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

by David Robbins

  Chekov led Shaikin and Tania around the corner. Ten meters ahead were the remains of a foundation in the ground. A square of broken cinder blocks stuck up from the snow like the jagged back of a rising beast. Other bricks marked where interior walls had once stood. The blackened remains of a pink wooden house lay behind the foundation.

  A pair of hinged cellar doors showed in the ground just above the snow. The boards of the doors were pastel green with metal handles of sky blue. Shaikin yanked up one of the doors; the effect on Tania, looking into the darkness below, was of entering an underwater cave of shadowy aqua.

  She followed Chekov down a short flight of steps. Shaikin lowered the door above their heads, and she became aware of the close, piquant smell of humanity in an oily mix with kerosene.

  Tania stood at Chekov’s back. Shaikin stepped in front of her. Hidden by her two friends, she folded her arms and waited to be either introduced or discovered.

  “Anatoly Petrovich.” A woman’s throaty voice. Tania could not see its owner. The voice was energetic, not tired the way Tania expected a whore would be at the end of her day.

  “Wait,” the voice said. “I know the one you like.”

  Tania looked over the shoulders of Shaikin and Chekov. The room was square, no larger than five meters long and wide. The ceiling was made of the beams and floorboards of the house that had once stood above. The walls were concrete block, thinly whitewashed. In the amber light and deep, sharp shadows thrown by the lantern, she saw no cobwebs or dust in the corners. At least, she thought, these women are good housekeepers.

  A gramophone scratched to life. Trumpets and woodwinds blared an introduction to a song promising to be lively. Tania looked down at Chekov’s hips. The little sniper raised his elbows and snapped his fingers. He swayed to the tune, a tango.

  The low voice spoke over the music. “Now who are your friends, Anatolushka?”

  In time with the music, Chekov wobbled his right hip into Shaikin, knocking his friend sideways a step. Shaikin’s hands stayed jammed in his coat pockets.

  “This is Ilya Alexeyavich Shaikin.”

  Shaikin righted himself and Tania caught her first glimpse of the two women. They were arranged on a mattress on the concrete floor. One of the women, a brunette with a round, soft face, was larger than the other. She wore a white linen skirt and blouse. Her clothes appeared to be undergarments. Her bare arms and legs were heavy, not enough so to make them unpleasant, but large and soft. Like feathers, Tania thought, of a white dove.

  Next to the brunette reclined a thin, pasty blonde. She wore an olive army undershirt above a skirt that had been stitched from a wool blanket. A frayed pink shawl wrapped her shoulders. The girl appeared sickly, brittle, with the hurting look of bruises under her eyes. The veins in her arms and neck were like blue streaks against frosted glass. Tania could feel the girl breaking even as she smiled up at her visitors.

  Behind the two barefoot women were pastel pillows. Tania stepped forward between Shaikin and the swaying Chekov. The brunette on the mattress clapped her hands over her mouth.

  “Oh. Oh, my,” she said through her fingers. “Oh. Wait right there.”

  The woman dug down behind the mattress, through the pillows. She pulled up a small bronze tube. She rolled it in her hand, then put it to her mouth. Her lips began to glow bright red.

  “Oh,” she said, “wait. Let me get this on. There now.”

  She stood while the fragile blonde sat smiling absently.

  “Hello.” The big brunette spoke with the radiant lipstick, her mouth damask against the whiteness of her skin and the yellow cast of the lantern. She reached her hand to Tania and stepped with her knees high, still the large white bird, over the softness of the mattress through the scratchy tango.

  She said, “I’m Olga Kopoleva. My friend is Irina Gobolinka. And you are . . . ?”

  “Private Tania Chernova.”

  The woman shook Tania’s hand. She looked back at blond Irina, who gathered herself deeper into her shawl. Olga grinned at Tania and shook her hand again, more firmly, as though greeting a dignitary. Tania thought quickly of Danilov. He should meet this woman.

  Olga pulled Tania forward, ignoring Shaikin and Chekov. “Come. Please sit.”

  The woman’s lips seemed to bite at Tania while she talked. “You are a soldier? This is your gun?” She pointed at Tania’s submachine gun, strapped over her shoulder. Tania sensed herself holding back, keeping judgment bottled for now.

  “Yes. Of course it’s mine.”

  Olga turned again to the silent, wan Irina. “She has her own machine gun. She’s a fighter. A woman.” She returned her attention to her guest. “Tania, dear, do you like music? We have a few records.”

  “This is fine.”

  Irina spoke. “It’s an Argentinean tango. We don’t know the name.” Her voice was unsure, fluttery, like a butterfly in wind. The pale girl giggled. “We can’t read the label. It’s in English, I think.”

  Olga continued talking, cutting Irina off. “Anatolushka likes this one best. It’s odd, but most of the men that visit us like this one. I’ll bet they don’t even know where Argentina is.”

  Chekov sat next to Tania. “Tania’s one of our snipers. She’s one of the best. Silent as the night. As deadly as a woman.”

  Olga enjoyed this. “Anatoly, you bastard,” she said, laughing and slapping at his leg, “we’re not all killers.”

