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

by David Robbins

  She picked up the bottle.

  Zaitsev pushed aside the blanket. Tania cocked the bottle back to heave it but set it down. She would throw words instead.

  “Go away and fuck someone else.”

  She folded her arms and legs tightly around herself like a beetle that had been touched.

  Zaitsev walked to where she hunched against the bunker wall. He hung his machine gun, helmet, and canteen on a hook. He knelt in front of her. She drew in even tighter.

  “Find some other whore, Sergeant.”

  He winced. Her pain was his; it flowed around them.

  “I don’t want to smell those women on you.”

  “Tania . . .”

  “Go on, Vasha, go have your fun.”

  “Tania, I—”

  “Shut up!” She reached for the bottle.

  Zaitsev took the bottle and set it out of the way.

  Tania tried to poke him in the eyes with her stare. She did not blink, feeling she’d crack if she did. She knew she had frozen stiff in the whores’ cellar. Even before she looked up at his form outlined in the doorway, she’d recoiled from the awakening of her body and emotions when Irina and Olga had paired off with Shaikin and Chekov. Her anger at Zaitsev’s sudden presence there and his patronizing attitude, following her to take her out of the “man’s place,” shoved her all the way down into the dark waters inside her, beneath the ice, where she sat now.

  How dare he humiliate me in front of Shaikin and Chekov! Treat me like a dog that’s gotten off a leash and must be chased down and retrieved! Tania, you’re a woman, he said. Those two whores were women. Is that how he sees me?

  She rose to her feet to gather her machine gun and the vodka.

  Zaitsev’s voice stopped her. “I’m sorry.”

  Tania laughed, facing him. “Don’t apologize. We’re both free. We can both make choices. Right now, I choose. I choose to get satisfaction for my woman’s body somewhere else.”

  She saw Zaitsev’s shoulders droop. His face tumbled, his hands fell. Good, she thought. Even as I freeze, he melts.

  “Tania, don’t . . .”

  “I already have. We both have.”

  He stepped forward. Zaitsev the hunter, she thought. Let’s see how he performs now, how he tracks and hunts. Let’s see what he finds in this great frozen forest.

  Zaitsev looked stricken. He sat at her feet.

  Without looking up, he spoke. His voice held the mournful sound of wind in empty buildings. Listening to Zaitsev, she grew sadder than him.

  “What can I say?” he began. “It’s hard for me, too. There’s so much killing. My friends die. My family waits in Siberia. Every day, every awful day, there’s no rest, no break. And now, this . . . this Thorvald is hunting me.”

  Tania knelt in front of him. She laid her rifle and the bottle in the dirt.

  Zaitsev did not look up at her. He paused, acknowledging that she was near him. She looked at his crown, at the thick, short hairs crowding, reaching to her.

  “After you left, I went hunting. I just roamed, I couldn’t concentrate.” He held out his hands as if showing her something small and tender. “I came looking for you. I had to find you and talk. To tell you you’re important to me. You’re how I survive. If I lost you, this would all go back to being a hell again.”

  Zaitsev brought his face up to her. His eyes shone. He blinked as if looking into the sun.

  “Now I feel like you’re someplace I can’t follow.”

  He reached to her lap for her hands; she allowed him to take them. His grip was warm, firm.

  “Tania, forgive me. I didn’t know what you meant to me. I didn’t know what made me follow you there and act like that. You were right. I . . .”

  Tania pulled back her hands. She brought her knees again to her chest, wrapping them tightly with her arms. She lowered her head onto her drawn-up knees. With her eyes open, looking into the small, dark cave made from her face, arms, and knees, a tear skimmed down her cheek. She shook her chin to make it fly off and land on the dirt floor.

  She felt him move closer. His voice came from near her forehead, buried in her arms.

  “I do now,” he whispered.

  Then Tania’s hair was in Zaitsev’s hand, pulling up to bring her face out of her cave. She knew the lamp was betraying her, that the path of the tear must be glistening.

