Derek Lambert: Vendetta

Paulus said: ‘You are better. The Führer knows this,’ in a tone that was difficult to identify.

‘With respect, General Paulus,’ Meister said, ‘I think we are equal. I think he and I know that.’ He coughed again.

‘Know? You have some sort of communication?’

‘Respect,’ Meister said.

‘How many Russians have you killed?’

Meister who knew Paulus knew said: ‘Twenty-three. According to the Soviet propaganda Antonov has killed twenty-three Germans.’

Paulus said: ‘Do you want to kill him?’ and Meister, still trying to blunt the prickles in his throat, said: ‘Of course, because if I don’t he will kill me.’

‘Tell me, Meister, what makes you so different? What makes a sniper? A good eye, a steady hand… thousands of men have these qualifications.’

‘Anticipation, Herr General.’ Meister wasn’t sure. A flash of sunlight on metal, a fall of earth, a crack of a breaking twig… such things helped but there was more, much more. You had to know your adversary.

‘And Antonov has this same quality?’

‘Without a doubt. That’s what makes him so good.’

He saw Antonov and himself as skeletons stripped of predictability. Anticipating anticipation.

He began to cough. The sharp coughs sounded theatrical but he couldn’t control them. He heard Paulus say: ‘I hope you don’t cough like that when you’ve got Antonov in your sights. Are you sick?’ when he had finished.

‘Just nerves,’ Meister said.

Losing interest in the cough, Paulus, leaning forward, said: ‘So, what are your impressions of the battle, young man?’

Handling his words with care, Meister told Paulus that he hadn’t expected the fighting to be so prolonged, so concentrated.

Paulus, speaking so softly that Meister could barely hear him, said: ‘Nor did I.’ He stared at the arrows on the maps. ‘Do you have any theories about the name of this Godforsaken place?’

‘Stalingrad? I’ve heard that Stalin is determined not to lose the city named after him.’

‘Stalin was here in 1918,’ Paulus said. ‘During the Civil War when it was called Tsaritsyn. The Bolsheviks sent the White Guards packing just about now, October. Stalin took a lot of the credit for it.’ Paulus leaned back from his maps. ‘Have you heard anyone suggest that the Führer is determined to capture Stalingrad because of its name?’

‘No, Herr General,’ Meister lied. He had but he didn’t believe it.

Paulus asked: ‘Have you ever considered the possibility of defeat, Meister?’

‘Never.’

‘Good.’ With one finger Paulus deployed his troops on the smaller of the two maps. ‘We didn’t expect the Russians to fight so fanatically.’ He seemed to be thinking aloud. When he looked up his face was drained by his thoughts. He waved one hand. ‘Very well, Meister, you may go. Good luck.’

‘One question, Herr General?’

Paulus inclined his head.

‘Wouldn’t it be better if the people back home knew about Antonov now? It would be a better story, the rivalry between the two of us.’

‘They will,’ Paulus said.

‘Why not now?’

‘I should have thought that was obvious,’ Paulus said. ‘In case Antonov kills you first.’

Meister began to cough again.

At dawn on the following day Meister went looking for Antonov.

During the night, frost had crusted the mud, and rimed the ruins so that, with mist rising from the Volga, they had an air of permanency about them, relics from some medieval havoc. Among the relics soldiers roused themselves to continue the business of killing, moving lethargically like a yawning new day-shift. It was a time for snipers.

Lanz walked ahead of Meister, rifle in one hand, sketch map in the other, as they left the remains of the Central railway station where they had spent the night after the interview with Paulus. The prolonged meeting had made it unnecessary for Meister to even consider Lanz’s advice to stalk Antonov during the assault on Mamaev Hill: the attack had taken place and for the time being it was in German hands.

Lanz’s map supposedly indicated safe streets but in Stalingrad in October, 1942, there were no such thoroughfares: even now survivors of Rodimtsev’s tall guardsmen and Batyuk’s root-chewing Mongols lurked among the relics.

They turned into a street that had been lined with wooden houses. Although they had been destroyed in August when 600 German bombers had attacked the city killing, so it was said, more than 30,000 civilians, you could still smell fire. Corpses lying among the charred timber were crystallised with frost.

Lanz, who was slightly bow-legged, paused beneath a leafless plane tree and said: ‘What’s it like to have a personal minesweeper?’

‘What’s it like to have a personal marksman?’

But of the two of them Lanz was the true protector: Lanz took the broad view of battle, Meister viewed it through his sights. Meister thought that Lanz, peering from beneath his steel helmet, looked like a tortoise.

‘Time for breakfast?’ Lanz asked.

‘When we get to the square,’ mildly surprised to hear himself, a soldier as raw as a grazed knuckle, giving orders to a corporal.

The bullet smacked into the flaking trunk of the tree above Meister’s head. He and Lanz hit the ground.

After a few seconds Lanz said: ‘Antonov?’

‘Antonov wouldn’t have missed.’

Holding his rifle, a Karabiner 98K fitted with a ZF 41 telescopic sight, Meister edged behind the bole of the tree to wait for the second shot.

The marksman, amateurish or, perhaps, wounded, was firing from the wreckage of a wooden church across the street. The fallen dome lay in the nave, a giant mushroom.

Meister, peering through his sights, looked for the sniper’s cover. If I were him… the altar just visible past the dome. He steadied the rifle, disciplined his breathing, took first pressure on the trigger.

River-smelling mist drifted along the street but it was thinning.

The second shot spat frozen mud into Lanz’s face. The marksman, whose fur hat had risen in Meister’s sights, reared and fell behind the altar.

‘Twenty-four,’ Lanz said.

They ate breakfast in a cellar in Ninth of January Square where in September Sergeant Pavlov and sixty men barricaded in a tall house had held up the German tanks for a week.

They ate bread and cheese and drank ersatz coffee handed over reluctantly by a group of soldiers when Lanz showed them a chit signed by the commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, to which Meister was attached.

The infantrymen looked very young and they were trying to look tough; instead they looked bewildered and Meister felt much older and decided that it was his singleness of purpose, his detachment from the overall battle, that made this so.

One of them, eighteen or so with smooth cheeks and soft stubble on his chin, said: ‘So you’re Meister. What makes you tick?’ his accent Bavarian, and another, leaner faced, with a northern intonation: ‘They say you’ve killed 23 Ivans. True, or is it propaganda?’

Lanz answered him. ‘Correction. Twenty-four. He just killed one round the corner,’ making it sound as though Meister had won a game of skat.

‘I don’t know what makes me tick,’ Meister said to the Bavarian.

‘Do you enjoy killing Russians?’

‘I do my job.’

‘What sort of answer is that?’

‘Do you enjoy what you’re doing?’

‘Are you crazy?’ the northerner asked. ‘Before I came to Russia I’d never even heard of Stalingrad. It’s like fighting on the moon.’

Meister drank some bitter coffee. His mother had made beautiful coffee and in the mornings its breakfast smell had reached his bedroom and when he had opened his window he had smelled pastries from the elegant patisserie next door, a refreshing change from the smell of perfume from his father’s factory that permeated the elegant house in Hamburg.