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.”