A Man Without Breath

‘Gradually I discovered more about what they had been doing. Not least because, in his delirium, one of them – the major – told me what their duties had been and why they were drunk. They’d been celebrating after carrying out a successful special operation near the station at Gnezdovo. I’m sure I don’t have to tell a German what a “special operation” amounts to. You Germans use this euphemism too, don’t you? When you want to kill thousands of people and pretend that it’s something sanitary. And this merely confirmed a local rumour that had been running for a while: the road to Vitebsk had been closed for several days, and a trainload of men had been seen in a railway siding. At the time I had no idea that these men were Poles, and it was only later I discovered that a whole trainload of Poles had been systematically liquidated.’

‘Did he tell you that, too?’ I asked.

‘Yes, the major told me. The other one – the one who fractured his skull – didn’t recover from his injury. But periodically the major was talkative. Fortunately he never remembered anything he had told me, and naturally I denied that he had said anything while he’d been unconscious. It’s odd but I’ve never told anyone what he told me until now. It’s even odder that I should be telling all this to a German. After all, there’s many a mass grave in this part of the world that’s full of Jews murdered by the SS. I assume your government now wishes to try to make anti-Soviet propaganda out of this incident.’

‘You assume correctly, Doctor Batov. They wish to look on in a little pantomime of horror as they find the bodies of hundreds of Polish officers while carefully sidestepping the burial pits of their own making.’

‘Then your Doctor Goebbels has a greater opportunity to shame us than perhaps even he suspects. You can forget there being hundreds of men. There are at least five thousand Polish officers buried in Katyn Wood. And if half of what Major Blokhin told me in his delirium is accurate, then Katyn is just the tip of the iceberg. God knows how many tens of thousands of Poles are buried in locations further afield: Kharkov. Mednoe. Kalinin.’

‘For God’s sake why?’ I asked. ‘All because of the defeat in 1920?’

Batov shrugged. ‘No, not just that, I think. It was probably also because Stalin feared that Poles would behave like the Finns and join the German side. Like I said, for Russians, Poles and Germans are virtually co-terminous. It’s the same reason why as many as sixty thousand Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were also murdered by the NKVD. Killing them was probably just seen as a simple way of making sure that eventually they didn’t kill us.’

‘Stalin’s maths,’ I said. ‘I never did like maths all that much. I’d forgotten how much until I came to Russia.’ I shook my head. ‘Even so, it’s hard to imagine. Even for a German. The things that men are capable of. It beggars belief.’

‘Perhaps it’s hard to imagine in Germany. But not in Russia. I’m afraid we Russians are rather more inclined to believe the worst of our government than you Germans are. But then, we’ve had a lot more practice. We’ve had the Bolsheviks and the Cheka since 1917. And before that we had the Tsar and the Cheka. It’s often forgotten what a bloody tyrant Nicholas the second was. Perhaps a million Russians were murdered by him, too. So, you see, we’re used to being murdered by our own government. You’ve only had Hitler and your Gestapo since 1933. Besides, it’s all easy enough to prove, isn’t it? What happened to these Poles. All you have to do is dig up Katyn Wood.’

I shrugged. ‘But even if we do that I still think it will suit plenty of people to say that it was Germany who killed those men. Frankly, I think Goebbels is wasting his time, although I wouldn’t dream of telling him that. The Americans and the British have invested too much in Uncle Joe to turn away from him now. It might be embarrassing for it to be proved in front of the world what they already know in their heart of hearts – that the Bolsheviks are every bit as loathsome as the Nazis. Embarrassing, yes, but I don’t think it will really change very much, do you?’

Batov was quiet for a moment. His eyes flicked to one side and for a moment I thought he was listening to something I couldn’t hear – a neighbour perhaps, or even someone else in the apartment. But when he took a deep breath and clasped his hands tightly for a moment – so tightly his knuckles whitened – I realized he was steeling himself to tell me something even more important.

‘What if I could prove definitively that the NKVD murdered those Poles? What if I told you I had evidence of what Major Blokhin and his men had done here – here in Smolensk and in Katyn Wood? What would you say to that, my German friend?’

‘Well, things might be different, I suppose.’ I paused, lit another cigarette, and pushed the packet across the table toward Batov. ‘But different for who?’

‘I mean, could they be any different for me and my daughter?’