“Come with us and maybe I look for apartment when I come back.”
“You’re such a liar.”
Tatiana laughed. “Vikki, I am good here at Ellis.”
“That’s the whole problem. You’re not good here at Ellis. You’re all alone, you live in one room with your child, you share a communal bathroom. You’re in America, for God’s sake. Rent yourself an apartment. That’s what we Americans do.”
“You don’t have an apartment.”
“Oh, for the love of Jesus and Mary! I have a home.”
“I do, too.”
“You deliberately don’t want a place of your own. Because that keeps you from getting involved with someone.”
“I don’t need to be kept from getting involved with someone.”
“When are you going to start being young? What do you think, if he was alive, he’d be faithful to you? He would not be waiting for you, I’ll tell you that. This very second, he would be knocking his brains out.”
“Vikki, how do you go around thinking you know so much when you know nothing?”
“Because I know men. They’re all the same. And don’t start telling me yours is different. He is a soldier. They’re worse than musicians.”
“Musicians?”
“Never mind.”
“I’m not having this talk. I’m not talking to you. I have patients. I have to go to Red Cross. Did I tell you I been hired on part-time basis for American Red Cross? They really need people. Maybe you should apply.”
“Mark my words. Knocking his brains out. Just like you should be doing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Majdanek, July 1944
THEY HAD STOPPED NEAR the woods in eastern Poland and were rearming and taking a drink.
“Why do we have to keep talking about God and about the Germans and the Americans and the war and Comrade Stalin?” said Ouspensky.
“We don’t talk about that,” said Telikov. “You do. You’re the only one who brings that shit up. Before you walked over, do you know what Commander Belov and I were discussing?”
“What?” barked Ouspensky.
“Whether the river perch or the river bass is easier to clean and which fish makes a better soup. I personally think the perch makes a great soup.”
“That’s because you’ve never had soup out of bass. Look, you’re dropping your ammo as you’re standing up,” said Alexander. “What kind of a soldier are you?”
“I’m a soldier that needs to lie down with a woman, sir. Or stand up with a woman. Basically anything with a woman,” replied Telikov, picking up his magazines.
“We got it, Telikov. The army does not supply women at the front.”
“We’ve noticed that. But I also heard that the 84th battalion a few kilometers south has three women nurses who accompany them in the rear. Why do we have only medics?”
“You’re a bunch of fucking convicts. Who will give you a female nurse? There are two hundred of you. That woman wouldn’t be alive in an hour.”
“I hardly think that matters, sir, to men like us.”
“And that’s why you’re not getting a female nurse,” said Alexander.
Telikov glanced at him in surprise. “Are you the reason we don’t have a woman nurse?”
Ouspensky said to Alexander, “I really don’t think it’s very fair of you, Captain, just because your own balls have been melted and frozen into igneous rock, that we should suffer. The rest of us are actually made of flesh and blood.”
“Yes, and we’re about to spill some of that blood, Lieutenant. Stop talking about my balls. Order your men to the firing line.”
Alexander went forward with 200 men, and by the time they reached Majdanek, at the end of July 1944, they had eighty.
They trod into Majdanek, which had been liberated by the Soviets barely three days earlier. The Nazi camp lay on a plate-flat field of brown-green grass and its squat, long green barracks looked almost like camouflage. Alexander smelled the acrid-sweet smell of burning flesh in the air, but said nothing, though by the gradual quieting down in his tank and around his formations, he could tell his men smelled it, too.
“Why did they want us to come here?” asked Telikov, coming up to Alexander and staring with him at the city of Lublin through the barbed wire fence. Lublin was just over the field and down a slope.
“The high command wants us to see what we’re dealing with as we force our way into Germany,” said Alexander. “So we don’t feel pity for the Germans.”
Ouspensky asked if the residents of Lublin could smell what he smelled, and Alexander replied that they had probably been smelling it every day for months.
The camp was small and seemed almost serene—as if the humanity had left it, leaving behind only ghosts—
And ash—
And bones—
And blue remnants of Zyclon B gas on the concrete walls.