  He leaned over her. His lips grazed her cheek, dipping into the trail of the tear. He cupped it with his lower lip and followed it to her eye. His breath in the wetness on her face was lush.

  She wrenched her eyes shut, squinting in a spasm as the ice inside her fissured and cracked open. Instantly she flew up through it; the water, no longer frozen but warmed now, fell from her, cascaded out of her closed eyes, down her cheeks, into his scooping lips. She flew out and above herself, her body left behind to convulse in his arms. She looked down and saw everything around her, the corpses and hatred, and shame, all of it, out in the open now, shimmering and cleansed in her raining tears.

  Zaitsev held her. His arms were wings, freeing her from the ice, flying her high into the cloudburst, into the wind blowing through the ruins of the city beneath her, soaking in her rain.

  * * * *

  TWENTY-ONE

  BLOOD HAD SEEPED THROUGH THE THIN LINEN COVERING the body, blotting into a rosette above the head. Damn it, thought Zaitsev, with the number of blankets they’re airlifting to us over the Volga, couldn’t they spare just one thick one to lay over Morozov?

  Konstantin Danyelovich Morozov had been one of Viktor’s bears and a friend of Zaitsev’s in the 284th, a fellow Siberian. Now he was a large corpse, shot through the cheek beneath the right eye, the back of his head split open. The bullet that killed him had bounced off his telescopic sight, smashing it.

  Zaitsev stepped away as two men lifted Morozov’s stretcher onto the back of a sled. They would pull it to the caves at the water’s edge, the storage area for the dead, to await evacuation and burial once the river froze.

  After the Volga turns solid, he thought, we’ll see these bodies link into a stream of sleds, like black ants teeming away from a picnic, thousands without end. Bodies going, blankets and vodka returning. But still no ammunition. No reinforcements.

  That’s a sure signal that something is up. The Germans have hurled as many as ten divisions at us since August. We’ve countered with less than five divisions of reinforcements. My snipers haven’t had a full complement of bullets to work with in the entire month of November. Even Atai Chebibulin has been frustrated in his efforts to find extra ammo.

  The generals and politrooks keep telling us to hold out. Hold out for what? We’ve been given the job of drawing as many Nazis into the city as possible and then keeping them here. We could wipe them out of Stalingrad right now with enough men and ammo on our side. The Nazis are shivering, hopeless. The force has gone out of them. They’re not soldiers any longer, just the limp, molted skins of former fighting men. But Stalin and his generals are holding back their thrust, hoarding our ammo, keeping us in check. It means they’re building up to strike back. They must be. They haven’t forgotten us.

  Something is coming. And it’s coming soon.

  Thorvald knows it, too. He must. He’s a colonel. He’s not like me, a dirty little sergeant getting his information through the grapevine or out of sterilized articles written by the likes of Danilov. He’s been flown in to kill me, just me. He goes home when he’s done it. He’ll want to do it soon.

  Zaitsev looked across the frosty crust forming at the river’s edge. He’d seen many frozen rivers in Siberia. He knew this ice wouldn’t be thick enough for trucks and horse-drawn carts until mid-December.

  And Morozov, also a Siberian; Zaitsev shook his head. Morozov would see no more rivers, nor sky nor life.

  Zaitsev turned away. Another friend. Another hero carted off on a sled like baggage, one more memory to safeguard and avenge.

  Morozov.

  This has Thorvald’s smell. Thorvald is ta
lking to me. He’s writing messages, drawing a map of where to meet him, scribbling in the blood of Baugderis, Kulikov, Morozov.

  And Shaikin.

