The Kindly Ones Page 40

  Outside, the air was dry, sharp, biting. I breathed in deeply and felt the cold burning the inside of my lungs. Everything looked frozen, silent. Von Gilsa got into his car with the Oberst from the AOK, offering me the front seat. We exchanged a few more words and then little by little everyone fell silent. I thought about the conference: Bierkamp’s anger was understandable. Köstring had played a dirty trick on us. Everyone in that room knew perfectly well that there was no chance the Wehrmacht would ever reach Daghestan. Some even suspected—but perhaps not Korsemann or Bierkamp—that Army Group A would, on the contrary, soon have to evacuate the Caucasus. Even if Hoth managed to link up with Paulus, it would only be to allow the Sixth Army to fall back to the Chir, or even the lower Don. One just had to look at a map to understand that the position of Army Group A was becoming untenable. Köstring must have had some certainty about that. Thus, it was out of the question to set the mountain people against us over an issue as unimportant as that of the Bergjuden: as it was, when they understood that the Red Army was returning, there would be troubles—even if only to prove, a little late of course, their loyalty and their patriotism—and we had, at all costs, to prevent things from going further. A retreat through a completely hostile environment, in terrain favorable to guerilla warfare, could become catastrophic. So some goodwill had to be shown to the friendly populations. I didn’t think Bierkamp could understand that; his police mentality, exacerbated by his obsession with numbers and reports, made him shortsighted. Recently, one of the Einsatzkommandos had liquidated a sanatorium for tubercular children, in a remote zone in the Krasnodar region. Most of the children were natives; the National Councils had vigorously protested, there had been skirmishes that had cost the lives of several soldiers. Bairamukov, the Karachai leader, had threatened von Kleist with a general insurrection if it happened again; and von Kleist had sent a furious letter to Bierkamp, who, according to what I had heard, had received it with a strange indifference: he didn’t see what the problem was. Korsemann, more sensitive to the influence of the military, had had to intervene and force him to send new instructions to the Kommandos. So Köstring hadn’t had a choice. When he arrived at the conference, Bierkamp thought the game wasn’t over yet; but Köstring, along with Bräutigam, no doubt, had already loaded the dice, and the exchange of opinions was only theater, a representation for the benefit of the uninitiated. Even if Weseloh had been present, or if I had stuck to a completely one-sided argumentation, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. The Daghestan trick was brilliant, irrefutable: it flowed naturally from what had been said, and Bierkamp could make no reasonable objection to it; as to saying the truth, that there would be no occupation of Daghestan, that was quite simply unthinkable; Köstring would have had an easy time, then, having Bierkamp dismissed for defeatism. It wasn’t for nothing that the soldiers also called Köstring “the old fox”: it had been, I said to myself with bitter pleasure, a masterstroke. I knew it was going to create enemies for me: Bierkamp would try to offload the blame for his defeat on someone, and I was the most likely person. I had carried out my work with energy and rigor, though; but as during my mission in Paris, I hadn’t understood the rules of the game, I had looked for the truth when what was wanted was not the truth but political advantage. Prill and Turek would now have an easy time of it to slander me. At least Voss would not have disapproved of my presentation. Alas, Voss was dead, and I was alone again.

  Night was falling. A thick frost covered everything: the twisted branches of the trees, the wires and poles of the fences, the dense grass, the earth in the almost bare fields. It was like a world of horrible white shapes, harrowing, ghostlike, a crystalline universe from which life seemed banished. I looked at the mountains: the vast blue wall barred the horizon, guardian of another world, a hidden one. The sun, over toward Abkhazia probably, was setting behind the ridges, but its light still touched the summits, casting on the snow sumptuous and soft pink, yellow, orange, fuchsia glints, which ran delicately from one peak to the other. It was a cruel beauty, enough to take your breath away, almost human but at the same time very remote from any human concerns. Little by little, behind, the sea was swallowing up the sun, and the colors were extinguished one by one, leaving the snow blue, then a gray-white that gleamed calmly in the night. The frost-encrusted trees appeared in the beams of our headlights like creatures in full movement. It was almost as if I had gone over to the other side, to that country that children know well, from which no one returns.

