Vendetta

by Derek Lambert

  The gunshot didn’t startle him. Nor the scream. But he relaxed his hold on the Karabiner and his finger forgot the trigger.

  Lanz said: ‘All right, I was wrong: it wasn’t Antonov. And yes, they were stupid, weren’t they. Stupid and dead.’

  When Meister told Misha what had happened he went back to the fire frowning. He sat for a while staring into the glowing remains of knowledge.

  Lanz said to him: ‘It wasn’t true, was it, what you told us about your father?’

  ‘No,’ Misha said. ‘Both my mother and father were killed in the Stalingrad during the fighting,’ and he burrowed deep into the blankets.

  ***

  At dawn, as the big guns broke open the day, Meister asked Misha: ‘Why did you do it? Why did you warn us? Don’t you know we’re the enemy?’

  And Misha said: ‘You’re not the enemy. And Antonov isn’t your enemy.’

  ‘Then who is?’ Meister asked but Misha merely threw another schoolbook onto the rekindled fire and watched the sparks chase each other up the chopped-off chimney.

  ***

  The following morning, after he had stolen breakfast, Lanz made a football. He constructed it with book-binding, sacking and an old pair of shoes and bound it with string and it was almost spherical.

  ‘How did you play with only one goal?’ he asked Misha, pointing at the posts chalked on the wall.

  ‘We had two teams’, Misha told him. ‘And we just kicked it about and tried to score goals and whoever happened to be in goal was allowed to use his hands to stop it.’

  ‘Then that’s how we’ll play it,’ Lanz said. ‘You and me. Five minutes each half. Russia versus Germany. I’ll kick off – just as we did last year.’

  At half-time, timed by Meister on the school clock, the score was 1-1. Misha, pale face polished pink by cold and exertion, still looked fit but Lanz, breath steaming like a race-horse’s after a gallop, had to lean against the wall.

  In the second half he recovered, racing around the playground on his bow legs, teaching Misha a trick or two with the ball. One minute from the end he scored.

  ‘Come on Russia,’ Meister called out.

  He looked at the clock. Thirty seconds to go. But Lanz’s legs were bending. He attempted some fancy footwork; Misha took the ball from him. As Misha steadied himself to shoot Lanz ran back to the goal.

  Misha shot. Lanz got his fingers to the ball but it hit the wall inside the posts.

  ‘Full-time,’ Meister shouted.

  ‘But nobody won,’ Misha said.

  ‘Nobody every does,’ Lanz said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The ice-floes were trying to shoulder the row-boat out of their river. Or send it to the bottom. The shudders as they ground against the hull passed through Antonov’s body.

  Unable to see the water from the bottom of the boat – just the dark sky and the heaving arms of the oarsmen – he imagined them as sharks on the attack.

  Razin’s voice reached him from the huddle of wounded soldiers. ‘We’re half way across.’

  A yellow flare lit the sky. Antonov shut his eyes but its brilliance penetrated his eyelids.

  Soviet guns on the east bank fired a few salvoes and German machine-gunners raked the river but the bullets were a long way from the row-boat: the flame-thrower had seen to that.

  When the flare died the cold advanced up his leg. He saw his father, brown face half-mooned with white by the peak of the cap he wore in the fields, paddling in the clear waters of the Ob, trousers rolled up to his knees, giving him swimming lessons.

  From the river beach, his mother, pregnant with Alexander, transmitted smiles of encouragement. She set great store by swimming, regarding it as a sophisticated accomplishment practised outside their land-locked steppe and today he was expected to conquer the breast-stroke.

  But the water this June day in the Silver Birch Festival was icy and his father had as much idea of swimming as he had of ballet-dancing. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘in you go. Kick with your legs, push the water aside with your arms.’ He made vague thrusting motions with his hands as though he were pushing aside undergrowth in the taiga.

  In fact he wasn’t interested in whether his son could swim or not – water was for fish – but at festival time he indulged his wife, rewarding her for the years of toil. Today he had bought her a pair of miniature birch-bark shoes.

  Yury, not hearing authority in his father’s voice, stayed in the shallows, white and stiff and pimpled with cold, while his mother, plump face bunched with frustration, gestured from the beach.

