Partisan Years Pt. 03

Author's note: A little more war in this one. Discussion of specific historical crimes against humanity.

Traitress

In the days after my encounter with Heinrich, I swung wildly between despair and normalcy. My section was sent to organize the peasants along the edge of the Pripet marshes. Keeping the villagers loyal meant we could use the marshes to appear from unexpected directions, strike the Germans and flee without consequence.

When we were among the people, setting right the damage of the war, or sowing the winter wheat, or bartering with them for food, I could put aside how I felt.

But when the physical work stopped and the day turned to soft evening, I felt ruined. At night, every night, I dreamed terrible things, no longer specific enough to have names or acts attached, miasmatic terror and dread and a pain that sat deep in my muscle.

It took several days for me to be able to sit comfortably and during those days I could barely eat. Anything I put into my mouth reawakened the bitter taste of Heinrich's cock. The lack of food made it easy to detach from my body and move automatically.

Kiril and Lev tried to convince me to eat. They were both delicate, Kiril because I was one of his charges, Lev because we were the only Jewish soldiers in the unit.

Slowly, I came alive.

In many villages most of the men were gone. They'd signed up at the start of the war, or been pressed into Polizei units, or fled to us, or they lay rotting in ditches with German lead in their skulls. Or they'd gone to Minsk, Gomel, Babryusk, as laborers free or unfree, searching for enough cash to survive the coming winter.

Those who stayed were indolent, drunk, apathetic. The war tore away their world and left them like detritus on a beach after a great storm. Nothing could move them, not even the hate for their neighbors who joined the fascist Polizei.

So we had to talk to the women and the girls to learn the movements of the Germans. I was in the cellar of one house a few days after Heinrich raped me, when I grasped this reality.

They'd harbored a Jewish mechanic who'd fled when the Polizei came to take his house. An informant told the Polizei. They came to the village with four German soldiers and burst into the house. They shot an old man, dragged the mechanic into the street and beat him to death.

The eldest daughter, my age, was home. The Germans raped her. Her grandmother was made to watch. The younger daughter, sixteen, escaped their attentions because she was in the fields.

She now kept a strict watch on the comings and goings of the Fascists. Her sister was nearly catatonic, two weeks after the event. I wanted to speak to her, tell her that there were others who'd suffered dishonor. But she refused to meet my eyes. The younger sister passed us all she knew of the Germans and the names of a score of other girls who kept a similar watch.

News came from Kiev, more than a week late, of the city's fall. No government, no army could sustain such losses and fight on. It took four years of war and a revolution for Hoffmann and Falkenhayn's columns to reach Kiev, and they held it all of a single winter. The Nazi armies took it in three months. They could not be stopped. It seemed that the autumn of that year would be the last twilight of the civilized world.

Though the details of the German Generalplan Ost were still secret, we lived through it. There was only kasha to eat, some spare potatoes here and there, the barest remnants of the harvest. The rest was taken at bayonet for Berlin and Vienna and the Ruhr, to feed the muscles that worked the presses, lathes and furnaces that forged the death machines.

The fall of Kiev cast the weakness of the Soviet Union into harsh light. All that we had sacrificed -- the camps, the purges, the terror, the breakneck industrialization, the great dams, the iron foundries, the railways -- all of it was too little, too late. Twenty years of sacrifice and toil, of tears and horror and hope and this humiliation was our reward.

We were still just peasants, our clothes still rustic, our factories primitive.

Who were we to stand against the Germans?

The Americans had not joined, the British reeled at the loss of their colonies, and Churchill's hatred for the Soviets made it obvious that no help would come from the fifth of the world crushed beneath the heel of his dictatorship.

The sense of general catastrophe made my own suffering feel so small, and gave me some horror onto which I could project my own violations: a second Brest-Litovsk, the fall of Moscow, Swastikas in Astrakhan and Arkhangel.

By the spring we would surely all be dead.

Autumn gripped the land now and rain swelled the streams. Groundwater rose in the dugouts. The Pripet marshes swelled. We lived in mud, marched in mud, fought in mud, worked in mud. In the rare dry days, our clothes stiffened and caked mud fell from them. But it was impossible to stay dry, to stay clean.

One night, after a sunny day, the whole of Kiril's section went down to a stream to wash our clothes in the clear water. It was a comparatively warm evening, one of the last for the next seven months. The mud sloughed from our equipment and uniforms.

