War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01]

by David Robbins

  Chekov and Kulikov patted each other on the back, laughing and breathless. Kostikev smiled his gilded grin. Tania coughed, struggling for air. She reached out to Kostikev’s shoulder. She pulled her hand back, bloodied.

  “Don’t worry,” Kostikev told her, beaming, as the others quieted. “I’m in love with a nurse. I get to see her now.”

  A guard in the trench handed down two bottles of vodka. Zaitsev gave the first swallow to Kostikev. The wounded man drank deeply, then reached the bottle back to Zaitsev. The clear glass was smirched with Kostikev’s scarlet handprint.

  Zaitsev looked at Kulikov. “Nikolay.”

  Kulikov helped Kostikev to his feet. Zaitsev gave them the vodka bottle. Arm in arm, the two men walked away down the darkness of the trench.

  Zaitsev stood. He could not see the icehouse but could tell by a licking glow against the sky where the building had stood.

  Chekov spoke. “I guess I’ll get some rest, Chief Master Sergeant. Good night, Tania.”

  “Good night, Chekov.”

  The little soldier yawned. Leaving, he handed Zaitsev the other vodka bottle.

  Zaitsev stood next to Chernova. The two of them were alone except for the silent guard at his machine gun. They watched the jumping light of the burning icehouse.

  “A good night’s work, don’t you think, partisan?”

  She spoke without turning her head. “My name is Tania, if you please, Chief Master Sergeant.”

  “All right, then,” he said gently, “Tania.”

  He took a swallow, then laid the bottle on the breastwork.

  “Good night, Tania,” he said, and walked away up the trench.

  * * * *

  TEN

  TANIA WOKE IN A TORPOR ON HER BEDROLL. ZAITSEV’S boot nudged her gently in the dark. A steaming cup of tea was waved under her nose. She accepted it, and Zaitsev told her that Kostikev’s wound was only a grazed shoulder. A few stitches, a roll with his nurse, and he’d be good as new.

  At dawn, the hares and bears again assembled in the giant Lazur basement. A moist coolness seeped from the concrete floor and block walls. On the far wall a hundred meters away, a row of white circles had been painted one meter above the ground. The circles were in groups of three. The first circle was small and barely visible, perhaps the size of a fist. The ring to the left of it was slightly larger, and the third was twice the size of the first. Above each grouping was a number, one through thirty. A row of barrels and crates lay before the near wall.

  Sergeants Zaitsev and Medvedev told the recruits to bring their Moisin-Nagant 91/30 sniper rifles and take a rifle and lie behind the crates and barrels. Each was given a number and told to aim at the largest circle. That circle, Zaitsev said, represented a chest shot at four hundred meters.

  After the hares and bears had slid behind cover and leveled their scopes, the two sergeants sat behind them. Tania smelled their cigarettes. She heard laughter from Medvedev. Maybe Zaitsev was telling him about the icehouse mission the night before.

  The recruits were left behind the barrels and crates for an hour, eyes straining down their sights. If one turned to speak to the sergeants or even take an eye away from the scope, Medvedev delivered a loud lecture on patience and stamina.

  Through her crosshairs, Tania watched the dawn light swell at the far end of the shop. After the first ten minutes, the white circle had begun to rise and fall; her heartbeat had entered her hands. She’d slowed her breathing and eased her grip. Finally, long after her legs and buttocks had begun to tingle from the chilly concrete floor, she heard Zaitsev walk down the line behind her.

  “One at a time,” he said quietly, “when I call your number.”

  He stood behind the recruits. Several minutes passed.

  “Twenty-eight. Fire.”

  A shot rang to Tania’s right. She held her breath to bring her target to the center of her crosshairs.

  “Fifteen.” Another shot.

  “Ten.” Chekov, at Tania’s right elbow, fired. The bang made her jerk left. Immediately, Zaitsev called out, “Nine,” Tania’s number. She corrected a millimeter, squeezed the trigger, and took the jolt, then reacquired the target quickly. A puff drifted on the brick wall dead in the heart of the circle. She smiled on the rifle stock and held still while other numbers were called and more shots barked in the shop.

