They did not try to set up billets in the peasant houses. They requisitioned Cherubin’s orchard and started building themselves wooden barracks. One of them was going to house the kitchen, which Kurt ran. Captain Gropius took him by jeep to Jeszkotle and the manor house, to Kotuszów and the neighbouring villages. They bought wood, cows, and eggs for prices they set themselves – very low, or else they didn’t pay at all. This was when Kurt saw the defeated enemy country close up, came eye to eye with it. He saw baskets of eggs brought out of cubbyholes, with streaks of hen’s droppings on the creamy-white shells, and the hostile, malevolent glances of the peasants. He saw ungainly, scrawny cows and admired the affection with which they were tended. He saw hens scratching in heaps of manure, apples dried in attics, round loaves baked once a month, bare-foot, blue-eyed children whose shrill voices reminded him of his daughter. But it was all alien to him. Maybe because of the primitive, harsh language they spoke here, maybe because the facial features were strange. Sometimes, when Captain Gropius sighed and said this entire country should be razed to the ground and a new order built on this spot, Kurt thought the captain was right. It would be cleaner and nicer here. At other times, the unbearable thought occurred to him that he should go home and leave these stretches of sandy ground, these people, cows, and baskets of eggs in peace. At night he dreamed of his wife’s smooth, fair body, and in the dream everything smelled safe and familiar, completely different from here.
“Look, Kurt,” said Captain Gropius, when they went on their next expedition for supplies. “Look what a big work force there is here, what a lot of space and land. Look at these stout rivers of theirs. You could set up hydroelectric power stations instead of these primitive mills, bring in power lines, build factories and get them to work at last. Look at them, Kurt, they’re not so bad after all. I even like the Slavs. Do you know that the name of this race comes from the Latin word sclavus, a servant? This is a nation with servility in its blood…”
Kurt wasn’t listening to him properly. He was feeling homesick.
They took everything they could lay their hands on. Some-times when they entered a cottage, Kurt got the impression the people there had only just finished hiding the food. Then Captain Gropius would draw his pistol and shout angrily:
“Confiscation for the needs of the Wehrmacht!”
At such moments Kurt felt like a thief.
In the evenings he would pray “that I won’t have to go further east. That I can stay here, and then take the same road home. That the war will end.”
Gradually Kurt got used to this foreign land. He knew more or less where each farmer lived, and even acquired a taste for their peculiar names, as he had for the local carp. As he liked animals, he had all the kitchen leftovers taken to their neighbour’s house – she was a skinny old woman with at least a dozen emaciated dogs. Eventually he got the old woman to greet him by smiling at him toothlessly and in silence. The children from the last, new house by the forest also came to see him. The boy was a little older than the girl. They both had very fair hair, almost white, like his daughter’s. The little girl raised a chubby arm and mumbled:
“Hi-hitla!”
Kurt gave them some sweets. The soldiers on guard duty smiled.
At the beginning of 1943 Captain Gropius was sent to the Eastern Front. He clearly hadn’t been saying his evening prayers. Kurt was promoted, but he wasn’t at all pleased. Promotion was a dangerous thing now – it distanced you from home. It was harder and harder to get supplies, and every day Kurt travelled around the local villages with a unit of men. In the voice of Captain Gropius he said:
“Confiscation for the needs of the Wehrmacht!” and took away whatever could be taken.
His men helped the SS troops to pacify the Jews from Jeszkotle. Kurt oversaw the loading onto trucks. He was sorry, though he knew they were going to a place that was better for them. He found it unpleasant when they had to seek out Jewish runaways in cellars and attics, chase terror-crazed women around the common and tear their children from their arms. He gave orders to shoot at them, because there was no other way. He fired, too; he didn’t wriggle out of it. The Jews refused to board the trucks, they ran away and shouted. He preferred not to dwell on it. After all, there was a war on. In the evenings he prayed “that I won’t have to go east from here, that I can stay here to the end of the war. God, make it so they don’t take me to the Eastern Front.” And God heeded his prayers.
In the spring of 1944 Kurt received an order to transfer everything to Kotuszów, one village further west, one village nearer home. It was said that the Bolsheviks were coming, though Kurt couldn’t believe it. Then, once they had all their belongings packed on trucks, Kurt survived a Russian raid, when the German garrisons at Taszów were bombarded. Several bombs hit the ponds. One hit the barn belonging to the old woman with the dogs. The maddened dogs went running around the Hill. Kurt’s soldiers started shooting. Kurt didn’t try to stop them. It wasn’t them shooting. It was their terror, in a foreign country, and their homesickness. It was their fear of death. Infuriated by terror, the dogs lunged at the loaded trucks and bit the rubber tires. The soldiers aimed at them straight between the eyes. The force of the shots sent the dogs’ bodies flying, and it looked as if they were turning somersaults. Splashes of dark blood appeared as they did back flips in slow motion. Kurt saw his familiar old lady run out of her house and try to drag away the live dogs. She picked up the wounded ones and carried them to the orchard. Her grey apron abruptly went red. She was shouting something that Kurt couldn’t understand. As the commander he should have stopped the stupid shooting, but the sudden thought possessed him that here he was witnessing the end of the world, and that he belonged to the angels that have to cleanse the world of dirt and sin. That something had to end, in order for something new to begin. That it was dreadful, but it had to be like that. That there was no turning back, that this world was condemned to death.
And then Kurt shot the old woman, who had always smiled at him in greeting, toothlessly and in silence.
The troops from the entire district assembled in Kotuszów. They occupied any buildings that had survived the air raids and built an observation point. Now Kurt’s task was the observation of Primeval. As a result, despite the move, Kurt was still in the village.
Now he saw Primeval from a certain distance, above the line of the forest and the river, as a community of scattered cottages. He also had a fairly precise view of the new house by the forest, where the fair-haired children lived.
In late summer Kurt saw the Bolsheviks through his binoculars. The size of peas, their vehicles were gliding along ominously in total silence. Kurt thought it looked like an invasion of small, lethally dangerous insects. He shuddered.
From August to the next January he watched Primeval several times a day. In this time he came to know every tree, every path, and every house. He could see the lime trees on the Highway and Maybug Hill, the meadows, the forest, and the copses. He could see people abandoning the village on carts and disappearing beyond the wall of the forest. He could see single, nighttime robbers, who looked like werewolves from a distance. He could see how day by day, hour by hour, the Bolsheviks were amassing more and more troops and equipment. Sometimes they fired at each other, not to do any harm – the time had not yet come – but to remind each other of their presence.
After dusk he drew maps and transferred Primeval to paper. He enjoyed doing it, because, amazingly, he was starting to miss Primeval. He even thought of how, once the world was cleansed of all the mess, he could fetch his two women and settle here, farm carp and run the mill.