Vendetta
Antonov felt that when his parents had waved goodbye to him outside the cottage, Alexander beside them smiling tremulously, they should have been framed in falling snow. Instead the snapshot in his mind was glazed with late-summer heat. Just the same, whenever he studied the photograph, he felt as though a dressing had just been removed from a wound.
He heard a disturbance at the other end of the tunnel that had been fractured by a shell. He reached for his rifle. ‘Razin?’
No reply. He aimed his rifle into the darkness and a young voice said: ‘Don’t shoot,’ although there wasn’t any fear in it.
The boy reached the light from the river exit and offered Antonov a bucket. ‘Thirsty? It’s been boiled.’ One of the water boys who quenched the Russian soldiers’ thirst and fed them scraps of food. They also fraternised with the Germans, subsequently describing uniforms and positions to the commanders of the encircled 62nd Army.
‘No thanks.’ Antonov grinned at him; his face was sharp and starved; Antonov had read Dickens at school and he reminded him of a pickpocket in Oliver Twist. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Misha.’
‘Shouldn’t you be on the other side of the river, Misha?’
Although he was only eighteen Antonov felt paternal. He had discovered that war confused age.
‘No point. I can only help over here. In any case the kids on the other side have got families.’
‘You haven’t?’
‘My parents were killed on the thirteenth.’
The thirteenth of September, a Sunday, was the day when the Germans had launched an all-out assault on the city. One month ago and the boy spoke as though he had lost his parents when he was in the cradle. War also confused time.
‘I’m sorry,’ Antonov said.
Misha said: ‘My father was a baker. He used to bake bread for the militia. What was your father?’
‘He’s still alive,’ Antonov said. ‘He works on a State farm. We grow a lot of grain. Maybe some of it found its way into your father’s bread.’
Misha shook his head. ‘Our flour came from the steppe near here. But the Fritzes flattened all the corn. Soon we’ll flatten theirs. Won’t we?’ he asked.
‘Of course. How old are you, Misha?’
The boy said he was nine and then, as though ashamed of the admission, picked up his bucket and crawled back along the tunnel.
Where was Razin?
***
Before departing for the Red Army transit camp Antonov had been allowed to see Tasya.
‘In the bad old days of serfdom,’ the colonel told him in the back of the Zil, ‘it was a punishment to be drafted. But you were allowed seven days in which to drink and fornicate before you left. Today you’ve got time for a kiss.’
‘But today it’s an honour to serve in the army,’ Pokrovsky reminded both of them. ‘Life in the barracks is as good as anywhere else. And life is good everywhere in the Soviet Union,’ he reminded himself. ‘You have a good education, good food, fair wages, paid holidays …’ Pokrovsky had a tendency to recite.
Yury who had never doubted any of this nodded as he watched his home recede in the distance. A lone horseman stood on the brow of a sloping wheatfield.
Tasya was wearing a white blouse embroidered in silk with red and blue daisies. Her flaxen hair was polished and thickly coiled and he realised she had been expecting him. The driver of the Zil, it materialised, was also a photographer and it just happened that he had a camera and plates with him.
Yury kissed Tasya, feeling her lips part slightly. But the farewell wasn’t complicated by any of the carnal visions that had visited him that morning.
Twenty-four hours later he was in the Red Army. Bewildered by the casual and coarse attitudes of his new comrades, shocked by instant antagonisms, discovering what he had always known but never appreciated, that the Soviet Union consists of many races.
Of the other nine marksmen assembled at Akhtubinsk one was a lieutenant, evacuated from beleaguered Leningrad and billeted in a separate hut, one was a scheming Georgian, four were Muscovites and full of it, two were Ukrainians and one was an Uzbek from Samarkand who looked like a Bedouin.
On the first day Antonov, the only new recruit in the group, was given an ill-fitting uniform, a Mosin-Nagant, mess tin and irons, two grey blankets and a mattress filled with straw. The food was uneatable but by the second day he was wolfing it down.
On that day the ten competitors went to the range. In the truck taking them there the Muscovites kept themselves to themselves but talked about Antonov.
‘I hear he uses barleycorn for sights.’
‘Shoots with a flintlock.’
‘Good at shooting bears – if they’re big enough.’
As Antonov’s rivals had been in the Army for some time they were familiar with the heavy Mosin-Nagants whereas he had only used a light hunting rifle.
He and the lieutenant scored the least points.