  After the drill, Zaitsev and Medvedev inspected the circles. When they returned, they gave the volunteers permission to fire freely at the targets to practice aim and trigger pressure.

  “Stuff something in your ears,” Zaitsev told the recruits, who dug in their pockets for bits of paper and cigarette butts.

  The morning wore on, and Tania fired over a hundred rounds. Her shoulder ached as if there were a bullet in it. Each pull of the trigger seemed to carry a different lesson shouted by the two instructors pacing behind the firing line. You’re pulling too hard. You’re drifting to the right. To the left. Get your cheek off the stock. Relax. You’re too loose. Quicker. Take your time.

  After an hour, the instructors again inspected the targets. When they returned with serious miens, those trainees who’d erred sufficiently were set back on the line for another session. Tania was not one of them, nor was Fedya.

  She rose on legs like India rubber and wobbled from the crates to slouch against a wall. Fedya sat next to her, and she thought how good he looked. He hadn’t shaved in the three days since they’d been flung into the Volga. His new uniform was dirty. His big face was a little less the all-seeing, all-worrying poet, the crazy goose, and showed some of the steel of the sniper volunteer. Something in his eyes was gone; the big stare, the look of wonder, white and broad like an opened book. Now he held his rifle across his lap, excitement on his body.

  “Good shots, eh? We’re both good shots,” he said.

  Tania touched his knee. “I didn’t know you could handle a rifle that well.”

  Fedya sat straighter. “The Bear took me out last night.”

  “He what? What did you do?” Tania couldn’t believe it. While she crawled with the hares, Fedya had roamed the darkness with Medvedev. She’d been eager to tell Fedya of her own adventure at the icehouse but now swallowed it. She motioned with her hands as if reeling in yarn, to draw out his story.

  Fedya shifted his weight. “Sergeant Medvedev said since I was the only freshman in the group, he could teach me from the beginning and I wouldn’t have anything to unlearn. At midnight we went through the trenches to the Dolgi Ravine. A machine gunner on the ridge was firing at the wounded being evacuated to the river. Sergeant Medvedev let me shoot him.”

  Tania leaned forward. “Just like that? You shot him?”

  The poet from Moscow had killed his first German and on the morning after possessed so few words for it. Tania was amazed. She thought it would have torn his heart out.

  Fedya ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know, Tania. It was ... he was shooting at the wounded and the nurses. I got so angry. I didn’t have any problem shooting him. I just . . .” Fedya looked at his feet.

  After a moment, he arranged his rifle in his lap. “Yes,” he said, bringing his eyes up to hers, “I shot him.”

  Fedya pulled from his pocket a fresh black notebook. He showed her the first page.

  “There it is. October twenty-sixth, 1942. Two-fifteen a.m. Machine gunner. Three hundred meters. Chest shot. Dolgi Ravine. Witness, V. Medvedev.”

  Tania flipped through the clean white pages. Each page a life. A German life. A broken stick. I want my own notebook, she thought with envy. I’ll fill up fifty of these.

  Fedya tucked the booklet away. “I heard about your raid on the icehouse last night. The sergeant and I heard the blast. It was something.”

  Fedya waited for her to speak.

  “I made a bet with myself you were in on that,” he added.

  She nodded. “It was something.”

  He reached his hand out to her. She folded her arms tightly over her chest and looked away at the ot
hers in the room, some walking about, some sitting in groups, others still with their attention fixed on their rifles. She shook her head, almost trembling.

  “Are you all right?” He lowered his hand.

  “Yes.”

  She rose, then leaned down and brought her face close.

  “Don’t ever touch me in front of the others. Ever.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t do it, Fedya.” She turned away, then stopped and whispered to him angrily. “I must be as good as the others—better, even. And I will not be viewed by them as just a woman. I will not be a nurse or go work a radio in a bunker. That’s where I’ll end up if I’m seen holding your hand. There’s time. There are places. But never until I say so. Do you understand?”

