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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Wednesday 15th – Jan and Mechelen – Spring and Summer 1941

Jan’s cold, but he’s starting to nod off: he’ll need to get to bed soon if he’s to refresh himself for tomorrow’s 4AM start.
But Mechelen is in full flow now: “So we’re stuck at the end of the railway line, with the [Slavs] all detrained, and the rail trucks all gone, and our own transport and supplies still nowhere in sight. And I’m already thinking that as soon as we get our ammunition and sappers we’re going to have to find a way of getting these people all funnelled out of here and into the woods, and we’ll definitely have to end up having to shoot them all because we’ve got no destination, and no transport, and no food or shelter, and not enough men to look after the columns. No options. Christ, what a mess.”
Jan pulls his sleeves down as far as they’ll go over his hands. He feels the fabric of his tunic stretching over his chilly shoulder blades.
“So that’s what we do. We hold the Slavs in the cattle pens behind the station until first light, when our trucks and support people turn up, and then we cobble together a timetable to get the ditches dug up in the woods and march the Slavs up there.”
“And it all goes off OK. The ghetto gets cleared, and we make room for the Westerners, and the Slavs disappear. But it was all so…amateurish and ad hoc. When the regional headquarters people find out what we’re done, and how we had to do it all off the cuff, without any formal authority or coordination, and without taking into account the proper demarcations of authority and responsibility, they send us a reprimand, saying it’s ‘against policy’ or saying we’ve overstepped the mark – ‘exceeded our authority’ is what they always seem to say – or ‘transgressed our jurisdiction’, one of the memos said – all ignorant rubbish. What were we supposed to fucking do? Find them food and shelter? Build a camp? Magic a small town into existence? Wait for somebody to come up with a better idea? [more context that illuminates the complexities and pressures they felt they were under?]… Stupid fuckers.”
“Anyway, six weeks later we get a detailed order coming through from the High Command, telling us to ‘use the measures implemented with success recently’ to resolve the problems of ‘overcrowding and inappropriate resettlement solutions’; i.e. ‘shoot them all, here, here, and here.’ Bloody ridiculous – they haven’t got a clue. Heads up their arses. And the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. We just have to get on with it, despite them. Whereas we know what we’re doing, and when we come up with something that works, or which they like, they pick up on it and turn it into the ‘new policy’. Fuck them. Christ, it’s cold. I’m going indoors for some schnapps – coming? You should probably get to bed early tonight – chances are you’ll find tomorrow pretty tiring. Come on.”

