Tin Sky (35 page)

Absence of recognizable tracks meant nothing per se in Russian forests: those who did frequent them knew how to mask their passage. Russian partisans hid well, not to mention the small
razvedchiki
units, no doubt making forays on this side of the Donets as much as their counterparts, German scouts, did on the other side. Depending on their cleverness and training, partisans were either less or more accurate at erasing their traces than Red Army soldiers.

The blasted tree, the dark line of firs were still distant. Birches and nut-bearing trees, nameless shrubs alternated all around. A boundary legible on Bora’s map and notes, and marked on the ground only by a shallow, narrow gully that fallen leaves concealed, marked the German minefield some three hundred paces to the men’s right. Depending on Manstein’s plans, it would either be cleared next month or added to.

Approaching as he did today, but not so much from the
direction he’d come from the first time, Bora could see how the ridge where lightning had struck the tree and Kalekin had been found was in fact circumscribed. Skirting it gave the impression of a rise or mound with a ditch on three sides rather than what in Russia was usually called – depending on its dimensions – a
yar
,
balka
, or
ovrag
. Today, the shape reminded Bora of ancient or medieval earthworks. Even the Great War trenches he and his brother had explored as vacationing boys in the woods of East Prussia had more in common with this kind of trough than a natural rift in the land did.

He gestured for Nagel to pause, and snapped photographs of the rise and of the hollow over which the blasted tree reclined bridge-wise. This, too, was interesting upon closer examination. Bora crouched to see if it was merely a cleft gaping at the foot of the large stump or if there was more to it. He got down on his hands and knees, moving aside creepers and brush. It seemed to be no more than a dip in the land, crowded with dead leaves, overarched by long-branched thorn bushes. But if he parted the tangle (a horseman’s gloves came in handy) a burrow was revealed, yawning in the flank of the rise. Larger than a fox hole but not by much, choked by brambles, it measured maybe forty centimetres top to bottom, and little more from side to side.

Again Bora signalled, this time for Nagel to stand watch while he continued to explore. Nagel, who had a penchant for worrying about him, didn’t seem enthusiastic, but obeyed.

Shining an electric torch inside the hole revealed nothing but clumped soil and a jumble of hairy roots. From the pasted-down texture of the dirt ledge, it appeared as if the animal it must be a home to had recently squeezed through. Entering was out of the question for a man of Bora’s size. He was about to resign himself to lying on his belly and peering as far as he could crane his neck, when on a whim he decided to strip the thorn branches where they hung thickest, to the left of the small opening. A not so cramped gap came into view then, sufficient – with some effort – to allow the passage of someone who did not suffer from
claustrophobia. Bora put his head in, then his arm holding the electric torch, and squeezed himself forward enough to illuminate the dark space. By that very motion, the woods above, Nagel, the world at large became instantly far away and foreign. It was irresistible. Bora pulled himself back and changed direction so as to put his booted legs in first, and sank out of sight.

Open German army food cans were the first objects he recognized on the ground, then a razor case, unstitched, of the type Soviet soldiers carried, a half-rotted wooden box or lidless crate against the dirt wall, with nothing inside. Bora couldn’t stand up in the small space, maybe a metre and a half in height and twice that much across, partly timbered. A cave-in of soil and planks as the vault had given way, towards the centre of the rise, further reduced the available room. At his feet, in the dark wet dirt, Bora glimpsed the bowl of a hand-carved spoon, typical of the resourceful Russian infantryman. The break on the shaft was new, sharp. A soggy tatter turned out to be a triangular canvas bag resembling a holster, its upper loop and lower buckle gone, which he identified as a Red Army axe cover. The round tin with something inside that had been scooped out like food contained in fact German boot grease. He recalled the soldiers of the 241st telling him about pieces of equipment and material disappearing around Krasny Yar.

He regretted not having a flash on his Kodak camera. With his foot he turned over the tins to shine a light on the impressed dates, double-checked the dilapidated wooden box for markings, and pried as far as he could into the timber-and-dirt collapse. Once he had finished, he had to admit that, as for many enterprises, it was easier getting in than out. There was nothing to grab on to to clamber out into the open; dirt crumbled and fell in chunks. When Bora did squeeze through at last, the greenness outside and Nagel’s sturdy figure a few steps away welcomed him back into a dangerous but less oppressive world.

