Vendetta

by Derek Lambert

  ‘Where do you come from?’ Antonov asked the driver. But he never found out because snow distorts distance and here they were on the west bank, beside a red flag as bright as a poppy. Back in the battlefield.

  ***

  Chuikov’s headquarters had been transformed. It was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, the corrugated iron roof of each dug-out was numbered in black paint and paths had been cut through the trampled snow.

  Antonov was escorted to dugout No. 14 where the captain with the young face and old hair and Gordov, the storm group leader, were waiting for him. Gordov looked plumper, as though the hunting had been good, and his pet beard was glossy. He even seemed pleased to see Antonov.

  ‘Welcome back to active service,’ he said.

  The dugout was heated by a one bar electric fire that had made a collection of toasted bread-crumbs; grey blankets, German by the look of them, covered the walls. In Stalingrad this was luxury and the occupants, drinking tea served from a battered samovar, glowed with it and it was difficult to believe that the Germans were only a few hundred metres away.

  The captain handed Antonov a glass of tea. It was sharp with lemon. How had they managed to get hold of a lemon? The captain held up a small bottle labelled LEMON CONCENTRATE.

  He said: ‘Are you glad to be back?’ tone suggesting that he was a hard man to convince and, when Antonov said, truth-fully, that he was: ‘The odds will be against Meister this time: you’re refreshed, he will be exhausted.’

  Antonov said: ‘With respect, Comrade Captain, I didn’t know the odds had previously been in Meister’s favour.’

  ‘I didn’t say they were. But he’s a trained marksman not a hunter from the taiga.’

  Antonov knowing that he was invaluable and experiencing an unaccustomed surge of power, said: ‘May I ask, Comrade Captain, where you were born?’

  The captain said: ‘Minsk,’ scarcely the Paris of the Soviet Union. And hurriedly: ‘You’ve brought your appetite for the duel back with you?’ Chuikov’s turn of phrase, Antonov recalled.

  ‘I don’t want to kill Meister if that’s what you mean.’

  The silence was a fog. Antonov heard the scrape of shovel on concrete outside it. It thickened, then evaporated.

  Gordov found direction first. ‘Then why are you here? Why did my men sacrifice their lives to rescue you, take you across the river?’ Astonishment being forged into anger.

  ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t kill Meister; I said I didn’t want to.’

  The captain said: ‘Do you want me to tell General Chuikov that?’

  ‘If you wish, Comrade Captain,’ Antonov replied. ‘But please convey my message accurately – didn’t want to, not wouldn’t.’

  The captain drank some tea, small precise sips. He was a precise man, Antonov decided, confused by non-conformity. When his glass was empty he said: ‘Tell us why you don’t want to kill Meister.’

  ‘Why should I want to kill him?’

  ‘Because he’s a German,’ Gordov said. ‘Vermin.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing against him personally.’

  ‘What would happen if we all thought that way?’

  ‘We wouldn’t have wars,’ Antonov said.

  ‘We didn’t start this one,’ Gordov said. ‘Do you want the Germans to march right through Russia to the Sea of Japan?’

  ‘The war,’ Antonov said, astonishing himself, ‘was started by old men. Meister and I are young. Maybe if we were all taught when we were young that there is no need to fight each other then we’d live in peace.’

  ‘Take a look at any playground,’ Gordov said. ‘Boys fight.’

  ‘Because they copy their fathers.’

  The captain said: ‘I’m sure General Chuikov will be interested in your views.’

  But Antonov, battle-wise, knew he wouldn’t tell him: it was the captain’s job to pit him against Meister and Chuikov wouldn’t want complications.

  Gordov said: ‘My sister was killed by the vermin.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Antonov said. ‘Truly sorry. But a lot of German girls will die before the war is over.’

  ‘Have you seen what the Germans did in the countryside? Have you seen the bodies of innocent peasants massacred in the villages?’

  Antonov said: ‘I just don’t want it to ever happen again. Is that so wrong?’

  Gordov made a grab for Antonov’s rifle. ‘Here, give me that. I don’t trust you.’

  But the captain reached it first. ‘Don’t be stupid, you haven’t got his eyes.’ And to Antonov: ‘Dangerous talk, comrade. I would curb that tongue of yours if I were you.’

