Partisan Years Pt. 07

"Will you fuck me?"

He nodded. Kissed me harder. I unwrapped my legs from him and led him away towards the wood.

Lev loved girls. Not the way that Vladimir loved them: for their sex and the ease with which he could wield power over them. Not the way Heinrich loved them: as objects of violence and recipients of cruelty, but as a man, as a human, is capable of loving another as his equal.

But he was not gentle. I didn't want him gentle. I communicated this to him with my body, pushing against him, and with my hands, when I took his hand in mine and set it on my throat.

He slid a finger into me. I'd been hurt so many times that this too, ached. But I pushed my cunt towards him, offering it to him, and whimpered with desire. When he slid a second finger inside me, I shuddered in pleasure.

"Is it?" he said.

"Delicious," I said.

But I was not ready to cum by his hand. I broke the kiss, unbuckled his belt. I kneeled on the pine needles on the forest food and drew his cock from his trousers. He had a weight to him, a width that made him seem so virile.

I felt alive when I took him in my mouth. The heat of him, the taste of his skin, his sweat, his want, it all made me dizzy. He ran his hands through my hair as I fought my reflexes and took him deeper. My hair, I thought, as his cock reached the back of my throat, had I washed it? Was I clean? These long weeks had I done anything to keep from physical ruin?

Warmth spread, as if from him, through my throat and into my body, down, down, to the parts of me which had lain inert these last weeks, those pieces of flesh and skin which are capable of turning the desires of the heart into a real, physical thing. I opened my shirt for him, then with my free hand I idly toyed at my clit until I dripped for him

I looked up at him, at those eyes with their fire and longing and their sorrow layered as deep as the snow at winter's height. I kept that contact as I sucked him off, even as my jaw grew weary.

His ardor for me reached its limit. He wrapped his hands in my hair and pressed his hips towards me and I felt the first burst of his cum down my throat, then the second in my mouth as he withdrew from me, the remainder he shot onto my face and chest. Then he bent to me, kissed me, his cum still on my tongue and lips, with all the hunger of a starving man.

He gripped my free hand, pulled it to his lips as he broke the kiss, sucked my fingers for my arousal. Then it was his turn. I lay back on the blanket of pine and he slid one finger into me and brushed my clit with his tongue. I brought his free hand up to my throat and he squeezed my neck.

I could barely contain myself. Within two minutes, the tension in my back and hips and thighs was unbearable, and I thrashed with orgasm, gasping as his hand kept a heavy pressure on my neck.

He did not stop.

He kept licking me, kept working his tongue over my clit and his fingers sliding in and out of me until I came again. It was exhausting, being made to cum so hard in such quick succession, and at the height of the second orgasm, I pulled back from him and curled into a ball.

He sat back, on his knees.

"I want you yet."

"Take me, then," I managed. "Crush me. Fuck me into the dirt."

He set me on my knees and slid his cock, hard once more, into me from behind. I'd been sensitive to his fingers, and the dual orgasms had brought my nerves to a heightened state. But even with such preparation, my cunt remembered the feeling of rape more easily than that of pleasure, and cried out in pain as he pushed inside me. I would not let them stop.

I would let nothing stop him, not the threat of pregnancy, not the passing hurt in my pussy.

Lev pushed inside me and I gasped. I felt his touch deep in myself. I moved, meeting his motion with my hips. It was purely involuntary. Everything moved to the same rhythm, his cock, my body, my breath, his fingers as they brushed my nipples, climbed higher, knotted in my hair, pulled my head back.

The pain drained like snowmelt from the fields, and all that was left was a burning fire. But it was not pain, not rage and humiliation, though I'd had too much already for any pleasure to ever be pure, but ardor, which burns clean, like a fire that leaves no smoke.

I was absorbed in the movement and the sensation of our bodies, the easy harmony and the frustrated want. All those long months, his deep grief, my endless torment, the barriers between us seemed then to be surmountable by flesh. He fucked me hard. I came a third time, it began before his own orgasm, and I collapsed onto my belly, still feeling it, and he pressed me into the ground, crushed me with his body, and ejaculated inside me.

For a moment, the world lay in perfect stillness, and the height of our pleasure lingered as a flashbulb lingers in the eye.

"I am a fool," he said, as he withdrew himself. "I should have pulled out."

"No," I said. "You would aid me, if I needed another curettage. Besides, I am a barren field, at least for the weeks being, I'm sure of it."

