by David Bishop
When I came to, my kommisar uniform had been taken and replaced with a gymnastiorka shirt and matching trousers. My precious valenki were gone, too, the warm felt footwear substituted for a pair of battered, black leather boots. Even my portyanki had been confiscated, the narrow strips of linen stripped away from my feet, leaving nothing to keep my toes safe from frostbite. I had no cap, no weapon and no insignia. I was now less than nothing, the lowest form of life in the Red Army. But the greatest loss was my spectacles. Being long-sighted, I could still see my surroundings, but reading was denied to me until I got a pair of replacement glasses. The chances of finding anything that resembled my prescription were slight indeed. My punishment was complete.
The firing squad watched as I tried to dig graves for Boris and Raisa in the frozen ground, the blunt shovel bouncing off the rock-hard earth. Eventually satisfied with my abject failure, the soldiers forced me to drag the bodies outside into the snow, my gloveless hands numbed by the cold, my body shivering uncontrollably. Finally, I was ordered to make my own way to the last known position of Captain Brodsky's shtrafroty.
"Follow the Neva River south-east to Porogi. That's thirty kilometres from here. If you have not arrived by this time tomorrow, you will be found guilty of desertion and shot on sight," one of the soldiers told me. "We'll follow you to the edge of Leningrad, to make sure you don't try to hide here in the city. Move!"
So my journey began, stumbling and shuffling through the bomb-blasted streets of the frozen city, the firing squad laughing every time I fell over. I had not eaten for two days, my head was pounding from the beatings it had taken, and a terrifying numbness was creeping up my legs, but somehow I kept going. I didn't want to give my escort the pleasure of seeing me fail, knowing that news would be passed on to Tager and his wife. As dusk approached I reached the south-eastern edge of the city and the soldiers turned back, satisfied they had done their duty. My fate was in my own hands now.
I staggered on into the darkness that night, determined to reach my new posting, determined to disappoint those who wished to see me dead. I could not save Boris and Raisa, but I could stay alive and frustrate those who would gloat at my demise. Once I was clear of the city I ceased to be in any danger from German aircraft or artillery bombardment. The cold was my enemy now, the sub-zero temperatures and biting wind quickly freezing any tears of self-pity that tried to escape my eyes. I think it was sheer bloody-mindedness that kept me going, aided by a full moon that shone overhead all night long. On and on I shuffled, refusing to give in, hugging my arms around me and stamping my feet to fight off frostbite.
By the time dawn lightened the horizon I was quite lost, my head spinning from exhaustion and hunger, and I was hardly able to stay on my feet. Any sense of direction had been left behind in the night. I thought I could see the ruins of a village behind me, but was unable to understand why it was there while the frozen river was still ahead of me. Was there another settlement between Leningrad and Porogi? Had I somehow wandered through Porogi in the night without realising it? I no longer had any reason left to solve this conundrum; all my failing energy was concentrated on keeping going and staying awake, staying alive.
"What is that dubiina doing?" The words floated to me across the ice, but I could not tell from where they had come. I spun round and lost my footing, falling heavily. In my dazed state I had wandered on to the frozen river and was now trapped in the no-man's-land between our front line and that of the Germans. I had reached my destination, but walked past it in the darkness.
"Looks like another suicide," I heard a different voice whisper. They were speaking in Russian, so I knew the men had to be from my side.
"Bring him back," the first voice replied.
"But captain-"
"You heard me! We have standing orders - no suicides and no desertions. Get your men out there and bring him back."
"Yes, captain," the second man spat.
I waited on the ice, unable to move. Even if I had wanted to crawl to safety, my legs were so numbed by the cold seeping into my body I doubted that I could have gone more than a few metres unaided. As dawn turned the sky overhead a pale, eggshell blue, I saw two men crawling out onto the ice towards me. There was something familiar about both of them, but I was beyond caring where I had seen them before.
