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15. THE BABI YAR KEY
On 10 October 1943 the Red Army sprinted over Dnieper River and got a foothold. Abrasha's army reached the left bank opposite to Kiev. Hitler considered the largest Soviet city in his jaws more important than Italy and moved some of his troops from to Kiev. Thus, once again the Red Army saved many American and British lives there later.
What was Kiev like then? Not the war zone yet, but the city without people looked dead. Besides the ruins, once-proud buildings, mansions and cars were deserted, looted or burnt.
"The SCHMUCKING pavement... will hospitalize a mountain goat," Roma the Scatterbrain cursed a few weeks later when he tripped on a main street. He used a stronger rhyming epithet, but it is not a schoolyard to cite it here.
Disgruntled characters -- mostly Ukrainian policemen, albeit Germans too -- assaulted and murdered whenever and whomever they wished with no provocation, broke into homes and businesses, seized the property and turned fancy neighborhoods to the hoods. To be noted by the thugs was not good for a prudent person.
The folks were terrified seeing uniforms or the armbands on the civilian clothes in the streets or the public transport and detoured to avoid the attention. Idleness and alcohol tormented the deranged thugs reveling in the sense of their significance.
Just about anybody who was a nobody could humiliate, rob and murder at random at any minute.
Sometimes a wild unbridled swarm formed to participate in a major event. The detachment, deprived of human hearing, vision and reasoning, listened to no one, destroyed and burnt everything destroyable and burnable, tore every thing and body to pieces on its way to hysteria. It is just what Comrade Lenin had in mind:
"An idea can capture masses and become a material force."
That force could drive to any insanity.
A similar picture Roma observed three decades later when he hardly avoided making himself a target. It was neither a war, nor another epoch -- just another zone, namely peaceful Detroit, USA, 1976. Albeit the mob had neither uniforms, nor armbands.
A year in a war was counted as three in calculating pensions for the military service in Russia. Nobody counted the years the general populace spent in the occupied cities back in Russia or USA.
Germans rounded up the people outdoors, in movie theaters, public baths, and houses. They checked out the Soviet identifications listing so-called nationality. Soviet officials gave no reason for existence of that notorious bloody paragraph. For purely racist segregation, one presumes. Germans sent the fit locals to slave in German farms and factories.
Brunets and long-nosed people were required to have not only the proper paragraph, but to get an expert medical opinion too. They dropped trousers right on the spot.
Once in 1942 Ukrainian neighbors dragged Roma's future friend, five then, to the police. He was a swarthy long-nosed Osset. His mother produced the right papers, and Germans released him.
After the main massacre, Germans converted the Babi Yar site to a temporary camp and transported thousands of victims from other parts of Ukraine for extermination. It took Syrets name from the nearby neighborhood. Carpenters, shoemakers, tailors, and other artisans served the needs of the SS men and of the Ukrainian guards there. They killed the workers within a few weeks.
Of course, thousands of civilians, in retaliation for just one or two of them breaking the Nazi order, ended in the ravine too. So did the Soviet prisoners of war. Second to the Jews, they were the largest group (3.3 million) perished or murdered altogether in Europe.
If occupiers were brutes, then Ukrainian policemen were much worse. They terrorized the populace in Kiev and prisoners-of-war in the Darnitza concentration camp.
Germans did not make a ghetto because Kiev had Babi Yar. But when they liquidated the ghettos in other occupied territories, the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police blockaded the places, hunted escapees and escorted Jews to their execution in pits.
Despite pro-Nazi activities and even formation of their own division SS "Galichina", Herr E. Koch -- occupied Ukraine's German commander -- denigrated Ukrainians and ordered his subordinates "dealing with that nation, inferior in all aspects, to have no social contacts with Ukrainians."
In 1943, Roma's future subordinate Nina was six. She looked typically Jewish, like her father killed in the action. Her mother was a typical Ukrainian. They remained in occupied Kiev, where even a nobody needed a pure luck to survive. The mother was lucky enough to be neither a Jew, nor a Gypsy, nor a loony, nor a commie, nor a Soviet official, nor a radio owner. Nevertheless, she committed offenses, for which should be shot several times. She neither handed over the felt boots, food and fuel above the prescribed three-days ration to, nor informed the Germans of and hid her own enemy -- the little dirty Jewess, or more precisely, Jewish-Ukrainian hybrid.
The German occupation made no good. The terrible hunger left them only the grate and skin. They looked like the Red Army stunted nags, half-dead from the lack of fodder. On his way to Kiev with a Red Army field hospital, Roma observed people, like stray dogs and cats, with such glistening eyes.
Not to starve to death, the mother scrapped some old clothes together and went, along with her daughter, to a village to barter the rags for food and stay with her relatives there. On the road, a German open truck stopped, and the undisciplined soldier-driver maliciously violated his superiors' order and offered them a ride.
