Derek Lambert - Vendetta

Sitting in front of him at a trestle table, Antonov said: ‘Why, Misha? You don’t want me to kill Meister.’

‘Our soldiers need a victory. General Chuikov said so. He told the captain to tell me that. It’s Christmas…’

‘And Christmas for the German soldiers.’

‘I’m Russian.’ Misha made a hole in the skin of the milk with a teaspoon. ‘So are you.’

‘But you like Meister.’

Misha stared intently into the hole in the skin. ‘One of you has got to die,’ he said, eventually. ‘I had hoped –’ He drank the milk, leaving the skin on the inside of the glass.

‘That it was all over?’ Antonov felt very old. ‘Life isn’t as convenient as that. Perhaps you and I, our generation, no your generation…’ The words were trapped butterflies. He asked gently: ‘Where have you got to tell Meister I will be?’

‘In a house, No. 23, at the edge of a graveyard beside a church.’

‘Ah.’ Antonov digested the captain’s lie. ‘And from the church a sniper would have a good view of that house?’

Misha nodded.

‘And a good view of another sniper creeping up to the house?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘I won’t be in that house,’ Antonov said. ‘They want to make it easy for me, Misha.’

‘They could have told me.’ Misha made a railway line with a fork on the soft-wood surface of the table. ‘My parents used to say things that weren’t quite true.’

‘But I don’t expect they were lies, not real ones.’

‘People used to come into the bakery and they would be nice to them. Make jokes with them. Then, when they’d gone they would say bad things about them.’

‘But they were being kind to them,’ Antonov said as echoes of his own childhood reached him. ‘If you think about it they were being kind.’

‘I suppose so,’ Misha said.

‘You know you’ve got to tell Meister where I really am?’

‘Then he might kill you.’

‘One of us has to die. You said that. And it has to be fair.’

‘I don’t think my parents meant to say bad things about them,’ Misha said. ‘They liked them really.’

‘You’ll tell him where I really am?’

‘I’ll speak to him,’ Misha said but Antonov wasn’t sure what he wanted him to say.

Inside the grand scheme of things, inside Stalingrad where they had defied the Germans since the long-ago summer, what was left of the Russian 62nd Army took small bites out of the enemy. A shattered workshop, a ravaged recreation ground, the shell of a restaurant, the stump of a pump-house… But the Germans clutched their captured rubble tightly; within the encircling Russians they still held most of the city, still bitterly contested a work-bench or an inspection pit in a demolished factory to the north.

Near Tsaritsa Gorge, in the school playground where they had been holed up before the Russian offensive, Meister and Lanz, standing beneath a numbed sky, peered over the wall and surveyed the debris where half a million souls had once lived.

Lanz said: ‘We hang on like ticks on a dog.’

‘Like those,’ said Meister, pointing at the two shrivelled pears still hanging on the bare limbs of the tree. ‘Our Christmas decorations,’ he added.

It was nine o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve, a Thursday, and hostilities were sporadic. Mortar shells exploded and machine-guns coughed but the noise was bandaged with cold. In Hamburg, Meister’s mother would be fretting about festive meals and his father would be worrying about how many high-ranking Nazis would materialise that evening, and in her small apartment Elzbeth would be burrowing into sleep after a night-shift in the factory where, against her parents’ wishes, she now worked.

Meister felt her warmth, her back pressed into his chest. He slid his arms around her and cupped her breasts and kissed her open lips as she turned to him. He thought it would be tragic if he died before he had made love to her.

Lanz fished the two model soldiers he had taken from the toy factory from his pocket. ‘Perhaps I’ll give them to him for his birthday,’ he said. ‘It’s tomorrow really but we celebrate it on June the twenty-fourth, Midsummer’s Day, so he can have two lots of presents.’

‘How old is he?’ Meister asked. ‘You never told me about him.’

‘Eight tomorrow.’

‘Does he live in Berlin?’ Lanz’s private life had always been under lock and key.

‘On the banks of the Spree.’ Lanz hesitated. ‘He lives with his mother. She’s a school teacher.’ For Lanz this was expansive; Christmas had turned the key. ‘I wanted to marry her but she said she wouldn’t marry a thief and I said it was the only job I knew and we had lots of rows about it and I thought, “Shit, if we’re fighting already maybe it’s better that we don’t get married,” and we never did. But she writes to me; at least I used to get letters until I came to this arshloch of a place. I’ve got them here.’ He slid one hand inside his greatcoat.

‘Maybe she would marry a soldier, a corporal.’

‘So who’s going to stay in the Army?’ Cautiously, Lanz entered a minefield of words. ‘Since I came to Stalingrad I’ve been thinking about settling down. You know, you start to think how short and sweet life is and if I’m lucky enough to get out of here alive why should I risk going to prison?’ Lanz now spoke with extreme caution. ‘As a matter of fact I’ve written to her along those lines.’

‘What would you do?’ Meister asked.

‘Security,’ Lanz told him. ‘Set a thief to catch a thief.’ He examined the toy soldiers; each was standing to attention holding his rifle. ‘Midsummer’s Day. We’ll be split up by then, you and I, because you won’t need a nursemaid anymore but you might like to think about the boy with his soldiers.’

‘What’s his name?’ Meister asked.

‘Karl,’ Lanz said. ‘Maybe that’s why I’ve looked after you so well.’

A voice from the classroom called out for water. There were two soldiers there, lying beside the fire. One was suffering from typhus, the other from tetanus. They had been left there to die.

It was the soldier suffering from typhus, spread by lice and rampaging through the Sixth Army, who wanted water. His temperature was soaring, there were red blotches on his wrists and his eyes deep in his face were staring at death.

Lanz gave him water in a tin mug. The other soldier watched. He hadn’t yet glimpsed death but the tetanus spasms were under way and he had difficulty in opening his jaws.

Misha came into the playground as three Ilyushin dive-bombers swept across the sky. He brought with him a tin of condensed milk, black bread and smoked fish.

Meister welcomed him joyously: even Lanz was pleased to see him, but, through Meister, he still asked penetrating questions. ‘Ask him why he’s still allowed to wander inside the German lines?’

‘Because I bring food,’ Misha said. ‘Don’t you want any?’

‘Ask him if he wants a cuff round the ears for being cheeky.’ Lanz raised his arm; he hadn’t tied the ear-flaps of his fur hat and when he moved they trembled.

Misha wore a black, peaked cap, a blue reefer that stretched to his knees and grey trousers rolled around his ankles. Meister had at last agreed to wear a fur hat acquired by Lanz but he refused to lower the ear-flaps: if his hearing was impaired his other senses would suffer too.

Lanz said: ‘What happens when he returns to the Russian lines? Don’t they ask what he’s been doing over here?’

‘I go straight to headquarters,’ Misha told Meister. ‘I bring them information instead of food. Like other boys.’

‘And the information. Is it true or false?’ Meister asked.