Tin Sky (2 page)

There was no clearing by the bank; leaves reached the water’s edge and tall canes bent this way and that to form a chain of broken canopies. Insects sparkled in the air like handfuls of gold dust over the slow current. Bora crouched where he could; he leant forward, dipped his fingers in the river and listened.

It was a spot, unmarked on maps, nameless as far as he knew, like so many spots he’d stood on at the risk of dying, made precious by that possibility. Less than a square metre on the left bank of a river that flowed into the Don, capricious and meandering, getting lost, flooding. From the Don they’d all retreated as they’d retreated from Stalingrad. And across this lazy current sat the Russians. It was just a matter of listening. Inner quiet, slowing of the heart. The horse loosely tied and waiting in the back. Bora could feel every muscle tense or relax in the crouch, lungs taking in the marshy air less and less frequently. Closing his eyes, the small, nearly inaudible sounds around him became distinct – water streaming or making a whirlpool, birds singing far and near, tremulous leaves picking up the barest breath of wind, the horse’s lips ripping a green shoot from the ground. From the other bank, birds calling, men elsewhere or silent, engines absent or turned off, villages, farms, towns, army camps, homesteads empty or mortally quiet.

Already in Stalingrad, towards the end, when all of them had grown close to madness one way or another, long pauses of stillness had become necessary to him. Bora grazed the water with his fingertips, listening. Each pore, each cell was a hearing organ, strained and yet giving itself up to whispers and silence alike. His entire life was present to him in these moments (boyhood bike rides, the sun on a doorway, holding hands with a girl, the Volga at Stalingrad, Dikta’s throat when he kissed her, a lizard, his stepfather in Leipzig, things not yet happened but just as present; anxiety come to a point too high to be felt, and turned to lack of sensation, a sublime void). Mosquitoes swarmed on his bare arms, flies bit, toads leapt in the mud. The sun rolled like a huge cart of fire across a tin ceiling, a tin sky.

Bora opened his eyes. He estimated the width of the river at this point, its depth, the invisible but existent ford. Calmly he stood up, untied his horse, regained the saddle and paced into the water across the Donets, towards enemy lines.

1

The determination of the value of an object must be based not on its price, but rather on the utility it can bring.

ST PETERSBURG PARADOX

3 May 1943. Early afternoon, near Bespalovka.

I write this diary entry after a fruitful and lively session with my regimental staff in the making. They didn’t like me going off on my own, but I know what I’m doing.

Regarding my little foray, you’d think the Soviets would man the bank where there are shallows. We’ve been sitting for a couple of months staring at each other along this river. But it’s true that you can’t guard every blade of grass, stack of rocks and river bend. On the map, the woods on the Russian bank (flatter than ours, with bogs and false rivers where we have low cliffs) appear criss-crossed by a number of paths, actually overgrown now. Part of the tree cover has been blasted during the last battle (or the previous one; it’s been two years that we’ve been going back and forth), and during mud season the shell holes have become pools. Elsewhere it has dried up, but water keeps seeping through even at a good distance from the river’s edge. No tank, ours or theirs, is safely coming or going across for another month at least – that’s for sure.

There’s a minuscule island in the middle of the ford, all trees and canes. Once I crossed over to it I had to dismount and wade to the opposite bank, stepping around carefully. The Russians are close by, and no mistake. Recently smoked papirosyi butts, the occasional tin can: not scouts, that much I know. We don’t
leave evidence. On a hunch, even though everything was still (even the birds, which should have put me on the alert), I kept advancing, because across the woods, on the edge far from the bank, there used to be a village we razed the first time around. However little shelter the ruins may afford, I told myself, there’s a cemetery with a good fence around it, and if it’s regular troops manning the area, they have no doubt set up there. In fact, there they were. No dogs, which was lucky for me. Dogs would have smelt the stranger from a distance. A platoon busily working, without a sentry to keep an eye on the environs. What I saw and photographed was worth the trip, anyway, especially the 76 mm anti-aircraft or anti-tank gun.