  Behind the beach couples played ping-pong on sagging tables; on the grey sand families spread themselves in the sun; in the water young men wearing bathing costumes that, when saturated, drooped alarmingly at the crotch, chased girls and splashed them.

  ‘Go on,’ his father urged. ‘For your mother’s sake.’

  ‘I’ll sink,’ Yury protested.

  His father pointed at the young men and girls. ‘They aren’t sinking.’

  ‘They were taught to swim.’

  ‘I’m teaching you.’

  Yury thought his father should be standing in the water, gun in hand, waiting for duck to fly into his vision.

  From the beach he heard his mother’s pleading voice. And heard her in the future, beside the water pump: ‘Of course Yury can swim now.’ She had never attached much importance to shooting.

  His father said: ‘If I had a swimming costume I’d join you.’ He smiled to show that it was a joke; adults often did that. ‘Come on, for your mother’s sake,’ wanting to get it over with, sink or swim.

  Yury stared at the clear water. Tresses of weed moved lazily. He took a step forward and mud spiralled to the surface. A tiny fish, contemplating the disturbance, darted away.

  Tensing his muscles, drawing a deep breath, he threw himself forward …

  The cold advanced rapidly, almost covering his legs. He shouted: ‘Hey, we’re filling up with water,’ remembering that, on that sunlit, silver-birch day, he hadn’t swum a single stroke and never had since.

  Razin reached down. ‘Shit, it’s pouring in,’ he called out.

  ‘Then block it,’ one of the oarsmen called out.

  Another ice-floe hit the boat, then another. The sharks, Antonov thought, had smelled a wounded prey. He saw their teeth on the other side of the hull.

  ‘Christ it’s cold,’ Razin shouted.

  The water reached Antonov’s hip: soon only his head would be clear, if he could raise it.

  Razin called out: ‘Bale you stupid bastards, bale.’

  Antonov saw a steel helmet scoop water from beside him. The water was in his ears drowning sound. He raised his head, sound returned. But he couldn’t hold up his head for more than a few seconds. He heard Razin shout: ‘I can’t feel my hand: my arm’s like a stump.’

  The steel helmet dipped and scooped.

  ‘How much further?’ Antonov asked.

  ‘Farther than that,’ Razin said and his voice sounded frozen too.

  The back of Antonov’s neck ached from supporting his head; any moment now he would have to lay it back gently and let the water into his ears, into his nostrils and down to his lungs. A stupid way to drown, lying on the bottom of a row-boat. He trembled with the cold and the proximity of the unknown.

  He eased his head into the water. Shut his eyes as he waited for it to extinguish hearing and breathing. The water reached the lobes of his ears, stopped.

  Razin said: ‘I can’t feel my arm.’

  The oarsmen grunted as they pulled. The steel helmet filled and emptied, then paused. The water rose above the lobes of Antonov’s ears. He tried to raise his head again but it was too heavy.

  He felt the nose of a big ice-shark butt the hull. Saw it wheel and return. The boat shuddered.

  Antonov heard Razin cry out. The cry submerged. The water was ice in his nostrils but gentle on his eyes. He breathed a little water. He cried out a bubble of sound. He tried to swim but he had no faith
and, apologising to his mother on the beach, he floundered between his father’s legs, a deathly white beneath the rolled-up trousers.

  * * *

  Snow fell on November 16 and settled in for winter.

  Its luminosity was the first thing Antonov noticed when he regained consciousness. He saw the whiteness through a window of the hospital and he knew that outside it was beautiful.

  There had been periods of awareness before but this was the first true awakening. He wanted to feel snow polished underfoot on a wooden track and he wanted to skate on a yard that had been hosed into a rink.

  He turned his head and saw Razin in a moulting blue dressing-gown sitting beside the bed, one arm in a sling, reading the chart that should have been hanging on the end of his bed.

  Razin said: ‘You nearly drowned.’ He tapped the chart. ‘But you’re on the mend. Stout peasant stock.’

  ‘Siberian stock, Antonov said. ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Two died – they hadn’t got enough limbs to swim with. But they were going to die anyway.’

  Flakes of snow hesitated at the window.

  ‘Did I swim?’ Antonov asked incredulously.

