A Man Without Breath

‘He’s right,’ agreed Von Gersdorff. ‘Without those original identity papers you’ve still got nothing.’

I thought for a moment. ‘What you were saying just a moment ago, about the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. Coming up from their crypts and their cellars.’

‘One has to admire courage like that. And to deplore the kind of treatment that brings about a situation where the German military behaves like an army of condottieri from the Middle Ages. I know I do, and many others besides me.’

Von Gersdorff bit his lip for a moment and shook his head bitterly. I tried to interrupt with an idea I’d just had, but seeing the colonel had hardly finished I kicked the door shut in case anyone heard our raised voices – even after Stalingrad there were plenty of men serving with the Wehrmacht in Smolensk who still worshipped Adolf Hitler.

‘This whole exercise in Katyn Wood – aren’t the Reds awful? this is the kind of Bolshevik barbarism that Germany is fighting against – it’s all bullshit while we’re busy blowing up synagogues and firing tank rounds at schoolboys with Molotov cocktails. What, do we think the world hasn’t noticed what we’re doing in Warsaw? Do we honestly believe that public opinion is going to ignore heroism like that? Are we really expecting that the Americans are ever going to come over to our side after we’ve murdered thousands of lightly armed Jews in Poland on the strength of what we’re uncovering here in Smolensk?’ He made a fist and held it front of his face for a moment as if wishing he could hit someone with it – me probably. ‘This Warsaw ghetto uprising has been going on since January 18th, long before anyone found a human bone in Katyn Wood, and it’s the scandal of Europe. What kind of a propaganda minister is it who thinks that the corpses of thirteen thousand Jewish insurgents can be hidden away or ignored while we bring the world’s reporters here to show them the bodies of four thousand dead Polacks? That’s what I’d like to know.’

‘When you put it like that,’ I said, ‘it does sound ridiculous.’

‘Ridiculous?’ Von Gersdorff laughed. ‘It’s the most stupendously fatuous piece of public relations nonsense I’ve ever heard. And thanks to you, Gunther, my name will forever be associated with it as the man who found the first body in Katyn Wood.’

‘Then tell him that,’ I suggested. ‘Joey the Crip. Tell him that next time you see him.’

‘I can hardly be the only person who thinks the same way. My God I expect there are lots of Nazis who recognize the obvious truth of what I’m saying, so perhaps I will.’

‘And what good would that do? Seriously. Look, colonel, I’m too old to lie to myself, but I’m not so stupid that I can’t lie to others. I’ve had a rotten feeling in my stomach every morning for the last ten years. There’s hardly been one day when I haven’t asked myself if I could live under a regime I neither understood nor desired. But what am I supposed to do? For the present, I just want to pinch a man for the murders of three – possibly five – people. That’s not much, I’ll agree. And even if I do succeed in pinching him I won’t get much satisfaction from it. For now, being a policeman seems like the only right thing I can do. I’m not sure that makes sense to a man with a keen sense of honour like you. But it’s all I’ve got. So. What you were saying just a moment ago, about the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto coming up from their crypts and their cellars. That’s given me an idea for what to do about Dyakov.’

*

The entrance to Smolensk Cathedral was up a series of wide steps under a great white vault that was as big as a circus tent. The outer corridors with their low roofs and frescoes of rather fey-looking angels were more like fairy grottoes. Inside, the gold iconostasis resembled a couple of stalls in a street full of jewellers’ shops and framed a Faberge egg of a central shrine and a copy of a Madonna – the original having been destroyed during the battle for Smolensk – who looked out from the window of her gleaming home with a mixture of pique and embarrassment. Light from the hundreds of flickering candles that burned in several tall brass chandeliers added an ancient, pagan touch to the cathedral interior, and instead of the Christian Madonna I would not have been surprised to see a vestal virgin maintaining the sacred fire of the many candles or weaving a straw figure to throw into the Tiber. All religion seems like something hermetic to me.

Preceded by a sergeant of panzer engineers, who was an expert in hidden bomb removal – by Von Gersdorff’s account, Sergeant Schlachter had removed more than twenty mines left by the Reds on the two remaining bridges across the Dnieper and, as a result, was a twice-decorated pioneer – the colonel and I stepped carefully down a long and narrow winding stone staircase that led into the cathedral crypt. There was a small elevator, but that had stopped working and no one cared to try to fix it, just in case that was booby-trapped too.