Partisan Years Pt. 06

Author's note: Apologies for the delay. Some writers block on this one. Full-time job and all. There's more explicit racism in this one, as Natalia encounters some Germans. Depiction=/=endorsement, but you all know that, this is a CNC forum after all. I figured I owed you the warning anyways.

The Long Winter

With the parasite gone and a scheme to snare Heinrich, I could put all that had happened to me into some rational context.

But when I was stuck with the men he'd let have me, my breath caught in my throat. Often I found tears leaking from my eyes on the march, more than the biting wind called for. The bruises on my wrists and thighs faded only slowly.

In the long nights of our journey back to our part of the war, I quivered with fear. When I slept my dreams were of pain, or humiliation so physically intense and degrading that I woke often with my own fingers inside me, and shame and grief so thick in my throat I could've choked. Nights like that, I had to finish, only then would the torment leave me, as nausea passes after vomiting.

Worse were the nights where I dreamed, but the dreams were of darkness; when I woke my heart pounded, but my body was dry and taut and felt far from me, like I was down in the depths of a hard despair and nothing would ever relieve it, not the rising sun or the roaring cannon, only the final, silent sleep.

On we marched, through the ice fields of silent, desolate armies and over the graves of thousands, through villages where chimneys stood out of the blackened ruin like tombstones, and where the grief stricken peasants had frozen upright after they watched the Germans at their work. This was the worst of the war to bear, this hopeless ruin under the bright winter sun. The whole span from the Arctic shore to the sea of Azov was given over to the Kingdom of Death. And here the Christian prophecy ruled, and the horsemen of it rode unleashed within the hearts of men, and the reveille trumpets heralded suns of no warmth, and moons the color of blood.

Both armies were utterly exhausted before Moscow by then and could scarcely maintain coherent patrols of their rear echelons, so we moved easily. The Germans compensated for this with ruthless massacre and punishing raids, against companies when they could find them, villages when they could not, so that it was the worst season yet to be a Partisan.

All through our journey I felt a tension building in me. Consciously, I knew it was a want of sex, the way you understand from a train timetable that the locomotive will cross such an embankment at such an hour.

I felt empty.

Sometimes, when talking to Lev, this emptiness nearly overcame me and I wanted to beg him to fuck me.

Though he held me in his arms as we slept, it was not the platonic embrace of brother soldiers, nor a lover's touch, but some deeper intimacy of broken things, as after a blast the glass of the window and the champagne flute lay entwined in the rubble.

Then we reached the woodlands and our brothers.

I'd never been so happy to see Vladimir. It'd been nearly a month since we set out, a week to get to Moscow, a week and a half there, a week and change back. But we had the radio.

He looked changed, thinner and gaunt. Kiril was similarly wasted. A third of the men had died or vanished. Victory curdled into a war of attrition.

I went to Vladimir that night. The unit was deep in the woods, back in dugouts and huts. He was drunk.

When I saw him, my stomach fluttered. I wanted him. I needed his body, the weight of him, the smell of him. My muscles and my bones ached for such pressure. I could never be still again until a man had taken me.

I later encountered others who developed a similar fever after severe rape, a psychological reversal of pain by the embrace of it. Even at the moment I knew how strange it was. Shame and disbelief tinged the want, made it more desperate, more heedless.

"You've been fucking the Prussian," Vladimir said.

"It was part of the deal," I said. "Not that I want him. He hurts me."

He snorted. Then he rose from the low bunk where he lay with his liquor and slapped me.

"You like it when he hurts you, don't you."

"No," I said. He struck me again, harder; I staggered. Then I shoved him. Vladimir stumbled and fell back on his cot.

"You stupid dog," I said. "Wandering around in the wilderness with no master, taking it out on whoever will bear it because they're weak."

"Stuck up bitch," he said from down there. "Komsomol whore."

"If you didn't want him to," I said. "You should've forbidden it."

"He does what he wants."

"Oh I know." I loomed over him. He reached up to grab my wrist. I shook his hand loose. He looked pitiful then, and I thought about leaving his dugout, seeking out Kiril or Heinrich or Lev, or one of the men who'd raped me on the road to Moscow, thought about drinking everything I could and stripping naked in the snow. Anger rose in me, hot as a magnesium flare. I hit him. "You fucking coward."

