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The Assassins Gallery Liberation Road Last Citadel Scorched
Earth The End of War War of the Rats Souls to Keep |
Odd, Nikki thought, to be outside Stalingrad again in August. Six years before, in 1942, Nikolas Mond, a corporal in the German 6th Army, had ridden east in the bed of a grey truck with twenty other soldiers down a dusty road, over the steppe of central Russia to the outskirts of Stalingrad. The wheatfields then, pregnant with August sun, with stalks still untrammeled and supple in their fleshy tones, waved under the summer heat as if pointing the way. He remembered the truck stopping in a late blue afternoon, one truck in an immense line of carriers, with men and guns bristling on their backs, black spikes on giant porcupines. The trucks stopped, six years ago, while the Luftwaffe destroyed the city below the horizon over two days and nights. When they were done, Nikki's truck followed the others like circus elephants into the inferno. Today, the land, a Russian tablecloth of heavy wheat and sky lace spreading away from the train window where Nikki sat, showed only the scars of farmers. Giant bales of golden hay and red barns broke the straight lines of the flat tan panorama. Vegetable and flower gardens lined the rail tracks. He watched them roll by beneath his window, flashing red, white, green, pink, red, pink, white. Communism, he thought. These people, hard fat women and lean hawkish men, they are only allowed to grow things for themselves alongside the railroad mound; the farmland they sweat on and the land around their huts is claimed by the State and the local Soviets, councils. Nikki learned much about the Russian people in his six years of captivity. These little gardens along the tracks were some of his favorite examples of a theory he had developed. Each one of the Russians, the broad babushkas, the red-cheeked teen soldiers, the leathery old men and the waiting girls, all of them kept little private flames of themselves alive, no matter what befell them: war, famine, Communism, economic collapse, Stalin's pogroms. The people in the Siberian villages raised their own little gardens by finding the smallest cracks of land for their own use beneath the all-consuming gaze of socialism. Their agrarian abilities amazed Nikki; they could grow anything anywhere, along the railroad, in window boxes and tubs, even in the sod on their village roofs. Nikki was also amused how the Russians doted on their young children, one of the few things under Communism which was theirs and theirs alone, at least until the babes grew out of infancy and into the hands of the State. Nikki also liked to cite how the Russians drove their vehicles, like mad men and women; tractors, cars, horse-drawn carts - anything moving, the Russians pushed to extremes, with crazed enjoyment and grim purpose. And they kept God alive, perhaps the most beloved and enduring possession the State could not fully take from them. God lived among the Russians not in the million churches which were closed up or turned into council buildings by Stalin, but in their hearts and in darkened rooms at night with only their kin and trusted neighbors around. Nothing could keep the Russian people from growing flowers and vegetable patches, or dressing their young ones like royal dolls, or speeding and careening, and no power could quench their need for a heaven waiting above this life. Nikki concluded that whatever the Russian was not forced to give up to the State, he did instead for himself with a refreshing, touching zest. Nikki recognized two different sorts of people in Siberia. There were the native Siberians, the brown skinned Oriental with eyes the shape and color of almonds. These were a simple and direct folk, tied as they were to the forests and waters of the land. Side-by-side with them lived the European-looking Russians, blue-eyed men and women sent east to Siberia for one reason or another by every Russian leader from Czar Nikolas to the vozd Stalin. The interbreeding of these peoples created some of the most handsome men and women Nikki had ever seen. During his captivity, Nikki came in contact with a surprisingly wide spectrum of Russians, from his keepers and politrooks to the people of the Siberian villages he often worked alongside in the fields or on railroad projects in the mountains. Many of these Russians, he guessed, were merely sleepwalking through the Communist regime. They viewed the speeches, red stars and hammer and sickle signage as nothing more than another plague of locusts to endure, another idea emanating from the city folks in the west who had too little else to keep themselves busy. The train headed west. Nikki had been on it, in this seat, for three days, rolling down from the Urals away from the prison camp in Tambov. Six years. The train neared a metal span over a wide, twisting river. He watched the water move closer, a green mirror wending through the fields. The train moved too fast for him to know if the wheat was waving under the August heat. "The Volga." someone in the back of the car said. Nikki felt a squeak in his chest, like a door opening on rusted hinges. Three days ago, as he lowered himself into the worn leather seat beside the scratched train window, Nikki and many