Tin Sky E-Book

Ben Pastor

• Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

FOURTH IN THE MARTIN BORA SERIES. SPELLBINDING MULTI-LAYERED CRIME NOVEL SET IN UKRAINE AS THE GERMANS REGROUP AFTER THE DISASTER OF STALINGRAD. FOR FANS OF PHILLIP KERR (BERNIE GUNTHER SERIES), ALAN FURST (SPIES OF THE BALKANS). THE HERO, MAJOR MARTIN BORA, IS AN ARISTOCRATIC GERMAN OFFICER OF THE ILK OF CLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG, TORN BETWEEN HIS DUTY AS AN OFFICER AND HIS INTEGRITY AS A HUMAN BEING. Ukraine, 1943. Having barely escaped the inferno of Stalingrad, Major Martin Bora is serving on the Russian front as a German counterintelligence officer. Weariness, disillusionment, and battle fatigue are a soldier's daily fare, yet Bora seems to be one of the few whose sanity is not marred by the horrors of war. As the Wehrmacht prepare for the Kursk counter-offensive, a Russian general defects aboard a T-34, the most advanced tank of the war. Soon he and another general, this one previously captured, are found dead in their cells. Everything appears to exclude the likelihood of foul play, but Bora begins an investigation, in a stubborn attempt to solve a mystery that will come much too close to home.

Leseprobe

Ben Pastor, born in Italy, became a US citizen after moving to Texas. She lived for thirty years in the United States, working as a university professor in Illinois, Ohio and Vermont, and presently spends part of the year in her native country. Tin Sky is the fourth in the Martin Bora series and follows on from the success of Lumen, Liar Moon and A Dark Song of Blood, also published by Bitter Lemon Press. Ben Pastor is the author of other novels including the highly acclaimed The Water Thief and The Fire Waker, and is considered one of the most talented writers in the field of historical fiction. In 2008 she won the prestigious Premio Zaragoza for best historical fiction.

Also available from Bitter Lemon Press by Ben Pastor:

Lumen

Liar Moon

A Dark Song of Blood

BITTER LEMON PRESS

First published in the United Kingdom in 2015 by

Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 2ET

www.bitterlemonpress.com

Copyright © 2012 by Ben Pastor

This edition published in agreement with Piergiorgio Nicolazzini Literary Agency (PNLA)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of Ben Pastor have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978-1-908524-52-2

Typeset by Tetragon, London

To Isaak Babel and his silence

Contents

Main Characters

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

MAIN CHARACTERS

von Bentivegni, Eccard, Colonel, chief of Abwehr central office

Bernoulli, Kaspar, Judge, German Army War Crimes Bureau

Bora, Martin-Heinz, Major, German Army

Kostya, POW and Bora’s Ukrainian orderly

Lattmann, Bruno, Abwehr officer

Malinovskaya, Larisa Vasilievna, Russian soprano

von Manstein, Erich, Field Marshal, Commander, Army Group Don

Mantau, Odilo, Gestapo Captain

Mayr, Hans, Colonel, German Sanitary Corps

Nagel, Master Sergeant, German Army

Nitichenko, Victor Panteleievich, Orthodox priest

Platonov, Gleb, Soviet Lieutenant General and POW

von Salomon, Benno, Lieutenant Colonel, 161st Infantry Division (ID)

Scherer, Jochen, Panzer Corps officer

Selina Nikolayevna; Avrora Glebovna, Platonov’s wife and daughter

Stark, Alfred Lothar, District Commissioner for Occupied Territories

Tarasov, Taras Lukjanovitch, retired accountant

Tibyetsky, Ghenrikh “Khan”, Russian Tank Corps commander

Weller, Arnim Anton, non-com, Sanitary Corps

The unpredictable wins, the obvious loses.

SUN TZU

Prologue

MONDAY 3 MAY 1943, MEREFA, KHARKOV OBLAST, NORTH-EASTERN UKRAINE

He had to listen. He had to go out and listen.

From Merefa to the river, as the bird flies, it was less than twenty-five kilometres. By the country lanes (there was hardly anything else but those around) and if you wanted to avoid villages and towns, the distance meant a zigzag now at right angles, now curvy and oblique, around ditches and ravines scarring the earth, eastwards and south. Birds filled the ravines; forgotten and devastated farms at the bottom let birds nest in their ruins, inside their charred ceiling beams. You heard the birdsong come as if from below the earth, as if birds of the afterworld were singing sweetly, or mermaids were calling with treacherous insistence. Then you reached the edge, and down the grassy or chalky slope five or fifty metres below you stood or lay the carcass of a hut with bent poles and rotten straw and broken windows, full of birds that went on singing despite your presence. Russian birds, Ukrainian birds would have had to give up singing long ago had they fallen silent every time an army had rumbled or stolen through in the past two, ten, hundred or hundreds of years. And the same applied to the wind, and the gurgle and chuckle of water in the river as it bent in and out, looping the bank.

Martin Bora stared at the map, elbows on it, chin resting on his hands. That he had to go out and listen, and not only for military reasons, was all he was actually capable (or willing) to think of for the moment. The itinerary to a place – not a town or a collective farm or isolated house but a solitary place – stared back at him as a thin broken line on the off-white network of numbered squares. Here Merefa, a small town now a suburb of Kharkov, with its shrine to the Virgin of Oseryan at the end of a westbound lane; there the Donets they called “northern” in these parts, fringed with woods wherever war hadn’t razed them to the ground, still swollen with the receding spring flood that here and there had made lakes and bogs of the low-lying fields. In between, the zigzag of dusty paths, landmines, booby traps, the less than occasional sharpshooter: the hair-raising unwritten geography he had to add in pencil when he knew enough about it, for himself and others. But also a singular peace of mind across those kilometres, with death that sounded like a skylark or a rustle in the bushes, pure and unalloyed as he was pure and unalloyed these days, after Stalingrad had tempered him, freed him of all dross. Or so he thought; so he hoped.

