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Rockets and People
among the occupation troops. Our critical incident had already been reported to
the commander, and the sentence would be carried out for the edification of
others, regardless of the German woman’s petition. Schmidt and his girlfriend were
stunned by this message.
That evening, after a hard day, we gathered by the fireplace in the spacious hall
at Villa Franka. It had come to pass that several officers of the Seventy-fifth Guards
Division billeted in Bleicherode who were hungry for cultured society had joined
our informal officers’ club. Our circle in Germany, which consisted of trade union
or “civilian” officers, somehow attracted real officers who were decorated with
combat ribbons and medals, but who had grown tired of the war.
The combat officers explained their interest in our activity, “You here are
involved in interesting and important work, but we’re a bunch of layabouts.You
know very well what you will be doing when you return home. But we have been
fighting for more than four years, and we happened to survive—now we have
nothing to do. The combat guards division is enjoying comfortable conditions
without the war, but it’s doomed to disintegration.”
On those evenings when we gathered by the fireplace, the souls of our
society were the “hussars,” Isayev’s name for Voskresenskiy, Boguslavskiy, and
Rudnitskiy, who lived in the Villa Margaret on the highest hill in Bleicherode. 2
Somehow, it turned out that Guards Captain Oleg Bedarev, a combat officer,
became the latest member of our “hussars’ squadron.” He had marched to
Thuringia all the way from Stalingrad with his combat girlfriend Mira, a Guards
captain in the medical service. Pilyugin called military physician Mira and Oleg
Bedarev our “Guards lovebirds,” and we included them among the welcome
members of our evening meetings and fireside chats, where we would share
fragrant kirsch and precious packs of Kazbek cigarettes purchased at the central
Berlin military exchange.
We, including Oleg, Mira, and their combat friends, traded stories about our
everyday life in the war for hours, constantly interrupting each other. Sometimes
Oleg would stop himself and say,“Let’s not talk about that.” To distract us from any
bad memories, he would pick up his guitar and perform songs that he had
composed himself. Oleg was also a poet and the editor of the division newspaper.
His poetry was very unsettling to the political department, which made it difficult
for him to get promoted.
Mira explained,“The political workers consider his poems to be demoralizing
and decadent. Not once does he mention the Party or Stalin in them.”
The tribunal’s sentence stunned Oleg and Mira as much as it did us.
“I was ordered to examine the condemned soldier and to certify that he was in
the proper state of health to be shot. It turns out that some regulation or another
2. The phrase “hussar” was originally used to describe ornately attired officers of the Hungarian light cavalry
from the fifteenth century. Chertok uses the word for his elegantly dressed associates.
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