of the men held the Volga in common as their talisman, their charm. They believed that, once they were west of the Volga, they would really be going home, not simply moved to another camp. The train lurched forward, not the first train Nikki had been on in his six years of captivity. He felt no pangs of anticipation yet. He would not allow himself to have hope. Not until he was beyond the Volga. Many times before, he had been told by smiling guards that he was going home to Germany. He walked with a thousand others to a dozen waiting trains, then watched as his hopes fell with the sun as the train tracks ran north, south or east, any direction but the west of home. What are they doing, he wondered, the diplomats? What are they doing with us, playing prisoners of war like chess pieces, years after the battles have ended? But is the war really over? Or is the din of battle no longer the pounding of artillery but the banging of gavels on hard tables in lush, smokey rooms, with old men as the warriors and no longer us boys? They are trying to pick Germany apart, gnawing like jackals on a corpse with gavels and demands and guarantees. The Americans, British and Russians, the winners, who can blame them? They're the ones writing the history; that's the winner's right. Germany did so much harm. And us boys, we were innocents but also killers. We are to blame because we let others make our decisions for us, yet blameless because we only followed orders. Perhaps it is better this way; let only old men make war. They don't have the energy to do it so well as we did. Nikki's train rumbled onto the bridge, jerking his thoughts free to see the river slide by far beneath him. The door inside Nikki, closed since Stalingrad in 1942, flung open at last. Light and air flooded in. For the first time in years, he felt a rush of excitement; yes! he thought, oh please, yes! Home! Go, train, go! Fly! Yet he kept his face free of emotion. He stared out his window, his expression as placid and plain as the glass pane in front of his nose. Show them nothing, Nikki thought. Nothing. This lesson he learned well in the cages of his first year as a prisoner. Nikki guessed Stalingrad was to the
south, downriver, in the direction of his shaking window as the train
moved above the river. He wondered what the city looked like now. 1948.
The war was over, what does the whole world look like, the Russians
occupying now with their Communism all the land Nikki and the soldiers
of the Third Reich had crushed with their tanks? Poland. The Balkans.
Hungary. Czechoslovakia. Rumania. Bulgaria. And eastern Germany, even
Berlin. What does it all look like? And me. What do I look like? Six
years, a slave in Siberia. I'm twenty-six years old now. The flames and horror of Stalingrad were today nothing more to Nikki than yellowed pages in a photo album. The battle was an old story, like a radio left playing on and on in an empty room. Stalingrad was just the beginning, just five months out of the last six years. Clearest in his thoughts of the battle were his surrender and the first days marching over the snow with a thousand other ragged German prisoners. The Red soldiers guarding them took liberties. They cursed the Germans, bashing stragglers with rifle butts, shooting the sick and wounded prisoners outright. On New Year's Day, 1943, Nikki was marched past a giant bonfire of railroad ties. Details of Russian civilians busily hoisted stacks of German dead onto the fire. The bodies lay in a tangled mass like quickly dumped cords of wood, some bits and pieces of bodies also. The dead were stripped of shoes and all metal. Nazi helmets were heaped high beside the piles of corpses, like metal beehives. These would be sent to the smelters for reshaping into steel for the Reds' war machine. The Russian men and women who swung the bodies onto the scorching pyre wore scarves over their faces, to hide from the fumes or to hide their faces from God. Nikki thought how awful to tumble so far from being alive, to land there, in that consuming fire, erasing you, evaporating your water, popping your bones into powder. No trace of you left, your powder mingled with the man burning and melting next to you. In the first weeks, Nikki marched in the endless column of prisoners streaming far north out of Stalingrad. The city was still under siege in early January of 1943. Von Paulus would not surrender until the end of the month. In his first days of captivity, Nikki saw the worst promises of war upheld. The stricken, starving faces moaning and shuffling through the blinding wind and snow, moving from camp to camp, to the north, then across the Volga, then east to more holding camps; these were human beings made into scarecrows. They wore tortured expressions, like zombies trudging to hell as fast as they could. Nikki remembered centering his thoughts on his feet, hour after hour, willing them to move, heel to toe, one after the other, never stop, to stop is to die alongside the cold road or with a bullet in the brain from a guard and then the flames melting your soul, one-two-three swing! onto the pile. The crackle of guards' pistols snapped at him like timber wolves in the whirling snow. He huddled himself tight, hurling himself down the road, lifting and setting his feet behind the battered pair of