‘Where did you meet him?’ Razin asked.
‘Outside Univermag.’
‘And you followed him?’ Antonov asked.
‘Of course.’
‘You did well. Here, I can’t match the watch but take this.’ He handed Misha a two-bladed penknife, its sheath covered with mother-of-pearl.
‘There’s something wrong,’ Razin said.
‘What can possibly be wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ Razin said. ‘One gold watch, one penknife, he’s doing well …’
‘I’ll use them to buy food,’ Misha said. ‘And information. Did you know I’ve met General Chuikov?’ He finished the sunflower seeds and stood up. ‘Now we must go.’
‘To the new place?’ Razin lit the primus stove on which their supper, soup made from dried potatoes and bread, stood in a bowl, cold and congealed. ‘Not tonight. We’ve just got here. We’ll have a look at it tomorrow.’
A bubble rose from the stagnant depths of the soup and burst on the surface.
Misha pulled his arm. ‘No, we must go now.’ He was blinking rapidly. He turned to Antonov. ‘Please.’ His hand on Antonov’s arm was a small claw.
Razin, stirring the soup, said: ‘What’s the hurry? Meister isn’t going anywhere. Not on a night like this.’
‘Tell him,’ Misha said to Antonov.
‘Tell him what? Anyway, let’s have supper first.’ Antonov found some black bread in the rattle box and cut it into two and then into three.
Razin took a swig of home-made vodka he had found in a shed in a devastated vegetable garden. ‘We’ll take a look in the morning.’ His voice sounded suddenly sleepy.
‘No,’ Misha said. ‘Now!’
‘You see,’ Razin said, ‘I knew there was something wrong.’ He rolled a pellet of black bread and threw it to the rat.
***
Lanz, consulting the map in the hooded beam of a flashlight, said: ‘I think we’re close.’ His voice was muffled as though it was full of sleet.
They could hear the river close by but they couldn’t see it: they hadn’t expected it to be so dark. Occasionally German flares burst overhead but even they had lost their dazzle.
Meister slipped his hand beneath his cape and felt the bulge in his tunic pocket. The white cap with the small peak. He intended to give it to the family of the dead boy.
What was Antonov doing now crouched in the tunnel? Writing to his girl? A country girl with a fine skin and white, white teeth. Meister envied him sitting in his tunnel writing to his girl.
Lanz said: ‘According to the kid Antonov gets into the tunnel through a shell-hole fifty yards from the river. If it wasn’t for that hole he’d be sitting in sewage. I wonder what the hell they do in there?’
‘Play chess maybe,’ replied Meister who didn’t want to share Antonov’s letter-writing.
‘Anyway it will be dry in there and they won’t be expecting us and if you lower yourself through the hole you’ll be able to get in a couple of shots before they go for their guns.’
‘Maybe,’ Meister said.
‘Or maybe I should roll a grenade down the tunnel.’
‘It’s got to be a bullet,’ Meister said. ‘You know that.’ He tapped the Karabiner through the waterproofed webbing. But he wasn’t being totally truthful with Lanz.
He stumbled over a body. He couldn’t tell whether it was Russian or German.
Lanz gripped his arm, doused the flashlight. They froze. Ahead a movement, a splash of water in a puddle. Lanz’s fingers bit into Meister’s arm. With his other hand he drew his pistol.
The flare exploded above them, light blurred by the sleet. As a machine-pistol opened up. As Lanz falling to the ground and pulling Meister with him, fired his pistol at the gun-bursts. The shooting stopped. They waited, pressed into the mud.
Lanz crawled forward. Meister slid his rifle from the webbing and covered him. Finally Lanz stood up and beckoned him. He rolled the body over with his foot. ‘Secret police,’ he said. ‘NKVD. Christ, look at that gun.’ He picked it up, it looked home-made. ‘They must make them in their tool-sheds,’ adding: ‘Thank Christ.’
‘Why “Thank Christ”?’
‘Because if they didn’t they’d strangle us with their bare hands.’
They moved on in what they hoped was the direction of the tunnel.
