Derek Lambert - Vendetta

Razin said: ‘They were fighting Rumanians mostly, the Third Army. The Rumanians fought well but what could they do with 100 old Czech light tanks against T-34s? By midday they were on the run.’

He took a packet of papirosy from the pocket of the dressing gown. ‘Can I?’ He folded a smile at the nurse.

‘You shouldn’t. Rules…’

‘Made to be broken.’ He lit the yellow cigarette.

So Razin had made a conquest. What did the girl see in him? A way with words, perhaps, that would be uncommon among her other patients; the mystery of his squandered intelligence; a cavalier attitude to authority… The girl, Antonov felt, wanted to know the source of every wandering line on Razin’s face.

‘Elsewhere,’ Razin said, ‘we didn’t have such an easy time of it. We ran into Paulus’s left flank and the Panzers fought like bastards. But we continued to advance towards Kalach. Here look.’

Razin produced a sketch-map. Kalach was about fifty miles west of Stalingrad. The idea, he explained, was for the Russians advancing from the north west to link up there with a force attacking from the south-east sealing Paulus’s Sixth Army in a pocket.

Razin went on: ‘The attack from the south-east was launched on the 20th. We ripped into the Rumanians all right. They fought well but their worst enemy was the steppe. A white wilderness. Even some of our brigade commanders lost their sense of direction and charged straight into enemy minefields.’

‘So, what’s happening now?’ the nurse asked, proud of Razin’s expertise.

‘Patience.’ Razin sucked smoke into his lungs. ‘Wait till you hear this. As you know the Don makes a sharp turn and flows south so, to reach Kalach, our forces advancing from the north-west had to cross it. And cross it they did with German tanks leading them.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Antonov said.

‘We drove five captured tanks over the bridge at night-time with their lights on the way the Germans drive them. Half way across the tanks stopped and out swarmed sixty Russians armed with sub-machine-guns. The Fritzes were caught with their pants down and the infantry swarmed over the bridge.’

Antonov had never seen Razin so animated. He wasn’t sure what was responsible – the presence of the girl, the Russian victories or the fact that he was remote from them.

‘And?’ the girl asked impatiently.

Razin nipped his cigarette in the wash-basin and returned the butt to the packet. Then, settling himself once more, he announced: ‘At 1030 hours today our forces linked up at Sovetski south-east of Kalach. The German Sixth Army, comrades, is surrounded.’

The girl purred. Razin looked as though he had done the job himself He said: ‘Now Paulus will have to turn his guns the other way.’

‘Just in time,’ Antonov said. ‘We were almost in the river.’

‘We were in the river,’ Razin reminded him.

The nurse said: ‘Is your arm hurting you?’ which Antonov thought was wonderful because she was supposed to be looking after him.

‘It’s not too bad.’ Razin patted his bad arm with his good hand.

‘Will it be over soon?’ she asked. ‘Stalingrad, I mean.’

‘It should be. They reckon there are nearly 300,000 Germans in the pocket and the Luftwaffe can’t fly in enough supplies, not in the Russian winter.’

‘So Paulus will surrender?’

‘I’m sure he wants to. The trouble is Hitler doesn’t want him to. Just as Stalin didn’t want Chuikov to.’

‘But Stalin was right, wasn’t he.’

‘Oh yes,’ Razin said. ‘He was right. No doubt about that. Ask the corpses lying in the ruins.’

Antonov said to the nurse: ‘I think it’s time for me to take my pills.’

She glanced at her watch.

‘Oh yes, so it is.’ She handed him two tablets, one white and one yellow, gave him a glass of water and took his temperature and pulse.

Then she said to Razin: ‘Come on, let’s celebrate,’ and led the way through the screens.

By day Antonov listened to the radio. Patriotic music, concerts, readings from Ehrenburg, Simonov’s poetry, news bulletins – belated in the case of Stalingrad – exhortations to work and fight and, a couple of times, repeats of The Oath of the Defenders of Stalingrad sent to Stalin and published on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Revolution.

In sending you this letter from the trenches, we swear to you, dear Iossif Vissarionvich, that to the last drop of blood, to the last breath, to the last heart-beat, we shall defend Stalingrad… We swear that we shall not disgrace the glory of Russian arms and shall fight to the end. Under your leadership our fathers won the battle of Tsaritsyn. Under your leadership we shall win the great Battle of Stalingrad.

Once Antonov would have been stirred by the message. Or believed he was stirred. No longer. The words had marched from a parade-ground, disciplined and uniformed. Now he had seen sacrifice: it was necessary not glorious.

But Stalin’s own words on the following day, November 7, had quickened the pulse. There will be a holiday in our street, too. How it had intrigued everyone. Was there at last to be a victory? Not merely a successful rearguard action?

Stalingrad had been the holiday in our street.

At night, between jagged dreams, Antonov listened to the cold crackling outside the hospital. Cold, that was, by local definition.

When he was a boy the Antonov household had once been visited by an exuberant uncle who lived in Yakutia in Siberia, the coldest inhabited part of the world where temperatures of minus fifty degrees centigrade were not uncommon.

When he talked about the cold it became a rogue. It snapped steel bars, froze the earth hundreds of metres deep all the year round and exploded trees – ‘Just like that, crash,’ clapping his hands together with a report that Yury had never been able to emulate.

To thwart the rogue he had drunk spirit, pure grain spirit also known as White Dynamite, and escaped from its breath, called People’s Mist because it was frozen vapour from humans, into the Red Star Dance Hall. He didn’t seem to be hostile to the cold for these diversions.

‘Give in to it,’ he would say, ‘and it kills your flesh in seconds.’ The idea of murdered flesh had fascinated Yury.

Cold? In Stalingrad, currently sheathed in twenty degrees of frost, they had never been personally acquainted with the rogue. But what if you were a German without winter clothing? What if you were Meister? Antonov stared through the window at the darkness beyond the fingers of snow in the corners of the frames. He shivered and turned into his pillows.

The footsteps on the flagstones of the field hospital, a converted collective farm two kilometres from the Volga, rang with authority, tapping small chords of pain in Antonov’s skull.

The screens parted and Razin’s nurse said: ‘You’ve got visitors,’ resolutely unimpressed by their identity.

General Vasili Chuikov and a captain, bringing with them a whiff of battle, sat on chairs beside Antonov’s bed and regarded him critically. Finally, Chuikov, pugilist’s face drained, sores on his hands bandaged, said: ‘Are they treating you well?’

Antonov said they were.

Chuikov stretched his hand across the bed to the captain, a young man with grey hair. ‘Give me the report.’

He scanned the hand-written document, then said: ‘You’ve had a hard time, comrade. How do you feel now?’

‘Much better, Comrade General.’

‘Good. It would be a terrible thing if your talents had been destroyed by one of our own rockets.’ Chuikov, running one hand through his soft bush of black hair, returned to the report. ‘You nearly drowned. You owe your life to your protector.’