Lev gave me a coat to protect my modesty. I took special care to clean my mother's boots, which had endured the marching and the weather with little damage. I wore the coat, then put on my trousers when they were dry and took my underclothes down to the stream and washed them too. But I could not work out the bloodstains Heinrich had left in my underwear.

Then the men sat about the fires. Slowly, one-by-one, they unrolled their bedrolls and dropped to sleep under the clear sky.

From a village a mile distant, came the faint pops of gunfire, but neither Kiril nor Lev stirred.

Lev, by his physical endurance and his generosity, had emerged as Kiril's right hand. At first, the Russians and the Ukrainians in the section belittled him, but he challenged any man to fight him bare knuckle if they thought a Jew weak. A pair of Uzbek brothers, an Armenian, a Tajik and a Tatar joined Lev in something of a bloc against the Russian soldiers and the Byelorussian recruits. These non-Slavs were all survivors of the disasters of July and August, all still proud of their Red Army discipline. In time they won adherents from among the other soldiers trapped behind the lines. They called me little sister.

Lev and his friends played cards naked by the fire as their clothes dried, the Uzbeks already asleep.

"Who is shooting?" I asked.

"Volodya," Lev said, with an edge of disdain for our commander. "He is done with some prisoners."

"Prisoners?"

"Whites."

I nodded. There was another burst of gunfire, four shots, nearly together, then the bark of a pistol a moment later.

I passed the challenge of the sentry, then stalked across the fields. A third volley sounded as I neared.

They'd shot the men in an empty stockpen behind a barn. The bodies lay in the manure. The full moon cast the dead in silver light, their blood a dark stain on their shirts. Vladimir Sergeyivich held a revolver in his hand, half a squad of gunmen nearby. They brought a fourth man from the barn, limping and battered, specks of blood on his clothing.

Vladimir Sergeyivich looked him up and down.

"You sold brother Russians to the Fascists," he said.

"No I didn't," the man protested.

"Have the courage not to lie to my face."

"Vasily Pavolovich wasn't a man. He was a beast, an NKVD man."

"And who am I?"

"Vladimir Sergeyivich Masovka," the prisoner said.

"And I have been both prisoner and guard," he said, raising his pistol. A single shot rang out. The man slumped in the arms of the guards, blood pouring from his head. Vladimir holstered the pistol, then spoke again. "One of you go and fetch the Jew-girl."

The phrase raised gooseflesh.

I called from the darkness.

"I'm here, Vladimir Sergeyivich."

He beckoned.

"These four ratted our courier and blew a network of friendly workers who smuggled guns past the front," he said. "We caught them because your girl saw them go into a Polizei Lieutenant's hideaway."

"And the cop?" I said.

Vladimir shrugged. "We'll get him and a whole station soon. I'm tired of hiding while cities burn and children starve."

In the moonlight he was almost handsome. The sharp features of his face possessed a grim serenity. He looked out to the black forest across the strips of field, up towards the main road, rather than towards the camp. Then he turned back and spoke in hushed tones to one of his men for a moment.

"Yes, yes," the soldier said. "I'll keep the watch."

I felt his hand on my arm.

"We're going to the wood," Vladimir said.

"So you can fuck me?"

He shrugged and I could see anger roiling in him. Then he released my arm and walked off along the track across the fields. His boots crunched in the damp gravel. As I watched, Vladimir unbuttoned his jacket and wiped his face with his hands. He took his revolver from its holster and extracted the spent casings from it, flicking each one into the fresh furrows where the peasants had plowed in the winter wheat. Then Vladimir stood there, examining the gun in the moonlight.

I approached.

"How many of these will they make before the end?" He asked without looking at me.

"You can read it in Pravda."

"Funny."

He half-turned towards me, holding the piece by its guard and barrel, like a relic. We were out of earshot of the village, out of the dull light cast by the oil lamps in the barn.

"They killed my brother with one of these, Natasha."

"Who did?"

"The Whites," he said. He walked a few paces further and I followed. "He was a Red Guard." I could hear the strain in his voice.

"What was his name?"

