and smell, but a Red Star, the special brand reserved for members of the NKVD and other important Soviet citizens.

We were in no doubt that our fate would be decided before the night was out, and we had no doubt, either, that we would be shot. Our crime was not so much having entered Russia in the first place as having broken out of Stalingrad when
Pravda
had already declared this to be an impossibility. If the news ever leaked out, Stalin himself would lose face, and this was the really unpardonable aspect of the whole affair.

The stinging wind whipped across our faces and through our thin uniforms. It was even colder sitting still in an open jeep than marching across the steppe. The three Russians were decked out in fur caps and boots and thick greatcoats, but Gregor and I were very ill-protected. After all, if the German Army could not provide its soldiers with proper clothing, why should the Russians bother to do it for them? Especially as we were already condemned to die.

We drove for hours along the Moscow-Orel-Kharkov road. No one spoke. The old sergeant sank deep into his coat and closed his eyes; the corporal went on smoking; Gregor stared vacantly into space out of dim eyes set in deep violet hollows. To the northwest the horizon was shot through with streaks of crimson, and I could hear the muted roar of artillery.

"The front," I whispered to Gregor.

"So what?" retorted Gregor through clenched teeth and barely opened lips.

Toward dawn we left the main highway and turned Kofi down a B road, narrow and winding. The old sergeant was snoring in the front seat. The corporal's head was sunk onto his chest and his mouth had fallen open. Even I was only semiconscious. Gregor suddenly nudged me in the ribs. I jerked my head up and he put a finger to his lips and let his eyes slide sideways toward the sleeping corporal. I followed his glance. The MPI had fallen out of his grasp, although the sling was still over his arm. As I sat looking at it, the vehicle bounced over a pothole, the corporal's arm fell off his lap and dangled in space, and the MPI slipped down toward the ground. Gregor bent forward and caught it neatly as it fell. The corporal slapped his tongue across his lips as he slept and heaved himself into a more comfortable position. We were moving along the edge of a wood. Gregor settled the MPI under his arm and silently released the safety catch. We looked at each other and nodded.

I jumped at the same moment as Gregor opened fire. I fell into a deep snowdrift, and as I clawed my way out, I saw the vehicle crash headlong into a tree and buckle like a concertina.

Gregor came running up the road toward me, waving the MPI above his head. "Let's get out of here!"

"Hang on," I said. "Why not swipe a couple of their nice fur caps before we go."

We walked back down the road. All three of the Russians were dead. I snatched off two of their caps and we pulled them on, letting down the flaps over our ears.

"They'll murder us for sure if they catch us like this," said Gregor.

"They were going to murder us anyway, remember?" I Struggled with two of the corpses and wrenched off their jackets. "Here!" I thrust one at Gregor. "Might as well do the job properly while we're about it. At least we look like Russians; so long as no one actually speaks to us, we might even get away with it."

"It's asking for trouble," moaned Gregor. "We'll be shot as spies."

We pushed our way into the forest, through the tangled undergrowth. Thorns caught at our legs, tearing through our clothes and digging into our flesh. Overhanging branches clawed at our faces until we were streaming with blood. We reached a clearing and ran like stags, back into the shelter of the trees, back into the clinging briars, on and on with panting breath and trembling legs, until at last we came out of the forest and back onto the familiar snow-covered carpet of the open countryside. We flung ourselves down, gasping and heaving. I stayed on all fours like an animal. My chest was full of knots and my eyes were hurting me again. My precious glasses had been taken from me long ago by the partisans.

Some way ahead of us lay the main Kharkov-Moscow road. And far off on the horizon we could see the smoke and flames of the front. On the road were long columns of trucks moving westward; dancing pinpoints of light in the semidarkness. Gregor handed me a cigarette. It was a Red Star, out of a pack he had taken from the dead corporal. The first few puffs made me feel weak and nauseous, but I persevered and the fierce pangs of hunger which had been gripping my belly began gradually to subside.

"That must be the road that leads to the front," I told Gregor.