In sending you this letter from the trenches, we swear to you, dear Iossif Vissarionvich, that to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, to the last heart-beat, we shall defend Stalingrad … We swear that we shall not disgrace the glory of Russian arms and shall fight to the end. Under your leadership our fathers won the battle of Tsaritsyn. Under your leadership we shall win the great Battle of Stalingrad.
Once Antonov would have been stirred by the message. Or believed he was stirred. No longer. The words had marched from a parade-ground, disciplined and uniformed. Now he had seen sacrifice: it was necessary not glorious.
But Stalin’s own words on the following day, November 7, had quickened the pulse. There will be a holiday in our street, too. How it had intrigued everyone. Was there at last to be a victory? Not merely a successful rearguard action?
Stalingrad had been the holiday in our street.
At night, between jagged dreams, Antonov listened to the cold crackling outside the hospital. Cold, that was, by local definition.
When he was a boy the Antonov household had once been visited by an exuberant uncle who lived in Yakutia in Siberia, the coldest inhabited part of the world where temperatures of minus fifty degrees centigrade were not uncommon.
When he talked about the cold it became a rogue. It snapped steel bars, froze the earth hundreds of metres deep all the year round and exploded trees – ‘Just like that, crash,’ clapping his hands together with a report that Yury had never been able to emulate.
To thwart the rogue he had drunk spirit, pure grain spirit also known as White Dynamite, and escaped from its breath, called People’s Mist because it was frozen vapour from humans, into the Red Star Dance Hall. He didn’t seem to be hostile to the cold for these diversions.
‘Give in to it,’ he would say, ‘and it kills your flesh in seconds.’ The idea of murdered flesh had fascinated Yury.
Cold? In Stalingrad, currently sheathed in twenty degrees of frost, they had never been personally acquainted with the rogue. But what if you were a German without winter clothing? What if you were Meister? Antonov stared through the window at the darkness beyond the fingers of snow in the corners of the frames. He shivered and turned into his pillows.
***
The footsteps on the flagstones of the field hospital, a converted collective farm two kilometres from the Volga, rang with authority, tapping small chords of pain in Antonov’s skull.
The screens parted and Razin’s nurse said: ‘You’ve got visitors,’ resolutely unimpressed by their identity.
General Vasili Chuikov and a captain, bringing with them a whiff of battle, sat on chairs beside Antonov’s bed and regarded him critically. Finally, Chuikov, pugilist’s face drained, sores on his hands bandaged, said: ‘Are they treating you well?’
Antonov said they were.
Chuikov stretched his hand across the bed to the captain, a young man with grey hair. ‘Give me the report.’
He scanned the hand-written document, then said: ‘You’ve had a hard time, comrade. How do you feel now?’
‘Much better, Comrade General.’
‘Good. It would be a terrible thing if your talents had been destroyed by one of our own rockets.’ Chuikov, running one hand through his soft bush of black hair, returned to the report. ‘You nearly drowned. You owe your life to your protector.’
‘Razin?’ Antonov frowned.
‘Of course.’ Chuikov looked puzzled. ‘He gave you artificial respiration. He was barely conscious when he was brought here. Didn’t you know about that?’
‘He didn’t tell me.’
‘There are men like that. Enigmas. They become soldiers out of perversity.’ Chuikov picked at one of the bandages and stared at Antonov. ‘You’re a strange couple. You became a soldier because you had good reflexes. Without those you’d still be working in the fields.’
Chuikov’s attitude towards Antonov had softened since he had been wounded: a wound was a medal.
The captain spoke at last. ‘You’ve heard about our victories, of course?’
‘I’m not up to date.’ It was three days since Razin had visited him and when he asked the nurse about him she merely smiled secretively and punched his pillows into shape.
‘Paulus is trapped inside the Stalingrad pocket. He has two options: he can try and break out or he can wait to be relieved.’
‘Three options,’ Chuikov said. ‘He can surrender.’
‘He won’t do that, not yet anyway.’ The captain didn’t smile. ‘Hitler has ordered him to stay put. Stupid because he might just have spoken out. Therefore we have to consider option two. Hitler has appointed Field Marshal Eric von Manstein to organise the relief of Stalingrad.’
