by David Bishop
I was striding through one of the graveyards created to hold the bodies of those who had been killed during the siege. Most of the graves were unmarked by religious symbols. Twenty-five years earlier the revolution had brought a new atheism to Russia, and most of the soldiers in the Red Army were raised without the beliefs of old. Our faith lay with the revolution itself, not on religious dogma passed down through the centuries. So I was used to seeing no crosses or other religious icons in the graveyard. Sometimes a fresh mound of earth would be adorned by the dead soldier's helmet, but this got scavenged within a few weeks by those still alive.
Yatsko had sent me to collect our daily orders from Brodsky. A week earlier the captain had shifted his quarters a kilometre behind the front line, leaving Yatsko to run the Smert Krofpeet in his absence. Brodsky had offered no pretext or excuse for his sudden retreat, simply saying he wished to spend as little time as possible in our company. Even tormenting Eisenstein had lost its appeal for the captain. He treated Eisenstein with ill-disguised disdain on the few occasions they met, preferring to send his messages through others.
I had been through the graveyard many times and paid my surroundings little attention when I first entered it that morning. My mind was troubled by an incident from an hour before, when I had seen how far the gulf between Sophia and Eisenstein had grown. I heard their voices while walking past one of the underground bunkers and went closer, planning to ask Sophia if she wished to accompany me on my errand for Yatsko. But the violence of their words stopped me in my tracks, so I remained outside, furtively listening in on their argument.
"You won't even let me touch you," Sophia said with a quiet desperation in her voice I had not heard before. "Don't you love me anymore, Grigori?"
"I told you to stay away from me," he retorted. "It is over between us."
"Why? Because you decide so? Don't I get some say in our future?"
"We have no future! Don't you understand that?"
"No, I don't." There was a long pause and I could hear Sophia sobbing. "I trusted you, Grigori. I even let myself care for you. Do you know how hard it was for me to do that? I thought you were different. What's changed?"
"Can't you leave me in peace, woman?" Eisenstein raged.
"Woman? Is that all I was to you? Another bliad' you could use and throw aside?"
"Stop asking me these questions, damn you."
"Not until you start giving me some answers. When we started this, I told you my fears, my hopes and dreams, my innermost secrets... I even told you about the officer who tried to rape me, the one that sentenced me to this godforsaken shtrafroty as punishment for denying him what he wanted. I shared everything with you. Why are you pushing me away, shutting me out?"
"I said leave me in peace!"
I heard the sound of flesh smacking against flesh and someone falling to the ground inside the bunker. It didn't require much imagination to figure out that Eisenstein had lashed out at Sophia, another symptom of his increasing instability.
"Is this about Yuri?" she asked softly. "I know how much you miss him, how much he meant to you. But you have to let him go, Grigori. Once you admit he's gone, once you can mourn for him, then you'll feel better. The pain gets easier to bear, I know it does. All three of my brothers died in the first week of the siege, but I learned to live without them. You've got to learn to do the same without Antonov."
"Stay away from me," Eisenstein muttered before storming from the bunker, shoving his way past me. I let him leave before going inside to find Sophia. She was hastily wiping her tears away but could not hide the angry red mark on the left side of her face, nor the hurt in her eyes.
"Did you hear all of that?" she asked.
"It was difficult not to," I said, smiling weakly. "Are you alright?"
"No. But he's the one you should be worried about." Sophia ran out of the bunker, fresh tears running down her cheeks. She collided with Strelnikov, who was on his way in. He grinned at her distress.
"I see the ice queen is still getting the cold shoulder from Eisenstein. Do you think she'll let me have a taste instead? No point letting her go to waste."
"Lay one finger on her and I'll break both your arms," I snarled before setting off for Brodsky's quarters.
As I walked between the first few graves in the burial ground, my mind was busy going over what I had witnessed. Perhaps I could have gone inside the bunker sooner. If I had sided with Sophia, maybe Eisenstein would have listened to reason, but I doubted it. He was in a world of pain and torment all his own. Needing our help was not enough now. He had to want our help. Until then, Eisenstein would only become more isolated.
