hat picture did the words "General Headquarters" conjure up in the mind of a driver sitting numbly in his seat, peering dully at the road ahead, blinking his red eyelids and trying periodically -- with the doggedness of a man who has not slept for a long time -- to drag the cigarette butt glued to his lip back to life? Probably in the very words he heard and imagined something high and enduring, soaring above the Moscow rooftops like a fairy-tale turret, while at its foot would sprawl the long-anticipated car park, a courtyard surrounded by a wall and covered with vehicles like the court of an old coach inn that he had once read something about. Somebody would constantly be arriving or taking their leave, and the endless chit-chat between the drivers would be well up to the level of that which their bosses the generals would be exchanging in quiet, dimly lit chambers behind heavy blinds on the eighth floor. To venture in imagination higher than the eighth floor was beyond the reach of Driver Sirotin, his own life having been lived hitherto at ground (and only) floor level, but neither would he have the brass located any lower. They must surely be allowed a view of a good half of Moscow from their windows.


How cruelly disappointed Sirotin would have been to learn that General Headquarters was buried away deep underground at Kirovskaya metro station, that mere plywood partitions divided off its cramped offices, while its buffets and cloakrooms were tucked away in railway carriages. It would have seemed reprehensible, meaning as it did that it was deeper underground than Hitler's bunker. It would have been quite wrong for our Soviet Headquarters to be thus tucked away because the German HQ was justly derided precisely for being in a bunker. In any case, how could a bunker inspire the same trepidation with which our generals would proceed into the entrance hall, their knees half giving way beneath them?


It was there, at the foot of the turret where he would have positioned himself and his jeep, that Sirotin anticipated discovering what fate now held in store for him, perhaps again melding his destiny with that of his general, or just as possibly decreeing it a separate course. If he kept his ears open he might well pick up some useful intelligence from the other drivers, just as he had picked up on this journey ahead of time from a colleague in Headquarters' motor transport division. Settling down for a lengthy smoking session while they waited for a conference to end, they had first talked of abstract matters. Sirotin recalled expressing the view that if you were to mount the engine from an eight-seater Dodge in a jeep, you would get a great little buggy you couldn't wish to improve. His colleague had not denied this but observed that the engine of a Dodge was on the large side and might well not fit under the hood of a jeep. You would have to make a special panel to cover it, and they then jointly concluded that things were best left as they were. From here the conversation moved on to changes in general and whether they were all that good a thing. Here too his colleague pronounced himself a believer in tradition, in which connection he hinted that they in the Army could expect some changes too, literally in the next few days, and the only question was whether they would be for the better or for the worse. What precisely these changes might be his colleague did not let slip, saying only that a final decision had yet to be taken, but from the way he lowered his voice you could gather that the decision when it came would issue not even from Front Headquarters but from a higher level, perhaps indeed from such a height as the two of them were never destined to see. "Although," his colleague suddenly said, "you just might. If you get to Moscow, tell the old girl hello from me." To register astonishment at the idea that he could possibly find himself in Moscow in the middle of the present push would not have been commensurate with Sirotin's status as the Commander-in-Chief's driver. He just nodded, while secretly resolving that his colleague couldn't have any hard information, had heard some distant echo, and might indeed have been the origin of it himself. But it had proved to be no echo, and he was really and truly being ordered to Moscow! Being a prudent sort, Sirotin had already started making preparations on the off chance. He fitted





new tires, "Mother's own," American tires which he had been keeping until they would drive into Europe, and welded on a bracket for an extra fuel canister, handy on a long journey. He even pulled on the tarpaulin they usually left behind whatever the weather because the General disliked it: "It's as muggy as a dog kennel under that thing," he said, "and it hampers dispersal," that is, jumping out over the sides on the double if you came under fire or were being bombed. So, all in all, it was not that great a surprise when the General suddenly ordered, "Harness her up, Sirotin. Let's have a bite to eat and then we're off to Moscow!"





Sirotin had never once seen Moscow, and was both delighted at having his long-held, indeed pre-war ambition realized, and at the same time apprehensive for his General abruptly recalled to HQ -- to say nothing of himself. Who else might he end up driving, and might he not do better to ask to transfer to driving a one-and-half-ton truck, where you got less hassle, and there was also a slightly better chance of staying alive in an enclosed cabin which would keep out at least some of the shrapnel. He also had a strange sense of relief and even of a kind of deliverance which he did not care to admit even to himself.