‘A very good general,’ Chuikov said. ‘As generals go.’ He smiled at Antonov.
‘We think,’ said the captain who was uncomplicated by humour, ‘that the Germans will bring up Panzer units from occupied Russia and other parts of Europe and attempt to break through to Stalingrad from the south. We shall be ready for them.’
‘I don’t underestimate Manstein,’ Chuikov said. ‘His speciality is armoured breakthroughs. It was Manstein who broke through in the Ardennes and sealed the fate of the French. It was Manstein who broke through the French lines along the Somme.’
Antonov realised that Chuikov had the same respect for Manstein that he had for Meister. But why was he sharing strategy with a soldier?
Chuikov said: ‘This means that, despite what Moscow may think, Soviet troops will have to be deployed to meet the threat. And that means that we, the defenders of Stalingrad, will continue to be holed up in the city with the German Sixth Army.’ Chuikov paused, listening to the sound of suffering on the other side of the screens. ‘Before the Soviet counter-offensive we received a message from Moscow.’ Chuikov handed Antonov a teletype. TRUST ANTONOV WILL BE FIT AGAIN TO RESUME DUTIES AT THE EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY STOP STALIN.
Antonov handed it back to Chuikov; he couldn’t think of an adequate reply.
Chuikov said: ‘To tell you the truth I wasn’t very interested in your duel with Meister. It was an indulgence for which I had no time. But now things are different. The focus of attention has shifted from inside the city and my men, still fighting, still starving, still dying, may think they’ve been forgotten. So you see, Comrade Antonov, they need a fillip – something more heady than the destruction of a cellar, the capture of a pile of rubble.’ Chuikov leaned towards the bed. ‘Now I want you to kill Meister.’ He held up the teletype. ‘At the earliest opportunity.’
The captain took a black fountain pen from the pocket of his brown jacket and held it up. ‘How many pens?’
Antonov stared at the pen. His concentration broke it in two. ‘It is a little indistinct.’
Reading from the medical report, Chuikov said: ‘We were wondering if your double-vision was any better.’
‘It’s better,’ Antonov told him.
‘How many generals do you see?’
‘One.’
‘Thank God for that.’
Antonov, turning on his pillows, saw two captains. They said: ‘Of course it is very difficult for a specialist to know whether a patient is suffering from double vision. To an extent he has to rely on the patient’s word.’
That angered Antonov as nothing had angered him before. ‘Are you trying to suggest …’
‘… that you’re malingering?’ Chuikov shook his pugilist’s head. ‘Captain Ostrov’s strong suite isn’t diplomacy. Rest assured I think no such thing. All that worries me is your appetite.’
‘Appetite, Comrade General?’
‘For the duel. Have you lost it?’
Antonov said he hadn’t and, hearing the lie in his voice, wondered if Chuikov had heard it too.
Chuikov stood up abruptly. ‘We must get back to Stalingrad. At least it isn’t so dangerous crossing the Volga these days: the Luftwaffe and the German gunners have other matters on their minds.’ He placed a bandaged hand on Antonov’s shoulder. ‘G
et well soon, comrade. And when you re-cross the river bring your appetite with you.’
The captain parted the screens and Chuikov, footsteps crisp on the flagstones, led the way back to battle.
That night Antonov dreamt that he and Meister, cowboy and bandit, or it might have been the other way round, were facing each other, hands on their gun holsters, in the dusty main street of an American prairie town. But when he went for his pistol he found that he could barely lift it and when he did manage to level it there were two Meisters in his sights and when he pulled the trigger he shot between the two heads of Meister and his brother Alexander reared up with a neat hole between his eyes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘Sunday was the best time in Berlin,’ Lanz said one day in the middle of December. ‘Crowds window-shopping in the Unter den Linden, bands playing, skating in the Tiergarten, würst in the street booths, a glass of Berliner Weisse in a bar …’
Lanz swallowed noisily. The menu that day in Stalingrad, known now as The Cauldron, was: Midday, rice and horsemeat; evening, eight ounces of bread, two meat balls (horse) à la Stalingrad, half an ounce of butter and real coffee. Extras: four ounces of bread, one ounce of boiled sweets and four ounces of chocolates; tobacco, one cigar or two cigarettes.
