Erika Holzer - Freedom Bridge

He pressed binoculars into Kiril’s hands.

“I don’t like,” Kiril said, handing the binoculars back.

“Your friend Brodsky is in this field!” Luka announced triumphantly. “Your friend and other traitors, all together in one big hole, like garbage in garbage dump. Look!” Luka said insistently, brandishing the binoculars. “Still have time to say goodbye!”

Kiril’s head snapped back as if he’d just caught the sting of a whip.

Not Stepan. Not in such a place!

Swinging around in the small aisle until he faced Rogov, Kiril lunged for his throat.

With a swift upward motion, Rogov broke Kiril’s hold with one hand. With the other, he brought the butt of his Nagant revolver against the side of Kiril’s head. Staggering backward, Kiril fell against Galya and Brenner before dropping to the floor. Luka resumed his seat and holstered his gun.

His head bleeding, his mind reeling, Kiril pulled himself up as the others sat frozen in their seats. Reaching for the wall phone, he shouted orders in German to the flight deck.

Galya gasped.

“Godammit,” Brenner muttered, gripping the arm rests again.

Adrienne Brenner’s hand was shaking as she pressed a handkerchief against Kiril’s head wound.

As soon the helicopter’s wheels touched the ground, Kiril thanked Rolf Gruner for setting down. “We’ll be staying only a few minutes,” he reassured the captain.

Opening the helicopter door, Kiril jumped down, Rogov right behind him. Galya and the Brenners followed.

Adrienne glanced back at the helicopter, its blades still rotating slowly, perched on the field like some wary bird poised for flight.

All five of them stood looking at a couple of uniformed soldiers headed in their direction, submachine guns in hand.

“Vopos,” Kiril told them. “Let me handle this,” he added with a warning glance at Brenner before walking toward the soldiers.

Brenner caught snatches of German, followed in short order by angry demands for an explanation. But Andreyev’s authoritative voice—he said something about it being an inspection—made the Vopos uncertain about what to do next. One decided he would go to the phone at the guard shack three hundred or so yards away.

The other Vopo’s mind was apparently made up for him, Adrienne thought, as she noticed what appeared to be some kind of a disturbance at the other end of the large field.

“What’s that about?” she asked Galya.

“Is better not know, better not be mixed in,” she whispered.

Adrienne shrugged and started to walk in Kiril Andreyev’s direction.

“Please to stay near helicopter,” Galya called after her. “We have no permit to be here. I heard Mongolian say field is mass grave. But not like Treptower. Not for heroes from Great Patriotic War. This is mass grave for traitors.”

Adrienne stared at her.

Like Paul Houston’s friend, Stepan Brodsky?

“Where do you think you’re going?” Brenner asked Adrienne.

“To see for myself,” she said flatly.

Her heels sunk into the black furrows of the freshly plowed field. It covered an area large enough for a hundred conventional graves, she thought. How many could be buried in a human dumping ground, a thousand? Two?

Dr. Andreyev, his Mongolian “shadow” a few feet behind him, was walking along a barbed-wire fence that surrounded the field. Adrienne groped in a side pocket of her bag for a slim silver object the length of a pocket comb. Avoiding the gaze of the pilots and the Vopos, but not particularly concerned about Dr. Andreyev’s nurse—or was Galya his girlfriend?—Adrienne slid the outer shell of the miniature Minox back and forth, exposing the lens as she snapped photographs of the field… the barbed wire… a couple of signs that said verböten .

The Minox back in her bag, she was about to rejoin the others when she caught a glimpse of Dr. Andreyev’s face. She was reluctant to infringe on his privacy. What changed her mind was the sight of his mouth. It was distorted by such pain that not even his dark glasses could mask it. Slipping out of her shoes so she could better navigate the pliant earth, she went over to him and touched his arm in a gesture of support.

“I have seen their barbed wire, their submachine guns,” he said slowly as if conversing with a total stranger. “I have been to their detention camps and their mental wards. I have seen how they punish the living. But this . This is a form of vindictiveness I had never imagined. To punish the dead? To rob them of a decent burial?”

“The dead are beyond punishment,” she said gently.

“What about the people who mourn them?” he countered. “A grave is for remembering. Why else do we return again and again to converse? To leave flowers? To say a silent prayer?”

Why else, indeed? she thought. Then he said something she would never forget.

“Now I must spend the rest of my life trying to forget this place.”

In an effort to distract him, she pointed out the disturbance she’d noticed at the other end of the field. “What’s happening over there?”

He shrugged. “I’ve no idea.”

“Why don’t we find out?”

As the two of them made their way back toward the fracas, Adrienne, lost in thought, was certain of one thing. Whatever his motives, her “tour guide” was no apologist for a totalitarian regime, neither East German nor Soviet. Kiril Andreyev was one of its victims.

Angry words nudged Adrienne out of her somber reverie.

“Are you denying what we both know? This is a burial ground!”

The angry words came from a short muscular man dressed in laborer’s clothes who was addressing a Vopo. Three other men stood next to the laborer, looking uncomfortable in their neatly pressed suits. One of the men had a protective arm around the shoulder of an old woman in black shawl and babushka.

… Not so old, Adrienne realized, moving closer. Just tired, bent, and weary, with deep crevices running down her parched cheeks.

“Can I help?” Dr. Andreyev asked in German, to the consternation of the Vopo.

“My name is Zind, Albert Zind,” the laborer said. The man’s hair was the color of sand. His blue eyes were expressionless.

“Erich and Gunther, my brothers. Our friend, Otto Dorf.” He pointed them out. “Our mother. We were told my sister’s body was here so we came all the way from Potsdam to visit her grave.”

Kiril translated for Adrienne.

“Our papers.” Albert Zind handed them to Kiril, who looked them over. “You can see they’re in order. And still they refuse to help us.”

“These people are a pack of fools,” grumbled the Vopo. “They claim to have special permission to visit some grave. Where do you see graves around here? Where are the headstones? Let them visit every cemetery in Berlin for all we care,” he said with feigned indifference.

“My mother is not well,” Zind persisted. “The trip has been grueling. I promised her she could say a few words at her daughter’s grave. Only a few words. Then we will leave.”

Again, Kiril translated for Adrienne. For once he was grateful that Luka Rogov was dogging his footsteps. The grim authority of Rogov’s military tunic, the red star emblazoned on his cap, spoke volumes to the East German Vopo.

With a friendly gesture in Rogov’s direction, Kiril said, “We insist that you allow this family to mourn. Unless, of course, you can prove to the appropriate authorities that their papers are false? If you cannot, my associate and I will file a report that you refused to follow our orders.”

The Vopo turned sullen, but he backed off.