"Yes."

"And after the war?"

"Will there be an after?"

"The Fascists will not win."

"Will we?" He asked. That question would haunt me layer. Just because your people do the dying and the killing, just because your wire cutters break open the prison camps and your tanks cross the Oder, and it is your soldiers that free your countrymen who toil in the slave factories in the enemy's heart, and your men raise the flag of liberty over the smoking ruin, does not mean that you have won.

"Yes," I said. And I believed it.

A flash at midnight

A week later, the Germans launched their great blow in the South.

Faithful Alyosha had the write up I'd given him after Minsk, which proved beyond all doubt that Heinrich had discarded evidence suggesting a German attack towards Baku. But for weeks, nothing. Nothing at all. Just the endless drudgery of partisan war: agricultural toil, political organization, intelligence work, the infrequent bursts of gunfire, long marches in hot woods to no discernible purpose.

I slept by Lev's side. But the dreams of my degradation and the pain caused by them made it impossible for me to offer him more than a chaste kiss, save one occasion, when, worn with desire and afire with loneliness, I was able to fuck him.

Our work took on a fevered aspect, as if by herculean efforts here we could halt the enemy before they reached the Caucasus.

Then, on the day the Germans crossed the Don, one of the men told me an old man speaking Yiddish wished to see me.

"For the girl with the Masovka detachment," he said, when I met him in the marshes at the edge of our zone of control.

"I am her."

"On the night of the new moon," he said. "On the civil defense road near," he said, then gave me the name of a small village. "At the bend after the stream. Tell no one."

"What must I do, what must I find?"

He looked up at me, so stooped had he grown with age that I fairly towered over him. His face was unreadable, a mask of sun-lined wrinkles and dark folds, yet gaunt almost beyond belief.

"The one who looks like a priest was right. You are the image of my granddaughter."

"Thank you, sir," I said. "But my grandparents are dead."

"Oh, she is a student in Leningrad," he said. "Or was. Whatever may become of our red cradle."

So Alyosha had called to me.

On the 10th of August, Kiril Denisovich grabbed me from the mess and guided me to the command post. A fair summer eve was on us.

Lev sat in the dugout.

"When you went on loan to the NKVD in the winter," Lev said. "What happened?"

"I can't say," I told him.

He lit a captured cigarette, drew on it. "You're on loan again. Starting tomorrow."

I'd known it would come to this. "With Heinrich?"

He nodded.

"Orders," I said. "Are orders."

"Natasha," he said.

"I won't hear your objection," I said. "For I have had the same thought. And it is not your life that is at stake here, but mine."

"Yakovlevna," Kiril said, breaking his silence. "It's a fool's errand to go. He'll kill you from jealousy."

"If we must die, O let us nobly die."

"There was nothing noble," Kiril said. "In the Yezhovschina, I was a junior man. And I was under one of the butchers. There was a man whose wife he favored. The husband I took in the night, I drove one of those black cars, you know. And we beat him, beat him because he'd been in Spain as an advisor, with a Colonel now out of favor. We wanted him to confess to selling secrets to the Italians."

"Spare me the lecture."

"No, Natalia," he said. "Listen, because men like Heinrich, they're not like anyone else, they don't see that a heart beats in your chest. The butcher, he was a Georgian, made me apply the trade to this man, this good communist. I wish I could tell you I regretted it, but you don't, not in the moment, you just hate the bastard. The regret comes later. The butcher raped the prisoner's wife in front of him to make him confess. He refused. We tried and shot him. The butcher killed the woman, he'd kept her from prison by forcing her to be his concubine. But her heart rebelled against him. And he could not abide less than complete possession of another. He strangled her."

"Then what?"

Kiril shrugged. He was silent for a long moment. Lev offered him the smoking cigarette and he plucked it, took a drag.

"Yezhov fell. I got my turn in a cell. But not a trial. They whipped me, yes, they tortured me, my former comrades. Then they put me right back into my rank. The butcher, I never saw again. I've heard they shot him. It doesn't matter. Heinrich will kill you because he can't have all of you."

"I know," I said. "She knew it too, I'm sure, when the car came for her husband in the night and she saw the butcher's eyes. But she did not run."

He shrugged.

"The world could use a few million more of you, Natalia."

Darkness was falling all round on the path. Heinrich cursed at me.

