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

by David Robbins

  “Thank you for the party,” he said. “It was a surprise.”

  “I have more.”

  He squeezed her hands. “I’m sure. But now I have a surprise for you. Chuikov thinks the Germans are going to try a breakout soon. Tonight, four hares are going to kill Paulus.”

  Tania’s eyebrows went up. “Cut off the head of the Sixth Army and the body will lie still.”

  “Exactly. Chuikov asked me to lead the mission.”

  Not a mission, Tania thought. An assassination.

  “And which three hares are going with you, Vasha? I hope this is my surprise.”

  “You’ll be my second in command.”

  Zaitsev told her he’d also selected two new hares from the latest sniper class. Tania knew them both. One, a Lithuanian Jew, Jakobsin, tall and slender, had dark skin that seemed to sizzle with electricity when he spoke. He’s a talker, Tania thought, but she’d seen him quiet and mean. He’s strong and can shoot. His eyes, narrow and black, see as straight as crows fly. And a woman, Yelena Mogileva; she’d lived only a hundred kilometers east of Stalingrad on the empty steppe of Kazakhstan. Tania knew little about Mogileva. The woman had said few words during her sniper training. She was skinny, but her hands were big like a man’s, with pronounced tendons and blue veins. Her cropped hair, once jet, was graying. Tania couldn’t guess the Kazakh woman’s age, couldn’t tell much about her at all except that she’d definitely handled a rifle before she was handed one in Stalingrad; she was a good shot and could sit unwavering for hours behind her scope. Mogileva had her own reasons for joining the snipers; whatever they were, Tania hoped they were good enough. Why is she coming? Why do we need two women along on this mission? Vasha’s teaching her, I suppose, the same way he taught the rest of us. I’m pleased Vasha selected me. He’s flattering me, telling me he doesn’t consider me a woman in battle. He wants me near him in danger; he trusts me when the time comes for killing.

  Intelligence had pinpointed the German Sixth Army’s command bunker in the downtown sector. Paulus was reported to be holed up in the Gorki Theater at the south end of Red Square.

  Zaitsev checked his watch. “After midnight, we’ll each carry two satchel charges. We’ll work our way down the riverbank, then slip past the House of Specialists to the rim of the park. Chuikov said that Paulus’s offices and bedroom are on the western side of the building. We’ll plant the charges at the base of the wall.”

  Tania knew the rest. She’d done it all before. They’d light the eight charges, then scurry under cover of the detonation to the icy edge of the Volga.

  “That much dynamite,” Tania laughed, making Zaitsev grin, “ought to bring down the house tonight at the Gorki Theater.”

  * * * *

  SHE WATCHED HIS HANDS SHUFFLING THROUGH THE canvas backpacks. He checked each for charges, counted the dynamite sticks, and inspected the wires and connections. He was meticulous; his respect for the implements of death was plain.

  Her fascination with the Hare’s body moved her, like it had many times. In her mind she saw him naked through his white camouflage uniform. Beneath the faint lantern, his arms and chest were hairless, lean, and blanched as linen. For a short man, his muscles were long; the smooth cords beneath his skin flexed when he set the parcels near the door of the bunker.

  “All set.” He looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. Where are they?”

  She leaned against the cool dirt wall. Jakobsin and Mogileva would come under the blanket in a few minutes. Those moments until their arrival belonged to her and Vasha.

  He moved to the opposite wall. He pressed his back against it, as she had. They looked at each other across the bunker, almost mirror images.

  “Do you think,” she asked into his eyes, “this will continue?” She reached her hand out and waved it back and forth. “You and me?”

  Zaitsev’s jaw worked. He said nothing.

  “We’re soldiers. We’re also lovers. The hand does not fit the glove.”

  “Are you saying it’s over?”

  “I can’t say. I know I’m only truly alive when I’m with you. I know I’m desperate. For love, for revenge, for this to be over, for this to continue. I’m pulled, Vasha, pulled apart, and I can’t make the pieces fit back together.”

  Tania lowered her face. The lamplight fell from her cheeks to hide her eyes behind the veil of her hair.

  “What I’m telling you, Vashinka, is that I’m scared. I’m lost every second. It was easier before, when all there was inside me was hate. Now the battle is inside me, too, between love and hate, and I’m being torn up just like the city. I don’t know which I want to win; I fight them both. It’s not over. I ... I just had to tell you I don’t know what it is we’ve started.”

  Zaitsev walked to her and stopped an arm’s length away. She wanted him to touch her; she wanted him to make the decision for her now, to take one side or the other in the battle and win it.

  “It would be beautiful, Tanyushka, to love you forever. To marry and live and work beside you. To teach our children how to shoot like their mother, the partisan.”

  She heard him chuckle at her old nickname. She smiled beneath her shadow.

  “I don’t know either, Tania. We bathe in each other’s life every night, and in the morning we go out and swim up to our necks in death. It’s strange and twisted and spinning, and I can’t catch it to take a good look at it. All I can do is let time and the fates figure it out, because they’re the only ones who know what’s going on with the world and with you and me.”

