steven conte - hcau-assets.supadu.com...he could no longer pretend to be asleep. ‘sir, welcome...

Steven Conte’s debut novel, The Zookeeper’s War,

won the inaugural Australian Prime Minister’s Literary

Award for Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2008

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book

and for the 2007 Christina Stead Award for Fiction.

The novel was published in the UK and Ireland and

translated into Spanish.

For more information visit

stevenconte.com

Tolstoy Estate_4pp.indd 1Tolstoy Estate_4pp.indd 1 30/6/20 10:51 am30/6/20 10:51 am

THE TOLSTOY ESTATE

Steven Conte


1

ONE

‘Captain?’ Winkel said. ‘You should put on your helmet.’

Paul Bauer, aged forty, an army surgeon, kept his eyes

shut. The corporal’s concern for him was touching, but after

twenty-six hours spent operating under canvas, followed

by eleven more of sabotaged sleep – at first near an active

artillery battery, then sitting in the cabin of a pitching lorry –

he hardly cared whether he lived or died. The lorry heaved

and he strained not to give himself away by bracing against

the dashboard.

‘He’s sleeping,’ Pflieger said.

‘Then wake him,’ replied Winkel.

‘He wouldn’t thank me for that.’

‘This forest … you should wake him.’

‘You wake him, why don’t you?’

‘Pflieger, I’m driving,’ Winkel said. ‘You’re sitting beside

him.’

The lorry reared again, smacking Bauer’s temple on the

window frame. It was Pflieger who swore. ‘Hey, Sepp, you

trying to kill us?’


2

‘Der Schlamm,’ Winkel said, ‘the mud’ – oozing loathing and

affront.

‘Just don’t roll the fucker,’ Pflieger said. ‘Drowning in some

Russian ditch, there’d be no glory in that.’

The lorry bucked, halted, then edged onwards again,

its speed set by the slowest of the seventeen vehicles in the

convoy. Their own was next to last. For a while no one spoke.

A sorrowing engine, shifting gears, rain battering the roof.

The labouring of wiper blades.

Pflieger said, ‘It’s getting late.’

‘I know,’ Winkel said.

‘We should have stopped at that village.’

‘Says you.’

‘Says me. And why not me?’

‘The great tactician.’

Sounding wounded, Pflieger said, ‘I’m not talking tactics,

Sepp, just common sense.’

‘Heard of perseverance?’

‘I only meant that soon it’ll be getting dark.’

A vicious lurch caught Bauer unawares, forcing him to grip the

dashboard for support. He could no longer pretend to be asleep.

‘Sir, welcome back,’ Winkel said. ‘Slept well?’

Bauer opened his eyes and made out, between strokes of the

wiper blades, the ambulance in front of them, its tail wagging

in the mud, though it was travelling barely faster than walking

pace. Autumn rains and the passage of more than sixty tanks

had churned the road into a striated bog. Beside it there were

low embankments sliced up where wagons, lorries and tanks

had tried but failed to find firmer ground. Pine forest on both


3

flanks. A gash of sky weeping rain. Three weeks earlier, on the

edge of a forest like this one, a Soviet sniper had shot and killed

Dieter Clemens, Bauer’s closest friend in the battalion and its

best anaesthetist.

Winkel said, ‘I was just saying you should put on your helmet.’

‘But not Pflieger?’

‘Sir, Pflieger is an idiot.’

‘Hey,’ Pflieger said. ‘I’m just sick of the weight of it.’

‘And there’s your hair loss,’ Winkel said.

Pflieger patted his head. At twenty-six, and still acne-prone,

he was rapidly balding. ‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it? Sir, what do

you think? You’re a doctor.’

‘I think the corporal is right,’ Bauer said, putting his own

helmet on. ‘We should play it safe.’

Pflieger smirked, which gave him a witless expression, his

tongue protruding a little from between his teeth. ‘A bit late

for that,’ he said, but put on his helmet all the same. Another

officer might have reprimanded him for the comment, but

Bauer was used to making allowances for Pflieger, who in the

French campaign had suffered a head wound that hadn’t so

much changed his personality as denuded it, exposing a simple

and essentially good-natured man who was no longer capable

of censoring his speech. In this instance Bauer happened to

agree with him: it was a bit late, five months into Operation

Barbarossa, to be fretting about safety, personal or otherwise.

Safety was hardly the point. If the Greatest Warlord of All

Time had had any regard for human life, he would not have

provoked a contest whose savagery made France seem in

retrospect like a war of flowers.


4

Bauer shivered, rewound his scarf and turned up the collar

of his greatcoat, reached into it for cigarettes and offered one to

Pflieger, who accepted, and another to Winkel, who refused.

Winkel was fighting with the steering wheel, a bantam-weight

jabbing lefts and rights. ‘I could light it for you,’ Bauer offered.

