Walter Model
— Bwaaaaang…!!!
“Why is the reveille sounding on a subbota…?”
Someone’s grumbling voice pulled me awake.
“At least there’s no morning run. Have a drink.”
On any ordinary day this would have been the hour to scramble up and into uniform. Even so, none of us showed the slightest intention of rising; we lay rolled in our blankets with only our heads poking free.
“A drink? Now that sounds good. Anyone free for a few after duty today?”
“Perfect! A weekend without vodka is no weekend at all.”
I was closing my eyes again, listening to my comrades casually making plans for a weekend binge, when—
“Hey! Look, the traitor’s up!”
Traitor? The word made me vaguely curious, but catching up on sleep mattered more, so I burrowed back under the blanket.
“Oi, traitor—get up already. We know you’re awake.”
Gailis’s voice.
Never mind that—why am I the traitor?
I ignored the chatterbox and shut my eyes again.
A short while later the room went suddenly quiet. Wondering what was going on, I cracked my eyes open in a half-daze—and found everyone staring down at me.
“…What? Why the scary faces?”
“Why? You really don’t know?”
I nodded.
“I don’t think I did anything wrong.”
“……”
“…Did I?”
When I tilted my head, Gailis fixed me with a deliberately menacing look and pulled something out.
“…What is it.”
Through sleep-blurred eyes I read the paper he thrust at me.
Cadets of outstanding academic standing are hereby exempted from this weekend’s Subbotnik.
Exempted: Yakov Svanidze, Valentin Kuzmin
“I saw that yesterday. Why are you showing it to me again…?”
I’d thought there might be some new information.
— Tug.
“…Let go, Gili.”
I tried to retreat under the blanket again, but Gailis had a death grip on it and refused to let go.
“No. You’re just going to fall back asleep.”
“So what? I’m catching up on sleep I already owe. Why are you stopping me?”
“Because I’m jealous! Jealous!”
Gailis grunted and heaved on my blanket. I heaved back, and the wool cloth went taut between us like a tug-of-war rope.
“Why do only we have to haul coal on a golden weekend…!!!”
“Blame your own grades, not me.”
“You heartless, bloodless bastard…!”
Gailis pulled with a face on the verge of tears, bellowing as he did. As if that would get him out of Subbotnik.
“You damn genius. Good at chess, sharp as a blade, and good in a fight too? What even are you?”
“Gili—Yasha’s good in a fight?”
A cadet who had been listening from the side cut in, eyes glittering.
“Good in a fight? Of course he—”
“Gili.”
“…Of course I wouldn’t know. But the idea of Yasha losing… I can’t even picture it.”
“…What’s that supposed to mean.”
Gailis glanced hastily out the window and let the sentence trail off. He had come within a breath of spreading last night’s entire affair through the barracks.
“What? Yasha’s good in a fight too?”
“Damn it, is there anything you can’t do, Yakov!!!”
“Everyone settle down. Sigh—Gili…!”
“S-sorry…”
Gailis looked needlessly apologetic. Before long the whole conversation had swung over to fighting ability.
“I heard Yasha can take ten men at once?”
“Where did that come from.”
“No idea. Someone said the other day he got surrounded by ten thugs in the street and flattened every last one of them by himself?”
“…Who’s saying that.”
“Where there’s smoke there’s fire, right? Rumors like that only start if a guy can actually fight.”
That left me without a reply. It wasn’t entirely fabricated. I had cleaned up Kuzmin’s whole pack by myself, after all.
I was a fairly promising junior taekwondo prospect, you know—retired after an injury and went into history because my scores fit the department.
Yakov’s body wasn’t ideally built for taekwondo, but it wasn’t clumsy either. Compared to the other cadets, I had a decent frame.
“Yasha, more importantly—this isn’t right, is it?”
Gailis held the paper up again and pressed on.
“You I can accept. But Kuzmin? I don’t understand how that guy’s name is sitting right next to yours.”
“…Kuzmin trained hard too. He actually scored perfect in marksmanship.”
“Even so… you must be thinking the same thing I am. How can someone like—”
Gailis couldn’t finish. His face twisted, and the hand holding the paper clenched tight. The usually bright-faced Gailis had carved deep furrows between his brows in pure anger; the others exchanged puzzled looks.
And then—
— Creeeak…
The dormitory door opened. Gailis turned toward it, and his expression curdled by degrees.
“…Just looking at that face turns my stomach.”
“……”
Without another word Gailis spun around and headed for the door.
— Thump!
He shoulder-checked Kuzmin, who was standing in the doorway, and stormed off somewhere.
“…What’s with the atmosphere?”
“Yasha…”
The other cadets asked with their eyes: Is there something between Kuzmin and Gailis? I didn’t answer. I simply rose from the bunk.
“What brings you here? This isn’t your room, Kuzmin.”
“…Yakov Svanidze.”
Kuzmin’s lips moved several times—starting a word, swallowing it, starting again, stopping.
“I have something to say.”
