The Tolstoy Estate Read online

  DEDICATION

  For my mother, Rosemary, and my sister, Eira.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Steven Conte

  Copyright

  ONE

  ‘Captain?’ Winkel said. ‘You should put on your helmet.’

  Paul Bauer, aged forty, an army surgeon, kept his eyes shut. The corporal’s concern for him was touching, but after twenty-six hours spent operating under canvas, followed by eleven more of sabotaged sleep – at first near an active artillery battery, then sitting in the cabin of a pitching lorry – he hardly cared whether he lived or died. The lorry heaved and he strained not to give himself away by bracing against the dashboard.

  ‘He’s sleeping,’ Pflieger said.

  ‘Then wake him,’ replied Winkel.

  ‘He wouldn’t thank me for that.’

  ‘This forest . . . you should wake him.’

  ‘You wake him, why don’t you?’

  ‘Pflieger, I’m driving,’ Winkel said. ‘You’re sitting beside him.’

  The lorry reared again, smacking Bauer’s temple on the window frame. It was Pflieger who swore. ‘Hey, Sepp, you trying to kill us?’

  ‘Der Schlamm,’ Winkel said, ‘the mud’ – oozing loathing and affront.

  ‘Just don’t roll the fucker,’ Pflieger said. ‘Drowning in some Russian ditch, there’d be no glory in that.’

  The lorry bucked, halted, then edged onwards again, its speed set by the slowest of the seventeen vehicles in the convoy. Their own was next to last. For a while no one spoke. A sorrowing engine, shifting gears, rain battering the roof. The labouring of wiper blades.

  Pflieger said, ‘It’s getting late.’

  ‘I know,’ Winkel said.

  ‘We should have stopped at that village.’

  ‘Says you.’

  ‘Says me. And why not me?’

  ‘The great tactician.’

  Sounding wounded, Pflieger said, ‘I’m not talking tactics, Sepp, just common sense.’

  ‘Heard of perseverance?’

  ‘I only meant that soon it’ll be getting dark.’

  A vicious lurch caught Bauer unawares, forcing him to grip the dashboard for support. He could no longer pretend to be asleep.

  ‘Sir, welcome back,’ Winkel said. ‘Slept well?’

  Bauer opened his eyes and made out, between strokes of the wiper blades, the ambulance in front of them, its tail wagging in the mud, though it was travelling barely faster than walking pace. Autumn rains and the passage of more than sixty tanks had churned the road into a striated bog. Beside it there were low embankments sliced up where wagons, lorries and tanks had tried but failed to find firmer ground. Pine forest on both flanks. A gash of sky weeping rain. Three weeks earlier, on the edge of a forest like this one, a Soviet sniper had shot and killed Dieter Clemens, Bauer’s closest friend in the battalion and its best anaesthetist.

  Winkel said, ‘I was just saying you should put on your helmet.’

  ‘But not Pflieger?’

  ‘Sir, Pflieger is an idiot.’

  ‘Hey,’ Pflieger said. ‘I’m just sick of the weight of it.’

  ‘And there’s your hair loss,’ Winkel said.

  Pflieger patted his head. At twenty-six, and still acne-prone, he was rapidly balding. ‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it? Sir, what do you think? You’re a doctor.’

  ‘I think the corporal is right,’ Bauer said, putting his own helmet on. ‘We should play it safe.’

  Pflieger smirked, which gave him a witless expression, his tongue protruding a little from between his teeth. ‘A bit late for that,’ he said, but put on his helmet all the same. Another officer might have reprimanded him for the comment, but Bauer was used to making allowances for Pflieger, who in the French campaign had suffered a head wound that hadn’t so much changed his personality as denuded it, exposing a simple and essentially good-natured man who was no longer capable of censoring his speech. In this instance Bauer happened to agree with him: it was a bit late, five months into Operation Barbarossa, to be fretting about safety, personal or otherwise. Safety was hardly the point. If the Greatest Warlord of All Time had had any regard for human life, he would not have provoked a contest whose savagery made France seem in retrospect like a war of flowers.