They reached me after a few minutes, an occasional shot fired from the German side of the frozen river zinging above their heads. "I know him," one of the men said after examining my bruised, bloody features. "He was on the Doroga Zhizni. He was the one who saw Constanta. What's he doing here?"
"Dying, if we don't get him back to our lines," the other man said gruffly, his blue eyes glinting coldly. "Can you move?" he demanded of me.
I shook my head, unable to speak by this time, not daring to part my lips in case the skin ripped completely off my mouth.
"Chort tzdbya beeree!" he snarled. "We'll have to drag him back. Stand up and we'll be picking German lead out our asses all the way to hell. Come on!"
Together the two men pulled me towards the Red Army's side of the Neva, never raising their heads more than a few centimetres above the ice. It took them long, agonising minutes to drag me to cover, a last volley of German fire slicing the air above our heads as we reached safety. The soldier who had recognised me produced a hip flask and forced it inside my mouth, emptying a few drops of searing liquid down my throat. I coughed and choked as the fiery concoction burned a path to my stomach, but it also revived me from my frozen stupor.
"Bojemoi," I gasped. "What is that?"
"Antifreeze. Drink enough and you'll go blind - if you're lucky!"
My saviours took off their shapka-ushanka caps and unwound the tightly wrapped woollen scarves hiding their features. Once their faces were visible, I recognised them as the penal company soldiers I had encountered while crossing Lake Ladoga in January. The smiling man who had fed me antifreeze was Yuri Antonov, still sporting a bushy blond beard and with the same gleaming, cheerful eyes. The other man was Grigori Eisenstein, his expression as sour as before. What was it the officer had told me about Eisenstein? He was the longest serving member of the shtrafroty inside the blockade.
It was Eisenstein who began interrogating me. "What were you doing on the ice, trying to get yourself killed? There are easier ways to die without you taking us stupidly with you, you fool!"
I shook my head. "I was sent to join a penal company stationed at Porogi."
"We hardly require a kommisar to look after our morale," Antonov laughed.
"I'm not a kommisar any longer," I replied, tapping my fingers weakly against the gaps on my uniform where the insignia of rank should be displayed. "I'm one of you now."
Eisenstein spat on the ground beside me. "Just what we need, another idiot to get us all killed.'
Another figure appeared behind them, wrapped inside the long coat of an officer. "Well, what's his story?" he asked tersely.
"We've got a new recruit," Antonov announced cheerfully.
The officer peeled a scarf away from his face to get a better look at me. "What's your name, convict?"
"Zunetov. Victor Zunetov." A thought occurred to me, seeping through the fog shrouding my mind. "Are you Captain Alexandr Brodsky?"
"Yes. How did you know my name?" the officer demanded.
"I've been assigned to your company."
The captain cursed, then jabbed an elbow into Eisenstein's ribs. "Do you know who this young fool's father is?"
Eisenstein stared hard at me, taking in my features, looking past the bruises and broken nose for a family resemblance. His eyes widened with recognition and he muttered a profanity beneath his breath.
"Exactly," Brodsky said. "If this whelp dies with us, you can guarantee his father will want retribution. Your families will pay the price for that, and so will mine." The captain pointed at me with his black, gloved hand. "I'll get this fool transferred somewhere else; anywhere else but here with us. In the meantime, you have to keep him in one piece. I
don't care what it takes or how many of you die saving him, but from this day onwards your most important task is making sure Victor Zunetov stays alive!"
Chapter Three
I spent the rest of that week in a blur, recovering from my ordeal. I later learned that Brodsky made other members of the shtrafroty give up part of their rations for me, so I could be nursed back to health. He even let me sleep on the floor in his quarters for three nights, until I was beginning to show signs of recovery. After that I was thrown outside with the others. None of them were pleased to see me or were particularly happy about the special treatment I had received. I spent my time conserving energy, concentrating on getting better while observing how the rest of the penal company interacted with each other. I had become intrigued by the study of anthropology while at university in Berlin. The group dynamics within the shtrafroty would have kept my former professors fascinated for years on end.