Jan remembers sitting out on the veranda of the mess hut with Mechelen the evening before he accompanied the unit on his first action. He was feeling nervous, wondering how he would react, and how he would conduct himself in front of the rest of the men. Earlier, inside, he’d noticed that the men hadn’t had their customary boisterous good humour. He didn’t want to ask for confirmation, but he assumed that this was attributable to their pensiveness and sombre reflection about tomorrow’s task. He’d been relieved when Mechelen had suggested that they go and sit outside, as he found the men’s morose silence oppressive and embarrassing.
The sun was down already, and it was pretty chilly to be sitting outside, but he preferred the perpetual chill across his back and shoulders to the atmosphere inside the hut.
“They’ll be fine tomorrow,” said Mechelen in the darkness. “They’re just a little nervous tonight. It’s always like this.”
“It is?”
“Oh yes. People – well, most people – never shake off that sense of anxiety about the unknown. That worry that something might go wrong, and that they might not do their job properly.”
“Even after so many actions?”
“Mm. It’s something to do with the type of men who get to be in these units, I think: you have to care about what you do, and you have to want to do it to a certain standard of perfection every time. And because there are so many variables in each action’s equation, and so many things that can go wrong, people worry about those things – especially the things that they might fuck up.”
Mechelen pauses and lights a cigar.
“Want one?”
“No. Thank you.”
“And the thing is, these boys are good - bloody good. The best, I think. I could you tell you some stories about other units I’ve accompanied, and reports I’ve heard…but maybe another time. The thing is, this lot are excellent, and they do their work in an extremely professional and efficient manner. Excellent. They won’t let anybody down.”
Jan takes a sip of his wine, feels the chill ripple from the back of his throat and up his neck, across the shoulders, and tingle down his arms. Out in the woods, a bird cries a creaking, plaintive cry. The night feels very still and cold after the cry fades.
“That’s the thing that irritates me,” says Mechelen. “These boys could do this job with one hand tied behind their backs now. And the High Command practically do tie our hands behind our backs sometimes, with all their pointless regulations and logistical stupidities. And the unrealistic expectations they have, and the unrealistic workloads they set. They’ve got no idea back at the High Command, no fucking idea: they’re so far away now that they don’t have a real feel for what it’s like out here, no sense of what it feels like to be here, doing the job, on the ground, day after day. How could they have? I’ve seen what it’s like back there – no-one tells the truth when they report back there: no, they just tell them what they want to hear – they don’t lie, exactly…they just don’t tell the whole truth about everything…especially about the quality of the troops, about the militias, about logistics and resources – you’ve seen it yourself – and about morale – about the real stuff that really makes a difference on the ground, in the everyday. And they rely, ultimately, on the abilities of these men her to make everything work properly. And I know it’s not exactly the kind of work that’s going to raise the roof in the movie theatres back home, and these aren’t pictures aren’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it would be nice if the High Command would at least show a little appreciation for the difficulties and sacrifices these men are making.”
Mechelen tips the last of the wine down his throat. Jan hears the alcohol chuckle down his gullet, and imagines Mechelen’s upturned chin, and the stretched throat and Adam’s apple.
“Let me give you an example,” says Mechelen. “They give us some order about assisting with a ‘resettlement’ – like the ghetto clearance in [Riga] last month, before you arrived. That had to be accomplished to make way for the arrival of the expelled [X]s from the West. The original [X]s from the locale had all been assembled in the ghetto over a period of months, and they’ve developed a whole culture and society there, and yet the local forces are expected to jump to attention and organise a fundamental clearance within a couple of days of the order being issued – as if there’d be no friction or drag or difficulties on the ground. As if the simple fact of the order made the accomplishment easy. And I know that’s how the armed forces work, fundamentally, but I sometimes think that the desk-wallahs – no offence – might make more allowance for what happens at the sharp end, in territories where we’ve not had time to establish our infrastructure and standard practices. But anyway. You get on with it, because that’s your duty, and what you’re trained to do. So you do it. They leave it to us to get on with it – without proper resources, no detail, nothing. Hopeless. So we improvise, do our best, make it up as we go along, and we clear the ghetto and assemble all the evictees further east at the destination we’ve been given, a ‘transit location’ out to the East, in a place none of us have even heard of, let alone visited for reconnaissance or preparation. And when you get there there’s a railway station, and a local commander who’s not expecting you, and five thousand people in rail cars with just the food that they’ve been told they can carry on their resettlement. And between you, with the local commander going apeshit in your faces, as angry and confused as you all are, you have to come up with a plan and make it all work, at three o’clock in the morning, in the rain, when all the High Command are asleep, or drunk, and none the wiser about what their simple orders mean. Not a clue.”

