Vendetta

by Derek Lambert

  ‘Of course we have Don Cossack blood in our veins,’ his father said as, guns in their hands, they waited for movement in the snow-quiet taiga.

  And now his fist was a rifle and he was peering through the sights, lowering the barrel, deviating to allow for evasive tactics. And now the fist was a bullet, on target. The Muscovite staggered back, hit the far wall and slid bloodily to the floor.

  After that no one commented upon Antonov’s rustic background.

  ‘I hear,’ Pokrovsky said later, ‘that you’ve been brawling.’

  Antonov, standing to attention in front of Pokrovsky’s desk in a small hut that smelled of carbolic, didn’t reply: his split lip and swollen cheeks answered the question.

  ‘We should think ourselves lucky he didn’t damage your eyes.’

  We?

  ‘I’m out of the competition,’ Antonov said.

  Pokrovsky touched one pointed ear, ran his fingers down his lined cheek. ‘I have arranged for you to be given one more chance,’ he said. ‘The day after tomorrow. Just nine of you. The lieutenant has departed.’ He paused. ‘But don’t be misled by regional differences. We have more than fifty languages in the Soviet Union but we speak with one tongue.’ He slipped an oblong of sugar into his mouth and drank some tea. ‘Now to business.’

  He told Antonov that he had one day in which to make an ally of his Mosin-Nagant. He pointed at an ammunition box containing yellow-tipped 7.62 mm ammunition. ‘Yours. There’s a forest five kilometres from here. Not unlike the taiga near your home.’ Pokrovsky almost smiled.

  Sitting in the Zil beside Pokrovsky who was driving, Antonov decided that he had glimpsed an unsuspected truth. That kindness is not necessarily selfless. But none the worse for that, he supposed.

  The forest, cathedral vaults of pine and congregations of silver birch, was similar to the taiga and he shot all day, taking one break, eating black bread smeared with caviar and drinking Narzan mineral water while Pokrovsky drank beer, until the gun was part of him and the yellow-tipped bullets were punching out the hearts of the black and white targets, buckling the cans that Pokrovsky threw into the air.

  On the following day he and the Muscovite with whom he had fought finished ahead of the other competitors. It had to be him, of course. When the two of them shot it out Antonov won by one point.

  Afterwards the Muscovite shook his hand and Antonov learned another truth although he wasn’t sure what it was.

  ***

  When Razin returned to the tunnel he told Antonov that a Russian sniper had been shot between the eyes in a church near Ninth of January Square. ‘Meister must have been on his way to Mamaev Hill,’ Razin said.

  ‘The obvious place.’

  ‘So we’ll stay put here for a while.’ Razin squatted next to Antonov. ‘And another thing – the Fritzes are launching an all-out attack on the north of the city tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  October 14. The sun, it was rumoured, was shining but beneath the acrid grime of the German assault there was little hope of confirming this.

  Meister watched the attack from a ruined toy factory, but it was difficult to grasp what was happening because the senses, stunned by the bombardment, lied.

  It was just before midday. According to information obtained by Lanz, five divisions, three infantry and two panzer, were attacking on a front three miles wide. Their objective: to dislodge the Russians from their last footholds in the industrial north and claim the city.

  It was, asserted Lanz, the final assault; but his tone questioned his words.

  Meister picked up a toy rifle with a sparkling red star on its butt. He aimed it at a doll with eggshell-blue eyes and fuzzy blonde hair sitting on a shelf; but he didn’t pull the trigger because the doll suddenly became his sister. He lowered the rifle; his head was full of noise.

  Lanz drew a diagram in the dust on the floor – the main factories, Red October, Barricade and Tractor Plant, lying between railroad and river. ‘They say that if we capture these we’ve won. And do you know what they are?’

  Meister shrugged.

  ‘Heaps of bricks. That’s what we’re fighting for, bricks.’

  Another wave of aircraft flew overhead to add their bombs to the shells and mortars falling on the Russians. Occasionally Yaks and Migs got among the bombers.

  The tormented ground continued to tremble. The doll fell from the shelf and lay on its side in the dust.