  Ilya Shaikin had been shot through the neck while spotting for Morozov in sector fifteen on the southern rim of the city center. The sector ran along the front line below the. Lazur in the afternoon shadow of Mamayev Kurgan. In this thin slice of downtown, Red soldiers were burrowed inside several formidable and well-placed buildings. These had become impregnable strongholds, with wave after wave of Germans crashing against them only to be repulsed by withering Russian counterfire. These fortresses were so steadfastly defended that they’d become landmarks on Red Army maps. In most instances they carried their former names, such as the House of Specialists, the state bank, and the beer hall. But in a few cases the previous stature of a building had been superseded by a new identity, arising out of the remarkable adventures of its Russian defenders. Such were the L-Shaped House and the Old Mill, whose names evoked murmurs of awe for the fighting prowess of their guardians. The most famous of all the strongholds was Pavlov’s House. The badly damaged apartment building had been unofficially renamed for the indomitable Russian sergeant Jacob Pavlov, who with twenty men had occupied the ruin on Solechnaya Street on the front line since September 29. Pavlov continued to deny the Nazis access to the Volga, which was only two hundred meters behind him. He’d held so long in place that the commanders had taken to calling him “the House-owner.”

  In the past three days, Zaitsev and Viktor had received reports of renewed German sniper activity south of Mamayev Kurgan, near the city center. Medical units had come under fire while evacuating the wounded in the alleys and streets in the area around Pavlov’s House. Two officers and a private had been shot through their hearts. One nurse had been killed by a bullet under her chin, another wounded by a bullet through the neck.

  It made sense to Zaitsev that Thorvald would avoid the factories: the sheer numbers of dead there would obscure his handiwork. It would hide his scent, the scat of slaughter, which he trusted would draw his quarry, the Hare, to him.

  That dawn, Shaikin had volunteered with Morozov to scout the reports of German snipers in sector fifteen. “You can’t be everywhere at once, Vasha,” Shaikin had said at the end of the meeting in the snipers’ bunker. “Just in case it’s our Headmaster shooting up the place. I’ll go have a talk with the wounded nurse. Then Morozov and I will take a look.

  “Oh, by the way,” Shaikin said, readying to leave, lifting the blanket in the doorway, “I’m sorry about yesterday afternoon. Chekov and Tania talked me into it. She should never have been in that cellar. You were a good fellow about it.”

  “Why should you be sorry, Ilyushka? Why would it matter to me if Tania was there?”

  “Vasha,” his friend said with a smile, “let me use Chekov’s words, his exact words, when he told me. He said, ‘Comrade Zaitsev is a very silent sniper, you know. But he’s quite a loud loverboy.’ “

  Shaikin’s last laugh was muted behind the dropping blanket.

  Now Shaikin lies in a field hospital for evacuation. Tania had run to tell him about it in the afternoon. “Vasha! Morozov is dead, a bullet to the brain. Shaikin has been shot through the throat. Shaikin dragged Morozov’s body out of their trench to where an artillery spotter saw them and sent help. Morozov’s body is at the Lazur. Shaikin is in the hospital in sector thirteen in critical condition. They said he had his hand clamped over his neck, Vasha, to keep the blood in.”

  * * * *

  “ILYUSHKA.”

  Shaikin opened his eyes, the begging eyes of a maimed animal.

  Shaikin gasped, “Vashinka.” The name was almost lost in the gush of air from the wounded man’s mouth, as though he had to fully empty his lungs to push the word through the gauntlet of pain in his throat.

  Zaitsev looked down on his friend. Shaikin was sunken into a stretcher propped on bricks. His neck was wrapped in clean gauze. His hand was crusted red between the fingers from his own blood.

  Shaikin clenched his eyes. Inhaling, his mouth remained open in a suffering circle, a small dark well. Zaitsev was stricken by the gurgling deep in his friend’s throat.

  “Don’t talk, Ilya.” He put his hand on Shaikin’s bloody fist. “Nod your head. Was it Thorvald?”

  Shaikin squeezed Zaitsev’s fingers. His eyes opened. His head shuddered up and down. Yes.

  “You talked to the wounded nurse? Was it him, too?”

  Shaikin winced. It seemed not from pain but from a thought.