On the third day he had his hair cropped and his wallet stolen from his tunic while he was shaving in the communal wash-house. The wallet was returned later; nothing was missing, but a photograph of Tasya, taken on the day of his departure, had been embellished with pudenda and balloon breasts. A scrawled caption compared her to a cow about to fornicate with a yokel.
Antonov sat quietly on the edge of his bed for a while, unable to comprehend such grossness. They were all Soviets so why should there be such hostility to someone from the steppe? However that sort of antagonism narrowed the field; the perpetrator had to be from a city. He glanced at the four Muscovites who had formed an enclave at one end of the billet; two looked faintly embarrassed, one was smiling, the fourth, grey-faced and built like a wrestler, lay on his back, hands behind his head, scrutinising the corrugated-iron ceiling.
Antonov who had never experienced physical violence walked over to his bed and showed him the photograph. ‘Did you do this?’
Yawning, the Muscovite commented obcenely on the photograph.
Antonov pulled him up by his tunic and drew back his fist to hit him but suddenly he wasn’t there and then he was attacking with fists, and booted feet. Antonov fell against the wall, hands in front of his face to protect himself from the fusillade of blows.
‘Of course we have Don Cossack blood in our veins,’ his father said as, guns in their hands, they waited for movement in the snow-quiet taiga.
And now his fist was a rifle and he was peering through the sights, lowering the barrel, deviating to allow for evasive tactics. And now the fist was a bullet, on target. The Muscovite staggered back, hit the far wall and slid bloodily to the floor.
After that no one commented upon Antonov’s rustic background.
‘I hear,’ Pokrovsky said later, ‘that you’ve been brawling.’
Antonov, standing to attention in front of Pokrovsky’s desk in a small hut that smelled of carbolic, didn’t reply: his split lip and swollen cheeks answered the question.
‘We should think ourselves lucky he didn’t damage your eyes.’
We?
‘I’m out of the competition,’ Antonov said.
Pokrovsky touched one pointed ear, ran his fingers down his lined cheek. ‘I have arranged for you to be given one more chance,’ he said. ‘The day after tomorrow. Just nine of you. The lieutenant has departed.’ He paused. ‘But don’t be misled by regional differences. We have more than fifty languages in the Soviet Union but we speak with one tongue.’ He slipped an oblong of sugar into his mouth and drank some tea. ‘Now to business.’
He told Antonov that he had one day in which to make an ally of his Mosin-Nagant. He pointed at an ammunition box containing yellow-tipped 7.62 mm ammunition. ‘Yours. There’s a forest five kilometres from here. Not unlike the taiga near your home.’ Pokrovsky almost smiled.
Sitting in the Zil beside Pokrovsky who was driving, Antonov decided that he had glimpsed an unsuspected truth. That kindness is not necessarily selfless. But none the worse for that, he supposed.
The forest, cathedral vaults of pine and congregations of silver birch, was similar to the taiga and he shot all day, taking one break, eating black bread smeared with caviar and drinking Narzan mineral water while Pokrovsky drank beer, until the gun was part of him and the yellow-tipped bullets were punching out the hearts of the black and white targets, buckling the cans that Pokrovsky threw into the air.
On the following day he and the Muscovite with whom he had fought finished ahead of the other competitors. It had to be him, of course. When the two of them shot it out Antonov won by one point.
Afterwards the Muscovite shook his hand and Antonov learned another truth although he wasn’t sure what it was.
***
When Razin returned to the tunnel he told Antonov that a Russian sniper had been shot between the eyes in a church near Ninth of January Square. ‘Meister must have been on his way to Mamaev Hill,’ Razin said.
‘The obvious place.’
‘So we’ll stay put here for a while.’ Razin squatted next to Antonov. ‘And another thing – the Fritzes are launching an all-out attack on the north of the city tomorrow.’
CHAPTER FIVE
October 14. The sun, it was rumoured, was shining but beneath the acrid grime of the German assault there was little hope of confirming this.
Meister watched the attack from a ruined toy factory, but it was difficult to grasp what was happening because the senses, stunned by the bombardment, lied.
It was just before midday. According to information obtained by Lanz, five divisions, three infantry and two panzer, were attacking on a front three miles wide. Their objective: to dislodge the Russians from their last footholds in the industrial north and claim the city.
It was, asserted Lanz, the final assault; but his tone questioned his words.
