Fruits of Communism
IN OCTOBER OF 1918 Red Army thugs stormed through the Lower Volga villages with army trucks, cleaning out the storage houses and larders of each German farmer. They left little behind for anyone to survive the winter. Holger had been alerted by Russian friends of the approaching menace and warned as many people as he could.
Alerted to the threat, Alexander resorted to the age-old practice of hiding supplies from an enemy. He and his men buried money and the little jewelry Albina possessed. They took a small herd of the best horses into the steppe to a place where a small stream, running towards the Volga, had allowed willows, alder and brush to create a hidden oasis.
The weather had been freezing cold but clear and dry. An ineffectual sun provided brilliant light, an ethereal clarity, which made the brown, ochre and red grasses glow with golden intensity. Although trees and brush were already bereft of leaves, the tangled brush provided good cover for a small herd of horses. The water, furthermore, had nourished a rich mat of grass that, although often frozen now, still provided good beds for the horses, and even a little fodder when thawed during a warmer day. Two of the stable hands – a German boy, Willy, seventeen, bright and sturdy, and a middle-aged Tartar man named Timur, burnt bronze, stoic and dependable, with an inscrutable face – had offered to stay with the horses until the raid on the village was over.
Albina had stuffed soft leather bags with sausages, bacon, black bread – the kind that lasted weeks – eggs, tea, flower, and vodka. It was inconceivable to send a man into the wild without spirits. At times men used vodka as medicine. They poured it over flesh wounds, believing they healed quicker that way and without infection. Other times, a shot of Vodka in their tea, heavy with sugar, made them feel less alone, warmed them and allowed them to fall asleep.
The two men had packed their supplies – a few furs to sleep in and some pots, cups and knives besides Albina’s bags – on some of the horses of their string. Young Willy cheerily looked at the outing as an adventure, smiling broadly over his wide freckled face, while the sedate Tartar’s face remained unreadable when they moved out.
Alexander knew his stock to be in good hands. Timur, once he had thrown in his lot with Alexander, had proved himself loyal and true, and Willy was faithfulness personified. The men had not been gone a day when the Reds came looking for supplies.
Yet Alexander and Klaus Grünfeld had been busy. They’d hauled horse feed, grain and dairy products into underground cellars, dug long ago to store root crops and potatoes safely through the winter. Then they covered the wooden entrance, which lay flat over the hole, with layers of dirt and a pile of steaming horse manure.
“I hope the Reds will be city folk,” remarked Klaus, “because any farm boy will immediately see that the manure has been recently dug from a pile that was hot in the middle.”
“Yes, let’s say a prayer for that,” said Alexander tiredly, having worked day and night to protect some supplies for the winter. He had been too clever to hide everything. To the eye of the casual observer there was still much to confiscate here.
The Reds had gone through all of Schaffhausen, picking it clean before they came upon the Grushov house. Their truck stopped in the frozen street, outlined against the golden, frozen steppe, for there was nothing across the street to block the view. Alexander commandingly stepped out of his door, as if to welcome friends.
He politely greeted them: “Dasdrastvuet tovarishtshy, good day, comrades.” As he had hoped, his politeness befuddled them, took them aback for a moment, for all day long they had encountered hostile, closed, sullen faces as they went about their business of robbing the population.
One of them, an intelligent looking man in a garb representing the upper half of a uniform, complete with cap, and a lower civilian half, called out:
“What is wrong with you, German, are you trying to trick us into leaving your food supply alone?”
“No, comrade soldier,” replied the smiling Alexander, “I am as Russian as you are, and my army service as a captain is already finished. So, why would I deny you anything?”
Albina, hidden behind a lace curtain, peered through the small window that overlooked the street. She looked upon her husband’s friendly behavior with dismay. Oh, God! Why would he draw special attention to himself?
“Be inconspicuous,” she thought, “look to the ground, not into their eyes. And why tell them that you are the only Russian in this village? It will make them curious to know more, and it can’t bode well for you that you are married to a German. You should have chosen a proper Russian wife.”
Thus she fretted, but outside, the drama went on unabated. There were ten of them. Motley looking at best, they did not inspire confidence. A second truck had pulled up behind the first. The trucks were already filled to overflowing and yet they were ready to take more.
“Ah, Russian,” shouted the smart, oddly attired young man, his voice dripping with irony, “what are you, a Russian captain after all, doing in this reactionary German village?”
Alexander smiled a friendly, broad smile, “Come, come now, friend! You must have served with Germans on the front, if you served at all, and know that they are all right fellows. This village was a good place to buy into for me. Less expensive than other places, clean; just look at the road and the houses, but the best is the pasture here for my horses.”
“So, you have horses, do you? We need horses for the army in our fight with the White Russians. How can I be sure you are not one of those white traitors, such a reactionary pig?”
Alexander laughed loudly, his voice boomed in Albina’s ears.
“Aha, you will not know until you have looked around and seen that everything I have said is true. Furthermore, you could trust me the way I trust that you really are who you say you are, a representative of the Soviet government? Your outfit says that you might be half and half of something else.”
Now the party official laughed too. This was the kind of intelligent banter he had missed since he had joined the Red Army. The party members were all dour apparatchiks, deadly dull, steeped in the language of Lenin whose slogans everyone repeated verbatim, ad nauseam. Energetically he jumped from the running board of his truck on which he had been precariously balanced.
“Let me see your horses, comrade,” he cried gaily and followed Alexander to the stalls.
“Not much here, is there?” he commented with sour disappointment.