It was warm already. The sky resembled the pale tin ceiling of an old building; occasional rainless clouds across it mimicked the pattern on the tin sheet. Below it, the living moved, and the dead lay still. The dead found in the small woods called Krasny Yar numbered five by now. Peasants, Russians; Bora knew little more about the story. He thought of them because his eyes met the name Krasny Yar on the map, written in Cyrillic and printed over in Latin letters. He was going nowhere near there, but not for the reasons the Ukrainian priest bellowed about; there was no more a devil in the woods than there was real hope of winning this war, even though as a Catholic and a German officer Bora believed both in the devil and in the final victory.

He stood to gather his gear in the one-floored schoolhouse he shared with his Ukrainian orderly and a sentry. It was the right place to spend part of his days: modest and unmarked, in case Russian planes made it past the German-held Rogany airfield to strafe or bomb recognizable structures. More often than not, he’d go alone. No escort, not even a driver. He sedately collected field glasses, compass, map case, pencils; and then camera, rifle, ammunition, anything else he’d take along for the trip.

Seeing the wedding band on his left hand surprised him for a fraction of a second. He’d started wearing it on the ring finger of that hand, contrary to German usage, because army vehicles and equipment often broke down in the Russian front’s dust or mud or snow, and he had to reach into tight greasy spaces to fix things. It was his resilient tie to life, that single gold band, being the link to Benedikta and all she meant to him. That she was angry at him for volunteering to go back to Russia after nearly dying there did not change matters between them. Her lovemaking before his departure proved that anger was love.

It was part of the reason why he had to go out and listen.

Wedding band and identification disc had to routinely be left behind. Bora removed them, entrusted them to the small safety of his trunk. He’d leave the large map here as well, and although he’d circled in red the wooded lot where dead peasants kept turning up, he wouldn’t even drive by there. No, no. There was no time to look into such things. Come June – July at the latest, if the date were, unwisely, further postponed – everything on this map and all its adjoining charts (Poltava, Kramatorskaya, Belgorod and on to Kursk) would be up for grabs again, and likely to be churned into extinction.

Well, at least he wasn’t killed en route to the river. Snipers, partisans, a way of life (or death) for the lone German out in the Russian open, were only slightly less of a problem than they had been in Ukraine. In the partly wooded area south of Bespalovka, where his regiment-in-the-making had its camp, Bora left the army car and continued on horseback. From there on, no wheeled or tracked vehicle could venture safely. Ditches, bogs, canals, wet turf replaced solid ground. Russia made mounted troops useful again, precious again, and those who hadn’t accepted the conversion of their glorious First Division to the Panzer Corps, like Bora, after biding their time and bleeding themselves white in infantry units, saw their chance again. And so the old class of young decorated officers, the von Boeselagers, Douglas von Boras, Salm-Hordtmars and Sayn-Wittgensteins, all related one way or another, had high-quality regiments designed for them. Armed reconnaissance, guerrilla warfare and invaluable support on vehicle-unfriendly terrain meant danger, excitement, absolute love for tradition – and the possibility of going out and listening.

Soon enough Bora was riding into a thicket of coppice – mostly birch, and willows further on, which peasants used for building and basket-weaving. Even the larger trees were new growth, planted long after the October Revolution. The trail was narrow, two feet across at most, less here and there where branches hung draped in fresh leaves. Boots, cavalry saddle, the horse’s flanks all became moist in the process; although it hadn’t rained, there was humidity in the air so close to the river. Even if he didn’t go out of his way to think, because feeling was much more useful at certain stages of reconnaissance, it came to Bora’s mind as he proceeded that it was in a shady area like this, circumscribed, that a few kilometres north of here those Russians had been mysteriously killed, culprit unknown. His orderly whispered of death by staves, blades, of eyes put out: killing such as peasant warfare had known five hundred years ago and more, and which conflict in today’s Russia was seeing once again.

He rode on, alert but somehow unmindful of himself, wondering if here, too, there were corpses lying about. But after the Germans’ Second Coming to Kharkov, as he called it, it would be surprising if there weren’t. In March they’d fought tooth and nail over every square inch of territory, and if now the Donets could serve as a frontier between the opposing armies, it was only after they’d paid for each square foot of land with soldiers’ and hostages’ and prisoners’ blood.

Where the birches gave way to willows, sky and water became visible beyond the tender green. Totila’s hoofs began to sink a little, but he was a patient, sure-footed animal and he kept going. Only the occasional sucking sound was produced as the horse’s shod hoofs pressed into or lifted out of the soft earth.

Bora noiselessly parted the supple branches the minimum that was needed to advance. Eager to listen, he’d let the birdsong go through him for the last several minutes, thin sounds and chirping, warbling phrases that pierced him from side to side like sweet arrows. Soon the lap and purl of shallow water eddying and circling would be heard, where willows too thinned out and twiggy brushes, canes and reeds took their place. Bora dismounted and walked through the wet grass towards the riverbank. Stepping carefully (as if a landmine wouldn’t blow him to shreds the moment he touched it or tripped the wire), his eye fell on the delicate halves of a bluish eggshell at his feet. On one of the branches overhead, the young bird must have hatched recently: there were fragile smears of pale moisture still visible inside.

Bora avoided crushing the shells under his boots. His Russian orderly came to mind, who’d started keeping hens for eggs. When I’m not around, Bora thought, he lets them scratch about by the row of graves by our outpost. Calls them droplets of his blood and his consolation on earth, because he’s a peasant at heart. Poor Kostya. Drafted when the war first began (if I think how I was playing the young embassy officer in Moscow as late as May two years ago, when my bags were already packed in East Prussia to attack the Soviet Union!), he hasn’t had time to fire a shot in anger. His entire regiment surrendered to the first German officer it met. He has a young wife in Kiev he worries about, is meek and good-hearted. Compared to him, I am a black soul.

There was no clearing by the bank; leaves reached the water’s edge and tall canes bent this way and that to form a chain of broken canopies. Insects sparkled in the air like handfuls of gold dust over the slow current. Bora crouched where he could; he leant forward, dipped his fingers in the river and listened.

