The Ocean of Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

years back, Mstislav Mstislavich, Prince then of Novgorod, strengthened its defences against the Lithuanian threat, making it his principal garrison in the south. Since then, however, it has fallen into disrepair once more. It’s a ramshackle place, and every last one of its inhabitants, young and old, come out to stare at us as we tie up at the jetty.
    Katerina, particularly, gets their attention. She has changed her style from peasant girl to boatman, borrowing the clothes of one of the men and even taking a turn at the oar for a while. The crew are in love with her, with that fierce protective love elder brothers have for younger sisters. A mere ten days in and I do believe they would die for her, were they asked to. As it is, they eye the natives of this town suspiciously – the young men especially so – with warning glances as if to ward off any possibility of trouble.
    We go ashore, meeting Grikov, the town’s head man, in his ‘house’ – a glorified hut with two rooms rather than one – and I do a little trading, and drink a little of his awful wine and, because these seem good people, trustworthy people, I offer to pay for a feast, and the whole town – all three hundred – are soon to be found carousing deep in drink, their faces greasy with fat. Roast bear, someone tells me, as well as wolf, alongside the more recognisable lamb and dog.
    As evening falls, the party continues, and one of the locals brings out a fiddle and starts up a tune, and soon there’s a crowd of villagers dancing in the firelight beside the dark-flowing river, and after a while Katerina joins in, lifting her hands above her head as she dances, in the Russian fashion, and twirling about, clapping with the rhythm, and there is laughter and singing and later – much later – we return to the boat as the last of the villagers straggle home.
    And it’s as she snuggles against me on the furs that she tells me how happy she is and how glad she is she has come with me, and how very, very much she loves me. But when I turn to answer her, she is already asleep, her beautiful face against my shoulder, her soft breath on my neck.
    I am tired, but sleep does not come easily. And there’s a reason for it. For you see, I remember the last time I came to Velikie Luki, in 1942. It was a very different place then, much bigger and uglier, though no less ramshackle. The river still flowed through it, but it was a dirty, grimy place and there was a sheen of oil on the water, and the scum of detergent from the massive industrial complex three miles north of the town.
    I was there with Dr Walther Stahlecker and sixty of his men from
Einsatzgrupen A
, posing as a war correspondent for the
Volkischer Beobachter
. Not that any words I could write about what Stahlecker was doing in the
Reichskommisariat Ostland
, as it was then known, would ever be published, but because the man was keen to show me – in a boastful kind of way – what he was up to there. Stahlecker smiled a lot, as if he really enjoyed his work, but those days I spent in Lithuania and the Smolensk region had the feel of a nightmare. Stahlecker had almost a thousand men under his command, trained SS killers who had no interest in fighting a war but in mopping up behind the lines after the regular soldiers, the
Wehrmacht
, had fought their way through. They were after Jews and Romanies and known communists, and in Velikie Luki they found almost four hundred.
    The memory of what happened – of what I was witness to that day just south of the town – returns to haunt me now, troubling me much more than usual. There was nothing I could do, of course, nothing but watch and keep my silence. These things have happened throughout history, and there is little we can do to change that, but sometimes, just sometimes, it worries me. Sometimes Albrecht Burckel’s words, spoken to me in another time, another place, come back to haunt me:
    ‘We act like policemen, Otto. Time cops, when we really