the residue of gunnery. The air-assault lieutenant colonel looked even worse, grimed with blood, soot, and mud. It was all very much unlike the movies about the Great Patriotic War in terms of glamorous appearance, Bezarin thought. But the emotional power seemed incomparably greater.
The air-assault commander was disappointed to learn how few tanks Bezarin had with him, and he was alarmed to hear that they were virtually out of ammunition. But Bezarin felt confident. Surely, the enemy had received reports that Soviet tanks had entered Bad Oeynhausen. That would slow down any planned countermeasures until the enemy assessed the impact of the change in the situation.
Bezarin ordered Dagliev to recross to the east bank and block any enemy counterattacks from that direction, then he returned to properly position his remaining tanks against a threat from the south or west. Small-arms engagements continued to flare in the center of the town, but the noise did not seem to worry the air-assault commander. The bridge, after all, was everything.
Now it was a matter of waiting to see who would arrive first, an enemy counterattack or formations of Soviet armor. Bezarin expected more high drama, perhaps even a sort of siege. But reality disappointed him. More small Soviet elements began to filter in, while some reconnaissance elements pushed on to the west. Another forward detachment found its way through, and its commander was disappointed that Bezarin had beaten him to the linkup. Regimental forward security detachments and advance guards arrived, often with vehicles from different units jumbled together. Lead elements from an army corps appeared, demanding that their vehicles receive unconditional right-of-way. The orders of march often made little sense, judged by the prescriptions of the manuals. But within an hour, enough combat power had crossed the Bad Oeynhausen bridge to hold the area against any counterattack the enemy was likely to launch. When Bezarin reestablished radio contact with his elements left behind at Rinteln, he learned that other Soviet units were crossing there, as well.
Mission accomplished, Bezarin attempted to make out his after-action report, huddled in the stinking interior of his tank. He felt a desperate need to explain the day’s events from the perspective of his battalion. He was unsure whether he was a hero or a war criminal. He intended to be as honest as possible about the situation that had gotten out of hand during the engagement amid the refugee column. He wanted to get it out in the open. He did not intend to live with it as a secret, like one of the tormented characters in Anna’s beloved novels. In any case, he doubted that it would be possible to hide it. It was too big, too terrible. He remembered the girl in the torn sweater, how her arm had flown high over a spray of blood in the moment before she fell. In his imagination, he could see each of her bony fingers, reaching higher and higher, even though she had been too far away for him actually to have made out the fine details he now traced in his mind. Then the fleeing girl was Anna, reaching to touch the coppery leaves of a birch tree in the Galician autumn, and it all made perfect sense to him as he fell into an iron sleep.
Twenty
Chibisov felt the strain of the war in his lungs. The days and nights of near-sleeplessness and the stress involved in maintaining the objective conditions for troop control as NATO pounded away at the front’s infrastructure had clamped his asthma around his chest like a shrinking jacket of steel. He had already taken twice the allowed dosage of his East German medications, but he continued to feel as though his body constantly remained several breaths behind its real need. He worried that his powers of thought would deteriorate to a dangerous degree, that illness would rob him of his focus. Already, he had been forced by the crush of events to make decisions for the commander that would have been unthinkable just days before, despite the level of trust between the two of them. The staffs ability to function had been terribly shaken. In two days, Chibisov had learned to make drastic, immediate choices in Malinsky’s absence, making decisions that killed numbers still uncounted, judging only by the powerful law of the plan and his insights into Malinsky’s approach to military operations. Sequential and even concurrent methods of support for decision-making and planning had largely broken down. The truly crucial decisions had to be made upon the immediately available information in the executive manner. Under the circumstances, Chibisov did his best to be a perfect chief of staff and deputy commander for the old man, struggling not to insert his personal views, always seeking to act as a pure extension of the commander’s will. But now Chibisov worried that he might make a false move out of the sort of temperamental spitefulness that sickness brought out in the human animal.
He had not been outside the bunker since the beginning of combat operations. Malinsky flew around the battlefield, applying his personal skills and attention at the points of decision, while Chibisov remained at the main command post, working the routine levers and gears. Chibisov had no doubt that Malinsky’s presence forward made a difference. The old man had the knack, the touch of the born general, able to see through the fog of war to the essence. Perhaps, Chibisov thought, there was something to bloodlines. Perhaps all of the centuries of family soldiering had made this difference in Malinsky, breeding a special, ultimately undefinable perfection in the man.
Chibisov smiled bitterly at the shortness in his lungs. Yes, and if bloodlines determined fate, then what did that imply for him? A little Jew from the ghetto of Kiev or Odessa, sputtering the arcane formulas of a new metal religion. Worshiping the correlation of forces and means, the norms of consumption and the mathematical coefficients of combat results. He sensed that he was, after all, an impostor. How could he be otherwise? How could any of them have been otherwise? His father had fought for the Soviet Union and the international cause of socialism in Spain, and had nearly died in Stalin’s camps for his suspicious voluntarism within a viciously capricious system. Only the German invasion had saved the man from death in the snows of Magadan. As with Malinsky’s father, Chibisov well knew. And he laughed. What would the Hitlerite Germans have thought had they known that their invasion actually freed Jews? To fight them from Maikop to Potsdam. Jews who would have sons to fight their sons.
Chibisov was never fully aware of the extent to which he accepted his Jewishness in the end. He mocked it to himself, working to hate it. Yet he inevitably cast himself in the term against which he so rebelled, insinuating it into the speech and thoughts of his comrades.
Yes, he thought, the great socialist experiment has been a failure for some of us. May we never annihilate the past? My father came out of the camps without reproach or even a question, to join the struggle as though he had only been on sick leave. And his father’s father had played cat and mouse with the Okhrana, the czarist secret police, plotting the future by smoky lamps in back rooms in the near-medieval Ukraine. His grandfather had manned the barricades, fighting fanatically to bring a new world to birth. In the years of the troubles, he had withheld food from the starving, from his own people by any definition, to shorten the long and agonizing labor. Every weapon had been justified. The final result was to absolve all guilt.
But there never was a final result. The golden age receded again and again. Next year in Jerusalem, Chibisov thought sarcastically.
Why did we believe? Why us, out of all of them? The Russians and Ukrainians, wretched in their superstition and drunkenness… it was easy to understand their blindness, their madness. But how were
We deceived ourselves, of course. Because we, of all the peoples of this earth, wanted most passionately to believe. Religious natures, with a weakness for mysticism. And the new religion of the revolution, of shining, benevolent socialism, the ideology of an unprecedented dispensation, of a new holiness… that was the new Jerusalem. New heavens and, above all, a new earth. It was, Chibisov thought, as though history had painstakingly set us up to be the fools.
And yet, we had to believe. What else was there except belief? Belief in any religion. Even the religion of war. Am I of the blood of David, of Joshua and Gideon? Or the crouched asthmatic son of willing fools?
Chibisov knocked lightly at the door to Malinsky’s private office. The old man had returned exhausted from visiting the front and army forward command posts, and despite the compounding successes of the day, he had ripped through the staff, unusually biting in his comments as he demanded key pieces of information. Chibisov had been relieved when he finally managed to steer the old man off for a bit of sleep.
Now, all too soon, he had to disturb Malinsky. This was not a matter he felt he could address by himself. It was, potentially at least, far too big. The one great variable.