‘No thank you, sir. I’ve given them up.’

‘Oh?’

‘Last week.’

‘Your health?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘He’s worried they’ll stunt his growth,’ Pflieger said.

‘Ha, ha,’ said Winkel, the smallest man in the battalion.

To reach the lorry’s pedals with greater ease he drove with a

bedroll between his back and the seat.

‘So why give them up?’ Bauer asked. ‘To trade?’

‘It was Lieutenant Hirsch who suggested it, sir.’

‘The lieutenant?’ Bauer asked, aware of the dispiriting effect

the dentist’s name had on him, an effect more pronounced

since Hirsch’s appointment as his anaesthetist, filling the gap

left by Dieter’s death.

‘My teeth were staining,’ Winkel said. ‘Lieutenant Hirsch

suggested I give up cigarettes.’

‘Good advice, I’m sure,’ Bauer said and lit up, unintentionally

making Pflieger laugh, a gasping racket that was generally

funnier than its cause. Bauer smiled and took a life-giving

lungful of smoke.

Still chuckling, Pflieger made a show of nudging Winkel

in the ribs. ‘Can’t let bad teeth spoil your chances with the

ladies, eh?’


5

The corporal flung a few more punches with the steering

wheel but said nothing. Winkel’s vanity about his personal

appearance – his hair cream and toothpicks, his ear- and

nostril-plucking – was a cherished source of humour among

his comrades, an expression of relief at having found a flaw in

a man they otherwise held in lofty regard, Bauer as much if

not more than the rest. He and Winkel were a similar age and

shared a bond, seldom discussed but never far from Bauer’s

mind, of having both lost a wife less than eighteen months

before the war, Bauer’s to illness, Winkel’s in a traffic accident.

Neither had children.

For several minutes all three men were silent. Rain rattled

on the roof and Bauer grew drowsy.

‘This fucking mud!’ Pflieger said.

Bauer muttered, ‘Amen.’

Formed from the Russian dust on which they and their

engines had choked throughout the summer, the mud weighed

on boots and hoofs and wheels, bringing an army of almost four

million men to a near standstill along a two-thousand-kilometre

front. Rasputitza the Russians called the autumn rainy season –

the Time of No Roads – a term Bauer had learned three weeks

earlier from an elderly peasant woman. His Russian was mediocre,

but in a brief conversation with a hostile babushka he had grasped

what the High Command, with Abwehr spies and Russian

linguists at its disposal, had apparently overlooked: in October

the roads essential to the German strategy were impassable by

definition. For half an hour after understanding this he’d been too

enraged to speak. From the start of the war he’d been impatient

for its end and, because the Wehrmacht had been triumphing


6

on every front, a German victory had seemed like the fastest

way to peace. True, the conduct of some of his countrymen in

Russia was criminal – at times depraved – but the killing would

end when the war did, he’d reasoned, and afterwards it was

possible that the gangsters in power in Berlin would moderate

their policies or even wither away. That, at least, had been his

thinking before his talk with the babushka. Since then he had

suspected that the Greatest Warlord of All Time was no more

than a jumped-up gambler, that the remaining two months of

1941 would not deliver victory, and that defeating the Soviets

might in fact take years, assuming it was possible at all. And if

it wasn’t? In his tiredness he hallucinated the walls of the forest

as cliffs of water parted for the Israelites, himself a soldier in the

Pharaoh’s army squelching across the seabed in pursuit.

They breasted a rise then gently descended, tracking

rainwater flowing from one wheel rut to another. Raindrops

boiled in the hoofprints of draught horses. From the first it had

troubled Bauer that the Soviet forces were apparently better

motorised than the Wehrmacht, yet for the most part the

horse-drawn supplies of the 3rd Panzer division had kept pace

with its tanks, which had been hampered not only by the state

of the roads but also by a shortage of fuel – in Bauer’s view,

another grave operational failing.

Haltingly, a curve brought the whole convoy into view,

and shortly afterwards a motorcycle scout appeared at the head

of the column and flagged down the lead vehicle, a lorry under

the command of Sergeant Major Norbert Ritter, leader of the

company’s security detail and, for last two months, acting

quartermaster. One by one the trailing vehicles drew to a halt.


7

Pflieger groaned. ‘What now?’

As if to mimic the noise of the rain on the roof, Winkel

started tapping on the steering wheel, an annoying sound,

though to ask him to stop would have been unkind, as it was

not in his nature to be still. Bauer had only rarely witnessed the

corporal sleeping, and even then Winkel had fidgeted, perhaps

dreaming of stripping an engine or staunching a wound.

