Winter of the World

He entered a clearing where lorries and buses were parked. A lot of people had been brought here. Some buses were leaving, skirting the accident; another arrived as Erik passed through. Beyond the car park, he came upon a hundred or so Russians of all ages, apparently prisoners, though many had suitcases, boxes and sacks that they clutched as if guarding precious possessions. One man held a violin. A little girl with a doll caught Erik’s eye, and he felt in his guts a sensation of sick foreboding.

The prisoners were being guarded by local policemen armed with truncheons. Clearly the Special Group had collaborators for whatever they were doing. The policemen looked at him, noted the German army uniform visible beneath the unbuttoned coat, and said nothing.

As he walked by, a well-dressed Russian prisoner spoke to him in German. ‘Sir, I am the director of the tyre factory in this town. I have never believed in Communism, but only paid lip service, as all managers had to. I can help you – I know where everything is. Please take me away from here.’

Erik ignored him and walked in the direction of the shooting.

He came upon the quarry. It was a large, irregular hole in the ground, its edge fringed by tall spruce trees like guardsmen in dark-green uniforms laden with snow. At one end a long slope led into the pit. As he watched, a dozen prisoners began to walk down, two by two, marshalled by soldiers, into the shadowed valley.

Erik noticed three women and a boy of about eleven among them. Was their prison camp somewhere in that quarry? But they were no longer carrying luggage. Snow fell on their bare heads like a benison.

Erik spoke to an SS sergeant standing nearby. ‘Who are these prisoners, Sarge?’

‘Communists,’ said the man. ‘From the town. Political commissars, and so on.’

‘What, even that little boy?’

‘Jews, too,’ said the sergeant.

‘Well, what are they, Communists or Jews?’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘It’s not the same thing.’

‘Balls. Most Communists are Jews. Most Jews are Communists. Don’t you know anything?’

The tyre factory director who had spoken to Erik seemed to be neither, he thought.

The prisoners reached the rocky floor of the quarry. Until this moment they had shuffled along like sheep in a herd, not speaking or looking around, but now they became animated, pointing at something on the ground. Peering through the snowflakes, Erik saw what looked like bodies scattered among the rocks, snow dusting their garments.

For the first time Erik noticed twelve riflemen standing on the lip of the ravine, among the trees. Twelve prisoners, twelve riflemen: he realized what was happening here, and incredulity mixed with horror rose like bile inside him.

They raised their guns and aimed at the prisoners.

‘No,’ Erik said. ‘No, you can’t.’ Nobody heard him.

A woman prisoner screamed. Erik saw her grab the eleven-year-old boy and clasp him to herself, as if her arms around him could stop bullets. She seemed to be his mother.

An officer said: ‘Fire.’

The rifles cracked. The prisoners staggered and fell. The noise dislodged a little snow from the pines, and it fell on the riflemen, a sprinkling of pure white.

Erik saw the boy and his mother drop, still locked together in an embrace. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh, no!’

The sergeant looked at him. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said irritably. ‘Who are you, anyway?’

‘Medical orderly,’ said Erik, without taking his eyes off the dread scene in the pit.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I brought an ambulance for the officers hurt in the collision.’ Erik saw that another twelve prisoners were already being marched down the slope into the quarry. ‘Oh, God, my father was right,’ he moaned. ‘We’re murdering people.’

‘Stop whining and fuck off back to your ambulance.’

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ said Erik.

(iii)

At the end of November Volodya asked for a transfer to a fighting unit. His intelligence work no longer seemed important: the Red Army did not need spies in Berlin to discover the intentions of a German army that was already on the outskirts of Moscow. And he wanted to fight for his city.

His misgivings about the government came to seem trivial. Stalin’s stupidity, the brutishness of the secret police, the way nothing in the Soviet Union worked the way it was supposed to work – all that faded away. He felt nothing but a blazing need to repel the invader who threatened to bring violence, rape, starvation and death to his mother, his sister, the twins Dimka and Tania, and Zoya.

He was sharply aware that if everyone thought that way he would have no spies. His German informants were people who had decided that patriotism and loyalty were outweighed by the terrible wickedness of the Nazis. He was grateful to them for their courage and the stern morality that drove them. But he felt differently.