Monday 13th – Jan and Mechelen – Spring and Summer 1941

“Did you say something? Hmm?” says Jan, looking at the side of Mechelen’s face. Mechelen is staring off over the light-flooded fields. He seems to be thinking about Jan’s question, but he doesn’t say anything for a long time. Jan can see his lips twitching occasionally. Eventually, Mechelen says, “No, I didn’t say anything. I don’t know that I have anything left to say. Certainly nothing adequate for all of this. Let’s just watch the sunset together in silence, eh? Just like old times?”
Jan stares at Mechelen’s cheek, and how the mouth is pulled back on that side in a wry, twisted rictus grin. Mechelen takes a pull at his schnapps, burps again. Jan shakes his head.
[…]
Some more campaign recollections…fragmentary montage that brings us back up to date, compressing the progress into a tighter flow to reframe where we’re going next (the sweep)…this summer evening is just a poised pause on their journey East, whereas for the people in the next town, it’s the last supper…
[…]
The May sun has dried out the countryside after the spring rains. The dirt roads are hardening, and the fields will take the tanks’ weight. The trees are budding and blossoming, and the woods are incessant with bird calls and the lowing/grunting of large mammals. Soon the fledglings will be on the ground, their wings vibrating in supplication to their harassed parents.
The trucks are drawn up at the roadside, their engines running, while Colonel [X?] checks directions at the junction ahead with his interpreter and a local [peasant?]. This is the third stop of this kind that they’ve had to make today, and Jan is starting to share the men’s amused resignation about the Colonel’s abilities. He wonders – not for the first time – whether they’d all be better off if Mechelen were in command; whenever Mechelen is running an operation, all the logistical elements – navigation, supply, resource allocation, timetabling – seem to mesh [seamlessly].
He puts his head out of the cab window and looks along the flanks of the trucks, up toward the head of the column: the pulsing exhausts of the heavy diesel [?] engines are propagating short, rippling waves in the dense roadside vegetation, seen through a heat haze from the same exhausts. Men’s heads pop in and out of view from other cabs and [truck beds], and he sees men pulling faces, and rolling their eyes, and laughing, and shaking their heads. These looks and movements all say ‘Colonel [X] is hopeless’.
[…]
He sees that the edge of the road is marked with a line of fallen, blown, yellowed blossoms from the hawthorns that stud the verges in this part of the countryside, where small farmsteads are the typical unit of landholding, and where twisted trees and bushes are one of the most common forms of land demarcation; that, and the ill-kept ditches and water courses that barely supply the fields with sufficient irrigation. The locals supplement the weak flow with their manual labour: old women – especially – seem to be tasked with carrying water (in buckets, bottles, or small metal churns) and pouring it onto the raised seed beds.
Earlier in the spring, when the hawthorns had been in their fullest blossom, and when their rich musky smell had been strong in the sunken lanes, Jan had taken part in his first proper action. He finds it hard to believe that that first action was only [x/3?/4?] weeks ago.

Sunday 12th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941

If she’s especially lucky, he’ll let her change the records for him, lifting the mechanical arm that swings from the edge of the turntable, feeling the spring-loaded strain and [mechanical, structural, systemic] resistance of the mechanism between her fingers; at once delicate, brittle and yet demanding the use of force. That controlled and appropriate strength that she finds hard to judge, but which Papa seems to hit upon instinctively in everything he does...[…].
Papa favours big, orchestral pieces that test the limits of the gramophone: Mahleresque symphonies and multivoice choral pieces involving – it seems – vast ensembles of booming brass and hundreds of singers. Marta prefers it when he plays the quieter, stiller pieces in his collection, especially when he plays them in the calm Sunday interlude between church and lunch: small-scale music – string quartets and solo piano pieces – in the white, sunlit room, with the smell of coffee and roasting meat drifting through the house. She thinks that there was a morning like that in the spring that’s just past, but those serene, still-life mornings seem to belong to long ago.
Mama’s trying to placate Papa: “I’m sure they didn’t mean it in that way – probably they just expressed themselves in an unfortunate way…”
“You weren’t there,” Papa shouts, “you didn’t hear what they said. And you didn’t see the look on their faces. They’d take away my business like that – ” – he snaps his fingers – “ – if they could, and if they could get away with it they’d take us out to the back of the factory and get rid of us, too. Like that.” He snaps his fingers again.
“No, darling, I don’t believe it. You’re upset and angry.”
“You fucking weren’t there, darling, so you really can’t say anything meaningful about it, can you?”
Silence.
The squeak of a cork being twisted. The clink of bottle on glass and the chuckle of poured spirits.
Angry nasal breathing.
Marta lets the tears well over her lower lids and – smooth and cold – onto her cheeks in the dark.
[…]
[Marta and Ivan, holding hands up at the summer house, feeling sad, lost, confused; and fearful about their parents’ future together…]
[…]
I. Jan/Mechelen – Summer 1941: anti-partisan operations