He was not the General's first. Two earlier drivers had come to a bad end if you counted from Voronezh, and that, after all, was where the Army's history began. Before that, in Sirotin's opinion, there had been no Army and no history, just sheer wretched chaos. So then, since Voronezh, the General himself had not suffered a scratch but two jeeps had, as they said in the Army, been shot from under him, on both occasions along with their drivers, and one time also with his aide. A persistent legend had grown up that the General had a charmed life, and confirmation of this was seen in the deaths of those who had been right next to him, literally a couple of paces away. Admittedly, a more detailed account revealed a slightly different picture: the jeeps had not exactly been shot from under him. The first time his vehicle had suffered a direct hit from a long-distance high explosive shell. The General was not actually in the jeep when it happened, having been held up for a minute at the divisional command post. He emerged to find everything a shambles. And the second time, when the vehicle was wrecked by an anti-tank mine, he had just got out to walk along the road and check how satisfactorily the self-propelled artillery was camouflaged before an attack. He ordered the driver to move away out of the open, and the idiot went and drove off into a grove of trees. The road had been cleared of mines but the sappers had left the grove as no traffic was projected to pass through it ... What difference did it make, Sirotin wondered, whether the General was too early or too late to


get himself blown up: that was all part of the charm. The trouble was, it did not extend to those accompanying him, it only took their common sense away. When you thought about it, his invulnerability had been the cause of their deaths. The experts had already worked out that almost 10 tons of metal went into killing a single soldier in this war. Sirotin did not need them or their calculations to know how difficult it is to kill a man at the front. You had only to last out three months or so to know not to listen to the shrapnel or bullets, but to listen to yourself, to that inexplicable chill which warned you, and the more inexplicable it was the more you could rely on it, to get the hell out of somewhere. It might root you out of the world's safest dugout with seven layers of logs in its roofing, and send you instead to some totally useless ditch to shelter behind an insignificant clump of grass, and the dugout would promptly be reduced to a log pile, while the tuft of grass protected you from harm. He knew that this crucial survival mechanism lost its edge if not constantly used, if you were away from the front line for as little as a week, but while this General of his was not obsessive about being at the front, he certainly had no aversion to it. Sirotin's predecessors could not have got that unused to it. So it must have been their own silly faults. They had not listened to themselves.


As far as the mine incident was concerned, you didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was against regulations and against common sense. Could he imagine himself driving off the road into a grove of birch trees for cover? He could not, even if every shrub had a notice stuck in front of it proclaiming: "Checked for Mines: Clear." There might well be none for the guy who had checked the area out, he would be well out of harm's way by now; but you could bet your bottom dollar that in his haste he had left just one little anti-tank mine specially for you. But supposing he had swept the grove from end to end with his belly button, everyone knew that once a year even an unloaded rifle goes off.


The shell took more explaining. Choosing to argue with a mine was something you did yourself, but a shell chose you. Some unknown hand traced its trajectory beneath the heavens, corrected a slight error with a rippling of the breeze, deflecting it two or three thousandths to the right or to the left, and all in just a few seconds. How were you to sense that your one and only, the one chosen for you by destiny herself, had already left the barrel and was rushing toward you, whistling, droning, except that you heard nothing while other men needlessly ducked their heads. But why would you have stayed in the open when something held the General up at that command post? It was that same inexplicable sixth sense that would have made you stay, that was what had to be recognized.


In these musings Sirotin was invariably conscious of his superiority over his two predecessors, but who was to say that this was any more than the eternal dubious sense of superiority of the man who is still alive over the man who is dead. That did occur to him, too. The trouble was that it was something you were not allowed to feel. It could disorientate you even more, driving away that saving chill. The science of survival demanded that you be always humble and never weary of begging to be spared and then, maybe, you might be all right. The main thing, however, that the chill whispered constantly to him was that he would not see out the war with this General. Why not? If you could have put a name to the reasons there would, of course, be nothing inexplicable about it ... Somewhere, sometime it would happen, there were no two ways about that. It was always at the back of his mind, and was why he was so often morose and depressed. Only a very experienced eye would have seen behind his bravado, behind the extravagantly dashing, gallant appearance, to that concealed presentiment. Somewhere the rope must have an end, he told himself. It had been winding round and round for a long time now; he had been too lucky, and how he longed to be let off with just a wound, and after his hospitalization to start afresh with a different general who did not have such a powerful charm protecting him.


