Another Green World (6 page)

Butler set off in that direction, passing unhurriedly through the narrow, rubble-filled lanes without pausing to ask directions or study the hastily stenciled placards affixed to such walls as still stood—often plastered over earlier, Gothic street markers—giving directions to this or that administrative branch or subordinate command. He trusted his homing instincts, knowing from experience that the most interesting places in this floating, half-real city—the bathhouses, the senior officers' brothel, the improvised labyrinths of the NKVD—would have no street address. They would simply be there, secret places in the ruins, opening before you like Aladdin's cave so long as you knew the magic words.

Butler knew them all. He always had. The key to both his success as a journalist and his failure as a novelist, it made things happen easily and rather too quickly, rendering him congenitally restless.

A block short of the cathedral stood the old public library, a post-Leninist artifact. Its upper stories had been blown apart and its books, of course, long since reduced to ashes. But a row of Willys utility vehicles— jeeps to everyone but the Reds—stood like horses tethered outside a saloon, and two duty drivers sat smoking near a doorway, to which a path through the rubble had been cleared. A stone pediment that once held a statue of some proletarian hero now propped up a sign identifying this as the Foreign Press Liaison Office—Butler's nominal destination.

He recognized one of the drivers, a crusty old fellow from Murmansk. “Enjoying the weather?” he called from several paces off, stepping carefully between bricks and uncollected shell casings and mortar crushed as fine as talc. One thing he hated about places like this was the likelihood of treading on the odd, unidentifiable bit of human remains. He sometimes wished the Red Army would acquire, along with other spoils of victory, the Wehrmacht's fastidiousness. You overrun a town, you press-gang civilian survivors or, if none exist, employ POWs to tidy up the streets; within forty-eight hours, everything is clean enough for the Herr General's mistress to promenade through.

“Better here than home,” the old Russian called back. “They'll be having a foot of snow up there by now.”

The other driver, a teenager missing most of his left arm, gave a dutiful smirk. Butler wondered if this boy was a victim of battle or of some routine industrial mishap or else—a slight but real possibility—a shirker who'd gotten drunk and chopped his own arm off to avoid being thrown into the line. All manner of social detritus seemed to collect around the Foreign Press Liaison Office, which was convenient for the reporters: a surfeit of willing, if dubious, sources of news from the front, rumors from
Moscow, predictions for the coming offensive, rosters and diagrams showing the order of battle, colorful accounts of partisan raids in Baltic outlands or Carpathian foothills, lurid reports of German atrocities, and statistics ranging from enemies captured to this year's better-than-expected harvest of rapeseed. Too easy, even by Butler's standards. Most of his colleagues spent their days mooning around HQ like a brood of hungover vultures. They seldom ventured into the field, and why should they? Nobody back in Peoria would know any better, and few anywhere would care.

As far as Yanks were concerned, the war was happening in Okinawa, the Hurtgen Forest, the Arno Line. It was a story of heroism and sacrifice, a clash of Hollywood-ready field commanders—Butler's money was on Jimmy Stewart to play Patton, facing Gable as a rakish Rommel—and, at its core, a morality play. Eisenhower tossed the word
crusade
about and nobody thought to question him, for the myth of holy knights versus infidels—or the Allies as cavalry, Nazis as savage redskins—fi t so snugly in the American
Weltanschauung.

Never mind that in the big picture, skirmishes in Western Europe barely counted as a sideshow. That the forces engaged there numbered only a fraction of those in the East. When five divisions hit the beach on D-Day, the world held its breath; one hundred and twenty Red Army divisions were now pointed right at Berlin alone, in just one sector of a six-thousand-kilometer front, stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Caspian Sea. But such details were so numbing that the world switched off the radio. And never mind that for Germans, the fight with the Anglo-American alliance was a quarrel among cousins—a distasteful business, but one in which honor must be preserved—whereas the fight with the subhuman Bolsheviks was nothing less than a
Schicksalskampf
, a struggle for destiny, into which the whole ruthless fury of an evil regime had been thrown. The truth of the matter, as Butler's colleagues understood, was that nobody back home wanted to know what was happening here. The good folks in Peoria wanted to open their Sunday paper and read about courage and triumph, not horror and bestiality. They wanted a happy ending and a big-screen kiss in the last reel—not some blood-drenched Wagnerian opera, corpses strewn all over the stage, closing on a brazen and dissonant final chord.

