Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  Without warning, Tom vomited.

  ‘Can’t you smell it?’

  ‘No smell,’ Kyukov said. ‘It’s too cold for things to smell. That only happens when the ice begins to thaw. Believe me, I know …’

  ‘Where’s Dennisov?’

  ‘You call him “general”.’

  ‘Where’s the general?’

  ‘He’ll be along later. I’m to show you the girl and check you have the photographs. Although, as you’ve agreed, you’d have to be stupid to come here without them. The general will do the swap later.’

  I have to be stupid to be here at all, Tom thought.

  ‘How much further?’

  ‘Save your breath for walking.’

  The corridor Kyukov strode down was patched with damp and dirt and decades of misery that had leached into its walls. At the far end, a single door on to a yard was so blocked by falling snow that they had to kick it away to get through. A single set of half-filled-in footprints led to a gymnasium beyond.

  The Tartar yanked back a new-looking bolt.

  ‘You don’t touch anything. All right?’

  Tom looked at him.

  ‘The general will be very unhappy if you touch anything.’

  Kyukov stepped back and gestured Tom through. Tom went, his shoulders tensed, half expecting to be clubbed from behind. Instead he heard a bang as the heavy door slammed behind him and its bolt thudded into place.

  ‘I’m going to get the general now,’ Kyukov called. ‘I’ll be an hour or so. Say hello to the girl for me.’ He went off laughing, leaving Tom on the wrong side of a reinforced glass door.

  The left wall of the changing room had toilet cubicles with no doors. Open showers and a long urinal shared the right. A rack for clothes running down the middle of the room had benches either side.

  What little light entered came through snow on a skylight above.

  The general will be very unhappy if you touch anything.

  It was only when Tom stepped into the gymnasium that he understood what Kyukov had been talking about. And when he did, he felt the room lurch and a hot anger rise inside him. He bit down on it, and felt cold fury take its place.

  Alex hung by her ankles in the middle of the room.

  She was naked, her head shaved and her flesh marble, her hands dangling a foot above the floor. Her hipbones were sharp, her ribs rabbit-like.

  Dog tags hung from her neck.

  Alex didn’t react when Tom crouched beside her.

  Her throat was cold beneath his fingers. She had a pulse, just about. Although her breathing was so shallow that her ribs barely moved. He checked the dog tags without thinking. Her stepfather’s: Edward J. S. Masterton. An army number followed.

  Dear God, could it get any messier? He filed that with all the other questions for which he’d only ever found half answers, and dug into his pocket for the lock knife he always carried.

  ‘I’ll get you down,’ he promised.

  She was way beyond hearing, at the very edges of this world.

  Sawing savagely at the rope, Tom wrapped his other arm tight around her hips. Even braced, he staggered as the rope fibres parted, only just catching her before she hit the floor. Laid out, with her body shaved and stark naked, eyes closed and barely breathing, she looked terrifyingly like the girl found frozen at Patriarch’s Ponds.

  The one he’d watched being cut open.

  He couldn’t bear for there to be another laid out on a slab.

  Blood pressure. Heart beat. Lung function … Tom tried to remember the dangers of being hung upside down.

  Blood had trouble leaving the brain. He knew that much. He was pretty certain being cold was a good thing. Unless she was too cold.

  ‘Alex. Wake up.’

  He slapped her cheek.

  Nothing, not even when he did it harder.

  Scooping her up, he headed for the changing room and found himself facing the bolted door. The door was sound, the glass reinforced with steel mesh; nothing he could see looked sharp enough or heavy enough to break it.

  How long had he been here? Ten minutes, fifteen?

  ‘Alex. Please.’

  He watched one eyelid flutter.

  ‘That’s it. Come on, wake up.’

  Her colour was slightly better, her ribs visibly rising and falling.

  He felt for the pulse in her wrist and instinctively closed his fingers around hers, making a promise that he’d do whatever was needed, whatever he could. The promise so instinctive he barely realized that he’d made it.

  ‘Alex. Please. It’s me.’

  She opened one eye, the first time she’d done so.

  ‘I need you to wake up.’