I landed a couple good punches before he had my wrists. I countered the grip and jerked him from the bed, marveling at my strength. I kicked Vladimir in the belly and he sagged away.

"He fed me to the men," I said. "They all raped me. But I lived and came back to you. And all you can do is wallow."

"He what?"

"He let four of the men take me," I said.

There was a hard edge to his voice when he spoke next. "Four?"

"All save Lev."

Vladimir rose, crossed to me. His physicality was different now, he had a stake in this beyond desultory resentment.

"And I won't fuck you anymore," I said. "Not if you're going to cum inside me."

"Who do you think you are?" He said. "You bourgeois slut."

Then he grabbed my right wrist with one hand and my throat with the other and shoved me to the wall, using his elbow to pin my left shoulder in place so I couldn't strike him.

"You don't get to decide who fucks you," Vladimir said.

"Neither does Heinrich," I said. This gave him some pause. He pressed on my throat until I couldn't speak. My eyes watered. But I was getting wet.

"He was always a lying bastard," Vladimir said. I nodded against the pressure of his hand, and he eased it. I breathed heavy, half-choked.

"Like you're any different."

He threw me across the room. His strength had returned. I stumbled and slammed into his cot, and cried out.

He crossed to me, struck me again before I could get my guard up. He forced me back onto the rough blankets and pulled on my belt so hard the worn leather snapped loose from the buckle. He pulled it free from the loops and pulled my trousers down.

"Tell me how it was," he said, his stubbled face close to mine.

Control had passed between us several times, whipsawing with whoever had the physical initiative. It was more than I'd gotten previous times, an affirmation that I had some strength, some capacity to choose. My breath was ragged, my body afire with want and hate.

"Natasha." He slid his hand into my underwear. I parted my legs for him, moaned soft at his familiar touch. "Tell me what they did to you."

I shook my head. It was too humiliating to confess it here, wet, burning and ready for him. The memory was ice in my veins. My eyes welled a bit as I thought of the pain and confusion I'd felt the next morning, how hard I'd fought, how the liquor made my head reel, how they'd fucked me each twice, and left my thighs and cunt slick with their cum.

I couldn't cum thinking of that.

But he slid his fingers into me, folding them up to reach the spot inside me that made me gasp. And there it was.

"Tell me," he commanded. I said nothing. He withdrew his fingers, half stood. I sat partway up, confused by his behavior. He was illegible.

Then I saw the broken belt in his hand.

Next I heard the whistle and the leather struck me across the face and I slid sideways, breath frozen for a heartbeat, my face paralyzed with the cold sting that follows broken skin. Damn him, damn him. I shielded my head with my hands as he struck me again, the belt leaving stinging trails on my hands and forearms. I buried my face in the blankets.

He whipped my exposed ass then.

Six lashes, a dozen, then his fucking prick at my entrance, which was wet but no longer relaxed after his attack. The familiar tight pain followed as he groaned and pushed against my reluctant muscles. His breath hard and loud in my right ear as he pried my hands away from my head.

He slid into me. "Tell me."

And I did. I spoke haltingly at first, about the liquor and the low, sultry gazes of the men. All the while he lay with his hard cock inside me and his weight crushing me. As my body got used to him, he pulled out slow and thrust back in. The depth of his thrusts awakened all the want I'd felt when I entered the room.

But I was crying. Tears ran as I told him how the room swam about me, and how they crushed my wrists and how I'd cum for them. He turned me over then so he could look me in the eyes as he went, and his rough thumb brushed the broken skin on my cheek where the lash bit me. His other hand rubbed my clit and I arched up to meet him.

I left my body as I told him about Ivan who'd licked my cunt and who I'd called by my slain fiance's name and who'd forced himself in me when I fought him. I could see Vladimir from above, his great bulk standing over the girl under him as she lay at the edge of his cot, one side of her face swollen and running with blood and tears, her body soft and pliant at his touch. I willed myself back down, back into myself, as he kissed me. I still couldn't cum like this, not with his sharp eyes visible to me. But I knew what would do.

I pulled him close and whispered in his ear. "Fuck me in the ass. Take me there too, so that they were not the last to have it."

His dick hardened in me. Vladimir pulled out. He hadn't sodomized me, not yet. Now I was giving him willingly what had only been taken by violence or treachery. I turned mostly onto my side, pulled one leg up towards my chest.