June and July are blurred together in Jan’s memory: long hot days of policing operations and anti-partisan sweeps in towns, villages and countryside all across the Eastern borderlands and Baltic fringes, fading into evenings of feasting and drinking in [country houses], commandeered hotels and makeshift field kitchens on the edge of the forest where they’d been working all day.
Evenings watching the sun set through a smirking haze of alcohol, reduced to immature giggling through drunkenness, listening to soldiers let off steam by firing their weapons into the dark between the trees, or whispering conspiratorially to a fellow officer about another (ill-favoured) colleague.
[…]
The trucks and cars are parked along the roadside this evening. The land drops away from the forest edge, sloping down to he river that winds through the flood plain and away to the horizon. The river reduced to a trickle by the summer. There’s a silvery/metallic haze of light and dancing insects over the course of the river, and it seems to shift constantly in the evening sunlight. Golden hour.
Jan is always a prime target for the insects: even when he doesn’t notice them, or feel them crawling on his skin and scalp, he ends up, the next morning, with bumps and itchy bites in just above the hairline and all over any exposed skin on his arms and legs. It doesn’t seem fair that someone who enjoys the open air and the beauty of summer evenings so much should be so attractive to biting insects and so reactive to their poisonous bites. He can see the shifting haloes of the gnats’ dance in the warm air above the slope down to the river. He knows that any blood-hungry insects will bypass Mechelen – who’s sitting beside him on the fallen tree trunk – and head straight for his own pink and sensitive skin.
He takes a big drag on his cigar and contorts his mouth so that he can blow the thick smoke alternately out of each corner and up against his cheeks, ears, and temples: an attempt at self-fumigation. He keeps his hand over the top of his vodka glass – he dislikes the feel of drowned insects on his tongue, however tiny and bedraggled and dead they are.
[Someone’s horribly glib (and deliberately shocking/tasteless/dehumanising?) analogy for how one becomes inured to killing (or to any form of continuous unpleasantness that you don’t want to look at directly…Mechelen?]
Mechelen burps throatily, savouring the taste of vodka and spiced meat on his tongue and in his pre-digestive gases [??]
Mechelen is thinking, composing a little theory-cum-aphorism-cum-metaphor in his head, practicing it so that he can wheel it out, ready-made and refined, at some appropriate juncture – probably another evening like this, after a hard day’s action, and with the evening mellowing down into half-drunk faux profundity. But it’s not ready yet: he has to spool it out so that he’s captured to his own satisfaction, and then smooth it down so that it sounds like natural speech when he unveils it.
You know how it is when you step out of your front door/an inn on a summer night after rain, and you tread on a snail with the full weight of your body? How weight is vectored and focused and transmitted down into a couple of square inches of the sole of one boot? You feel, or half-feel – it doesn’t come into consciousness properly – the curve of the snail shell for a split second, the tight sweep and tension of that structure, but your foot is coming down, and your weight is shifting in irreversible motion, and before you can think ‘that’s a snail, I should stop’, your weight has pinioned forward, and the shell and soft parts are shattered and squashed. Destroyed. Slime and shards of shell, glutinous and revolting. And as the sensations register, you feel a strange nausea and regret transmitted up your leg and spine to your brain – a sickly sense that you’ve done something awful, which you could have avoided if you’d reacted quicker (even though your nerve fibres couldn’t possibly have transmitted the message to your brain in time for you to stop). A sense of revulsion and guilt. It turns your stomach – that crisp collapsing crunch, the imagined smearing of the soft parts, the thought of what you’ve done. You stop for a moment, look up at the sky and it’s light scattering of stars, try to clear your head. And when you look down again, your eyes better adapted to the dark, you see that the whole path/pavement is dotted with snails and slugs – dozens of them, gleaming in the faint starlight and the light from the inn; large snails, and tiny ones like little shards of fingernail (??). You walk, trying to avoid them, but it’s hopeless – wherever your next step takes you, you’re bound to squash/crush something as it makes its slow track across the damp pavement. You try, you try to avoid them – at first, anyway. But then, when you realise that it’s hopeless, you steel yourself, and start striding quickly home, getting the unavoidable destruction over with as quickly as you can. You do what you know you must do in order to get home. And you still feel a little badly about it, as you walk along, humming to yourself to cover the sound your boots make on the shells, and walking heavily so that you don’t feel that tentative, momentary pressure and resistance beneath your boots (you just want to get it all over with, with as little sensation and reminders of the cost as possible. When you arrive home, scraping your boots on the grass next to your garden path, you know that you couldn’t have done anything else. This was the necessity. This is life. And this is what this war is like: we must do unpleasant things, but they must be done. We do not have any alternative. We must do what we can to make these things bearable, but we must do them.”