And really, whose job was it to disappoint them? It wasn't the task of a working reporter to explain that this war was no Christian morality play, but rather a pagan saga—the story of Ragnarok, the last battle, twilight of the gods, death of the old world order. That was the business of historians, Butler supposed, or of poets; people working calmly in quiet rooms.

From somewhere in the wastes of Rownje, an explosion went off like the thump of distant fireworks. Cleaning up UXBs, a nice job for the
shtraf
brigades. The one-armed driver—stabbed by guilt?— cocked his head toward the sound, then faced Butler with the sharp, appraising gaze of the bloody-minded opportunist. A character type not prominent in
War and Peace
but well represented in, say, Gogol's
Dead Souls.
Well, so are we all, thought Butler—that is the kind of war it is.

“Say, did you hear they found the place where the Gestapo did their interrogations?” the man said. “And outside, executions. It's an old tsarist mansion with high walls all around. I could get you in there. You'd have an exclusive.”

The older one from Murmansk shook his head. “Sammy here's a frontline man. He likes to write about real soldiers, real fighting, not these other things, the torture, the occupation.”

Butler smiled and turned away, wondering why Russians liked to call him Sammy. Maybe they felt it sounded American. Inside the ruined library, officious young women behind a folding table proffered travel directions, commissary vouchers, clean linen, first-aid kits, Russian phrase books containing the latest official jargon, a newly commissioned hagiography of Comrade Stalin and the latest tidings from the major Red Army commands.
XVII Army
, 2
Bielorussian Front, commanded by Comrade General

I. Shretsev, sends its greetings to patriots everywhere and proudly declares the liberation of Vitebsk.
Butler knew a couple of these good Communist ladies in a vague, genial way. As he stood blinking his eyes, adjusting to the interior gloom, a Georgian brunette sporting a red beret and sergeant's insignia gave a little cry of recognition.

“Comrade Sammy! Here, we are holding several items of post for you. Packages from abroad.” Flashing a smile, she ducked into an alcove screened by a panel of brightly dyed Azerbaijani cotton.

Butler glanced around the room. On one wall, over disintegrating plaster, a notice board displayed recent press clippings, accounts of the Red Army's progress in rolling back the German aggressors, and a
Pravda
tract by Ehrenburg, the Rimbaud of hot-blooded propaganda. (“One cannot bear the Germans, these fish-eyed oafs; one cannot live while these gray-green slugs are alive. Kill them all and dig them into the earth.”) Stacked on the concrete floor, a jumble of Western publications ranging from months-old copies of
Look
and the
Saturday Evening Post
through cheaply printed Maquis broadsheets to last week's
Stars and Stripes
, its cover glumly adorned with Mauldin dogfaces. The only comfortable chairs in sight had been claimed by a pair of earnest Indochinese and a drunken Brit, who
was known, for reasons Butler had never learned, as the Reaper. The latter gave him a quick, collegial nod.

From the screened alcove tottered a pile of cardboard boxes, followed by the lady sergeant, struggling to postpone the inevitable collapse.

“Let me help you, tovarich,” said Butler, springing forward. His arms briefly tangled with hers, and a few boxes clunked to the floor.

“I'm so sorry.” The sergeant was lightly panting.

Butler studied the line of perspiration at her temple, running down skin as dark and fine as polished wood. “Nothing to worry about,” he said softly in passable Russian. “I'm sure anything valuable will already have been stolen.”

She giggled, met his eyes, flushed becomingly.

“Why don't we just set it all down over here,” Butler suggested, edging them into a corner, “and we shall see what we've got. Maybe I can shed some of this stuff right now.”

One of the larger packages, postmarked Washington, D.C., held half-pound bags of unground A&P coffee beans, a dozen cartons of Lucky Strikes, a stack of phonograph records and several pairs of extra-sheer nylon stockings.

“These are…for you?” the lady sergeant asked, switching to broken English and charmingly failing to mask her open-mouthed wonder.

“No, they're for you,” said Butler, pressing the nylons into her hands. “A gift from the people of the United States.”