These were basically the misgivings, there was nothing else, that Driver Sirotin imparted to Major Svetlookov from the army counterintelligence unit when the latter called him in for a talk or, as he preferred to put it, "for a bit of a gossip about one or two things." "Only, you know what?" he said to Sirotin. "You can't have a proper talk with anyone in the unit. Somebody's bound to come charging in with some crap. Let's see if we can't find a better spot. But in the meantime, not a word to anyone, because you never can tell, eh?"





Their meeting took place in a small wood not far from headquarters. They met there at the edge of the trees. Major Svetlookov sat himself down on a fallen pine tree and took his peaked cap off, turned his stern, bulging forehead with the red line left by the capband towards the autumn sun, and seemed thereby to neutralize his superior rank, disposing one to honest and open conversation. For all that, he motioned to Sirotin to sit down on a lower level than himself, on the grass.


"Come on then," he said. "Tell me all about what's on your mind, and why our soldier boy is sad at heart? I can see something's bugging you, not much gets past me ..."


It was not wise for Sirotin to be talking about things which the science of survival bade you keep silent about, but Major Svetlookov immediately saw his problem and was sympathetic.


"Never mind, never mind," he said without a trace of irony, vigorously tossing his flaxen locks as far back as he could. "We quite understand all this mysticism. We are all superstitious, not just you, the Commander-in-Chief is too. And I can tell you a secret, his life is not all that charmed. He does not care to remember it and does not wear the badges he was awarded for being wounded, but he was, as the result of his own stupidity, in '41, near Solnechnogorsk. He earned himself eight bullets in the stomach. You didn't know? His orderly didn't tell you? He was there when it happened. And there was I thinking you had no secrets from each other. Ah well, I expect Fotii Ivanovich ordered him to keep it quiet. So we'll keep quiet about it too, eh? Here, listen," he suddenly glanced down at Sirotin with a merry but piercing gaze. "I don't suppose you are, you know, holding out on me? Keeping back the one thing that really matters about Fotii Ivanovich?"


"What would I have to keep back?"


"You haven't noticed him behaving strangely lately? I should mention that one or two people have. But you haven't, nothing at all?"


Sirotin shrugged, which could equally well have meant that he had not noticed anything, or that he did not see it was a matter for the likes of him. He had, however, detected a danger, as yet unclear, which threatened the General, and his first impulse was to distance himself if only for a moment in order to understand what threat there might be to himself. Major Svetlookov was peering straight at him, and it was not easy to meet the gaze of those piercing blue eyes. He had evidently figured out what was behind Sirotin's confusion, and this gaze was to put him back in his place as a member of the entourage of the Commander-in-Chief, which was the place of a devoted servant who trusted his chief implicitly.


"Don't tell me about sundry doubts or suspicions or miscellaneous other nonsense," the Major said firmly. "I only want facts. If there are facts, it is your duty to alert me to them. The Commander is an important man. He has done a lot of good things, he is valuable, and that puts us under an even greater obligation to do our utmost to support him if he has stumbled in some respect. Perhaps he is tired. Perhaps right now he needs special care and attention. He is not going to ask us for it himself, is he, and we might not notice, we might miss an opportunity, and then we would kick ourselves afterwards. It is, after all, our job to look after every man in the Army, and as for the Commander, well, it's obvious, isn't it?" Who precisely this "we" was who had to look after every man in the Army, he and the Major or the whole of the Army's counter-intelligence, in whose eyes the General had evidently somehow "stumbled," Sirotin did not know and, for some reason, did not feel he could ask. Their talk was ever more obviously drawing him in a particular direction, towards something mightily unpleasant, and the thought vaguely occurred to him that he had already taken a small step towards treachery in having agreed to come here to "gossip."


From the depths of the forest there came the damp freshness of the breeze that preceded evening, and into it a cloying, sickly stench insinuated itself. That wretched burial detail, Sirotin thought. They collected our own dead but had not bothered to pick up the Germans. It would have to be reported to the General, he would teach them not to fall down on the job. They hadn't felt like picking the corpses up while they were fresh, so they could hold their noses and get on with it now.


"Tell me one thing, though," Major Svetlookov said. "What do you think his attitude is toward death?"


Sirotin looked up at him in astonishment.


"Same as the rest of us, I suppose."


"You do not know," the Major said severely. "The reason I ask is that just now the protection of our command personnel is very high on the agenda. There has been a special, classified, directive from HQ, and the Supreme Commander has stressed on more than one occasion that commanding officers are not to put themselves at risk. Thank God, this is not 1941, we have worked out how to force a river crossing, and recognize there is no reason for the Commander-in-Chief to be there in person. What was the point of him making the crossing along with everybody else under fire? Perhaps he was deliberately placing himself at risk? From desperation of some kind, from fear of failing to cope with the operation? Or maybe, you know, he might have gone a bit odd. Who's to say. To some extent it would be understandable, this is after all a very complex operation ..."


