Tin Sky (19 page)

When Avrora Glebovna and I left Hospital 169 last night, someone was shouting at the top of his voice on one of the wards.
War’s a fucking ballerina
was the most intelligible sentence, repeated over and over. She covered her ears to avoid listening. From her, not one word on the moments she spent before seeing her father’s body – not to me. Tomorrow I have a choice: either I tell them they’re off to a detention camp, or I send them off without telling them. I haven’t yet decided what it’ll be.

All afternoon, I drove from one medical point to another, from hospitals to army morgues. Khan’s body is nowhere to be found – or else they’re not telling me. Came back low on fuel (although the only positive thing of my additional task is that I am to be allowed all the fuel I want), nearly ready to draw my horns in and eat humble pie with the
Oberstarzt
at Hospital 169. He could be useful in locating the corpse, so I must prepare myself to come down a peg or two and give him what he’ll undoubtedly ask for in exchange. If I choose to believe what Weller told me about him, Mayr is recovering from jaundice and suffers from debilitating neuralgia attacks. In Stalingrad army surgeons would do anything to lay their hands on morphine for their patients – or themselves, what do I know? I saw some aberrant behaviour there towards the end. Had I wanted to answer Terry when he asked me if any of ours had gone mad, I could have described a chamber of horrors.

Enough. The regiment’s accoutrements are coming in, good home-built material, plus some excellent tackle from heterogeneous sources: Polish saddles and harnesses from four years ago (where did we keep them all this time?), Russian equipment (including M-40 and M-41 mortars and 4-A radios that average 150 km in reception), which makes up for its simplicity with its ruggedness. Speaking of which, I asked my officers to break with cavalry tradition enough to switch from P08s to P38s. As handguns go, they’re less fiddly, and preferable to Lugers in these extreme climates. I switched as far back as Poland, although in those days it was seen as heretical eccentricity.

In the mail, a letter from the celebrated writer Dr Ernst Jünger, whom I met in Probstheida at my grandparents’ home eight years ago and with whom I have been corresponding intermittently. This was sent in September, when our hopes were still up. I’m sure it can wait a little more before I answer it. I have toed the line all day, and now I deserve to open Dikta’s letter.

He’d read in novels and seen in movies how unanticipated news can cause people to drop the letter they are reading. It
seemed like a cheap dramatic device, but Bora did exactly that with the contents of his wife’s envelope, and then stood staring at it without picking it up.

There was no letter, no text at all, save “To Martin” and Dikta’s signature on the photograph. Taken at Magdalena Ziemke’s famous studio in Dresden, where actresses and top party officials had their pictures taken, it portrayed her completely nude.

In a suffused light (the artist’s trademark
glow
), Dikta crouched in a three-quarter pose with her chin on her hand, the ash-blonde knot of her hair nearly undone, wisps from it seemingly ablaze in stunning black and white contrast. Neck, breasts, nipples were crispness itself, and there was a powdery mist where lines swelled into curves. In the smooth, twisted pose a tendril of blondeness flickered in the shade of her thighs, but so that the viewer had to search for it and become an accomplice. She was looking elsewhere, to an invisible point at the lower left corner of the image’s scalloped edge, yet something in her lids and eyelashes seemed on the verge of a trembling upward motion, so that she’d look straight at him; and it’d be unbearable. In the shade of her thighs that blonde mark – more than glimpsed, less than seen – guarded the tender petal of her sex, subtly lit from somewhere so that it, too, glowed like a white flame.

Bora didn’t know how to react other than physically: a desperate automatism that mortified him at being aroused by his wife, as if it were base and indecent. Of all the arguments Dikta had used to keep him from going back to Russia, this was the cruellest. As if he didn’t know what he was giving up.
What does she think, what does she expect: that I should masturbate in front of it? You can’t do anything else with a photo like this. It’s what it’s for. She wants my desire to regress, for me not to have another object of affection if not herself. Why? I
have
no other object of affection besides her.

This was the last straw after a hopeless day. Angrily Bora swept the portrait off the floor and shoved it inside his diary so
that he’d be screened from it, protected somehow. It was what Platonov had tried to do by flipping his women’s photograph upside down. And he, Bora, had heartlessly returned it face up.

