The Tolstoy Estate Read online

  ‘Apologies, sir, I forgot.’

  ‘I can’t afford to lose another anaesthetist.’ He turned to Ehrlich. ‘Corporal, give the captain your helmet.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Ehrlich said, and swiftly obeyed, exposing a head as narrow as his face was sharp. Molineux thanked him, tried on the helmet, took it off again and was loosening its straps when the sound of yelling drew Bauer’s attention upstream. Two corpsmen had lost a log in the current, sending it bucking and spearing at the bridge.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Metz yelled as the log struck home. Swiftly it swung about, forming a dam and then a weir, and although several corpsmen scrambled to retrieve it, they were too late. The bridge gave way.

  Metz screamed an obscenity – for him a sign of great rage – only to fall silent, as they all did, at the noise of an engine over-revving in the forest. Bauer pictured a T-34, maybe several, crashing through the trees, but while many of his comrades flung themselves into the muck he stayed standing, curiously unafraid. Norbert Ritter, a brutish man but a brave one, had snatched a rifle and was plodding off towards the danger, palsy-footed with mud, quickly followed by the men of his security detail. Seconds later, a lone Soviet lorry emerged in front of them from the forest. It braked and Ritter and his men closed in, their weapons trained on the cabin. The tarpaulin-sheeted tray was empty, yelled one of the corpsmen. Then the driver’s door opened and a young soldier emerged, thrust his hands in the air and stepped down into the mud. He was unarmed. Straight dark hair topped with a brown forage cap. A blanched face. His body quaking. More of Ritter’s men arrived and a second Russian, an officer, clambered out of the lorry. He was older, short and paunchy, bare-headed and bald. He frowned at the men pointing rifles at him, gazed skyward, drew a pistol and shot himself above the ear.

  TWO

  Winkel was shaking him through the half-open passenger door. ‘Sir, we’re here.’

  Nighttime. Wind and rain. The distant thudding of artillery. Bauer groaned. ‘What time is it?’

  Winkel looked at his watch. ‘21:05.’

  ‘That late?’

  ‘Der Schlamm.’

  ‘Of course, the mud. Why did I ask.’

  ‘I’ve unloaded your gear, sir. And scouted for rooms.’

  ‘Bless you, Sepp.’

  ‘But the lieutenant colonel . . .’

  ‘Is asking to see me?’

  ‘Correct.’

  Bauer took off his helmet and put on his officer’s cap. ‘You’d better show me the way.’

  He got out of the lorry, his whole body aching – a foretaste of old age, he supposed, if he lived that long. Beneath his boots was the welcome sensation of gravel, on his face a fusillade of sleet. In the beams of ambulance headlights he made out a double-storey building, which though large was not quite the mansion Molineux had led him to expect. A forecourt with an oval drive. Leafless birches flailing in the wind. On the building’s front porch he exchanged a salute with a sentry then followed Winkel into a vestibule that was crammed on one side with furniture. Overhead there were lights on – evidently B Company had got a generator running. A pair of corpsmen came in after them carrying one of the unit’s trestle tables, followed by the radio operator with his metal suitcases. Directly ahead, beside a pair of glassed internal doors, Molineux was leaning over a wooden cabinet and writing in what appeared to be a visitors’ book. He turned and held out a pencil. ‘Bauer, be the second to commemorate our arrival. Write something worthy.’

  Bauer took the pencil. ‘Worthy? Why?’

  Molineux cleared his throat and spread his arms. ‘Because A Company, medical battalion, 3rd Panzer division is now in possession of a Russian national shrine: the ancestral estate of Count Leo Tolstoy.’

  Bauer blinked. Molineux was an incorrigible prankster. ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’

  ‘Would I debase such a moment with mockery?’ He opened the cabinet, revealing shelves stacked with leaflets, and handed one to Bauer. ‘Here, proof.’ Printed in Russian on poor-quality paper was a guide welcoming visitors to Yasnaya Polyana, the National Memorial and Museum-Estate of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy – the ‘Leo’, Bauer recalled, was a Germanisation – author of the ‘immortal works of literature’ War and Peace (Voyna i mir) and Anna Karenina, both composed ‘in this very house’. On its reverse side was a basic map of the estate.

  Molineux grinned. ‘And you had the insolence to doubt me.’

