A Man Without Breath

A few minutes later three Polish girls arrived with vodka, took off their clothes – without being asked, I might add – and lay close beside me on the bed. Two lay either side of me like a pair of sidearms; the third lay between my legs with her head on my stomach. Her name was Pauline I think. She had a nice body and so did the others, but I didn’t do very much and nor did they. They just stroked my hair and shared my cigarettes and watched me drink – too much – and generally despise myself. After a while one of them – Pauline – tried to unbutton my trousers but I swatted her hand away. There was comfort enough in their idle nakedness, which felt natural and like one of those old paintings of some stiff scene invoking pastoral poetry or a stupid bit of mythology, the way old paintings sometimes do. Besides, if you drink enough it provokes only the desire to sleep and takes the edge off any thoughts that might prevent this from happening; that was the general idea, anyway. Thinking I was playing some sort of coy game, Pauline laughed and tried to unbutton me again, and so I held her hand and told her in my halting Russian – for a moment I forgot that she was Polish and she spoke German – that her company and that of her friends was quite enough for me.

‘What are you doing in Smolensk?’ she asked when she realized I was quite serious about being serious.

‘Oppressing the Russians,’ I told her. ‘Taking what doesn’t belong to Germany. Committing a crime of truly historic proportions. Killing Jews, on an industrial scale. That is what we’re doing in Smolensk. Not to mention everywhere else.’

‘Yes, but you personally. What do you do? What is your job?’

‘I am investigating the deaths of four thousand of your countrymen,’ I told her. ‘Polish officers who were captured by the Russians as a result of an unholy alliance between Germany and Russia and then murdered in the Katyn Wood. Shot one after another and piled into a mass grave, one on top of the other, like so many sardines. No, not like sardines. More like a horrible lasagne, with layers and layers of pasta and something darker and slimier in between. Sometimes I have this nightmare that I’m part of that lasagne. That I’m lying in a pool of fat between two decaying human strata.’

They were silent for a moment, then Pauline spoke. ‘That’s what we heard,’ she said. ‘That there were thousands of bodies. Some of the soldiers who come here say the whole area smells like a plague.’

‘But is it true?’ asked the other. ‘Only we hear a lot of rumours about what is happening over at Katyn Wood and it’s hard to know what to believe. Soldiers are such liars. They’re always trying to scare us.’

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Hand over heart. Just for once the Germans aren’t lying about something. The Russians murdered four thousand Polish officers here in the spring of 1940. And many others besides in several other places we don’t yet know about. Perhaps as many as fifteen or twenty thousand men. Time will tell. But right now my government is rather hoping to tell the world about it first.’

‘My elder brother was in the Polish army,’ said Pauline. ‘I haven’t seen him since September 1939. I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead. For all I know he could be one of those men in the forest.’

I sat up and took her face in my hands. ‘Was he an officer?’ I asked.

‘No. A sergeant. In an Uhlan regiment. The 18th Lancers. You should have seen him on his horse. Very handsome.’

‘Then I sincerely doubt he’s one of these men.’

This was a lie but I meant it kindly; by now we knew that as many as three thousand of the bodies found in the mass graves at Katyn were those of Polish NCOs, but it didn’t seem right to tell her that, not while she was lying beside me. Three thousand NCOs seemed like a lot to me – perhaps as many NCOs as there were in the whole Polish army. It wasn’t that I thought she would get up and leave, merely that I didn’t have the stomach for the truth. And, after all, what was one more lie now, when so many lies had and probably would still be told about what had really happened in Katyn Wood?

‘And we certainly didn’t find any horses,’ I added by way of corroboration.

Pauline breathed a sigh of relief and laid her head back on my stomach. The weight of her head was almost too much for me.

‘Well, that’s a relief,’ she said. ‘To know that he isn’t one of them. I wouldn’t like to think of him lying up there and me lying down here.’

‘No indeed,’ I said quietly.

‘But it would be ironic, don’t you think, Pauline?’ said one of the others beside me. ‘Both of you eight hundred kilometres from home, in a foreign country, lying on your backs, all day and all night.’

Pauline shot her friend a look. ‘You know, you don’t seem like the other Germans,’ she said, changing the subject.

‘No, you’re so wrong,’ I insisted. ‘I’m just like them. I’m every bit as bad. And don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that there’s any one of us who’s decent. We’re not worth a damn. None of us is worth a damn. Take my word for it.’