“No, not much,” agreed Alexander. “But what do you expect? A stud contains mostly brood mares. That’s the business – foals, new horses to be sold at the earliest. What did you expect, riding stock?”
“Guess you’re right,” agreed the Red commissar disgruntled. While they looked at the stables the soldiers, like ants seeking food, swarmed all over the house, the garden, the stalls and the smoke house. They found a few sausages and hams there and a side of beef hanging in the cold shed, all things they enthusiastically carried off to the waiting trucks.
They found a few sacks of grain, placed strategically for them to find in the larder, together with a few other supplies the Grushovs thought they could do without this winter. However, that was all they found, and they grumbled resentfully. Albina, standing quietly in the kitchen, holding her little ones close to her body, was frightened by their resentful comments.
As she spoke Russian without a trace of an accent, they had accepted her fully as a Russian wife. However, their nasty comments about the dearth of goods in her house worried her to death. What would she do if they tore the place to pieces? How would they fare this winter if they found the root cellar? While she prayed frantic prayers for help, she still managed to remain calm on the outside, the picture of a mother worried about her children and little else.
At the height of her despair, Alexander entered the kitchen with the young commissar. Much as if he were in a parlor with polite society he introduced the commissar.
“Commissar Patunov, meet my wife Ekaterina Alexandrovna Grushova.”
“How clever he is,” thought Albina, “turning me into a proper Russian lady by changing my name.”
“What did you find?” Patunov interrogated his men returning from their foray into the street.
“A few hams, a side of beef, some sausages, flour, and some incidental stuff,” reported a tall Asiatic-looking fellow. Commissar Patunov turned to Alexander and exclaimed sarcastically, “And with such trifles you expected to make it through the winter?”
“I haven’t gotten my flour back from the mill and had hoped to buy some pigs from my neighbors to slaughter before November. However, that will not be possible now that you have relieved them of their burden.”
“There is a cow in the stable out back,” said a weasel-faced, runtish man, sounding unpleasant and whining as he spoke. His words instantly raised frightened Albina’s ire. She bravely turned to Patunov, fiercely addressing him in a truculent tone.
“Not the cow! I implore you! Do not take the cow! These infants,” she pointed at her two small boys, “must have milk or they will not make it through the winter. You have taken all else already. We are not rich people and work hard for the few things we have. Why punish us even more?”
Patunov looked at her with new interest, almost respect, “So the lioness defends her cubs?” He laughed amusedly and, turning to Alexander, he said with deep meaning in his voice, “Do you have by chance some spirits stashed away? Something to make my men happier than they are now?”
Every eye in the room was on Alexander, and the faces of the men in their oddly assembled outfits expressed eagerness, greed, calculating their chances of obtaining the drink they craved.
“There is nothing here, I looked in every crevice,” said a sallow faced, square shouldered soldier, disappointedly.
Alexander knew that Patunov was trying to save their cow and that he had better come up with some of the vodka he had stashed away. Fortunately he had not hidden the liquor in the root cellar but had instead buried the two-gallon crocks in the garden.
“If you would send your men to the trucks to wait, I might be able to find some vodka.” Everyone knew that he was loath to give away the hiding place. Patunov waved his hand imperially and said, “So go outside already, men. I will make sure that he finds something to drink.”
A tall, consumptive soldier, looking dubiously at Patunov, objected in the tone and manner of an apparatchik, “Comrade Patunov, I think what you are doing is against regulation. I mean, it is not right for you to act alone. One of us should be with you.”
“Since when do you know the regulations, Emelyan? Who is in charge of this group? You, Emelyan, or is it me who has authority? So, out with you. I brook no disrespect of my order.”
A moment later Albina stood forlornly but relieved in her kitchen. The soldiers had cleared out, some of them reluctantly, for they wished they could plunder some more. She, too, understood that Patunov wanted to save her cow. It was for this reason that he went with Alexander into the frozen, stark garden, ravaged before the first frost when they’d harvested the last cabbages, carrots and beets. There, among dry beanstalks, softly decaying cabbage leaves and other debris, they dug in a marked place and unearthed two brown crocks of vodka.
“That will hold them and make them forget the cow,” Patunov remarked acidly. “They are not bad men, but their new power has made them quite ruthless.” He felt it necessary to apologize for his odd assortment of men and their ruthless ways.
“I thank you, Commissar Patunov. The cow will make the difference this winter to my wife and children. By the way, with whom did you serve? I know you have been in battle. You act like it.”
“Yes, I fought the Japanese under Admiral Makarov, a brave and able man; unfortunately he died too soon. Without him we were led by an incompetent and lost the struggle. I have become what I am now because the leadership is rotten and needs to be replaced.”
“At all cost to the country, Patunov?”
“Yes, at all cost. If one cleans a stall one must throw out even the last of decaying straw, lest it infect the new bedding. I learned that at my father’s farm and have never forgotten.”
It was but a moment later that the trucks were on their way with the vodka circulating among the men.
Albina sank into a chair, depleted of energy. She looked in disbelief at her husband, who stood laughing in the kitchen. “Why are you laughing?” she cried, annoyed. “I am half dead with worry and fright and you are laughing.”
“Oh, how well I know my fellow Russians. I am amused that the vodka saved us from closer scrutiny.”
“No, it was not the vodka, it was Patunov who saved us. He was the one who knew what would work.”
“Yes, after all, the commissar was not so bad a fellow,” smiled Alexander, filling his arms with two animated little boys who realized that the frightful men had gone and Papa was laughing again.