“They used it recently, Nagel, although the hole has been there a long time. The wooden box – an ammunition crate, I
think – goes back to the Great War at least. It makes you wonder whether the older sister was kept in a similar hideout twenty years ago. It’s dark enough, even in daytime.” He described the shelter, listing the objects inside. “All our army tins bear the 1942 date, so they might be the pilfered items the 241st Company men told me about. What do you make of it?”

Nagel wore a habitual frown. One had to know his careworn face as well as Bora had learnt to in order to recognize a lack of real concern on it. “There’s not many of them at any rate, Herr Major – five at most, from what you said. Either that, or they have other such holes in the woods. They tried to eat boot grease? Could be untrained irregulars, or civilians hiding for whatever reason. It could be runaway Jews.”

Neither of them spoke the word
deserters
. Neither of them mentioned to what excesses sieges and starvation had brought German and Russian soldiers in the past two years. Nagel skirted the subject. “If it happens to be anyone left over from the civil war, he’d be in his forties, minimum, and pretty out of his mind by now.”

“Just the right combination to get you to hack up or dismember your victims.”

“Or eat them, Herr Major. On this front we’ve seen that, too.”

There, Nagel had said it. “Christ, let’s hope not.” Irregulars, civilians, deserters. Jews. Hadn’t the Security Service been on the lookout for
Dorfjuden
? Bora formulated the thought and found it highly unpleasant.
Would desperate rural Jews in hiding eat tinned pork meat? Probably. Would they steal it in the first place? If they don’t read German, yes. And why wouldn’t they kill?
“Jews would go out of their way to avoid being discovered,” he reasoned.

“Yes, sir. Although as long as German soldiers aren’t harmed, it’s not automatic that we’d intervene. We haven’t thus far.”

Together they climbed the rise and looked around as far as the curtain of trees allowed. The wind, still blowing over the woods, mimicked the fresh sound of running water. Bora pointed out where he’d found the wooden button, and the spot
where the soldiers had retrieved Kalekin’s corpse. “I wonder what they did with the old fellow’s head,” he grumbled. “The truth is, we could be facing the same individual – or individuals – who have holed up here and committed murder for the past twenty-odd years, or else entirely different people who have found shelter in the Yar ever since. It could be someone who only occasionally frequents the woods. As you say, Nagel, if there’s any pattern, the aim seems to be to keep folks away. What for? What are they guarding?”

“Maybe just their own hides, Herr Major.”

“Right.”

In a zigzag they kept heading north, careful to note any evidence on the forest floor that might reveal sinkholes, caves, trenches. From the quadrant where the woods became thicker as they followed an imperceptible slope, gradually extending to the Udy River and its mined banks, Bora had the impression for a moment of smelling an open fire somewhere. Abstinence from cigarettes ever since the start of Barbarossa had granted him a keen sense of smell, useful in the field although a definite disadvantage in unclean quarters (not to mention the horrific stench of death at Stalingrad, the memory of which sickened him to this day). Depending on the direction of the wind over the Yar, ragging the heads of the higher trees and making the sombre edge of firs boom like a sea cliff, the odour of smoke could come from one of the farms toward Krasnaya Polyana or Schubino, or even from across the Donets, as on the day Khan had arrived and cinders of the grass fire he’d himself set had fallen all around like snow.

Bora recalled the woods on the enemy bank, where the half-blind old woman had mistaken him for a Russian recruit, and how he’d thought then she resembled the deadly hag of the fairy tale, Baba Yaga. Khan compared himself to the witch, flying in her magical iron mortar and rowing with a broom that sweeps the air behind it. But no Baba Yaga, no
koldun
, ghosts or goblins made fires. Nagel signalled that he smelt it too. The
odour of burning wood on a warm day might not necessarily indicate a man-made fire, either, much less a hearth. On the rocky outcrops dry brush could go up in smoke by itself.