It was a spot, unmarked on maps, nameless as far as he knew, like so many spots he’d stood on at the risk of dying, made precious by that possibility. Less than a square metre on the left bank of a river that flowed into the Don, capricious and meandering, getting lost, flooding. From the Don they’d all retreated as they’d retreated from Stalingrad. And across this lazy current sat the Russians. It was just a matter of listening. Inner quiet, slowing of the heart. The horse loosely tied and waiting in the back. Bora could feel every muscle tense or relax in the crouch, lungs taking in the marshy air less and less frequently. Closing his eyes, the small, nearly inaudible sounds around him became distinct – water streaming or making a whirlpool, birds singing far and near, tremulous leaves picking up the barest breath of wind, the horse’s lips ripping a green shoot from the ground. From the other bank, birds calling, men elsewhere or silent, engines absent or turned off, villages, farms, towns, army camps, homesteads empty or mortally quiet.

Already in Stalingrad, towards the end, when all of them had grown close to madness one way or another, long pauses of stillness had become necessary to him. Bora grazed the water with his fingertips, listening. Each pore, each cell was a hearing organ, strained and yet giving itself up to whispers and silence alike. His entire life was present to him in these moments (boyhood bike rides, the sun on a doorway, holding hands with a girl, the Volga at Stalingrad, Dikta’s throat when he kissed her, a lizard, his stepfather in Leipzig, things not yet happened but just as present; anxiety come to a point too high to be felt, and turned to lack of sensation, a sublime void). Mosquitoes swarmed on his bare arms, flies bit, toads leapt in the mud. The sun rolled like a huge cart of fire across a tin ceiling, a tin sky.

Bora opened his eyes. He estimated the width of the river at this point, its depth, the invisible but existent ford. Calmly he stood up, untied his horse, regained the saddle and paced into the water across the Donets, towards enemy lines.

1

The determination of the value of an object must be based not on its price, but rather on the utility it can bring.

ST PETERSBURG PARADOX

3 May 1943. Early afternoon, near Bespalovka.

I write this diary entry after a fruitful and lively session with my regimental staff in the making. They didn’t like me going off on my own, but I know what I’m doing.

Regarding my little foray, you’d think the Soviets would man the bank where there are shallows. We’ve been sitting for a couple of months staring at each other along this river. But it’s true that you can’t guard every blade of grass, stack of rocks and river bend. On the map, the woods on the Russian bank (flatter than ours, with bogs and false rivers where we have low cliffs) appear criss-crossed by a number of paths, actually overgrown now. Part of the tree cover has been blasted during the last battle (or the previous one; it’s been two years that we’ve been going back and forth), and during mud season the shell holes have become pools. Elsewhere it has dried up, but water keeps seeping through even at a good distance from the river’s edge. No tank, ours or theirs, is safely coming or going across for another month at least – that’s for sure.

There’s a minuscule island in the middle of the ford, all trees and canes. Once I crossed over to it I had to dismount and wade to the opposite bank, stepping around carefully. The Russians are close by, and no mistake. Recently smoked papirosyi butts, the occasional tin can: not scouts, that much I know. We don’t leave evidence. On a hunch, even though everything was still (even the birds, which should have put me on the alert), I kept advancing, because across the woods, on the edge far from the bank, there used to be a village we razed the first time around. However little shelter the ruins may afford, I told myself, there’s a cemetery with a good fence around it, and if it’s regular troops manning the area, they have no doubt set up there. In fact, there they were. No dogs, which was lucky for me. Dogs would have smelt the stranger from a distance. A platoon busily working, without a sentry to keep an eye on the environs. What I saw and photographed was worth the trip, anyway, especially the 76 mm anti-aircraft or anti-tank gun.

Returning, I don’t know what came into my head. In the woods facing the islet where I’d left Totila, there was an old woman gathering sticks, and instead of stealing past her, I stopped to give her a hand. Half-blind, she didn’t realize I was a German: only a soldier. She called me “little soldier”, even though I was twice her size and could have picked her up with one hand. She spoke Russian, so I assume she’s one of those moved in by the central government after the Ukrainians were starved off years ago. A witch from the old march tales, she seemed: in rags, bent over. That’s how they made up stories like Baba Yaga and her flying mortar, I thought. Next, she’ll show me her house on chicken legs, which you’re supposed to address so it’ll let you in. In fact, she only asked me if I were “one of the boys at the graveyard”, by which she meant the platoon I’d spied on. I boldly said that I was. She then grabbed a stick and tried to thrash me with it, the fool, cursing me out for digging in her yard “to bury all those metal pots”. Pots? Landmines, of course. It means they’re not planning to move soon, at any rate: otherwise they’d be clearing the terrain, not mining it. Do they expect our tanks to cross over the shallows before then? It seems the Soviets have been mining every inch of cultivated and fallow land in this section for weeks; the few peasants still around are in revolt. As – by her own admission – the old woman and the others keep gardening among the “pots”, it’s safe to suppose they’re anti-tank mines, or else they’d have been blown to smithereens. She was still ranting when I left.

Little does she know. Far from being her “little soldier”, in a month I’ve been able to do most of the planning for the regiment, to be called Cavalry Regiment Gothland, bearing as its insignia the leaping horseman of my 1st Division (not the horse’s head like Regiments Middle and South), plus the clover leaf of its parent unit, the 161st ID. Out of the 27 officers slated to fill the commanding positions, I have thus far managed to pull together 18, from the many places where they ended up after our 1st Cavalry Division was disbanded late in ’41. Except for one, so far all readily expressed the willingness to come. The senior non-coms (Regimental Sergeant Major Nagel foremost among them; I’m ready to insist with Gen. von Groddeck – and even Field Marshal von Manstein – that his presence is imperative) are in the works. As for the troopers, I trust my officers will do a good job of recruiting. It’s inevitable that a number of locals will be necessary, both as scouts and interpreters; four of us officers speak Russian, although I’m the only one technically qualified as an interpreter. I pointed out to Lt. Colonel von Salomon that it is preferable to have ethnic Germans. If we fight under our byname for Ukraine, “Land of the Goths”, it is only right. The problem is, a good number of Russia’s Germans have been transferred to the Warthegau. Others have fought for the Soviets and were made prisoners: these I don’t trust and I’d rather do without. Cossacks are much prized, but I don’t particularly care for their methods. I am and remain a German cavalryman: swashbuckling, sabre-rattling and hard drinking aren’t what I’m looking for. Am I being difficult, at this stage of the war? Well, I may be difficult, but it is my regiment, and within reason it is at my discretion (and good judgement) that it must come into being.

