A Man Without Breath

We hardly knew each other and yet, without ever having acknowledged it with so much as a word or a brushed finger, we both seemed to recognize something in the other’s eyes that – against all expectation and beyond all understanding – felt as if it was determined to make us lovers. We had connected on some invisible level behind our clever conversation and common courtesies, and it would have spoiled the game if either one of us had mentioned aloud what we sincerely hoped would happen. There was no admission of what we really felt – an atavistic attraction that was more than lust and yet not love either. Words – even German words – would have been inadequate and certainly too clumsy for what we felt. No more was there any kind of objection raised to the idea of what hovered unspoken in the air between us. Never; not once. It just seemed as if we both knew it was going to happen because it was simply meant to be. Of course that kind of thing happened a lot during the war, but still this felt like something out of the ordinary. Perhaps it was the place we were in and what we were doing, as if there was so much death around that it would have seemed a kind of blasphemy not to have gone along with what the capricious generosity of life seemed willing to thrust upon us.

And when, standing in front of her wooden door, we turned expectantly towards each other, the trees at Krasny Bor held their silvery breath and the darkness discreetly closed its black eyes so that nothing might prevent this final coming together. But like a conductor trying to settle his orchestra for a long, silent moment, I just held her and looked at the perfect oval of her face in anticipation of the moment when I might inhale the sweet breath in her mouth and taste the subtler heaven in her lips. Then I kissed her. At the brush of my mouth on hers I heard bees in my ears and felt a leap in my chest as strong as if the damper mechanism had been lifted on a grand piano and every string had sounded at once, and my apotheosis was complete.

‘Are you coming in, Bernhard Gunther?’ she asked.

‘I think I am,’ I said.

‘You know something Bernie? You ought to be a gambler, luck like yours.’

CHAPTER 9

Wednesday, April 28th 1943

I had to hand it to Goebbels; the minister had chosen his Katyn public relations officer carefully. Lieutenant Gregor Sloventzik wasn’t even a member of the Party. Moreover he seemed to be extremely good at what he did – a real Edward Bernays, a man who understood the science of ballyhoo extremely well. I thought I’d never met a man who was better at handling people – everyone from the field marshal to Boris Bazilevsky, the deputy mayor of Smolensk.

Sloventzik was a reserve army officer who’d worked as a journalist on the Wiener Zeitung before the war, which was how he knew the people at the ministry. The first state secretary in the ministry, Otto Dietrich, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian-born Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands, were both reputed to be his close personal friends. Smooth and personable, Sloventzik was in his early forties, with an easy smile and impeccable manners. He was tall, with longish hair and a hawk-face, and with his dark complexion he was no one’s idea of a Nazi. He wore a tailored lieutenant’s army uniform as if it had been a colonel’s, and under his right arm he was forever carrying a large ring file that held pages of key facts and figures about what had been discovered concerning the bodies in the mass grave at Katyn Wood. His efficiency and diplomatic skills were only exceeded by his great facility with languages; but his powers of diplomacy came crashing down to earth when, a matter of hours before the arrival of the international commission representatives, the Polish Red Cross decided that Sloventzik had grievously insulted the whole Polish nation and hence it was now considering returning immediately to Poland.

Count Casimir Skarzynski, the secretary general of the Polish Red Cross, with whom I had formed a closer acquaintance – I wouldn’t have called it a friendship, exactly – and Archdeacon Jasinski came to my hut at Krasny Bor where, much to the irritation of Field Marshal von Kluge, they were staying, and explained the problem.

‘I don’t really know who and what you are, Herr Gunther,’ the count said carefully. ‘And I don’t really care. But-’

‘I told you before, sir. I’m from the German War Crimes Bureau in Berlin. Before the war I was a humble policeman. A homicide detective. There used to be a law against that sort of thing, you know. When people killed other people, we put them in prison. Of course, that was before the war. Anyway, until you arrived Judge Conrad and I were, at the invitation of the Wehrmacht, the investigating officers here in Katyn.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. So you say.’

I shrugged. ‘Why don’t you tell me how Lieutenant Sloventzik has insulted your nation and I’ll see what I can do to put that right?’