Femur bones, and clavicles…
And spy holes in steel doors.
A “bathhouse” on one side of the small camp.
And ovens with one long tall chimney stack on the other.
A road that connected them.
Barracks that divided them.
A commandant’s house.
SS barracks.
And nothing else.
The men walked through slowly and silently, and then bent their heads, and finally, standing at the back of the camp, they took off their caps.
“Can’t pretend this was a forced labor camp, can you?” Ouspensky said to Alexander.
“No, can’t.”
But something else, too—past the ovens with white ash and white pieces of human skeletons, there were mounds of white ashes. Not ant mounds but sand dunes, pyramids, two stories high of white ash, and on even ground nearby the white ash was spread out, and on it grew enormous cabbages. Alexander, and his lieutenant and his sergeants and his corporals and his privates, stared at the ash and the cabbages the size of mutant pumpkins, and then someone said that he had never seen cabbages so big before, and if they took one, they would have dinner for eighty men tonight. Alexander didn’t let them touch it. In the long wooden warehouse full of shoes and boots and sandals, shoes of all sizes, boots lined and leather, he did let them take a pair of boots each, mindful of how hard it was to get requisitioned footwear in the Red Army, particularly in the penal battalions. The shoes were piled from floor to ceiling, jammed three meters high behind a wire netting.
“How many shoes you think there are here?” asked Ouspensky.
“What am I, a mathematician?” snapped Alexander. “Hundreds of thousands, I would guess.”
They left the camp silently and didn’t stop at the barbed wire fence to glance at the steeple churches of Catholic Lublin just a couple of kilometers away.
“Who do you think they did that to, Captain? Poles?”
“Hmm. Poles, yes. Mainly Jewish Poles, I think,” Alexander replied. “The command won’t say, though. They don’t want the Soviet army to be less outraged.”
“How long do you think it took them?” asked Ouspensky.
“Majdanek became operational eight months ago. Two hundred and forty days. Slightly less time than it takes one woman to make one life, they managed to snuff out a million and a half lives.”
No one spoke until they were a kilometer away.
Afterward, Ouspensky said, “A place like that just shows me the communists are right. There is no God.”
“That didn’t look like God’s work to me, Ouspensky,” said Alexander.
“How could God allow that?” Ouspensky exclaimed.
“The same way he allows volcano eruptions and gang rape. Violence is a terrible thing.”
“There is no God,” Ouspensky repeated stubbornly. “Majdanek, the communists, and science have shown us there is no God.”
“I cannot speak for the communists. Majdanek showed us only man’s inhumanity to man—this is what man sometimes does with the free will God gave him. If God made all men good,
it wouldn’t be called free will, would it? And finally it’s not science’s place to show us if there is a God behind the universe.”
“It absolutely is. What else is science for?”
“Experiments.”
“Yes?”
“Experiment with this—on such and such a day I slept so many hours and felt this way afterward. I ate x amount of food and was able to work for this long. In my forties my face began to line—science has told us this is the beginning of old age. How can the science that measures and combines and mixes and observes tell us what is behind the sleep?” Alexander laughed. “Ouspensky, science can measure how long we sleep, but can it tell us what we dreamed about? It will observe our reactions, it can tell if we twitched or laughed, or cried, but can it tell us what was inside our own head?”
“Why would it want to?”
“It can only report on the visible, on the ostensible, on the tangible. Science has no place inside my head, nor yours. How can it possibly tell you if there is a God? It cannot tell me what even you are thinking about and you are as transparent as glass.”
“I am, am I? You’d be surprised, Captain. I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about—”
“Where the nearest cathouse is?”
“How did you know?”
“Transparent as glass, Lieutenant.”
They drove on in their tank.
Later: “Captain, what are you thinking?”
“I try not to, Lieutenant.”
“What about when you can’t help it?”
“I think about the Boston Red Sox,” said Alexander. “And whether they’re having a good season this year.”
“The who?”
“Never mind.”
“Oh, my dear God.”
“There you go, calling on Him again. I thought He didn’t exist?”