The happy couple obliged in the truck body. It was already filled with Ukrainians. The happiness was short lived though.
"Stop!" the fellows-countrymen shouted and banged on the driver's cab. "A little dirty Yid is among us."
The German obliged, got out of his cab and looked at the little disturber of the Olympian calm:
"All to be off!"
The traitor of his own Fuhrer and great German nation did not shoot, put the couple in his cab, drove to and dropped them in their village.
As the touchy and exciting consequence of that episode, years later Roma had no qualms working for German expatriates in Iowa and Toronto, then spent five years in the courts for his defense from and offence against them.
In the spring of 1943 some Ukrainian policemen deserted with their arms to join the Ukrainska Povstanska Armyia (Ukrainian Insurgent Army). Others retreated westward with the German forces and were incorporated into the Ostbataillone and the Ukrainian National Army later.
In July 1943, when the Red Army started to recapture the occupied territories, Germans put forward obviously the most important task of erasing ghastly all evidence of Babi Yar's mass carnage. In mid-August they embarked on exhuming and cremating the ravine's corpses.
That is why Germans sent not all their prisoners to the grave in Babi Yar and surprised 327 inmates (including 100 Jews) from a nearby Syrets concentration camp. The guards led the captives toward Babi Yar and instead of shooting, just chained them together with the clamps on the ankles and a large padlock. Then the jailers lined the men up, checked everyone's chains, provided a dinner and placed the prisoners in the ravine's dugouts with guarded iron doors and a watchtower's machine-guns always aimed at.
Since then, the guards checked the chains three times a day. Yet, they tolerated the ropes that inmates attached to their trousers' tops to suspend the chain and relieve the tortured ankles. After the check up the guards reported happily to a certain Topaide, the German commanding officer:
"In the heavenly team there are so and so live corpses."
At first the captives put railway rails on the ground. Then they topped that with the granite monuments and tombstones removed from the Jewish cemetery and still bearing the inscriptions. The iron fences from the cemetery were next. Finally, they covered the furnaces with wooden logs doused in gasoline or heating oil.
The job was a top secret even for the German suppliers. They brought food, logs and oil only beyond the ravine. Then the guards' trucks moved the stuff farther.
On August 18, 1943, bulldozers opened the mass graves. During six weeks the prisoners hooked and pulled the corpses out of the mass grave in the ravine to the top ground. Each German slave master with a sharp iron whip and the open pistol holster handled five men and shouted "Schnell! Schnell!" all the time. They shot on the spot and then had burnt, sometimes on the stake, those who fell ill, lagged behind or talked. The guards on the slopes kept their machine-guns at ready too.
Not a day passed without shooting five people at least, some inmates committing suicide. That is why Germans brought the replacements in every day.
"The front moves here," the newcomers said. "Listen to the faraway sounds of blasts."
On the high ground, inmates removed rings, earrings and other jewels, clothing and the footwear from and put the bodies on the cremation pyres, 2-3 thousands of bodies per one fire. The prisoners used pliers for the victims' golden teeth,
Men hardly breathed. The Germans could not withstand the lively scenery and stink, drank vodka and water all the time and were replaced very often. Yet, they did not allow the prisoners to wash even the hands.
Did Kurenevka's (Podol's part of Kiev) dwellers guess what was going on in Babi Yar when the thick black smoke covered the sky over and the wind brought the burnt flesh stink? It was well beyond their imagination.
Fire did not destroy the bones. The slaves crushed the half-burnt bones on tombstones with wooden rams, sieved the matter and crushed the big remains again, then mixed everything with and spread the stuff over the surrounding vegetable gardens and dirt roads. The thorough job left no trace of the mass grave.
While the Red Army advanced closer and closer, the Germans became more and more anxious.
"The work is very slow," the higher-ups shouted at Topaide and started the chain reaction. "Wake up the prisoners earlier and punish more to finish the job quicker."
"You're too cordial," Topaide yelled at his German guards then. "Beat them up."
Authorities around the world always and everywhere have used carrot-and-stick policies. After the inmates had their share of the stick, he had the inmates lined up and promised a bit of carrot to come their way.
"I'll take those working well to Zhytomir, Berdychev and Lvov. The rest would stay here," he said and pointed to a furnace."
The executions went still on in Babi Yar, the bodies going directly to the furnaces. The last in line were Germans' own servants and the collaborating fries that knew too much.
A gasenvagen came to the ravine almost daily. Germans opened the door and had captives unloaded the corpses from and put into the fire. Sometimes the machine arrived with the people inside still crying and knocking on the walls.
Once the gasenvagen came filled with naked dead girls. Some held handkerchiefs with hidden rings, earrings and watches. The Germans chuckled and joked. The girls were the sexual slaves the retreating gangs could not take along.