I...

...just finished watching "Memento", I think. Wasn't it great? Wasn't it?

Saturday 4th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941

Marta wipes the tears out of her eyes and smoothes them from her cheeks. Sniffs back hard, shakes her head. Sees the bright sunlight become dazzling through the moist filter of her eyelashes, and holds her eyes there, half-shut, moving her head slowly to catch the sun. Marvels at the intensity of the light.
She hears Ivan walk to her side, and can hear his breathing, quickened from his run.
She opens her eyes and turns towards where he’s standing between her and the sky, and looks up at his blondish fringe hanging down, unevenly cut with a pair of dress-maker’s scissors. (She remembers the cold weight of them against her own forehead, and some maid’s unsteady hand tracking them across her fringe.)
“Hello, dear,” she says to Ivan, reaching out her hand. She can’t believe how happy she is to see him.
He sits down next to her, still holding her hand. Despite the sun, he feels strangely cold. They sit in silence for a while, happy with this contact: the comfortable familiarity and love of the sibling’s fingers entwined with your own.
Ivan says, “Why doesn’t Papa love Mama any more? I don’t understand why he doesn’t.”
“I don’t know,” says Marta, “Really I don’t.”
Last night, after dinner, she’d heard Mama and Papa raising their voices to each other again. She had wanted it to stop, and she had wanted to run away to her own room, but instead she had stayed in the little sitting room next to the dining room, listening to Mama and Papa through the open double door that provided the sitting room’s only light.
Papa had finished his cheese, and was drinking brandy from the bowl of an enormous glass. His face had already had that unhealthy purple-red flush when Marta had got down from the table half an hour ago. Since then she’d been curled up on the two-seat sofa in the adjacent room, hugging her knees, with her feet tucked up inside her dress, the hem anchored with her feet: a self-contained little tent. Since she asked to leave the table, Mama and Papa haven’t really said anything: there’s just been the sound of cutlery on china, and the chink of glass on glass.
Now, though, she can tell that Papa is angry about something. He rarely swears – and usually only in the factory – but he’s using bad words tonight. This frightens Marta, making her think that her Papa is moving off into some strange place that she doesn’t recognise. She wants Mama and Papa to be reliable, not unpredictable: there’s enough in her emotional life and her school environment that can’t be relied on at the moment.
She thinks about how Papa is when he’s sitting in his study (which overlooks the big, white-gravelled drive at the front of the villa. She likes it when he sits in his armchair there, with the door open and the gramophone playing his music, with the sunlight bright on the white-painted window frames, and light reflecting off the gravel onto the delicately-patterned plaster ceiling. Her best times there have been when Papa invites her in: sometimes he’ll beckon her over to sit on his knees, and he’ll cuddle her while the music plays; she’ll smell the smells of his hair oil and the stiff, musty smell of his tweedy jacket, and she’ll feel the strength and hardness of his arms and chest through the fabric of his clothes. This strength is strange, given the flabbiness of his belly and his triple chin, but it is undeniable: his arms can grip like steel hoops, and any child’s escape attempts are futile.