I was passing the fourth line of graves when I stumbled over a discarded helmet. I picked it up, looking round for the most recent burial mound, thinking the helmet must have rolled off the grave during the night. What I saw shocked me. All the graves were empty. No, not empty - they were devastated. Someone must have dug them all up during the night. But there were dozens of graves, all with their soil thrown aside, the lids of the coffins lying askew.
I ran back to our encampment, calling for the others to come and see. It took some persuading but eventually I got all the squad members to the graveyard, even Eisenstein.
"You brought us here for this?" Yatsko complained. "We've seen the work of grave robbers before, Zunetov."
"We've seen cases where one or two freshly buried bodies were dug up by starving civilians driven to cannibalism by their hunger," I said. "There must be forty or fifty corpses missing here. Some have been in the ground for months."
"I came through here yesterday," Strelnikov said quietly. "All these graves were intact then."
"So the bandits have gotten organised," Yatsko blustered. "So what?"
"They're not bandits," I insisted. "They're cannibals, grave robbers!"
Uralsky examined several of the desecrated burial mounds while we argued. He jumped down into one of the broken coffins, studying the earth around it. "This wasn't the work of grave robbers," he commented.
"Who was it then?" Yatsko demanded.
The sniper pointed at the remnants of shattered wood. "These coffins were opened from the inside. The dead rose from their graves last night."
"That howling we heard," Sophia said, realisation dawning on her face. "It must have been calling them, summoning them up from the earth."
"Don't be ridiculous!" Yatsko snapped. "Corpses do not rise from the dead!"
"I didn't believe in vampyr before I joined this squad," she replied. "Are you also going to deny they exist?"
Yatsko had no answer to that. He glared around at the rows of empty graves. "Even if you're right - and I'm not saying you are - where would these corpses go? They can't have simply walked across no-man's-land. We have sentries along the entire front line and they would have been seen."
"Most of the sentries retreated to their trenches last night," I pointed out. "They couldn't stand the sound of that wailing."
"So where do you suggest these walking dead went?" Yatsko asked.
"Wherever their master called them," Eisenstein whispered hoarsely. "The Germans can't win this battle by conventional methods, so they have engaged in psychological warfare instead, trying to terrorise us into submission. First the vampyr, now this: raising our own comrades from the grave. Even death is no defence from Constanta and his kind."
"You don't know Constanta had anything to do with this," Yatsko spat.
"Don't I?" Eisenstein asked, stroking the wounded part of his neck. "How can you be so sure?"
Yatsko lost patience with us. He ordered the rest of us to fill in all the graves before stomping off to report what had happened to Brodsky. "I forbid you from mentioning this to anyone else. Morale is already low. Spreading rumours and lies about this incident will only make matters worse."
It was long past midday by the time our work in the graveyard was finished. We returned to camp and rested for a few hours, waiting for Yatsko to come back. When he didn't app
ear by dusk, Uralsky and I went out on patrol along the edge of the front line. Patrol was a misnomer for what Uralsky did in such circumstances. He would find a vantage point from which to watch the German sentries on the other side of no-man's-land. Most knew better than to stand where they could become a target for our snipers. But new arrivals to the front line were not so wise. When Uralsky heard of fresh faces among our counterparts on the German side of the blockade, he made it his mission to give them a deadly welcome.
Uralsky would lie down and wait, for hours if need be. Everything had to be precisely as he wanted before he would even rest a finger against the trigger of his rifle. Wind speed and direction were important, but so was the amount of movement made by the target. Few snipers had the luxury of more than one shot, so they had to make it count. I had known Uralsky to wait for three days in one case, before firing his weapon. If the shot was not perfect, he would not take it. At times I felt he was offended by the lack of precision amongst the rest of us on the battlefield. Everything he did, everything he said, was achieved with utter economy. Not one wasted word, not one wasted bullet. Certainly he had nothing but disdain for the PPSh I carried as my weapon of choice. It was crude but effective for an amateur like me. To him it was a blunt tool, like the club of a caveman.