Returning, I don’t know what came into my head. In the woods facing the islet where I’d left Totila, there was an old woman gathering sticks, and instead of stealing past her, I stopped to give her a hand. Half-blind, she didn’t realize I was a German: only a soldier. She called me “little soldier”, even though I was twice her size and could have picked her up with one hand. She spoke Russian, so I assume she’s one of those moved in by the central government after the Ukrainians were starved off years ago. A witch from the old march tales, she seemed: in rags, bent over. That’s how they made up stories like Baba Yaga and her flying mortar, I thought. Next, she’ll show me her house on chicken legs, which you’re supposed to address so it’ll let you in. In fact, she only asked me if I were “one of the boys at the graveyard”, by which she meant the platoon I’d spied on. I boldly said that I was. She then grabbed a stick and tried to thrash me with it, the fool, cursing me out for digging in her yard “to bury all those metal pots”. Pots? Landmines, of course. It means they’re not planning to move soon, at any rate: otherwise they’d be clearing the terrain, not mining it. Do they expect our tanks to cross over the shallows before then? It seems the Soviets have been mining every inch of cultivated and fallow land in this section for weeks; the few peasants still around are in revolt. As – by her own admission – the old woman and the others keep gardening among the “pots”, it’s safe to suppose they’re
anti-tank mines, or else they’d have been blown to smithereens. She was still ranting when I left.

Little does she know. Far from being her “little soldier”, in a month I’ve been able to do most of the planning for the regiment, to be called Cavalry Regiment Gothland, bearing as its insignia the leaping horseman of my 1st Division (not the horse’s head like Regiments Middle and South), plus the clover leaf of its parent unit, the 161st ID. Out of the 27 officers slated to fill the commanding positions, I have thus far managed to pull together 18, from the many places where they ended up after our 1st Cavalry Division was disbanded late in ’41. Except for one, so far all readily expressed the willingness to come. The senior non-coms (Regimental Sergeant Major Nagel foremost among them; I’m ready to insist with Gen. von Groddeck – and even Field Marshal von Manstein – that his presence is imperative) are in the works. As for the troopers, I trust my officers will do a good job of recruiting. It’s inevitable that a number of locals will be necessary, both as scouts and interpreters; four of us officers speak Russian, although I’m the only one technically qualified as an interpreter. I pointed out to Lt. Colonel von Salomon that it is preferable to have ethnic Germans. If we fight under our byname for Ukraine, “Land of the Goths”, it is only right. The problem is, a good number of Russia’s Germans have been transferred to the Warthegau. Others have fought for the Soviets and were made prisoners: these I don’t trust and I’d rather do without. Cossacks are much prized, but I don’t particularly care for their methods. I am and remain a German cavalryman: swashbuckling, sabre-rattling and hard drinking aren’t what I’m looking for. Am I being difficult, at this stage of the war? Well, I may be difficult, but it is my regiment, and within reason it is at my discretion (and good judgement) that it must come into being.

Driving from the Bespalovka camp back to Merefa, Bora changed his mind about Krasny Yar, and decided to take a detour there. He travelled along a dirt lane, straight and white like a parting in the hair, between fields of new grass where larks sang and
quails called out with their three notes, clear like water drops. Were it not for the skeletons of Soviet trucks and the cannibalized remains of other vehicles by the roadway, it would have seemed a peaceful landscape. Silos and low roofs, long metal sheds, stables and tractor shelters pointed to the presence of collective farms, mostly abandoned during the fighting at winter’s end. Only stray dogs lived there now, which German soldiers, depending on their mood, shot dead or took along as mascots. Occasionally, farm boys stared from behind the fences. Krasny Yar lay beyond, an unidentified spot on the horizon no road sign pointed to. Bora had driven past it when going elsewhere, without stopping.

When he arrived, the impression of dislike he’d had driving through earlier was confirmed. The destitute hamlet and the wooded patch where corpses had been turning up bore the same name, yet the place wasn’t beautiful –
krasny
– at all, and neither was it enough of a ravine to call it a
yar.
A piece of sloping ground at most, at the end of a dirt road passable only as far as a fork that diverged widely. On the left, the trail died amid the handful of crumbling huts. On the right hand, what trace there was had ceased to exist, ploughed by tanks that had left behind track marks as deep as graves. The edge of the woods bristled a couple of hundred metres beyond, where the earth rose into a weary swell and then sank.