At last he opened his mouth, wearing a leaden expression I had never seen on him before.
“…Can you spare a moment?”
I followed Kuzmin out of the barracks.
— Creeeak… Thud.
The stares boring into the back of my head cut off as the door shut. Gailis had vanished without a trace.
— Step, step, step.
I walked quietly behind Kuzmin. We emerged from the building without a word. The sun was still low; the long shadow of the main building covered half the yard outside.
— Halt.
In the darkest corner of that shadow, we faced each other.
“……”
“So—what did you want to say?”
Even with my prompting, Kuzmin could not quite open his mouth. The gaze that had always looked down on me with arrogance now wandered, repeatedly finding the ground.
— Tap, tap.
He kicked absently at the frozen earth with the toe of his boot. White breath rose and faded from lips that kept forming words and swallowing them again, measuring the depth of his hesitation for him.
“…My father is a member of the Leningrad Party Committee. My mother is a well-known painter, and my maternal uncle is a political commissar—a former officer with a reputation even under the Empire. I was born into that bloodline.”
Kuzmin paused.
“…So I believed I was different. That I was aimed higher than the rabble gathered in a place like this, at least.”
“……”
“That’s why I couldn’t stand it. That a Georgian country bumpkin passed the entrance exam in one go for a place I barely scraped into—and then took first place on top of it.”
Kuzmin let out a short breath. White vapor rose and scattered.
“I couldn’t accept it. And Instructor Savelyev—who I thought of as an idol—went around praising you constantly. Always in comparison to me, the inadequate one.”
“…That’s news to me.”
“Being measured against a face I didn’t even know… was worse than I expected. So the day I first saw your name and face after induction… I wanted to break you. I thought that was the only way this endless misery would end. Crossing the line—all of that—came from the same place.”
Kuzmin’s shoulders sagged.
“But you saved me. I heard it was you who worked on Instructor Savelyev so I wouldn’t be expelled, Svanidze.”
He bit his lip and squeezed his eyes shut.
“And that made it… even harder to bear. If only you’d mocked me. If only you’d trampled me with satisfaction…”
I waited in silence for whatever came next.
“I’m sorry, Yakov Svanidze.”
Kuzmin bowed his head.
“I won’t make excuses. What I did can’t be covered over with an apology. Even so… I decided this had to be said in person.”
His breath drifted white down to his boots.
“Thank you for saving me… truly.”
Kuzmin stayed like that for a long time, head lowered.
“Raise your head, Kuzmin.”
Slowly, he looked up.
“I only thought the punishment was excessive for the crime. Assault and false accusation… yes. Not light matters. But not heavy enough that a man should rot in a camp for the rest of his life either, right?”
I scratched the back of my neck for no good reason. The whole situation felt strange and unfamiliar.
“I’ll take the apology for now. Coming in person and bowing your head isn’t easy—I know that. But there is no next time. If you cross the line again, I won’t lift a finger to save you.”
“…Right. Thank you.”
Kuzmin nodded heavily.
Hatred is a surprisingly fragile emotion; without a target to strike back at, it doesn’t last. I had never hated him to begin with, so what remained in him was probably only a defeat close to admiration—and a shame turned inward on himself.
“Ah—and properly apologize to Gailis as well. If you think about it, he took the worst of it.”
“…Understood.”
“That’s all I had to say.”
Kuzmin gave a quiet nod.
“Then we’re finished here?”
“That is…”
He hesitated, then continued.
“On the holiday… do you have plans?”
“Holiday?”
“As a gesture of apology, I’d like to treat you to a meal. Since both of us are free of Subbotnik, we could go into the city and have a drink…”
“Ah—if it’s that, I’ll take the thought for the deed. I already have an engagement.”
I cut him off with a shake of the head. I had already received the apology; that was enough. There was no need to enter a cycle of debts given and repaid.
“…Is that so.”
Kuzmin trailed off, clearly disappointed, but he did not press further. He took a step back.
“…All right. Then.”
He turned and started back the way he had come. After a few paces he paused, and without looking around left one more line.
“Thank you. I mean that.”
Telling Kuzmin I had a prior engagement had not been an empty line; I secured leave from Savelyev and slipped out of the school.
“Yasha—over here, over here!”
A tavern somewhere in Leningrad. The moment I stepped through the door at the appointed hour, the party already waiting waved me over.
“It’s been far too long, Dzhugashvili.”
Zhukov lifted one corner of his mouth and held out his hand.
“Almost ten days, isn’t it? Lucky our schedules lined up.”
The towering Rokossovsky greeted me with a smile as well.
“Good to see you both again. But this gentleman is…?”
My eyes, still receiving the greetings of two future marshals, drifted naturally between them.
A face I had never seen before.
“The Weimar Republic officer I mentioned in the letter. His name is…”
“Walter Model.”
…Hm?
The gentleman with a round monocle over his right eye repeated himself in Russian.
“Captain Otto Moritz Walter Model, of the Reichswehr. A pleasure to meet you, Yakov Dzhugashvili.”