  ‘I don’t pull the trigger with my tongue, Comrade Captain.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re going to pull it?’

  ‘If I don’t Meister will pull his.’

  This seemed to satisfy the captain because when Gordov, furiously combing his beard with his fingers, tried to speak he held up his hand. ‘Let’s get down to business,’ he said.

  He spoke in numbers. The ruins of a wooden church 300 metres from the dugout. A reconnaissance party leaving at 1400 hours. Antonov to follow accompanied by Razin and two others. The captain treasured numbers.

  ‘It will still be light at 1400 hours,’ Antonov said.

  ‘So?’

  Gordov said: ‘There’s a culvert leading from here to the edge of the graveyard beside the church. I know, I helped to build it.’ He frowned, displeased at the intrusion of the period before he became a warrior.

  ‘We want to make sure that Meister knows where you are,’ the captain said. ‘Then, when he comes for you, it will be easy for you, in a vantage point, wearing winter-white, to put a bullet between his eyes.’

  Antonov said: ‘Can you tell me, Comrade Captain, how you’re going to make sure Meister knows where I am?’

  ‘Because we have a courier,’ the captain said, opening the door and calling Misha’s name.

  ***

  Snipers, like hunters, anticipate deceit and, defensively, call it strategy. Antonov anticipated the captain. And deceived him.

  Claiming that he had been told to report to the medical officer for a last check-up, he went looking for Misha and found him in a corner of the improvised canteen drinking a glass of hot milk.

  Since the Russian victories some of his lost boyhood had returned to his face, blunting the sharp angles, but he was still bird-bright and wary.

  Sitting in front of him at a trestle table, Antonov said: ‘Why, Misha? You don’t want me to kill Meister.’

  ‘Our soldiers need a victory. General Chuikov said so. He told the captain to tell me that. It’s Christmas …’

  ‘And Christmas for the German soldiers.’

  ‘I’m Russian.’ Misha made a hole in the skin of the milk with a teaspoon. ‘So are you.’

  ‘But you like Meister.’

  Misha stared intently into the hole in the skin. ‘One of you has got to die,’ he said, eventually. ‘I had hoped –’ He drank the milk, leaving the skin on the inside of the glass.

  ‘That it was all over?’ Antonov felt very old. ‘Life isn’t as convenient as that. Perhaps you and I, our generation, no your generation …’ The words were trapped butterflies. He asked gently: ‘Where have you got to tell Meister I will be?’

  ‘In a house, No. 23, at the edge of a graveyard beside a church.’

  ‘Ah.’ Antonov digested the captain’s lie. ‘And from the church a sniper would have a good view of that house?’

  Misha nodded.

  ‘And a good view of another sniper creeping up to the house?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘I won’t be in that house,’ Antonov said. ‘They want to make it easy for me, Misha.’

  ‘They could have told me.’ Misha made a railway line with a fork on the soft-wood surface of the table. ‘My parents used to say things that weren’t quite true.’

  ‘But I don’t expect they were lies, not real ones.’

  ‘People used to come into the bakery a
nd they would be nice to them. Make jokes with them. Then, when they’d gone they would say bad things about them.’

  ‘But they were being kind to them,’ Antonov said as echoes of his own childhood reached him. ‘If you think about it they were being kind.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Misha said.

  ‘You know you’ve got to tell Meister where I really am?’

  ‘Then he might kill you.’

  ‘One of us has to die. You said that. And it has to be fair.’

  ‘I don’t think my parents meant to say bad things about them,’ Misha said. ‘They liked them really.’

  ‘You’ll tell him where I really am?’

  ‘I’ll speak to him,’ Misha said but Antonov wasn’t sure what he wanted him to say.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Inside the grand scheme of things, inside Stalingrad where they had defied the Germans since the long-ago summer, what was left of the Russian 62nd Army took small bites out of the enemy. A shattered workshop, a ravaged recreation ground, the shell of a restaurant, the stump of a pump-house … But the Germans clutched their captured rubble tightly; within the encircling Russians they still held most of the city, still bitterly contested a work-bench or an inspection pit in a demolished factory to the north.