All day on the 11th he and I had worked to tie up our commitments, to collate chickenfeed for the Abwehr. We set out on the 12th and made eleven miles cross country before nightfall, with our faked papers and Heinrich's German.

As twilight gathered we reached the road that led off between the pine forests, into the undulating country of dacha, stream, meadow, wood, this fairytale land of soft grass and lowing cattle, this nightmare world of mass graves and starving children. A watch before midnight, deep in the darkness, he stopped.

I was dressed, more or less, as a peasant girl and carried no arms.

"The briefing said to bring you unmolested," he said. "But there's no way Colonel Pfrondorf is out in the sticks. We're to meet his adjutant tonight, and you'll be right as rain for him tomorrow, understood."

"What?"

I heard the click of the hammer of his revolver. "Strip."

"Here?" I said. "Now?"

"Well I can't fuck you with the adjutant watching, now can I?"

"No."

"Scream, fight, I'll overpower you, and after the Colonel has had you and after our return I'll put a bullet in your guts and you can lie there dying of sepsis thinking how you should've known better."

I hastened to drop my pack, open my tunic, pull my trousers down.

"Your underwear," he said. "Give them to me."

I obliged, and stood naked in my boots.

"Against the tree."

He put the revolver away and I stood against the pine he indicated.

It all went very fast: his hand at my throat, another at my clit, working it until my cunt warmed for him. Then a thrust inside, bursting pain. My breath came so fast, so fast I couldn't control it.

He thrust into me. The world went to gray and black and I was outside myself. Whirring sensation from his strokes, from the touch of his finger on my clit and the rasp of air in my throat. Oh, I knew this so well, oh I fit so easily into this script.

He didn't fuck me long enough for me to cum. And after he finished inside me he looked at his watch, trying to see what time it was.

"Damn moonless night," he said. "Yours isn't one of those radium ones is it?"

"No," I said.

"Schade. Los geht's. Schnell." He gestured for me to dress. Then he made me jog with him to catch up time. His mood was inscrutable. I felt only burning hate for him and sudden doubt that Alyosha would be there, at the bend where the adjutant was to meet us. The night felt like a dream; my steps seemed to make no distance; pain radiated from the bruised muscles of my cunt, for no amount of fingering could ever ready them for him. My head spun, I felt tears on my cheeks.

For an hour or more we moved at the double quick, only slowing when we passed an abandoned church the summons had noted as a landmark.

A man sat on a stump at the top end of the path's bend, across the stream from us, his peaked cap tilted in the darkness. All along the stream, bushes and undergrowth hid the banks from view, and up the slope, tangled webs of plant growth concealed the earth.

He rose. He struck a match. The flare of its tip was bright as the sun to my parched eyes, in its golden glow I'd hoped to find the face of Faithful Alyosha. But it was the Adjutant of Colonel Pfrondorf. The Adjutant touched the match to a cigarette, drew his breath.

Heinrich waded into the stream, I paused to take my boots off, there's nothing worse than walking all night with wet feet, and in the summer one never knows if the next day will bring the burning sun, or rain and mud.

He turned to look at me. A sprosser sang upstream. Another answered. There was any unearthly power to the songs of these common nightingales.

Heinrich waited midstream, torn for a moment with indecision.

"Fuck the boots," he said. "Let's go."

"Hab keine Angst," the Adjutant said, then in Byelorussian, "It's not far to go, we needn't hurry." His voice broke. Bitter, coursing adrenaline flooded my mouth. "All you need to give is the partisan dispositions. Like you did for May Day."

"Nein, verdammte, Judische Fotze!" Heinrich said. He went for his gun. "Nein!"

Something in the Adjutant's hand clicked, an electric torch. The beam caught Heinrich in its golden arc and his black shadow fell all the way to the bank, to my bare toes on the packed earth where the path met the water. For a heartbeat he stayed there, frozen in panic and defeat.

Two great flashes burst from the bushes before Heinrich. Rifle shots. The noise immense, deafening. His body twisted, nerves still working. Blood in the air, cordite on the wind. Bolts clicked back and shoved forward. He staggered, fell, half in the stream. His hands, those torturous, devilish implements, searched weakly in the soil for purchase.

The Adjutant descended the bank, flicked his Wehrmacht cap off his head, drew his pistol.

"Fuer Thaelmann und Rosa und alle unsere Maertyrertoten." There were tears in his eyes, visible in the glow of his cigarette.

