Derek Lambert: Vendetta

‘What’s it like being a hero?’ the Bavarian asked.

‘Great,’ Lanz answered.

‘I suppose you’ll get an Iron Cross if you kill Antonov,’ the Bavarian said ignoring Lanz. ‘And a commission and a reception in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin.’

If kill him,’ Meister said. ‘But in any case I don’t want any of those things,’ and Lanz said: ‘How do you know about the Adlon?’

‘I’ve been around,’ the Bavarian said. He produced a looted bottle of vodka from his tunic and poured some down his throat. ‘Great stuff. Better than schnapps.’ He choked and turned away.

‘Come on,’ Lanz said to Meister, ‘move yourself – you’ve got an appointment with Comrade Antonov.’

‘Look out for mines,’ the northerner warned them. ‘We’ve been using dogs to explode them. The lieutenant lost his Dobermann that way. Where are you going anyway?’

‘Mamaev Hill,’ Meister told him.

‘Shit. Are you sure it’s ours? It could have changed hands again – the Russians shipped a lot of troops across the river in the mist.’

‘Then Antonov will be early for his appointment,’ Lanz said.

By 10 am the frost had melted and the mist had lifted and galleons of white cloud sailed serenely in the autumn-blue sky above Mamaev Hill which was still in German hands.

From a shell-hole on the hill, once a Tartar burial ground, more recently a picnic area, now a burial ground again, Meister could see the industrial north of Stalingrad and, to the south, the commercial and residential quarter. And he could make out the shape of the city, a knotted rope, twenty or more miles long, braiding this, the west bank of the Volga. It was rumoured that the German High Command hadn’t anticipated such an elastic sprawl; nor, it was said, had they envisaged such a breadth of water, splintered with islands and creeks.

Through his field-glasses he could see the Russian heavy artillery and the eight and twelve-barrelled Katyusha launchers spiking the fields and scrub pine on the far bank. He scanned the river, clear today of timber and bodies because, although they had used flares, the German gunners hadn’t been able to see the Russian relief ships in the mist-choked night.

Where was Antonov?

Meister swung the field-glasses to the north where only factory chimneys remained intact, fingers prodding the sky. He wouldn’t be there: snipers don’t prosper in hand-to-hand fighting.

He looked south. To the remnants of the State Bank, the brewery, the House of Specialists, Gorki Theatre. No, Antonov would be nearer to the hill than that, moving cautiously towards Mamaev, Stalingrad’s principal vantage point. Scanning it with his field-glasses…

Meister shrank into the shell-hole. Lanz handed him pale coffee in a battered mess tin. ‘Where is he?’

‘Down there.’ Meister pointed towards the river bank. ‘Somewhere near Crossing 62. In No Man’s Land.’

‘Will you be able to get a shot at him?’

‘Not a chance. He won’t show himself, not while I’m up here.’

‘He knows you’re here?’

‘He would be up here if the Russians still held Mamaev. It’s the only place where you can see how the battle’s going. Who’s holding the vantage points.’

‘You’ll be a general one day,’ Lanz said.

‘I wanted to be an architect.’

‘I want to rob the Reichsbank. Instead I became a nanny.’

Meister, who was never quite sure how to handle Lanz in this mood, drank the rest of his foul coffee. It was said to be made from acorns and dandelion roots and there was no reason to contest this.

Lanz lay back on the sloping bank of the crater, lit a cigarette and said: ‘How long is this going to last?’ words emerging in small billows of smoke.

‘Antonov and me? God knows. It’s been official for three days thanks to Red Star.’

If the Soviet army newspaper hadn’t matched Antonov against him the duel would never have started.

A Yak, red stars blood-bright on its tail and fuselage, flew low overhead. The Germans held the two airfields, Gumrak and Pitomik, but the Russians held the whole of Siberia. They could retreat forever, Meister thought.

‘I wish to hell it was over,’ Lanz said.

‘One way or the other?’

Lanz, smoking hungrily, didn’t reply.

Meister thought: ‘What would I be doing now if I were Antonov?’ and knew immediately. He would be checking whether any Russians had been killed today by a single marksman’s shot.

Could he find out about the sniper who had died at the altar near Ninth of January Square? Russians isolated in pockets of resistance were often in radio contact with Red Army headquarters.

Yes, it was possible.

Yury Antonov, waiting for Razin to return from a command post, dozed in a tunnel leading to the river.

He saw sunflowers with blossoms like smiling suns crayoned by children and he heard the insect buzz from the taiga shouldering the wheatfields and he smelled the red polish that his mother used in the wooden cottage.

It had been a languorous Sunday early in September when they had come for him. He had been lying fully clothed on his bed picturing the naked breasts of a girl named Tasya who lived in the next village. His younger brother, Alexander, was sitting on the verandah drinking tea with his father and his mother was in the kitchen feeding the bowl of borsch bubbling on the stove.

After a Komsomol meeting the previous evening he had walked Tasya home. He had kissed her awkwardly, feeling the gentle thrust of her breasts against his chest, and ever since had been perturbed by the intrusion of lascivious images into the purity of his love.

He was almost eighteen, exempt from military service because of a heart murmur triggered by rheumatic fever, and she was seventeen. He was worried that, like other girls, she might be intoxicated by the glamour of the other young men departing to fight the Germans. A farm labourer wasn’t that much of a catch. But at least he was here to stay.

He considered the contents of his room. A small hunting trophy, the glass-eyed head of a lynx, on the wall beside a poster of a tank crushing another tank adorned with a Hitler moustache – he dutifully collected anti-Nazi memorabilia but here on the steppe the war seemed very far way – his rifle, a red Young Pioneer scarf from his younger days, a book of Konstantin Simenov’s poems… Yury himself often conceived luminous phrases but he could never utter them.

He heard a car draw up outside. A tractor was commonplace, a car an event. He peered through the lace curtains. A punished black Zil coated with dust. Two men were climbing out, an Army officer in a brown uniform and a civilian in a grey jacket and open-neck white shirt. Fear stirred inside Yury, although he couldn’t imagine why.

His father called from the verandah: ‘Yury, you’ve got visitors.’ Yury could hear the apprehension in his voice. He changed into a dark blue shirt, slicked his hair with water and went outside.

They were sitting on the rickety chairs beside the wooden table drinking tea. The officer was a colonel; he had a bald head, startling eyebrows and a humorous mouth. The civilian had dishevelled features and pointed ears; he popped a cube of sugar into his mouth and sucked his tea through it. Alexander was walking towards the silver birch trees at the end of the vegetable garden.

The colonel said: ‘I’m from Stalingrad, Comrade Pokrovsky is from Moscow. Have you ever been to Moscow, Yury?’

Yury shook his head. He wondered if Pokrovsky was NKVD.

‘Or Stalingrad?’

‘No, Comrade colonel.’

‘Ah, you Siberians. You’re very insular – if that’s the right word for more than 4 million square miles of the Soviet Union. What’s the farthest you’ve been from home?’