  Bauer was thunderstruck. In the middle of the last war, as a youth of fifteen, he had read War and Peace in translation, a six-week undertaking that had inspired a decade-long fascination not only with the novels of Tolstoy but also with those of Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Lermontov, Gogol. Hoping to read them in the original, he had tried to learn Russian, an effort ultimately undone by the demands of his surgical training, along with what he had come to recognise as his own wearying of the intensities of the Russian soul – as portrayed, at least, in nineteenth-century fiction – particularly in the wake of his wife Clara’s diagnosis.

  ‘Sir, the lieutenant colonel?’ Winkel said.

  Bauer pocketed the leaflet. ‘Of course.’

  ‘First the visitors’ book,’ Molineux said. ‘Your stab at immortality.’

  Bauer examined the book. All the entries before Molineux’s were written in Russian – the most recent by Red Army soldiers who had recorded their ranks as well as their names, though not the units to which they belonged. Molineux’s signature had spilled over the lines designed to contain it. Veni, vidi, vici, he’d added in the space assigned for comments.

  Molineux said, ‘I know what you’re thinking: that our own Julius won’t approve.’

  ‘Not of us signing before he has, no.’

  ‘Don’t be such a coward. The race goes to the swift.’

  Bauer raised the pencil but hesitated.

  Winkel said, ‘Sir, the lieutenant colonel wanted to see you straight away.’

  ‘Hurry up and write,’ Molineux said, ‘or Metz will have you shot.’

  Bauer put down the pencil. ‘Later maybe.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Molineux said, ‘that was just my little joke.’

  ‘It’s not Metz.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Call it lack of inspiration.’

  ‘In writing, first thoughts are best,’ said Molineux. ‘The same as in speech.’

  In camp at Oryol, days before his death to a sniper, Dieter Clemens had raised the near treasonous topic of whether Operation Barbarossa in any way resembled Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, a conversation that had reminded Bauer of his precociously early but, as it turned out, once-only reading of War and Peace. To now arrive at the house in which the novel had been written felt deeply uncanny, an emotion that only logic could dispel.

  ‘I should go and see Metz,’ he said.

  ‘As should I. Thanks to your dithering he’ll have us both court-martialled.’

  Winkel led them through a pair of glass-panelled doors into a small reception hall. Polished floorboards, a wooden staircase, off-white walls devoid of decoration. A door on the left led into a drawing room that was empty of furniture apart from a grand piano, around which stood Metz, his orderly Egon Ehrlich and the unit’s three subalterns. On the lid of the piano there were maps and papers, logbooks and binoculars. All of the men were muddied, even Metz. ‘Where’s the major?’ Metz asked.

  ‘Settling in upstairs, sir,’ Winkel said.

  ‘Bedding down Bertha, I bet,’ Molineux said.

  ‘Get him down here immediately,’ Metz said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Winkel replied, and hurried away.

  The largest map on the piano was also the most detailed. Molineux asked where they were on it; Metz tapped at the midpoint of a road that ran roughly south to north.

  ‘And the enemy?’ Molineux asked.

  ‘At Tula,’ Metz said, pointing to the burr of a city on the map’s northern edge. ‘Population four hundred thousand.’

  Before Bauer could draw nearer for a close
r view, Volker Hirsch appeared at his side and asked in a whisper if he could have a word.

  ‘Of course,’ Bauer said, stepping away from the piano. ‘What about?’

  Hirsch hesitated. At twenty-four he was a qualified dentist but shyer than the average child. Tall but stooped. Not plump so much as softly muscled. Ginger hair, a freckled face, round spectacles. ‘That officer,’ he began, ‘the Soviet one?’

  ‘Who shot himself?’ Bauer asked. He hadn’t even noticed Hirsch’s presence at the culvert.

  ‘Yes, him.’

  ‘A commissar,’ Bauer said, anticipating the question. ‘Captured political officers are being executed,’ he went on, speaking flatly of the order that he and Dieter Clemens had discussed with so much angst. ‘He would have known that.’

  ‘We would have shot him?’ Hirsch asked.

  ‘Us? I think not. Though who can say? We wouldn’t have lacked for volunteers,’ he went on, sounding angrier than he’d meant to. Hirsch hardly seemed like a fanatic, but his generation had been drilled in obedience and it paid to be cautious around them. ‘If not us, the next unit along. Failing that, the SS or the Reich Commissariat. I’d like to think that in his position I’d have done the same.’

