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

But the train has come to a stop and is waiting for the green signal to allow it to pull into the station. The delay is irksome, and the remoteness of everyone and the emptiness that has appeared is a pain, and everyone is now irrevocably only looking out for themselves.

But now, out of the Black Eagle, from the fraternity of questionable ex-prisoners, the sturdy, ruddy faced hunchback is bringing across the highway a roast suckling pig, standing on all fours in a dish. The dish is being steadied by the owner himself, the Eternal Chancer. The pig, with a tomato stuck in its jaws, with carrots and green branches stuck in its back, is placed at the head of a farewell banquet. Major Bystrov is leaving.

Later Bystrov did come to see me once or twice in Moscow. He had a new position. He told me about his problems over moving from Omsk. I passed on a request from Klavochka to see him and he agreed to meet her at my apartment. I will never forget that evening, Klavochka in an attractive black silk dress with a square neckline and heavily embroidered with beading, patiently getting colder and colder in our chilly apartment, still under the impact of how much in love with her he had been and his proposal. Waiting for him to come at any moment, whereupon everything would work out well. He stood her up.

It seems to me that in the candlelight on that day in wartime so long ago, by the stove in Bydgoszcz, when he confided to me his plan to capture Goebbels, he began to dissolve, and was dissolving the whole time from then on, until he became a phantom and ultimately disappeared, leaving a trace in the form of Klavochka’s sequins, and a profound, sad puzzlement in her heart.

But, for now, we are still in Stendal. People are gradually leaving. Bystrov has gone, driving off in his car. The headquarters courier, Zhenya Gavrilov, looks at me with plaintive courtesy. In Poznań I had witnessed what at first had seemed no more than a harmless flirtation with Zosia, a local girl, and their inconsolable separation washed with his tears. The memory of that happiness only grew more intense in his sorrowful separation, until his heart was filled with despair. He passed his days now in a state of stupefaction, all his old initiative gone. Victory had not been the harbinger of a reunion with his beloved. While the war was going on, he had been able to hitch-hike back, with the kindly permission of Colonel Gorbushin, once or twice to Poznań. Now, as day by day ever more stringent conditions were being imposed on us, there was little chance of that, and marrying foreigners had been prohibited. He lost the will to live. Puffy, red eyelids corroded by tears reluctantly opened a slit, to reveal dull eyes which not so long ago had been quick and covetous.

Did it happen at the front that a soldier cried on leaving a village and bidding farewell to a girl he had fallen in love with? Hardly. In war men are warlike. Victory is the time for love, and that is why Gavrilov is crying now.

‘And you? After all, we agreed.’ ‘Well, what about you?’ ‘My grandmother used to say, “Victory is a disaster. Look what it’s done for us.”’ ‘She said that?’ ‘She was talking about something different. We will honour our Victory.’ ‘We shall.’

‘On 9 May, when they let off the fireworks, no matter where we are, we will think about each other. That is forever. The first glass on 9 May I will always, in my mind, drink to you.’ ‘And I to you.’

‘You have important work ahead of you. I know you will cope with it. How much we have been through. That cannot just disappear. I believe in you. You will write, I know, and you will not have to make anything up. You will write everything just the way it was.’

When we were still in the Baltic States, we came across a single domino piece, a double two. I broke it, gave half to him and kept half myself. These jokey halves seemed to be a pledge nobody else knew about of our secret oneness, or rather, and this was no joke, two talismans, which people so need at the front. Six months later, when R. was in Moscow, and through the years when he dropped in as he was passing through, he would ‘present’ his half of the double-two as a sign of faithfulness to our memory of the past.

I do not know what missions his native land sent him out on with my talisman in his pocket. He rose in his career through the ranks, and perhaps this modest little fragment reminded him of a time when he was pure, aloof and brave, like a free man. I keep my half of the double-two in a jewellery box with my medals.

Eventually a lorry took me from Stendal to front headquarters, to which I had been ordered to report for demobilization. We drove through Berlin and saw an American patrol, soldiers in khaki overalls strolling confidently down the street arm-in-arm with young German women.

Our truck sped another forty kilometres along Hitler’s famous autobahns. The driver, that same driver, my would-be ‘intended’, looked at me without a hint of ruefulness. Keeping his left hand on the steering wheel, he offered me a pack of American cigarettes a black driver had presented to him. ‘Help yourself, Comrade Lieutenant!’ Only I was a non-smoker.

He delivered me to my destination in Potsdam, front headquarters, lowered the side of the truck and carried a big heavy radio into the hotel. It was a parting gift to me from our army unit.

‘At home they’ll be preparing the dough for me, distilling the schnapps!’ he exclaimed euphorically, anticipating the welcome he would soon also be enjoying. ‘All the best for your life in peacetime,’ he said. He shook my hand firmly, and with that last handshake all my ties were broken. For four years I had not been my own person, I had been one of a community in the thick of a war and suddenly… I was out, completely alone. It was something I had forgotten or perhaps never known, something stupefying, just very bewildering.

On my own now, in those bewildered days in Potsdam, I slope in perplexity past gardens barely touched by yellow and crimson rust that screen the detached houses and the concealed, muted liveliness within them. I meet almost nobody coming the other way. It is a warm autumn. Lakes, mist above them, a haze that envelops and engulfs the feverish, nagging pain of parting.

What lies ahead? What is going to happen? I have no profession, only the unrelenting obligation I have, for some reason, taken on myself: to write. And is it an obligation? More likely, it is an alarming, doomed destiny. It is so little, but at the same time too much for my impending life, when I will be completely alone with everything that happened, everything yet to happen, with my secrets and my faltering faith in the logic of ordinary life and its fragmented routine.

In May we were still full of marvellous hopes for our peacetime future. On the threshold of victory, and for a brief moment after it, we all imagined a renewed world of real living, with much more freedom and much less mistrust than before. Our people, who had so selflessly displayed their best qualities in the war, could surely, we believed, count on the trust of their rulers. Had not the children of ‘enemies of the people’, and those ‘enemies’ themselves, to the extent that they were released from the prisons – priests, the supposedly ‘wealthy’ peasants who had been purged, the thieves – all risen up to defend the Motherland? Had they not given their lives?

In line with these awakened hopes, for a time excited ‘news’ spread, and Bystrov shared it with me, that some freedom of initiative would be allowed, like under the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, as the quickest way of healing the gaping wounds left by the war. Or that now we would be allowed to go on holiday abroad. In a word, we were thrilled and excited by the prospect of new uplands.