Partisan Years Pt. 04

The Iron Rod

Then it was December 5. The day the guns all along the Moscow front roared, the day the ski troops and the Siberian divisions poured from our Capital and smashed into the Fascist lines. The day Zhukov had his way, the day our victory began and the salvation of the world dawned bright with the Red sun in the low eastern sky.

That was also the first day I could really use my right leg since I'd taken a splinter through the calf in October. I could walk only with a limp and considerable pain, but I made it through the day's march without staggering or falling. The wound was still a barely closed knot of flesh. I was still strong after weeks of light duty. I was small enough to subsist on poor rations while the big men hollowed and slowed. Hunger takes strong men first.

But I was at least six weeks pregnant with Vladimir's child. It took an iron will not to vomit up the black bread, stolen sausage and mealy potatoes that comprised our limited rations. Even a few missed meals in those weeks could mean death as those who slowed from fatigue fell to the Germans and were shot, or lapsed into waking dreams in the bitter cold and lay down, never to rise.

Before the counterattack in December, the snow was relatively light, the cold harsh only to badly clothed men. This gave the advantage to the Germans, for it was their tanks and motor vehicles that allowed them to sweep across the central plains of Russia and encircle whole armies. It made it easier for them to rundown partisan detachments, and Vladimir's combat group fell back from the Smolensk rail line in late November. There were more men now, two hundred some-odd soldiers, though we lacked everything: guns, ammunition, bayonets, shovels, food, boots, clothes, medicine. Most had come from other detachments mauled by the Polizei and the rear area forces.

As the operation before Moscow grew more serious, I began to calculate how long I had to live.

Vladimir was too busy, generally, to fuck me, and Heinrich displayed little interest in me. His men often served as the first echelon in attacks and his nerves had begun to fray after so many close calls with shells and wire and machine guns. Kiril, though I wanted him badly, maintained his revolutionary discipline, and Lev grieved so for his wife in Kiev that it seemed he would never look at another woman. So none had any idea what I was concealing.

But I still knew. I had a few weeks, until January or February at the very latest, before it was impossible to hide my condition and I became an absolute liability to the unit. Each night I prayed to miscarry. Each day that I woke nauseous, but healthy, was a spiritual defeat. There was a parasite growing inside me, a fragment of my destruction, pushing my organs aside slowly, like a piece of shrapnel moving a millimeter a day.

I hoped the poor food and the long exertion would kill this parasite. For I did not intend to perish now that Moscow fought on and winter ground the Germans and a gun in my hand felt natural. I would see the war to its end or to my death in battle. Nothing else would do.

The first days of the counteroffensive were tenuous. All we had were rumors: Klin liberated, Kalinin retaken, a great battle before Mozhaisk, Rzhev attacked, Tula near to freedom, great battles in the center where the tanks closed to within meters of each other on ground consecrated in the struggle against Napoleon.

It was only on December 18, midway through Chanukah, that definite news reached us of the enemy's withdrawal from Tula, the destruction of the German XXXV corps and the flight of 3rd Panzer Army to the lines about Rzhev, and of the American entry to the war.

That day we'd overrun a supply depot maintained by a rear echelon unit and captured liquor, food and ammunition. It was enough for our purposes and enough to hurt the operations of the enemy's patrols between Orsha and Smolensk. We learned the news from a captured German radio as evening fell.

At the time, we were crammed into a village a day's march from the rail line, abandoned by its inhabitants at the height of the summer fighting. It lay at the edge of the agrarian lands and the forests, too exposed for a permanent base, but too well situated to abandon without a fight.

I was in the officer's house with the radio and the captains and Lev and some of the others. Lev and I were reporting the results of recent intelligence work on the dispositions of the auxiliary Polizei units near Orsha. Vladimir rose from the radio, slid the headset off, and gave the news. Kiril took off out into the snow to spread it among the men.

There was no containing the celebration: Moscow was saved, for now. The Soviet Union would endure. The Fascists had not won. Winter marched beside us.

Vladimir cracked a bottle of vodka and one of schnapps and passed them round, toasting. Men gathered outside the officer's house, demanding Vladimir speak. He slugged back his drinks until he was red in the face, then clambered out onto the roof over the porch.