  Near Tsaritsa Gorge, in the school playground where they had been holed up before the Russian offensive, Meister and Lanz, standing beneath a numbed sky, peered over the wall and surveyed the debris where half a million souls had once lived.

  Lanz said: ‘We hang on like ticks on a dog.’

  ‘Like those,’ said Meister, pointing at the two shrivelled pears still hanging on the bare limbs of the tree. ‘Our Christmas decorations,’ he added.

  It was nine o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve, a Thursday, and hostilities were sporadic. Mortar shells exploded and machine-guns coughed but the noise was bandaged with cold. In Hamburg, Meister’s mother would be fretting about festive meals and his father would be worrying about how many high-ranking Nazis would materialise that evening, and in her small apartment Elzbeth would be burrowing into sleep after a night-shift in the factory where, against her parents’ wishes, she now worked.

  Meister felt her warmth, her back pressed into his chest. He slid his arms around her and cupped her breasts and kissed her open lips as she turned to him. He thought it would be tragic if he died before he had made love to her.

  Lanz fished the two model soldiers he had taken from the toy factory from his pocket. ‘Perhaps I’ll give them to him for his birthday,’ he said. ‘It’s tomorrow really but we celebrate it on June the twenty-fourth, Midsummer’s Day, so he can have two lots of presents.’

  ‘How old is he?’ Meister asked. ‘You never told me about him.’

  ‘Eight tomorrow.’

  ‘Does he live in Berlin?’ Lanz’s private life had always been under lock and key.

  ‘On the banks of the Spree.’ Lanz hesitated. ‘He lives with his mother. She’s a school teacher.’ For Lanz this was expansive; Christmas had turned the key. ‘I wanted to marry her but she said she wouldn’t marry a thief and I said it was the only job I knew and we had lots of rows about it and I thought, “Shit, if we’re fighting already maybe it’s better that we don’t get married,” and we never did. But she writes to me; at least I used to get letters until I came to this arshloch of a place. I’ve got them here.’ He slid one hand inside his greatcoat.

  ‘Maybe she would marry a soldier, a corporal.’

  ‘So who’s going to stay in the Army?’ Cautiously, Lanz entered a minefield of words. ‘Since I came to Stalingrad I’ve been thinking about settling down. You know, you start to think how short and sweet life is and if I’m lucky enough to get out of here alive why should I risk going to prison?’ Lanz now spoke with extreme caution. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve written to her along those lines.’

  ‘What would you do?’ Meister asked.

  ‘Security,’ Lanz told him. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief.’ He examined the toy soldiers; each was standing to attention holding his rifle. ‘Midsummer’s Day. We’ll be split up by then, you and I, because you won’t need a nursemaid anymore but you might like to think about the boy with his soldiers.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Meister asked.

  ‘Karl,’ Lanz said. ‘Maybe that’s why I’ve looked after you so well.’

  A voice from the classroom called out for water. There were two soldiers there, lying beside the fire. One was suffering from typhus, the other from tetanus. They had been left there to die.

  It was the soldier suffering from typhus, spread by lice and rampaging through the Sixth Army, who wanted water. His temperature was soaring, there were red blotches on his wrists and his eyes deep in his face were staring at death.

  Lanz gave him water in a tin mug. The other soldier watched. He hadn’t yet glimpsed death but the tetanus spasms were under way and he had difficulty in opening his jaws.

  Misha came into the playground as three Ilyushin dive-bombers swept across the sky. He brought with him a tin of condensed milk, black bread and smoked fish.

  Meister welcomed him joyously: even Lanz was pleased to see him, but, through Meister, he still asked penetrating questions. ‘Ask him why he’s still allowed to wander inside the German lines?’

  ‘Because I bring food,’ Misha said. ‘Don’t you want any?’

  ‘Ask him if he wants a cuff round the ears for being cheeky.’ Lanz raised his arm; he hadn’t tied the ear-flaps of his fur hat and when he moved they trembled.

  Misha wore a black, peaked cap, a blue reefer that stretched to his knees and grey trousers rolled around his ankles. Meister had at last agreed to wear a fur hat acquired by Lanz but he refused to lower the ear-flaps: if his hearing was impaired his other senses would suffer too.

