A Man Without Breath

I folded my arms and shook my head. ‘You know we are on the same side, corporal. In this war. I may not enjoy the confidence of the leader, but the minister of propaganda will take it very amiss if I’m not available to show our important foreign guests around Katyn Wood later on this morning. It will render all of his careful work meaningless. I don’t think it would be a presumption to say that the doctor will be very angry when he finds out that I’ve been arrested. I’m certainly going to make a point of finding out who you are and informing him that you were most unhelpful.’

I hated myself for saying all that, but in truth I was scared. I’d been arrested before, of course, but life seemed to count for very little so far from home, and after what I’d seen in Katyn Wood it seemed all too easy that mine could end abruptly in some ditch, shot in the back of the head by a grumpy army corporal.

‘I’m just obeying my orders,’ said the corporal. ‘And I don’t give a fuck who you know. Someone like me – someone at the bottom of the heap – none of that bullshit matters a damn. I just do what I’m told, see? And that’s the end of it. An officer says “Shoot that bastard”, then I shoot that fucking bastard. So why don’t you save your fucking breath, Captain Gunther? I’m dog-tired. All I want to do is finish my fucking shift and go to bed and get a couple of hours’ sleep before I have to get up and do what I’m told all over again. So fuck you and fuck your little friend in the ministry.’

‘You certainly have a way with words, corporal.’

I checked my mouth and retreated into the warmth of my coat collar. We reached the outskirts of Smolensk and the checkpoint at the Peter and Paul bridge again. The same boys from the field police were on duty. And it was them who filled in some of the blanks while the corporal showed them our signed orders.

‘Do you know what’s going on here?’ I asked the kennel hounds.

‘Sorry, sir,’ said one – the man I’d spoken to before, ‘but we did like you said. We were on our way down to the prison with the prisoner, but when we stopped at the checkpoint near the Kommandatura the field marshal – who was in a passing car – saw us and more importantly he saw his Putzer, Dyakov. Dyakov told him some story about how you’d tortured him in retaliation for the field marshal tearing a strip off you in the officers’ mess the other day. At least that’s what I think he said. Anyway, the field marshal believed him and he was absolutely furious about it. Never seen him looked so pissed off. Turned the colour of beetroot. I’m afraid he countermanded your orders and made his escort drive Dyakov straight to the SSMA; then he asked where you were. We told him you’d gone back to Krasny Bor and he said that if we saw you before he did we were to place you under immediate close arrest and take you to the Luchinskaya Tower.’

‘Where the hell’s that?’ I asked.

‘It’s in the wall of the local Kremlin, sir. Not a very nice place at all. The Gestapo use it sometimes to soften up their prisoners. Sorry, sir.’

‘Tell Voss,’ I said. ‘Tell Voss that I think that’s where I’m being taken to now.’

One of the other field policemen handed back our orders and waved us on our way.

A few minutes later we arrived at a round corner tower made of red brick. From the outside it was a forbidding sort of place; inside the forbidden had become downright proscription: damp and smelly, and that was just the entrance hall. The cell where I was to spend what remained of the night was through a heavy wooden trapdoor in the floor and down a series of slippery stone steps. It was like descending into a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann. At the bottom of the steps I realized I was on my own, and when I turned around I saw the corporal’s boots exiting through the trapdoor. It was the last thing I saw. The next moment the trapdoor dropped with a loud bang that was like a meteorite hitting a mountain top and I was plunged into darkness I could have cut with a knife.

When I’d got a hold of myself, I slid down the rest of the stairs on my backside and then stood up. With eyes straining to see if there was something more than my own poor self, and hands outstretched in front of me lest I come upon some wall or door, I looked one way and then the other, but there was only darkness visible. Plucking up what remained of my sorely tested courage I gulped down some of the cold damp air and called out. ‘Hallo,’ I said. ‘Is there anyone down here?’

No answer came.

I was alone. I had never felt more alone. Death itself could not have felt much worse. If the purpose of my incarceration was – as the kennel hound on the bridge had put it – to soften me up, then I was already feeling pretty soft. I couldn’t have felt softer if I had been made of cream cheese.

I sat down and waited patiently for someone to come and say what was to become of me. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.

CHAPTER 14

Monday, May 3rd 1943