  “You are,” said Chekov.

  “Stop,” laughed Olga.

  Tania watched the large woman’s lipstick smear at the corners of her mouth. Olga’s breasts jiggled lavishly under her blouse when she shifted her attention from Chekov to Irina to her. Tania looked down at them. A woman’s breasts are the only things in the world that can move like that, she thought. They can make any room in the world, even beneath the surface of a war, into a room rippling with sensation. I’ve done it before. Olga does it now.

  “Tania.” Irina opened her eyes wide. “You’ve killed Nazis?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  “More than a hundred. Between here and Moscow.”

  Olga asked, “You were in Moscow? In the battle?”

  “No. I was outside Moscow. In the forests. I was with the partisans. We attacked German convoys.”

  The conversation, the eyes of the women and Shaikin and Chekov, had become focused on Tania. This had not been her intention, to take up space or energy on this visit. She’d simply wanted to observe, slake her curiosity, then leave. But with the unforeseen remembrance of her days with the resistance, her many sacrifices rose now to her surface. She realized that she was wearing them, without warning, in her face and voice. Her skin felt warm, prickled by the friction of the visions fleeing past her: her parents in their cozy home, whom she had not contacted in over a year—they must fear daily for her safety and for the grandparents, little knowing it was too late for their fears; Tania’s friends back in Manhattan in their two-tone shoes flirting with soldiers and buying war bonds; young Fedya dead; old Yuri dead in a sewer; so many members of her partisan cell, dead in the fields; all the mourning women, young and old, and children, in Byeloruss, the Ukraine, Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad. She looked down at Irina, the child whore, thin and white as cobwebs. Tania thought of her own lost American girlhood: cars and parties, books and speeches, her heart skipping at a handsome boy, her mind reaching for ideas. She missed America with a pang in her breast; she missed herself, deeply, in her marrow. And in that marrow, where she could feel nothing keener, burned her hatred for the Nazis for doing this to her.

  Tania tried to fight down the visions, but the ghosts in their scenery swarmed around her, as they did so often when she was alone, or more recently after she’d made love to Zaitsev. Sometimes when her woman’s body came alive in his arms, he brought the specters up out of her as if they were rising out of a tomb. Now these whores were doing it. The sexuality of their cellar, Olga’s swaying bosom, Irina’s pliant white skin, the Arg
entinean tango; Tania felt them digging at her own body, unearthing her sorrows.

  Seated next to Tania, Chekov reached into his coat pocket for a bottle of vodka. He handed it to Olga. The woman cooed over the gift. She clutched the bottle to her chest.

  Chekov looked up at Shaikin, who had dug into his own pockets. Shaikin walked around the mattress to Irina. He handed the girl four packets of chocolate.

  Olga’s eyes returned to Tania. The business of the cellar had commenced. Tania found she had no questions, no sisterhood to explore with Olga or Irina. She’d lost her preoccupation with their nature. She knew enough now; they were whores on their surface. Beneath that, she had no interest. She would accept their purpose in Stalingrad, even their contribution. Shaikin and Chekov smiled at the women while they presented their tributes. This satisfied Tania. These women serve, too, she admitted, because her friends’ smiles were indeed the same toothy smirks she’d seen on the soldiers who’d passed them ten minutes ago, young men skipping back from this cellar to their dooms with a song on their lips.

  Tania had to leave. These women had kindled something in her body, some spark in her heart and loins that, when it glowed and caught, pulled her back into her flesh. The flesh carried memory and too much pain. When Chekov and Shaikin handed over their payments, the ugliness of the whores’ trade gave her a reprieve from her visions. She flung down her warming heart in that moment to retreat without it back into the depths of what had become for her the empty husk of her emotions, her bare cell.

  These two women are more of the wartime dead, Tania thought. I have that in common with them. They’re like the corpses at the summer funerals my grandfather took me to when his patients would pass away. They were painted nicely, spoken of in whispers. They looked well and composed in their deaths.

  Olga held her gaze on Tania. Irina busily unwrapped one of the chocolate bars. Tania, too, would present the women with a gift before she left the cellar.

  “I have something for you,” she said to Olga.

  “Really?” The prostitute resettled herself into the mattress. She nestled the vodka bottle between her legs to hold it upright with her thighs and free her hands.

  Tania reached to Chekov’s waist. Quickly, she drew from Chekov’s belt his captured German Luger pistol.

  “Tania, give me that! What are you doing?”

  She tossed the pistol onto Olga’s lap. The gun struck the woman’s thigh and bounced onto the mattress beside her. It lay there, ugly against the pastels.

  Pale Irina pulled her knees away from the pistol on the bed as if it might strike at her. Olga looked at the gun beside her. Her hands fingered the bottle between her legs.

  “Right now,” Tania said, “this cellar is in our territory. That’s today. Tomorrow, this little nest of yours could be behind German lines.” She pointed to the stairs. “If a German comes down those steps, you use that pistol. You kill him. Do you understand me? You do it.”

  She stabbed her finger at Irina and Olga.

  “I’ll do your fighting for you, girls, but you die with the rest of us. You die Russian.”