Driving from the Bespalovka camp back to Merefa, Bora changed his mind about Krasny Yar, and decided to take a detour there. He travelled along a dirt lane, straight and white like a parting in the hair, between fields of new grass where larks sang and quails called out with their three notes, clear like water drops. Were it not for the skeletons of Soviet trucks and the cannibalized remains of other vehicles by the roadway, it would have seemed a peaceful landscape. Silos and low roofs, long metal sheds, stables and tractor shelters pointed to the presence of collective farms, mostly abandoned during the fighting at winter’s end. Only stray dogs lived there now, which German soldiers, depending on their mood, shot dead or took along as mascots. Occasionally, farm boys stared from behind the fences. Krasny Yar lay beyond, an unidentified spot on the horizon no road sign pointed to. Bora had driven past it when going elsewhere, without stopping.

When he arrived, the impression of dislike he’d had driving through earlier was confirmed. The destitute hamlet and the wooded patch where corpses had been turning up bore the same name, yet the place wasn’t beautiful – krasny – at all, and neither was it enough of a ravine to call it a yar. A piece of sloping ground at most, at the end of a dirt road passable only as far as a fork that diverged widely. On the left, the trail died amid the handful of crumbling huts. On the right hand, what trace there was had ceased to exist, ploughed by tanks that had left behind track marks as deep as graves. The edge of the woods bristled a couple of hundred metres beyond, where the earth rose into a weary swell and then sank.

Bora’s rugged personnel carrier could negotiate the tracts of even space remaining across the fields, but seeing German soldiers in the village, he stopped at the fork, and after surveying the edge of the wood through his field glasses, he left the vehicle and walked towards them. Infantrymen, which put him at ease. Here was where one could just as likely find men of the 161st ID or SS belonging to Das Reich, whose area of control extended behind the infantry sector and west to the city of Kharkov.

The infantrymen saluted. Two had taken off their summer tunics and were drinking from their canteens. Another was putting away a folding shovel. The non-com among them came closer. “Going into the Yar, Herr Major? Flies’ll eat you alive,” he commented drily. “We just buried another.”

Bora rolled down his shirtsleeves, buttoning the cuffs to reduce the surface available to insects. “Who was it this time?”

“An old Russki peasant as far as we can tell, Herr Major. The head was missing – badly chopped off, too.”

The patrol belonged to the 241st Reconnaissance Company of the 161st ID, newly strung out from north to south on a strip of land that ran with a slight elevation from north-west to south-east. The non-com showed Bora the fresh burial, and related the rumours about the “weird deaths” that circulated among the troops. “Comrades from other patrols report stuff disappearing around here. Shirts, socks, cans of boot grease, all in full daylight. And inside the Yar you orient yourself by dead reckoning, because compasses malfunction. The Russkis claim the place is haunted. Not that I believe any of this nonsense, Herr Major, ’cause the Russkis will try to spook us if they can’t do anything else. Fact is, the Russkis don’t like it at Krasny Yar either.”

“Tell me more about the man you buried.”

“Peasant clothes, barefooted, with the long hanging-out shirt they wear out here, hands tied behind his back with an old piece of wire, half rusted through. We could have left him where he was, but my sister’s a nun; I thought we ought to bury him even if he’s a Red.” The non-com gladly accepted a cigarette (Bora did not smoke these days, but carried a pack to offer occasionally). “In the rotten farms around here there’s just old folks and kids, Herr Major. The farm boys come begging, but the old cross themselves if you mention Krasny Yar. Some of us end up doing it on purpose, to see them react – it’s pretty funny. In the woods, nothing worth reporting other than the dead man. Coming back we saw one of the farm boys had followed us, and fired into the air to make him stay away. That scared him off, which is better than ending up dead, too. Seems the Russkis have been telling stories about this place for years. They go a long way to avoid it and have done so forever; the old folks say it was already this way when they were children.”

Bora glanced back at the line of trees. “I’m going in. Keep an eye on my vehicle, will you?”

“Yessir. We won’t be on our way for another hour and a half.”

“Good.” Bora checked his watch. “It’s 16.00 hours now; I’ll be back before 17.00.”

The non-com squashed the cigarette butt against the breech of his rifle. “By the way, sir, after the burial the priest trekked in there.”

“Which priest?”

“The batty one: the Russian.”

“Father Victor?”

“The one from Losukovka.”

“Victor Nitichenko, that’s him.” Bora turned, heading for the Yar.

The small woods rose up suddenly out of the grassy expanse. Here there were none, and there they were, trees that grew thick at once, disorderly as they’d surfaced from among the stumps of the old ones, cut years before. Bora had thus far kept away on purpose, pushing this place and the events that had occurred here to the edge of his mind, because he had other things to worry about. But Krasny Yar and the Krasny Yar dead did not quite go away; their presence remained perceptible.

“Keep straight ahead,” the non-com had indicated, even if “straight” in the woods does not mean much. In a few minutes, however, following what seemed to be a trail left by small animals – or by elves, if the woods had been enchanted – Bora realized that in fact he could almost walk in an unswerving line. Out east, as in the days of the German tribesmen and Romans battling at Teutoburg, forests were measured in hours, or days. Walking directly (not while reconnoitring, when the going was much slower), this was at most a couple of hours’ worth of woodland, yet within its boundaries had thus far died five – no, six people.

