David Robbins - Last Citadel

He crumpled the paper that had wrapped his sandwich, making an echo in the gallery hall, and stuffed the wad into the paper sack. He held up the imperfect circle of his apple. He admired it, red and splotched, uneven, bumpy. Only numbers were perfect, he decided; nothing else of mankind was. But it was their perfection that made numbers cold, made them no longer so important.

Abram Breit left his paper sack on the bench. He set the apple beside it for the lingering guard.

‘Katerina Berkovna?’

Katya turned to the voice. Ten meters behind her, an ancient man loomed on the lawn. The sea breeze freshened in his moustaches and crackled in his red burka cloak. He was far too broad and erect to be as aged as he was. This, thought Katya, is the Kuban. These are the Cossacks.

‘Lumanova,’ she said to the cemetery keeper.

She sent a quick glance to Leonid. Her husband stayed to the side in his major’s uniform, quiet, folded against the chill swirling off the Black Sea. Leonid nodded to her. I’ll be here, his gesture said. Go on.

The elderly giant strode to her. He opened his arms. His breast was mottled with medals.

‘Katerina Lumanova,’ he said. ‘Hero of the Soviet Union. Welcome home.’

Katya held her place while the great arms wrapped her, the dark cloak eased over her. The old man smelled of oils and wax, loam, wind, years.

‘Come,’ he said.

The old man led Katya into the crowded cemetery. She did not look at any of the crosses and tablets, chiseled and weathered by centuries of this wind. She strode behind the flowing cape, ahead of her quiet husband, through the long path of graves. In a minute, they left the cloture of the cemetery and entered open, rising ground.

The old man led them up a slope, then halted. He stepped aside and Katya lifted her gaze.

There were only two graves on this hillcrest. The earth here was bare but green. The hill presided over the village below and the patchwork fields of spring plantings, all yellow boxes and emerald squares. The Kuban River sallied west to the Azov Sea, cows walked in the shallows. In the southern distance, the Caucasus Mountains serrated the mist, guarding the coastline.

Both graves lay at the foot of marble Orthodox crosses. One grave had grown over nicely, with grass new for the spring. The other was a bald brown rectangle, a hole freshly dug and filled.

Katya sank to her knees. The earth was soft and receiving. She looked to her left, beside her father’s bare grave.

‘Hello, Valya.’ She leaned to run her hand through her brother’s grass, like rubbing his head. ‘Hello.’

She raised her head to Leonid, standing alone.

‘Leonya, come here.’

Her husband padded across the lawn to stand beside her. The cemetery keeper, unbidden, came too. The old man spoke first to Leonid.

‘Her father was hetman of this village. Did she tell you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dimitri Konstantinovich. He was a hellion, he was. His old father was the same. I didn’t know the boy here very much. He was always quiet as a youngster. But he was marvelous with a sword. That’s all I knew of him. Still, as a man he must have been one hell of a fighter.’

The back of Leonid’s hand brushed Katya’s hair. ‘The three of them,’ he said. All three Berkos. Heroes of the Soviet Union.’

Hero of the Soviet Union. These were the words etched into the crosses along with the names and dates of death.

‘The boy died at Berlin,’ the old man told Leonid. ‘Right at the end. A shame. Brave, I heard. A tanker, a real German killer. Good for you, lad. You took some hides, didn’t you? And Dima here.’

The cemetery keeper pivoted his large, slow hand to point at the bald brown grave. The old man clucked his tongue.

‘The damned Communists wanted to keep him in Moscow, you know, put him inside one of their monuments. Hero Dimitri Berko. Cossack. Working for the Reds into eternity. Bah! That would have proven there was no God.’

Katya had petitioned the Soviets to return her father to his village, to lay him next to his son. She, a hero and a hero’s daughter and a hero’s sister, asked, and the government had finally agreed. They found someone else, someone just as blistered and dead as Dimitri, to ensconce in Moscow. When the government agreed, she came home, too, for the first time since she left ten years past.

‘Do you know what happened? How the son here had to fire his cannon to kill a Tiger and so kill his own father?’

Katya stood, to silence the cemetery keeper. She patted his expanse of chest between the wings of cloak.

‘Thank you.’

The old man clamped his lips and blinked. He dropped his chin and backed away.

Katya reached for Leonid. He stepped into the vast space left by the old Cossack. Katya linked her arm with Leonid’s. She turned him to the graves.

‘Papa, Valya. This is my husband, Leonid. We were married right after the war. We live in Kiev now. Leonid still flies fighters. I don’t fly anymore.’

Katya eyed Leonid. She squeezed his arm and let go. Leonid kissed her cheek through her wafting hair. He turned away, taking the cemetery keeper with him back down the hill.

Alone, Katya lifted her face to the sky. She felt lost without Papa and Valya.

She turned to face the wind and the open land below, and began to cry.

This was where Valya and Papa had gone, into the Kuban wind. Into the mountains and seas. Into the earth, not as corpses but wheat and alfalfa, hay and tree, sunflower.

She laid her palm across her stomach. The tears dried on her cheeks.

Papa, Valya, she cast into the wind, knowing this was how they could hear her. I’m going to have a child.

Heroes, she thought. We are heroes, my clan.

The Russians have learned a lot since 1941. They are no longer peasants with simple minds. They have learned the art of war from us.

For ease of reading, this novel refers to all ranks in the German SS in terms of their American or British equivalents. For historical accuracy, the following table of comparative ranks is included.