The diary’s tough canvas-bound cover, worn at the corners and stained, was now all that separated him from those neat and muted forms, marvellous where light and flesh and golden-fleece became one. In yesterday’s dream Dikta had knelt on the bed with nothing but a garter belt on, lovingly taking his clothes off in a similar glorious glow.

I will not open it again to look at the picture inside. I will not
.

But of course he did.

5

SATURDAY 8 MAY

In the morning, Bora felt drunk. There was no apparent reason for it; it wasn’t imputable to alcohol, and he hadn’t taken anything stronger than aspirin the night before. Instead, for the first time in quite a while, he’d had a wet dream: little surprise there. It hadn’t soiled the camp bed only because he’d gone to sleep with his uniform on.
And I haven’t even masturbated for it
, he thought irritably. The need to wash his underwear and riding breeches brought to mind the babushkas, dead and alive, Stark’s promise to get him “five more” if necessary, and the entire bungle of Khan’s death, Platonov’s women, Mantau and his SS colleagues.
Well, Kostya is a married man: if I soak my clothes and let him take it from there, he’ll handle it just fine. I’d be more embarrassed to have an old woman touch my mess
. Last night he’d slipped Dikta’s photograph back inside the envelope it had come in and resealed it by pasting a strip of glued paper along the cut edge. The envelope now lay at the bottom of his trunk, although he didn’t plan on leaving it behind whenever he travelled away from the command post.

If last night his wretchedness had failed to abate his desire, this morning something close to self-righteous resentment in him tried to fight back. Why in God’s name did she make things so difficult for him? Without any fuss or complication, his brother’s girl had let him marry her, make her pregnant, and now sent photos upon which she described herself to her
husband as “fat Duckie” (Duckie being her nickname, and the birth expected in late June). Peter showed them to everyone, ecstatic as he’d been ecstatic about the full moon seen through the telescope when they were boys at Trakhenen.

Not Dikta’s way at all, Bora knew. Her seductive image had nothing to do with child-bearing. Deep down, Dikta with a child was unimaginable, even for him. He was unable to say whether he would even like it, given the times they were living in. He said he would, but it was a statement expected of a young National Socialist husband. And although before Stalingrad his anxious mother had resorted to writing “Dikta doesn’t feel well” – an obvious hint at a possible pregnancy, as if the prospect would make him more prudent, or eager for a transfer away from Russia – Dikta had never confirmed it. And if he hadn’t impregnated her before Stalingrad (when he’d been sure he had), or in Prague a few weeks ago – No.

No, no. Making love to his wife was an end in itself, and as such
not
sterile, not needing to create life. His impractical, confident longing was that they would both remain forever young, forever at the height of vigour, fit to pour themselves into each other incomparably, out of a ferocious existential joy of doing it. He didn’t need to be reminded of this by the photo Dikta had sent him via her mother’s lover.

The seminal fluid that had seeped through the army cloth had had time to dry; still it left a telltale halo. Bora looked out of the door to see if Kostya was around. He wasn’t, and the sentry sat half-turned, rolling himself a cigarette. He decided he’d walk past the schoolyard, beyond the graves and the fence, where a small canal brimmed with water after the rain. There he could bathe with his breeches on, and effect a first laundering.

The canal banks had been cleared of mines when they’d first arrived in the area; but still, one never knew. Bora stepped with brisk carelessness, taking off his army shirt. The downpour had made the mud black and very soft; slippery once he had removed his boots on the incline to enter the cloudy water.
The early hour, glass-like, crisp, made objects near and far visible in detail. Wherever Kostya had gone, he’d be back soon; noise would come from engines and whatever else functioned in the Ukrainian countryside these days; but at the moment silence was priceless.