  Hirsch fingered his collar. ‘You saw the puff?’

  ‘The puff? From the pistol, you mean?’

  ‘Not the discharge. From his mouth.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Bauer. ‘Vapour?’

  ‘The bullet killed him and the puff left his mouth,’ Hirsch said. ‘As if . . .’

  ‘As if what?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Hirsch said. ‘As if his spirit was leaving his body.’

  ‘That would have been vapour,’ Bauer said.

  At this moment Winkel re-entered the room, followed by Siegfried Weidemann, the battalion’s second in command to Metz, as well as its chief physician. He caught sight of the piano and paused.

  ‘Why, Major,’ Metz sneered, ‘thank you so much for coming.’

  Weidemann, sixty, dignified, snowy-haired, greeted Metz with a nod but was still eyeing the piano. He came over, raised the fall board and ran through a scale. ‘Lovely,’ he said, and stroked the keys. ‘A Bechstein. How remarkable.’

  ‘Your attention, Major,’ Metz said. Weidemann turned to him, compelled by fused vertebrae in his neck to pivot on his heels, an odd constraint for a man who reminded Bauer of an owl, the effect of winged, white eyebrows. ‘I was just explaining that the enemy has withdrawn to Tula,’ Metz went on, ‘forming a salient there – a protuberance, if you will – that’s ripe for excision.’

  ‘Oh very good, sir,’ Molineux said.

  ‘In the meantime we have seized a remarkable prize,’ Metz said. Here he slapped the piano, leaving Bauer momentarily confused. ‘Corporal, those leaflets.’

  Ehrlich handed out copies of the guide that Bauer already had in his pocket. On the reverse side the estate’s buildings and other features of note were numbered in a legend: an ornamental entrance on the Chern to Tula road; three major and several minor buildings scattered more or less evenly between gardens, orchards and ponds. Across a band of woodland on what appeared to be a ridge at the rear, the dotted line of a trail led to a spot marked as Tolstoy’s grave.

  ‘We are here,’ Metz said, pointing to a building identified as the Tolstoy House. Bauer looked around the empty drawing room. Leo Tolstoy walked here, he realised, ate and drank and no doubt read. He recalled a photograph he’d seen of the writer in old age, heavily bearded, his eyes piercing, dressed in a peasant’s tunic, baggy trousers and high leather boots – the aristocrat turned sage, straying as if by accident into the twentieth century.

  Metz said, ‘This is not only an ideal site for a field hospital but also, when the front moves on, a base hospital. There’s no saying whether Tula will have suitable structures.’

  ‘Or any structures at all,’ Molineux said, cocking an ear to the sound of the guns, audible even indoors.

  ‘Quite,’ Metz said. ‘Accordingly, I’ve already ordered Sergeant Major Ritter to post guards on all the major buildings.’

  ‘But, sir, surely that’s unnecessary,’ Bauer said.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because the Soviets must have spared this place deliberately.’

  ‘It’s a national shrine,’ Molineux added.

  ‘Ritter’s men could perform other tasks,’ Bauer said. Losses from combat, accident and illness, while not as severe as those of a frontline unit, had placed the battalion under pressure, forcing some men into roles for which they were ill-suited, notably their dentist taking over as an anaesthetist. Meanwhile Ritter, a born fighter, had little patience for his duties as quartermaster.

  ‘It’s not for me to divine the enemy’s motives,’ Metz said. ‘They’ve blundered and I won’t let them rectify their error by having partisans fire the buildings. Now, may I go on?’

  Bauer nodded, feeling intensely weary. Quite possibly Metz was right. In war, who could really distinguish accident from intent?

