A Russian knelt, aiming his rifle at the tramcar and Meister shot him seeing, as he squeezed the trigger, a target with black circles round a bullseye. Beside the tram, Lanz was firing his pistol.
As always the Russians attacked with little regard for their own lives – Meister didn’t believe there was anything to choose between the courage of Russians and Germans – but they had to minimise losses and suddenly Meister realised they were concentrating on the firepower from the tramcar.
Snow fell softly in Christmas flakes.
Meister, re-loading his rifle, turned and found he was sharing the tramcar with a Russian soldier.
They stared at each other. The Russian was young, about his own age. The ear-flaps of his fur hat were tied above his head. His face was lean and wild. Meister could smell him. Vodka and tobacco and, despite the cold, sweat. Meister was terrified of the bayonet, its nakedness. But the terror was guiding him; avoid the thrusting blade, hit back somehow. So there wasn’t much difference between fear and courage, he thought, as he prepared to pull back the rifle from the window, swing it round and shoot.
If one of them spoke maybe the need to kill would disappear. He opened his mouth but no words emerged. The Russian moved towards him. He looked like a student Meister had known in Hamburg.
As Meister flung himself to one side, swivelling his rifle, the Russian lunged with his bayonet. The blade buried itself in the varnished wood beside the driver’s seat.
The Russian pulled the rifle. The bayonet began to come loose.
Meister levelled his rifle at the Russian. They looked at each other. The Russian had thick eyebrows that almost joined each other.
Meister wished they could talk.
He took first pressure on the trigger.
The Russian spat.
Turning, Meister clubbed him on the head with the butt of the rifle. As he climbed from the tramcar he felt as though he were alighting outside Hamburg’s rathaus.
By which time German re-inforcements had arrived and the Russians were retreating into the falling snow.
***
What was left of the bathhouse, the meeting place of the Soviet male, lay between Mamaev Hill and the chemical factory amid a confusion of twisted railway lines leading nowhere.
Although devastated, it still retained traces of nobility and hints of decadence. Like a Roman ruin, Meister thought. Marble benches climbed from either side of a miniature amphitheatre; a brass rail, fragile with wear, swung in the breeze; steps led down into darkness that was surely scented.
Here, on the benches, while steam issued from pipes attached to the walls, convivial men had met to talk and share and boast and argue and beat each other as pink as prawns with birch twigs before retiring to the rest-room to drink beer, eat salted fish, play chess and continue the debate.
Situated on a rise, it was a perfect look out post. What’s more it was only 800 metres from the vantage point where, according to Misha, Antonov was waiting.
Meister, standing in the small arena of the steam-room, called out to Misha but there was no reply.
***
While Meister explored sniping possibilities, Lanz disappeared into the darkness below the stairs. A scrape of a match followed by a spurt of light and the glow of candle-light. Another matchscrape and Meister smelled wood-smoke ascending the stairs.
He sat on a slab of masonry and peered through a crack in the wall. Snow fell lightly on him through the space where the roof had been. He could just see the ruins of a church, a cemetery containing graves demarcated by what looked like brass bedsteads, beyond it the remains of a house.
After a while he heard a bird singing. For a moment he thought the song must be in his head. He called to Lanz: ‘Can you hear anything?’ and when Lanz said yes, a bird singing, he went to look for it.
In the rest-room where, mugs of beer in their hands, Russians had once recovered from the masochism of the steam-room, he had to light a match because here the roof was intact. Wooden chess pieces were scattered over the floor. Among them lay the body of a Russian soldier, his body preserved by the cold, a pool of frozen blood beside him.
Above him, in a cage suspended from the ceiling, a canary was singing to itself. Who had owned the canary and what was it doing in the bathhouse? Perhaps the soldier who had been shot in the chest had found it in an abandoned house and brought it with him.
A packet of birdseed stood on a stone-topped bar where beer had once been dispensed. Meister poured a handful of seed into the cage: Antonov would have done the same.
Then he returned to the steam-room and, through the sights of the Karabiner, gazed steadily at the shell of the wooden church.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
From the church Antonov saw grey smoke rising from the broken chimney of the bathhouse. He saw it as a smoke signal I AM HERE.
The wind had dropped and the smoke was a stem in the sky and the unpredictable day was blue and gold and white, a traitress diverting attention from the truth, the cold. Not cold, according to Antonov – about minus twenty-five degrees he guessed; cold enough to freeze your soul according to Razin, delicate city dweller.
And such was the prevalent splendour of this day, that it found beauty, bare and lonely, in the devastated landscape. A leafless tree bowed eloquently by an explosion, a wall sculptured by shell-bursts; even corpses wearing shrouds of snow were invested with dignity.