Crumpled and ground into the dirt by the enemies and circumstances, the prisoners did not feel themselves worthless. No matter what has happened or what will happen, they did not lose their value.
"A crumpled and dirty money bill worth the same as the new one," a nameless inmate said. "Dirty or clean, crumpled or finely creased, you are still priceless to those who love you. The worth of our lives lies not in what we do, but by who we are."
Scabies ate the filthy, sooty bodies of the half-clothed walking corpses stinking of rotting flesh and having just a little physique. Yet, their spirit defied everything that the Nazis had done to them and was set on surviving in order to tell the world about Babi Yar.
Once a miracle happened. A German guard allowed to a certain Fedor Savertanny to step away from his group to satisfy his call of nature. Then some bosses distracted the guard's attention. Fedor managed to get rid of his chain and to escape to the city.
Fedor's miracle turned to the shooting 15 inmates in retaliation. That is why the prisoners agreed to escape only as one group. Sixteen men started digging a tunnel in the barracks with their bare hands, camouflaged the hole and put the dirt under the bunk beds. But a certain Nikon, one known informer and ex-policeman, informed the Germans. They shot all diggers and had them put onto the furnace.
Once an inmate pulled the corpses out.
"My wife and two daughters!" he screamed. "That's her neck's scar
after the surgery she had just before the war."
In the evening he came to the dugout.
"My wife and two daughters, ten and twelve, could not flee from Kiev," he sobbed. "I went to the front on the first days of the war, was captured and heard nothing of them."
"The only person who is with us our entire life is we," the young philosopher said. "Don't sob because it's over, smile because it happened. You experienced a nice woman, had lively girls and can recall all the happiness you've had. I'll die without experiencing even a girlfriend. Cherish those moments and count your blessings, not your curses. The number of breaths we take doesn't measure our life. The moments taking our breath away do."
A certain Yasha (Jacob) Kaper could not sleep that night. If we open the door padlock and attack the guards, at least some people will escape and tell to the world about all this, he thought.
"Let's find the key matching our big padlock," he said to Volodya Kuklya and Leonid Kadomsky. "I know the key type. The bottom corpses -- the Jews -- are absolutely naked; the middle layer is half-naked and the top ones -- the gentiles -- are dressed. Most of them have keys in the pockets. They locked their flats and apartments and took the keys with them when they left."
Then Yasha explained what to look for.
"Bring only the right key type to the dugout," he said. "The guards search us always. Don't have more than one key in a pocket. The noise will kill you."
Only Yasha brought a new key every day. The couple found nothing suitable, they said. After a few days, Yasha bothered them no more.
"I have several suitable keys," he said to certain Trubakov and Doliner. "If you shield me near the door from the guards when they give out our meals and from other inmates, I'll test the keys in the padlock."
Jewish luck! After another two days, one key matched. Yasha hid it near his sleeping spot.
While pooling the corpses, the inmates were on the lookout for sharp metal pieces. That is why mishap almost botched Yasha's plan. A German guard checked the cuffs and touched a hard object in a nameless conspirator's pocket.
"Turn the pocket out!" he ordered.
Scissors fell out.
"What had you taken the scissors for?" Topaide himself beat the poor fellow.
"To cut my hair."
"Lie! To cut the rivets on the chains."
"No."
The savage beating brought still the same answer. When the prisoner fainted, he was thrown into the fire. Under the flame he regained consciousness, screamed and died horribly.
On September 29, 1943 there were no corpses anymore. The prisoners removed the camouflaging fences. When the Germans ordered to erect another furnace, the men understood for whom the furnace will burn.
The Germans lined them up, whispered something and looked at the road. The big bosses did not come, and the Germans put the men into the dugout.
"Vogt, a guard, whispered to me that tomorrow would be our last day," a certain Yakov Steyuk, an interpreter, told the conspirators. "Someone else said that they waited for their higher-ups. That is why we're still alive."
"I've got the key," Yasha said to a certain Budnik. He came back with Steyuk. They asked for the key.
"Later tonight we remove our chains, open the door and run away," they said.
While the men helped each other to get the chains off, four Germans approached the dugout and opened the door.
That's the end, Yasha thought.
He was wrong. The Germans brought in two big pots of potatoes. The Last Supper! Did they read the bible or what?
The conspirators told other inmates of the plan. Everyone was quiet, but nobody slept.
At midnight, Yasha got up, but people were afraid to take their cuffs off. He got pincers, broke the rivets of his clamps and helped all those he trusted.
At that time Volodya Kuklya carefully inserted the key into the padlock, all his extremities trembling. At first he failed to press hard enough through the barred door. Finally, he made one turn.
A German guard heard the clink and came up to the door. Kuklya ran away from. The guard pointed his flashlight to the padlock and tried the door. Everything was fine until Kuklya tripped over the pots while running.
