Derek Lambert - Vendetta

Tensing his muscles, drawing a deep breath, he threw himself forward…

The cold advanced rapidly, almost covering his legs. He shouted: ‘Hey, we’re filling up with water,’ remembering that, on that sunlit, silver-birch day, he hadn’t swum a single stroke and never had since.

Razin reached down. ‘Shit, it’s pouring in,’ he called out.

‘Then block it,’ one of the oarsmen called out.

Another ice-floe hit the boat, then another. The sharks, Antonov thought, had smelled a wounded prey. He saw their teeth on the other side of the hull.

‘Christ it’s cold,’ Razin shouted.

The water reached Antonov’s hip: soon only his head would be clear, if he could raise it.

Razin called out: ‘Bale you stupid bastards, bale.’

Antonov saw a steel helmet scoop water from beside him. The water was in his ears drowning sound. He raised his head, sound returned. But he couldn’t hold up his head for more than a few seconds. He heard Razin shout: ‘I can’t feel my hand: my arm’s like a stump.’

The steel helmet dipped and scooped.

‘How much further?’ Antonov asked.

‘Farther than that,’ Razin said and his voice sounded frozen too.

The back of Antonov’s neck ached from supporting his head; any moment now he would have to lay it back gently and let the water into his ears, into his nostrils and down to his lungs. A stupid way to drown, lying on the bottom of a row-boat. He trembled with the cold and the proximity of the unknown.

He eased his head into the water. Shut his eyes as he waited for it to extinguish hearing and breathing. The water reached the lobes of his ears, stopped.

Razin said: ‘I can’t feel my arm.’

The oarsmen grunted as they pulled. The steel helmet filled and emptied, then paused. The water rose above the lobes of Antonov’s ears. He tried to raise his head again but it was too heavy.

He felt the nose of a big ice-shark butt the hull. Saw it wheel and return. The boat shuddered.

Antonov heard Razin cry out. The cry submerged. The water was ice in his nostrils but gentle on his eyes. He breathed a little water. He cried out a bubble of sound. He tried to swim but he had no faith and, apologising to his mother on the beach, he floundered between his father’s legs, a deathly white beneath the rolled-up trousers.

Snow fell on November 16 and settled in for winter.

Its luminosity was the first thing Antonov noticed when he regained consciousness. He saw the whiteness through a window of the hospital and he knew that outside it was beautiful.

There had been periods of awareness before but this was the first true awakening. He wanted to feel snow polished underfoot on a wooden track and he wanted to skate on a yard that had been hosed into a rink.

He turned his head and saw Razin in a moulting blue dressing-gown sitting beside the bed, one arm in a sling, reading the chart that should have been hanging on the end of his bed.

Razin said: ‘You nearly drowned.’ He tapped the chart. ‘But you’re on the mend. Stout peasant stock.’

‘Siberian stock, Antonov said. ‘What about the others?’

‘Two died – they hadn’t got enough limbs to swim with. But they were going to die anyway.’

Flakes of snow hesitated at the window.

‘Did I swim?’ Antonov asked incredulously.

‘Like a stone. But we were near the shore and the water wasn’t deep and one of the oarsmen got you ashore. The others managed to swim.’

‘And you?’ Somehow Antonov couldn’t imagine Razin swimming.

‘I thought of those plump nurses: I made it.’

‘How’s your arm?’

‘Thawing.’ With his good hand Razin held the arm in the sling as though it belonged to a stranger. ‘Exposure, not quite the same as frostbite, according to the medics. And rare in just one limb. They’re very interested in me, those boys. They want to see if it turns gangrenous and starts to spread. If it does, chop.’ He aimed the blade of his good hand at the sling.

Razin’s face became fuzzy. Antonov shut his eyes. When he opened them Razin had two faces once again.

‘What’s the matter?’ Razin asked.

‘There are two of you.’

‘They were afraid of that, double vision. They got all the water out of your lungs but they weren’t as worried about those as they were about your sight.’

‘Scared I won’t be able to shoot Meister?’

‘Double vision isn’t exactly an asset for a sniper. Especially when a hair-line fracture of the skull has been confirmed,’ he added. He settled himself comfortably in the chair. ‘Let’s hope your vision stays that way until the war’s over.’

Leaning his head, shaved and bandaged, on the stacked pillows, Antonov looked around. The bed was surrounded by screens; beyond them he could hear desultory talk and the sighs of men in pain.

He asked Razin if Moscow still wanted him to kill Meister.

‘Why not? Nothing’s changed. You still humanise statistics. There are so many dead, so many wounded, that figures lose their impact. But you’re every mother’s son.’

So is Meister, Antonov thought.

‘If you kill Meister they’ll toast you in every home in the Soviet Union. Sergei, Stepan, Mikhail, Nikolai… They’re alive and well and beating the hell out of the Fritzes.’

‘Maybe it won’t come to that.’ Razin’s two faces became one again. Through the window Antonov could see the white church with the green dome.

‘The counter-attack? That won’t make any difference. When it comes, if it comes, you and Meister will still be in Stalingrad. But not,’ Razin added thoughtfully, ‘if you’re still over here on the east bank. How long do you think you can drag it out?’

‘Until I’m cured.’

‘You can do better than that.’

‘I can’t fake a fractured skull.’

‘You can fake double-vision. Nothing simpler. Why not try triple-vision?’

‘You don’t have to go back,’ Antonov said. ‘Not if your hand’s still bad.’

‘Wrong. Wherever you go I go. You’re my meal ticket. If you cross the river without me then they’ll stick me in the front-line again.’

Antonov said: ‘Strange, isn’t it, a river separating us from hell.’ Razin’s face was slipping out of focus again.

‘The Dneiper is a more impressive river,’ Razin said. ‘A monarch. On summer evenings we used to stroll along its banks and if you had a girl on your arm you bought her a carnation with a stem wrapped in silver paper.’ Razin stared into the past. ‘Did you know that Christianity was introduced into Russia via the Dnieper in the tenth century when Prince Vladimir ordered his subjects to be baptised in its waters? And did you know that there’s a Golden Gate like Constantinople’s in Kiev and a monastery built inside caves?’

Antonov shook his head cautiously but the movement disturbed an ache in his skull.

‘You should learn some Ukrainian,’ Razin told him. ‘“Ya ne razoomayoo” and “Do pobáchenya.” “I don’t understand” and “Goodbye.”’

‘Do pobáchenya,’ Antonov said and slept.

The Russian counter-attack, code-named Uranus, was launched on November 19, a Thursday, about 100 miles north-west of Stalingrad. But Antonov didn’t hear details until four days later.

They were brought to him by Razin, wearing the same dressing-gown and trading conspiratorial smiles with a nurse with Mongol features and shiny blue-black hair cut in a fringe.

The offensive, he told Antonov, began at 7.30 am in freezing fog. An eighty-minute bombardment by Katyushas, heavy guns and mortars.

At 8.50 assault troops and tanks attacked in the snow-covered steppe south of the Don.

Razin recited units involved – 47th Guards, 5th Tank, 124th Rifle Division… But they meant nothing to Antonov; he saw snow, churned brown and blood-red, littered with the bodies of men who had met for the first time.