Now and then one or the other looked quickly in the direction of where sounds like small animals scuttling about crinkled the air. Nothing was ever seen. Were there partisans lying in wait, watching them, their invisibility would be the same: the unforgiving, seldom-failing crack of SVT rifles would have long ago made all the difference. Or it might soon. Bora regretted allowing Nagel to come along.
The risk is mine; why involve a family man in all this?
As for himself, he felt remarkably at peace.
If they shoot me now, my spirit will fly at once out of here, back to Merefa and into my trunk and inside the envelope where Dikta’s naked photo is. If there’s a heaven, that’s heaven. In a sealed envelope with my wife, because what I desire most is to put my hand between her legs as I did in Prague – just my hand, so my fingers may nudge the breath-thin silk away from the tender well of her flesh.
It surprised him how sober and lucid he could remain while thinking about it, aware of the smallest detail around him and yet just as authentically in the Prague room where they’d wantonly touched and savoured each other half the night before making love for the long other half. At one point the scent of woodbine wafted overwhelmingly to him from a cluster of dead trees, and Bora breathed it in to the bottom of his lungs (you never know which scent is the last you’re going to inhale); the questioning call of a
cuckooshka
from its perch, so much like a mechanical bird’s in a German clock, sounded to his ears familiar and unnerving at the same time.

Nagel’s figure came and went behind the trees as he kept to Bora’s right. It felt lonely in spite of him.
He and I could get lost and not know it for a while
, Bora thought.
I could already be dead and not know it. If God loved me, I’d have died in Prague, when Dikta sat astride my knees, facing me, letting me search her with my hand, kissing me. But here I am.
Inside the compass, which had functioned well until now, the needle had begun to tremble and become aimless. Bora pointed to the small round case on
his palm, and the sergeant, who was looking his way, nodded to show he’d noticed the same.

On they went, orienting themselves exclusively by landmarks. A negligible ditch indicated on maps as Orekhovy became important, with its namesake, a growth of walnut trees, alongside it. For the compass, north was everywhere and nowhere, but the nut-tree ditch stayed still. The land dipped and rose; uncharted lesser mounds were perceivable. Bora marked them on his map without stopping to explore them now. At one point they had to cross the ditch to continue, and it was a threshold. The mid-morning hour and its warmth took on a new garb, a new face: the wind fell; a stillness was created where birds turned silent first around the men, and then, like a widening circle in a pond, the singing ceased further and further away from them, until the entire woodland became soundless.

“Herr Major,” Nagel said, and nothing else.

A storm of flies raged noiselessly ahead, where a small clearing outlined a patch of green light. Steady-hearted as he judged himself to be, Bora felt a rise of anxiety, a kind of superstitious repugnance at going further.
But I’ll go, I’ll go. Whatever it is, I’ll register it on camera, too. It could be anything from a creature that died a natural death to an animal sacrifice that dingbat priest has carried out, if he dared come this deep into the Yar.
As if he didn’t know what it most likely was.

On his part, Nagel fully anticipated matters, because he halted after calling Bora’s attention to the flies. Bora kept walking.

That it was a putrefying human head impaled on a stake he realized when he was still six or seven steps away from it, more than close enough to judge it had belonged to old Kalekin. Something fearfully primitive, belonging to a medieval Dance of Death: drawing nearer would be an exercise in morbidity. Bora did it only to look for evidence around the grim trophy.

What Bruno Lattmann had said,
How will we go back to our families after this
, held true. Bora covered his nose and mouth. Embracing his mother, lying with his wife after this, after everything, give
or take, that had happened in the last four years!
It’s not just what we’ve done or was done to us, but what we’ve seen others do, what we haven’t been able to keep our eyes away from
. He held back his nausea, but barely. Bitter saliva came up and had to be spat out while he photographed the shreds of flesh, the chunks of hair on the pitiful remains.
That’s what the axe was for, whose soggy cover I saw in the underground shelter.
He turned away so as not to smell or see more than he had, and marked with an X the approximate spot on his map. To Nagel, who’d drawn closer and was frowning hard, he said, “It’s been there nearly three weeks. No point in removing it, or making the daughters-in-law see
that.
”