  Lanz said: ‘What happens when he returns to the Russian lines? Don’t they ask what he’s been doing over here?’

  ‘I go straight to headquarters,’ Misha told Meister. ‘I bring them information instead of food. Like other boys.’

  ‘And the information. Is it true or false?’ Meister asked.

  ‘It’s true. But what does it matter?’

  And that was true, too. What did it matter anymore? Gruppe Hoth was retreating and the Sixth Army was trapped and that was all there was to it; nothing Misha could tell the Russians would make any difference.

  They opened the can of condensed milk and broke the bread and leathery fish into pieces. Meister tried to feed the sick men but they had no appetite.

  Meister chewed some fish, then asked the question he had been nursing. ‘Do you know where Antonov is?’

  He and Lanz had come to the playground calculating that, if, as Paulus had suggested, the Russians wanted them to find Antonov they would send Misha there.

  Misha sucked the thick, sweet milk from his finger. Then hesitantly, he delivered what sounded like a rehearsed answer: ‘I can take you to him,’ in the same tone that he must have used in reply to a question in the classroom.

  Lanz’s words of counsel earlier that morning came back to Meister. ‘I know he saved our lives once but that doesn’t mean you can trust him. If this thing with you and Antonov is heading for a showdown one of you is going to get killed and, although Misha has taken a shine to you, he’s got to choose one way or the other and he is Russian. So make sure he doesn’t lead you into a trap.’

  Meister said: ‘I asked you where Antonov is?’

  ‘Between the German and Russian lines. One of those positions that’s Russian one minute, German the next.’

  ‘What is it now?’ Meister asked.

  ‘Nobody’s.’

  Lanz asked: ‘What’s he saying?’ and when Meister told him: ‘Ask him where the cover is. Factory, store, warehouse, a pile of bricks …’ but when Meister asked Misha all he said was: ‘I can take you there.’

  ‘Then it’s a trap,’ Lanz said, rolling a piece of black bread into a pellet and popping it into his mouth.

  �
��I don’t think so.’

  ‘You mean you don’t want to think so.’

  Meister addressed Misha, moulding his words with great care. ‘All right, lead us there. But don’t forget that neither of us wants to kill each other. But, as we have to, everything must be equal. Do you understand that?’

  The gold watch chimed deep inside Misha’s clothing. ‘I understand,’ he said.

  ‘I must know the real place where Antonov is waiting and he must know that I know.’

  Misha said: ‘I can take you there.’ He turned, hands thrust in his pockets, shoulders slightly hunched, and walked through the classroom and out of the door beyond the fire, and for a moment he was a nine-year-old schoolboy on his way home on a cold winter’s day.

  As he stood waiting outside a wind loaded with snow bowled through the ruins, found the school and shook the pear tree divesting it of one of its decorations. The shrivelled pear bounced once, then lay still.

  Picking up his rifle, Meister, accompanied by Lanz, followed Misha, leaving the two soldiers to die.

  ***

  Often white-clad Russians inside The Cauldron attacked during a snowstorm; they did so as Meister, Lanz and Misha reached a German command post, a cellar protected by a cluster of foxholes and a crippled tramcar.

  As grenades tumbled out of the snow, as ghosts uttered jackal war cries, Meister and Lanz dived behind the tramcar pulling Misha with them. A German machine-gun chattered. A white figure reared up, one hand clawing the red patch on his chest. Fragmentation grenades exploded. One rolled towards Meister; he stared at it fascinated. Swearing, Lanz grabbed it and hurled it away; it exploded above them, cubes of cast-iron thudding into the ground and striking the snow-pasted sides of the tramcar.

  Meister told Misha not to move; then he climbed inside the tram, levelled his rifle through a broken window beside the driver’s controls, and shot a Russian through the head. He fired again, twice, on target both times.

  How many more of them? The white-clad soldiers, bayonets drawn, had already taken two foxholes; behind them came the mainstay of the attack, troops wearing fur hats and brown padded jackets. Meister shot two of them.

  In the next foxhole bayonets flashed. In, out. He didn’t know whether he would have the courage to face a thrusting blade. Or to wield one. Stalemate. Until he killed you.