"What's the matter?" the German shouted.
"We're fighting over potatoes," Steyuk, the interpreter, said. The German roared.
"They are fighting over potatoes," he told another guard walking on the dugout top. "They don't know that tomorrow they will need nothing."
"We'll try again after the guard change," the inmates decided.
When everything calmed down, Kuklya silently made the second key turn, removed the key and opened the padlock. Then the inmates killed Nikon the Informer in his sleep and rushed out of the bunker en masse. Those with metal pieces attacked the guards. The rest just ran out. The machine-gunner did not shoot. He was afraid of killing his own in the darkness and fog.
Yet, out of 325 prisoners who broke out, 311 were shot during the attempt and on the following morning. Only 14 survived.
The Soviet regime ignored the hundreds thousands murdered in Babi Yar. The devil's dozen years passed, but the local and foreign calls for a monument grew stronger and stronger. The government sickened to death, gave in and put a dam across the ravine mouth.
This is where Roma sped up -- inadvertently, unwittingly and indirectly -- the ravine demise. What a schlimazel! Not some dumb statistics, but his relatives' wretched fate interlaced his own life that elapsed against the background of those events.
In 1958 he moonlighted as an electrician at Petrovski Brick-works. He did not know that when their excavators and water jets dug out the bulk materials for the bricks in the quarry, the pumps drew the slurry into Babi Yar. They turned the ravine to a pond. The engineers thought the solids would settle down and the water would flow to Dnieper River.
In 1961 rains overfilled the pond, ruined the dam and flooded the densely populated area between Babi Yar and Dnieper. At the hill bottom, the morning traffic stopped, the passengers remaining in the vehicles.
Suddenly it became obvious nobody was perfect. Creators are great in their intentions -- not in their execution. The Almighty Himself did a sloppy job. Babi Yar's slopes had a propensity to landslides. As to the human landscapers, the mud in the pond did not settle down. It rushed in a ten-meter-high wave, swallowed up, swept away and buried every thing and body, except the old psychiatric hospital the Germans took care of the patients in their time. The building was built like a fortress and people stood on its roof.
Militiamen and soldiers cordoned the zone till a tall fence was erected. In a few months the water found its way to the river and the mud dried up. The workers cut the passage in the soil for the only through streetcar line there and fenced it off such that nothing could be seen through and over. No cameras were allowed. Even commercial flights were diverted from the area.
The media gave severely deflated body count and forgot to mention the firemen, militiamen and soldiers, who cordoned the initial flood zone and were swallowed by the mud. In a few years the corpses were dug out from the dried-up mud. They were in the same positions the disaster struck them -- like in Pompeii.
Persistence paid off. The glorious Soviet workers excavated the landslide soil, moved it back to and filled up the Babi Yar ravine, erected residential and industrial buildings right on the killing, burying and burning spots.
The landslide spared the Jewish cemetery on the top of the hill. Neither did the bulldozers. They swept away the graves, monuments, coffins and remains -- the city needed a television center and an amusement park in that place. The authorities generously allowed the Jews to claim the remains. Most relatives were dead or failed to find the proper graves in that chaos. Abrasha's youngest brother Buzya's grave and monument had the same fate.
The bulldozers did not erase the memory of the place though. During Khrushchev's "thaw", Babi Yar became a place of pilgrimage. Among those demanding a memorial were writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Viktor Nekrasov. In 1961, poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko published "Babi Yar". His poem started with "No gravestone stands on Babi Yar". A year later, Dmitri Shostakovich set the poem to music. The poem and the musical setting had a tremendous impact in and beyond the Soviet Union.
Brave Jewish souls blamed the authorities in broad daylight, but the granite plaque appeared overnight (in 1966) with the inscription that a monument would be erected in memory of the victims, no Jews being mentioned.
Thereafter, on every anniversary of the first shooting, at that plaque one or another, as Nazi friends would say, Wertvoller Politischjude -- politically useful Jew -- and traitor of the Jewish nation delivered a memorable speech devoted to Zionists' underhand plotting and brutality.
"Jews are often the greatest anti-Semites," Roma explained that fact to his German-born employer in Canada years later. "I try to be objective as a computer, but still remain unprincipled and biased. For example, Italians invented Fascism, Russians -- concentration camps, but I prejudice only Jews."
"Why them?"
"It's safer. I'm one of them. The most annoying is that Israelis stubbornly write from the wrong side. The rays of hope are the Russian immigrants reforming them properly."
Finally, in 1974 the authorities erected the 50-foot-high bronze sculpture about a mile from the massacre spot:
"Here, in 1941-43, the German Fascist invaders executed over 100,000 citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war."
What citizens? What for?
The king of half-truth was kaput. Long live Dr. Goebbels' disciples!