  ‘Like a stone. But we were near the shore and the water wasn’t deep and one of the oarsmen got you ashore. The others managed to swim.’

  ‘And you?’ Somehow Antonov couldn’t imagine Razin swimming.

  ‘I thought of those plump nurses: I made it.’

  ‘How’s your arm?’

  ‘Thawing.’ With his good hand Razin held the arm in the sling as though it belonged to a stranger. ‘Exposure, not quite the same as frostbite, according to the medics. And rare in just one limb. They’re very interested in me, those boys. They want to see if it turns gangrenous and starts to spread. If it does, chop.’ He aimed the blade of his good hand at the sling.

  Razin’s face became fuzzy. Antonov shut his eyes. When he opened them Razin had two faces once again.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Razin asked.

  ‘There are two of you.’

  ‘They were afraid of that, double vision. They got all the water out of your lungs but they weren’t as worried about those as they were about your sight.’

  ‘Scared I won’t be able to shoot Meister?’

  ‘Double vision isn’t exactly an asset for a sniper. Especially when a hair-line fracture of the skull has been confirmed,’ he added. He settled himself comfortably in the chair. ‘Let’s hope your vision stays that way until the war’s over.’

  Leaning his head, shaved and bandaged, on the stacked pillows, Antonov looked around. The bed was surrounded by screens; beyond them he could hear desultory talk and the sighs of men in pain.

  He asked Razin if Moscow still wanted him to kill Meister.

  ‘Why not? Nothing’s changed. You still humanise statistics. There are so many dead, so many wounded, that figures lose their impact. But you’re every mother’s son.’

  So is Meister, Antonov thought.

  ‘If you kill Meister they’ll toast you in every home in the Soviet Union. Sergei, Stepan, Mikhail, Nikolai … They’re alive and well and beating the hell out of the Fritzes.’

  ‘Maybe it won’t come to that.’ Razin’s two faces became one again. Through the window Antonov could see the white church with the green dome.

  ‘The counter-attack? That won’t make any difference. When it comes, if it comes, you and Meister will still be in Stalingrad. But not,’ Razin added thoughtfully, ‘if you’re still over here on the east bank. How long do you think you can drag it out?’

  ‘Until I’m cured.’

  ‘You can do better than that.’

  ‘I can’t fake a fractured skull.’

  ‘You can fake double-vision. Nothing simpler. Why not try triple-vision?’

  ‘You don’t have to go back,’ Antonov said. ‘Not if your hand’s still bad.’

  ‘Wrong. Wherever you go I go. You’re my meal ticket. If you cross the river without me then they’ll stick me in the front-line again.’

  Antonov said: ‘Strange, isn’t it, a river separating us from hell.’ Razin’s face was slipping out of focus again.

  ‘The Dneiper is a more impressive river,’ Razin said. ‘A monarch. On summer evenings we used to stroll along its banks and if you had a girl on your arm you bought her a carnation with a stem wrapped in silver paper.’ Razin stared into the past. ‘Did you know that Christianity was introduced into Russia via the Dnieper in the tenth century when Prince Vladimir ordered his subjects to be baptised in its waters? And did you know that there’s a Golden Gate like Constantinople’s in Kiev and a monastery built inside caves?’

  Antonov shook his head cautiously but the movement disturbed an ache in his skull.

  ‘You should learn some Ukrainian,’ Razin told him. ‘“Ya ne razoomayoo” and “Do pobáchenya.” “I don’t understand” and “Goodbye.”’

  ‘Do pobáchenya,’ Antonov said and slept.

  ***

  The Russian counter-attack, code-named Uranus, was launched on November 19, a Thursday, about 100 miles north-west of Stalingrad. But Antonov didn’t hear details until four days later.

  They were brought to him by Razin, wearing the same dressing-gown and trading conspiratorial smiles with a nurse with Mongol features and shiny blue-black hair cut in a fringe.

  The offensive, he told Antonov, began at 7.30 am in freezing fog. An eighty-minute bombardment by Katyushas, heavy guns and mortars.

  At 8.50 assault troops and tanks attacked in the snow-covered steppe south of the Don.