Bora’s rugged personnel carrier could negotiate the tracts of even space remaining across the fields, but seeing German soldiers in the village, he stopped at the fork, and after surveying the edge of the wood through his field glasses, he left the vehicle and walked towards them. Infantrymen, which put him at ease. Here was where one could just as likely find men of the 161st ID or SS belonging to
Das Reich
, whose area of control extended behind the infantry sector and west to the city of Kharkov.

The infantrymen saluted. Two had taken off their summer tunics and were drinking from their canteens. Another was
putting away a folding shovel. The non-com among them came closer. “Going into the Yar, Herr Major? Flies’ll eat you alive,” he commented drily. “We just buried another.”

Bora rolled down his shirtsleeves, buttoning the cuffs to reduce the surface available to insects. “Who was it this time?”

“An old Russki peasant as far as we can tell, Herr Major. The head was missing – badly chopped off, too.”

The patrol belonged to the 241st Reconnaissance Company of the 161st ID, newly strung out from north to south on a strip of land that ran with a slight elevation from north-west to south-east. The non-com showed Bora the fresh burial, and related the rumours about the “weird deaths” that circulated among the troops. “Comrades from other patrols report stuff disappearing around here. Shirts, socks, cans of boot grease, all in full daylight. And inside the Yar you orient yourself by dead reckoning, because compasses malfunction. The Russkis claim the place is haunted. Not that I believe any of this nonsense, Herr Major, ’cause the Russkis will try to spook us if they can’t do anything else. Fact is, the Russkis don’t like it at Krasny Yar either.”

“Tell me more about the man you buried.”

“Peasant clothes, barefooted, with the long hanging-out shirt they wear out here, hands tied behind his back with an old piece of wire, half rusted through. We could have left him where he was, but my sister’s a nun; I thought we ought to bury him even if he’s a Red.” The non-com gladly accepted a cigarette (Bora did not smoke these days, but carried a pack to offer occasionally). “In the rotten farms around here there’s just old folks and kids, Herr Major. The farm boys come begging, but the old cross themselves if you mention Krasny Yar. Some of us end up doing it on purpose, to see them react – it’s pretty funny. In the woods, nothing worth reporting other than the dead man. Coming back we saw one of the farm boys had followed us, and fired into the air to make him stay away. That scared him off, which is better than ending up dead, too. Seems the Russkis
have been telling stories about this place for years. They go a long way to avoid it and have done so forever; the old folks say it was already this way when they were children.”

Bora glanced back at the line of trees. “I’m going in. Keep an eye on my vehicle, will you?”

“Yessir. We won’t be on our way for another hour and a half.”

“Good.” Bora checked his watch. “It’s 16.00 hours now; I’ll be back before 17.00.”

The non-com squashed the cigarette butt against the breech of his rifle. “By the way, sir, after the burial the priest trekked in there.”

“Which priest?”

“The batty one: the Russian.”

“Father Victor?”

“The one from Losukovka.”

“Victor Nitichenko, that’s him.” Bora turned, heading for the Yar.

The small woods rose up suddenly out of the grassy expanse. Here there were none, and there they were, trees that grew thick at once, disorderly as they’d surfaced from among the stumps of the old ones, cut years before. Bora had thus far kept away on purpose, pushing this place and the events that had occurred here to the edge of his mind, because he had other things to worry about. But Krasny Yar and the Krasny Yar dead did not quite go away; their presence remained perceptible.

“Keep straight ahead,” the non-com had indicated, even if “straight” in the woods does not mean much. In a few minutes, however, following what seemed to be a trail left by small animals – or by elves, if the woods had been enchanted – Bora realized that in fact he could almost walk in an unswerving line. Out east, as in the days of the German tribesmen and Romans battling at Teutoburg, forests were measured in hours, or days. Walking directly (not while reconnoitring, when the going was much slower), this was at most a couple of hours’
worth of woodland, yet within its boundaries had thus far died five – no,
six
people.