Antonov, white hood over his corn-stubble hair, walked round the nave of the church. It was open to the sky and it smelled of charred wood. He had glanced into a church once in Novosibirsk and had been surprised to see so many old women praying; he had been impressed, for he was very young at the time, by the priest’s beard because it looked as though it had been knitted.
On the blackened wall he noticed an icon. Heat had partially melted the face of Christ on the cross but the eyes were still questing. He felt a great temptation to pray but, because religion had been outside the curriculum of his school, he didn’t quite know how. Or to whom.
Then suddenly as the sun gilded the remains of the altar, sacrificed to war, he understood. Communism, Christianity, Mohammedism … it didn’t matter to whom you prayed, only that you prayed. And he prayed. For Meister and himself.
***
In the vestry, a stone extension of the church and still intact, Razin was sitting on a pile of dusty vestments writing a letter to the nurse.
‘She says she’s quite happy to live in Kiev,’ he said as Antonov walked in. ‘I thought you were supposed to be keeping watch?’
‘No point. Neither of us will show ourselves and neither will make a move outside until it starts to snow.’
‘And then?’
‘There’s a wrecked tank out here, a KV. I want you to draw his fire while I make a run for it. With luck I should be able to pick him off from behind it.’
‘Maybe he thinks you’re in the house. If he does he’ll be looking the wrong way and you might get a sighting from here.’
‘He knows we’re here.’
‘You’re very sure of the boy,’ Razin said, signing his letter with a flourish.
‘You have to trust someone.’
Antonov looked through a small, barred window framed with shards of glass. The sky was still blue and there was the Russian tank, an impotent prehistoric animal, abandoned among the mangled rail tracks.
A hundred metres past it stood a heavy German anti-tank gun. It had been punched on its side and its blunt muzzle was burried in the snow.
Razin said: ‘When you go watch out for anti-personnel mines. They’ve got three copper whiskers. Tread on those and Meister won’t have a target any more and he wouldn’t want that, would he?’ He looked at Antonov curiously. ‘Now that it’s inevitable, what do you feel?’
‘The same as I always did: I don’t want to kill him.’
‘And he feels the same way?’
‘I don’t know how he feels.’
‘But you think you know.’
‘I should
like to have met him in Hamburg,’ Antonov said. ‘In an inn maybe with his friends. His girl-friend perhaps.’
‘How do you know he’s got one?’
‘That girl in the photograph in the German magazine. But as he’s rich and smart and clever he’s probably got lots of girls.’
‘Will you marry Tasya?’
‘Not now, Stalingrad has re-arranged our lives.’
‘It brought you close together on the east bank. You can’t get much closer than that.’
‘You don’t know what happened over there.’
‘You didn’t spent the time discussing Marxism,’ Razin said.
‘In any case, what’s the point of discussing the future? There is no future for one of us, Meister or me. One of us will never even know the outcome of the war.’
‘We’ll win,’ Razin said. ‘Russia and her enemies will win.’
‘Enemies?’
‘Have you forgotten? Before Germany attacked us Britain and America were our enemies. Imperialists, capitalists. It’s only the Germans who have made them our allies.’
‘Do you think they will become enemies again when all this is over?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ Razin said. He picked up the rifle he had brought with him from the east bank and began to clean it. ‘A distinct possibility.’
‘You make it sound as if we’re fighting for nothing.’
‘We fought,’ Razin said, ‘because we had to.’
‘I would like to think there was some glory in it somewhere.’
Razin said: ‘Glory is for gravestones.’
‘Maybe we’re fighting to end all wars. Maybe people will look back upon Stalingrad and think, “Nothing was worth that. Nothing like that must ever happen again.’”
‘Or maybe they’ll say, “Stalingrad? Where was that? What happened there?’”
‘I want to believe that I’ve got to kill Meister for a reason.’
Razin leaned his rifle against the wall. ‘You’re forcing my hand,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that there isn’t any reason: you don’t want to kill each other.’
Antonov gazed into a time when there was no war and saw Meister sitting in an inn covered with an envelope of snow. He was drinking beer from a tankard and smiling at the girl in the photograph. He looked closer and the young man wasn’t Meister, it was himself.
***
Lanz emerged from the rest-room of the bathhouse carrying the dead soldier’s rifle. It was an SVT1938 fitted with a telescopic sight; the soldier had been a sniper too.
He sat close to the pipes on the wall, hissing with steam since he had lit the boiler downstairs, and examined it.
Meister, sitting half way down the tier of marble benches, said: ‘They did away with those last year. They were too light, too fragile.’
‘But pretty,’ Lanz said, running his finger along the cleaning rod fitted to the side of the stock instead of underneath it. He lit a Russian cigarette, a Kazbeck, and inhaled, grimacing. ‘So which of you is going hunting?’
‘Whoever makes a move becomes a target. Even if it’s snowing.’
‘You or him?’
‘Both of us?’