***
‘We must go now,’ Misha said. ‘We must.’
‘When we’ve finished eating,’ Razin said. ‘Boris doesn’t like to go without his supper. Do you?’ He threw the rat another pellet of black bread. ‘In any case, what’s the hurry?’
‘The Fritzes are going to attack this stretch of the river bank at dawn.’
‘You wouldn’t lie to me would you, Misha?’
‘I know about these things.’
Antonov said: ‘We’d better do what he says.’
‘I don’t trust him. Do you?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ He saw the political officers emptying their pistols into the soldiers floundering in the river. Since then he had adopted a new policy: neither trust nor distrust, neither believe nor disbelieve: it was easier that way. ‘But if the Germans do take this stretch of river bank we’re trapped.’
Razin wiped his mess-tin clean with a piece of bread which he ate, chewing slowly.
Misha said: ‘You won’t even get wet, we’re going underground.’ He pulled at Antonov’s sleeve. ‘We can get there through the tunnel on the other side of the shell-hole,’ pointing into the darkness beyond the candlelight.
Antonov, neither believing or disbelieving, began to pack his gear.
***
‘There’s the shell-hole,’ Lanz whispered. The sleet had eased and Meister could just make out a black wound in the hump of the tunnel.
‘Good,’ Meister said. ‘Now we’ll be able to find it easily.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘In the morning,’ Meister said, glad at last he could release the deceit. ‘At dawn. When we come for him.’
‘Don’t give me any of that shit,’ Lanz said. ‘We’ve come for him now.’
‘I can’t shoot him down there,’ Meister said. ‘Not hiding in a sewer.’ There was sometimes dignity in death; he had seen it already on the battlefield. ‘You don’t shoot a man in the back or when he’s eating or sleeping.’
‘I do.’ Lanz drew his pistol.
‘No.’
‘Try and stop me and you get the first bullet.’
And he was away, swallowed up by the black wound, and Meister was shouting to Antonov in German and broken Russian and he was down in the darkness of the tunnel making for the faint grey orb where the sewer disgorged into the river.
The beam of the flashlight startled him. He watched it explore the rounded walls, pick out some boxes, a couple of mattresses.
Lanz’s voice reached him in echoes. ‘The little bastard has double-crossed us. He came here and warned them.’
Meister, following the beam of the flashlight, saw a pile of sunflower seed husks on the carpet.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
In the subterranean world of Stalingrad women were in charge. In cellars, sewers and connecting tunnels they shepherded what was left of families – old men, babushki, children – into groups where, surrounded by prams, punished chairs and primus stoves, they cooked and clucked and crooned. Sometimes they camped beside the neighbours who had lived next to them above ground and where thus able to exchange the terrible tidings of war as they had once exchanged gossip.
During the night, and sometimes in daylight when there was a lull in the bombing and shelling, they emerged from their burrows to scavenge for provisions and, headscarved and predatory, they didn’t look much different from the days when they had shopped at the local gastronom or challenged the cashier’s calculations on the abacus in Univermag. At least as they foraged in the rubble they didn’t have to queue. But sometimes they didn’t return and their old and their young were beckoned into another ci
rcle.
As Antonov and Razin followed Misha into the vaults of ground held by the Germans, occasionally surfacing to run from one haven to another, the numbers thinned out but those remaining had a permanent air about them and Misha explained that they were directly beneath the remains of their homes. ‘Where someone died,’ he added.
A women called out: ‘Misha, come. Drink some soup.’ She wore black and was barrel-shaped and her eyes were small above the bunches of her cheeks, but for one surprising moment Antonov saw her as a young girl and her eyes were wide and clear as she peered into the future.
Misha whispered: ‘She lost her two sons in the air-raid on August 23. I used to play with them, Georgi and Andrei. They were twins. People said they couldn’t tell them apart but I could.’
The woman ladled soup into a wooden bowl. ‘Here, drink, it’s good stuff. I found some potatoes and cheese rind and some flour.’ Steam rose from the bowl.