That night we were lying atop a vantage point, waiting for his quarry to appear at a German lookout position opposite us. Uralsky would refuse to acknowledge my presence once his target was in play, but it was my best chance to talk with him while we were waiting, away from the others. I asked him how he became so skilled as a marksman.
"Practice," he said.
I waited for him to say more, having once been told in a psychology lecture that most people could not stand any gap in conversation which lasted more than a few seconds. The vast majority would feel obliged to say something, anything, to break a silence after seven seconds. Uralsky felt no such obligation. He sat for most of a minute, staring straight at me, refusing to give in to my ploy. I cracked first, inevitably.
"I could practice the rest of my life and never be as good a shot as you."
"You started too late," he replied.
Another long silence followed, after which I abandoned any attempt to outwait him. "When did you start shooting?"
"Young."
"Fifteen? Ten?"
"Seven."
"Bojemoi! I don't think I'd even seen a gun before I was ten."
Uralsky smiled, but did not reply. This is like drawing blood from a stone, I thought. Time to try another approach.
"Who taught you to shoot?"
"My father's father. We hunted wolves and other predators in the snow. The meat was cured so it could keep us alive through the winter. The pelts got sold at market in the spring to buy what we could not grow or make ourselves." I listened, fascinated by this account of his early life. It was the most I had ever heard Uralsky say in one day, let alone a single conversation. As he talked, his left hand gently stroked the side of his rifle, like a lover's caress. "But the pelts had to be perfect, otherwise they were worth nothing."
"How could a pelt be flawless if you shot the wolf?"
Uralsky tapped a finger below one of his eyes. "You shoot the animal through here, at such an angle that the bullet does not escape their body." He frowned. "I miss my grandfather. Yuri looked a lot like him, you know."
"I didn't."
Uralsky nodded sadly. "The blond hair and the beard, the size of him... They were just the same. Just the same..."
I was just about to ask another question when movement on the far side of no-man's-land caught Uralsky's attention. Within moments he was fully stretched out on the ground, all talk of his grandfather and Antonov forgotten, utterly focussed through the sniper sight atop his rifle. Two hours I waited beside him, and in that time no movement came from Uralsky. He could have been a statue, but for the trickle of urine that escaped him after a hundred minutes.
Eventually the waiting got too much for me and I crawled down backwards from our vantage point, leaving him to finish the job. I could be of no further use and might distract him from the target. Better I return to camp to see what had become of Yatsko. It was not like him to stay away from us for an entire day. Besides, I wanted to know what Brodsky had to say about the dead rising from their graves.
I got back to find Strelnikov dead, Sophia sobbing by a fire, and Eisenstein staring distractedly at the full moon overhead. I hissed a curse and bent down to examine Strelnikov's body, pressing my fingers against the side of his throat, searching for a pulse. His neck was broken and his lifeless eyes stared past me, a startled look of disbelief fixed on his features. The skin across his face was torn and ripped, with several fragments of fingernail still lodged in the bloody flesh underneath. I tried closing his eyelids but they refused to obey, so I laid a plashch-palatka rain cape over his head. Sophia was in no shape to answer any questions so I approached Eisenstein instead. He acknowledged my presence, but little more.
"What happened here?" I asked. He ignored me. "Grigori, I need to know what's been going on. Yatsko could be back soon and-"
"Yatsko is already back," Sophia interjected. "He saved me, not Eisenstein."
"Saved you from what?"
She pointed at Strelnikov, her hand trembling in mid-air, her eyes refusing to look at the corpse beneath the rain cape. "Him."
When I first arrived, Sophia was facing away from me, so I didn't see how torn her clothes were, nor did I notice the bruises and cuts on her face. She had been fighting and she had lost, but Strelnikov had lost more. He had lost his life. Glancing about, I could see no sign of Yatsko, so I moved closer to Sophia and handed her a hip flask of crudely made vodka. The dead man's grisly necklace of garlic and human tongues was on the ground between her feet; Sophia must have torn it off him during their struggle. I removed it from her sight while she drunk gratefully from my flask, her face reacting with satisfaction to the pain caused by the alcohol as it moistened her split, bloody lips.