  Her eye closed, her eyelids fluttered and then she opened both eyes at once. Her pupils were huge in the gloom of the changing room. Like a fool, Tom tried to stand her upright and grabbed her as she crumpled.

  He needed Alex safe.

  He needed her out of there.

  Awake was what he needed most of all, but both her eyes were now firmly shut and her head lolled from side to side as he tapped first one cheek and then the other. Alex’s breathing was definitely steadier, her ribs rising and falling almost normally, her heartbeat steadying.

  She still looked starved, though. A ghost of the girl she’d been. It would take time to cure that.

  Stripping off his shirt and jacket, Tom threaded her arms through the jacket’s sleeves, tucked the dog tags inside and zipped it shut. The best that could be said was that it covered her to the thighs and would be warmer than nothing. His shirt he used as a makeshift skirt, tying it round her waist under the jacket.

  It felt like he was dressing a small child.

  Tom tucked the photographs under his belt, folded his lock knife and slipped it into his jeans pocket. When he looked back, Alex was staring up at him.

  ‘Who?’ she asked.

  ‘Tom,’ he said. ‘We met at your stepfather’s party.’

  The girl’s eyes focused on the changing room behind him and widened in shock, her question forgotten, his answer unheard. Tears rolled down her face. ‘You’re not meant to move me. He’s going to be so cross.’

  ‘We’ll be gone before he’s back.’

  She tried to shake her head, then she shut her eyes and her head slumped as she slipped to the edge of sleep or unconsciousness.

  ‘Don’t,’ Tom said. ‘Stay with me.’

  A moment later, Alex whispered, ‘He’ll catch us.’ Her chin trembled. ‘You could say you didn’t understand his orders. He might believe that. You made a mistake. You’re sorry …’

  ‘Alex, I’m going to get you out of here.’

  Her mouth twisted in misery. ‘You don’t know him,’ she said.

  His father had been a tsarist officer.

  Not Kyukov, General Dennisov.

  Tom had been told that or read it somewhere.

  Criminals, recidivists, tsarists, Jews, separatists, the gulags were at their height in the thirties, filled according to Stalin’s whim or paranoia. Kyukov and Dennisov had made it out of here as children.

  This was a man who had survived Stalin by feeding his superiors to the machine.

  To do that you had to know where the machine’s hungers lay, what its weaknesses were … The commissar’s entire cadre were compromised in one go by the photographs of the baby-faced officer lashed to a chair. All those threads tying the USSR’s future leaders into one sticky web …

  Careful planning or lucky accident?

  Either way, the man was unstable, unstable as sweating gelignite with a faulty fuse.

  Tom should have felt right at home.

  Stepping up on to the double-sided bench running down the middle of the changing room, he clambered on to the bar from which clothes had once hung, balanced there precariously and grabbed for the skylight before he could fall. The window frame was so rotten its lock simply ripped away.

  Now he just had to get Alex up there.

  ‘I can’t,’ s
he said.

  ‘You can,’ Tom promised her.

  ‘You’re just making things worse.’

  She was cross. Cross was good. Cross showed Alex was still in there.

  When cajoling and encouragement failed, Tom fell back on cruelty.

  Threatened with being hauled up by a rope, the girl let herself be balanced on the bench, boosted up to the rail and held upright until she found the edge of the skylight. ‘Up you go,’ Tom said.

  He gripped her ankles, intending to lift her, but let go when he heard her whimper and felt blood on his hands from where Kyukov’s rope had lacerated her. He thought for an instant that she was going to crumple, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to catch her properly if she fell.

  ‘Hold on,’ he said.

  ‘I’m trying,’ Alex said.

  ‘I’ll make a stirrup with my hands.’

  Shakily she raised one foot for the stirrup and Tom boosted her up, watching her foreshorten and vanish.

  ‘Alex?’

  He needed an answer.

  All he got was silence. And then she was staring down, her eyes wide. The wind had roused her and she was hugging herself with one hand, holding the edge of the skylight with the other, and shivering.

  ‘There’s a Jeep.’ She sounded scared.