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19. THE JEWISH NATION'S SHAME
Abrasha finished the war at the Baltic Sea in Konigsberg, Eastern Prussia -- German officers' den. He got a few orders and medals, but Roma does not remember what for, except such obvious as medals "For the Seizure of Konigsberg" and "For the Victory in the Great Patriotic War".
An automotive mechanic to the core, Paul Bauer became a transportation boss in a German Democratic Republic a few years later. He was not a rat contrived to catch a cat's tail though. His son was killed somewhere on the Russian front. His wife and daughter literally lived in the Berlin subway, along with the remained population. When the Red Army reached the subway, the Nazis opened the Spree River gates and drowned everyone. The Red Army took the surface rout and thus revenged for them.
Abrasha's commander was decorated for organizing the excellent logistics. Yet, the hero of the occasion was forgotten till 1952. So was his personal file's black spot:
"In spite of the pressing warning of his superior, senior lieutenant Karpfengal took under his wing and befriended Fascist prisoner Feldwebel Paul Bauer. They chatted like friends in German, although a year later, said Feldwebel quite adequately covered our Soviet soldiers-drivers in Russian."
In Konigsberg Abrasha crossed out a line in his book of favors, dated September 1941. He found Von Dulow's patrimony. Bombs ruined the three-story building, but spared the basement. A few families shared it. An old woman pointed out to the baroness' room:
"She'll return in the evening."
He came back with his kitbag filled with a smoked pork leg, American tinned stewed pork, dried milk and egg powder, a rye bread loaf, an Indian tea pack, a paper-bag of sugar, a schnapps bottle, a makhorka pack, a cake of laundry soap and a few boxes of matches.
No mortal would press out a sound out of the call button of the electric bell, and Abrasha knocked on the door:
"Do the Von Dulows live here?"
"No."
"And who are you?"
"Baroness Marlene Von Dulow."
"Then why do you lie?"
"Is this really a life?"
The senior lieutenant of the victorious army reached out his helping hand:
"I came to repay favor to Captain Von Dulow."
The baroness opened the door, raised up her head and glanced at him for a moment. Out of their bloodline, but he talked their lingo, albeit with the Berlin accent (Abrasha got from Paul). Yet, the phrase itself puzzled her most.
"Fell in a battle," she said and dropped her eyes down.
"Oh, those merciful fuhrers." Abrasha understood standard condolences from an enemy would be out of place. "They kill nobody themselves, but are the pen-and-tongue pushers. The sons of female dogs take excellent care that boys won't live to the moment of dropping their tears on their parents' funerals."
"This corridor talk will make no good, Herr Officer."
"Then may I come in?"
"Victors don't need the permission."
"I did not conquer you, Madam," the gallant said. "Please come out. It's a bad omen in my country to give something over the threshold."
"Excuse me, Herr Senior Lieutenant. Enter please."
"Should I leave the door unlocked?"
"It's not necessary for the squatters to see us," she said and locked the door up.
"Your beloved pen-pusher and clubfooted catholic freak..."
"Dr. Goebbels is dead," the baroness said.
"Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment impressed him deeply in his youth, I presume. So did Nietzsche and Mein Kampf."
"They say he exclaimed at first, who's that man? A half plebeian, a half god?" She looked at Abrasha with less fear. Yet, the harshness of his sermon abused her ear. Each harsh step of his march to her in Konigsberg abused her soul and body.
"Then the impressionable youth made up his mind and spent his time sincerely convincing that Nazism was ethical," Abrasha went on.
"Give me the means of communication, and I'll cleanse the Reich of doubt, he pleaded to Fuhrer," she said. Abrasha's accent of a Berliner puzzled her.
"Sounded like Archimedes' Give me a place to stand and I'll move the world."
"You're a very cultured man, Herr Officer."
"When I hear 'culture' I grab my revolver, your cultured Dr. Goebbels proclaimed."
"He committed suicide."
"Unfortunately, not immediately after he said that. Still, in time to save lawyers' fee for American taxpayers though. And he did that not with his revolver. Because he was not an officer, albeit an evenhanded gentleman. He gave orders to poison Jews, his wife, six children and spared himself from cyanide neither."
What the devil does he need her? A half of his kitbag content can buy twenty women -- Germans and displaced persons.
"The criminals were caught and severely punished," the baroness tried to shut him up.
"Only the unlucky ones."
"My husband was killed in summer 1943."
"Those who aim a gun share the guilt of those who pull the trigger," Abrasha starred at her and lingered in confusion. "When I met your husband four years ago, he was twenty-nine."
"I'm thirty. Wars make everyone older."
"It's not the war. You put a scarf over your head and ears like German soldiers getting out of the Stalingrad ruins in the winter."