“I thought you tried not to think?”
Alexander laughed. “I’m going to prove the inability of science to disprove the existence of God to you, Ouspensky.” He turned around and looked at the column of men marching doggedly behind the tank. “Now, look. Over there we have Corporal Valery Yermenko. This is what the army knows about him: he is eighteen years old, he has never lived away from his mother. He went straight from his family farm to Stalingrad. He fought in the city, surrendering to the Germans in December of 1942. When the Germans themselves surrendered a month later, he was “freed” and sent up the Volga to a forced labor camp. My question to you is, how did he get here? How is this young man walking with us through eastern Poland, in a penal battalion with the dregs the Siberian camps didn’t want? That’s my question: How did he get here?”
Ouspensky stared at Yermenko and then at Alexander. “Are you telling me that there is a God because some bastard named Yermenko managed to claw his way into your penal battalion?”
“Yes.”
“And I understand this why?”
“You don’t. But if you talk to him for two minutes, you will understand why God created the universe and the universe did not create itself.”
“We have time for this?”
“You have some place else to go?”
Very close to Lublin, they made their slow way through a field that was heavily mined in staggered row formations. The chief combat engineer got almost all of the mines, except for the last one. They buried the engineer in the hole made by the mine. “All right,” said Alexander. “Who wants to be the new chief engineer?”
No one spoke.
“One of you will either volunteer or I will volunteer one of you. Now which will it be?”
A small private in the back of the formation raised his hand. He was tiny, he could have been a woman, Alexander thought. A small woman. Private Estevich trembled as he stepped forward and said, “We won’t be hitting another field for some time, sir?”
“We will be coming into a town that has been occupied by the Germans for four years and before they retreated, they mined it to welcome us. If you want to sleep tonight, you will have to prepare to un-prime our sleeping quarters, Private.”
Estevich continued to tremble.
Inside the tank and in motion, Ouspensky said, “Will you tell me the end of your fascinating theory? I’m aflutter with anticipation.”
“Well, aflutter further, Lieutenant. I will tell you tonight, if we make it into Lublin alive.”
Estevich did well. He found five round mines in a small, largely intact house. The Germans left one place in town for the Soviet soldiers to rest in and then mined it to kill them. Eighty men made their beds in a broken dwelling, and when they were sitting in front of the fire outside in the yard, Alexander said, “Ouspensky, do you ever think of how many things you don’t know?”
Ouspensky laughed.
“Think of how many things you stumble on and say, how should I know?”
“I never say that, sir,” said Ouspensky. “I say, how the fuck should I know?”
“You don’t even know how an insignificant corporal in the first brigade ended up under my command when by all rights he should have been somewhere else, and yet you can sit there and assure me with all confidence that you are certain there is no God.”
Ouspensky thought first and then said, “I’m starting to hate this Yermenko.”
“Let’s call him over.”
“Oh, no.”
“Before I call him, I will remind you that for the last four hours you have been performing a scientific experiment on him. You have been observing him, you have been watching him carefully. The way he marches, the way he carries his rifle, the way he holds his head. Is he out of step? Does he show signs of tiring? Is he hungry? Does he miss his mother? Did he ever lie down with a woman?” Alexander smiled. “How many of these questions have you been able to answer?”
“Quite a few, sir,” said Ouspensky indignantly. “Yes, he is hungry. Yes, he is tired. Yes, he wants to be someplace else. Yes, he misses his mother. Yes, he lay down with a woman. All he needed was half a month’s salary back in Minsk.”
“And you know all this how?”
“Because that describes me,” replied Ouspensky.
“All right. So you know the answers to these simple questions because you know yourself.”
“What?”
“You know the answers because you’ve looked inside yourself and you know that though you’re marching and though you’re holding your rifle high, and though your step is with your fellow soldier, you’re tired, you’re hungry, and you want to get laid.”
“Yes.”
“So, you’re saying there is something behind what you see, and the reason you’re saying there is something else is because you know there is something behind you. There is something inside you that makes you say one thing and do another, that makes you march yet feel melancholy, that makes you look for whores yet love your wife, that makes you shoot an innocent German yet not want to hurt the rat that’s running among the mines.”