  Tania raised her head. It would be beautiful, he’d said.

  “And what,” she asked, “is it you want?”

  Zaitsev seemed to answer the question inside his head first. Approving of the words with a nod, he spoke.

  “To love you forever. To never let you go.”

  Tania’s breath snatched in her breast.

  Zaitsev reached for her hand. He pulled her forward, away from the wall. There is the strength, she thought, in the hand.

  So. He loves me. Then he should know me. I will open up to him, this one man.

  Smiling close to his lips, she asked, “Do you remember, Vasha, when I said I had more surprises for you?”

  His grin curled lasciviously. “Tania, we don’t have time. Not right now.”

  “We have time for this one. I should have told you sooner. I was afraid you would send me away, or that Danilov would take me out of the hares. But now I have to tell you. Because of what you just said.”

  Zaitsev crinkled his brow. “All right. Tell me.”

  Tania pulled back from his grin to gauge all of his face.

  “I’m an American.”

  She noted no movement of his eyes or his arms around her waist. He stayed impassive, his body stock still; the hunter, she thought, waiting, always waiting.

  “No,” he said, “you’re not.”

  In English she answered, “Yes, I am, you cute little Siberian. You have no idea what I’m saying, do you?”

  “Tania, you’re speaking English.”

  She returned to Russian. “We do that in America.”

  “You’re not American.”

  “I am. My parents are Russian. They live in New York now.”

  Zaitsev began to swell with this; Tania sensed him on the move, the hunter rising from cover to engage.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Fighting.”

  “Are you a spy?”

  Tania slapped his chest with an open palm. The knives, pistol, bullets on him all rattled.

  “No!”

  “Then how did you—

  Tania bridged his lips with a raised finger.

  “When there’s time, Vasha. But you understand why I couldn’t say anything before, and why you have to keep this our secret. If the politrooks find out, they’ll make me a hero, just like you, but only in newspapers. They won’t let me fight. Please say it’s all right. Please.”

  Zaitsev shook his head. At first
Tania thought that he might reject her or the idea that she could be foreign, not Russian. But he made the head shake comic, an overblown gesture, rattling his brains hard, with a smile.

  “Yes, Amerikanushka,” he said, feigning dizziness with crossed eyeballs. “Yes, it’s all right.”

  He straightened out his eyes and pulled her to him more tightly. “When the war is over, can we go to live in Florida?”

  Tania laughed heartily at this.

  The sounds of boot steps slipped past the blanket in the doorway. Zaitsev let her go and stepped back. He shrugged. See, he seemed to say, I have to let you go so soon.

  No, you don’t, Tania thought. She rose to her toes and thrust her face quickly at him. Just before he could avoid her, just when the blanket lifted, she kissed him with a quiet smack of her lips.

  There, she thought. The moment needed to come full circle; it had to be closed with a kiss, even a small one.

  She stood quietly, her hands behind her at parade rest while he addressed the two new hares. The tall dark man and the thin woman had come only one step into the bunker. Their faces showed their awe at being included on this foray with the Hare himself.

  Zaitsev did not look at her until all four of the snipers had loaded up their rifles and explosive packs. While the two new hares were filing out the bunker door, he mouthed the question “New York?” to her behind their backs. She grimaced at him and mouthed back, “Stop it.” Like this, with serious miens now in place, Zaitsev and Tania walked up beside Jakobsin and Mogileva to go out into the Stalingrad night to assassinate General Paulus.

  The four burdened snipers picked their way down the Volga cliffs to the ice. They moved crisply along the high limestone wall. The night was thinned by a wedge of moon shining behind the clouds like a peeking child. Tania imagined the landmarks they passed beneath, checking them off on a memorized city map. The beer factory. The state bank. The House of Specialists, which marked the southern extreme of the Sixty-second Army’s beachhead along the Volga. Ahead one kilometer was the main ferry landing, in German hands now. Tania remembered floating past it clinging to a timber with Fedya and Yuri in the burning river. This night, she returned as a sniper on a secret mission with the famous Hare, who loved her, who never wanted to let her go. Who wanted to live with her in warm, sunny Florida, America.

  To her left, gossamer light shimmered on the icy Volga. The river was black and cold. But above and to her right the city cast down a heat like a match held near her cheek. The sticks are still up there, she thought. The city felt as if it were burning, the flames leaping out of its entrails just as they had the first night she’d seen Stalingrad from the opposite bank.

  The battle continues here and across Russia, she thought. So long as the sticks live on our soil, there’s still a job of killing to do.

  Forget Florida, America.

  The hate had ambushed her again. It’s so strong in me, so solid, she thought, surprised how quickly it reared to the surface. The part of me that does not hate is so thin, less than my skin. I can almost stand back and look at the hate. I can describe it, touch it, like a statue inside me. The statue grows; it’s filling me up. The hate has become me. Oh, Vasha, I want ... I want. But the hate is all of me. Every step we take on this ice, every crunch of my boots, I hear the guns, see the bodies jerk and fall, pile upon pile. Will they never stop falling?

