A Man Without Breath

‘Very well, sir. It goes like this. A bishop is visiting a local church and in the vestibule he notices three pictures hanging on the wall. There’s one of Hitler and one of Goring and there’s a picture of Jesus in the middle. The bishop questions the pastor of the church about this arrangement and the pastor tells the bishop that these three pictures help to remind him of what it says in the Bible – that Christ was nailed up between two criminals.’

I smiled to myself. I’d heard many permutations of this joke before, but not for a while. Most people who made jokes about the Nazis were just letting off steam, but for me, it always felt like an act of political resistance.

‘Yes, I can see why that would make anyone very angry,’ I told him. ‘Well, you did the right thing all the same. I imagine the Gestapo had more pressing matters to deal with ahead of the leader’s visit to Smolensk. I shall certainly make a point of seeking out this Captain Hammerschmidt and asking him why he didn’t think to question these men.’

Lutz nodded, but he hardly looked convinced by my explanation.

‘However, the next time you hear something you think affects our morale or security here in Smolensk, it might be best if you spoke to me first.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Good.’

‘There is one thing I wanted to ask you, sir.’

‘Go ahead, Lutz.’

‘This Doctor Batov who the Ministry of Enlightenment have told you can come to live in Germany. Can that be right, sir? He’s a Slav, isn’t he? And Slavs are racially contaminated. I thought that the whole point of our drive toward the East is to expel these inferior races, not to assimilate them into German society.’

‘You’re right, of course, but sometimes exceptions must be made, for the greater good. Dr Batov is going to perform a very important propaganda service for Germany. A very important service that might help to change the course of this war. I don’t exaggerate. As a matter of fact, I’m going to see him now, to tell him the good news. And for him to perform this service I was speaking of.’

Once again Lutz hardly looked convinced by my arguments. I wasn’t surprised: that’s the trouble with dyed-in-the-wool Nazis – stupidity, ignorance and prejudice always get in the way of them seeing the bigger picture. But for that they might be impossible to deal with.

*

Glinka Park was a landscaped garden with trees and stupid little paths just inside the southern wall of the Kremlin, with the Luther church and the town hall a stone’s throw to the east. You could smell the circus and hear the complaints of some of the animals from its menagerie further to the west; then again, that might just have been the effect of some town drunks who were making a horizontal party of it with some booze and a little campfire and some pet dogs on the Rathausstrasse side.

In the centre of the park was a large statue of Glinka; around his size fifty-six bronze shoes was a wrought-iron fence that had been made to look like music paper, with notes in positions that you just knew without being able to read music were probably from his most popular symphony. With the Nazis in charge of a large part of the country, it was hard to imagine a Soviet composer finding very much to write a symphony about, unless some modern maestro felt inspired to write a new overture to victory complete with real cannon and bells and a triumphant Russian army, and now that I’d thought about it, that wasn’t hard to imagine at all: 1812 and the Grand Army’s disastrous retreat from Moscow was beginning to seem much more contemporary than felt comfortable. I just hoped I wasn’t going to be another frozen body lying in the snow on the long road back to Berlin.

I saw Martin Quidde before he caught sight of me. He was wandering around with a leather dispatch case in one hand and a cigarette in the other, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world, when in fact it wasn’t like that at all; as soon as he saw me he looked one way and then the other like a cornered dog, as if wondering where to run.

‘Was he a great composer, do you think?’ I asked him. ‘Did he really deserve this? Or were they just short of a nice statue to put in this park whenever it was that some boyar locked the lid on his piano for good?’ I checked Glinka’s dates on the pedestal. ‘1857. Seems like only yesterday. Back then Germany was just a twinkle in Bismarck’s blue eye. If old blood and iron had known then what we know now, would he have done it, d’you think? Unified all the German states into one big happy family? I wonder.’

Quidde hurried me away into the trees as though we were more likely to fall under suspicion if we remained near the statue. Several times he glanced anxiously back, almost as if he expected Glinka to climb down off the pedestal and come after us with a baton and a couple of bars of serious music in his hand.