  ***

  To an extent Meister attributed his presence in Stalingrad to his sister, Magdalena, who was two years older than him. When, reluctantly, she had taken him as an adolescent to a café in Hamburg protruding over the water of the Binnenalster he had observed that she paid most attention, albeit not transparently, to the young men who had the most to offer – a future, perhaps, in the SS or Luftwaffe combined with athletic prowess, looks and wealth and some indefinable attraction that he merely sensed.

  Knowing that he possessed none of the obvious assets – an aptitude for languages was hardly an entrée – suspecting that he lacked the more subtle accomplishments, Meister had set about rectifying this state of affairs. Thus he had become not only a sharp-shooter on the rifle range but a very smart young man indeed with occasional access to his father’s Mercedes-Benz and a reputation as a wit that, when the natural flow ran dry, had to be augmented by memorised aphorisms from a book of quotations.

  The reputation and, in fact, the whole charade was soon demolished by Elzbeth. ‘That sounds suspiciously like Samuel Johnson,’ she said one day as, with elaborate nonchalance, he entertained her in one of the lounges of the Vier Jahreszeiten. ‘So he thought of it as well,’ Meister blustered; but his cheeks felt as though they were steaming.

  ‘Why do you bother, Karl? Be yourself.’

  What confused him was that as Elzbeth was one of Magdalena’s acquaintances, one of the set, she should accept his epigrams, borrowed or otherwise, without question. Her blonde hair made small and deceptively innocent wings in front of her ears.

  ‘How do we know our true selves? We’re all guided, influenced.’

  ‘Then we should resist,’ she said, ‘before it’s too late.’

  And so, abandoning affectation, he took her boating on the Aussenalster and walking in the countryside, and one Sunday morning he escorted her to the fish market at St. Pauli where at a stall thronged with young people who didn’t belong to the set they breakfasted on würst thickly daubed with mustard. And later that day he kissed her in the back of the Mercedes-Benz on a wharf overlooking the Elbe.

  He joined the army two days after he was pictured with Elzbeth in the German newspapers receiving the cup for marksmanship in Berlin. He was trained as a sniper and two months later he was in Stalingrad.

  ***

  ‘I presume,’ Lanz said, raising his voice to compete with the bombardment, ‘you were one of the Young Folk.’

  ‘Of course. And Hitler Youth.’

  He had been given a dagger engraved with the words BLOOD AND HONOUR and told that he could now defend his brown-shirt and uniform with it. At college grace had always been recited before meals; it had asserted that God had sent Hitler to save Germany.

  ‘Did you belong to any organisation?’ Meister asked.

  ‘The Young Offenders’ Association.’ Lanz was drinking vodka from an Army-issue flask and he was a little drunk; a lot of the troops were. ‘Did you believe all that Nazi shit they taught you?’ Lanz asked.

  ‘I believed what I saw. A new deal for Germany. A sense of purpose. Equality.’

  ‘Unless you happened to be a Jew.’

  Meister didn’t reply. He had been uneasy about the Jewish problem since the night in November, 1938, when he had seen a mob pillage a synagogue in Hamburg. His father, holding his hand on the sidewalk, had laughed as uproariously at the distraught rabbi as he had at the clowns at the circus a few days earlier.

  A Katyusha exploded nearby, its bellow distinct from the other explosions.

  Lanz said: ‘And do
you believe in all this?’ gesturing towards the gunfire.

  ‘I believe the Bolsheviks have got to be defeated.’

  ‘Bolsheviks! Don’t you realise that the end product of National Socialism and Communism is the same?’

  It had never occurred to Meister. He searched his aching mind for a devastating retort. Finally he said: ‘National Socialism is the equal distribution of benefits: Communism is the equal distribution of poverty.’

  He thought that was neat; he doubted whether Elzbeth would have agreed.

  Lanz rubbed at his bald patch as though he were trying to remove it. It looked like a Jewish skull-cap, Meister thought.

  Lanz swigged vodka. ‘And I suppose you think we’re going to beat the Bolsheviks?’

  ‘We’ve captured great tracts of Russia.’

  ‘Ah, but Russia goes on forever. Want a drink?’ offering the flask to Meister.

  ‘You know I don’t drink.’