‘Well for God’s sake get it over with,’ Lanz said. ‘This is no way to spend Christmas Eve.’
‘You wanted to stretch it out not so long ago.’
‘And now I want an end to it. An end to the siege. An end to the war. Goodbye Russia. Hallo Berlin.’
Meister said: ‘It’s funny, you know. I keep thinking, “One of us has got to die.” But that isn’t true, is it? Both of us could die.’
He moved closer to the steam, feeling it warm and wet on his cheeks. If I get back to Germany, he thought, I will go hunting like Antonov. Stalk game beneath a vault of pine trees. Take with me bread and cheese and fruit. And he thought how fine it would be if they could go hunting together, he and Antonov; how fine it would be to adjourn afterwards to an inn and drink beer together and discuss what they had or hadn’t shot.
The bird sang daintily.
The steam, thicker now, formed sparkling clouds above the bathhouse.
The sky began to grow heavy with snow.
***
Observing the heaviness, Antonov said: ‘It will snow again soon.’
‘The sooner the better,’ Razin said.
‘Then I will make my move.’
Antonov stared through the barred window. The tank, even though it was tipped forward on its tracks, had assumed an air of menace.
As he stared the outline of the tank began to lose its definition; then there were two tanks.
***
Meister crawled to the top bench and peered through a gap in the jagged rim of the retaining wall. He saw a knocked-out Russian tank. Between the bathhouse and the tank stood a big German anti-tank gun. For several minutes he lay considering the gun and its formidable armour.
***
Misha arrived in the church as the first flakes of snow were falling. The peak of his cap was dusted white and his cheeks were polished.
He joined them in the vestry and sat on the vestments beside Razin.
He said: ‘I told Meister where you are.’ His breath steamed.
‘The truth?’ Antonov asked.
‘The truth. Like you told me to. He wanted the truth too. He said everything had to be equal. I understand that. But I don’t understand why you have to kill each other. I did once. Not any more.’
His voice was fluted with anxiety.
Antonov wanted to explain but there wasn’t any reason. Because he’s German and I’m Russian? What sort of answer was that? He told Misha that after the war such questions might have answers; that the war was being fought to settle such questions.
And he thought: Meister and I understand why we don’t have to kill each other. But it was too late for that: it always had been.
Antonov said to Misha: ‘I have to go any moment now.’
But Misha didn’t reply. He just stood, shoulders slightly hunched, staring at Antonov as, rifle gripped in one hand, he prepared to make a run for the marooned tank.
***
In the bath-house Meister prepared to make a run for the anti-tank gun. It was too soon to make his move, he knew that. The snow wasn’t thick enough and he would be visible, black on white, like a target propelled across the range in Hamburg; but he had to go now; had to.
He told Lanz to keep him covered with the dead Russian’s rifle.
Lanz, kneeling below the top bench, said: ‘Give it a couple of minutes. If Antonov’s still in the church he’ll put a bullet through your brains before you’re half way there.’ His bald patch was spreading with snow.
Meister buttoned up his camouflage jacket, picked up the Karabiner. ‘I’m going now,’ he said.
‘Stupid.’
Meister smelled perfume.
‘Tell him one of the toy soldiers was from me,’ he said and was gone.
***
Razin said: ‘If he’s got any sense he’ll still be in the bathhouse and he’ll see you because the snow isn’t thick enough yet.’
He pulled the white hood back from his head. His neat moustache was a stranger in his crumpled features.
‘Sense?’ Antonov came out of the vestry into the shell of the nave. ‘Since when has sense entered this business?’
Razin picked up his rifle and stood behind a jigsaw stretch of wall beside the altar.
Antonov turned to say goodbye to Misha but he had gone.
He said to Razin: ‘Two shots. Now.’
And ran from the church. Too soon, he thought as the sparse flakes of snow touched his face. Like an animal in the taiga that, in old age, has grown careless.
***
From his position near the altar Razin fired two shots. Lanz, sighting him from the top of the steam-room, picked him off with one bullet. Razin’s dying shot, before he fell beside the altar, hit Lanz in the head, knocking him down the benches to the floor of the small amphitheatre where once men had attack
ed each other with nothing more lethal than birch-twigs.
***
As petals of snow began to cover their bodies Antonov came from behind the tank. Meister from behind the gun.
They stared at each other.
A canary sang.
A gold watch chimed.
They turned and looked at Misha standing between them. Then they dropped their rifles.
EPILOGUE
Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal at the end of January, 1943; almost immediately afterwards Paulus surrendered. All German resistance within the Stalingrad pocket ended on February 2.
Casualty figures during the battle that lasted from high summer to the abyss of the Russian winter are contradictory but the killed, wounded and missing at Stalingrad – subsequently renamed Volgograd – can be numbered in their hundreds of thousands.
Two at least lived in the sliver of No Man’s Land between fact and fiction that is hope.
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