Derek Lambert - Vendetta

Meister said: ‘It’s funny, you know. I keep thinking, “One of us has got to die.” But that isn’t true, is it? Both of us could die.’

He moved closer to the steam, feeling it warm and wet on his cheeks. If I get back to Germany, he thought, I will go hunting like Antonov. Stalk game beneath a vault of pine trees. Take with me bread and cheese and fruit. And he thought how fine it would be if they could go hunting together, he and Antonov; how fine it would be to adjourn afterwards to an inn and drink beer together and discuss what they had or hadn’t shot.

The bird sang daintily.

The steam, thicker now, formed sparkling clouds above the bathhouse.

The sky began to grow heavy with snow.

Observing the heaviness, Antonov said: ‘It will snow again soon.’

‘The sooner the better,’ Razin said.

‘Then I will make my move.’

Antonov stared through the barred window. The tank, even though it was tipped forward on its tracks, had assumed an air of menace.

As he stared the outline of the tank began to lose its definition; then there were two tanks.

Meister crawled to the top bench and peered through a gap in the jagged rim of the retaining wall. He saw a knocked-out Russian tank. Between the bathhouse and the tank stood a big German anti-tank gun. For several minutes he lay considering the gun and its formidable armour.

Misha arrived in the church as the first flakes of snow were falling. The peak of his cap was dusted white and his cheeks were polished.

He joined them in the vestry and sat on the vestments beside Razin.

He said: ‘I told Meister where you are.’ His breath steamed.

‘The truth?’ Antonov asked.

‘The truth. Like you told me to. He wanted the truth too. He said everything had to be equal. I understand that. But I don’t understand why you have to kill each other. I did once. Not any more.’

His voice was fluted with anxiety.

Antonov wanted to explain but there wasn’t any reason. Because he’s German and I’m Russian? What sort of answer was that? He told Misha that after the war such questions might have answers; that the war was being fought to settle such questions.

And he thought: Meister and I understand why we don’t have to kill each other. But it was too late for that: it always had been.

Antonov said to Misha: ‘I have to go any moment now.’

But Misha didn’t reply. He just stood, shoulders slightly hunched, staring at Antonov as, rifle gripped in one hand, he prepared to make a run for the marooned tank.

In the bath-house Meister prepared to make a run for the anti-tank gun. It was too soon to make his move, he knew that. The snow wasn’t thick enough and he would be visible, black on white, like a target propelled across the range in Hamburg; but he had to go now; had to.

He told Lanz to keep him covered with the dead Russian’s rifle.

Lanz, kneeling below the top bench, said: ‘Give it a couple of minutes. If Antonov’s still in the church he’ll put a bullet through your brains before you’re half way there.’ His bald patch was spreading with snow.

Meister buttoned up his camouflage jacket, picked up the Karabiner. ‘I’m going now,’ he said.

‘Stupid.’

Meister smelled perfume.

‘Tell him one of the toy soldiers was from me,’ he said and was gone.

Razin said: ‘If he’s got any sense he’ll still be in the bathhouse and he’ll see you because the snow isn’t thick enough yet.’

He pulled the white hood back from his head. His neat moustache was a stranger in his crumpled features.

‘Sense?’ Antonov came out of the vestry into the shell of the nave. ‘Since when has sense entered this business?’

Razin picked up his rifle and stood behind a jigsaw stretch of wall beside the altar.

Antonov turned to say goodbye to Misha but he had gone.

He said to Razin: ‘Two shots. Now.’

And ran from the church. Too soon, he thought as the sparse flakes of snow touched his face. Like an animal in the taiga that, in old age, has grown careless.

From his position near the altar Razin fired two shots. Lanz, sighting him from the top of the steam-room, picked him off with one bullet. Razin’s dying shot, before he fell beside the altar, hit Lanz in the head, knocking him down the benches to the floor of the small amphitheatre where once men had attacked each other with nothing more lethal than birch-twigs.

As petals of snow began to cover their bodies Antonov came from behind the tank. Meister from behind the gun.

They stared at each other.

A canary sang.

A gold watch chimed.

They turned and looked at Misha standing between them. Then they dropped their rifles.

Hitler promoted Paulus to Field Marshal at the end of January, 1943; almost immediately afterwards Paulus surrendered. All German resistance within the Stalingrad pocket ended on February 2.

Casualty figures during the battle that lasted from high summer to the abyss of the Russian winter are contradictory but the killed, wounded and missing at Stalingrad – subsequently renamed Volgograd – can be numbered in their hundreds of thousands.

Two at least lived in the sliver of No Man’s Land between fact and fiction that is hope.

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