Елена Ржевская - Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter - From the Battle for Moscow to Hitler's Bunker

The room is home to a sideboard too massive to be carried off by people fleeing in panic, its cut-glass panes sparkling. Outside the window a ragged bluish twilight is descending. The dense stone houses are bespattered with slithering snow. It is fast becoming dark in the room. Something darts across the floor and rustles in one corner, perhaps a mouse, perhaps some malevolent Germanic spirit. I come out of my reverie, pull off my mittens and grope in the already dark hallway for what remains of the candle. I pull it off the commode where at the last moment it has been blown out as those who had lived here retreated in haste from the apartment with their suitcases, bearing all the bundles of belongings they could carry and more, and now their ghosts are haunting the nooks and crannies, colliding with the ghosts of the Poles heaved out of their family home five years ago. All their other property became the spoils of war for the German family that invaded their apartment. Now a German catastrophe totters on top of that of the Poles.

I went back to the room and remembered about the window. From high up by the ceiling there hung a twined cord which I pulled and heavy curtains floated towards each other and fitted snugly together. For me it was an unfamiliar blackout method, but it was good not to have to fix a groundsheet or a blanket over a window. Now I could allow myself to light the candle. I struck a match, acutely aware, and later when recalling that evening, even more acutely aware, of the incongruity of how this halfburned candle had passed from one set of owners to another, and on from them to me.

I stood there, clutching what remained of the candle, looking round at the imperturbable sideboard and the magnificent curtains with their fringe and pompoms, so treacherously willing to serve new masters. I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs – one thing you don’t enjoy in war is privacy – and along the corridor, flashing his torch, came our Major Bystrov.

‘Cold enough to freeze hell over, Lelchen! Kalt! Sehr kalt! Warum kalt? Why is it cold when we’ve got a stove here?’ As indeed we had, only I had no idea how to get it going. I had never seen one like it before: low, small, square. It looked more like a locker, a smooth-faced stove with no chimney. Where was the smoke supposed to go? On the floor beside it was a wicker basket with neat briquettes of brown coal.

Bystrov had nothing against a degree of female incompetence, and may even have felt it displayed him to advantage. With speed and efficiency he worked out how to operate the stove and dealt with the perplexing fastenings on its door. (I held the candle.) The stove opened and the acrid smell of cold ash wafted out, a memory of the life lived here before we came, its last residue of expiring warmth.

A house that until recently had belonged to someone else was now abandoned. A candle. A few curious moments of a serenity rare in war, when everything is up in the air, still being made sense of by administrations, but when one thing at least is clear: the enemy has been pushed out and our orders are to stop here for now, in this city. Did something happen at that moment? It seemed at the time that nothing had, but looking back now it is clear that something did, at least as far as Major Bystrov was concerned.

I was used to his intimate German nickname for me (‘Lelchen’) and took it in my stride. I was used to his laborious efforts to piece phrases together from what he remembered of his school German. I had got used to his secret, passionate decision in respect of Klava – Klavochka! That brought us together, too. Even before then he had been happy to share confidences with me, but now, because Klavochka was my friend, I was positively his confidante. This time it was quite some confidence he shared.

Bystrov got the stove going and gave me instructions on how to keep it alight. Tonight, when people billeted here arrived, they would have somewhere to warm up. He was in a hurry to return to headquarters and prepare a reconnaissance report from intelligence coming in from the division, but paused for a moment and suddenly told me, as if it were obvious, ‘Here is what I have decided, Lelchen – or rather, this is the task I have set myself: when we enter Germany I am going to capture Goebbels.’ He might even have come specially looking for me to tell me that.

He had told me before that he could not be satisfied with a life without a specific task to accomplish in each phase of it, but then he had been speaking about before the war. At the front his job was to implement aims and plans that had been decided for him. In that respect, the war had clipped his wings. Now, however, it seemed he was on the brink of acquiring a clear mission of his own.

Who in their right mind would come up with an idea like that? But then again, Bystrov was not a loudmouth, not immature, not a fantasist. You could never have accused him of that, and now, somehow, he was growing rapidly. Those relentless days that fused into one long day left no time to delve into what might be going on in his mind, and in any case I had no inclination to try. We were in thrall to just one, overarching goal that was common to all of us, and that was to win the war.

It is only now, from a distance of many years, that I am trying to understand the meaning of the changes in him then, when victory was imminent. The blurred shadow from a guttering candle flame, its light glinting in the glass of that portly sideboard, the pretentious pompoms, the chimneyless stove, the obscure nooks populated by the town’s undead, the rustling… And in this weird setting, unflappably real, Major Bystrov. For a moment I see that calm expression on his yellow-tinted face but then, elusive, he dissolves in the candlelight and is gone.

Bystrov at the mature age of thirty-eight had a successful life behind him, and was still focused on it. In that life he had a candidate’s degree in biological science and was passionately devoted to the theories of Lysenko and the notion of being able to predetermine the sex of calves, bull or heifer, at will. He believed he was close to obtaining practical results when the war, temporarily, intervened. The war had also interrupted his work on a second dissertation, in philosophy. This, for some reason, I found incredible. Even though life at the front so discouraged speculative thinking, simplified matters and left no time for disconsolate navel-gazing, there were apparently highbrow individuals who still thought differently and devoted themselves to philosophical studies.

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.