Yaremche
The Inn Cellar
Which wine went with which dish was far from Captain Salid’s mind. He yearned to return, if not to that very interesting wine cellar and whatever treasures it might still contain, then to a treasured volume in the original French, Varietals of the Loire River Valley, compiled in 1833. To know the present and expect the future, you had to know the past. But there was other business to attend to.
“Look, friend,” he said in good Russian to the man on the table, “this is getting us nowhere. We both know how it must end. It’s only a question of the journey to that spot. You would do the same to me were our positions reversed, so there’s no morality here, really. It’s war, that’s all, and duty. So why not make it easy on yourself?”
And me, he thought.
He finished his cigarette and stubbed it. The cellar of the inn made a rather poor torture chamber, but one did what one must. One adapted. It was the soldier’s way. As he saw it, he was not cruel, he was practical. Certain goals had to be achieved.
“Don’t bore me with the lost-peasant routine. Peasants don’t wander about, not in time of war. They understand the danger. You’d only be out and about on a mission, a job, and I think I know what that is. So please, tell me, and it’ll go so much easier on you.”
The man was spread-eagled, secured by ropes. He was largely naked, except for a crude wrap that provided modesty. How much longer would it last? His nose was crushed, his teeth smashed in, both eyes swamped in puffed-out, blood-filled tissue and crusted scab. Blood ran from a dozen or so slashes and contusions randomly placed on his limbs. His body was a festival of bruising, hemorrhaging, cuts and, worst of all, the angry red blossoms where they’d laid the torch against him. Fire was man’s most primitive fear, his most painful prosecutor, his cruelest adversary, and Salid had no compunctions about using it against his enemies.
“Let’s go over this one more time. We picked you up scurrying uphill, into the mountains, with three loaves of bread, a bunch of carrots, three potatoes, and a large piece of salted beef. Someone here in the village gave you the food. That we know. I’ll tell you what, I don’t even care. That’s fine. Petty heroism by some other peasant fool, no need to get all indignant about it. I don’t care, Himmler doesn’t care, nobody cares. That’s your victory, all right? You protected your allies, you gave no one to the hated Police Battalion torturer in the silly red hat, you are heroic and a tribute to the ideal of the new Stalinist Man. I’d kiss you for your bravery if I had the time.
“But you’re a bandit. Of course, what else can you be? You were getting food for other bandits hidden in the mountains, survivors of the gun battle some days ago. Possibly one of these survivors is a woman bandit known to be a sharpshooter. One of your missions surely was to abscond with a rifle so she can complete her mission. Now you mean to return, which means you know where they are. So this is all I ask. Tell us. Lead us. Turn them over to us. Do that, and I’ll let you survive. We’ll cut you free, get you medical aid, your people will be here in a few weeks, days maybe, you’ll go into a refugee center hospital and all the villagers will say, He did not give us up. He was a hero, that one. You’ll get some kind of red banner and, when all this is over, go back to your village with a chestful of medals and scars, a hero in the Great Patriotic War. Every June twenty-second, you’ll wear your medals to remind people of your bravery in the partisan war against Hitler.”
The man said nothing. He stared grimly at the low ceiling in the room. His consciousness fluttered in and out and waves of pain came and went, each seemingly more intense than the one before. He was not a heroic man, and his horizons had been limited by his education, of which he had none; his culture, which demanded total obedience; and his workplace, which was the earth and demanded only sixteen hours a day in toil to nurse a living from, assuming the Stalinists did not take too much grain that year. There was only one metric by which he could be considered “free”: he would not talk.
“I think it’s the fire that gets you the most,” Salid said. “Peasants fear fire. It can wipe out a crop, burn down a hut, scatter the cattle, alert the Cossacks, and in a single night everything is lost. So the fear of fire is deep in you. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time having you beaten. That was foolish on my part. You can beat a Jew, he has no resistance to pain, a little of it lights off his imagination, and soon enough he’s selling out his family, his parents, his rabbi, his children. Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of it. But your life is so harsh that pain means nothing. We could beat on you until we were exhausted and then you’d ask, What’s for dessert? Foolishly, I wasted time and effort from my fine Serbian colleagues here.”