It might not have seemed to Sirotin that the operation was actually that much more complicated than any other and it seemed to be going perfectly smoothly, however those up there at the great height from which Major Svetlookov had condescended to him might well have considerations of their own.


"A one-time incident perhaps," the Major was meanwhile wondering aloud. "No, there is a pattern behind it all. When the Commander-in-Chief of the Army moves his command post ahead of the divisional posts, what option does the divisional commander have? He moves even closer to the Germans; and the regimental commander has to move in right under their noses. Are we trying to show off to each other how brave we are? Or supposing you are moving up to the front line without an escort, not using an armored car, without even taking a radio operator with you. You're asking to be ambushed, or you might be trying to cross over into German lines. How are we to establish afterwards that there was no treachery going on, and that it was all just a mistake? We have to foresee these possibilities, and head them off. And that means you and I first and foremost."


"What can I do about it all?" Sirotin asked with some relief. The subject of their talk had finally become clear to him and was close to his own anxieties. "It's not up to a driver what route he chooses."


"It certainly isn't for you to give instructions to the Commander-in-Chief! But it is within your competence to know in advance where you're making for, isn't it? Fotii Ivanovich does say to you, doesn't he, 'Harness her up, Sirotin, we're stopping off at the 108th?' Doesn't he?"


Sirotin was properly impressed by such knowledgeability, but objected,


"Not always. Sometimes he gets in first and then tells me where we are going."


"Quite true, but you don't just have one destination in the course of a day, you inspect three or four positions: half an hour in one then, maybe, a good two hours somewhere else. There's nothing to stop you asking him whether you are going to be there long and where you are going next, as if you want to be sure you are going to have enough gas. And there's your opportunity to ring through." "Ring through where?"


"To me, of course. We'll exercise general oversight, and contact the position that you are heading for at any particular time so they can send someone out to meet you. Of course, I realize there are times when the Commander-in- Chief wants just to turn up unannounced, to catch everyone with their pants down. One thing does not need to get in the way of the other. We have our own job to do. The divisional commander will not know when Fotii Ivanovich is going to show up, but we will."


"I thought," Sirotin said, smiling uneasily, "that your job was catching spies."


"Our job takes in everything," the Major said. "The main thing is that we should always know what is happening and that the Commander should never be left without our protection. Will you promise me that?"


Sirotin furrowed his brow, stalling for time. There seemed nothing wrong if every time, no matter where he and the General were heading, Major Svetlookov should be in the know, but he didn't at all like the idea that he would be having to report behind the General's back. Sirotin asked straight out:


"What, do you mean, keep it secret from Fotii Ivanovich?"


"Uh-huh," the Major mocked him. "You don't like idea, but the whole point is to keep it secret. Why trouble the Commander with it?"


"I don't know," Sirotin said. "It doesn't seem right, somehow."


Major Svetlookov heaved a long sad sigh.


"And I don't know either, but I do know that's how it has to be. So there we are. There used to be political commissars in the army and it was all so simple. What I have been trying to get out of you for an hour already the commissar would have promised me without a second thought. Nobody would have found it strange in the least. The commissar and counterintelligence worked hand in glove. Now military commanders are trusted more, and it has become infinitely more difficult to do our job. You can't just drop in on a member of the Military Soviet. He is a general too, and values that more than being a commissar. You're not going to get him to waste his time with this sort of nonsense. But we lesser mortals have to get on with it and work away on the quiet. Yes, our Supreme Commander has made life difficult for us, but he has not let us off doing our duty."





The sadness and concern in the Major's voice and his openness and also the burdensomeness of the task imposed by none other than the Supreme Commander all came together to leave Sirotin feeling he did not have a leg to stand on.


"Yes but, phoning through, you know ... The signaller's line is nearly always busy, and when it is free he's not just going to let you use it. And you have to tell him where you are phoning to, and before you know it, it will get back to Fotii Ivanovich. No, it's ..."


"What do you mean, 'No'?" Major Svetlookov thrust his face towards him, instantly amused at such naivety on Sirotin's part. "What a funny fellow you are! Are you really going to go and say, 'Please put me through to Major Svetlookov in Smersh?' That really would land us in the soup. The simplest way is to play the lovesick soldier phoning his lady. That line works every time. Do you know Kalmykova in the military police? The senior typist?"