  ‘I’m on my way …’

  51

  Not One Step Back, Stalingrad, Winter 1942

  ‘I volunteer, Comrade Commissar. Let me prove my loyalty.’

  The haggard major stared at the boy who’d stepped forward. Before he could speak, the boy grabbed the wrist of a grinning Tartar a few years older.

  ‘He volunteers too.’

  His friend looked so surprised that the first boy gripped his shoulders, hugging him tightly and whispering what the major imagined was encouragement. Had Major Milov known the truth, he’d have been less moved.

  ‘We can always desert.’

  When the school’s commander stepped forward, the major cut him off with a glare, staring out over the assembled boys. They stank of dirt and shit and too few showers, but no worse than those he’d left behind him.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eighteen,’ said the boy. It was an obvious lie.

  The Tartar might be eighteen. Just. The major found Asiatic faces difficult to judge, and the loyalty of their owners. But the smaller boy, the sharp-faced one – he was younger.

  ‘Their crimes?’

  ‘This one, thieving, delinquency, slander, rape. That one …’ The school’s commander nodded at Pyotr Dennisov. ‘From a family of traitors.’

  ‘Kulaks?’

  ‘Worse. White Army officers.’

  ‘Parents dead?’

  ‘Father executed. No idea about his mother.’

  The camp where Pyotr Dennisov had spent most of his short life was a maloletki, reserved for the children of traitors, renegades and recidivists. A few miles further into the forest was a ChSIR, which held wives of traitors to the Motherland. Part of a grouping outside Stalingrad, both supplied labour for the logging industry.

  If his mother was still alive, Pyotr hadn’t heard from her.

  The prisons in the city had already been emptied, their inhabitants thrown into the front line. The Soviet Army in Stalingrad was out-machined and outnumbered by experienced enemy officers and professional soldiers. But what the USSR did have was a near-bottomless well from which to draw conscripts.

  ‘What are you volunteering for?’

  ‘To fight. To die.’

  The commissar was surprised that the penal school hadn’t been emptied before this. He’d have taken the lot of them by now. He was, however, puzzled by a boy who would volunteer rather than plead youth, or keep his head down and hope like the rest of his school. ‘Your name?’

  ‘Dennisov, Comrade Major. Pyotr Dennisov. This is Kyukov.’

  ‘He doesn’t speak for himself?’

  ‘His Russian is not good.’

  ‘You speak Turkic?’

  ‘A little, Comrade Major.’

  You didn’t have to speak Russian to die. You didn’t have to speak at all. You simply had to charge the guns, probably unarmed, wait until the man in front fell, pick up his rifle if he had one and keep going.

  ‘Over there,’ he told them.

  The two boys went to stand behind the major as he turned to address the rest. He imagined by now that they had guessed what he intended to say.

  Later, the words became so famous they were used in a poem by Yevtushenko, unless it was by Voznesensky. Back then, it was just a standing order: When the man in front dies, the man behind takes his place …

  It was shouted so loudly and so often that by the time Pyotr reached the front of the queue he’d heard it a hundred times.

  ‘Here …’

  A corporal thrust a loaded rifle at him and gave a clip containing another five bullets to Kyukov behind. Kyukov’s mouth twisted in displeasure at not getting his own gun.

  ‘You’ll get one soon enough,’ Pyotr promised, as another corporal shoved them away from the head of the line. ‘Not mine, though …’

  ‘Thought we were going to desert?’

  ‘See anywhere to run to? Anywhere to hide?’

  The weight of the other conscripts, shoves from corporals and brave words from red-capped political officers – shouted through megaphones – carried the lot of them to the ruined edge of a railway siding. Falling snow made it impossible to see the far side and a whining wind howled through what remained of an engine shed.

  ‘Over there,’ Kyukov indicated a concrete signal box with a shell hole and half its roof blown away.

  ‘When the whistle goes,’ Pyotr agreed.

  It went, and all but two of the first hundred poorly armed conscripts raced up a slippery bank and on to the twisted tracks, with only ‘Not one step back’ shouted from behind to disturb them until the machine guns opened up ahead and they started falling, their rifles unfired and grenades unthrown. Those behind snatched up weapons, as ordered, and died in turn, cut down like screaming wheat.