Meister picked up a toy rifle with a sparkling red star on its butt. He aimed it at a doll with eggshell-blue eyes and fuzzy blonde hair sitting on a shelf; but he didn’t pull the trigger because the doll suddenly became his sister. He lowered the rifle; his head was full of noise.
Lanz drew a diagram in the dust on the floor – the main factories, Red October, Barricade and Tractor Plant, lying between railroad and river. ‘They say that if we capture these we’ve won. And do you know what they are?’
Meister shrugged.
‘Heaps of bricks. That’s what we’re fighting for, bricks.’
Another wave of aircraft flew overhead to add their bombs to the shells and mortars falling on the Russians. Occasionally Yaks and Migs got among the bombers.
The tormented ground continued to tremble. The doll fell from the shelf and lay on its side in the dust.
***
To an extent Meister attributed his presence in Stalingrad to his sister, Magdalena, who was two years older than him. When, reluctantly, she had taken him as an adolescent to a café in Hamburg protruding over the water of the Binnenalster he had observed that she paid most attention, albeit not transparently, to the young men who had the most to offer – a future, perhaps, in the SS or Luftwaffe combined with athletic prowess, looks and wealth and some indefinable attraction that he merely sensed.
Knowing that he possessed none of the obvious assets – an aptitude for languages was hardly an entrée – suspecting that he lacked the more subtle accomplishments, Meister had set about rectifying this state of affairs. Thus he had become not only a sharp-shooter on the rifle range but a very smart young man indeed with occasional access to his father’s Mercedes-Benz and a reputation as a wit that, when the natural flow ran dry, had to be augmented by memorised aphorisms from a book of quotations.
The reputation and, in fact, the whole charade was soon demolished by Elzbeth. ‘That sounds suspiciously like Samuel Johnson,’ she said one day as, with elaborate nonchalance, he entertained her in one of the lounges of the Vier Jahreszeiten. ‘So he thought of it as well,’ Meister blustered; but his cheeks felt as though they were steaming.
‘Why do you bother, Karl? Be yourself.’
What confused him was that as Elzbeth was one of Magdalena’s acquaintances, one of the set, she should accept his epigrams, borrowed or otherwise, without question. Her blonde hair made small and deceptively innocent wings in front of her ears.
‘How do we know our true selves? We’re all guided, influenced.’
‘Then we should resist,’ she said, ‘before it’s too late.’
And so, abandoning affectation, he took her boating on the Aussenalster and walking in the countryside, and one Sunday morning he escorted her to the fish market at St. Pauli where at a stall thronged with young people who didn’t belong to the set they breakfasted on würst thickly daubed with mustard. And later that day he kissed her in the back of the Mercedes-Benz on a wharf overlooking the Elbe.
He joined the army two days after he was pictured with Elzbeth in the German newspapers receiving the cup for marksmanship in Berlin. He was trained as a sniper and two months later he was in Stalingrad.
***
‘I presume,’ Lanz said, raising his voice to compete with the bombardment, ‘you were one of the Young Folk.’
‘Of course. And Hitler Youth.’
He had been given a dagger engraved with the words BLOOD AND HONOUR and told that he could now defend his brown-shirt and uniform with it. At college grace had always been recited before meals; it had asserted that God had sent Hitler to save Germany.
‘Did you belong to any organisation?’ Meister asked.
‘The Young Offenders’ Association.’ Lanz was drinking vodka from an Army-issue flask and he was a little drunk; a lot of the troops were. ‘Did you believe all that Nazi shit they taught you?’ Lanz asked.
‘I believed what I saw. A new deal for Germany. A sense of purpose. Equality.’
‘Unless you happened to be a Jew.’
Meister didn’t reply. He had been uneasy about the Jewish problem since the night in November, 1938, when he had seen a mob pillage a synagogue in Hamburg. His father, holding his hand on the sidewalk, had laughed as uproariously at the distraught rabbi as he had at the clowns at the circus a few days earlier.
A Katyusha exploded nearby, its bellow distinct from the other explosions.
Lanz said: ‘And do you believe in all this?’ gesturing towards the gunfire.
‘I believe the Bolsheviks have got to be defeated.’
‘Bolsheviks! Don’t you realise that the end product of National Socialism and Communism is the same?’
It had never occurred to Meister. He searched his aching mind for a devastating retort. Finally he said: ‘National Socialism is the equal distribution of benefits: Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.’
He thought that was neat; he doubted whether Elzbeth would have agreed.
Lanz rubbed at his bald patch as though he were trying to remove it. It looked like a Jewish skull-cap, Meister thought.