Misha looked at Antonov and Razin. ‘Go on, drink it,’ Razin told him.
Misha took the bowl from the woman. Arms crossed, she nodded with maternal approval as Misha put his lips to it.
Antonov looked around the cellar. An old man and woman sat close together inside a circle of battered possessions; outside the circle stood two heaps of small clothes and some wooden toys.
The woman turned to Antonov and Razin. ‘What brings you down here?’ she asked.
‘Misha knows a tunnel where we can surprise some Fritzes.’
‘Good. Kill as many parasites as you can. Soup?’
Antonov shook his head. ‘We’ve just eaten.’
‘Then you’re lucky. But sit down and have a smoke.’ She handed them a tin of makhorka and some newspaper. ‘A drink?’ She passed Antonov a bottle of vodka and when, smiling, he refused: ‘You don’t drink firewater? Are you sure you’re a Russian soldier?’
‘He’s a Siberian,’ Razin said, lighting an untidy cigarette, and Misha, leaning forward in the oily light of the stove, said: ‘That’s Yury Antonov,’ but the name meant nothing to the woman and Antonov was relieved.
‘Where in Siberia?’ she asked.
‘Near Novosibirsk.’
‘Ah, I went to Tomsk once. A long time ago. And you?’ to Razin.
‘Kiev.’
But Kiev was beyond her horizons.
She said: ‘I hear there are ice floes on the Volga.’
‘Mushy stuff,’ Antonov said. ‘There will be ice on the Ob by now.
‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the Ob.’
‘One of the longest rivers in the world.’
‘The Volga’s different,’ dismissing the Ob. ‘It takes a long time to freeze right over. But soon the ice-floes will be as hard as concrete and it will be very difficult to cross it. Any news of a counter-attack?’ she asked Razin.
‘There’s always news of it but it never comes. If it does come this is how it will be.’ Razin drew a diagram on the dust and the flagstones. ‘From the south, fifty miles or so from Stalingrad, and from the north-west across the Don. That’s where the Fritzes are weakest,’ he explained.
‘I’ve heard that re-inforcements are on the way,’ the woman said.
‘Let’s hope the Fritzes haven’t heard as well. If we do counter-attack and the armies from the north and south meet up then they will be surrounded in Stalingrad. Just as we are now. And you,’ nodding at the woman and the old couple, ‘will be able to escape across the Volga on an ice-floe.’
Misha began to hum Katyusha. Boris inched towards the food and warmth.
The woman said: ‘Mother of God, that’s the fattest rat I ever saw.’
‘That’s Boris,’ Razin said.
The woman threw a stone at the rat; it retreated but not too far. ‘Rats! They’re making stews with them in some cellars.’ She turned to Antonov. ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘One, Alexander.’
‘The same age as you?’
‘Younger,’ said Antonov, remembering that she had been the mother of twins.
‘And you?’ to Razin.
‘Just me.’
‘Enough, I shouldn’t wonder. Rats! God in heaven. How old is Alexander?’
‘Sixteen. He wants to be a pilot.’
‘Didn’t you?’
‘I was medically unfit,’ Antonov said. ‘Then they found I could shoot straight.’
‘Have you shot many Germans?’
‘A few.’
‘Shoot some more for me.’ She poured vodka into a tin cup and drank it. ‘Are your parents alive?’ And when he said they were: ‘Tell me about them.’
He told her about his mother’s authority in the house, his father’s affinity with the outdoors. He saw his mother masking the windows with newspaper to keep the cold at bay; saw his father hand-scything their own plot of wheat. He saw the frost patterns like ferns on the inside of his bedroom window; he breathed on them and his mother and father slithered away and he was back in the cellar.
‘You like hunting?’ the woman asked. ‘Most Siberians do.’
‘I went whenever I could.’
‘So you like killing?’
‘I never thought of it that way.’
‘And now?’
‘It has to be done.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t like it,’ and hoped he was telling the truth.
