Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño

like Juan Stein, with straw-colored hair and very deep-set blue eyes. It was a photo of his mother and father, he told us. The other one was a portrait – an official portrait – of a Red Army general called Ivan Chernyakhovsky. According to Stein, he was the greatest general of the Second World War. Bibiano, who knew about these things, mentioned Zhukov, Koniev, Rokossovsky, Vatutin and Malinovski, but Stein stood firm: Zhukov was brilliant and cold, Koniev was a hard man, Rokossovsky had talent and the help of Zhukov, Vatutin was a good general but no better than the German generals he was pitted against, you could say the same of Malinovski really, none of them was a patch on Chernyakhovsky (to equal him you’d have to roll Zhukov, Vasilevsky and the three best tank commanders into one). Chernyakhovsky had innate talent (if there is such a thing in the art of war), he was loved by his men (in so far as the rank and file can love a general) and he was young, the youngest general in charge of an army (known as a front in the Soviet Union), and one of the few high-ranking officers to die in the front line, in 1945, when the war was already won, at the age of thirty-nine.
    We soon realized that there was something more between Stein and Chernyakhovsky than an admiration for the strategic and tactical gifts of the Soviet general. One afternoon, during a conversation about politics, we asked him how he, a Trotskyite, could have lowered himself to ask the Soviet Embassy for the general’s photo. We were joking, but Stein took us seriously,confessing that the photo had been a gift from his mother, who was Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s cousin. She was the one who had requested the photo from the Embassy, many years back, as a blood relative of the hero. When Stein had left home to come and study in Concepción, his mother had given him the photo without a word of explanation. He went on to tell us about the Chernyakhovskys, a family of dirt-poor Ukrainian Jews, and the various destinies that had scattered them all over the world. It turned out that his mother’s father was the brother of the generals father, which made him one of the great man’s third cousins. Our admiration for Stein was already unconditional, but after that revelation it knew no bounds. Over the years we learnt more about Chernyakhovsky: he commanded an armored division in the first months of the war, the 28th Tank Division, which was driven back through the Baltic Republics to the vicinity of Novgorod. Then he was at a loose end until he was given the command of a corps (which in Soviet military terminology is equivalent to a division) in the region of Voronezh; this corps was part of the 60th Army, and when, during the Nazi offensive in ’42, the commander of the Army was dismissed, his post was offered to Chernyakhovsky, the youngest of the eligible officers, which naturally provoked jealousy and suspicion among his comrades. We learnt that, in this new post, he served under Vatutin (who was then commanding the Voronezh Front, which in Russian military terminology is equivalent to an army, but I think I already said that), whom he respected and admired; that he converted the 60th Army into an invincible fighting machine, steadily advancing throughRussia and then through the Ukraine; nothing and no one could stop it. In 1944 he was promoted to the command of a front, the Third Belorussian Front, and during the ’44 offensive he played a key role in destroying the Army Group Center, consisting of four German armies, and this was probably the greatest blow suffered by the Nazis in the Second World War, worse than the siege of Stalingrad or the Normandy landings, worse than Operation Cobra and the crossing of the Dnepr (in which Chernyakhovsky took part), worse than the counter-offensive in the Ardennes or the battle of Kursk (in which he also took part). We discovered that of the Russian armies which participated in Operation Bagration (the destruction of the