“There’s no such thing as an innocent German.”
Alexander continued. “The thing that makes you lie and feel remorse, that makes you betray your wife and feel guilt, the thing that makes you steal from the villagers knowing all the while you’re doing wrong, that thing is inside Yermenko, too, and that’s the thing science can’t measure. Let’s go and talk to him, and I will show you how far from the truth you were.”
Alexander sent Ouspensky to get Yermenko. He offered both men a cigarette and a glass of vodka and put more wood on the fire. Yermenko was wary at first, but then drank and warmed up. He was young and extremely diffident. He wouldn’t look Ouspensky in the eye, kept shifting from place to place, and said, yes, sir, no, sir, to every question that was asked of him. He talked a little about his mother in Kharkov, about his sister who died of scarlet fever at the start of the war, about his farming life. When asked about the Germans, Yermenko shrugged and said he didn’t read any newspapers and didn’t listen to much news. He didn’t know what was going on, he just did as he was told. He made a smal
l joke at the expense of the Germans, he drank another glass of vodka, and shyly asked for one more cigarette before going to bed. Alexander excused him and he left.
Ouspensky raised his eyebrows. “All right—so he’s a cipher. He is everyman, he is like Telikov, and like the engineer who just got killed—he is like me.”
Alexander was rolling cigarettes.
“He doesn’t want to know about the Germans, he just goes and shoots them when you tell him to. He is a good soldier, the kind you want in your battalion. Has some war experience, listens to orders, doesn’t complain. What?”
“So you’ve observed him closely, you’ve watched him, and now you called him over and you talked to him. We socialized with him. We warmed him up, we chatted, we joked, we know a bit about this person, science has made its conclusions, right?”
“Right.”
“Just the same way that science has observed the earth and the motion of the moon and the sun and the stars in the galaxy. The same way the telescope helped science discover the Milky Way and the nine planets, the same way the microscope helped Fleming discover penicillin and Lister discover carbolic acid. Right? We put Yermenko under the telescope when he marched, and under the microscope when he sat with us. We observed him the way science observes the universe—the only way science can observe the universe. Perhaps for a shorter time, but we have used the scientific principles that scientists use to tell us of the universe and how it was made, of atoms, of electrons, of cells. Perhaps we could find out what Yermenko’s blood type is? Perhaps we could find out how tall he is? How many push-ups he can do? Would all that help us, you think, to understand what is behind the man who marches on the field with us?”
“Yes,” said Ouspensky. “I think it would.”
Alexander lit a cigarette and offered one to Nikolai. “Lieutenant Ouspensky, Valery Yermenko is only sixteen years old. He killed his own father at the age of twelve. Village justice they called it, for the father was beating his mother daily. Yermenko simply got tired of watching it. He beat him to death with a stick. Do you know how hard it is to beat to death a grown man, especially for a small boy? He escaped village justice by running away and joining the army. He lied about his age—said he was fourteen—and they took him. During his training, he constantly had run-ins with his training sergeant, finally accosting him in the woods as the man was coming from mess and breaking his neck for humiliating him earlier at target practice. In Stalingrad, he distinguished himself by killing over three hundred Germans with his hands and his army knife—the army was too afraid to issue him a rifle. The building he took over remained under Soviet control from the beginning of the siege until the end. The Soviets gave up Yermenko to the Germans because they didn’t want anything to do with him. When the Germans surrendered, the Red Army got Yermenko back. They sent him to the Gulag where he sliced open the guard on duty, took the guard’s uniform and rifle and walked out of the camp compound, walking a thousand kilometers through the Soviet plains before coming to Lake Ladoga. Do you know where he was headed? To Murmansk. He wanted to get on one of the Lend-lease ships. Turns out he read just enough papers to learn about American Lend-lease: what they’re sending, what they’re producing, and in what numbers the ships are coming into the port. He was apprehended at Volkhov and our General Meretskov, not knowing what to do with him, decided to give him to me to dispose of.”