  She looked into Fedya’s face, wanting and expecting to find a ripple of pain there. She saw concern. She saw purpose instead of hesitation.

  What have I done? she thought. The boy is in love with me.

  “Tania, I only wanted to make sure you were all right.” He rose also, shouldering his rifle, and turned to rejoin the bears. “And no, I don’t understand or agree.”

  She stopped him. “Fedya?”

  “Yes?”

  She quietly asked, “Have you told anyone I’m an American?”

  “No. And do you know why I haven’t?”

  He paced back to her the distance he had walked away. Close to her, his large chest near, she felt heat; the kill had not made him colder but had inflamed him. The poet, the scared boy, was impassioned with a gun in his hands.

  Fedya spoke slowly. “Because if I did, they would treat you differently. They’d protect you and parade you like a show pony. I have enough sense to know that, Tania. Give me credit.”

  He spun and walked off, his rifle clutched in one mitt.

  After thirty minutes, Zaitsev and Medvedev ordered everyone back behind the crates and barrels. The intermediate-sized circles represented a head shot at 300 meters. The smallest circle was also a head shot but at 450 meters, the maximum distance at which they could expect to work. These targets were to be fired upon at will.

  “Begin,” Medvedev called, and walked behind the trainees. Zaitsev stood near Tania for five minutes. Through binoculars, he watched the blooms of brick dust issue from her target. With each bullet, words of encouragement and invectives flowed into her ears while Zaitsev, and Medvedev elsewhere along the line, molded the volunteers as quickly as possible into snipers to bedevil the enemy.

  * * * *

  TANIA LOWERED HER RIFLE. SHE WAS CERTAIN THAT SHE could not physically tolerate firing one more round. Her elbows, knees, eyes, and especially her right shoulder were pummeled and swollen. Her hips felt locked. She had to roll out of her sitting position onto her stomach and push up to get off the floor.

  The trainees limped to the mess line. Each was given a bowl of warm gruel, a plate of sliced meat with bread, and a tin cup of tea. She sat on a crate and looked into the queue where Fedya stood. He nodded. She pointed at the crate next to her.

  She wanted to dilute her angry comments of the morning. Perhaps there was a way to make Fedya understand her feelings without cramming them into his ears with such force. They had made love. It had been good, passionate, a release. But what baggage did the act carry? Did it mean they were joined, their spirits entwined the way their bodies had been? Had they been consecrated by Fedya as lovers, turned into pretty images in one of his poems? Or were they nothing more than what Tania felt them to be, two warriors on the edge of a battlefield sharing the last shreds of life left to them? Tania had not visited the depths of love while rocking on the bed with big Fedya. Yes, they had both cried out. But he had called her name.

  Tania watched him collect his rations. She saw the agreeable confidence of his motions and thought, There’s no room in me for Fedya’s innocent love. I am full with sorrow and bitterness enough for a hundred hearts. I’ll be his friend. Perhaps I’ll sleep with him again. But I will not fall in love. He’ll accept that. Or he’ll step aside.

  Before Fedya could join Tania, Danilov hopped in front of her. The commissar inclined his head in a mannered greeting and sat on the crate next to her. The crate groaned when the rotund little politrook unbuttoned his greatcoat. He took out a pencil and opened his notebook in his lap. A blur of scrawl covered every line and margin as he flipped to one of the few blank pages.

  “My dear,” he began, “I am Captain Danilov. I believe you know who I am and my own mission in this sniper unit. Of course, I do not have the honor of actually being a sniper. But I have taken a great interest in the activities of this first class of trainees. I will be describing your activities and lessons for the rest of the army through my articles in In Our Country’s Defense. Perhaps you have read one or two of them?”

  “No, comrade commissar.”

  “Well,” he replied with a smile, his single eyebrow a cloud over his dark eyes, “maybe you’ll read this next one. You will be in it for your part in last night’s icehouse raid. What can you tell me?”