Brodsky himself was a vainglorious creature, with sandy brown hair and a carefully cultivated moustache. The captain did nothing to hide how much he despised those under his charge, plainly believing such a command was beneath him. Whenever Brodsky sent the shtrafroty out on one of its numerous missions, he never went along, deferring combat leadership responsibility to Eisenstein. There was no love lost between the two men, but the captain seemed to recognise the value of Eisenstein's extensive experience on the battlefield.
By comparison with Brodsky, Eisenstein remained something of an enigma to me during my first days with the penal company. At a guess at his age I would have said he was in his late twenties, but he looked older due to a receding hairline and his permanently squinting features. The only person Eisenstein ever displayed any affection towards was the mountainous Yuri Antonov, sometimes smiling at one of the big, bearded blond man's crude jests. Antonov was the joker of the pack, always laughing and smiling, rarely taking offence at whatever anyone else said. He appeared slow to anger, refusing to rise to the bait when one of the others tried to goad him. Antonov would simply laugh at them with a deep boom of amusement so low it must have begun in his boots.
The only other member of the shtrafroty around camp that week was Vladimir Strelnikov, a pinch-faced creature in his twenties with an unhealthy appetite for seeing the pain and suffering of others. His greasy black hair was slicked back close to the scalp and he sported a wispy moustache above his thin, moist lips. He introduced himself by offering to amputate my frostbitten feet if they turned gangrenous, before showing me his collection of severed tongues, cut from the mouths of all the German soldiers he had tortured. Strelnikov sneered when I expressed revulsion.
"Those fascist gaduka deserved what they got, each and every one of them."
Antonov warned me not to listen to Strelnikov. "If he had his way, Vladimir would murder every man he met and rape all the women. Isn't that right, Strelnikov?"
"Whores, they're all whores," Strelnikov agreed eagerly.
"Is that why he's in the penal company?" I asked Antonov.
For once Antonov's perpetually cheerful demeanour darkened. "Never ask that question, my friend," he said, a stern warning in his words. "If any of us is to trust each other, better you do not know what we did to become part of the shtrafroty. Otherwise you might think twice before saving the lives of your brothers in arms, and once that happens, we are all lost. Understand?"
I nodded at the wisdom of that, but the thought of what my comrades had done to join this company of the cursed nagged at the back of my mind. "How many of us are there?" I asked instead.
"At full strength we should be nine," Antonov said, taking a seat beside me. We were still stationed close to the ruins of Porogi, taking shelter in what was left of an abandoned boathouse by the frozen Neva River. Brodsky had reluctantly given permission to light a fire and I was using its warmth to bring my purple and black toes back to life. Antonov stared into the flames, a curious smile playing about his lips.
"We lost Plotnikov defending the Doroga Zhizni in January, and our radio operator Kamarov died a week later when Brodsky sent us behind enemy lines at Shlissel'burg. With you here we are eight, if you include the captain."
"Eight? Where are the others?"
"You'll meet them soon enough. They've gone to scout the way north to our next posting."
"Where are we going?"
"Back to Lake Ladoga," Strelnikov interjected. "Back to the Doroga Zhizni."
Two days later we set off for the Road of Life, skirting the Neva's northern edge as the frozen river made its way towards Lake Ladoga. The journey was an arduous march across barren ground, and we kept low to avoid German snipers stationed along the enemy's front line.
Eisenstein led the way, Antonov close behind him. The two of them paused every few kilometres, consulting a crudely drawn map and checking it against the few landmarks visible on the horizon. The captain had remained behind at Porogi, happy for his charges to make their own way along the outskirts of the blockade without him. Strelnikov was supposed to be bringing up the rear, but decided that I should fulfil that function to prove my worth. Eisenstein and Antonov made no attempt to intervene, so I reluctantly agreed.