Sirotin had a vague recollection of a bosomy, flabby and, in his 26-year-old eyes, ancient old bag with an unrelenting bossy expression and thin, pursed lips yelling authoritatively at the two girls junior to her.


"What, not your type?" The Major smiled, a blush rapidly suffusing his cheeks. "She has her admirers, you know. They even say she's dynamite in the sack. Let's face it, love is blind. In any case we are not running a convent. When we do move into Europe, this year or next, they have monasteries there specially for women. More precisely, for virgins, being as how these lady monks, 'Carmelites' they are called, give a vow to stay virgins till the day they die. Think of the sacrifice! So their purity is guaranteed. Choose whichever one you fancy, you can't go wrong."


The austere Carmelites somehow got associated in Sirotin's mind with caramels, and seemed very enticing and sexy indeed. For all that he just couldn't see himself making a pass at Flabby Breasts, or even chatting her up over the telephone.


"Sehr gut", the Major conceded. "Let's think of an alternative. How do you fancy Zoechka? Not that one that works for the military police, the one who's a telephone operator at headquarters. With the curls."


Now those ash-blond curls spiralling down from her forage cap on to the curve of her little porcelain forehead, the surprised look in her little eyes that sparkled so brightly, the neatly taken-in tunic with a single button undone (never two, which might have got her into trouble), the little custom-made chrome leather boots, and the thin, long, manicured fingers, that was all much closer to his heart.


"Zoechka," Sirotin repeated dubiously. "I thought she was going with that guy from operations section, practically married to him."


"That 'practically' has just one secret obstacle, a lawfully wedded wife in Barnaul who is already bombarding the political section with letters. And two dearly beloved offspring. We shall have to do something about that. So ... You wouldn't turn up your nose at Zoechka? I suggest you get stuck in straight away. Roll along to see her, start building bridges -- and then phone from wherever you can. You think the signaller isn't going to connect you, the driver of the Commander-in-Chief? All right. You just don't need to be a shrinking violet, remember your status in the Army. Just give Zoechka the old 'How I miss you, long to kiss you' routine, and then, in passing, drop in something along the lines of, 'I've got to go now, sweetheart. Ring you again within the hour from Ivanovo.' There's a lot of loose talk goes through signals, one more slip won't make any difference. But we can even get round that, we'll work out a code later, a password for each position. Anything you don't understand?"


"No, but somehow ..."


"What do you mean, 'No, but somehow ...' Eh?" The Major was suddenly irate. Somehow it did not seem in the least surprising to Sirotin that the Major already had the right to get angry with him for being slow and cut him down to size. "Do you think I'm doing all this for my own benefit? I'm doing it to safeguard the life of the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Army! And yours, incidentally, also. Or are you seeking death too?"


He heatedly slashed at his boot with a stick that whistled as he brought it down. God knows where that had come from. The sound it made was nothing, but for some reason Sirotin cringed inwardly and got a sinking feeling in his belly, the same dismal, anguished feeling produced by the whistling of a shell after it has left the barrel of an artillery piece and splashes down into marshy ground. The sounds are all the more significant and terrifying precisely because the roar of splintering steel and the splash as a fountain of brackish water rises in the air and the rending of branches severed by shrapnel are by now no longer any threat to you. You have been missed again.


This meticulous, limpet-like Major Svetlookov who could see everything, had recognized what was bugging Sirotin and making his life a misery, but he had also intuited something more important, and that was that there really was something up with the General too, something dangerous and leading ineluctably to his destruction and the destruction of those around him. When he had stood up full height during the river crossing in his conspicuous leather jacket so picturesquely exposing himself to the bullets coming from the right bank and from the swooping Fokker aircraft, it was not bravado or "setting a personal example of bravery," but that same mysterious thing which Sirotin was sure he had seen from time to time afflicting certain other men: He was seeking death. Sirotin wanted in every way possible to help this concerned, omnipotent Major, to give him as much detail as he could about the oddities of the General's behavior in order that he should be able to build them into whatever calculations these were that he was working on.


Translated by Arch Tait.





A longer version of this excerpt will be published in an upcoming issue of Glas: New Russian Writing, a literary quarterly in English. Old copies of Glas, with excerpts from novels by Booker prize finalists and winners from previous years, can also be obtained. Contact Natalya Perova at 441-9157 or P.0. Box 47, Moscow 119517, or Password Books Ltd, 23 New mount Street, Manchester M4 4DE, UK. Individual copies of Glas can be bought for $12.