  I hadn’t been wrong about Bierkamp: the axe fell even faster than I thought it would. Four days after the conference, he summoned me to Voroshilovsk. Two days before, they had proclaimed the Autonomous Kabardo-Balkar District during the celebration of Kurban Bairam, in Nalchik, but I hadn’t attended the ceremony; Bräutigam, apparently, had made a long speech, and the mountain people had showered the officers with gifts, kinzhali, carpets, Korans copied by hand. As for the Stalingrad front, according to rumors, Hoth’s Panzers were struggling to advance, and had run aground in the Myshkova, sixty kilometers from the Kessel; in the meantime the Soviets, farther north up the Don, were launching a new offensive against the Italian sector of the front, routing them; and the Russian tanks were said to be within striking distance of the aerodromes from which the Luftwaffe was trying to supply the Kessel! The officers from the Abwehr still refused to give out any exact information, and it was hard to form a precise idea of the critical nature of the situation, even by tallying together the various rumors. I reported to the Gruppenstab what I managed to understand or corroborate, but I had the impression that they weren’t taking my reports very seriously: recently I had received from Korsemann’s staff a list of the SSPF and other SS officials appointed to the different districts of the Caucasus, including Groznyi, Azerbaidjan, and Georgia, and a study on the plant called kok-sagyz, which is found around Maikop, and which the Reichsführer wanted to start cultivating on a large scale to produce a substitute for rubber. I wondered if Bierkamp was thinking just as unrealistically; in any case, his summons worried me. On the way there I tried to muster all the arguments in my defense, to prepare a strategy, but since I didn’t know what he was going to say to me, I kept going in circles.

  The interview was short. Bierkamp didn’t invite me to sit down and I remained standing at attention while he held out a piece of paper to me. I looked at it without really understanding: “What is it?” I asked.—“Your transfer. The officer in charge of all police structures in Stalingrad asked for an SD officer urgently. His previous one was killed two weeks ago. I informed Berlin that the Gruppenstab could bear a reduction in personnel, and they approved your transfer. Congratulations, Hauptsturmführer. It’s an opportunity for you.” I remained rigid: “Can I ask you why you suggested me, Oberführer?” Bierkamp still looked displeased but he smiled slightly: “In my staff, I want officers who understand what is expected of them without having to explain the details to them; otherwise, one might as well do the work oneself. I hope the SD work in Stalingrad will be a useful apprenticeship for you. Also, allow me to point out to you that your personal conduct has been questionable enough to give rise to unpleasant rumors within the Group. Some have even gone so far as to mention an intervention from the SS-Gericht. I refuse on principle to believe such rumors, especially about an officer as politically aware as you are, but I will not allow a scandal to tarnish the reputation of my Group. In the future, I advise you to be careful that your behavior doesn’t expose you to such gossip. Dismissed.” We exchanged a German salute and I withdrew. In the hallway, I walked by Prill’s office; the door was open, and I saw that he was looking at me with a slight smile. I stopped on the threshold and stared at him, while a radiant smile, a child’s smile, grew on my face. Little by little his smile vanished and he contemplated me with a puzzled, troubled look. I didn’t say anything, just kept smiling. I was still holding my transfer. Finally I went out.

  It was still just as cold, but my fleece-lined coat protected me and I walked a bit, aimles
sly. The snow, poorly swept, was frozen and slippery. On the corner of a street, near the Kavkaz Hotel, I witnessed a strange spectacle: German soldiers were coming out of a building carrying mannequins wearing Napoleonic uniforms. There were hussars in orange, pistachio, or daffodil-yellow shakos and dolmans, dragoons in green with amaranthine piping, soldiers of the Old Guard in blue coats with gold buttons, Hanoverians in shrimp red, a Croat lancer all in white with a red cravat. The soldiers were loading these mannequins, upright, into canvas-covered trucks, while others were securing them with rope. I approached the Feldwebel who was supervising the operation: “What’s going on?” He saluted me and replied: “It’s the regional museum, Herr Hauptsturmführer. We’re evacuating the collection to Germany. Orders from the OKHG.” I looked at them for a while and then returned to my car, my travel orders still in my hand. Finita la commedia.