  Bauer shivered, rewound his scarf and turned up the collar of his greatcoat, reached into it for cigarettes and offered one to Pflieger, who accepted, and another to Winkel, who refused. Winkel was fighting with the steering wheel, a bantam-weight jabbing lefts and rights. ‘I could light it for you,’ Bauer offered.

  ‘No thank you, sir. I’ve given them up.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘Your health?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘He’s worried they’ll stunt his growth,’ Pflieger said.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Winkel, the smallest man in the battalion. To reach the lorry’s pedals with greater ease he drove with a bedroll between his back and the seat.

  ‘So why give them up?’ Bauer asked. ‘To trade?’

  ‘It was Lieutenant Hirsch who suggested it, sir.’

  ‘The lieutenant?’ Bauer asked, aware of the dispiriting effect the dentist’s name had on him, an effect more pronounced since Hirsch’s appointment as his anaesthetist, filling the gap left by Dieter’s death.

  ‘My teeth were staining,’ Winkel said. ‘Lieutenant Hirsch suggested I give up cigarettes.’

  ‘Good advice, I’m sure,’ Bauer said and lit up, unintentionally making Pflieger laugh, a gasping racket that was generally funnier than its cause. Bauer smiled and took a life-giving lungful of smoke.

  Still chuckling, Pflieger made a show of nudging Winkel in the ribs. ‘Can’t let bad teeth spoil your chances with the ladies, eh?’

  The corporal flung a few more punches with the steering wheel but said nothing. Winkel’s vanity about his personal appearance – his hair cream and toothpicks, his ear- and nostril-plucking – was a cherished source of humour among his comrades, an expression of relief at having found a flaw in a man they otherwise held in lofty regard, Bauer as much if not more than the rest. He and Winkel were a similar age and shared a bond, seldom discussed but never far from Bauer’s mind, of having both lost a wife less than eighteen months before the war, Bauer’s to illness, Winkel’s in a traffic accident. Neither had children.

  For several minutes all three men were silent. Rain rattled on the roof and Bauer grew drowsy.

  ‘This fucking mud!’ Pflieger said.

  Bauer muttered, ‘Amen.’

  Formed from the Russian dust on which they and their engines had choked throughout the summer, the mud weighed on boots and hoofs and wheels, bringing an army of almost four million men to a near standstill along a two-thousand-kilometre front. Rasputitza the Russians called the autumn rainy season – the Time of No Roads – a term Bauer had learned three weeks earlier from an elderly peasant woman. His Russian was mediocre, but in a brief conversation with a hostile babushka he had grasped what the High Command, with Abwehr spi
es and Russian linguists at its disposal, had apparently overlooked: in October the roads essential to the German strategy were impassable by definition. For half an hour after understanding this he’d been too enraged to speak. From the start of the war he’d been impatient for its end and, because the Wehrmacht had been triumphing on every front, a German victory had seemed like the fastest way to peace. True, the conduct of some of his countrymen in Russia was criminal – at times depraved – but the killing would end when the war did, he’d reasoned, and afterwards it was possible that the gangsters in power in Berlin would moderate their policies or even wither away. That, at least, had been his thinking before his talk with the babushka. Since then he had suspected that the Greatest Warlord of All Time was no more than a jumped-up gambler, that the remaining two months of 1941 would not deliver victory, and that defeating the Soviets might in fact take years, assuming it was possible at all. And if it wasn’t? In his tiredness he hallucinated the walls of the forest as cliffs of water parted for the Israelites, himself a soldier in the Pharaoh’s army squelching across the seabed in pursuit.

  They breasted a rise then gently descended, tracking rainwater flowing from one wheel rut to another. Raindrops boiled in the hoofprints of draught horses. From the first it had troubled Bauer that the Soviet forces were apparently better motorised than the Wehrmacht, yet for the most part the horse-drawn supplies of the 3rd Panzer division had kept pace with its tanks, which had been hampered not only by the state of the roads but also by a shortage of fuel – in Bauer’s view, another grave operational failing.