"Mitya. Dimitry Sergeyivich. You wonder why I'm still loyal to those pricks in Moscow, why I still fight for them after they ripped my nails out, it's for him. He believed. My big brother. He was a good man. A stoker in the Vyborg district. He was at Gatchina. He fought the Czechs. He was in the unions and the Soviets. He was wounded at Tsaritsyn. They captured him when they overran one of the field hospitals. They killed the wounded like I shot those men. Lead in the skull, shit in the bed, blood on the pillows. After that I fought."

He fell silent, still contemplating the gun in his hand. He slid it into the holster.

"Now it's over," he said. "The grand experiment."

I said nothing.

"You know, I've had it all. War, peace, riches, prison. Women who crawled to me, women who ran from me. Scorn, respect, fear and love. None of it makes any sense to me," Vladimir said. "Just the flesh. The pleasures of the earth."

I realized then that he envied Kiril, envied Lev, even envied me, because we still believed in something, that as ruined and broken as it was the world might someday be better than it was at this black hour. His life had no such organizing principle, or if it did, he had long lost it.

When you envy, you want.

Sometimes that want is to be what you envy, other times to possess it. I think, more often, you want to smash what it is you envy, to break it and tear it down to the same earth you tread, so you can see that it too is dust.

He turned on me then, at the edge of the forest, and seized my shoulders. He kissed me with a savage passion.

"Why?" I asked.

But he kissed me again.

"We're going to war, Natasha."

"We're at war, Volodya."

"No. We're marching," he said. "The order is in from Moscow."

"Where?"

"On the German supply line and the Smolensk rail," he said. Then his big hand settled on my throat, and I was conscious of a tree a pace behind me, of the rough wool of Lev's coat on my nipples, which stood upright in the cool air. I wasn't wearing any underwear, those were drying by the fire.

"Choke them," Vladimir said as he eased my coat open. He found one of my breasts with his mouth, tonight he was rough, fast, but using what he'd learned could set me going. His hand put pressure on my windpipe. "Strangle them so they can't rape Moscow the way they raped Kiev."

He returned to kissing me. I could smell the powdersmoke on him. The rough brush of his dry lips and unshaved face excited me at a physical level. I could feel a base heat building in me, feel myself getting wet.

His words, though, had awakened a terror in me. We'd had our tastes of combat, nothing more. The typhoon now aiming for Moscow would pull all within. Of course the harsh word, Rape, froze my breath and stilled my reaction, and I could hear his moans the first time as he'd cum inside of me, see Heinrich's blue eyes searching for satisfaction as he pushed down on my throat til the world grayed.

Vladimir finished unbuttoning my coat, and set it on the ground beside. After Heinrich, this felt practically polite. But I dreaded the thought of returning Lev's coat smelling like another man, or of wiping Vladimir's cum from my face with the sleeve. I needed to take control, bend him to my will.

So I reached for his belt.

But he grabbed my wrist.

"Not tonight," he said. "We seek battle in the morning. I don't need a mouth and some fluttering eyes. I'm going to fuck you hard."

"Vladimir," I said. But he shoved me back and I staggered against the evergreen.

He shoved his tongue down my throat and his hand down my pants, and when he found I was wearing no underwear he pulled those down and ran a finger over my cunt lips.

"Already wet," he said. "You're a good slut."

He turned me around and pushed my face against the broad trunk when I protested, my cheek chafing at the bark.

"Slow, Volodya please," I hissed.

"Brace yourself."

Then he pulled my hips back for a better angle and I had to grasp for the tree with my hands. Then I felt the head of his prick at my entrance and I shifted forward to delay. He pushed me against the trunk, wrapped his hand in my hair and pulled my head back to make it harder for me to struggle. Then, with impressive dexterity, he found my entrance again and slipped his cock in. Without fingering, with scarce any warm-up, he felt vast.

That first thrust, after he'd pushed the head inside me, brought a sharp sheet of pain as he forced my hesitant cunt open with all the strength of his legs and hips. I cried out, a shrieking gasp. His thrust drove the breath from me, filled me up so there was nothing else inside me but this intruding, painful thing, and the intense, electric jolts of unwished for pleasure that shot off from it.

In this respect, Vladimir was not a creative man. He liked push a girl up against something hard and fuck her. My chest was pressed against the vast bulk of the tree, my head pulled back so I looked up through its boughs towards the sightless night sky.