  COURANTE

  And so I took a train in Minvody and slowly made my way up north. The traffic was constantly disrupted; I had to change convoys several times. In filthy waiting rooms, hundreds of soldiers milled around, standing up or sprawling on their kits, waiting to be served soup or a little ersatz coffee before heading off into the unknown. Someone would give up a space on a bench for me and I would remain there, motionless, until an exhausted stationmaster came and shook me. In Salsk, finally, they put me on a train coming up from Rostov with men and materiel for Hoth’s army. These makeshift units had been hastily and haphazardly formed: men on leave intercepted on the way home, as far as Lublin and even Posen, and sent back to Russia, underage conscripts whose training had been sped up and then curtailed, convalescents swept out of the lazarettos, individual soldiers from the Sixth Army found wandering outside of the Kessel, after the catastrophe. Hardly any of them seemed to have any idea of the gravity of the situation; and that wasn’t surprising, the military communiqués remained obstinately silent on the subject, at most mentioning activity in the Stalingrad sector. I didn’t speak with these men; I stowed my kit and wedged myself into the corner of a compartment, withdrawn into myself, absently studying the large vegetal shapes, branching out, intricate, deposited on the window by the frost. I didn’t want to think, but thoughts flooded in, bitter, full of self-pity. Bierkamp, a little inner voice raged inside me, would have done better to put me directly in front of a firing squad, that would have been more human, rather than making hypocritical speeches about the educational value of a siege in the middle of a Russian winter. Thank God, another voice groaned, at least I have my shuba and my boots. It was frankly a little difficult for me to conceive of the educational value of pieces of burning metal tearing through my flesh. When you shot a Jew or a Bolshevik, it had no educational value, it killed them, that’s all, even though we had a lot of nice euphemisms for that too. When the Soviets wanted to punish someone, they sent them to a shtrafbat, where the life expectancy was a few weeks at most: a brutal method, but an honest one, just like everything they did, in general. One of their great advantages over us (aside from their seemingly countless divisions and tanks): at least with them you knew where you stood.

  The tracks were congested; we spent hours waiting on sidings, following unfathomable rules of priority set by mysterious, distant authorities. Sometimes I forced myself to go out and breathe in the biting air and stretch my legs: beyond the train there was nothing, a vast white expanse, empty, swept by the wind, cleansed of all life. Under my feet, the snow, hard and dry, cracked like a crust; the wind, when I faced it, chapped my cheeks; so I turned my back to it and looked at the steppe, the train with its windows white with frost, the rare other men propelled outside like me by their boredom or their diarrhea. Insane desires seized hold of me: to lie down on the snow, rolled in a ball in my coat, and to stay there when the train left, hidden already under a fine white layer, a cocoon that I imagined as soft, warm, tender as the womb from which I had one day been so cruelly expelled. These surges of melancholia frightened me; when I managed to regain control of myself, I wondered where this could be coming from. It wasn’t a habit of mine. Fear, maybe, I finally said to myself. Fine, fear, but fear of what, then? Death was something I thought I had tamed within me, and not just since the massacres of the Ukraine, but for a long time already. Yet perhaps that was just an illusion, a curtain drawn by my mind over the low animal instinct that was still there, lurking? That was possible, of course. But maybe it was also the idea of being surrounded: of heading alive into this vast open-air prison, as into an exile with no return. I had wanted to serve, I had carried out, for my nation and my people and in the name of this service, difficult and terrible things that went against my grain; and now I was to be exiled from myself and from the common life, sent to join those already dead, the abandoned ones. Hoth’s offensive? Stalingrad wasn’t Demyansk, and even before November 19 we were already at the end of our tether, out of breath and out of strength, we had reached the farthest limits; we, who had been so powerful, who thought we were just getting started. Stalin, that cunning Ossete, had used the tactics of his Scythian ancestors on us: the endless retreat, always farther into the interior, the little game, as Herodotus called it, the infernal pursuit; playing, using the emptiness. When the Persians gave the first signs of exhaustion and dejection, the Scythians imagined a way to give them some more courage and thus to make them drink their cup of sorrow to the dregs. They willingly sacrificed some herds that they let wander about in full visibility and that the Persians eagerly fell upon. Thus they regained a little optimism. Darius fell several times into this trap, but finally found himself driven to famine. It was then (writes Herodotus) that the Scythians sent Darius their mysterious message in the form of an offering: a bird, a rat, a frog, and five arrows. But, for us, no offering, no message: death, destruction, and the end of hope. Is it possible that I thought about all this at the time? Didn’t such ideas come to me later on, when the end was approaching, or even later, when it was already all over? Possible, but it is also possible that I already was thinking like that between Salsk and Kotelnikovo, for the proofs were there, you just had to open your eyes to see them, and my sadness had perhaps already begun to open my eyes. It’s hard to say, like a dream that leaves only vague, sour traces in the morning, like the cryptic drawings that, in the manner of a child, I traced with my fingernail in the frost on the train’s windows.