  Haltingly, a curve brought the whole convoy into view, and shortly afterwards a motorcycle scout appeared at the head of the column and flagged down the lead vehicle, a lorry under the command of Sergeant Major Norbert Ritter, leader of the company’s security detail and, for last two months, acting quartermaster. One by one the trailing vehicles drew to a halt.

  Pflieger groaned. ‘What now?’

  As if to mimic the noise of the rain on the roof, Winkel started tapping on the steering wheel, an annoying sound, though to ask him to stop would have been unkind, as it was not in his nature to be still. Bauer had only rarely witnessed the corporal sleeping, and even then Winkel had fidgeted, perhaps dreaming of stripping an engine or staunching a wound.

  A minute or two went by and the convoy started moving again, only to halt a few hundred metres further on; in the distance Bauer saw Ritter’s security detail piling out of the lead lorry. In an expansive interpretation of Article 8(1) of the Geneva Convention (weapons permitted to medical corpsmen) several were carrying machine pistols, and one man a medium machine gun, experience having shown that red cross insignia on vehicles and armbands offered scant protection in the Soviet Union.

  ‘Fuck it,’ Pflieger said, ‘it’s going to get dark.’

  ‘Karl, language,’ Winkel said. ‘There’s an officer present.’

  Pflieger apologised, sucked his cigarette until the tip came close to his lips, dropped the stub and ground it under his heel. ‘Oh shit, here comes Ehrlich.’

  Corporal Egon Ehrlich was trekking rearwards, pausing at each vehicle to speak with its driver. The mud was forcing him to use a ponderous, high-stepping gait that Bauer associated with neurological injury, and it was a full five minutes before he reached them. Only slightly taller than Winkel, Ehrlich’s mud-enlarged boots made him look like a cartoon figure – some sharp-faced relative of Mickey Mouse perhaps, wearing a helmet and a shelter sheet, each dripping with rain. He stepped onto the running board and Winkel wound down his window. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘A blown culvert. We’re laying down some logs. Sepp, get your rifle and report to Ritter. Pflieger —’

  ‘Guard the lorry?’

  ‘Get a shovel and go with Sepp.’

  ‘But I’ve only just got dry.’

  ‘Don’t argue, just do it,’ Ehrlich ordered. Hanging off the door with one hand he at last got around to saluting with the other, though in a sloppy style unnatural to him.

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Corporal.’

  Ehrlich stepped off the running board and disappeared towards the rear. Why the man disliked him Bauer was unsure. Not envy of his rank, he thought, though they were about the same age and had similar backgrounds, having both grown up on small farms. No, more likely Ehrlich sensed that he, Bauer, cared too little for the rigmarole of rank. How and when and even if a man saluted didn’t bother Bauer, and for Ehrlich this possibly made the business of subordination that much harder to bear.

  ‘Why do I have to dig?’ Pflieger asked, pulling his shelter sheet from his kit.

  Winkel took his rifle from the rack he’d designed and fitted to the back of the cabin. ‘So you don’t have to shoot? Perhaps the sergeant wants to save you from moral distress.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Why not? He’s thoughtful that way.’

  Bauer wished them luck and they clambered out. Pflieger unhooked a shovel from the side of the lorry and the two men started forward, a pair of puppets jerking through the mud, Pflieger lanky and a full head taller than Winkel.

  At last, a chance to sleep. A blanket would have been welcome but there were none inside the cabin, and so making do with his greatcoat, Bauer lay across the seat, resting his head on his folded scarf. The rain was easing now, the sound of it on the roof reminding him of rainfall on the slate-tiled farmhouse of his childhood, of lying in bed beneath an eiderdown in the room he had shared with Jürgen, his brother – long dead now, victim of a botched amputation at Verdun.

  A rap on the window made him start. ‘Hey, Bauer!’

  Molineux. Bauer drew an arm across his helmet. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’

  ‘Bah! You insomniacs are your own worst enemies.’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘Exercise! You need exercise!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, it’s raining.’

  ‘No longer. Listen.’

  It was true, the rain had stopped.

  ‘Open your window.’

