Army Group Center), by far the most distinguished was the Third Belorussian Front, which advanced unstoppably, with unprecedented speed and penetration, and was the first to arrive in Eastern Prussia. We also found out that Chernyakhovsky had lost his parents when he was an adolescent, and had boarded in other peoples houses, with other people’s families, that he was mocked and humiliated for being a Jew, but proved to those who insulted him that he was not only their equal but their superior, that as a child he had witnessed the followers of the Ukrainian nationalist Petliura torturing then trying to assassinate his father in the village of Verbovo (with its little white houses scattered over the slopes of the rolling hills), that his adolescence was a mixture of Dickens and Makarenko, that during the war he lost his brother Alexander, knowledge of which was kept from him for an afternoon and a whole night because he was in the midst of an offensive, that he died alone in themiddle of a road, that he was twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, awarded the Order of Lenin, four Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of Suvorov (first class), the Order of Kutuzov (first class), the order of Bogdan Kmelnitzky (first class), and numerous, countless medals, that by order of the Government and the Party monuments to him were erected in Vilnius and Vinnitsa (no doubt the one in Vilnius has disappeared and the one in Vinnitsa has probably been torn down too), that the city of Insterburg in the old Eastern Prussia is now called Chernyakhovsk in his honour, that the kolkhoz for the village of Verbovo in the district of Tomashpol is also named after him (although the kolkhoz is a thing of the past), and that in the village of Oksino in the district of Umanski in the region of Cherkassy, a bronze bust was set up to commemorate the great general (I’d bet a month’s pay the bust has been replaced; Petliura’s the hero now and tomorrow, who knows?). To sum up, as Bibiano said, quoting Parra: that’s how it goes, the glory of the world; no glory, no world, not even a miserable mortadella sandwich.
In any case, on the wall of Juan Steins house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, was incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don’t know why I’ve kept the photo, Stein said to us. Maybe because he was the only really important Jewish general in the Second World War and he came to a tragic end. Though the real reason is probablythat my mother gave it to me when I left home, like a sort of riddle. She didn’t say a word, just handed me the picture. Was she trying to tell me something? Was it meant to be the start of a dialogue? Et cetera, et cetera. The Garmendia sisters thought the photo of Chernyakhovsky was awful. They would have liked to replace it with a portrait of Blok (
there
was a good-looking Russian) or Mayakovsky, their dream lover. Sometimes, especially when he was drunk, Stein would wonder what Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s third cousin was doing in the literature department of a university in southern Chile. And sometimes he said he was going to use the frame for a photo he had of William Carlos Williams doing his day job as a small-town doctor. In the photo he was carrying a black leather bag and there was a stethoscope, like a two-headed snake, emerging, in fact almost falling, from the pocket of his old jacket, which was showing its years, but comfortable and still warm in the cold weather, and the footpath he was walking down was long and tranquil, edged with picket fences painted white or green or red, behind which you could glimpse little patios or strips of lawn (and a mower left out by someone who had been called away, perhaps). Dr. Williams was wearing a dark, narrow-brimmed hat, and perfectly clean, almost
In any case, on the wall of Juan Steins house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, was incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don’t know why I’ve kept the photo, Stein said to us. Maybe because he was the only really important Jewish general in the Second World War and he came to a tragic end. Though the real reason is probablythat my mother gave it to me when I left home, like a sort of riddle. She didn’t say a word, just handed me the picture. Was she trying to tell me something? Was it meant to be the start of a dialogue? Et cetera, et cetera. The Garmendia sisters thought the photo of Chernyakhovsky was awful. They would have liked to replace it with a portrait of Blok (
there
was a good-looking Russian) or Mayakovsky, their dream lover. Sometimes, especially when he was drunk, Stein would wonder what Ivan Chernyakhovsky’s third cousin was doing in the literature department of a university in southern Chile. And sometimes he said he was going to use the frame for a photo he had of William Carlos Williams doing his day job as a small-town doctor. In the photo he was carrying a black leather bag and there was a stethoscope, like a two-headed snake, emerging, in fact almost falling, from the pocket of his old jacket, which was showing its years, but comfortable and still warm in the cold weather, and the footpath he was walking down was long and tranquil, edged with picket fences painted white or green or red, behind which you could glimpse little patios or strips of lawn (and a mower left out by someone who had been called away, perhaps). Dr. Williams was wearing a dark, narrow-brimmed hat, and perfectly clean, almost
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