Bora knew that some of the murders dated to the last occupation of the area by German troops. It had been local krest’yane – farmers who hadn’t been killed, deported, or who hadn’t fled in two years of war – who reported the disappearance of this or that relative, a fact in itself that made it unlikely the missing had joined the partisans. In every case the woods, or the fields immediately around them, were the last places where the victims had been seen; and Krasny Yar was where their bodies were found by searchers.

It was true what he’d been told: the magnetic needle trembled and gyrated. Eventually Bora put the compass away. According to the non-com, the mutilated corpse was discovered about a kilometre into the wood from where he’d entered (“always leave the patch of firs to your right. The spot’s on the rise with the lightning-blasted tree, near the hollow”). It must be close to a kilometre now. The firs were there, dark green. No rise, no tree and no hollow yet in sight. Fallen branches snapped under his boots; a tangle of creepers which had grown rank since the snow melt shot up through the first cleft in the ice. Wet spots, spongy and treacherous, were betrayed by the capricious mosses around them. Bora bypassed them to regain the elfish trail. Common birds called from distant trees. The soldiers before him had advanced in a broken line; Bora’s expert eye read small signs in the bruised greenery showing how they had fanned out.

After a short time, in the thicket to his right, he spotted something moving, progressing against the dark of the ragged firs. Or not progressing, exactly: something that swayed, stealthily passing from one point to another. The Losukovka priest, he told himself, the one from Our Lady of the Resurrection of the Dead, Nitichenko. He’d come to pay his respects to Bora at his arrival in Merefa, because he now lived with his mother by the pilgrimage church in nearby Oseryanka.

Russian priests were specialists at recognizing the authority of the moment; and besides, it had been the German Army that had allowed him to reopen his Ukrainian rite church, and to say mass. “Poor among the poor, called to serve at a great distance from my parish church, in Ostroh and Staraya Kerkove, Krasnaya Polyana and Sloboda Solokov…” For no specific reason, Bora did not care for him. It was not surprising that he moved so cautiously. It was the clergy’s way in this country. It is the attitude so many of us have in life, Bora thought. But not mine. He didn’t want to give the priest the satisfaction of thinking he could spy unseen, but didn’t feel like calling his name out loud either. He kept an eye on the black shadow in the trees while he continued steadily to the slope where he’d just noticed the blasted tree. Split and torn through, it leant over one of those hollows found in wooded areas not far from rivers (the Udy bordered Krasny Yar to the north-west): a pit like the hole that leads to hell, a magic kingdom, or a treasure cave. Thinking in mythical terms comes easy in a place like this.

The rise sat in a blade of afternoon sun that cut through the foliage at a slant. Flies reeled in the light undisturbed; great clusters of them buzzed above the blood-soaked ground. Bora climbed the rise and slackened his pace. He chased the insects before reaching the edge of the hollow, but the flies hovered around him. In the snarl of grass and creepers, he noticed a coarse wooden button on the ground, which he picked up and pocketed. There were traces all around like those made by boars when they root for food, digging with their tusks in the dead leaves. They most likely pointed to a struggle at the time of the murder; or else they’d been left by the soldiers as they recovered the body or uselessly searched for the missing head. Where they’d hauled it out of the woods – an uncommon mercy there and then – the forest floor was equally discomposed.

The idea that a severed head lay somewhere near was strangely disquieting for one who’d driven fear into corners unreachable by reason. Not that Bora thought he ought to be afraid. It was a near-superstitious disgust for the blind eye, the dead jaw, the symbolic meaning of a bloody skull separated from the torso. In Khartoum, my great-grandfather’s head was exposed by the Mahdi’s followers for days. It was Great-grandmother Georgina who travelled there alone ten years later to demand the skull, still on display in the residence of Abd Allah. She took it along in her little Victorian trunk, under the admiring escort of the Mahdi’s successor, who – seeing his offer of a jewel refused – asked her to marry him, and was turned down.

The odour of blood was imperceptible in the open, although there must have been plenty of it spilt. In the springtime grass, flies formed hairy knots, sucked what they still could from the soaked earth; dispersed by a sweep of Bora’s arm, they landed on him, but preferred the dead man’s blood. The non-com spoke of the Yar as being shunned, but Bora could have said that no place was off limits, much less safe from war in Ukraine; it would be worse in a few weeks, as it had been a few weeks earlier. The cycle of war around Kharkov had the inexorable nature of a pendulum. “The other bodies, who found those? Do we know?” he’d enquired.

The non-com had shrugged, puffing on his cigarette. “They say the priest found one. The others, sir, I wouldn’t know.”

I’ll have to send out Kostya to ask around. At a prudent distance from him, the shadow to Bora’s right hesitated, hanging like a black tatter forgotten on the washing line.

“Victor Panteleievich!” Bora called finally. “Father Victor, come out.”

Nitichenko heard him, but did not react. Perhaps he was annoyed at having been discovered; perhaps he was afraid. Bora resorted to the usual gesture adopted when the locals did not listen to him, which was to unlatch his pistol holster. It was a calm movement, little more than a transfer of the right hand towards the left hip, but it usually had the desired result. The priest picked his steps through the trees, emerging into the open at the edge of the hollow. He saluted with exaggerated humility, looking up and sideways as cats do when they study a rival before deciding whether to attack or turn tail.

Without staring directly at his feet, Bora noticed the priest had no shoes on. The first and last time they had met, Father Victor had been wearing calf-high boots that creaked at every step, most likely worn for the occasion. Perhaps he usually went barefoot; or else there were other reasons why he chose not to wear footwear that might give him away in this wood.

“Povazhany Major,” he said in a contrite tone, “I came to say a prayer for this poor Christian’s soul.”

“We don’t even know that he was a poor Christian,” Bora replied. “He could be a committed atheist, or a political commissar.” In Russian the word “Christian” merely referred to a peasant, but Bora was irritated by the priest’s attitude.

“Whoever he was, povazhany Major, he was dreadfully punished for his sins.”

“Oh yes? How do we even know that? That he was a sinner, I mean.”