Before leaving Porogi, I had secured sufficient extra clothing to keep me from freezing to death on the journey north-east. Stripping garments from the corpses of other soldiers was a grisly task, but better that than losing the use of my toes. I was most grateful to the unfortunate soul whose valenki I purloined, even though they were two sizes too small. I also acquired a weapon once more, wrenching a PPSh submachine gun from the stiff fingers of another dead comrade. Antonov spent the night before we departed teaching me how to strip, rebuild and care for my new best friend.
"Anything that keeps you alive in this frozen hell is better than any woman you ever had," he confided. "Look after your weapon and it will look after you."
It was nearly dusk when we reached an abandoned railway line that marked the way to Shlissel'burg. Eisenstein and Antonov paused on the far side of the tracks, studying something on the ground. The two men smiled as they looked back at Strelnikov and me, then ran off into the gathering darkness. Strelnikov sprinted forward to see what the pair had spotted, then followed their example. I hurried across the tracks, searching the ground for whatever had caused the others to flee.
A word had been formed from black stones in the freshly fallen snow: tselka.
"Virgin?" I wondered out loud. "What does that signify? Who's the virgin?"
I felt a cold circle of metal being pressed against the back of my neck.
"You are," a gruff voice whispered in my right ear. I spun round, already raising my PPSh, to fire but the submachine gun was smashed from my grasp by two powerful hands. Three men in white coveralls were aiming rifles at me. Behind them I could see empty spaces in the snow where the trio had been lying in wait. I had hurried right past them, not noticing their presence in the twilight.
"You're dead." The man on the left of the trio had spoken, his wild eyes glaring at me, a four-day growth of black whiskers peppering his cheeks and chin. A grimace spread across his features as he lowered his weapon. "Do that behind enemy lines and you'll get us all killed!"
The figure in the centre of the threesome pushed back the white hood of his winter camouflage suit to reveal a painfully thin face, dark hair and callow features. He could be no more than eighteen, I decided. Whom had he angered to get such a hellish posting? I pushed aside the question to accept a handshake offered by the young soldier. He smiled broadly before flipping me through the air and over his back. I landed with a heavy thud in the snow, accompanied by the laughter of my attacker.
"You're not among friends here, tselka. You're among hardened criminals - best you try to remember that!"
The last of the trio said nothing, merely shouldered his weapon and glared at me with disapproval. I slowly, painfully, got back to my feet as the others emerged from the shadows to effect introductions. The silent, brooding figure was called Uralsky, while his younger colleague w
as Borodin ("Call me Nikolai," he said soon after, apologising for the acrobatic welcome. "Don't worry, Eisenstein did the same thing to me when I joined the shtrafroty"). The crazy-eyed man with the grimace was Yatsko. Once I knew their names, our journey continued, and we soon reached the edge of Lake Ladoga. As we strode briskly on to the ice, Yatsko whispered a terse report to Eisenstein. I kept as close to them as possible, catching most of what passed between the pair.
"Next patrol should reach this side by dawn. If the fascists follow their usual pattern, we can expect an attack at least two hours before sunrise."
Eisenstein nodded. "If Constanta or one of his acolytes is involved, they'll want time to get back to their bunker in Shlissel'burg."
"The last convoy was reportedly attacked by a pack of wolves. Several drivers had their throats torn out, others said they saw the wolves stopping to lap up blood spilled on the ice."
"Good."
I could hold my tongue no longer. "Good? What the hell are you saying? Wolves don't attack armed convoys, and they don't drink blood!"
Eisenstein scowled at me. "If you want to survive this night, you'll keep silent and do what you're told, tselka."
"Stop calling me that, I'm not a virgin," I protested.
"Maybe not in the bedroom, but on the battlefield you are," Yatsko sneered. "When was the last time you killed a man?"
I had to admit I had never taken a human life.
"With any luck you won't take one tonight either," Eisenstein said. "We're hunting something far more dangerous."
Before I could speak again, Eisenstein clapped a hand over my mouth while looking up into the dark sky. The sound of flapping wings was clearly audible above the vast lake of ice.