A minute or two went by and the convoy started moving

again, only to halt a few hundred metres further on; in the

distance Bauer saw Ritter’s security detail piling out of

the lead lorry. In an expansive interpretation of Article 8(1)

of the Geneva Convention (weapons permitted to medical

corpsmen) several were carrying machine pistols, and one

man a medium machine gun, experience having shown that

red cross insignia on vehicles and armbands offered scant

protection in the Soviet Union.

‘Fuck it,’ Pflieger said, ‘it’s going to get dark.’

‘Karl, language,’ Winkel said. ‘There’s an officer present.’

Pflieger apologised, sucked his cigarette until the tip came

close to his lips, dropped the stub and ground it under his heel.

‘Oh shit, here comes Ehrlich.’

Corporal Egon Ehrlich was trekking rearwards, pausing at

each vehicle to speak with its driver. The mud was forcing him

to use a ponderous, high-stepping gait that Bauer associated

with neurological injury, and it was a full five minutes before

he reached them. Only slightly taller than Winkel, Ehrlich’s

mud-enlarged boots made him look like a cartoon figure –

some sharp-faced relative of Mickey Mouse perhaps, wearing a

helmet and a shelter sheet, each dripping with rain. He stepped


8

onto the running board and Winkel wound down his window.

‘What’s up?’

‘A blown culvert. We’re laying down some logs. Sepp, get

your rifle and report to Ritter. Pflieger —’

‘Guard the lorry?’

‘Get a shovel and go with Sepp.’

‘But I’ve only just got dry.’

‘Don’t argue, just do it,’ Ehrlich ordered. Hanging off the

door with one hand he at last got around to saluting with the

other, though in a sloppy style unnatural to him.

‘Sir.’

‘Corporal.’

Ehrlich stepped off the running board and disappeared

towards the rear. Why the man disliked him Bauer was

unsure. Not envy of his rank, he thought, though they were

about the same age and had similar backgrounds, having both

grown up on small farms. No, more likely Ehrlich sensed that

he, Bauer, cared too little for the rigmarole of rank. How and

when and even if a man saluted didn’t bother Bauer, and for

Ehrlich this possibly made the business of subordination that

much harder to bear.

‘Why do I have to dig?’ Pflieger asked, pulling his shelter

sheet from his kit.

Winkel took his rifle from the rack he’d designed and fitted

to the back of the cabin. ‘So you don’t have to shoot? Perhaps

the sergeant wants to save you from moral distress.’

‘You think so?’

‘Why not? He’s thoughtful that way.’


9

Bauer wished them luck and they clambered out. Pflieger

unhooked a shovel from the side of the lorry and the two men

started forward, a pair of puppets jerking through the mud,

Pflieger lanky and a full head taller than Winkel.

At last, a chance to sleep. A blanket would have been

welcome but there were none inside the cabin, and so making

do with his greatcoat, Bauer lay across the seat, resting his head

on his folded scarf. The rain was easing now, the sound of it on

the roof reminding him of rainfall on the slate-tiled farmhouse

of his childhood, of lying in bed beneath an eiderdown in the

room he had shared with Jürgen, his brother – long dead now,

victim of a botched amputation at Verdun.

A rap on the window made him start. ‘Hey, Bauer!’

Molineux. Bauer drew an arm across his helmet. ‘I’m trying

to sleep.’

‘Bah! You insomniacs are your own worst enemies.’

‘Go away.’

‘Exercise! You need exercise!’

‘For Christ’s sake, it’s raining.’

‘No longer. Listen.’

It was true, the rain had stopped.

‘Open your window.’

Bauer sat up, cursing, and unwound the rain-speckled

window, revealing the large and ruddy face of Hermann

Molineux. Hooded eyes. A sardonic grin.

‘I was almost sleeping,’ Bauer said.

‘Let’s go for a stroll.’

‘You’re at war with sleep, aren’t you?’


10

‘Nonsense, I’m its ally,’ Molineux said, cold air making

vapour of his breath.

‘Some psychological trauma you’ve sustained from doing

anaesthesia.’

‘Now, now, let’s have none of that Jewish claptrap here.

You disappoint me, Bauer. You’re too much with your

thoughts. Stretch your legs. Get your arteries pumping.’

‘I thought you hated exercise,’ Bauer said.

‘You must be thinking of another, more slovenly man. Fresh

air, the scent of pine, bullets ruffling my hair – I’m wild for it.’

‘My socks are dry,’ Bauer said. ‘I don’t plan to wet them

again.’

‘Our billet’s not far off and you can change them there.

Ehrlich claims we’re being put up in style – B Company has

found us a stately home no less.’

‘Unburned?’

‘Virgo intacta apparently. The rain perhaps. Some poor Ivan

will be getting shot for his carelessness. The point is, before long

we’ll be drinking vodka by an open fire, admiring some sweet

little Galinka or Innushka pegging out our laundered uniforms.’