An illusion. Some units hadn’t eaten for three days and all you could infer with any certainty from the bill of fare was that the beleaguered troops were devouring one of their means of transport, their horses.
Many horses hadn’t been lucky enough to make the abrupt transition from a bullet in the brain to the stewpot. They had frozen to death in the white, ravaged countryside outside Stalingrad. When Meister and Lanz had arrived in the south-west, transferred from the city to harry the Russians fending off Manstein’s relief force, some horses had still been alive, standing on three legs, waving a broken fourth limb in greeting and farewell.
From their observation post, a small pickling plant standing on a rise outside the charred remains of a wooden village, Meister could hear the sound of battle.
Strategically, he reflected, their position was curious. Here they were in German-held territory separated from another advancing German force by units of the Red Army who were retreating. Put like that it sounded as though the Germans were poised for another famous victory. The possibility was as illusory as the menu.
True the German relief force, known as Gruppe Hoth because, under Manstein’s overall command, they were led by General Herman Hoth, stood a faint chance of reaching Stalingrad. They were said to have advanced fifty miles in eight days, only thirty miles short of their objective, but the whole purpose of the drive was to allow Paulus to escape and there was nothing victorious about that.
What Meister wanted to know, as did every solider trapped in The Cauldron – forty-five miles from east to west, fifteen miles from north to south – was whether Paulus would try to break out and meet Gruppe Hoth. Whether Hitler would finally authorise him to do so. Whether, even if he did, the Sixth Army, reeling from typhus as well as Soviet gunfire, supplementing its rations with rats, numbed by frostbite, would have the strength to thrust its way through the encircling Russians.
A gust of wind blew an eddy of snow into the pickling plant. Meister, wearing a camouflage jacket – Ordnance didn’t seem to have grasped that in the Russian winter white made you a chameleon – shivered. The snow made a tiny drift in one corner of the store room under a row of glass jars containing cucumbers in frozen brine. They had broken a few jars and hammered the cucumbers from the ice but they had tasted of ammonia and Lanz had speculated that, before abandoning the village, the Russians had pissed in them.
Lanz had lit another of his fires. It was a poor thing, made from charred wood, but it glowed resolutely holding the frost at bay and it was a cheerful companion in adversity.
‘Mind you,’ Lanz said, holding mittened hands to the fire, ‘there wasn’t all that much to eat in Berlin even in those days. You know, we had ration cards – blue for meat, yellow for fat, white for sugar … But I suppose you didn’t know much about ration cards.’
‘I knew about them. But you’re right, we had more than our fair share.’
‘And a car, of course.’
Two, Meister remembered. He nodded. No need to elaborate.
‘No problems with gasoline rationing?’
‘I wouldn’t have known about that.’
‘My God, I wish I’d known about you Meisters – I would have robbed you blind.’
Lanz blinked at the fire. His face was protected by a wool face mask fashioned from a scarf and all his thoughts were in his eyes. He wore a stolen fur hat and a field-grey great-coat that was too big for him. He was comical or sinister according to his eyes.
Meister stared across the steppe. It would soon be dark. The hollows in the snow were filling with night and the sky to the west was a chilled pink. The wind, making stringed instruments of barbed wire and bent girders, played a dirge.
‘Do you know when the best time to rob a house was?’ Lanz asked.
‘When the occupants were on holiday?’
‘Wrong. That was when they removed the valuables. No, the best time was during a Party rally. Find a house owned by a Nazi big-shot and it was like picking your own pockets. While the family were listening to Hitler spouting and watching the storm troopers goose stepping, while the staff were drinking their master’s booze … I broke into Ley’s place once but I hadn’t done my homework. I was disturbed by a valet who didn’t drink and he chased me along a street lined with brownshirts and police. I only had a tiny car that ran on gas from a wood-burning stove and it was so slow I had to run for it. Luckily Hitler came along just then and instead of shouting, ‘Stop thief,’ the valet stopped and shouted ‘Sieg Heil’ and I got away. So you see I’ve got a lot to thank the Führer for.’