  Bauer sat up, cursing, and unwound the rain-speckled window, revealing the large and ruddy face of Hermann Molineux. Hooded eyes. A sardonic grin.

  ‘I was almost sleeping,’ Bauer said.

  ‘Let’s go for a stroll.’

  ‘You’re at war with sleep, aren’t you?’

  ‘Nonsense, I’m its ally,’ Molineux said, cold air making vapour of his breath.

  ‘Some psychological trauma you’ve sustained from doing anaesthesia.’

  ‘Now, now, let’s have none of that Jewish claptrap here. You disappoint me, Bauer. You’re too much with your thoughts. Stretch your legs. Get your arteries pumping.’

  ‘I thought you hated exercise,’ Bauer said.

  ‘You must be thinking of another, more slovenly man. Fresh air, the scent of pine, bullets ruffling my hair – I’m wild for it.’

  ‘My socks are dry,’ Bauer said. ‘I don’t plan to wet them again.’

  ‘Our billet’s not far off and you can change them there. Ehrlich claims we’re being put up in style – B Company has found us a stately home no less.’

  ‘Unburned?’

  ‘Virgo intacta apparently. The rain perhaps. Some poor Ivan will be getting shot for his carelessness. The point is, before long we’ll be drinking vodka by an open fire, admiring some sweet little Galinka or Innushka pegging out our laundered uniforms.’

  Bauer sighed and got his shelter sheet.

  ‘So you’re coming then?’

  ‘A man as far gone in delusion as you needs supervision.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent,’ Molineux said, and stepped off the running board.

  Bauer got out and immediately sank boot-deep into the mud. ‘A stroll?’

  ‘A slog, a stomp – call it what you will. I couldn’t tolerate being stuck in that tin can a moment longer.’

  ‘At least, not without an audience,’ Bauer said, gesturing at the corpsmen from Molineux’s lorry, who had taken up defensive positions by the
road.

  The first few steps convinced Bauer he’d made a mistake: the mud gave way to his boots easily but then clung on with freakish strength. He pictured corpses clasping him, trying to drag him underground, and to dispel the image strode energetically onwards, so that soon his quadriceps were aching. He was overheating and unbuttoned his greatcoat, though his fingers were cold and water chilled his toes. He felt a fool to have come. Molineux was panting. His face had reddened and in places was starting to go purple. He was a big man, older than Bauer and out of shape, almost portly – proof of his skill at scrounging alcohol and his wife’s devotion to sending him calorific foods. At the lead lorry Bauer asked him if he’d like a rest, but in reply he shook his head and pointed to his goal: a stream bisecting the road, alongside it fifty or more of the men felling and trimming pines into logs. Dusk was about an hour away, but beneath the dripping trees twilight had already fallen.

  At the blown culvert Sergeant Major Ritter, a big bull-necked man, was overseeing the construction of a rudimentary bridge, delivering orders in a Berlinisch accent, his larynx guttural with damage from some long-ago brawl. Nearby stood the battalion’s commanding officer and head surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel Julius Metz, one knee jouncing as if to speed up the work. The stream was in full spate and so noisy that at first Metz failed to notice their arrival. Seeing Molineux, he frowned. ‘Captain, you’re out of condition. Hardly a good example to set for the men, now, is it?’

  Molineux nodded, too winded to speak.

  Metz continued, ‘There are two types of men in this world: those for whom their body is a temple, and those who treat it as a slum. As a medical man, Molineux, you ought to know better.’

  Still gasping, Molineux said, ‘Sir, what can I say?’ He gestured at his boots. ‘Feet of clay, sir, feet of clay.’

  Metz, who neither drank nor smoked, was at the age of fifty-two in excellent shape, a tall man with a long face that Bauer supposed women of a certain age might find handsome if stern: grey eyebrows, a narrow nose and a cleft chin that Molineux had once pointed out to Bauer resembled buttocks, right down to its bristled crease, an image Bauer had since tried in vain to unremember.

  ‘And where’s your helmet?’ Metz demanded. ‘Didn’t I expressly order all officers to wear helmets in the field?’