Cold and lazy, the current reached to his waist. In both directions, the narrow ribbon of water ran on, reflecting the brilliant turquoise of the May sky. In his groggy state of mind, the impression was of standing in a flow of liquid air. Cupping his hands, Bora leaned forward to scrub his face and neck. Suspended particles of diluted soil tasted slightly bitter on his tongue; fine grit met his teeth. The leather sheath of his ID tag, dangling from a braided cord around his neck, grew dark with dampness; his grey braces formed two floating loops at his sides. Cold water awakened his skin through the soaking cloth. How far away now were the summarily executed babushkas, never to know the texture of his man-dirty uniform in the wash. How far Platonov’s body at Hospital 169, Khan’s unobtainable body, the tank safely in the Field Marshal’s headquarters, Mantau, the Karabakh horse, the slaughtered hens, Dikta’s thighs, the dead at Krasny Yar…

When, still bent at the waist, Bora tilted his head to rub his neck, his eye met the square edge of a wood-cased Russian mine sticking out of the mud along the bank. Rain had partially exposed it, like a strange geometric tongue or insane deadly mushroom. He found himself entirely indifferent to its presence.
Oh well, we’ll take it out sometime
, he thought without the least alarm.
It belongs there, after all
. He was no longer used to landscapes free from the marks of war, and risk made life worth biting into.

In March, leaving the hospital in Prague, the intact state of the city had taken him aback. Houses, palaces, towers, belfries still standing appeared artificial to his eyes; there was something of a theatre backdrop or movie set in the flawlessness of the ancient skyline. Free of rubble, the streets gaped, empty. Out of
place were the windows with intact panes, each of their frames in its rightful place. Bora recalled how he had looked around, trying not to act surprised, although he had furtively grazed the corner of a sound wall, the solid surface of a portal, to verify its reality. His wonder had only lasted minutes. But in the handful of minutes Bora had imagined the fall of the city – not of
that
city: of any city – according to the rules of war. And so the Gunpowder Tower began to crumble from the top down and fell apart one cornerstone at a time, a blackened gold angel at a time; the cathedral on Hradschin Hill dissolved like a termite hill under a violent rain. Streets filled with debris, recreating the familiar obstacle course, the known, claustrophobic sense of impediment.

Only then had he been able to accept Prague still untouched, with the proviso that it would not stay so forever: knowing this comforted him. Dikta, walking at his side, had noticed nothing. She hugged his arm with her whole perfumed, haughty self: ultimately unreachable, for all that she was about to be mightily possessed. The woman present and unattainable, bliss prolonged through time. Even his wife’s absolute beauty, her physical perfection, their peerless carnal rapport had for a moment been acceptable to him only in view of their end.
Only that which ends is precious
, he’d thought, and had stopped to kiss her in the street.

In Prague he’d realized how much he was loved. By his wife, his mother, his stepfather, his brother. Peter, en route to a furlough home, stopped by to ask if he wanted him to stay. Bora had said, “Are you out of your mind? Go and see Duckie, knucklehead. I’m not dying.”

It surprised him now that he remembered the episode. Only through his diary entries had he been able to reconstruct the last days in Stalingrad, when a high fever had made him forget many details. He hazily recalled the end of the long trail out of the siege, in the winter snow, when he’d reached German lines with however many he’d managed to drag along, and a colonel in a sheepskin coat had shaken his hand, crying out,
“Thank God, thank God!” But it was possible he’d forgotten it, and someone had told him afterwards. Of his stay in the infectious disease ward in Prague he remembered two or three days clearly, although it had been close to a month.

The rumble of aeroplanes taking off from Rogany brought him back to reality. Bora wondered what he was doing half-dressed in a canal with his skin bristling when he had so many chores to attend to.

After rubbing himself dry and changing into a clean uniform he felt worse.
I hope it isn’t another bout of pneumonia
, he told himself. It felt like it: fever and a sick headache. In spite of it he laid out the day’s routine, beginning with a fact-checking request to Bruno Lattmann. Lattmann had ready access to colleagues at Offices III D and III Q, and the inordinate ability to collect data at a moment’s notice. Then came three solid hours with a prospective Russian-born officer, formerly of the 5th Don Cossack Regiment. From Odilo Mantau and the
Leibstandarte
folks complete silence. It was possible, as Bentivegni had said, that Mantau had had to answer to RSHA Amt IV “Gestapo” Müller for losing Khan Tibyetsky, and the SS tank men might still be searching the Tractor Factory for the long-since-removed T-34.