Derek Lambert - Vendetta

Razin wiped his mess-tin clean with a piece of bread which he ate, chewing slowly.

Misha said: ‘You won’t even get wet, we’re going underground.’ He pulled at Antonov’s sleeve. ‘We can get there through the tunnel on the other side of the shell-hole,’ pointing into the darkness beyond the candlelight.

Antonov, neither believing or disbelieving, began to pack his gear.

‘There’s the shell-hole,’ Lanz whispered. The sleet had eased and Meister could just make out a black wound in the hump of the tunnel.

‘Good,’ Meister said. ‘Now we’ll be able to find it easily.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

‘In the morning,’ Meister said, glad at last he could release the deceit. ‘At dawn. When we come for him.’

‘Don’t give me any of that shit,’ Lanz said. ‘We’ve come for him now.’

‘I can’t shoot him down there,’ Meister said. ‘Not hiding in a sewer.’ There was sometimes dignity in death; he had seen it already on the battlefield. ‘You don’t shoot a man in the back or when he’s eating or sleeping.’

‘I do.’ Lanz drew his pistol.

‘No.’

‘Try and stop me and you get the first bullet.’

And he was away, swallowed up by the black wound, and Meister was shouting to Antonov in German and broken Russian and he was down in the darkness of the tunnel making for the faint grey orb where the sewer disgorged into the river.

The beam of the flashlight startled him. He watched it explore the rounded walls, pick out some boxes, a couple of mattresses.

Lanz’s voice reached him in echoes. ‘The little bastard has double-crossed us. He came here and warned them.’

Meister, following the beam of the flashlight, saw a pile of sunflower seed husks on the carpet.

In the subterranean world of Stalingrad women were in charge. In cellars, sewers and connecting tunnels they shepherded what was left of families – old men, babushki, children – into groups where, surrounded by prams, punished chairs and primus stoves, they cooked and clucked and crooned. Sometimes they camped beside the neighbours who had lived next to them above ground and where thus able to exchange the terrible tidings of war as they had once exchanged gossip.

During the night, and sometimes in daylight when there was a lull in the bombing and shelling, they emerged from their burrows to scavenge for provisions and, headscarved and predatory, they didn’t look much different from the days when they had shopped at the local gastronom or challenged the cashier’s calculations on the abacus in Univermag. At least as they foraged in the rubble they didn’t have to queue. But sometimes they didn’t return and their old and their young were beckoned into another circle.

As Antonov and Razin followed Misha into the vaults of ground held by the Germans, occasionally surfacing to run from one haven to another, the numbers thinned out but those remaining had a permanent air about them and Misha explained that they were directly beneath the remains of their homes. ‘Where someone died,’ he added.

A women called out: ‘Misha, come. Drink some soup.’ She wore black and was barrel-shaped and her eyes were small above the bunches of her cheeks, but for one surprising moment Antonov saw her as a young girl and her eyes were wide and clear as she peered into the future.

Misha whispered: ‘She lost her two sons in the air-raid on August 23. I used to play with them, Georgi and Andrei. They were twins. People said they couldn’t tell them apart but I could.’

The woman ladled soup into a wooden bowl. ‘Here, drink, it’s good stuff. I found some potatoes and cheese rind and some flour.’ Steam rose from the bowl.

Misha looked at Antonov and Razin. ‘Go on, drink it,’ Razin told him.

Misha took the bowl from the woman. Arms crossed, she nodded with maternal approval as Misha put his lips to it.

Antonov looked around the cellar. An old man and woman sat close together inside a circle of battered possessions; outside the circle stood two heaps of small clothes and some wooden toys.

The woman turned to Antonov and Razin. ‘What brings you down here?’ she asked.

‘Misha knows a tunnel where we can surprise some Fritzes.’

‘Good. Kill as many parasites as you can. Soup?’

Antonov shook his head. ‘We’ve just eaten.’

‘Then you’re lucky. But sit down and have a smoke.’ She handed them a tin of makhorka and some newspaper. ‘A drink?’ She passed Antonov a bottle of vodka and when, smiling, he refused: ‘You don’t drink firewater? Are you sure you’re a Russian soldier?’

‘He’s a Siberian,’ Razin said, lighting an untidy cigarette, and Misha, leaning forward in the oily light of the stove, said: ‘That’s Yury Antonov,’ but the name meant nothing to the woman and Antonov was relieved.

‘Where in Siberia?’ she asked.

‘Near Novosibirsk.’

‘Ah, I went to Tomsk once. A long time ago. And you?’ to Razin.

‘Kiev.’

But Kiev was beyond her horizons.

She said: ‘I hear there are ice floes on the Volga.’

‘Mushy stuff,’ Antonov said. ‘There will be ice on the Ob by now.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘the Ob.’

‘One of the longest rivers in the world.’

‘The Volga’s different,’ dismissing the Ob. ‘It takes a long time to freeze right over. But soon the ice-floes will be as hard as concrete and it will be very difficult to cross it. Any news of a counter-attack?’ she asked Razin.

‘There’s always news of it but it never comes. If it does come this is how it will be.’ Razin drew a diagram on the dust and the flagstones. ‘From the south, fifty miles or so from Stalingrad, and from the north-west across the Don. That’s where the Fritzes are weakest,’ he explained.

‘I’ve heard that re-inforcements are on the way,’ the woman said.

‘Let’s hope the Fritzes haven’t heard as well. If we do counter-attack and the armies from the north and south meet up then they will be surrounded in Stalingrad. Just as we are now. And you,’ nodding at the woman and the old couple, ‘will be able to escape across the Volga on an ice-floe.’

Misha began to hum Katyusha. Boris inched towards the food and warmth.

The woman said: ‘Mother of God, that’s the fattest rat I ever saw.’

‘That’s Boris,’ Razin said.

The woman threw a stone at the rat; it retreated but not too far. ‘Rats! They’re making stews with them in some cellars.’ She turned to Antonov. ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘One, Alexander.’

‘The same age as you?’

‘Younger,’ said Antonov, remembering that she had been the mother of twins.

‘And you?’ to Razin.

‘Just me.’

‘Enough, I shouldn’t wonder. Rats! God in heaven. How old is Alexander?’

‘Sixteen. He wants to be a pilot.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I was medically unfit,’ Antonov said. ‘Then they found I could shoot straight.’

‘Have you shot many Germans?’

‘A few.’

‘Shoot some more for me.’ She poured vodka into a tin cup and drank it. ‘Are your parents alive?’ And when he said they were: ‘Tell me about them.’

He told her about his mother’s authority in the house, his father’s affinity with the outdoors. He saw his mother masking the windows with newspaper to keep the cold at bay; saw his father hand-scything their own plot of wheat. He saw the frost patterns like ferns on the inside of his bedroom window; he breathed on them and his mother and father slithered away and he was back in the cellar.

‘You like hunting?’ the woman asked. ‘Most Siberians do.’