“We’re all sinners before God.”

“That’s true. So he wasn’t one of your parishioners?”

Father Victor, wearing his long hair tied in a ruffled ponytail in the old manner, answered that he hadn’t seen the corpse close up and didn’t believe so; even if – he abjectly added – the number of those who came to hear mass even from far away had grown after the Germans’ return.

“Who told you there had been another murder in the woods?”

“I dreamt it at night, esteemed Major, as clear as a picture, just as I dreamt the other one; and that’s why I came here with the permission of your men” (those of the 241st Company were not at all Bora’s men) “as I did a year ago for that poor daughter of God with a cut throat.”

“And who was she?”

“A half-wit girl from the Kusnetzov farm, south of Schubino.”

Bora checked the time on his watch. “And the other bodies? In Merefa I heard of search parties organized to seek those missing from nearby farms, and how they were all found here one way or another.”

The priest moodily raked the hair back over his ears, looking elsewhere. “This has been going on a long time – a long time. We don’t know how many died in all. Women, children… Those killed since the war started, I can show you where they were found. Even if in my dreams I’ve seen them moved, dragged elsewhere from where they died.”

“Moved by whom?”

“The dreams didn’t say, povazhany Major. But it is an unclean spirit that dwells in this wood, and has for a whole generation. Maybe more than a generation.”

Sure, sure, we need to hear this nonsense too. Bora latched his pistol holster. “I want to take some photos. Show me where the other corpses were found, before it gets dark.”

Other times – ever since coming to Russia – he’d had to deal with superstitious priests, more gullible than the oldest among their followers. They filled people’s heads with tales and lies, they populated nature with angelic and diabolical forces worse than in the days of the tsars. They were myopic, bigoted and dangerous. On one occasion he’d reached the point – he who was otherwise so measured – of slapping a deacon for denouncing as a partisan dispatcher a poor farm girl who’d refused herself to him.

TUESDAY 4 MAY, MEREFA

The following day, Bora had once more relegated Krasny Yar to the back of his mind. He had chores to do in Merefa and Kharkov. First, however, came a meeting with the 161st Division chief of operations, Lieutenant Colonel Benno von Salomon, who acted as liaison between the division and Bora’s cavalry regiment-in-progress. Von Salomon travelled often nowadays, and this morning he was in Merefa after conferring with District Commissioner Stark, whose office was just out of town.

Von Salomon, with his long bloodhound face and the slow, precise lawyer’s speech he carried over from civilian life, failed only on principle to formally grant Bora’s request, promising all the same that he’d get German “or at the most, ethnic German” troopers within a reasonable time. They briefly discussed how to procure cold bloods – mounts used to harsh climates – and whether some of Bora’s former colleagues might be interested in returning from the Panzer Corps to the cavalry. “Not that I expect it,” Bora admitted, “but personally, if I had to choose between a desk job in the armoured troops and front-line duty in a saddle, I’d have no doubts.”

“It doesn’t mean their commanders will release them.”

“They will as soon as they see the Field Marshal’s signature, Herr Oberstleutnant.”

More numbers followed, estimates, the minutiae of an organizational plan. Von Salomon read Bora’s typewritten notes with his face low, underscoring every line in pencil as if to impress words and ciphers in his memory. “Good,” he said at last, smoothing the pages on the teacher’s desk, all that Bora had to offer as a drawing table. “I’m glad you, at least, are keeping your lucidity. It’s not universal, you know. We all cope with the size and scope of what’s around us as best we can.”

“Yes, sir.”

There’s always a moment when the narrow door of formality between colleagues opens a crack more to reveal a space where a few liberties – if not exactly familiarity – are allowed. Von Salomon had already created this space by remarking on Bora’s lucidity. Later, putting away his pencil in a monogrammed leather case, he added in a low voice, “Just think, it was reported to me that a certain colonel in an artillery regiment demands that all his officers be born under the zodiacal sign Leo. ‘The sign of conquerors,’ he says. And a dear friend, whom I do not identify by name out of respect, has been collecting hair clippings from his fallen soldiers in an album, arranged by colour. I’m afraid he has filled more than one volume by now.” The leather case found the breast pocket, slipped inside it. “You’re aware that in the first winter on this front… well, in that first winter all sorts of things happened. Before Moscow we built a fence with the bodies of Russians run over by tanks: they and their long coats had turned flat and stiff like cardboard cut-outs. We used them as road signs, too. So you will appreciate it if these days I tell you how it reassures me to deal with a young man who has kept his right mind.”

“I am grateful to the colonel.”

Von Salomon had already remarked upon Bora’s impeccability in a complimentary way at their first meeting, an unusual show of approval for a higher officer. “Impeccable” meaning in fact “unlikely to sin”, it was about as far as any of them felt (or were) at this time of their warring lives. But Bora was not deluded; von Salomon referred to appearance and comportment. He did make a point of keeping up the appearance of a German officer, if nothing else. The stiff upper lip (“Stoicism”, Dikta called it, in her less spiteful moments) was a family trait. He’d thought a little less of the lieutenant colonel after the compliment. Not because he didn’t appreciate it, but because he was sure he did not deserve it.

“In your own way, Major, those of you who kept their lucidity are impregnable fortresses.”

Ein feste Burg… It was Luther’s hymn about God as inviolable citadel. As a Lutheran, von Salomon was surely not ignorant of Bora’s descent from the reformer’s wife, even though he might not know that the landed Boras from Bora (or Borna) itself had remained Catholic with the stubbornness of Saxons who do not give in to anyone, not even other Saxons. Whatever the case, it was excessive praise, and Bora said so.

The lieutenant colonel shook his balding head. “No, no, allow me. I speak from experience; I met my demons in the winter of ’41. If you haven’t been told – and I’d rather you heard it directly from me – I was repatriated in the winter of ’41 after a serious nervous breakdown. They sent me first to Bad Pyrmont, then to Sommerfeld, closer to home. It was just exhaustion, not insanity. As you can see, I have recovered perfectly.”

