But what did I really know about Bystrov? I only imagined at that time that I knew him. He seemed just a level-headed, unassuming sort of fellow, until he emphatically made his mark. His slightly yellowed face was impassive but there was something in his movements, in the way he seemed always to be leaning forwards, as if preparing to jump; he seemed impulsive, focused, with a secret inner spring waiting to be released. It seems to me now that he was not really as immersed as the rest of us in the flow of the war.
In Omsk, in a comfortable apartment that had become chilly only as a result of the war, his wife, a chemist, would sit down at the piano late at night, after work, wearing a pair of warm boots and warmly wrapped up. He asked her to do that, and he would read us the letters she wrote him. So what was she playing back there? Scriabin, as I recall. How stable life was there, even now, safe, far away from the front! His only sadness was that they had no children. Others had far greater problems, their homes reduced to a heap of ashes, their relatives suffering in occupied territory, missing, or refugees barely alive, perhaps not all that far from his home in Omsk.
The keeper of the hearth was his wife, in the homely comfort of his mother-in-law’s apartment. Although that lady had died before the war, he cherished the memory of a representative of the ‘former people’, the ci-devants, with her sagacity and kindly benevolence towards him. The lynchpin of Bystrov’s life at the front was the dream he and his wife shared of the day when the war would be over, he would come back home and they would be reunited. But then, like a bolt from the blue, there was Klavochka! Who could have seen that coming? This is what happened.
We had reached the Baltic coast and, on our front, the war was over. For the time being, however, only our army was withdrawn and redeployed to Poland. The officers of the adjacent army, ‘my’ Guards army from which I had been transferred six months previously, came to our farewell party, and my friend, the headquarters clerk, Klavochka, asked to be allowed to come along. Out of a military tunic for the first time, she was wearing a neat suit made up from hessian of some sort, but skilfully tailored in the military mobile store. How deplorable that for so many years a tunic, so absurd and constricting on voluptuous Klavochka, should have masked her feminine deportment, the lightness of her vivacious shoulders. Her small head, crowned with billowing, self-styled curls, no longer seemed at all small above Bystrov’s shoulder as he whirled her round in a waltz. He had once mentioned having won a prize at an evening of ballroom dancing in Omsk, and that he had also come first in a motor race.
All this dated, 1930s, superman tinsel seemed thoroughly improbable in the charred setting of Byelorussia, which is where we were talking about it, but perhaps no more improbable than the cows that were going produce male or female calves on Lysenko’s say-so. There was, however, evidence to back up his claims, and when the time came for Bystrov to take his place at the wheel of a patched-up captured Opel, he proved an outstanding driver. Even before that, at our farewell party, he showed himself to be an outstanding dancer.
Klavochka danced tirelessly, heart and soul for the first time since the outbreak of war, with an outstanding dance partner! And she sang. She had a powerful, beautiful voice, and took her place, big and sumptuous, in the centre of the hall, eclipsing all other puny attempts by homegrown army entertainers. Her audience clapped and begged for encores, which she gladly provided. There was jubilation in her singing, and that evening Klavochka won every heart. Our colonel, unable to take his eyes off the pair of them, exclaimed, ‘Go for it, Klavochka! Klavdia the Great!’
Bystrov did not leave her side for an instant, and when she sang he stood close by. Again and again he whirled her round and, when he took her back to her seat he ardently, tenderly kissed her plump hands. He would have been the last person anyone would have expected so to lose his heart on the dance floor, in front of everyone. Bystrov was not, of course, so much captivated by the resemblance the colonel’s sportive eye had detected of Klavochka to Catherine the Great as she sang centre-stage in such grandeur. No, as he danced with her in his arms, whispering in her ear, kissing her hands, he was bewitched by her lightness, her warmth and gaiety.
The next morning Bystrov summoned a soldier and instructed him, ‘Right now, lad, take yourself off straight away…’ He sent by special courier to the headquarters of our neighbouring army a fervent declaration of love asking Klavochka to marry him. For the few days remaining before we were on our way again, the same scene was repeated every morning: ‘Right now, lad…’ and letter after letter winged its way to Klavochka.
He was entranced and wondrous to behold in those days, but what had brought this about? What sudden squall had so blown him off his steady course that he could, without a second thought of Omsk, surrender to this enchantment? Was it Klavochka? Yes, of course, partly; but something in Bystrov himself had been quietly ripening and just waiting to be detonated. The squall was that period of time itself, as victory beckoned. In a mere two weeks’ time we would be seeing in the New Year of 1945.
Bystrov had been changing. Close up it had been less visible than it is now, from afar, as I write these lines. He was already looking back less to his old life than to the new life incontrovertibly approaching as victory came nearer. Its contours were as yet obscure but already exhilarating. He was on tenterhooks, and suddenly there was Klavochka. Perhaps it was a personality change, a revelation.
He had served in the Army unassumingly, unhurriedly, not making himself unduly conspicuous, but now he was in a hurry. Eager for risk, he assigned himself a mission and went behind German lines, something his rank officially precluded. He did that not to gain recognition but because he needed to, in a hurry to compensate for things he had not found time for, had not made the effort for, despite being aware of inexhaustible reserves of strength within himself. Now he wanted everything: Klavochka, personal renown and, apparently, the scalp of Josef Goebbels.
Although I had great faith in him, not least because he succeeded at everything he undertook, his determination to capture Goebbels struck me as hare-brained. That sort of exploit was the last thing in my own mind. It seemed the purest vanity project. For a start, we did not know what route our army would be taking, where we would be when victory came, or where Goebbels might be hiding by then.
There was nothing hare-brained about the way Bystrov achieved a goal he had set himself, and the time was to come when not only was he moving in on his quarry, but his quarry was itself moving towards him. Perhaps it was the excitement of a researcher that motivated his pursuit of such a prize specimen. I do not know. Just as I do not know whether it was chance or predestination that made what he announced by the light of that candle beside that stove, which seemed a mere ridiculous whim, come true. I was to find myself drawn into the thick of events beyond even the dreams of Major Bystrov, and certainly of anything I myself could have imagined in our billet in Bydgoszcz.
All night Studebakers with doused headlights were rumbling through the city.[1] By dawn the sound of their labouring engines had ceased and the front seemed to have moved on. I was sent from headquarters to support the commandant appointed for the city because the garrison had no other interpreter. I was walking through the city to the outskirts. The liveliness in the streets had subsided; everything seemed quiet and empty. There was a slight frost in the air, and suddenly the sun peeped out, almost spring-like in its brightness.
1
The reference is to Studebaker US6 trucks, made in the USA during the Second World War for use by the American forces and, from 1942, also by those of the USSR.