Derek Lambert - Vendetta

He winked.

On the table in the bedroom stood a bottle of pink champagne, Tsimlyanskoye, and two glasses.

Antonov levered off the cork with his thumb; it hit the ceiling and he lost a quarter of the bottle in a gush of pink foam. They laughed, clinked glasses and sipped the champagne; Antonov had never tasted it before; it tasted like cherryade, disappointing.

He glanced at his watch. ‘So we have one hour and three-quarters left.’

She stared into her glass. Then: ‘Everything’s different in war, isn’t it. Before the war we would never have thought about this,’ glancing at the double bed with the coverlet drawn back. ‘Well, we might have thought about it but…’

He had thought about it all right: Antonov remembered his imagination slavering the morning after the Komsomol meeting, the morning they had come for him. He had been ashamed of the fertility of his imagination, a perplexing combination of farmyard knowledge and chivalrous respect. But since then he had heard the crude way soldiers referred to women; at first it had shocked him; no longer; however crude their language they still kept creased photographs of wives and girlfriends in their wallets and if anyone made a suggestive remark about those then beware… Look what happened to the Muscovite at Akhtubinsk.

Antonov watched the bubbles exploding on the surface of his champagne: he finished the glass, replenished it; the exploding bubbles synchronised with the gunfire on the other side of the river. He gazed speculatively at Tasya, knowing what was expected of him.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Just eighteen. You know that.’

He felt no desire. This worried him: he had no intention of making love to her – their situation was too contrived – but surely he should have been aroused. He recalled a joke he had heard in the trenches about a Ukrainian – they had a reputation for being henpecked – who couldn’t achieve an erection unless he was wearing an apron.

Antonov look a long pull on his champagne.

Tasya kissed him under the ear. ‘Don’t drink too much,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’ And then, picking up a blue case, disappeared into the bathroom. He heard the bolt slide home.

Antonov patrolled the lavender-scented room, agonising about his indifference. Panicking about an act that he wasn’t going to perform. Stupid!

When she emerged from the bathroom wearing a filmy white nightdress he began to tremble. ‘I’ve left the hot water running for you,’ she said and he went into the bathroom carrying his glass of champagne. When he took a swallow the bubbles frothed noisily in his mouth.

Bath towel round his waist, he re-emerged. She was curled up beneath the sheets, eyes wide open; she had removed her make-up and she reminded him of a child waiting for a bedtime story.

He decided to slip into the bed and kiss her and perhaps caress her and explain that he didn’t want to make love because they had both been pushed into it although, God knows, he wanted to, and yes, one day, when they weren’t being manipulated, they would make love and it would be wonderful. And he would continue his agonising when she had gone.

But when he got into bed he discovered that there was no need to agonise ever again.

The journey from the west bank of the river to the east had been relatively uneventful; the return trip made up for it.

They departed at Crossing 62 at dusk when, according to the pundits of whom there was no shortage, the German gunners took a break because visibility was confused and it wasn’t dark enough for flares. The experts were right until the ferry was half way across.

The flares went up first, rekindling daylight, followed by mortars that sent gouts of water over the bows of the ferry, a dowager, with a tall funnel.

Antonov, sitting in the stern beside a political commissar with soap-shined cheeks and vodka breath, remembered the ships he had seen blown out of the water. Bodies had splashed into the water among the debris. In early September the Borodino, with 1,000 wounded soldiers on board, and the Yosif Stalin, carrying a similar number of civilian refugees, had been sunk.

Soldiers following the passage of a ship under fire took bets on its chances of reaching its destination.

A yellow flare lit the sky.

‘Do you think they’re looking for you?’ the commissar asked.

Antonov, regarding him with astonishment, saw the features of a man schooled never to accept anything straightforward; the face, he realised at this burgeoning time of awareness, of someone who would never understand that a subtlety of life is sometimes the obvious.

‘They don’t want me to die here,’ he told the commissar. ‘They want Meister to get me. If they heard in Berlin that I had been killed by a mortar heads would roll.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’ The commissar rubbed his shiny cheeks with the tips of his fingers. ‘What’s it like to be so important?’

Antonov glanced at him again; he had the naked air of someone accustomed to wearing spectacles. Without them he was divested of importance. ‘Where are your glasses?’ he asked.

‘I trod on them,’ the commissar said.

‘Bad luck.’ Authority was reaching him every day, but from where he knew not.

‘Oh yes, it was bad luck all right.’ The commissar peered at the advancing bank of the river.

A mortar engulfed them with water so that, for a long moment, Antonov thought they had been thrown into the river. But when they surfaced they were still sitting on the wooden benches where workers and trippers and lovers, parents and children asking when they were going to reach the other side, had once sat.

Troops crammed on to the slatted benches stared at them curiously.

A dripping soldier said: ‘Who are you with?’

Antonov told him.

‘So you’ve been in Stalingrad?’

‘A couple of weeks.’

‘Is it always like this?’ as another mortar showered them with water.

‘Always. Who are you with?’

‘One hundred and thirty-eighth division. Lyudnikov’s mob. The rearguard.’

‘Glad to have you on board.’ Antonov grinned despite everything.

The mortars stopped firing.

‘Shit,’ said a voice. ‘Here it comes.’ As machine-gun bullets ripped through the compressed bodies. But no one had warned the newcomers from Lyudnikov’s 138th and the bullets hit them at shoulder level.

Crouching, watching blood mingle with water on the deck in the false daylight, Antonov felt the beginnings of panic ripple through the troops: they had been prepared to fight in the streets but not to be floating targets. In pamphlets handed out as they boarded the ferry they had been advised to hit the ground and make for the nearest cover. Here, the only escape was the river.

The commissar and other political officers, pistols drawn, had taken up positions on the rails. One was shouting through a megaphone: ‘Keep calm, another fifty metres and they can’t touch us.’

Which was true: when a ship got within a certain distance of the steep shoreline the Germans couldn’t bring their guns to bear on it. Antonov had watched this happen and heard soldiers on the shore who had won their bets cheer. But fifty metres was a long way under fire and a MG 34 could fire a lot of bullets in that distance.

The machine-gun opened up again. Men whimpered. Russian big guns on the east bank began to fire, the shells slithering overhead before exploding somewhere in the gathering darkness. To the west the sky was a gentle violet, everywhere else it was brilliant.

A soldier tried to climb onto the rail but a political officer pulled him back. ‘Keep calm, not much further –’