The baroness took off her headscarf with trembling hands and drew herself up. Tall and slender like a palm, she looked shy and somewhat unusual in her rags. Abrasha caught her intelligence in the air and contempt and sarcasm in her hardly moving lips and face muscles.
Move away from the evil and make good to the man who saved your life, the ex-Yeshiva bucher decided in accordance with the Holy Writ.
"Any children?"
"No. The major married me and went to France. Then -- the Russian front."
She pulled herself closer to Abrasha, and suddenly her warm breath poured over him the story of her first meeting with her husband. Then she complained of the Red Army soldiers and quoted Friedrich Nietzsche:
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
"Pardon, Baroness. I came not for that."
He looked around. Damaged luxurious furniture filled the small room up.
"I exchange the items for food and fuel," the baroness excused herself.
"You have to forgive our soldiers," Abrasha said. "They can take along only watches and small things."
"Then why did they fire their machine-guns point-blank at mirrors, china and chandeliers?"
"To deprive their commanders of."
"Do you disapprove them?"
"A Jew is grateful for what they have done for him anyway."
"A Jew?"
"Don't be afraid."
"Our family doctor was a Jew too."
"And you helped him to survive, of course. Listen, Baroness. Perhaps, you're a good woman, but I'm tired of the stories your people put. All of you were good to your Jews. Yet, even the best German shepherd dog would detect no Jew all over Germany."
Abrasha dropped the content of his bag on a toilet table with a holed cheval glass:
"Whom do you live with?"
"Just me and myself"
"How do you get along?"
"Fine."
"These goods are for both of you and yourself."
The smell of the warm bread and the smoked food filled the room.
"You can buy a few women at once even for less."
"I've never bought a woman and give all that to you for some delicate reason."
Baroness looked at Abrasha and thought she understood the reason. But so did Frieda in the first chapter.
"May I ask the details of your meeting with my husband?"
"Shhh... It's a secret. A Russian blurts a secret out only when he is drunk, in love, or making love to hide his first love."
"What is his first love?
"Vodka."
"Okay, I won't ask, Herr Officer. You'll tell me later, perhaps." "You may ask. But I won't tell you anyway. What the secret police should not know one does not tell to the first comer either."
Some specific feeling sparked the baroness' face. It was neither fear, nor curiosity. She stood frozen. Only her hungry eyes were alive. Obviously, the seeping hate did not fill them. The eternal mourning did not survive either.
"Our small secret will die in this room," she said.
"Let it die alone. Without us."
The baroness did not insist and fastened her eyes to the goods on the table.
"This inferior kind of tobacco probably useless for you," Abrasha picked up makhorka.
"I do smoke," she said. "Do you?"
"I don't, but I know what running out of something to smoke means, especially in a war."
"Thank you, Herr Officer, for your pity. Please sit down."
A bed was the only place to do that, and Abrasha did.
She looks like not more than thirty-one, he thought.
"American cigarettes are out of question," he said. "So does coffee."
"Makhorka will do," she nodded and tried to overcome unexplainable emotions. "Coffee is unhealthy but irresistible. A cup of tea with milk powder will soften the air up too."
"I'm soft enough."
"Otherwise, it will look like a business transaction."
"All right," Abrasha agreed and put his service cap and shoulder belt with the revolver upholster on the bed. "This will soften you up too."
"I'll ask the squatters if they have some hot water," she went out with a coffeepot.
"The water is not too hot." She returned and dropped some tealeaves in the pot. "Let wait for five minutes."
"Don't worry, Baroness. I have time till tomorrow."
"Then let us eat something first."
She fell upon the food. From time immemorial women distinguished themselves in voracity and its aftermath. Take Eve's apple scandal, for example.
The full stomach comforted the baroness' nerves amazingly quickly. She collected herself and offered the bread and the pork to Abrasha too.
"Only some schnapps or tea, please," the gentleman refused.
He felt himself a kind, generous, noble and lenient mensch. His clear conscience made him content, merry and complaisant like a Swiss Army knife.
Baroness' full stomach made her complaisant too, if not like the knife, than at least like a folding bed. She fell into a total delightful eclipse, good for the body and touching for the soul. She rolled a cigarette with makhorka. Not used to strong tobaccos, she coughed at first, then fell into a mirage -- heaven on earth or something, and dreamy thoughts went into her head.
"Some warm water still remains in the pot," she uttered a heavenly sound. "Would you like to wash yourself up first?"
"Please leave it for yourself," the mensch declined. "Cold water is fine for me."
"I'll dilute the warm water with the cold one."
She went out with the coffeepot and came back with a washbasin and a bucket, both empty:
"We don't have the running water and collect the waste water for the toilet."
"Pardon, Baroness, should I get out?"
"It's okay. It's better if you stay in. Your presence does not bother me."
