Derek Lambert - Vendetta

Bullets cut through the soldiers again. You could hear their impact on flesh and bone and now some of them were screaming and trying to fight their way to the rail. One political officer fired his pistol into the air.

‘Don’t panic, only twenty metres –’

Another flare, white this time, lit the sky. A banner of sparks flowed from the funnel of the ferry. Fluorescent feathers of water reared to the starboard as the machine-gun overshot. But the gunner soon corrected his aim: a few feathers rose to the port, then the bullets were among the men again.

Antonov turned to the soldier from Lyudnikov’s 138th. ‘They’re right,’ he said. ‘A few more metres and we’re safe.’ But the soldier didn’t reply; blood trickled from his mouth and his eyes were closed. He looked like a man who had grown up in the country, Antonov decided; perhaps he was a Siberian who had dreamed of a wooden cottage in the snow-quiet taiga; reassuringly, Antonov patted the dead man’s shoulder.

At the rails the political officers were fighting with soldiers trying to jump. Antonov watched with dispassionate interest. Why did they bother? The men were only taking evasive action, adapting the instruction in the pamphlets.

Only a few more metres. Another burst of bullets tore into the bows of the ferry. Lower this time, entering between the lower rail and the deck, ploughing through the mêlée of legs; but even when they were hit the men didn’t fall, such was the congestion.

One man was standing on the rail now. The commissar grabbed his legs but the soldier kicked him in the face and dived and by this time two more were on the rails; one jumped, one fell back as a political officer seized one of his legs. Other soldiers climbed on to the rails, rolling, jumping, diving into the water; through the rails Antonov saw them threshing, sinking, surfacing.

He saw the commissar level his pistol at the frantic figures in the water. Impossible. The enemy was over there, finger on the trigger of an MG 34. ‘We’re all Russians,’ he wanted to shout but his lips were frozen, tongue paralysed.

He saw the pistol jerk in the commissar’s hand. He gazed into the crowded water. It was turning pink. He looked up again. The commissar was still firing; so were the other political officers. And when a soldier on the deck thrust his way through the bodies and hurled himself at one of them another shot him in the head and kept his pistol levelled at the rest of them.

Suddenly the machine-gun stopped firing; the ferry had reached the shelter of the cliffs. The pistols continued to fire for a few seconds, then they stopped.

The political officers stared at their guns. The men stared at the political officers. Antonov heard the slap of small waves against the hull of the ferry. He screamed but no sound issued from his throat.

What will your feeling be when you kill him?

Antonov, sitting in the tunnel, stared at Razin who was feeding his rat with peanuts.

Antonov wasn’t sure that he wanted to kill Meister: he would rather have shot the commissar with the soap-shiny cheeks.

‘I’ve only got one piece of advice for you – don’t marry a girl unless you laugh at the same things.’

‘What if you haven’t got any sense of humour?’

‘Don’t get married at all.’

Meister, hearing his father’s voice, smiled and Lanz, zipped into a sleeping bag on Platform One in the Central Railway Station, asked: ‘Was she good?’

‘Was who good?’ Meister stirred sleepily in his bag.

‘The girl you were dreaming about.’

‘I was dreaming about my father.’ A quirky dream because humour wasn’t his strong suit.

Meister shielded his eyes against the dawn light shining through the space where the roof had been, then closed them and tried to summon his father back to the dream.

After a while he returned but now he was a clown in a circus and other clowns were pouring water over him, bucket after bucket of it, and the white paint was being washed from his face and the water streaming down his cheeks was tears and the spectators laughing at his discomfort were all Jews and Meister found that he, too, was laughing. And crying.

And, watched by his mother holding a parasol, he was flying a kite, a dragon with a green tail, on the clipped grass on the banks of the Aussenalster. At first the kite wouldn’t leave the ground; then his father, pointed beard wagging, made an adjustment to the tail and the kite took off taking Meister with it.

When he let go he fell towards the lake but a gust of wind blew him towards the Historical Museum to the south-west of Hamburg and he tumbled into an old-fashioned rifle range. He peered along the barrel of a musket and, beyond the primitive sights, saw Antonov, but when he squeezed the trigger he disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Meister awoke with a jerk.

Lanz, squatting on his sleeping bag peeling an apple, said: ‘You dreamt you were falling? When you hit the ground you’re dead.’

Meister sat up and looked round the shell of the station. Sleeping soldiers lay on the platforms and the concourse; a black locomotive lay on its side – as though it had been slapped; the station clock had stopped at 4.20; the stalls in the men’s lavatory stood exposed; a crooked nameplate at the end of the platform where he and Lanz were camped indicated that a train had once stood there panting, waiting to depart for Rostov – Meister wondered if it had got there. The station had changed hands many times in the early days of the battle, five times in one morning, and there were dark stains on the concrete between the two sleeping bags.

A German spotter plane, the daily prelude to hostilities, droned across the sky, its pilot looking for Soviet re-inforcements that had crossed the Volga overnight. As soon as the pilot radioed back to base Junkers and Heinkels would take off, heavy with bombs.

Lanz said, ‘How did your father make his money?’

Not what sort of a father was he? A thief knew his priorities. ‘Perfume,’ he said.

At least he had succeeded in surprising Lanz. ‘Perfume?’ Lanz placed his fingers on his skull-cap baldness and rubbed the flesh backwards and forwards on the bone. ‘You mean we still made perfume while we were re-arming?’

‘You’d be surprised how much we produced.’ He could hear his father telling him how much. Felt the scratch of his grey-threaded beard against his cheek as he kissed him goodnight and turned his face away from his cigar-smell.

‘I hope you didn’t wear it.’

‘No, but the whole house smelled of it. My father used to bring samples home from the factory and ask my mother to give her opinion. Then she gave them to the maids and they swamped themselves with it.’

‘Maids! National Socialism was all right for some.’ Lanz chewed the core of the apple, then ate the skin. Why had he bothered to peel it? ‘Is your old man a member of the Party?’

The question invited an apology and Meister was grateful to the Russian gunners who opened up on the other side of the river making conversation impossible for the moment.

His father was a Party member and many of Hamburg’s leading Nazis had visited the tall, gabled house in the centre of the city. From his bedroom Meister had heard the murmur of dinner conversation, rising in volume as the meal progressed, and the toasts to the Führer and, occasionally, martial songs, although these were muted and short-lived when his mother, purveyor of unspoken but aristocratic reproof, was present.

Once or twice Goebbels had been present. Small, lame, unprepossessing, he had become transformed when he spoke, words like cascading stars lighting the future.

Before dinner, while drinks were being served in front of the log fire, Goebbels, still in uniform after the Party rally, swastika on his arm, had talked to Meister.