The sergeant stared at him, then broke into a laugh. “Ah, the well-known American largesse,” she said, reverting to the polished, Ballet Russe elocution native to Leningrad. Foreign Press Liaison ranks were weighted toward politically reliable university students with a flair for languages.

“Here,” Butler said, reaching into the folds of his expensive overcoat, the sort senior Party types got to wear. “I have some stories here that need to be filed, but I expect to be occupied all afternoon. I wonder, if you get a few minutes?”

The sergeant nodded, brisk and businesslike, stacking the sheaf of papers atop the nylons—interrelated clauses of a wordless contract—and regarding Butler with a certain expectancy, wondering if there was more.

There was. Butler quickly inventoried the stack of parcels, culling this or that item for immediate use, stacking the rest against the wall. Soon the pockets discreetly sewn into his coat lining were filled. He smiled at the sergeant, giving her the hapless shrug of a man comically overwhelmed.

“Would it be possible to have the rest of these items shipped forward?

I'm with the 104th Guards, Special Reconnaissance, near Przemysl. Perhaps if someone is driving out in the next day or two …”

“Of course, comrade. I will see what can be arranged. Will you be checking in again today?”

“I'll be tied up,” said Butler in colloquial English, which everyone knew from the movies. “Got to catch up with the folks back home.”

“And home is…Washington, D.C.?”

Butler shook his head and smiled.

No sign announced the place he was looking for. The place had no name, and neither did the man who waited there.

Puak, he was called: a Russian word meaning spider. It was not a name but a mask, a fitting image; as
Stalin
, for example, meant steel, and
Füchschen
meant little fox. His position vis-à -vis the 4th Ukrainian Front was undefined and, for all Butler knew, nonexistent. To say he was Moscow's man in Rownje—a typical correspondent's formula—meant nothing, because Moscow, in such a context, might mean any number of things: the Stavka, the Chekha, the NKVD, or any of the rival power blocs within these shadowy organizations. Unquestionably Puak had been sent here by certain higher powers, but who those powers were and what their ultimate motives might be remained as mysterious as the man's true identity.

Butler chuckled when he saw the dull brass plaque engraved with what the casual eye would take for a street number, 1965. In truth this was no address but rather a date: the glorious year, just two decades hence, when—according to a prophecy attributed to Felix Dzerzhinsky—world Capitalism would have breathed its last and the enlightened rule of the proletariat would reach from pole to pole.

Fixing the date there struck some as pessimistic and others as starry-eyed, but to Butler it seemed about right. Today was 1944, and Nazism would surely be destroyed within the year. There would follow a time of upheaval and hardship in Europe—the sort of messy, confusing, and expensive situation from which Americans always strive to extract themselves. They had abandoned Europe in the Twenties and would do so again, Butler was certain, in the Fifties. With the Yanks out, the Soviets would soon be running the show. The old empires would be dismantled, and former colonial subjects—accounting for the bulk of the world's population—would look to the USSR as the great liberating power, a beacon of hope and a model for the future. The United States, thus isolated,
would hold out a while longer as a privileged island of revanchism, secure between its shining seas. But that game couldn't go on forever. In the absence of global markets to exploit, America would fall victim to the greed, decadence and hedonism of its own elite. It would die of consumption. As to
when
this would occur, well, 1965 was as good a guess as any.

He stood for a minute outside the building where the brass plaque hung, too small to have been a house, more likely a shop or storefront. For some reason, the notion of a cobbler's workshop came to mind—an echo, perhaps, of one queerly affecting story among the thousands about the
Rattenkrieg
at Stalingrad. Most of these were pure fiction, but the tale of the shoemaker's son turned spy was sufficiently quirky and human-scale that it might actually have happened. And true or not, it would have appealed to Puak.

So it was with no small delight that Butler stepped over a freshly swept threshold into a room that looters had cleared of everything except a long workbench bearing a couple of decades' worth of small hammer marks and the dull black sheen of shoe wax. A man who looked like a Lower East Side cop sat at one end of the bench, calmly twirling an old-fashioned billy club like the ones the Tsar's police had wielded against factory workers on the streets of St. Petersburg. Here, in a town where you could pick up automatic firearms off the sidewalk, this object seemed wonderfully quaint, until Butler looked more closely at the thick, blond-haired man whose narrowed eyes and taut shoulders suggested a readiness to demonstrate the weapon's efficacy on your skull.