"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked gently. "If you don't, I understand, but it might be better if-"
"He was waiting for me when I got back from patrol," she muttered, staring deep into the fire, its flames reflected in her eyes.
"Strelnikov?"
Sophia nodded, careful not to say his name out loud. "I tore my gymnastiorka on some barbed wire, so I went down into one of the bunkers to darn it. He was waiting for me. He had been drinking, I don't know for how long, but the place reeked of cheap alcohol. Some kind of brandy, I think. He came out of the shadows and got in between me and the doorway. Said I had been teasing him for weeks, months, giving him glimpses of me. Said he knew I wanted him, but Eisenstein had gotten to me first. Now that was over, it was his chance." She shook her head. "I never gave him any reason, never..."
"I know."
She wiped her nose on the sleeve of her tattered khaki blouse. "I tried to fight him off, down in the bunker. I fought with everything I had, ripped half my nails off clawing his face, but he was too strong for me, too strong. He tore my clothes, pinned my arms above my head, trying to force himself inside me. But I stopped him," she said, smiling with grim satisfaction before the horror of what she'd been through claimed her once more. "I shoved my knee so hard into his groin it lifted him clear off the ground. He fell over backwards and I ran outside screaming, calling for help."
"When was this?"
"One hour ago, maybe two. I don't... don't remember exactly." She took a deep breath. "I made it this far when I saw Eisenstein. He was sitting in exactly the same place he is now. He never moved from that spot the whole time. Strelnikov found me, got me cornered. I screamed at Eisenstein to help, to defend me, but he looked right through me. Strelnikov pinned me down on the ground. This time he beat me to make sure I wouldn't fight back. Everything after that was a blur. Then I heard a cracking, popping sound, like little firecrackers going off. When I opened my eyes, Strelnikov was dead and Yatsko was wiping his hands clean. He saved
me from... He saved me."
As Sophia said this, Yatsko emerged from one of the bunkers and walked towards us. He stopped on the other side of the fire, his face impossible to read.
"Get yourself changed and cleaned up," he said gruffly to Sophia. "I sent for Brodsky; he should be here soon. The captain will want to talk to you." Sophia nodded numbly, standing up with some difficulty. "Zunetov, you better help her."
"No, I can do this by myself," Sophia insisted, but she didn't move, her eyes fixed on Eisenstein nearby. I went round the fire to talk with Yatsko, who had folded his arms across his chest.
"What you did was the right thing," I told him quietly.
"I don't need your approval," he sneered.
"I know, but I want to thank you. I was wrong about you. I never thought you would intervene like that."
Yatsko snorted. "I know how your mind works, Zunetov. You think you're clever, but you know nothing about me. I don't pretend to be a good person, but I'm not a rapist. If I want to hurt someone, I do it in other ways."
"I'm... sorry," I said feebly. "I misjudged you."
"Save your confessions for a priest," Yatsko scowled before stomping off.
Once he had gone, I saw Sophia move closer to Eisenstein, her eyes still ablaze with anger. "You sat there, watching what that scum tried to do to me, not lifting a hand to help. Why?" she demanded.
But Eisenstein did not reply, did not even look her in the eyes.
"Why? Tell me!" Sophia cried, but still got no reaction. She slapped Eisenstein hard across the face, again and again, exhausting her fury upon him. He took each blow without flinching, making no attempt to defend himself. Finally, when her anger had run its course, she staggered back from him, sadly shaking her head.
"Have you become a monster too, Grigori? Is that it? What makes you any better than Strelnikov or Constanta or any of the other fiends that walk this battlefield?"
Finally, he looked up at her, one hand rubbing the bandage on his neck. "You don't understand," he said before getting up and walking away.