  Tania reached into her coat pocket. She pulled out two chocolate bars and threw them backhanded at Irina. Then she whirled and stomped onto the first step. She reached up to push open the ocean blue cellar door.

  The door was pulled out of her grasp to rise on its own. The final light of the day flooded down with the cold. In the opening, in silhouette, stood Zaitsev.

  He held the door open and looked down at her.

  Chekov called out, “Vasha? What are you doing here? Come down and close the door. You’re letting out the heat.”

  Zaitsev stepped into the cellar and lowered the door. He walked past Tania to the edge of the mattress. He nodded at Shaikin, who stood beside Irina. He looked at Chekov and jerked his thumb toward Tania at the steps.

  “Interesting decision to bring Tanyushka along, Anatoly. Did she make it for you?”

  Chekov lowered his head. Shaikin gave Zaitsev a thumbs-up.

  Zaitsev took the Luger off the bed and held it up to Tania.

  “Yours?”

  Chekov spoke. “Mine.”

  Zaitsev handed the pistol to the little sniper. “Put it away.”

  He looked back into the shadows at Tania. “Recruiting, Tania? Danilov will be jealous. That’s his department.”

  Zaitsev turned to Chekov and Shaikin. “After today, tell them goodbye,” he said evenly. “No more. Understand?”

  Both men nodded.

  Zaitsev bowed his head in mock gentility. “Ladies.” Then he walked over to Tania and spoke to her. “You’re leaving.” He put his hand under her elbow.

  Tania jerked her arm free. “What do you mean, I’m leaving?” She pointed at Chekov and Shaikin. “If they stay, I stay.”

  Shaikin raised his arms in exasperation and exhaled as if he’d been skewered.

  Tania’s tone was sharp. “Besides, what are you doing here?”

  “You’ve been given an order, Private.”

  “By whom?”

  “By your sergeant.”

  Tania laughed. “Are you still my sergeant in a whorehouse?”

  Zaitsev thrust his arms up to open the door. “That’s enough.” He grabbed Tania’s wrist and pulled her up the steps. She hit him in the back with her other fist.

  “Tania,” Chekov called through the jingling of their rifles and stomping boots, “don’t be like that. It’s just a little fun.”

  Shaikin’s voice chased them. “I told you, Anatoly.”

  Outside, Zaitsev let her go and slammed the doors down with a bouncing clatter. She stomped off.

  Zaitsev ran and grabbed her again. He brought his face close. “What were you doing down there?”

  She tried to yank away. He put both hands on her wrist and jerked her arm down hard.

  “Stop it. What were you doing in there?”

  He can ask me this? she thought. He can visit whores and then ask me what I was doing there when he arrived?

  “Shaikin and Chekov invited me. I went to see what it was about. And who invited you?” She reached down with her free hand and grabbed his crotch. “Him?”

  She let Zaitsev go before he could force her to. “Leave me alone,” she said.

  Zaitsev released her arm. “Calm down. Listen to me.”

  She put her hands on her hips and spread her legs, as though she were readying for the ground to shift.

  He took two steps back. He thinks I might swing at him, she thought. He could be right.

  “I came to get you out of there,” he said. His hands worked with his voice, illustrating his words. “After I left you in the trench, I turned to come back to you. To talk. I saw you leave with Shaikin and Chekov and head this way. By the time I figured where you were going and caught up with you, you were already inside.”

  Tania pointed back at the cellar doors in the snow.

  “And why did I need to be hauled out of there so quickly by my sergeant? Why me and not Shaikin and Chekov?”

  “Tania, that . . .” He pointed, too. “That is a man’s place.”

  “And I don’t belong in a man’s place.” Tania lowered her hand and her voice. “Is that it?”

  Zaitsev took a breath to buy time for an answer. When none came, he shrugged.

  Tania thought of chess. If a white king could shrug when he’s in checkmate, he would look like Zaitsev right now.

  “Is that it, Vasha?” She brought her hands to her breasts. “What do I have to do to be treated like an equal by you? Do I need to kill more? I will. Just tell me.”

  “Tanyushka,” he said, “you’re a woman.”

  “Ah,” she said with angry sarcasm, “I see. So that’s what’s in the way. My woman’s body. Yes, yes, Vasha, thank you for making it so clear for me what it is I need to do. I need to stop making love to you.”

  She snapped her fingers. “There. It’s over. No more. Now I’m not a woman. I’m just another sniper.”

  �
�Tania . . .”

  “No! We’re both men now. It’s OK. We can talk like men. You’ve obviously been here before, Sergeant. Why don’t you go back inside now and join the party in the men’s place? Hurry, though. They close after dark. But you must know that already.”

  With that, she ran into the debris.

  * * * *

  TANIA SEARCHED FOR SOMETHING TO THROW WHEN Zaitsev’s steps approached the hanging blanket.

  Beside her on the floor of the snipers’ bunker stood a full vodka bottle. She’d tried to drink the stuff during her hour of sitting in the cool dirt of his corner, but she’d lost interest in getting drunk. It’s just one more way to feel lousy, she thought. I have enough ways.