Bauer sighed and got his shelter sheet.

‘So you’re coming then?’

‘A man as far gone in delusion as you needs supervision.’

‘Excellent, excellent,’ Molineux said, and stepped off the

running board.

Bauer got out and immediately sank boot-deep into the mud.

‘A stroll?’

‘A slog, a stomp – call it what you will. I couldn’t tolerate

being stuck in that tin can a moment longer.’


11

‘At least, not without an audience,’ Bauer said, gesturing

at the corpsmen from Molineux’s lorry, who had taken up

defensive positions by the road.

The first few steps convinced Bauer he’d made a mistake:

the mud gave way to his boots easily but then clung on with

freakish strength. He pictured corpses clasping him, trying

to drag him underground, and to dispel the image strode

energetically onwards, so that soon his quadriceps were aching.

He was overheating and unbuttoned his greatcoat, though his

fingers were cold and water chilled his toes. He felt a fool to

have come. Molineux was panting. His face had reddened and

in places was starting to go purple. He was a big man, older

than Bauer and out of shape, almost portly – proof of his skill

at scrounging alcohol and his wife’s devotion to sending him

calorific foods. At the lead lorry Bauer asked him if he’d like a

rest, but in reply he shook his head and pointed to his goal:

a stream bisecting the road, alongside it fifty or more of the men

felling and trimming pines into logs. Dusk was about an hour

away, but beneath the dripping trees twilight had already fallen.

At the blown culvert Sergeant Major Ritter, a big bull-necked

man, was overseeing the construction of a rudimentary bridge,

delivering orders in a Berlinisch accent, his larynx guttural with

damage from some long-ago brawl. Nearby stood the battalion’s

commanding officer and head surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel Julius

Metz, one knee jouncing as if to speed up the work. The stream

was in full spate and so noisy that at first Metz failed to notice

their arrival. Seeing Molineux, he frowned. ‘Captain, you’re out

of condition. Hardly a good example to set for the men, now,

is it?’


12

Molineux nodded, too winded to speak.

Metz continued, ‘There are two types of men in this

world: those for whom their body is a temple, and those who

treat it as a slum. As a medical man, Molineux, you ought to

know better.’

Still gasping, Molineux said, ‘Sir, what can I say?’ He gestured

at his boots. ‘Feet of clay, sir, feet of clay.’

Metz, who neither drank nor smoked, was at the age of

fifty-two in excellent shape, a tall man with a long face that

Bauer supposed women of a certain age might find handsome

if stern: grey eyebrows, a narrow nose and a cleft chin that

Molineux had once pointed out to Bauer resembled buttocks,

right down to its bristled crease, an image Bauer had since

tried in vain to unremember.

‘And where’s your helmet?’ Metz demanded. ‘Didn’t I

expressly order all officers to wear helmets in the field?’

‘Apologies, sir, I forgot.’

‘I can’t afford to lose another anaesthetist.’ He turned to

Ehrlich. ‘Corporal, give the captain your helmet.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Ehrlich said, and swiftly obeyed, exposing a head

as narrow as his face was sharp. Molineux thanked him, tried

on the helmet, took it off again and was loosening its straps

when the sound of yelling drew Bauer’s attention upstream.

Two corpsmen had lost a log in the current, sending it bucking

and spearing at the bridge.

‘For God’s sake,’ Metz yelled as the log struck home. Swiftly

it swung about, forming a dam and then a weir, and although

several corpsmen scrambled to retrieve it, they were too late.

The bridge gave way.


13

Metz screamed an obscenit – for him a sign of great

rage – only to fall silent, as they all did, at the noise of an

engine over-revving in the forest. Bauer pictured a T-34,

maybe several, crashing through the trees, but while many

of his comrades flung themselves into the muck he stayed

standing, curiously unafraid. Norbert Ritter, a brutish man

but a brave one, had snatched a rifle and was plodding off

towards the danger, palsy-footed with mud, quickly followed

by the men of his security detail. Seconds later, a lone Soviet

lorry emerged in front of them from the forest. It braked and

Ritter and his men closed in, their weapons trained on the

cabin. The tarpaulin-sheeted tray was empty, yelled one of

the corpsmen. Then the driver’s door opened and a young

soldier emerged, thrust his hands in the air and stepped

down into the mud. He was unarmed. Straight dark hair

topped with a brown forage cap. A blanched face. His body

quaking. More of Ritter’s men arrived and a second Russian,

an officer, clambered out of the lorry. He was older, short

and paunchy, bare-headed and bald. He frowned at the men

pointing rifles at him, gazed skyward, drew a pistol and shot

himself above the ear.


steven conte - hcau-assets.supadu.com...he could no longer pretend to be asleep. ‘sir, welcome...

Documents