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

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 For the time being, however, only our army was withdrawn and redeployed to Poland.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] 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. 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.

Then I noticed that to one side and slightly behind, my shadow was following me like a compacted version of myself. It had never seemed to be there at the front, or perhaps I had not noticed it. I felt suddenly uneasy, as if I, and my shadow following me like a pet dog, in this unfamiliar city were separate from everything of which I had been so much a part all these years at the front: as if now I was on my own, no longer belonging. It was a weird, even alarming sensation. It gradually faded as I walked on, but perhaps it was a portent of a new dimension my life was about to take on. I don’t know.

Neither do I quite remember how I came to be talking to Marianna, but it happened when I reached the city prison. The massive, brown, five-storey prison was empty, all the prisoners having been freed. Through the open gate of the prison yard and visible from the street, the former Polish warders were pacing around. They had suffered under the Germans and were ready now to go back to their old jobs. All were wearing their uniform caps and old heavy blue greatcoats, which in itself testified to their patriotism, since retaining any Polish uniform had been severely punishable under the Germans. This crowd of blue greatcoats seen through a prison gateway was a token in the winter sun of a resurgent nation.

A small person in grey, perhaps a young girl perhaps an old lady, tightly wrapped in a raincoat, was scurrying to and fro by the prison perimeter. This was Marianna K___skaya, a prostitute. Her shoulders were hunched, her collar pulled up to her ears. The ends of a light headscarf were firmly tied under her chin. Her face was blue with cold but her prominent green eyes looked up at me trustingly. She had been freed from prison by the Red Army but had not gone away. She was waiting for someone she was sure would be coming back for her and whom she called Alfred. There was something touchingly vulnerable about her.