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

An ex-typist for the Gestapo, as dark-skinned as an Indian, her back as slender as a boy’s, with a black fringe of straight hair, in a short, fluttering skirt, climbed lightly and impudently over the fence, ready to make herself useful or make herself scarce, and walked along ‘our’ street with an arch spring in her step, showing off gleaming legs and dangling a broadbrimmed raspberry red hat by its elastic. (Hats were still fashionable.) She walked bouncily along, audaciously intending to treat someone with apples from her bag, evidently wanting to dispose them favourably towards her. This seemed not to be an insurmountable challenge, if the tall, handsome soldier sent here to headquarters from a Lithuanian division, in view of the acute need for translators, was anything to go by. This risk-taking young fellow was, in defiance of all regulations, smitten by the diabolical Gestapo girl. On the other side of the wooden fence, the typist’s fit, handsome young husband was waiting for her. Climbing back over the fence in the same manner as before, she quickly rejoined him and they went off back to their uneasy, and to us incomprehensible, life.

Hungry refugees sat all day on the ground in the square by the town hall. Victorious soldiers, growing languid in the hot sun, hung round the necks of stray dogs long ropes of precious pearls recovered from a bombed jewellery shop during the advance, and were drowsily amused, watching as these strange, weightless collars dangling on the dogs’ chests and, when they ran, flapping up in front of their muzzles, goaded them. The dogs rushed around crazily until the thread broke and the pearls scattered over the roadway. Then the dogs went back to the soldiers and waited patiently to be thrown something to eat, and wandered around with strands of thread, strung with pearls, caught in their fur.

A truck driver I barely knew, having only ever been driven once or twice in his truck, hailed me in the street: ‘Comrade Lieutenant, wait!’ He handed me a letter and asked me to read it when I had a moment. It was a written proposal of marriage. He promised me a good life, on the basis of a house in Sochi which he co-owned with his sister. The letter brimmed with confidence that I would respond positively, but he was not in the least downhearted or offended when I did not. From then on, though, when we met we would stop and chat like friends, not mentioning the letter but with a sense of having a connection, because we knew about something that had happened, and also knew something about each other that nobody else knew.

He was still wearing the tunic of the rank-and-file front-line driver, but these days of peace had given him new confidence: very soon he would again be behind the wheel in a holiday area and, moreover, in the midst of all the devastation, owning half a house on the fashionable Black Sea coast. He was probably mentally asking me, ‘How many of us men have survived, and how many of you women are going to be looking for a man back there in Russia?’ – and aware of his immeasurably stronger negotiating position. ‘Not every woman is going to get one. The wretched war has done you quite some disservice.’ Or perhaps he was genuinely taking pity on me in what he took to be my unenviable circumstances by offering his candidacy.

When a sergeant happened to come by one day with a camera my suitor yelled, ‘Oy! Take a photo!’ He inscribed on the back of the photo, which showed the two of us standing together, words of parting that had become almost traditional in the war: ‘If not I, at least my picture is always with you.’

An elderly, nondescript looking lieutenant (on our travels all he ever did was issue us our monthly allowance), had until very recently been shy and self-effacing, presumably burdened by a sense of the insignificance, and even oddity, of his position as an accountant in the headquarters of an army on active service. But now he opened up and lost his inferiority complex. A roadside incident had helped. On the highway, a huge Studebaker truck that was hurtling towards a pedestrian, him, suddenly braked. As was not uncommon now on the roads, a huge black driver jumped down from the cabin to greet him. He grabbed his puny form in his arms, pressed him ardently to his bosom, expressing his admiration for the Red Army, and delightedly tossed the accountant, along with his briefcase, up in the air. Having endured the initial terror and survived (he did not crash down on to the concrete of the highway), the diffident accountant suddenly had a blinding revelation of the part he had played in the heroic events of the war.

We unrolled the old carpets smelling of mothballs and rolled up and sewn into their covers, and spread them on the floor. Perhaps we wanted to live the way the people who were here before we came had lived, to have a taste of their comfortable German way of life. Or perhaps we were in a hurry: when would life again be so comfortable and seemingly carefree?

The old plush armchair, the standard lamp with its faded grey silk lampshade, the cabinet with the porcelain… A place for everything and everything in its place. And the moths circling, businesslike, in the humid evenings just above the carpets. And completely covering the end of the house, the crimson leaves of the twining vine. And in the evenings the old wrought iron lantern will be lit. What could be better? And yet, something is missing. There is no sense of being at home. Something is not right. There’s no living in a house where there’s no master. This is no more than a billet. In places we had been put up in at the front, even in dugouts, we had felt far more at home, far more carefree, more relaxed and secure. The owner’s wife is working away in the tiny garden where one kind of fruit succeeds another. On the porch the owner’s ginger-haired mongrel, Trudi, is slumbering. The owner brings her something to eat in a paper poke, the dog gulps it down, whimpers, quietly licks its owner’s hands, runs after him, wagging its erect tail, following him as far as the dense barrier of shrubbery stretching along the boulevard. Until recently, no one, neither the owner nor his dog, would have dared to push their way through those bushes.

Before disappearing into them, her master firmly orders Trudi to turn back (the dogs here are amazingly well behaved), and she trots back to the house with her tail between her legs. The owner, holding his bowler hat firmly on his head, disappears into the bushes. Then the dog, after looking all around, nervously wagging her tail, heads for the kitchen of the victors.

Bystrov was greatly impressed by Germany, by its roads, and particularly by the way the town merged unnoticeably with the countryside and how the countryside, with its stone buildings, merged with the town. ‘This is where socialism should really have been built,’ he told me in confidence. ‘It should have been started here, not in Russia.’ In Rathenow, from where we later moved to Stendal, we had lived in the gloomy mansion of the owner of a factory that made cases for spectacles. For some reason Bystrov particularly took to that house. It had a grand staircase up to the first floor and a chandelier in the hall. He seemed so downcast when he said there was absolutely no possibility he could ever have anything to compare with it. I felt nothing remotely like that regret. I was, of course, much younger than him, and what had I in common with the respectable owner of the house, who on Sundays invariably took his ease on a chaise longue on the balcony?

Bystrov changed. Little by little, it has to be admitted, he forgot Klavochka, which is forgivable given that their romance had lasted for only the one evening of their acquaintance, when our army was being given a send-off. What a succession of massive events and alarums were to follow.

In Rathenow Bystrov had a modest lyrical interlude, a light, amusing romance with a pretty German woman, the local hairdresser. It was so uncomplicated, so irresponsible, and had an added dash of danger, because it could have done serious damage to his career. I think he looked back fondly on his amorous escapade. It is no small matter how we see ourselves afterwards, remembering, and now Bystrov could remember himself as a fine, gallant gentleman, with none of the churlishness of a victor, with little posies of flowers, sneaking out through a window at night, completely unseen, in violation of a strict prohibition of intimacy with German women, overcoming the conditioning of servile obedience and fear, seizing a moment of freedom, and feeling almost European.