Derek Lambert - Vendetta

They were given .22 training rifles almost identical to the Mauser 98a but manufactured for use with small-calibre ammunition to comply with the Treaty of Versailles, and told to fire six rounds at conventional black and white targets.

When Meister wound back his target there wasn’t a mark on it but his neighbour’s target was drilled with twelve bullet holes.

But the instructor wasn’t as snappy as he sounded. Kneeling beside Meister whose face was pressed into his mat, he said: ‘Don’t worry, son, it happened to me once. Stay behind after the others have gone.’ And to Meister’s neighbour: ‘One word about this and I’ll kick your backside from here to Berlin.’

Later Meister peppered the bull and magpie with bullets and the instructor said: ‘You’re going to be good, son, really good and I wish I was going with you wherever that is.’

Kneeling beside the shell-hole, Meister experienced again the despair he had felt when, gazing at his blank target, he had believed that he would never command respect in Magdalena’s set and even now felt hot with shame although, since Stalingrad, he knew that it had never mattered anyway.

Glancing at Misha, curled like a foetus, he wished that he had found out earlier in his life that such values are smoke screening truth.

He squeezed the trigger gently as a shape that hadn’t been in his vision before moved in the moonlight. Stupid but then they were stupid. He squeezed the trigger harder and the shape reared and fell forward.

He waited. Two members of an assault group.

Misha joined him. Meister didn’t look down. He stroked the trigger, light, downward movements. He doubted whether he would have to shoot again but it was important to keep contact with the gun.

‘… really good and I wish I was going with you wherever that is.’ The instructor had died just before Britain declared war in 1939; a fragment of shrapnel that had been pressing on an artery since 1917.

The gunshot didn’t startle him. Nor the scream. But he relaxed his hold on the Karabiner and his finger forgot the trigger.

Lanz said: ‘All right, I was wrong: it wasn’t Antonov. And yes, they were stupid, weren’t they. Stupid and dead.’

When Meister told Misha what had happened he went back to the fire frowning. He sat for a while staring into the glowing remains of knowledge.

Lanz said to him: ‘It wasn’t true, was it, what you told us about your father?’

‘No,’ Misha said. ‘Both my mother and father were killed in the Stalingrad during the fighting,’ and he burrowed deep into the blankets.

At dawn, as the big guns broke open the day, Meister asked Misha: ‘Why did you do it? Why did you warn us? Don’t you know we’re the enemy?’

And Misha said: ‘You’re not the enemy. And Antonov isn’t your enemy.’

‘Then who is?’ Meister asked but Misha merely threw another schoolbook onto the rekindled fire and watched the sparks chase each other up the chopped-off chimney.

The following morning, after he had stolen breakfast, Lanz made a football. He constructed it with book-binding, sacking and an old pair of shoes and bound it with string and it was almost spherical.

‘How did you play with only one goal?’ he asked Misha, pointing at the posts chalked on the wall.

‘We had two teams’, Misha told him. ‘And we just kicked it about and tried to score goals and whoever happened to be in goal was allowed to use his hands to stop it.’

‘Then that’s how we’ll play it,’ Lanz said. ‘You and me. Five minutes each half. Russia versus Germany. I’ll kick off – just as we did last year.’

At half-time, timed by Meister on the school clock, the score was 1-1. Misha, pale face polished pink by cold and exertion, still looked fit but Lanz, breath steaming like a race-horse’s after a gallop, had to lean against the wall.

In the second half he recovered, racing around the playground on his bow legs, teaching Misha a trick or two with the ball. One minute from the end he scored.

‘Come on Russia,’ Meister called out.

He looked at the clock. Thirty seconds to go. But Lanz’s legs were bending. He attempted some fancy footwork; Misha took the ball from him. As Misha steadied himself to shoot Lanz ran back to the goal.

Misha shot. Lanz got his fingers to the ball but it hit the wall inside the posts.

‘Full-time,’ Meister shouted.

‘But nobody won,’ Misha said.

‘Nobody every does,’ Lanz said.

The ice-floes were trying to shoulder the row-boat out of their river. Or send it to the bottom. The shudders as they ground against the hull passed through Antonov’s body.

Unable to see the water from the bottom of the boat – just the dark sky and the heaving arms of the oarsmen – he imagined them as sharks on the attack.

Razin’s voice reached him from the huddle of wounded soldiers. ‘We’re half way across.’

A yellow flare lit the sky. Antonov shut his eyes but its brilliance penetrated his eyelids.

Soviet guns on the east bank fired a few salvoes and German machine-gunners raked the river but the bullets were a long way from the row-boat: the flame-thrower had seen to that.

When the flare died the cold advanced up his leg. He saw his father, brown face half-mooned with white by the peak of the cap he wore in the fields, paddling in the clear waters of the Ob, trousers rolled up to his knees, giving him swimming lessons.

From the river beach, his mother, pregnant with Alexander, transmitted smiles of encouragement. She set great store by swimming, regarding it as a sophisticated accomplishment practised outside their land-locked steppe and today he was expected to conquer the breast-stroke.

But the water this June day in the Silver Birch Festival was icy and his father had as much idea of swimming as he had of ballet-dancing. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘in you go. Kick with your legs, push the water aside with your arms.’ He made vague thrusting motions with his hands as though he were pushing aside undergrowth in the taiga.

In fact he wasn’t interested in whether his son could swim or not – water was for fish – but at festival time he indulged his wife, rewarding her for the years of toil. Today he had bought her a pair of miniature birch-bark shoes.

Yury, not hearing authority in his father’s voice, stayed in the shallows, white and stiff and pimpled with cold, while his mother, plump face bunched with frustration, gestured from the beach.

Behind the beach couples played ping-pong on sagging tables; on the grey sand families spread themselves in the sun; in the water young men wearing bathing costumes that, when saturated, drooped alarmingly at the crotch, chased girls and splashed them.

‘Go on,’ his father urged. ‘For your mother’s sake.’

‘I’ll sink,’ Yury protested.

His father pointed at the young men and girls. ‘They aren’t sinking.’

‘They were taught to swim.’

‘I’m teaching you.’

Yury thought his father should be standing in the water, gun in hand, waiting for duck to fly into his vision.

From the beach he heard his mother’s pleading voice. And heard her in the future, beside the water pump: ‘Of course Yury can swim now.’ She had never attached much importance to shooting.

His father said: ‘If I had a swimming costume I’d join you.’ He smiled to show that it was a joke; adults often did that. ‘Come on, for your mother’s sake,’ wanting to get it over with, sink or swim.

Yury stared at the clear water. Tresses of weed moved lazily. He took a step forward and mud spiralled to the surface. A tiny fish, contemplating the disturbance, darted away.