Sure. I'm just a servant -- not a mensch -- for the bloody aristocrat. Good manners of Ubermensch are not for Undermensch. Who won the war after all? Does she want me to undress and wash her too?
Abrasha looked aside. The good manners are first.
She bent topless over the basin:
"Could you pour water from the coffeepot on my head?"
"Your wish is my command, Madam."
A shameless Fascist shepherd dog's mother! Thinks that I'm a eunuch. Her robust breasts knowing no suckling are still maidenly. She won't allow babies to spoil her tits. Just look how her blue-blooded fingers soap and comb her hair. She substituted good breeding for hard work. The snowflakes' silkiness of her aristocratic palms, never used to physically work with, is inspiring. Such tender movements could definitely defuse a bomb.
"Thank you, Herr Officer. I'll handle the rest myself."
Educated on idle tales of chivalry, she thinks I'm a castrated Prussian officer from Russia. Does her light head know the difference between Prussia and Russia? Those novels of her aren't strong in geography. She thinks her phrases borrowed from stupid books fog her maidenly mat buttocks. One can't bind boundlessness... though should aim at anyway.
"Sorry I failed to get toilet soap," he said.
"Oh, I've forgotten even its smell. I left some water for you, Herr Officer."
Washing was not in his plans. He was afraid it would be too dark and he'll lose his way back among the deserted ruins. But what military man, particularly a Jew, would refuse to take a bath?
"Luckily, my bald scalp does not need much water."
"Your hairy body makes up for that."
When Abrasha finished, the bed was ready for the night.
"What side do you like, Herr Officer? The right?"
Her simple, wordily question whipped him up. Did he understand her right?
He stood like a boy in front of a school principal who caught him with a cigarette in the mouth and a hand in the pocket, doing unto himself what he would like to do unto a woman.
"Do you like me?" the most foolish of the foolish males mumbled.
Put a muzzle on your stupid mouth, the goddamn dogface with a spinning head.
"I'm a baroness and can't lie. No, you are not my type of a romantic hero."
"Then why?" He was not merely sick, but sick mentally -- the one who spitefully bites a hand with a pill. A contemptuous idle talker. Behave like a master. When wild males fight each other, the females watch either with indifference or with some pleasure and then give themselves up to the victor.
"I want sex," the woman said plainly. "In the words of our family doctor, intercourse inhibits aging and intensifies the blood flow to the love hole, so to speak."
Alas! Such preparatory bombardment did not intensify Abrasha's own blood flow. She reduced him to a fat zero, a soulless penis-pusher.
"The real youth's elixir is hunger," he said. "Overeating brakes the sexual functions, short hunger activates them."
"Regular sex maintains a higher estrogen level in women," the baroness went on. "That associates with better bones, cardiovascular health and feeling of joy in life."
"The sick lose appetite," Abrasha did not stop either. "That indicates hunger cures and rejuvenates the body."
What can one say? A mental case? A nice-looking dame whom Fuhrer deprived of the Aryan males. Only move a limb!
"What did I say?" He snapped off -- every time his open mouth makes things worse.
The baroness dived under the blanket dressed only in a bashful smile and white, silky, lacy briefs any Soviet woman would trade her body and soul for.
"What are those for?"
Shut up, fool!
"Briefs are no-hurdle for a gentleman," she said. "He pleases a woman when takes her bra and brief off completely."
"I am not an American. The Red Army dispenses no condoms."
"It is no hurdle for a gentleman either."
He did not want to disgrace a Soviet officer's uniform in the eyes and other parts of the German baroness' body, and took everything off.
The darkness was impenetrable like her briefs he took away. Abrasha kissed and fondled the resilient legs, thighs and breasts. That lasted for a while. Her body stressed and snuggled up to him. He raised his head. Her arms clasped his body, her lips parted and welcomed his trembling tongue. Shock waves advanced through her body, and he covered it with his. Her hands dropped to his waist and pulled him tightly down to her own.
The whole life panorama is said to pass in a drowning man's head.
Perhaps.
If he reported that in person.
But what passed in a head of a man of the Jewish bloodline whose body covered a Fascist officer's widow of the noble bloodline right in the Prussian officers' den in 1945?
Abrasha portrayed himself in all his embodiments: fatherless at seven, still blond with curls like brain convolutions; sprouting at twelve in the year of the October Revolution; farm hands at fourteen. Then he depicted all women he wanted to be intimate with, but was not.
He had not enough brains to live foolishly. If he wrote his memoir, it would be complaints' book. He looked back at his past, recalled all the temptations he had and felt awfully sorry for withstanding to them. The schlimazel squandered his youth on the work and studies, did not experience a woman, except his better half, and philosophized at the godsend moment. Hitler would spin in his ashtray if he had one. S-exploitation, or not, a Jew has to make love to a German baroness if not in the interest of the international unity, then at least in the name of Fuhrer.