Vladimir's cock was slick with my arousal, but it would take more than that to make it painless. I spat in one hand, slid it over my anus. I'd never touched myself there before, not when I had to masturbate to dispel the nightmares. At the brush of my own skin I felt electric.

He turned my head up and kissed me as I reached down and guided his tip against my asshole. His forehead pressed against mine, his eyes huge with want. He pushed against me. I breathed slow and looked up at him.

When his tip passed inside of me I gasped and let go of the shaft, wrapped my hand around his arm, then slid it to his face. I turned to kiss him and he searched my mouth with his tongue. His cock inside me hurt, of course it hurt, but it was a deep ache, almost nostalgic.

He thrust further, and I broke the kiss and closed my eyes. The intensity of sensation made me turn from him. I gripped the blankets in my hands, buried my head away from him. I felt his momentum stop, all of him inside me now. It was a vast feeling, hard and strange and so much better than being forced. I could feel my body trembling in shock that I enjoyed what was happening to me.

Then his fingertips caressed my pussy lips; brushed my clit; worked inside of me. He withdrew his penis slowly, and as he did I the emptiness returned. At the same time, he slid two fingers into my cunt up to the knuckles.

"Fuck me," I said. "With all you have."

He slid back into me. "You're so tight, Natasha."

"Slow first," I said. "I will open for you."

He fucked me with a rhythm, the fingers in my cunt moving with the cock in my ass, and his other hand balled in my hair, keeping me still beneath him. It was slower sex, not the desperate destruction of rape, or even the hurried unity of bodies I'd had with him on rare nights when I could tolerate a man's touch.

Gradually he sped up as I loosened, and I begged him for more.

When I came, at last, the pain had gone from my ass, and the thrill of his fingers inside me made me call out. This time it was his name. I shook hard under him, squeezing my eyes tight and begging him to fuck me.

"Cum in me, Volodya."

He gave into himself then, all restraint disappearing, his fingers pushed deeper inside me, a third joining the two already in my cunt, his thrusts fast and hard now. I reached back, pulling his face down towards me, searching for his mouth, gasping, whining even with the last throes of my orgasm. He buried himself in my as with one final, desperate thrust, and came then.

We lay together for a while afterwards, his cock still hard in my ass, before he slid it loose and cleaned himself. He sat naked on the cot. I lay, satisfied with an encounter for the first time in my life.

"Natasha," he said. "If he lets another man touch you, I'll kill him."

I nodded. But I knew it was beyond his power.

A Perfect Blue

In February, Dirlewanger came from Poland. Other SS units vied with his for cruelty.

No longer did we find villages emptied by fear, looted haphazardly.

We found burned churches packed full of human bodies, the bones still smoking and stinking, cracked by heat, half-charred forms lying in the snow about, shot as they'd tried to escape. We found children butchered with bayonets after unspeakable violations. The Germans were not content to shoot our prisoners anymore, but resorted to medieval barbarism, flaying, castration, hanging men from frozen trees, or stripping them naked and forcing them to stand in the aching cold until they dropped.

This was not war.

War bears the recognizable aspects of cruelty: rape, theft, shellfire and machine guns, even the occasional massacre of prisoners. What the Germans did on Soviet soil, what they did in Poland and along the Baltic Littoral, in Greece and Yugoslavia, in the Ghettos and the KZs, was the flagrant, unadulterated expression of the death drive.

There was nothing human in these gray-green termites. They'd become the cutting edge of a vast machine powered by oil and coal, wheat and tinned pork, whose labor was not the construction of a society, but the negation of all humanity, beginning with the Jews of Europe and the Soviet peoples.

Against this was measured the frenzied labor of our Soviet working class, joined now by the American worker, the Chinese peasant, the French intellectual and the British Imperialist. So far we'd been measured, yes, and found wanting.

Mene. Mene. Tekkel. Upharsin.

I saw men die. I killed a carload of collaborators with a grenade through the windscreen. In a firefight, Ivan was shot through the skull and half of Vladimir's group slaughtered. Lev put a knife through the breast of a Byelorussian traitor.

But such flashes of flame and flows of blood were the exception. Most of what we did was to march and work in bitter cold, to talk to peasants, to nod on the watchline and fight sleep. It might've been a month, it might've been a thousand years.