‘I would have caught you,’ Meister said, ‘and handed you over to my father.’
‘Would you now?’
‘Not now. My values have changed. They have to, don’t they?’ Meister gestured across the hibernating land that war wouldn’t allow to sleep. ‘I’ve got a lot to thank the Führer for as well.’
‘Don’t become a thief for God’s sake.’
‘There are worse occupations. It depends what you steal.’
‘So when is it bad to be a thief?’
‘When you’re stealing young minds,’ Meister said.
Distant gunfire made a summer storm on the winter horizon. Glimmers of light followed by grumbling explosions.
Lanz said: ‘You’re right of course. About values. About war. It legalises crime. For murder, read heroism. For theft, the fortunes of war. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, which values are the correct ones.’
‘None of them, perhaps,’ Antonov said.
‘Come now.’ Lanz threw a charred stick onto his puny fire. ‘Rape, child abuse, cruelty … No justification for any of those.’
Meister, staring across the darkening void said: ‘Those are crimes against people. Against ourselves if you like. The other crimes – murder, theft, fraud – they’re offences against a code which we’ve compiled.’
‘You should become a judge,’ Lanz observed. ‘Especially when I’m in the dock.’
‘I couldn’t be a judge. I don’t even know whether we or the Russians are in the right any longer.’
‘Neither,’ Lanz said.
‘Not even Misha knows.’
‘Don’t bet on it. A very demanding parent, Mother Russia. Just as demanding as a Jewish mother. If it really came to it, you versus Antonov, Germany versus Russia, he wouldn’t hesitate.’
‘He saved us,’ Meister said.
‘But where is he now?’
‘With his own people,’ Meister said. ‘Where else?’ and wished it were not so.
***
The dawn was dove-grey and pink-breasted, deceptively soft, as Lanz, riding a bicycle with a buckled front wheel, left the pickling plant to find breakfast. Before Meister returned to normal sniping
duties such a foray wouldn’t have been necessary because the cooks had been ordered to make sure he didn’t go short of food. Now he had to make out as best he could and he was grateful that his bodyguard was a thief.
Lanz returned as the guns thirty miles away began their overture. His eyes glittered through his mask and his breath smoked and crystallised ahead of him.
Inside the pickling plant Lanz the Magician began his act. He placed his canvas bag on the table and with a flourish began to extract his ‘rabbits’. A packet of salted biscuits, fragmented and speckled with mould; two shrivelled potatoes that had begun to sprout before the frost pruned them; a paper bag containing a spoonful of tea; and the finale, a can bearing the word SPAM.
‘By courtesy of the Yanks,’ Lanz said plunging a bayonet into the can. ‘We should be grateful they’re helping to feed the Ivans.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In the remains of the police-station,’ Lanz said. ‘Where else?’
He prised back a flap of metal skin. The flesh beneath was pink, glistening ambrosia, and its aroma made their stomachs whine.
Lanz held up one hand. ‘Wait, let’s be civilised. A proper meal, food and drink.’ He filled a blackened saucepan with snow and perched it on the fire and emptied the tea into a jar. Then he eased the Spam out of the can onto a wooden plate.
‘Do you think Gruppe Hoth will make it?’ Meister asked. He talked to distract his attention from the tinned meat.
‘If he’s going to he’ll have to hurry: there are only ten more shopping days till Christmas.’
The last Christmas Meister had spent in Hamburg had been in 1940. Special rations had been issued. Three eight-ounce rations per person of peas, beans and lentils; extra marmalade and sugar. It had also been announced in the Press that troops at the front were to receive 100 million cigarettes, 25 million cigars and an ocean of booze.
Goering stated that a thousand Deutschmarks would be given to the child of every pilot killed in action, the money to be paid when he or she came of age, and the newspapers contained recipes for eggless and almost fatless Christmas cakes.
Vendetta Page 13