  Razin recited units involved – 47th Guards, 5th Tank, 124th Rifle Division … But they meant nothing to Antonov; he saw snow, churned brown and blood-red, littered with the bodies of men who had met for the first time.

  Razin said: ‘They were fighting Rumanians mostly, the Third Army. The Rumanians fought well but what could they do with 100 old Czech light tanks against T-34s? By midday they were on the run.’

  He took a packet of papirosy from the pocket of the dressing gown. ‘Can I?’ He folded a smile at the nurse.

  ‘You shouldn’t. Rules …’

  ‘Made to be broken.’ He lit the yellow cigarette.

  So Razin had made a conquest. What did the girl see in him? A way with words, perhaps, that would be uncommon among her other patients; the mystery of his squandered intelligence; a cavalier attitude to authority … The girl, Antonov felt, wanted to know the source of every wandering line on Razin’s face.

  ‘Elsewhere,’ Razin said, ‘we didn’t have such an easy time of it. We ran into Paulus’s left flank and the Panzers fought like bastards. But we continued to advance towards Kalach. Here look.’

  Razin produced a sketch-map. Kalach was about fifty miles west of Stalingrad. The idea, he explained, was for the Russians advancing from the north west to link up there with a force attacking from the south-east sealing Paulus’s Sixth Army in a pocket.

  Razin went on: ‘The attack from the south-east was launched on the 20th. We ripped into the Rumanians all right. They fought well but their worst enemy was the steppe. A white wilderness. Even some of our brigade commanders lost their sense of direction and charged straight into enemy minefields.’

  ‘So, what’s happening now?’ the nurse asked, proud of Razin’s expertise.

  ‘Patience.’ Razin sucked smoke into his lungs. ‘Wait till you hear this. As you know the Don makes a sharp turn and flows south so, to reach Kalach, our forces advancing from the north-west had to cross it. And cross it they did with German tanks leading them.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Antonov said.

  ‘We drove five captured tanks over the bridge at night-time with their lights on the way the Germans drive them. Half way across the tanks stopped and out swarmed sixty Russians armed with sub-machine-guns. The Fritzes were caught with their pants down and the infantry swarmed over the bridge.’

  Antonov had never seen Razin so animated. He wasn’t sure what was responsible – the prese
nce of the girl, the Russian victories or the fact that he was remote from them.

  ‘And?’ the girl asked impatiently.

  Razin nipped his cigarette in the wash-basin and returned the butt to the packet. Then, settling himself once more, he announced: ‘At 1030 hours today our forces linked up at Sovetski south-east of Kalach. The German Sixth Army, comrades, is surrounded.’

  The girl purred. Razin looked as though he had done the job himself He said: ‘Now Paulus will have to turn his guns the other way.’

  ‘Just in time,’ Antonov said. ‘We were almost in the river.’

  ‘We were in the river,’ Razin reminded him.

  The nurse said: ‘Is your arm hurting you?’ which Antonov thought was wonderful because she was supposed to be looking after him.

  ‘It’s not too bad.’ Razin patted his bad arm with his good hand.

  ‘Will it be over soon?’ she asked. ‘Stalingrad, I mean.’

  ‘It should be. They reckon there are nearly 300,000 Germans in the pocket and the Luftwaffe can’t fly in enough supplies, not in the Russian winter.’

  ‘So Paulus will surrender?’

  ‘I’m sure he wants to. The trouble is Hitler doesn’t want him to. Just as Stalin didn’t want Chuikov to.’

  ‘But Stalin was right, wasn’t he.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Razin said. ‘He was right. No doubt about that. Ask the corpses lying in the ruins.’

  Antonov said to the nurse: ‘I think it’s time for me to take my pills.’

  She glanced at her watch.

  ‘Oh yes, so it is.’ She handed him two tablets, one white and one yellow, gave him a glass of water and took his temperature and pulse.

  Then she said to Razin: ‘Come on, let’s celebrate,’ and led the way through the screens.

  ***

  By day Antonov listened to the radio. Patriotic music, concerts, readings from Ehrenburg, Simonov’s poetry, news bulletins – belated in the case of Stalingrad – exhortations to work and fight and, a couple of times, repeats of The Oath of the Defenders of Stalingrad sent to Stalin and published on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Revolution.