"Comrades!" he called to the assembled men, pointing east. "You turned them back! By your blood and your fire you weakened them, so the bayonets of your brothers could stop the enemy's onrush."

Then he sang the Internationale.

"Arise, ones branded by hunger. Arise, the starving and the damned."

Others joined, frigid mouths stumbling over the words, until by the first chorus, every voice lifted up in song.

"This is our final and decisive battle. The Internationale will lead man up!"

Then the Slavianka Farewell, Kalinka, Katyusha, the marches of the civil war. All the while, bottles passed from hand to hand, multiplying as if by magic. Lev was beside me, his breath billowing in the night air, his face red with joy. He seized my hand and brought it to his lips.

"We will survive," he said.

Men who hated the Union in peace sang now with their whole breasts. Soldiers nearly speechless with the horrors of defeat stood proud for the first time since June, waving their hats in the bitter cold. Those who'd never wavered in the defense of the Soviet Union wept at the sound of their comrades joining as one in the songs of our grand project.

Then, the warmth in the blood and the liquor in the belly proved enough and the men gathered in small groups, friends with friends and countrymen with countrymen, singing, then dancing, laughing.

I did not drink. I wanted to keep my wits secure. Waves of nausea partly from hunger, partly from my condition, made vodka singularly unappealing. Kiril and Lev drank until they flushed, Vladimir drank until his voice quavered and his steps grew uncertain. The other men drank and drank, until the stumbling officers began ushered them into the dugouts and the huts for fear of frostbite. Even then the singing continued. Some cried, shouting the names of murdered comrades and dead family members.

Heinrich, as officer of the watch, did not drink. But I saw him on the porch of the officer's quarters, clapping his hands in time to the songs, mouthing the words around a captured cigar that hung in the corner of his mouth.

I did not want to sleep yet. The sky was too vast, the cold too bitter, the feeling of victory too pure. I felt light. My boots left almost no print on the packed snow. And I remembered a night like this, just a year ago, the night my engagement to Lazar began.

He came to see me in Minsk and we walked the city in the snow from evening until dawn, talking. We'd been one soul that night. Dreams and plans, love and socialism, and maybe, one day, children, that was what we talked of, and I pledged myself to him under the unimaginable cold of the Minsk sky.

I wanted to feel close to him again.

The force of that desire hurt me deep and the wind stirred tears to my eyes. I turned back to the officer's post, where I'd left the notebook I wrote my coded reconnaissance reports. That was the same notebook where I scribbled messages to Lazar in Yiddish in the margins of the used pages, things he'd said to me, things I'd loved about him. It was my last piece of him, in that way.

The little furnace strained to keep the heat going. Draped blankets and scraps of cloth covered the windows and plugged the gaps in the log walls. The place was two rooms, a common room where men assembled for council, and a locked room where the codebooks and the paychest were. The officer of the watch kept his vigil from the desk in the code room when he was not walking the perimeter.

My notebook was on the code desk. But Heinrich had locked the inner door when the drinking began. His great coat hung on a hook beside the door, however. I crossed to it, felt the pockets, found the key. Wherever he was, he'd be back soon. Ten minutes without a great coat could be lethal in this cold. He was probably just at the latrine.

I knew what would happen if he caught me. But it was worse to leave my notebook. I needed it, down in my soul I needed that book, more than physical safety, more than food. How else could I tell Lazar that Moscow endured and that we would survive. Without it I had my worn boots and my memories and nothing else.

I turned the lock, stepped inside. The code room was colder than the main room, its small stove down to embers.

I picked my notebook off the table and turned to go.

I closed and locked the code room door behind me.

The front door opened and Heinrich entered with a load of firewood in his arms. I hid the key from sight, too far from his greatcoat to return it.

"Yakovlevna," he said. "The rest have gone quarters, save the watch."

I held up my notebook.

"Left it on the briefing table," I said, gesturing to the table in the middle of the main room. He nodded, kicked the door shut behind himself.

"Be a comrade," he said, and seemed on the verge of saying something else. But he paused, dropped the wood, and went for his coat. A metal cudgel hung from the belt of his field jacket. To move would betray that I had something to hide.

"Well," he said, fishing in the pocket of his coat. "Looks like I need to sound the alarm."