  ‘Fuck. Fuck. Fuck …’ Kyukov scrambled up the steps and collapsed on the floor. Pyotr crawled over him and peered out through a crack. Behind him the Tartar was still swearing. Kyukov had never been in a fight he couldn’t win. Pyotr knew this. It was one of the reasons they were friends.

  This was different.

  ‘We’re going to die here.’

  Pyotr shook his head. ‘No, we’re not. We’re going to become heroes.’

  Enough blood had been spilt for patches of snow, ice and churned-up earth to smoke, steam rising from puddles in ever diminishing wisps until the blood cooled.

  Snow fell. An hour later, with darkness also falling, an artillery barrage lit the sky to one side of them, and they could see that the bodies in the more exposed areas had become mounds, indistinguishable from the earlier snow.

  ‘Heroes?’ Kyukov said.

  Pyotr smiled. He’d been waiting for the question.

  ‘They keep heroes alive. That’s why we’re going to become heroes, so we can stay alive.’ He could tell, looking into his friend’s wide face and dark eyes, that he didn’t get it, didn’t understand how it would work.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Kyukov said.

  ‘We had breakfast,’ Pyotr reminded him.

  Kyukov grumbled, and Pyotr went back to examining the rows of metal levers that had once changed points on the track, trying to imagine this place as part of a normal station with unbroken rails and trains to take him elsewhere. A man might have to live a long time before that happened.

  His way was better.

  The enemy’s side of the tracks was in darkness, but the glow of a fire showed from inside a machine shop with sandbags piled high at the front. A loudspeaker in a broken window above blared bad Russian across the gap, suggesting that they surrender and promising Red Army soldiers shelter, warm clothing and food.

  Swiftly, a loudspeaker fired up on the Soviet side.

  Sovie
t citizens did not surrender. There was no man here who wouldn’t willingly give up his life for the Boss. It was the Germans who’d die here, forgotten by their wives, who were being fucked by filthy foreigners as their husbands froze or lost their balls to Russian bombs.

  ‘You think that’s true?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you worry about what was going on back home?’

  ‘You think the Germans would really give us food if we surrendered?’

  ‘I think they’d put us up against a wall. Our side certainly would if they caught us going over to the enemy.’

  ‘Pyotr,’ Kyukov said, ‘look …’

  ‘At what?’ he said crossly.

  ‘To the left. Wait for the next flare.’

  Below them, in the lee of a broken wall that kept him free from drifting snow, a Russian sergeant lay, his face shrunken back to the skull. It was his watch Kyukov had spotted, gold by the look of it, looted from a German most likely. It wouldn’t buy their way out but it had the makings of a bribe. ‘Go and get it,’ Pyotr ordered.

  Kyukov shook his head.

  ‘I’ll whistle if anything moves.’

  ‘It’s too risky,’ Kyokov said.

  ‘Oh well, if you’re scared …’

  Slithering down the steps, feet first, keeping his body tight to the cold concrete, Pyotr Dennisov prayed that his movements were invisible.

  A day in battle and he already feared the enemy’s snipers. He was also furious at having trapped himself into doing this. At ground level, he edged around the base of the signal box, knowing that he was now exposed, with only his resemblance to one corpse among hundreds to keep him safe.

  Cold had reduced the sergeant’s corruption to a slow crawl. His eyes were gone, liquefied or taken by crows, his nostrils leprous and his teeth bared. He smelled of sour milk and frost had glued him so tightly to the ice that bits of his face came away when Pyotr rolled him over. Inside his jacket were photographs, folded letters and a silver cigarette case. Pyotr left the photographs and letters.

  The leather of his watch strap was so frozen that it cracked slightly when Pyotr unbuckled it. He was turning to go when he hit his kneecap hard, the shock sending black waves through him. A rifle, bigger than any he’d seen.

  The Russian corporal clutching it didn’t want to give it up. Resting flat to the ground, Pyotr tugged again and kept tugging until the rifle slid out from under its previous owner. Pyotr’s breath rose like steam.