Bora nodded. Bad Pyrmont, at the border with Switzerland, was merely a spa, the same one where his stepfather had gone to brood over Nina’s first refusal to marry him in 1912. But at Sommerfeld the army had built nothing less than a sanatorium for the mentally unstable.

It was an unsolicited apology on the part of his superior in rank. Any comment would be superfluous. Yes, Bora had overheard how von Salomon had not come unscathed through the Russian experience, so he was careful (he would be, in any case: military sobriety required it) to keep the mildly expectant attitude of the younger officer. That the man had been repatriated for health reasons as early as the winter of 1941 did not change matters, even though increasingly erratic behaviour, coupled with the tendency to weep over setbacks, was wholly unacceptable in a lieutenant colonel, such as von Salomon had been since 1941. He’d served valorously enough to be decorated once back at the front, but promotion to full colonel still eluded him.

With the coming of spring, he seemed to be flagging again a little. Bora thought of a colleague’s worried comment a few days earlier, when he had travelled to Generaloberst Kempf’s Poltava HQ to get official support for the organization of his unit. “But then,” his colleague told him over a mug of beer, “it could be worse. We’ve got folks here who are superstitious about walking on the shady side of the street, or leaving their quarters with the left foot. Did I tell you about the captain at Zaporozhye who collects live flies in a glass jar, just to see them cannibalize one another and eventually die? That’s sick, isn’t it?”

However von Salomon took Bora’s discreet silence about health matters, he seemed anxious to change the subject. “How’s the update coming along?” he asked.

He meant the painstaking work of gathering details about Soviet guerrilla methods in handbook form: the distilled essence of interrogation, wire-tapping of all kinds and on-sight observation, Bora and his colleagues’ ongoing project ever since 1941.

“Satisfactorily so far, Herr Oberstleutnant. It’ll soon be ready for use as a third edition of the Partisan Warfare Handbook, or as an addendum to what we have already. It’s a stand-alone text. Naturally, we’re adding items every week.” Bora said it to convince himself, trying not to think of the difficulties he was encountering as an interrogator.

“Good, good.” Von Salomon stood to place the typewritten sheets about the cavalry unit – meant for Generalleutnant von Groddeck – inside an already overstuffed briefcase. The meeting might have ended here, except he’d apparently heard about the deaths at Krasny Yar, and was “rather intrigued”.

“Are you familiar with the place, Major?”

Krasny Yar, again. Bora said he wasn’t, not really. “I only went there for the first time yesterday, Herr Oberstleutnant.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

Bora bit his tongue. Those Krasny Yar corpses kept coming up, adding trouble to trouble, surfacing in conversation in the same way they surfaced in the woods. Managing the unexpected is always difficult, even in peacetime; when abnormality reigns, the unexpected is intolerable, mostly because you don’t recognize it at first. You simply stagger when yet another weight is added. Lucidity, on the other hand, was something he took pride in. What else was there, when one had gone beyond courage and beyond fear? Both words were meaningless now, as if his mind (or soul) had developed calluses and no blow would register upon it until it bled.

He told the colonel what he knew, sketchily because he had errands to run and wanted to make it to the district commissioner’s office before a queue grew in front of his office. “None of the victims died from gunfire, so possibly the killer doesn’t want to be heard, or perhaps he has no firearms. The dead were mostly women or the elderly, which might make one suspect the attacker may not be in his physical prime; but then, as I understand, mostly women and older people went into the Yar. Our soldiers in the area were never harassed: for the reasons above, or because the killer feared we would then mount a full-scale operation. That’s all the solid data, Herr Oberstleutnant. The rest is peasant gabble.”

Thankfully, von Salomon had lost interest midway through the exposition. When they parted ways in downtown Merefa, each bound to his next task, the colonel insisted on seeing Bora to his vehicle. Walking between two buildings, he pushed his younger colleague aside with a sudden, barely controlled shove, so that Bora would be the one to step into the shade. It could have been a coincidence, and Bora was careful not to show he’d noticed. As he started the engine, however, he saw the colonel in the rear-view mirror still rigidly keeping to the sunlit centre of the lane, forcing a courier’s motorcycle to swerve around him and skirt the wall.

Only three kilometres lay between what Bora called his Merefa outpost (the small schoolhouse on the road to Alexandrovka, with a sombre row of graves outside its courtyard) and the office of Gebietskommissar Alfred Lothar Stark. Despite this, he had time during the brief stretch to face two stocky Russian fighter planes heading for him, hedge-hopping back from who knows where – without ammunition, otherwise they wouldn’t have spared the solitary army car. They swept over him so low that he slammed on his brakes and nearly went off the road. He’d just accelerated again when they veered ahead of him, cutting across his path this time. Bora was able to decipher the white letters – Gitlerji – painted on one of the fighters. Whatever curse they were addressing Hitler with in Cyrillic, they attracted the attention of the German pilots stationed at Rogany, who appeared from nowhere, skimming the roofs with machine guns blazing. And even if they barely missed Bora, they scored a direct hit on a picket fence, pulverizing it along with the ridge pole of the izba beyond, only to vanish behind the rooftops after their fleeing enemies, towards Oseryanka.

When Bora reached his destination, an ominous plume of black smoke to the west marked the place where one of the Russian fighters had most likely met its end. The sky was otherwise free of noise and of the peculiar happy blue of the season. As a pilot’s brother, on principle Bora did not wish evil to flyers in general. All he could do was hope that there was another reason for the black cloud out there.

The building that served as Stark’s brand-new headquarters had in the old days been the residence of a German manufacturer, such as one found in and around Kharkov before the Revolution. Whether descendants of Moravians settled here long ago or technologically advanced newcomers, Germans had frequented the region for years. The brick construction, gabled and tall, with the date 1895 inscribed on a limestone scroll under the peak of the roof, could have stood anywhere on German soil. Although the long-disused factory behind it had perished during the fighting, the house was still referred to as the Kombinat. A branch of the Kharkov railroad led directly to the factory and the residence from the old-fashioned little architectural jewel still called – the war notwithstanding – New Bavaria Station. The Kombinat’s façade bore signs of the house’s old elegance, including stained glass in the bullseye windows by the door, miraculously intact. And this even though (Bora knew; he’d gone in a couple of times before) the interior had been partitioned into cubicles years ago to host Rabfak worker–students of the Kharkov Technical Institute for Engineers, and later the aeroplane factory employees. Only the ground floor maintained some of the old glory, and the district commissioner’s office was just inside the main entrance, to the right.