"Why?"

"The key to the code room is missing."

I said nothing.

"Of course," he said. "That would mean whoever stole it could face military justice. At the least a beating from the men for putting a stop to the drinking."

"Of course," I said. "And if you mislaid it?"

"We both know that's not the case."

He came up the room real slow, keeping his gloved hands behind his body, his face red with cold. I had a few seconds, precious few, to act. If I used a gun, it would be too loud.

I transferred the key to the hand that held my notebook, let the other hang next to the sheath of my bayonet. I could stab him without killing, then raise some sort of alarm. Or I could pin him and put the blade to his throat and work it out from there.

Then, with simultaneous motions, I tossed the notebook and key across the room and drew the bayonet. I lunged towards him, the blade held low in a knife fighter's grip.

But his hand flew up before I could close the distance, a revolver in it.

I froze.

He shook his head.

"Down," he said.

I put the bayonet down.

"Kick it to me."

I obeyed.

"Tie your boots together."

"Fuck you."

"We'll get there," he said. "Now tie your boots together."

I kneeled. He knocked the front door closed with his hip, locked it.

My stomach flipped and my head swam. I couldn't focus my eyes. Whatever happened now would be awful. I wasn't ready for it. It wasn't fair. All over the damned key. My hands shook working the knots, but I made sure the laces were loose enough I could kick the boots off. I could make it fifty yards barefoot in the snow.

"Put your rifle down, take your greatcoat off, then step back until your back touches the code room door."

I obeyed, shuffling backwards. Hot humiliation rose in my throat.

Then I pressed into the door. Heinrich cocked the hammer on the revolver, it would be a hair trigger now, and he kept it trained on me as he crouched, picked the key from the floor and approached.

Cold air still clung to him, so that his approach felt like the advance of something graven and wrong, a little whiff of death in that chill.

"Down," he said. "Mouth open."

I squatted, not wanting to kneel as that would surrender any chance of movement. I expected him to unbutton his pants and pull out his cock. I wanted that even. If I could make him cum he might let me go. But he pushed the gun forward.

I opened my mouth and closed my eyes. The steel was so cold it hurt as he slid the barrel into my open mouth. It was afraid now, properly terrified. The steel touched the back of my throat and I nearly gagged. I tried to push him away by the legs, but he shoved the pistol further deeper, tipping my head back so the muzzle sat back at the opening of my esophagus.

"Think your body would hold in the sound of the shot?"

I felt my self control going. Tremors spread through my limbs. He broke eye contact. I salivated hard around the barrel.

"You'd probably live, for a while at least," he said. "Enough that I could have you still."

I felt my bladder loose, the piss soaking through my pants, dripping down into my socks, dripping onto the floor. I could feel tears coming too; I felt very small and delicate and stupid.

"Vladimir said you did that," he said. "Filthy little cunt."

He reached for the lock with his other hand, slid the key in, then clicked it open. Slowly, he drew the barrel out, the post-sight brushing the roof of my mouth at the back. I gagged then, a single horrid wave of revulsion sweeping up from the base of my body. I squeezed my eyes shut, contained it, fought it back down. If he'd sodomized me for spitting in his face, I couldn't imagine what he'd do if I vomited on his boots.

There was a click by my head as he turned the knob. The door behind me gave. I nearly fell, and caught myself with my hand. His cock was visible under his layered trousers, throbbing for me already.

He kicked me between the legs and I sprawled back into the code room, blind with pain. Then he kicked me where the shrapnel had ripped through my flesh, and fire raced out along the nerves, agony deep in the muscle. It hurt worse than when I'd been hit. I cried out.

He returned to where he'd dropped the wood, holstered the pistol, picked up some of the firewood and walked back to the door of the code room.

With one hand, he seized me by the field jacket and hauled me bodily into the code room. I felt cold all over, a deep fatigue in the limbs, resignation to sex I did not want with a man I hated. I could tolerate this, maybe, if he just fucked me or if he made me cum with his fingers. Maybe that would let me escape to that black realm where I watched what men did to my body without feeling it acutely.