  ‘Christ! What do you do except spout propaganda? What did I do to deserve this, nursemaid to a college kid? Have you ever had a woman?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Of course,’ Meister lied.

  ‘One like this?’ Lanz took a creased photograph of a naked woman wearing stiletto-heeled shoes from his wallet and showed it to Meister. She was smoking a cigarette in a holder and smiling coyly at the camera.

  ‘Prettier than that,’ Meister told Lanz

  ‘So who’s looking at her face?’

  Remembering the quivering embraces with Elzbeth in the back of the Mercedes-Benz, the tentative, exploratory caresses, Meister was ashamed of the flicker of arousal he had experienced when he had looked at the photograph.

  Lanz said: ‘Have you got a photograph of your girl?’

  ‘No,’ Meister said, but his hand strayed to the pocket of his tunic where, beneath studio lights, Elzbeth lay close to his heart.

  Lanz shrugged. ‘Did you expect it to be like this?’ he asked, waving the flask towards the battle in the north of the city.

  ‘I don’t think anyone realised how tough the Russians are.’

  ‘If you’d been at Moscow you would have got the general idea.’

  ‘I suppose I imagined killing and suffering. But not massacre – on both sides.’

  ‘Can you give me one good reason why I should look after you?’ Lanz asked.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Well, I can. Being with you I stand a better chance of surviving. And surviving is what I’m good at. So don’t ever think I’m doing it for you.’

  ‘I never thought that,’ Meister said.

  ‘It was your sort of people that got us into this. Prussians, Junkers.’

  ‘The French got us into this,’ said Meister, resurrecting the lectures at college. ‘And the British. The Treaty of Versailles that bled us white.’

  ‘What I meant,’ Lanz said, choosing his words with drunken care, ‘was that it was your sort got us into the first war. If that hadn’t happened there wouldn’t have been a Treaty of Versailles. And maybe we would never have heard of this arschloch of a place.’

  But the last war was too long ago for argument.

  ‘Were you a successful thief?’ Meister asked.

  ‘Watch your wallet,’ Lanz said.

  ‘They say the Russians have got a division of criminals in the 62nd Army.’

  ‘The 112th. Beware of them. They won’t get any medals but they’ll survive. Like me.’ Lanz picked up a toy soldier and pocketed it. ‘For my son,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t know you were married.’

  ‘I’m not.’ Lanz slipped another soldier into his pocket. ‘They tell me Antonov has got a nanny too. An old soldier from the Ukraine. Old soldiers, they’re survivors too.’

  Meister picked up his field-glasses and peered through a shell-hole in the wall. He saw a woman in black pushing a pram filled with rubble; she was obviously crazy but, Meister wondered, had she been sane before the battle began? He saw a Persian cat picking its way around a crater and the rotting corpse of a Russian soldier smiling at him from beneath a cloud of flies.

  He focussed the field-glasses on the fighting. A ragged line of German soldiers was advancing into the smoke. A young officer was urging them forward.

  And for a moment it seemed to him that the officer and his men were probing the cordite mists for some truth to which they hadn’t yet been introduced.

  The Katyusha that exploded in their midst must have killed them all.

  Then a breeze crossed the Volga breaching gaps in the smoke and through one of them Meister saw Antonov.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Antonov, searching for Meister in the vacuum behind the German attack, felt naked as the smoke parted around him.

  He looked to his left. A factory of sorts built on a rise, long and squat, roofless and windowless, walls pocked by shells and bullets. Good cover, good vantage …

  He threw himself to the ground taking Razin with him. The bullet hit the street lamp at the level where their heads had been. Glancing up, Antonov saw the bright wound in the green-painted metal.

  The last thing he noticed before smoke swathed them again was a woman pushing a pram, searching, it occurred to him, for the past.

  Back in the tunnel Razin’s rat was waiting for them. Its name was Boris and Razin maintained that it was shell-shocked; it had wandered into the tunnel but, unlike its fellows, had shown no inclination to swim the Volga; instead it had circled the two of them, sitting down from time to time to favour them with a pink-eyed stare. It had impudent whiskers and protruding teeth and at times Antonov felt that Razin was more concerned about its welfare than the outcome of the vendetta with Meister.