Lanz swigged vodka. ‘And I suppose you think we’re going to beat the Bolsheviks?’
‘We’ve captured great tracts of Russia.’
‘Ah, but Russia goes on forever. Want a drink?’ offering the flask to Meister.
‘You know I don’t drink.’
‘Christ! What do you do except spout propaganda? What did I do to deserve this, nursemaid to a college kid? Have you ever had a woman?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Of course,’ Meister lied.
‘One like this?’ Lanz took a creased photograph of a naked woman wearing stiletto-heeled shoes from his wallet and showed it to Meister. She was smoking a cigarette in a holder and smiling coyly at the camera.
‘Prettier than that,’ Meister told Lanz
‘So who’s looking at her face?’
Remembering the quivering embraces with Elzbeth in the back of the Mercedes-Benz, the tentative, exploratory caresses, Meister was ashamed of the flicker of arousal he had experienced when he had looked at the photograph.
Lanz said: ‘Have you got a photograph of your girl?’
‘No,’ Meister said, but his hand strayed to the pocket of his tunic where, beneath studio lights, Elzbeth lay close to his heart.
Lanz shrugged. ‘Did you expect it to be like this?’ he asked, waving the flask towards the battle in the north of the city.
‘I don’t think anyone realised how tough the Russians are.’
‘If you’d been at Moscow you would have got the general idea.’
‘I suppose I imagined killing and suffering. But not massacre – on both sides.’
‘Can you give me one good reason why I should look after you?’ Lanz asked.
‘None.’
‘Well, I can. Being with you I stand a better chance of surviving. And surviving is what I’m good at. So don’t ever think I’m doing it for you.’
‘I never thought that,’ Meister said.
‘It was your sort of people that got us into this. Prussians, Junkers.’
‘The French got us into this,’ said Meister, resurrecting the lectures at college. ‘And the British. The Treaty of Versailles that bled us white.’
‘What I meant,’ Lanz said, choosing his words with drunken care, ‘was that it was your sort got us into the first war. If that hadn’t happened there wouldn’t have been a Treaty of Versailles. And maybe we would never have heard of this arschloch of a place.’
But the last war was too long ago for argument.
‘Were you a successful thief?’ Meister asked.
‘Watch your wallet,’ Lanz said.
‘They say the Russians have got a division of criminals in the 62nd Army.’
‘The 112th. Beware of them. They won’t get any medals but they’ll survive. Like me.’ Lanz picked up a toy soldier and pocketed it. ‘For my son,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know you were married.’
‘I’m not.’ Lanz slipped another soldier into his pocket. ‘They tell me Antonov has got a nanny too. An old soldier from the Ukraine. Old soldiers, they’re survivors too.’
Meister picked up his field-glasses and peered through a shell-hole in the wall. He saw a woman in black pushing a pram filled with rubble; she was obviously crazy but, Meister wondered, had she been sane before the battle began? He saw a Persian cat picking its way around a crater and the rotting corpse of a Russian soldier smiling at him from beneath a cloud of flies.
He focussed the field-glasses on the fighting. A ragged line of German soldiers was advancing into the smoke. A young officer was urging them forward.
And for a moment it seemed to him that the officer and his men were probing the cordite mists for some truth to which they hadn’t yet been introduced.
The Katyusha that exploded in their midst must have killed them all.
Then a breeze crossed the Volga breaching gaps in the smoke and through one of them Meister saw Antonov.
CHAPTER SIX
Antonov, searching for Meister in the vacuum behind the German attack, felt naked as the smoke parted around him.
He looked to his left. A factory of sorts built on a rise, long and squat, roofless and windowless, walls pocked by shells and bullets. Good cover, good vantage …
He threw himself to the ground taking Razin with him. The bullet hit the street lamp at the level where their heads had been. Glancing up, Antonov saw the bright wound in the green-painted metal.
The last thing he noticed before smoke swathed them again was a woman pushing a pram, searching, it occurred to him, for the past.
Back in the tunnel Razin’s rat was waiting for them. Its name was Boris and Razin maintained that it was shell-shocked; it had wandered into the tunnel but, unlike its fellows, had shown no inclination to swim the Volga; instead it had circled the two of them, sitting down from time to time to favour them with a pink-eyed stare. It had impudent whiskers and protruding teeth and at times Antonov felt that Razin was more concerned about its welfare than the outcome of the vendetta with Meister.
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