  In Kotelnikovo, the staging area for Hoth’s offensive, they were unloading another train before ours, so we had to wait a long time to disembark. It was a little country station made of worn brick, with a few platforms of bad cement laid between the tracks; on either side, the cars, stamped with the German emblem, bore Czech, French, Belgian, Danish, Norwegian markings: to gather materiel as well as men, they were scouring the farthest reaches of Europe now. I stood leaning on the open door of my car, smoking and watching the confused commotion of the station. There were German soldiers of all kinds there, Russian Polizei or Ukrainians wearing armbands with swastikas and carrying old rifles, Hiwis with hollow features, peasants red with cold come to sell or exchange a few meager marinated vegetables or a scrawny chicken. The Germans wore coats or furs; the Russians, padded jackets, most of them in rags, from which tufts of straw or pieces of newspaper escaped; and this motley crowd was talking, heckling, jostling each other at the level of my boots, in huge jerky waves. Just beneath me, two big, sad soldiers were holding each other by the arm; a little farther down, a haggard, dirty Russian, trembling and wearing only a thin cloth jacket, was stumbling along the platform with an accordion in his hands: he approached some groups of soldiers or Polizei, who sent him away with a rough word or a shove, or at best turned their backs to him. When he came up to me I took a small bill out of my pocket and held it out to him. I thought he would go on his way, but he stayed there and asked me, in a mixture of Russian and bad German: “What would you like? Popular, traditional, or Cossack?” I didn’t understand what he was talking about and shrugged my shoulders: “It’s up to you.” He looked at me for an instant and struck up a Cossack
song that I knew from having heard it often in the Ukraine, the one whose refrain goes so gaily Oy ty Galia, Galia molodaya… and which relates the atrocious story of a girl carried off by the Cossacks, tied by her long blond tresses to a pine tree, and burned alive. And it was magnificent. The man sang, his face raised up to me: his eyes, a faded blue, shone gently through the alcohol and the filth; his cheeks, beneath a scruffy reddish beard, quivered; and his bass voice, hoarse from coarse tobacco and drink, rose clear and pure and firm and he sang verse after verse, as if he would never stop. Beneath his fingers the keys of his accordion clicked. On the platform, the agitation had stopped, the people were watching and listening, a little surprised, even the ones who a few minutes before had treated him harshly, overcome by the simple and incongruous beauty of the song. From the other side, three fat peasant women were coming in single file, like three plump geese on a village path, with a large white triangle raised in front of their faces, a knitted wool shawl. The accordionist was blocking their path and they flowed around him the way a sea eddy skirts round a rock, while he pivoted slightly in the other direction without interrupting his song, then they continued along the train and the crowd shuffled and listened to the musician; behind me, in the corridor, some soldiers had come out of their compartments to listen to him. It seemed never to end, after each verse he attacked another one, and no one wanted it to end. Finally it did end, and without even waiting to be offered more money he continued on his way to the next car, and below my boots the people dispersed or resumed their activities or their waiting.