"Well, why do you wait?" the woman whispered eagerly and her hand searched under the blanket. She was no longer a baroness but a dame, with a dame's tacky want.
Abrasha's arms enveloped her neck, and his fingers wove into her soft hair. He breathed the scent of her skin. Their mouths met urgently again. Abrasha's fingers glided tediously downward along the satin of her fine skin, stopped at her breasts, then trailed along her tightened nipples.
"Come, come," a faint sigh deserted her throat's bottom.
His tender kisses puzzled her imagination, and she felt spiders on her back. Sloe-eyed, she pulled back slightly to look into his eyes. The full moon circled in the sky, but it was damned dark in the cellar.
Then there was a shout, and the dame jumped up.
"Unable?"
Abrasha thought the neighbors heard her scream too.
"I knew Jews were circumcised, but not to such extent," she said.
"A piddler in a haystack. Cursed cows have curt horns," the former farm hands recited -- almost -- the idiom and proverb.
"You are merely out of tune and full of bull."
"Dammit. You excelled too. In males, their drive to females is the most vulnerable. Have you heard of a primus?"
"A kerosene kitchen burner?"
"As you have pumped up a primus and a male, so they will burn. First, you turned your tongue loose with a sermonnete that I'm not your type. Then you had the gall to lecture me on your sexual needs. For a bright woman, you're surely dumb. Even a mink fur feels like barbed wire if one's nerves are raw."
"You have really gotten on my nerves too. A woman can forgive anything, but the neglect."
Here Karpfen-gall's gall bladder burst:
"Germans are always offended and blame a law and an order, or somebody else."
They laid together, side by side, for several minutes. His hand still rested on her full breast.
"Take your hand off," she asked. "I'm sensitive too."
But his putz was not! Forgot about Marx's supply and demand? Shamefully, the damned dipstick failed to properly articulate her feelings and hope, was not ready for the deep commitment and disgraced the Jewish nation on that front. Perhaps, a penis is connected to the heart, grasps something its owner does not and softens when the heart hardens like an egg in boiling water.
The baroness put her hand over the blanket and pushed it down between their bodies -- You! Off my real estate!
She said nothing and dozed off. Abrasha did not. His only rescue was to get back to his own bed and put the dark ruins between them.
He sat up on the bed and discovered that to undress was easier then to dress. If he were a smoker, he would have a light. When the trite discoverer pulled his boots from under the bed, he smelled a rat.
"What is that?" he mumbled because it was not a rat, but day-old urine.
"Be careful. Don't kick a pot."
Abrasha's instant howl proved that her warning was late. The life turned its gross side, lower than the bass clef.
"Clumsy bear..." she said.
Even an armored cruiser sailing peacefully encounters a mine now and then. The man of the hour did not take the potluck. He kicked over the chamber pot -- an under-bed invalid that lost its handle under Russian barbarians' bullets.
As a scalded mongrel, the shame of the Jewish nation and of Soviet officers fled out disgracefully and dishonorably. The woman's mute, but ringing laughter chased him. His legs trembled and tangled in the dark corridor, although he drank only a glass of schnapps. He found himself on the former second floor of the staircase. That far did the evil spirits bring the contemptible hygienist that was lazy to learn the topography of the baroness' room, building and place in advance.
Even a German shepherd dog would have difficulties to find the right way home. The city was the motherland of the famous mathematical problem called The Bridges of K”nigsberg.
The 18th century townspeople had the time, boots, muscles and pleasure to stroll about the seven bridges.
"Is there a route crossing each bridge only once?" they wondered. In 1736, mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), born in Switzerland, but working in Russia and Prussia, fathered the modern graph theory -- mathematics' branch of modeling networks, dependencies in production and logistic processes.
In 1945 the bombers solved that problem too -- only two bridges functioned.
Not only Abrasha's dipstick wanted to have nothing to do with Germans. So did Comrade Stalin. He annexed the Eastern Prussia, deported her population to the Central Germany, renamed Konigsberg to Kaliningrad, extended and put Poland between Russia and Germany.
Genghis Khan had been dead, but after the war with Germans Abrasha's army unit went from Prussia deep to Russia, to the city of Kazan, Tatar Autonomous Republic's capital. Actually, they were going to Japan, but the American imperialists deprived them of the fruits of victory there. What else could one expect from those war birds who were forced into the battle only when japan and Germany declared the war? The beardies gained their war experience in carpet bombing of Europe and Japan. Then they dropped nuclear bombs -- the derivative of certain Jewish physics and tricks -- and stuck Abrasha with Tartars. They liked him though and enticed with the captain rank and a decent salary. Yet, the Jew threw off the Tatar yoke customarily and came back to Kiev in February 1946. A month later Moscow approved his new rank. Too late -- he became a reservist already.
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