  Throwing Boris crumbs of black bread, Razin said: ‘A much maligned beast, Comrade Rat. Why? Because he’s small and quick and he gets hungry. Now if he were an elephant he would be venerated. And yet one elephant can do more damage in five minutes than a rat can do in a lifetime.’

  Antonov said: ‘Elephants provide ivory; rats spread the plague.’

  ‘Not Boris.’ Razin threw him a morsel of cheese. ‘Story-tellers through the ages have a lot to answer for. If an animal isn’t physically attractive then it’s the villain. What sort of philosophy is that to teach the young? Small wonder the school bully beats up the poor little bastard with buck teeth and muscles in the wrong places.’

  The rat’s whiskers moved busily as it ate the cheese.

  ‘What about poor old Reynard?’ Razin warmed to his theme. ‘Just because he’s got a long nose and likes chicken for dinner he’s the devil incarnate. But everyone is supposed to love pussy cats. And what do they do? They catch birds and tease them till they die.’

  ‘Foxes steal,’ Antonov said.

  ‘Steal?’ Razin, pulling at his drooping moustache, looked incredulously at Antonov. ‘Do you think Reynard knows the meaning of steal? He just spots a good meal and gets it the best way he can. He’s clever: the story-tellers have made him cunning.’

  The tunnel shook as a shell exploded near by. A brick fell from the curved roof but the rat nibbled on.

  Razin extended an eloquent, battle-dirty hand. ‘And what will the tellers of tales make of all this?’ long fingers clasping Stalingrad in the palm of his hand. ‘Glory, that’s what. Heroism. Knights in shining armour. And not just the story-tellers, the writers of school history books too. Because, you see, that’s where all this begins,’ holding his hand aloft. ‘In the schoolroom. Did you ever read about the misery of war in the classroom?’

  Antonov cast his mind back to the rows of desks with their pencilled grooves, inkwells filled with purple ink made from powder and water; heard the scratch of chalk on blackboard, smelled disinfectant and modelling-clay and pencil sharpenings. He shook his head. No, war had always been glorious, especially the Civil War.

  ‘Small wonder we grow up the way we do. The next revolution should be in the schoolroom.’

  Faintly they heard German voices chanting: ‘Russians, you’ll soon be blowing bubbles in the Volg
a.’

  ‘But surely,’ Antonov protested, ‘war brings out the best in people. Bravery, sacrifice …’ Antonov tried to free the words that were always imprisoned inside him.

  ‘Try survival,’ Razin said. He laid his head on a red cushion he had removed from a wrecked house. ‘Isn’t that why we’re cowering in a sewer with Boris?’

  Antonov rested his back against the wall of the tunnel. The tunnel was a telescope and through one end he saw a wooden balcony float past on the river with an old man clinging to the balustrade.

  He said: ‘I can’t understand why you’re here at all. You know, with the prospects you had.’

  ‘What do you want from me? Unhappy childhood? Young life permanently scarred? Son of a great man unable to emulate his father?’

  Antonov who wanted none of these things began to clean his rifle.

  ‘I had a happy childhood,’ Razin told him. ‘I collected stamps,’ as though that summed it up and in a way it did. ‘We lived in a neat little house in Kiev, in Lipki, with a white fence round it and when I close my eyes I can hear the breeze in the lime trees and feel the stickiness on the leaves and smell the river, the Dnieper, and hear the bells on the trams and, do you know, it’s more real than this. They say that when you grow old the past is more real than the present so maybe I’ve got older quicker than most. Old soldiers do, I suppose.’

  Razin’s voice aged.

  ‘And I remember the poplars – lots of trees in my memories — and the chestnuts candlelit in spring and the wide skies, and window-shopping with my parents although there wasn’t much in the windows but it didn’t matter – that’s where people make mistakes about upbringing, deprivation doesn’t mean a damn thing – and funnily enough the breathy smell from the metro station, Mayakovskaya. Have you heard the proverb, “If you use your tongue you’ll get to Kiev”?’

  When Antonov said he hadn’t Razin said: ‘To be honest I never knew what it meant. But when Russians are stumped for an explanation for anything they make up a proverb. Proverbs and superstitions, the clues to our souls.’