  The Kazakh woman stumbled ahead of her. The noise laid the whip to Tania’s temper. “Get up,” she mumbled; all the jocularity and tenderness she’d shared with Zaitsev in the sniper’s bunker only an hour before had dissolved.

  But the sound of her own voice broke the spell of hatred like the snap of a hypnotist’s finger. The quick spur of anger at Mogileva returned Tania to the night chill, the rifle and dynamite packs slung across her shoulders, the mission and the line of snipers walking in front of her.

  The abrupt release swirled in her stomach. Just walk, Tania thought. Don’t think. Just follow the tall man in front of you. Vasha’s at the head of the line. Vasha will take care of it all. He’ll point you at the Germans and let you kill them. Tonight, tomorrow, and again, just follow Vasha. Stay close to him. All of life that is not war and hatred will wait. Just stay close to Vasha.

  The thought of closeness touched Tania. Stay close to him, she repeated. Stay with Vasha.

  Deep inside, in the center of the hardness that was her pain, a thrill hovered like a hummingbird in her breast. You are alive, Tania, it said. You move, you live, you love. Just stay alive.

  In that suspended second, Tania knew the beating warmth of a heart that had not turned hard, a heart that did not belong to the statue of hatred but was hers, soft and quickened and hers.

  Ten meters ahead, Mogileva tripped and fell forward. Out of the woman’s boots, like from a rocket, exploded a blast of orange light. Sand and ice ripped out of the ground, riding the detonation. Tania froze, wondering even while shrapnel from the mine clawed into her stomach if she had found love too late.

  She fell onto her back, her arms spread wide as if in greeting. She could not move; a weight pressed on her chest and abdomen, crushing her to the ground. Her mouth was engulfed in thirst, but she could not swallow. A blue spot like a welder’s torch hovered in her eyes. She felt nothing. Then came the strong coursing of her pulse and something slipping out of her stomach, a rising heat, as if someone had left a door open there into the cold night.

  Slowly the weight was lifted and laid beside her. She lolled her head to look at Jakobsin. The length of his white front was blackened and torn. Smoke ghosted from his tattered face and chest.

  Hands dug beneath Tania’s shoulders. Her head was lifted into a lap; a jumble of arms and legs gathered her in. She struggled to halt her rolling eyes. The rising in her stomach called her to come down there, to leave through the open door. No, she thought. In a little while. Let me stay a bit longer.

  She heard the voice of Vasily Zaitsev. She could not break out of herself to hear what he was saying. His hands were under her head, but the hands were not strong enough somehow to keep her eyes still. Where is he, she wondered? He is all around me.

  A shaft of agony leaped from her stomach and rose to her throat. She opened her mouth to cough it out. Warm ink burbled on her breath and ran down her cheeks.

  Tania could not move, though her senses reeled in a tempest of confusion. She closed her eyes to shut it out. Too much, she decided. Too much going on. Are these Vasha’s hands? Where is he?

  The ground disappeared beneath her. She was turned to her side; her head and her right arm dangled, pointing at the earth. Let me lie back down, she thought. It was warm and quiet, and I felt pain only once.

  Tania became aware of a pressure against her stomach. Something was tight against her there; the warmth escaping out of her had stopped. Now there was only pain, the stabbing of a thousand blades deeply into her, past her spine, out into the night like the glow from a flame. She was burning. The torment kicked at her in a rhythm, pounding like the stomping of boots.

  The pain cleared her faculties. She was alive, yet— Oh, it hurts! What happened? Panic circled her senses like a jackal. I’m wounded, in the stomach, an explosion. Pain and blood. Jakobsin dead. Mogileva. A land mine. The blast. What’s happening? Where is Vasha? Arms are under me, Vasha’s arms, legs running. Oh, the steps hurt! Go slower. No, run! Run with me, don’t let go!

  The salt taste of blood filled Tania’s mouth. In her midsection, the ache threatened to envelop her. She opened her eyes.

  Zaitsev holds me to him. He presses against me, closing my wound with his chest. Run, Vasha! He’s my bandage; his life holds mine inside me while we run.

  Stay close to him, Tania. Stay alive.

  Oh, run, Vasha, run!

  Tania swished her tongue to clear her mouth. A dribble spilled over her lips.

  In English she murmured, “Run.”

  Zaitsev’s gait slowed. He spoke. His breathing was fast and heavy but his words were clear.

&nb
sp; “Stay with me, Tanyushka. We’ll make it to the hospital.”

  Tania could form no answer. She’d spent her strength. So many things to say, and all she could utter was “run” in the wrong language.

  She began the slide down into her body, into the joggling pain, to splash in it, then to slip beneath it into unconsciousness.

  * * * *

  THIRTY

  SHE MOANED ONCE, TERRIBLY, WHEN HE STUMBLED. HE righted himself quickly from his knees, never letting go the pressure, keeping his bloody chest pressed into Tania’s open gut.

  Zaitsev ran again. The sand hissed under his skimming boots, the sound mingling with his pounding breath. His mind swerved between panic and focus: Tania’s limp weight in his arms terrified him, and her blood was running into his boots.