Bora was in luck. No queue: only Russian prisoners on their knees, waxing the floor. In the small parlour to the left, a brown-jacketed assistant enquired as to his business; he then leapt from behind his desk, stepped across the corridor and opened Stark’s double door just enough to put his head through. Whatever he was told, the assistant simply slid both wooden leaves wide open and went back to his desk.

“Major Bora,” Stark called, seeing him on the threshold. “Come in, come in. What have you got for me today?”

Bora walked in. The panelled, well-lit room was overly spacious, but then space was needed for the amount of paperwork that started and ended here; in just a few weeks, the Gebietskommissar (Geko, as he was nicknamed) had set up an efficient system of managing people and resources in the area that the army countenanced mostly because it hampered the Security Service’s overbearing. Whatever Stark’s office had been earlier – most likely a parlour – it had some pretence of elegance: a high ceiling, coffered, a chandelier shaped like a transverse metal bar, on which etched opaline glass bulbs the size of melons lined up; glass cabinets; a spotless, carpetless oak floor. Stark himself, in his gold-brown SA blouse, radiated both optimism and a busy man’s problem-solving attitude. Asking Bora what he might have for him only revealed his trust that officers would spontaneously turn in captured goods or civilians for labour. They’d met a week earlier on account of the mounts Bora still needed to bring his unit to full strength, Stark displaying an impressive knowledge of the horseflesh yet available in the Kharkov Oblast.

Bora said, “I actually have a couple of questions for you, District Commissioner.”

Stark gestured for him to sit down while he continued to converse with someone on the telephone. “Not the insecticide again, Colonel… I’ve got your requests here. I read them; I understand. But we’re strapped for it; we need it for other hospitals. Believe me, if I could, I would. I shipped it all out last week. Well, bricks we do have; I got a load straight from Nova Vodolaga. If it’s bricks you want, and nothing else, I can favour you.” Covering the mouthpiece, Stark looked over. He saw that Bora remained standing, and took it to mean he was in haste. “Yes, Major?” he enquired.

“I need five women —” Bora began to say.

“Five women?” Stark lowered the receiver, smiling in a friendly way. “That’s the cavalry for you. You need five women?”

“— to do the washing and cleaning for us, Herr Gebietskommissar.”

Stark grunted a “Yes, goodbye” into the mouthpiece, and returned the receiver to its cradle. Looking over the top of his glasses, he leafed through the typewritten sheets in a neat folder of his. “Well, if that’s all you horse boys need them for, Major, I’ve got five babushkas your grandma’s age.”

“They’ll do.”

“Have them picked up tomorrow morning sevenish at the Merefa station, and then stop by to sign the paperwork. What’s the other question?”

“Well, it was insecticide until I heard you a moment ago. I did try to remedy things on my own, but – I brought along a list the medical corps gave me. I think it’s a crescendo, in terms of efficacy. Pyrethrum, for example. I don’t know where to find it, even though I have access to three out of the four other components – coal oil, ether and turpentine. Naphthalene I think I could scrounge from maintenance if they have some to spare.”

“Pyrethrum? We’ve got none.”

“Potassium arsenite was my next bet. Other ingredients: ten parts of milk is fine, but where do I find molasses?” (Stark shook his head.) “So, I’m down to sulphur dioxide, even though without pressurized bottles we’d have to burn it on a gas cooker for – what, seven hours or so? With wooden huts and straw roofs, it’s not a great idea. For best results, hospitals recommend hydrocyanic acid, better if Zyklon B, poured on floors and sealed off. But the ventilation time —”

“Please!” Stark raised his hands in an alarmed gesture. “Leave the hydrocyanic acid alone; don’t even think of it! You’d kill yourselves and your mounts. I’ll see if I can get you bottled sulphur dioxide. You’ll have to ration it like water in the desert, though. For a closed room, 100 grams per square metre will do, in about five hours.”

“When may I send for it?”

“I said I’ll see if I can get it. Send someone on Friday if I don’t call you back.” The phone rang again as Bora left, and Stark picked up the receiver while shaking his head. “Zyklon B,” he muttered. “What are they thinking?”

Bora thanked him and left. As golden pheasants went, District Commissioner Stark was better than most. Physically, he’d have resembled a sturdy pheasant even without the administrator’s telltale brown-yellow blouse. The fact that his office had just been set up here within the bounds of militarily administered Ukraine represented an escalation in the infighting among the Party, the SS and Rosenberg’s Ministry for Eastern Occupied Territories. The Army steered clear of the tiff, but Bora’s “new father-in-law”, as he called his wife’s stepfather, was too close to the Party’s inner circle for him not to have heard about it.

By all accounts, considering that it was his charge to extract all that was possible from this region, Geko Stark did it with some basic humanity. Perhaps his early days as a newspaperman had a role in that. He’d given up a rich post as a Gauleiter to serve here, and now operated from Merefa like a tranquil spider in its web, keeping in touch with his assistants on the road. Stark’s strong voice (the voice of an industrialist, more or less his own grandfather’s voice at the publishing house, clear and distinct) reached Bora in the corridor, where he had stopped to read communiqués on a bulletin board. The Russian prisoners waxing the floor drew back on their knees, making room for him, without raising their heads. Yes, Stark was organizing things. Soon everyone would have to come knocking here to get what was needed. If Generaloberst Kempf resented having such gross civilian interference in his sector, he kept it to himself, or had other things to worry about. Leaving the Kombinat, Bora overheard Stark bellow, “And where am I to find those?” over the phone, whatever those were.