Derek Lambert - Vendetta

After a while he heard a bird singing. For a moment he thought the song must be in his head. He called to Lanz: ‘Can you hear anything?’ and when Lanz said yes, a bird singing, he went to look for it.

In the rest-room where, mugs of beer in their hands, Russians had once recovered from the masochism of the steam-room, he had to light a match because here the roof was intact. Wooden chess pieces were scattered over the floor. Among them lay the body of a Russian soldier, his body preserved by the cold, a pool of frozen blood beside him.

Above him, in a cage suspended from the ceiling, a canary was singing to itself. Who had owned the canary and what was it doing in the bathhouse? Perhaps the soldier who had been shot in the chest had found it in an abandoned house and brought it with him.

A packet of birdseed stood on a stone-topped bar where beer had once been dispensed. Meister poured a handful of seed into the cage: Antonov would have done the same.

Then he returned to the steam-room and, through the sights of the Karabiner, gazed steadily at the shell of the wooden church.

From the church Antonov saw grey smoke rising from the broken chimney of the bathhouse. He saw it as a smoke signal I AM HERE.

The wind had dropped and the smoke was a stem in the sky and the unpredictable day was blue and gold and white, a traitress diverting attention from the truth, the cold. Not cold, according to Antonov – about minus twenty-five degrees he guessed; cold enough to freeze your soul according to Razin, delicate city dweller.

And such was the prevalent splendour of this day, that it found beauty, bare and lonely, in the devastated landscape. A leafless tree bowed eloquently by an explosion, a wall sculptured by shell-bursts; even corpses wearing shrouds of snow were invested with dignity.

Antonov, white hood over his corn-stubble hair, walked round the nave of the church. It was open to the sky and it smelled of charred wood. He had glanced into a church once in Novosibirsk and had been surprised to see so many old women praying; he had been impressed, for he was very young at the time, by the priest’s beard because it looked as though it had been knitted.

On the blackened wall he noticed an icon. Heat had partially melted the face of Christ on the cross but the eyes were still questing. He felt a great temptation to pray but, because religion had been outside the curriculum of his school, he didn’t quite know how. Or to whom.

Then suddenly as the sun gilded the remains of the altar, sacrificed to war, he understood. Communism, Christianity, Mohammedism… it didn’t matter to whom you prayed, only that you prayed. And he prayed. For Meister and himself.

In the vestry, a stone extension of the church and still intact, Razin was sitting on a pile of dusty vestments writing a letter to the nurse.

‘She says she’s quite happy to live in Kiev,’ he said as Antonov walked in. ‘I thought you were supposed to be keeping watch?’

‘No point. Neither of us will show ourselves and neither will make a move outside until it starts to snow.’

‘And then?’

‘There’s a wrecked tank out here, a KV. I want you to draw his fire while I make a run for it. With luck I should be able to pick him off from behind it.’

‘Maybe he thinks you’re in the house. If he does he’ll be looking the wrong way and you might get a sighting from here.’

‘He knows we’re here.’

‘You’re very sure of the boy,’ Razin said, signing his letter with a flourish.

‘You have to trust someone.’

Antonov looked through a small, barred window framed with shards of glass. The sky was still blue and there was the Russian tank, an impotent prehistoric animal, abandoned among the mangled rail tracks.

A hundred metres past it stood a heavy German anti-tank gun. It had been punched on its side and its blunt muzzle was burried in the snow.

Razin said: ‘When you go watch out for anti-personnel mines. They’ve got three copper whiskers. Tread on those and Meister won’t have a target any more and he wouldn’t want that, would he?’ He looked at Antonov curiously. ‘Now that it’s inevitable, what do you feel?’

‘The same as I always did: I don’t want to kill him.’

‘And he feels the same way?’

‘I don’t know how he feels.’

‘But you think you know.’

‘I should like to have met him in Hamburg,’ Antonov said. ‘In an inn maybe with his friends. His girl-friend perhaps.’

‘How do you know he’s got one?’

‘That girl in the photograph in the German magazine. But as he’s rich and smart and clever he’s probably got lots of girls.’

‘Will you marry Tasya?’

‘Not now, Stalingrad has re-arranged our lives.’

‘It brought you close together on the east bank. You can’t get much closer than that.’

‘You don’t know what happened over there.’

‘You didn’t spent the time discussing Marxism,’ Razin said.

‘In any case, what’s the point of discussing the future? There is no future for one of us, Meister or me. One of us will never even know the outcome of the war.’

‘We’ll win,’ Razin said. ‘Russia and her enemies will win.’

‘Enemies?’

‘Have you forgotten? Before Germany attacked us Britain and America were our enemies. Imperialists, capitalists. It’s only the Germans who have made them our allies.’

‘Do you think they will become enemies again when all this is over?’

‘It’s a possibility,’ Razin said. He picked up the rifle he had brought with him from the east bank and began to clean it. ‘A distinct possibility.’

‘You make it sound as if we’re fighting for nothing.’

‘We fought,’ Razin said, ‘because we had to.’

‘I would like to think there was some glory in it somewhere.’

Razin said: ‘Glory is for gravestones.’

‘Maybe we’re fighting to end all wars. Maybe people will look back upon Stalingrad and think, “Nothing was worth that. Nothing like that must ever happen again.’”

‘Or maybe they’ll say, “Stalingrad? Where was that? What happened there?’”

‘I want to believe that I’ve got to kill Meister for a reason.’

Razin leaned his rifle against the wall. ‘You’re forcing my hand,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that there isn’t any reason: you don’t want to kill each other.’

Antonov gazed into a time when there was no war and saw Meister sitting in an inn covered with an envelope of snow. He was drinking beer from a tankard and smiling at the girl in the photograph. He looked closer and the young man wasn’t Meister, it was himself.

Lanz emerged from the rest-room of the bathhouse carrying the dead soldier’s rifle. It was an SVT1938 fitted with a telescopic sight; the soldier had been a sniper too.

He sat close to the pipes on the wall, hissing with steam since he had lit the boiler downstairs, and examined it.

Meister, sitting half way down the tier of marble benches, said: ‘They did away with those last year. They were too light, too fragile.’

‘But pretty,’ Lanz said, running his finger along the cleaning rod fitted to the side of the stock instead of underneath it. He lit a Russian cigarette, a Kazbeck, and inhaled, grimacing. ‘So which of you is going hunting?’

‘Whoever makes a move becomes a target. Even if it’s snowing.’

‘You or him?’

‘Both of us?’

‘Well for God’s sake get it over with,’ Lanz said. ‘This is no way to spend Christmas Eve.’

‘You wanted to stretch it out not so long ago.’

‘And now I want an end to it. An end to the siege. An end to the war. Goodbye Russia. Hallo Berlin.’