‘I went hunting for food the other day,’ she said. ‘A soldier gave me a grenade. A pineapple, he called it. Like an egg with squares cut in it. He showed me how to use if it I was stopped by parasite soldiers. You pull out a pin and when you throw it the lever comes away from the egg and it explodes a few seconds later. Anyway I was stopped by a German soldier shouting at me from behind a wall. I had found some old cans of meat and I didn’t want to lose them so, without really thinking, I pulled the pin and threw the pineapple and, because he was so surprised I suppose, the German didn’t do anything about it and the pineapple exploded. His body was in a terrible state but his face … His face,’ she repeated after a few moments, ‘was very young. Perhaps nine years older than … Anyway let’s say nine years older than Misha.’
She looked at Misha but he was asleep on the flagstones. Gently she covered him with a blanket.
***
She woke them an hour before dawn. Shook them and gave them tea from an ancient samovar; the old couple slept on, arms round each other as if they were on their honeymoon.
‘How do you feel?’ she asked and when Antonov gave the old peasant reply: ‘Better than tomorrow,’ she smiled.
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘Quite a target with that fair hair of yours.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘black hair’s worse against snow.’
‘God go with you.’
He felt her gaze lingering with them as Misha led the way through a trapdoor into what was left of her house. God go with you … in a society that had rejected religion.
He had mentioned these habitual references to God to Razin and the Ukrainian had replied: ‘Communism is a religion.’
Misha said: ‘We have to go above ground for a little way now.’
Outside the sleet had stopped but the night air had a snow-coldness about it, and the rubble was slippery underfoot as they made their way from the cellars of the State Brewery to the vaults of the State Bank to the basement of Univermag.
They were deep inside German-held territory.
Razin, pistol in hand, shone his flashlight. They were in the furniture depository; there was even a bed there; Razin lay on it and the springs played a few chords of rusty music.
He said to Misha: ‘So where the hell are you taking us?’
‘Beneath the stage of Gorki Theatre. Under Red Square to the railroad station. Through a tunnel to Tsaritsa Gorge. There’s a church there overlooking my school.’
‘So?’
‘That’s where Meister is.’
Razin, exploring the basement wi
th the flashlight, said: ‘Odd that Meister should have chosen your school.’
‘It’s a good hiding place.’
‘A coincidence, though. Don’t you think so?’
‘I suppose so.’ The flashlight lit Misha’s face; his eyes were wide and dark in his sharp features.
‘You took him there, didn’t you? Got the watch for telling him where we were.’
‘No!’ Misha blinked; in the beam of the flashlight Antonov saw tears squeezed from beneath his eyelashes.
‘Leave him alone,’ Antonov said. ‘There’s no point.’
‘Then came to us – and got a penknife.’
‘I led you away from your tunnel.’ Tears trickled down his cheeks.
‘Who do you want to win Misha, Meister or Antonov?’ Razin asked.
‘Antonov, of course. I’m a Russian –’
‘I know you do,’ Antonov said. ‘And I don’t care how you got the watch and I gave you the knife. What does it matter? Soldiers go looting, the prizes of victory. And we’re going to win, aren’t we, Misha?’
Misha nodded, pressing his fingertips to his eyes.
‘All right then, let’s go to school, your school.’
***
The Katyusha exploded as they emerged from Gorki Theatre. It killed the big rat outright and knocked Antonov, Razin and the boy to the ground. The last thing Antonov saw before he lost consciousness were flakes of snow falling like feathers from the darkness above.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Antonov’s mother came towards his bed, bedclothes smelling as always of warm cleanliness, carrying a bowl of steaming borsch. His father stood at the door, smoking rifle in his hands. Alexander stood on the bed-rail beating his chest like a gorilla.
A breeze coming from the wheatfields rippled the curtains and he could see cranes flying high in a summer sky. Tasya took the bowl from his mother and spooned borsch to him. When he refused it she offered her bare breast.
Then Alexander swung on a vine and Antonov caught his hand and Misha said: ‘Not so hard, you’re hurting,’ and Razin, pulling on his moustache, said: ‘Welcome back.’
Vendetta Page 9
