Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [128]
The eve of the Great Patriotic War found him designing and constructing bulwarks on the Karelian Isthmus for the defense of Leningrad. Natasha moved to Armavir to a war factory, but after a short while communication was cut off between them.
June, 1942
My Beloved Brother, Igor,
The war has kept contact from us for a full year. I have not heard from you in all this time, but I know from friends you are stationed in the same place as where you were assigned after you left the university.
The bearer of this letter, a colleague in the Party, is being transferred to your district and has agreed to try to get this message to you.
My family and I have been evacuated into the interior. We are settled, and now to the task of organizing food production. We are faring quite well.
I have terribly bad news. Natasha is dead. She was among the defenders of Armavir. Many survivors are now in my area so the accounts of her death are authentic. I fear to say the entire business is most distressing. She was wounded and captured by the Nazis, abused, and done away with in a most brutal manner.
My deepest pity is for you at this moment of grief. I beg you to be of stout heart and take vengeance on the Nazi monsters for what they have done to Natasha and our glorious Motherland.
Long live the Communist Party! Long live Stalin! Death to the enemy!
Your loving brother,
Alexander
The Russian lands are cold and morbid, and a long shadow of death and tragedy hovers over her people. The woeful cries of toil and grief and poverty fill her music and her poems; life is suffering, suffering is life. The winters are as brutal as life is brutal.
All that is tragic in Russian heritage struck down on Igor Karlovy where he lived among the freezing and the starving in the Siege of Leningrad. The letter was the most painful chapter in a pain-filled journey through life. The death of his beloved Natasha all but sucked the will to survive.
When is it that a man like Igor Karlovy seeks out a woman such as Olga Shiminov? Is it when his soul wallows in a bottomless pit of grief? Is it when he clings stubbornly to a thinning thread between hope and complete depression?
Or perhaps it was the warmth that first brought him back to life, the warmth of Olga Shiminov’s apartment. Outside the dead were stacked like frozen logs in the gutters; the starving walked about in trances; Finnish and German cannon beat upon them without respite. Was it something so simple as the cold and the rumble of hunger in his belly that drew him to Olga Shiminov?
She was one of the most important Komsomol leaders in Leningrad. As a deputy in charge of women’s labor battalions she came into frequent dealings with Igor in the numerous engineering problems in building fortifications, roads over the ice, demolishing dangerous buildings, clearing rubble.
It was on a night in December during one of their many conferences that they became unbearably cold in his heatless office and Olga suggested they finish their work in her flat, where it was warm. Warmth ... that is what one needed in the Leningrad winter. For the masses there was no fuel. Every wooden structure had been demolished and long consumed as firewood. Everyone was cold and hungry ... except important officials like Olga Shiminov.
She had her own room with a private bath and kitchen. It was a luxurious palace in that frozen tomb of a city. And her cupboards held tea and vodka and potatoes and bread and beef.
Did he sell himself for warmth or was it just a weariness of life that afforded him no resistance? In truth, Igor never looked at her as a man looks at a woman in all those months they had worked together. Olga kept herself drab and severe as befitting an official of the party.
She was entirely without Natasha’s female wiles, sensuous looks, soft touches, desirable body. Olga was a daughter of the revolution, the ultimate product of this new way of life. She carried her breasts with a sort