Cold red dawns and unfeeling blue twilights, the pale sun in the weak sky, the driven snow. Hoar frost in my hair. Numb limbs, empty bellies, frozen feet, eyes streaming in the cold. Cold so great it froze the grease on rifle bolts. Cold so vast you could not imagine the touch of another's skin. Cold like the grave and cold like a fever. A desperate struggle to append more cloth, more fur to one's kit, to cover the last square millimeters of skin. How did we last?

Kasha and rotten potatoes. The frozen flesh of German horses. Pine needles boiled to tea against scurvy. And through it all a low, burning hate. That hate was the damped coals of human freedom, the pilot light of liberty. It keeps you warmer than any calorie or coat. Those who let it go out were themselves extinguished.

In villages or good camps, I had sex with Vladimir again. And I submitted to Heinrich twice in this period, though I forced my mind out of my body.

In late February we helped open the Vitebsk gate. In poured guns and ammunition, printworks and men. No longer would we have to depend on crossing half-guarded sections of the line. Then the order came from Moscow in March by radio: prepare to sabotage German buildups for the spring offensive before Moscow.

And for Heinrich, a mission. Minsk.

I went with him. Vladimir and Kiril both knew, but to the rest of the men, we were out on long term reconnaissance.

The city was in half-ruin. Unburied bodies still lay in the snow in the outer neighborhoods, whether felled by shot or hunger none could say.

Class conflict raged, with gun battles between the partisans in the proletarian neighborhoods against the nationalists and their German protectors. The Germans kept the city center under their iron heel and kept their belt of terror tight around the ghetto, where 100,000 Jews were imprisoned.

Heinrich's cover, for the Abwehr, was that he was an inspector for a Baltic firm looking to build a factory in Byelorus. I was to play his secretary and Byelorussian translator. This would give us time. To the NKVD we were in Minsk to turnover our chickenfeed and find what we could, whether from the Abwehr themselves or the drop sites for written intelligence that still survived, or from surveys conducted independently.

The Germans had set up clubs, restaurants and hotels for themselves in the heart of the city so they could play like they were in Berlin or Hamburg, or any of those other, civilized places, and not starving, horrible Minsk.

The clothing I wore for cover, a dress, stockings, a proper jacket and scarf, real boots, a lined coat, were the finest garments I'd ever worn. Even in peacetime I'd had nothing like these. There was a name on the tag in the back of the coat: Lena Kikoina. Had she been shot? Had they merely stolen this? Was she taken to Germany to work as a slave? Had she fled and left this?

Heinrich's Abwehr handler was a Colonel in the military administration tasked, in part, with the logistics of the grain requisition and the maintenance of military rail. For cover, Heinrich would need his approval for the use of some rail facilities. But before we met him we toured a couple of facilities to speak with industrial managers about the labor situation.

The first was a ruined tractor factory. The second was a textile mill.

The mill was just outside the ghetto, along a spur rail line that ran out south of the city, towards the Ukraine. The girls who worked there were on lease from the ghetto. They worked the spindles and looms with deft ease, ducking and shuffling, keeping the threads tense and the machines greased and the fiber spinning. It was a dance I knew well from my days in the printworks by the University.

Later, I learned, the Germans had laid waste to my printworks with 15 centimeter shells when the workers and the shattered remnants of several Red Army companies turned the plant into a fortress.

The mill girls were thin, they were starving, with yellow stars sewn to the breasts of jackets that, in another life had fit snug, but hung now loose and flapped in the breeze, like the clothing on a scarecrow in an autumn storm.

I watched them work, all these Jewish girls, and watched too as their produce was loaded by Byelorusian workmen onto flat cars, bundles of trousers in Feldgrau, thousands of them. The freight cars were pulled by a locomotive, and as it left I caught one of the girls watching it go through the window of the factory mess.

"Smolensk?" I asked her. She shook her head.

"Kiev." Then she looked away from me, anger rising in her cheeks, and picked at the weevils infesting the heel of bread given her for the meal at shift's start.

Not Moscow, then. But where and why?

We met Heinrich's handler in one of the low-ceilinged restaurants downtown.

Waiters served us pork in a dark sauce, potatoes with leeks and garlic, wine, vegetables, good brown bread with fatty butter, plates of candied fruit and smoked sausage. It was how Kings ate.