  He squeezed Zaitsev’s hand again and spoke.

  “Nurse.”

  His burbling voice was more sorrowful for Zaitsev than the bandaged throat and faded face.

  Shaikin’s mouth twisted. “Dead,” he said. He brought his hand up to his neck to point at the bullet entry point where blood was now seeping through the bandage. “Nurse, here.”

  Zaitsev recalled what Tania had told him that morning. Two officers and a private, shot through the heart. Then the nurses and Shaikin, pierced through the neck like gaffed fish. Morozov, killed by a bullet through his telescopic sight. Like Baugderis.

  Thorvald’s stench again. He’s shooting everything in sight, even medical officers and nurses. And he’s doing it with a flourish, an unmistakable style, so I’ll be sure to recognize his tracks.

  Four days ago he displayed his abilities on the dummy Pyotr on the eastern slope of Mamayev Kurgan. The next morning, he shot Baugderis and Kulikov. Then the Headmaster moved south and waited. What was he doing? Why the three-day gap?

  He was looking. He was searching for the perfect blind, a shooting cell into which he could disappear and kill anything Russian moving near him. And he found it. He can approach it invisibly and escape immediately. I know him. There, in his little fortress, he’s curled up like a serpent, bringing down five medical personnel in the past two days and this morning the two snipers who confronted him, Morozov and Shaikin.

  Yes. He’s settled in. He wants this over with. He’s making it clear; he wants to go home. So he’s engraved an invitation in lead and copper and flesh and blood and sent it to me.

  Come, the Headmaster has written. Come, Chief Master Sergeant Vasily Gregorievich Zaitsev, to the same spot where your friends met me today. Ask little, dying Shaikin. He’ll gurgle out the address for you.

  Come, Hare.

  Thank you, Headmaster. I accept.

  * * * *

  THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED MORE QUICKLY THAN THE light. Zaitsev hunched his stiff shoulders. A cold ache ran down his neck to his lower back. For two hours, without break, he sat staring into his periscope.

  The contours of the ruins and rubble dimmed through the eyepiece while the curtain of dusk lowered. He was in the identical spot that Shaikin had struggled to describe for him, where Shaikin had taken his bullet. Behind Zaitsev was a black patch in the dirt like a hunter’s blaze on the trench floor, where Morozov had fallen. Zaitsev surveyed one more time the bank of apartment buildings southwest along Solechnaya Street. He leveled his gaze and looked to his right to take in the 250 meters of open ground in Ninth of January Square, with its spilled fountains, broken benches, and uprooted shrubs and trees. The park had become a perplexity of trenches, destroyed vehicles, and craters. The square was bordered on his left by three blocks of Solechnaya Street. At the left-hand corner of the park, across the street, was Pavlov’s House. Behind the square, running along its northwest boundary, opposite where he sat, were shops and office buildings interrupted by alleys and avenues. This, Zaitsev judged, had been the heart of Stalingrad before the war.

  Finally, he lowered the periscope with hands numb and weary. He’d accomplished what he’d come to do: memorize the details of the front line from this vantage point. If anything changed over the next several days, any rock moved or brick stacked, he would know.

  He pulled off his white mittens to blow into his hands. He cracked his knuckles and stretched his palms to animate his grip. From his pack, he pulled a
pad and pencil to draw hurried sketches in the dying light.

  Zaitsev stretched his legs, which had tightened from sitting for so long in the biting air. Beneath his feet was the stained ground where Morozov’s blood had pooled and soaked down. Zaitsev slid a few meters to the side. It was not proper to linger on this spot where one friend had splashed his life into the earth and another had been mortally wounded. It seemed somehow a sacrilege for him to sit here, as if on graves. Spirits were here, where a man had died. He thought how his old grandfather would have lectured him for thinking this way; Grandmother Dunia, shaking her birch stick, would have told him to respect those spirits and listen to them, they are of the dead and know things we do not.