Jack Grimwood - Moskva

‘We need to move,’ Kyukov said.

He said it so often Pyotr barely noticed.

It was three days since they’d eaten, almost as long since they’d felt close to warm and Pyotr was regretting sharing his cigarettes. Crawling to the shell hole, he peered out. ‘Something’s happening.’

NCOs were gathering, Soviet conscripts being manhandled into a line. Political officers tugged their collars and gripped their megaphones as they began to rehearse their words.

‘Look at that,’ Kyukov said.

Out of sight of the enemy, two Red Army soldiers lugged a machine gun. When one slipped, her cap fell away to reveal blonde hair. The other helped his comrade up, then picked up the gun again. They were young, obviously a couple.

Kyukov grinned. ‘Let’s go down there.’

‘And get killed? We wait…’

The whistle went and the troops raced up the icy bank towards the tracks, the two with their machine gun at the rear. As a German gun opened up, and soldiers at the front stumbled, they fell too. It was a ruse. Dropping into a crater, they slotted a circular magazine on top of the gun and opened fire the moment the last of those in front fell, the black magazine spinning like a record.

Its burst was brief.

The boy lunged forward to remove the disk and replace it. The next magazine burned out as fast and was replaced as quickly. They were lucky or well trained or simply desperate, because the enemy machine gun suddenly stilled. Pyotr thought that a fresh wave would charge from his side but all that happened was that those screaming kept on screaming and the enemy gun remained silent.

‘Oh shit,’ Kyukov said.

A mortar arced high from the German side.

It exploded the moment it landed; the boy busy replacing the disk jerked sideways, half the skin and all of his uniform ripped from his shoulders. The girl simply shuddered, her cap coming away again.

‘Fucking, fucking fuck!’

It was the angriest Pyotr had ever seen his friend.

Grabbing the big rifle from the corner, Kyukov jerked at its bolt, which jammed. He hammered at the weapon with such fury that its magazine dropped away. The round that fell from the clip was fatter than Pyotr’s thumb.

‘Wait,’ Pyotr said.

‘Why would I fucking wait?’

‘A bullet bigger than your dick deserves better.’

The sky was dark that night; the moon hidden by cloud and no flares lit their brutal little section of the city. An owl hooted from the factory opposite. How it survived and why it didn’t simply leave was a question asked by more than the two hiding in the signal hut. They were the only ones to hear the whimpering from no-man’s-land though. Both machine gunners had survived. If not being dead yet could be called surviving.

Between the moans of the injured, Pyotr and Kyukov’s hunger and the eerie hoots of the owl, it was their worst night in the signal box yet. They were out of cigarettes, they’d had no food to start with and the tiny room stank from where they’d shat in one corner until neither had anything left to shit.

Sometime after midnight Pyotr made his decision.

‘I’m going out,’ he said.

‘I’m coming.’

‘You stay here and keep guard.’

Kyukov shook his head fiercely. ‘I know where you’re going. I know what you’re going to do. I’m starving. I’m near dead with cold. You don’t leave me behind this time.’

A man had to eat…

That was how Pyotr Dennisov justified himself.

He wasn’t to know until later that cannibalism was rife on both sides, with bodies being stripped of their entrails before being buried, and sometimes going missing altogether. You had to have been cold and desperate and on the edge of starvation to understand. He doubted if his friend had any such qualms. But then Kyukov marched to the sound of his own invisible drum.

Pyotr sharpened the knife. Kyukov used it.

That was their friendship in a nutshell.

Neither spoke later of what they’d done out there, under the cover of darkness, in the hollow of a crater, in a wasteland that barely merited being called a siding.

‘No bones,’ Pyotr had said. Nothing was to be left at the end that might be used as evidence. So Kyukov had cut flesh from the boy’s flank, and peeled skin from his shoulder, rolling it tightly so that it looked like a fancy document tube.

‘I’m done,’ Kyukov hissed.

‘Give me a moment…’

‘What if they send up another flare?’

Before dawn, Pyotr crawled out again.

The girl was as he’d left her, her uniform badly buttoned, recently dead and her eyes now turned to the sky. Her flesh, when he undid the buttons, was as white as he remembered, white as ice and already cold enough to make him shiver.

He’d removed her hair. All of it.

He was glad he’d left the rest of her uncut.

Kyukov’s boy had been enough to feed his cruder hungers.

An hour later, furious at the loss of their machine gun, frustrated by their failure to take the siding, the Germans brought up a Panzer that announced itself by smashing down the wall that had concealed its approach. It was huge, frightening, with the Balkenkreuz , the iron cross of the Wehrmacht, stark on its side.

‘Fuck,’ Kyukov said.

‘Fuck nothing.’ The tank got off one shot before Pyotr jacked an anti-tank bullet into his anti-tank rifle and emptied the entire magazine, all five rounds, straight through the turret’s roof where it was thinnest.

Few soldiers who retreated from a battlefield in Stalingrad were allowed to live. Pyotr Dennisov and Rustam Kyukov were among that number. Buoyed up by the destruction of the Panzer, the Red Army attacked again, crossing the tracks and overrunning the factory. The battle to take the ruined building lasted thirty-six hours and was fought room by room and floor by floor.

When it was over, the Red Army set up machine guns on the far side of the factory, anti-aircraft posts on its roof and brought in sappers to repair the rails. By then, Dennisov and Kyukov were across the river and behind the lines, waiting to see a small man who’d recently arrived from Moscow to put some backbone into the Soviet forces.

‘What if he asks how we survived without food?’

‘We starved, we survived on patriotism, on love of the Motherland, on a desire to do our duty. Eat the damn soup and look grateful.’

The first thing the fat little man asked was why they’d been cowering in a signal box for days. Because they were traitors? Because they were spineless, gutless cowards? The major with him, the comrade commissar who’d come to their school, actually smiled when Pyotr said that they’d found the big rifle right at the beginning and kept themselves hidden, waiting for something worth shooting.

‘What are you grinning at?’ the man asked.

Kyukov grinned some more. ‘I’m alive. They’re not.’

At a nudge from his friend, the Tartar explained in atrocious Russian how the Comrade Major had come to the school, how inspiring he’d been, how he and Dennisov had simply wanted to do their duty. How they’d survived on patriotism, on love of the Motherland.

And the little man listened, his mouth twisting, and finally sighed as if to say as answers went theirs would do. They were to be promoted and given medals. The comrade major would assign them to their next posts. Before that, someone from the army newspaper wanted to talk to them. They were to stand up straight, speak clearly and be sure to say that any man here would have done the same.

The man from the paper had a camera with a flashgun.

He took photographs, asked them to spell their names, ordered them to stare heroically into the distance, then told them to look shyly at the camera, and took one final photograph of them with their arms around each other’s shoulders.