The smell of him, the heavy weight of his body, the abrasive bark against my bare skin, the pain between my legs, all was so alike what he'd done in the Dacha, that I quickly reached that same state of detachment I'd achieved there.

I could see a big, strong man with a slight, dark-haired girl. His cock slipped in and out of her, her face an expressionless mask, placid detachment rather than extreme duress. A couple of his thrusts, and the weight of his grip on her hair, were enough to rub her face against the tree bark and raise pinpricks of blood on the right cheek. Stinging pain, abstractly interesting abrasion of the nipples, hard, painful strokes inside. His movement becoming ever more fluid, ever easier.

Then, the girl started moving her body back against him, participating in the motion, until he stepped back and she braced herself against the tree, hands on the bark, bent in half at the waist, arching her back as he pulled her head back by the hair.

Then he released the hair, grabbed her throat and reached between her legs with his other hand.

He found my clit, licked his middle finger and caressed it. I came back to myself and moaned, feeling the last resistance of my cunt disappear. My body was hungry for him now. More, faster, now.

He slammed into me, the sound of his body against mine carrying in the sparse woods, my own voice like some comic birdcall. Whoresong, I thought.

"Right there," I said, in breathy Russian. "Yes. Harder. Harder."

I burned for his touch. This was new, wanting to be fucked, rather than experiencing sexual pleasure as a physical thing detached from desire. I wanted him, wanted all of him, his mouth, his hands, his penis, the hard, uncaring edge of his voice when he spoke to me, and the soft plaintive growl when he discussed his brother.

He slapped my ass, the sharp pain fading to a dizzy sting. He slapped me again, then gripped my ass hard with his hand.

I wanted to feel his cum dripping from me, to feel it dry on my thighs and taste the hint of it in the back of my throat. And I wanted him to come to me in the cool of the mornings, wake me with his touch, slide into me when I could still think of him as a body without humanity, as a stand-in for what could be, as Lazar brought back to me.

That last thought sent shame coursing through me. I had a man. One I wanted. One who wanted me. One to whom I'd given word. And he had died for his country. Now a brute had raped me, and I had sucked his cock, been raped a second time by a worse barbarian, and when raped a third time all my loyalties disappeared.

While one of Vladimir's hands worked on my clit, the other snaked back up to my throat and pulled me back and up, until I was standing on the very tips of my toes, back arched, hands woven into Vladimir's hair behind me, head pressed against his collarbone, his cock inside me working in long, measured strokes. He'd built a terrible tension in my body, all the nerves taut like wire. It was all I could do to keep my breath going.

"Say it," he said. I knew what he meant. But I couldn't say it, not yet, so I craned my head round, contorting, searching for his lips with mine. And he kissed me, slipping his tongue over mine, squeezing my throat with his free hand.

The orgasm surprised me, the difficult position had brought me to the edge unnoticed, the completeness of his control over me left me unable to resist. It was the touch of our tongues that pitched me over the edge. I shook, my body quivering as his fingers crushed the moan in my throat. My thighs shook, my hips twitched, my knees buckled. My cunt sought to pull him deeper, and I wanted him to cum inside of me, to shudder and empty himself.

The strength went out of me, and he laid me on the ground then.

Vladimir pulled my head back by the hair and slammed into me. The new position gave him more leverage, more depth. It was, at first, more painful, as it was reminiscent of my first time. But the head of his cock was hitting one spot in the front muscles of my cunt that felt like nothing else I'd ever known, making me gasp and whimper.

The earth beneath me was cool, still damp with weeks of rain. I dug my fingers into the soft pine needles, the dirt beyond.

"Say it," he commanded, his whole weight on me, the whole length of him sliding in and out of me. "Say it."

The cool under me was a sharp contrast to the the heat inside that started with Vladimir's cock and raged like fire. I was conscious of sweat breaking out on my body, of a feeling like the need to piss, but not quite.

I gave myself up to him there, letting all of the muscles of my body go lax, so that I was nothing under him. I came again, a deep orgasm, so hard the muscles of my stomach fluttered and my breath came in sharp gasps and then in breathless words.

"Lazar," I heard myself say. "Lazar. Take me."

He let go of my head, grabbed both of my hips and pushed into me with all his force. I felt his whole body shake, the hot flood of his cum inside me. The last deep thrusts struck something that had never been touched before. Then he collapsed on top of me.