  Tania looked to Zaitsev, who was speaking with some of the hares. She wished he’d save her from this unctuous, dangerous man perched beside her with his legs kicked out in front of him, croaking like a toad. She knew that with a word this commissar could send her out of the sniper school to a noncombatant role. And Fedya was right; if this commissar learned an American was fighting in their number, she would become a curio, a political and propaganda coup, too valuable for the rodina to risk her taking a bullet.

  “Have you spoken with Comrade Zaitsev?” she asked. “He was the leader of the mission.”

  “We have spoken. It was he who insisted I talk to you. Apparently you killed a Nazi with your bare hands last night. And you lit the fuses that blew up the headquarters.”

  Tania looked at the commissar’s little feet. His ebony boots were shiny. She wondered, How does he keep them that way?

  Danilov continued. “What do you think of Comrade Zaitsev? And what do you think about being one of his hares?”

  Tania searched for something to say. To her surprise, there was more than she expected in her storehouse of words. She realized they were not the words the commissar wanted to hear. He expects me to give him a heroic quote, she thought. How magnificent Zaitsev was in leading our most dangerous mission last night. What an honor it is to serve under such a man. I can’t tell this commissar the truth, that I have no idea whether Zaitsev is a hero or a strutting coward; he seems to me to enjoy his growing status as a headline for In Our Country’s Defense, one of the many new and improved icons of the Russian cause. No, I can’t say true words to this little Chekist, that I also find Zaitsev disturbing, that I want to touch his veined hands and flat Siberian face; when his voice tells me to move or stop, to aim left or jump right, my body follows. How badly I want for him to be the hero that Danilov is constructing.

  “Comrade Zaitsev is a bold man,” she said, and the commissar set upon his notebook with his flying pencil. “He is indeed a hero, and all those who fight by his side will do heroic deeds. I am honored to be a sniper, one of the hares, under him.”

  “And after the building blew up last night, you ran, simply ran, through the streets to reach the Russian lines?”

  “The explosion covered our sounds. I couldn’t hear myself run. Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev ran ahead of us. We followed. It wasn’t my decision to make. But it was the right decision.”

  Danilov closed his notebook. “One last question, Private Chernova. In these dangerous times, it is important that Russia is defended by, let us say, committed fighters. As a woman, you would die for the rodina? You are prepared for that?”

  The Communist bastard, she thought. His question carries the same stench as the Green Hats’ queries on the Stalingrad road.

  “Comrade commissar, I would not die for the rodina as a woman. I would die as a Russian.” Tania cocked her head as if aiming her sniper rifle. “And I certainly will not die a coward. Comrade.”

 
; Danilov tucked his notebook under his arm and yanked in his legs. He stood from the crate. He was barely taller when standing than Tania was seated.

  “Of course, my dear.” He buttoned his coat with one hand. He stopped and reached the hand to Tania. When he spoke, the dramatic and false qualities of his voice were gone.

  “Of course. Comrade.”

  Tania shook the flabby hand. She watched Danilov walk away. Zaitsev looked across the room. He nodded to Danilov when the little commissar bustled past him.

  Tania replaced her spoon into her boot. She laid her plate down and walked back to the firing line. Three other soldiers were taking the time for extra practice. Their shots echoed in the great hall while she knelt behind her crate. She brushed aside empty casings, spilling them to clatter across the floor. She stuffed paper wads in her ears and threw back the bolt to send home another round. Fixing her eye through the scope on the smallest circle, she curled the second fold of her index finger over the trigger. She watched the target bob, riding her heartbeat. She waited, her breathing shallow, for her hand to steady. In seconds the target grew dead still under the crosshairs. It seemed huge, unmissable, summoning the bullet. She pulled the trigger slowly, evenly. The rifle cracked and recoiled into her tender shoulder. Through the scope, she found the sudden red breadth of the brick wall, struck in the center of the smallest circle. She pulled back the bolt to fire again.