  C Company would remain in Chern, Metz announced, and from there evacuate casualties to Oryol. Meanwhile B Company had gone ahead to establish a dressing station in the village of Malevka, just south of Tula. Divisional headquarters had reported fierce fighting there – the sound of heavy guns was proof enough of that – and tomorrow casualties were sure to arrive. Accordingly, operating theatres would be set up overnight in the building Metz had selected for a hospital. Here he pointed on the map to a long narrow structure about three hundred metres away, the Volkonsky House. Officers would be housed in the Tolstoy House; enlisted men in the third of the estate’s main buildings, which the legend identified as the Kusminsky Wing. Metz spoke briskly and cogently, apparently unaffected by the strains of the past two days. Bauer couldn’t say the same for himself, and as Metz moved on to logistical matters his attention strayed. On the walls there were pale rectangular shadows where paintings must have recently hung, though to judge by the piano and the furniture in the vestibule the evacuation of the house’s contents was incomplete. Tolstoy’s house, he reminded himself.

  Metz finished his briefing and invited questions. Molineux raised a hand. ‘Will there be dinner tonight?’

  ‘Field rations,’ Metz said. ‘The kitchen can wait.’

  Molineux groaned. ‘Couldn’t Pabst whip us up something special, sir?’

  ‘We eat the same food as the men, Captain. You know that. Show some fortitude, won’t you, and if that doesn’t work try contemplating the conditions that B Company is likely to be dining in tonight.’

  Weidemann asked if there was a usable airfield nearby, and Metz was beginning his reply when a door at the far end of the room swung open and a woman entered, startling all of them, particularly Metz, who drew his P38 and levelled it at her. The intruder looked unperturbed. She was neither young nor old. A small mouth, large eyes. A triangular face. She was wearing spectacles, her auburn hair pulled back in a bun.

  ‘Ruki vverkh!’ Metz barked at her, making upwards jerking motions with his pistol, but though the woman complied and raised her hands she was lackadaisical about it. She wore a quilted jacket, a knee-length skirt, woollen stockings and a pair of tan-coloured brogues – not a stylish outfit but not that of a manual worker either. In Russian she demanded to know which of them was in charge.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Metz said when Bauer translated. ‘Corporal, search her for weapons,’ he said, and Ehrlich patted her down – avidly, a rat inspecting a cheese.

  ‘I think Egon might need some help, sir,’ Molineux said.

  ‘Captain, spare me the humour,’ Metz said. ‘Now is not the time. Bauer, ask her what she’s doing here. And how she got in. Ehrlich, that’s enough. She’s clearly unarmed.’

  Bauer stepped forward. The woman’s spectacles gave her a scholarly air, though behind them her large eyes were focused and shrewd. Haltingly, he introduced himself in Russian and asked the woman her name, speaking slowly to avoid errors, aware of his
fatigue.

  ‘Ty perevodchik?’ she asked. ‘You’re the interpreter?’

  Metz demanded to know what she’d said.

  ‘I am a surgeon,’ Bauer explained to her.

  The woman said something too quick for him to catch, saw his puzzled expression and repeated, ‘You’re a butcher . . .’

  He stared at her, too tired to think of a riposte.

  ‘Of Russian,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘But there is only me. We are doctors,’ he went on, ‘a field medical unit.’

  ‘Savages,’ she said, as if stating a self-evident truth.

  ‘Bauer, she’s talking over you,’ Metz said. ‘Don’t listen, command!’

  The woman turned to Metz and spoke at him in Russian, so rapidly that Bauer had to ask her to slow down. She complied, her tone satirically plodding. Their men had done something to the buildings, she said. Damaged them, Bauer guessed. He caught the words doors and walls.

  ‘Where was this?’ he asked.

  ‘Many places.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘My own room.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘In the Volkonsky House. Are you going to interpret or not?’

  Bauer relayed the gist of what she’d said, bringing a look of incredulity to Metz’s face.

  ‘She tells us not to damage anything? When the Red Army has been burning every house, hut and woodshed between here and Brest-Litovsk? Tell her we’ve saved her precious buildings. She ought to be grateful to us. Who is she anyway? What’s she doing here?’

  Bauer asked the woman her name.

  ‘Trubetzkaya,’ she replied. ‘Tovarishch Trubetzkaya.’

  ‘Don’t use “Comrade” with us, please. Not even in Russian. What’s your first name and patronymic?’

  ‘I prefer Tovarishch,’ she insisted.

  ‘Not if you wish to survive the war.’

  ‘Tovarishch Trubetzkaya,’ she repeated, again speaking directly to Metz. ‘Head Custodian – Acting – of Yasnaya Polyana.’

  Bauer relayed her answer, leaving out the comrade. She seemed young to him for such a senior position, acting or otherwise.