boots in front of him. Nikki's column crossed the frozen river. They walked east for a month, more than one hundred fifty kilometers by his reckoning. His column passed through small villages untouched by the war. The Red Army had stopped the Wehrmacht at the city on the Volga, yet the citizens on this side of the river showed their hatred for the Germans just as if they had been in the battles themselves. Nikki understood. Their children had been there. Old men and women broke into their limping ranks to slap at them or steal from them lighters, fountain pens, packs, hoarded bits of food, even writing paper. Only in a few instances did Russian villagers display any measure of pity, offering Nikki and his procession of specters bowls of gruel and scraps of bread. Early in their march, the guards discouraged this, knocking the precious sustenance from the prisoners' shaking hands. As the march wore on, the guards slowly relented, turning their backs on what little relief their pathetic prisoners could gather for themselves. Bivouacs were set up for the prisoners along the way. These were rarely more than hastily thrown up tents, drafty barns or windowless factory rooms. Straw was strewn on the ground for bedding. Food, when available, was only bread, water and thin soup. Every morning, Nikki awoke, straw sticking to his lips and eyelashes, his joints aching. He rose at the guards' shouts, looking around as he righted himself at the still bodies that did not rouse, men dead in the night from starvation and cold. Typhus also ravaged the prisoners. It was contracted from the lice riding in their crevices. These men were marked for death in the night by their fevered thrashing in the straw against the backdrop of the quiet moaning and rattles of the famished. At dawn, Nikki stood, rising out of the freezing graveyard, to limp into line. Finally, Nikki and the few hundred survivors of the march were loaded onto trucks. They were driven for six days to their first prison camp at Tambov in the Ural foothills. Over the next few years, Nikki would be moved to other Siberian camps in Oranki, Susdal, Yelabuga and Krinovaya. He shared his prison time with fellow Germans, as well as Italians, Rumanians and Slavs. Their work was primarily to clear paths through the Urals for rail tracks. During the war, Stalin moved many Soviet industries east of the mountains, to protect them from the Nazi invasion. Now, these factories needed rail links to the western half of the nation. The prisoners bent their backs over picks, shovels and sledge hammers ten hours a day. They went into tunnels for the dangerous task of setting dynamite charges. The men split boulders and loaded the rocks onto truck beds or built retaining walls into the carved-away sides of mountains with the pieces. At night, the prisoners were often lectured by Communist agitators about the evils of their governments and Fascism. Many of the men turned against their countries, adding their prison camp huzzahs to the growing cheers for world socialism. The louder they bellowed, the better was their treatment. Doctors, nurses, food, clothes, even mail and some news began to appear as the years moved past. It was plain the Russians wanted some prisoners left alive, to use as chips on the post-war world's political gaming tables. For his entire captivity, Nikki kept his own close counsel. He remained on the outskirts of his comrades' attempts to alternately aggravate and placate their jailers. He made no friends, relied on no one. He took part in no schemes, no games, no political rallies, nothing to help pass the time. He did not mark a calendar. He did nothing to make himself an object of hatred, suspicion or even association. Nikki flowed with the days without fighting them, still a member of time's brigade. He pictured himself crawling into time, a long tube of minutes and years enmeshed. He kept himself moving forward. A step, a month, a night, a second, all were indistinguishable. He knew he would not die, or thought how surprised he would be if he did. Nikki could do the hardest work a man can do. He could watch and wait. Then four days ago, a guard announced in Nikki's barracks they were being sent home in the morning. "Goodbye." the guard said, "and let our countries be friends," in Russian Nikki could understand. Now the train rumbled off the high, steel bridge, leaving the grassy, olive Volga behind and below. Ahead of Nikki was a treeless vista of steppe. The wind rules this part of Russia, he thought. Nothing stands in its way. This train is just a little black, speeding interruption in the lonely August vastness of Russia. Even the men and machines of the Third Reich, the most powerful armed might in history, did not make this land tremble. Nikki closed his eyes. He let the shushing of the engine and the clacking of the wheels on the rail wash around him, like moths flitting about a lantern. He reached out through the noises to the silent bright place in his heart, to the place inside him where he lived for the last six years, to the pond on his father's pastures, where the cattle come to drink, the dog rolls in the mud and the insects hum before lunch in August. The dairy farmer reached out and held on, pulling himself forward. |
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