‘Right then,’ said Captain Kasko. ‘Now for some information about you.’ He took a blank sheet of paper and dipped his pen in the spill-proof inkwell. ‘So, born in Byelorussia, nationality Jewish, resident of Moscow, student.’ He then informed me, ‘In the morning you are being sent to Captain Borisov in an intelligence section group.’
He clattered about, pushing stools out of the way, gathering up his papers, moved the lamp to the stove, seized the desk and, pressing it to his stomach, humped it over to the wall.
He undid a cape groundsheet, took out his bedding and spread it on the table in a neat, housewifely manner, showing not the slightest concern about German tanks and bombs and, turning down the wick in the lamp, lay down and slept the sleep of the just.
The night passed. Before dawn I was again in the plywood-faced vehicle I had visited with the commissar and the prisoner. We were on the move to a new destination, but where we were or what sights we might be driving past there was no telling from inside this plywood hut on wheels. They set me down at the entrance to the village. ‘Look for a hut opposite the well; that’s where the intelligence unit is, and get to work.’
I walked along, keeping to the huts on the side they had indicated. There the houses were intact, but opposite several in a row had been destroyed. Through a gaping hole I could see a stove, but anything that had been destroyed by a bomb or a shell was either covered with snow or had been dismantled for firewood. A cat darted out and stood waiting, motionless, hungry, her eye glinting peevishly. She vanished through the gap, leaving her dainty, despairing pawprints in the snow.
A Red Army soldier was bowling along in an empty sleigh. In the distance a soldier with a rifle was walking to and fro outside a log hut. There was no one else, no sign of villagers. The village seemed extinct.
The well – my landmark – was very visible, with the long arm of the well sweep upraised. Opposite was a house with three windows. I turned the latch and the door opened. Little did I know as I went in how firmly that house would remain lodged in my memory and my heart.
I climbed stairs to the landing, where there were two doors: one leading to a covered courtyard and the other, to the right and insulated, leading into the hut itself. I discovered that later, but back then I just pushed one open at random and found myself in a smoky kitchen full of children. It was so unexpected that I was completely thrown and did not know what to do when Nyurka, the five-year-old ataman of this nursery, came dancing over to greet me with a German ramrod in her hands.
The extinct village in the crossfire of the battle for Moscow was decidedly alive.
The German was sitting in a corner by the table. The children shied away to a different corner and stared at him. It was impossible to compare him with those seventeen phantoms writhing with cold in that barn. He was handsome and young, and somehow fresh.
‘What is your name?’ I asked woodenly as I sat down on the edge of the bench.
‘Hans. Hans Thiel.’
The baby in a wicker basket whimpered and the eldest boy, barefoot and wearing a cap that had slid over his ears, began furiously rocking the cradle. The rod from which it was suspended swayed and creaked above us.
What else should I ask him? The blue light of his Aryan eyes was dazzling and I looked around for something else to focus on, deciding on the wall clock above the table. Green kittens frolicked on its dial, the hands indicated twenty-four minutes to ten, and a rusty padlock on a chain stood in for the clock’s weight.
‘Hans Thiel, do you have a profession or are you a professional soldier?’
‘I was training to become a naturalist.’
‘And what exactly were you intending to study?’ That was really the best I could do, and I could not shake off a strange feeling that I had known this German for ages.
The baby was still crying, and her brother bent over her, clutching the edges of the basket: ‘Shush, Shurka, that’s enough!’ He began singing in a thin, girlish voice, nodding his head up and down in the big cap. ‘There now, Shurushochki, shush Shurushochki!’
‘The topic of my dissertation,’ the senior lieutenant said loudly over the crying and the lullaby, ‘was Papilio.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘Or more precisely, the butterfly’s proboscis.’ Oh, a butterfly. Der Schmetterling. The very sound was musical. ‘Der Schmetterling’.
What is happening? I am six and my brother is a little older. We are lying under the bed waiting for our German teacher, Luiza Ivanovna. Her skirt rustles and smells of liquorice. ‘Guten Tag.’ We stay silent, pretending not to be there. She does not poke around the room, does not pull us out from under the bed, but sits down at the table, opens her extraordinary book published in Berlin and reads aloud, enticing us into the open like the Pied Piper.
Greta, Hans and Peter are three German children. They are keeping a diary, each for one week at a time. In Luiza Ivanovna’s voice they tell how they caught butterflies, and how frightened they were by a grass snake. They like brooks, and sunsets, and surprises on Christmas Eve.
A calf stirred itself and tried to get up. It stood for a moment on wobbly outspread legs before collapsing back on to the straw. A little barefoot boy with no trousers on, probably about two years old, peed on the floor. Captain Borisov returned from the communications point and commenced the interrogation. Lieutenant Thiel replied succinctly, making no attempt to be evasive.
The lady of the house arrived back wearing a dark sheepskin, and gasped, ‘Oh, my God, a German!’ She stood dumbfounded at the door. The German stood up, very straight, in a double-breasted greatcoat buttoned up high to a black cloth collar. The dark face of St Nicholas the Wonderworker peered from an icon in the corner behind his blond head. The clear, regular face of the German, in contrast, looked so much like one in a glossy picture in Fifty-Two Weeks, that old picture book in which sensible, storybook children lived long, long before two world wars in their musical German childhood. Schmet–ter–ling.
The woman moved away from the door. Senior Lieutenant Thiel turned abruptly in the doorway, stood motionlessly to attention, and threw back his bare, handsome head in an act of formal leave-taking. ‘Weirdo,’ said his hostess, but without malice. He strode through the doorway, past the home-made millstones in the passage, and down the steps with Savelov close on his heels, holding a rifle.
Zaimishche village. The Finns had already visited. Our hostess, Matryona Nilovna, told us they were even more vicious than the Germans. She had hidden their life-giving cow and five children in the forest from the Germans and waited for them to be gone. God alone knows how they survived and did not freeze to death. Now she had us in her house. Would we be staying long ‘or will you be running off again?’ she asked despondently. Her face was dark with soot from the stove and all her worries. About her husband she knew ‘nothing you can count on’; he had disappeared somewhere without trace in the war. She would sit down for a moment on the bench, her hands heavy in her lap until it was time to lift Shurka from her cradle and breastfeed her; or get to work washing at the trough; or perhaps it would be ‘time to feed the cow’.
We, the army, were in the guest half of the hut, and the entire family was in the kitchen. It was crowded there. In a cradle suspended over straw Shurka was lying on rags. Kostya, the eldest son, wearing his father’s cap over his ears, would lean his elbows on the table, talk to our guard and, without looking, rock the cradle with his bare foot. He was in charge of everything. Genka, a bit younger, rushed around all day and would stray away from the house. Nyurka fidgeted with her twisted German ramrod. Two-year-old Minka, barefoot, with a hole torn in his pants, felt the cold and periodically peed on the floor, tried to get the ramrod off Nyurka, and whined. ‘Shush!’ said his mother and, to Nyurka, ‘Don’t be mean, let him play with the chain.’ A loud bang, very close. Nyurka jumped and whimpered. ‘Shush, little one. The good Lord will protect us,’ Matryona Nilovna reminded her quietly.