Against the sound of rifles, the report of the pistol was tiny, like a cough compared to thunder, or like a book closing in a dusty room in which nothing has moved in a very long time. I jumped back, landed on my ass. I hadn't started at the rifle shots, but all the import of it struck me now and my legs sang with nervous energy; I tried to stand but my limbs worked at cross purposes.

The Adjutant offered me his hand.

"Comrade," he said. "Your jacket."

I passed it to him and he shot through one side of the collar and through the skirt of it. He shot through the top of my pack as well.

"Foolish of Heinrich to walk right into a German patrol," he said.

"Where's Alyosha."

"Who?"

And I knew. He'd washed his hands.

The Adjutant turned and walked back across the stream and up, into the trees. The gunmen stole out of the bushes and crept downstream. I could see their guns were Mosins, not Mausers. Our men. I put my boots back on.

Then I ran.

Denouement

Bear with me a moment more, even as your passion fades and ardor cools. For I have poured to you my torment, and you must hear how it was that I lived. Because I lived. Oh I lived.

That was the last I was raped in the war.

The Germans pushed on. We fought them. For two long years we battled the occupiers and their death squads, the collaborators and the SS guards.

In that time, I was Lev's woman. He loved me, and I him. We worked to make the revolution in the countryside and to save the Soviet union. Then came Bagration, that great tide of fire and fury, and the avenging angels fell upon the Germans. The grapes of wrath, grown heavy, came to the vintage. The wine we made of them was sweet.

All through it, I worked with Faithful Alyosha, sometimes through his intermediaries, sometimes directly. We built informants, broke local collaborator organizations. All that time, I never saw the Adjutant.

Lev and I joined up with all our men when the Red Army reached us. They didn't keep all the fighters, not forever, but a hard core of us fought on as one platoon in a makeshift rifle regiment. All the way to Berlin.

By April '45, I was pregnant again, not far along. But enough that I told Lev. We knew the war would end and soon.

But the foe had a last trick. Lev was shot and killed in the fighting near Seelow. He fell during a rainstorm as we advanced. It was such a small wound. Such a small thing, the shot that passed through his heart. He was dead within the hour.

I reached Alyosha by signal that evening, for though Alyosha and I had not worked together since Bagration, Major Kiril Denisovich had a way to reach him.

I fought on, onto the end. I was in Wannsee when the garrison in Berlin surrendered, and I can still remember how we cheered. How we wept. And that was nothing to the week hence, when Doenitz gave up the fight. PEACE! PEACE AT LAST!

And I was just a girl again, with a big gun and some old friends in the hot May sun in the ravished ruins of Europe. I'd not let myself feel Lev's death til then. It was towards evening and the sun was that westerly red, the shadows all like burnished copper. Everywhere was stillness, everywhere dust, the warmth and the heavy foliage absorbed the tramping of feet. For we were soldiers, still, and march to orders. On the other side of the road the streams of German prisoners passed, interspersed with much greater columns of freed Soviets and Jews and Yugoslavs and Poles and Greeks and all the wreckage and human ruin of war, all the Germans had stolen from a continent.

I wept.

That night we bivouacked on a ridge looking easterly towards the ruin of Berlin. The setting sun set the burned city in bruised dark.

"Natasha," a soft voice called. It was my savior, my Alyosha, in a commissar's uniform now, not a priest's black or a peasant tunic.

"Brother Alyoshka."

I clasped him to me. Alone among all men he'd never wanted me, not even Kiril Denisovich could say that (I felt his eyes), but Alyosha, my brother, my soul, my comrade.

"How far along?"

"Three months," I said.

"There's a flat in Leningrad," he said. "It will be hard. But you can make it. The girl there is a student, a music student, she is like you. She will help."

"What will I do when it's done?"

He looked out over the ruin of our enemy's capital, where once the red flag had flown proud in defiance of the Black and White and Red, where our first martyrs lay.

"There will be a need for strong women to rebuild the country," he said. "And the alliance will not last. We will have to struggle for a free Germany, for a socialist Europe, to finish the revolution in Greece, in France, in Italy and Yugoslavia. You have a talented tongue, Natasha. And a quick mind."

There was no question: Socialism must triumph, must be made to triumph.

"The child?"

"You can raise it as you can," he said. "And if the work is too dangerous, there will always be that flat in Leningrad. There's a school too, near there, to train for the work you must do and the tongues you shall have to speak."