Wednesday 1st – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941

[Reorientation after long absence: …Where was I? Can’t remember, really… – at the canalside with Ivan and Michael…they were drifting apart, about to be parted and throw Ivan and Marta back together before the fatal sweep…so I need to do this thing with Ivan and Michael and then cut back to Marta (wherever the hell I left her last… I think she was sitting up at the Summer House in the spring of ’41, hearing Ivan coming…check back…) – this timeline needs to be checked, consolidated and mapped, and synchronised with the one for Mechelen (et al) and the opening section about the ‘Bystander’s Testimony’… So, it’s Ivan and Michael, then Ivan and Marta back together, and then flip back to Mechelen et al and the next stage of the Eastward movement (all those things about the geopolitics and the escalation of the violence and the resentments…)]
One day, late that summer, Ivan and Michael are sitting at their familiar post above the lock, not speaking. They’ve spent a lot of time in silence recently, though they haven’t been spending any less time together: it’s as if they have dropped into a tramlined arrangement of days, where they get up, have breakfast, and – provided it’s not raining – meet at the canal. Sometimes they’ll bring things to play with – tin toy cars, model soldiers, paper and pencils – and other times they’ll just sit, or dangle their feet in the canal and watch the minnows, or walk, or slash at the long grass with sticks, or use the magnifying glass [given to them by the bargee earlier…?] to focus the sun on the shiny carapaces of insects until they combusted with an explosive pop.
Today is a simple ‘sitting in silence’ day. Michael has the bargee’s fold-out map open on his lap. He’s been staring at it for a while, squinting. Lately, Ivan has found that he’s a bit put off by the thought of Michael’s funny eye: it’s become strangely annoying, and he doesn’t want to see it, so he sits on Michael’s other side.
Michael sighs, and Ivan looks at him. Michael says, “Look, I want to show you something,” so Ivan shuffles over to him on his bottom.
“Look,” says Michael, pointing at a spot at the centre right of the map, an inch or so down from the pale blue Baltic. “This is where we are.”
Ivan looks down at the map, and at Michael’s dry, pale brown wrinkled finger crooked above the network of roads and railways converging on the city – a grey smudge against the stylised greens and browns of the contoured countryside. He waits for Michael to fill the silence with something that has meaning, and which might give him a clue about where Michael might take this conversation next: Michael’s speech so far has had a strange feel to it, and hasn’t given away the contours of what will follow. [Ivan has noticed how you can [infer] the shape of most conversations from the first few words, from the tone of the speakers’ voice, and from the speed of speech and the patterns of pauses. He didn’t used to recognise this, but now, all of a sudden this summer, he does.] He waits.
He realises that Michael is crying. Feels himself go cold, feels the pale hairs on his tanned forearms stand up.
Waits again, in silence.
Eventually, Michael says, “My dad showed me this place on the map last night. He said that we won’t be staying much longer. We’re going.”
“Oh,” says Ivan, swallowing a big swallow that has trouble getting past his Adam’s apple. He can tell that this is a new kind of conversation, a scary one that leads to a cold place. A type of conversation that hangs over the edge of an abyss. He doesn’t like it. He wants predictability and certainty. Comfort. “Where are you going, then?”
“Dunno.”
Ivan listens to the water trickling through the sluices in the lock gates, dripping and rippling on the plane of water below. The lock gates are smeared with dirt, crushed weeds and oil, and the grass on the tow path is yellowing into its faded autumn form. Ivan remembers the bargee giving them the map earlier in the year, and thinks of himself and Michael wearing their jumpers when the weather was cooler and wet: it seems a long, long time ago, when he was much younger. It frightens him to try and think about a future where Michael isn’t be a reliable feature of the canalside; makes him feel exposed and small.
At length, Michael says “West. We’ll be going west, I think. Where the money is, like dad says before. Away from the Russians.”
“Where the coal comes from,” says Ivan.
The day, no longer stilled, starts to decline into afternoon.
[…]