As I lay there, wracked with pain from his kicks, he got the fire going again, then took the cudgel from his belt. It was a machined steel piece, with a plate between the handle and the haft to protect against stabs. The haft itself was thick and smooth, eighteen or so centimeters long, the head a smooth, bulbous thing about five centimeters long and broader than the haft by a third. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a large phallus.

"Take off your field jacket and boots."

My hands moved without conscious effort, slipping open the buttons of my padded field jacket. Slowly, as I got it loose, I sat up. I'd lost the shirt I'd worn the first time he assaulted me after I was wounded. The only clothes I still had from those first weeks were my mother's boots, the inner pair of trousers and my inner pair of socks, all three now damp with piss. Everything else was taken from dead men, Soviets and Germans alike.

My undershirt was too large, an office worker's shirt, once crisp and white. My hands fumbled with the buttons here too, and I shivered in the cold. The celluloid buttons were just a touch too big for the holes in the placket and it took me a minute to get them open, but Heinrich had no time for this.

"Up," he motioned with the cudgel. When I hesitated he screamed it. "Up!"

"Wait," I said. "I can't risk ripping anything, I can't have damaged clothes in this weather."

"You can piss yourself but you can't take off your fucking shirt?"

Once more, I felt small and stupid. I had to turn away from him so he wouldn't see my face red with shame or the tears coming to my eyes.

Then I shrugged my shirt off, took off what passed for a brassiere, and sat on the floor before him, still in my trousers.

The fire was stronger now, but not enough to give proper heat. The hair all over my body stood on end.

"Those too," he said. "Lets see what the shell did."

When I finished taking my pants off, my legs and pussy felt exposed at the cold air. I stood naked before him.

The wound on my stomach where a sliver of steel had cut me was healed to a faint pink line, but my calf had an ugly knot of scar and thin skin, barely closed. A bruise was forming where he'd kicked me already.

"You'll do," he said, then crossed to me. I backed up against the table the officers used for a coding desk.

"I don't want to," I said. I'd been used enough to know it mattered to me still to make some token resistance, so I could say afterwards that it was not my fault what was done to me, that I had asked for anything but this.

"That doesn't matter," he said, his voice dropping hard with desire.

"I'll scream."

"No you won't."

"Help," I said, loud, not loud enough to be heard outside. I drew a deeper breath, enough to shout with. He hit me, just once, backhand across the face, the pommel of the club adding just an extra bit of weight and pain. I fell on my side on the coding table, pushed myself up. Blood welled inside my cheek.

He wrapped his fist in my hair and shoved me down so hard the breath went out of me, pushing me until I lay face down across the table.

I knew he was going to hurt me and that when Vladimir found out I was pregnant he'd give Heinrich the task of shooting me. It seemed so unfair, now that I thought about the Old Bolsheviks and the Komsomol leaders and the others we'd lost in the Yezhovschina, that this White Worm yet lived.

"Petulant bitch," he said. I heard him taken his field jacket off, then his shirt, down to the blue undershirt he wore, heard the buckle of his trousers. I was ready for him, as ready as I would ever be, willing my cunt to relax, to dampen. Fear had done some of this already: I was used to violation, I knew the cadence of its progress and the contours of its cruelty, and my body remembered and reacted.

And then there was something frigid and hard between my ass cheeks. The cudgel tip. He pushed me down further, so my ass stuck up a bit, my head pressed hard to the coding table.

He spit, not on me, but on the cudgel, several times. I looked back over my shoulder as best I could as he examined how much lubrication he'd accrued there.

"Why?"

"You know why," he said. "You think you're special. You think you deserve something from the world. All of you do, but it's not coming. And because I want to."

Then the cold brush of the steel against my anus. Steady pressure, circling rising. I breathed out. The hurt rose, dull at first and then harsh. He relented a second, spat again, took his left hand from my hair and used it to hold my ass cheeks apart. The pressure resumed and I cried out in shock as I felt the cudgel head push past the ring of muscle and slip inside me, still cold, but trailing a hot pain and pressure. The cold metal and the heat of agony mixed strange and I felt my cunt respond in expectation of his fingers.

He put more force into it. The haft sliding in, each centimeter felt long and stretching, the muscles of my ass trying to force this thing out, the pain building as a result. He shoved it, a whole centimeter or two slipped into me.