Derek Lambert: Vendetta

‘Misha.’

‘Shouldn’t you be on the other side of the river, Misha?’

Although he was only eighteen Antonov felt paternal. He had discovered that war confused age.

‘No point. I can only help over here. In any case the kids on the other side have got families.’

‘You haven’t?’

‘My parents were killed on the thirteenth.’

The thirteenth of September, a Sunday, was the day when the Germans had launched an all-out assault on the city. One month ago and the boy spoke as though he had lost his parents when he was in the cradle. War also confused time.

‘I’m sorry,’ Antonov said.

Misha said: ‘My father was a baker. He used to bake bread for the militia. What was your father?’

‘He’s still alive,’ Antonov said. ‘He works on a State farm. We grow a lot of grain. Maybe some of it found its way into your father’s bread.’

Misha shook his head. ‘Our flour came from the steppe near here. But the Fritzes flattened all the corn. Soon we’ll flatten theirs. Won’t we?’ he asked.

‘Of course. How old are you, Misha?’

The boy said he was nine and then, as though ashamed of the admission, picked up his bucket and crawled back along the tunnel.

Where was Razin?

Before departing for the Red Army transit camp Antonov had been allowed to see Tasya.

‘In the bad old days of serfdom,’ the colonel told him in the back of the Zil, ‘it was a punishment to be drafted. But you were allowed seven days in which to drink and fornicate before you left. Today you’ve got time for a kiss.’

‘But today it’s an honour to serve in the army,’ Pokrovsky reminded both of them. ‘Life in the barracks is as good as anywhere else. And life is good everywhere in the Soviet Union,’ he reminded himself. ‘You have a good education, good food, fair wages, paid holidays…’ Pokrovsky had a tendency to recite.

Yury who had never doubted any of this nodded as he watched his home recede in the distance. A lone horseman stood on the brow of a sloping wheatfield.

Tasya was wearing a white blouse embroidered in silk with red and blue daisies. Her flaxen hair was polished and thickly coiled and he realised she had been expecting him. The driver of the Zil, it materialised, was also a photographer and it just happened that he had a camera and plates with him.

Yury kissed Tasya, feeling her lips part slightly. But the farewell wasn’t complicated by any of the carnal visions that had visited him that morning.

Twenty-four hours later he was in the Red Army. Bewildered by the casual and coarse attitudes of his new comrades, shocked by instant antagonisms, discovering what he had always known but never appreciated, that the Soviet Union consists of many races.

Of the other nine marksmen assembled at Akhtubinsk one was a lieutenant, evacuated from beleaguered Leningrad and billeted in a separate hut, one was a scheming Georgian, four were Muscovites and full of it, two were Ukrainians and one was an Uzbek from Samarkand who looked like a Bedouin.

On the first day Antonov, the only new recruit in the group, was given an ill-fitting uniform, a Mosin-Nagant, mess tin and irons, two grey blankets and a mattress filled with straw. The food was uneatable but by the second day he was wolfing it down.

On that day the ten competitors went to the range. In the truck taking them there the Muscovites kept themselves to themselves but talked about Antonov.

‘I hear he uses barleycorn for sights.’

‘Shoots with a flintlock.’

‘Good at shooting bears – if they’re big enough.’

As Antonov’s rivals had been in the Army for some time they were familiar with the heavy Mosin-Nagants whereas he had only used a light hunting rifle.

He and the lieutenant scored the least points.

On the third day he had his hair cropped and his wallet stolen from his tunic while he was shaving in the communal wash-house. The wallet was returned later; nothing was missing, but a photograph of Tasya, taken on the day of his departure, had been embellished with pudenda and balloon breasts. A scrawled caption compared her to a cow about to fornicate with a yokel.

Antonov sat quietly on the edge of his bed for a while, unable to comprehend such grossness. They were all Soviets so why should there be such hostility to someone from the steppe? However that sort of antagonism narrowed the field; the perpetrator had to be from a city. He glanced at the four Muscovites who had formed an enclave at one end of the billet; two looked faintly embarrassed, one was smiling, the fourth, grey-faced and built like a wrestler, lay on his back, hands behind his head, scrutinising the corrugated-iron ceiling.

Antonov who had never experienced physical violence walked over to his bed and showed him the photograph. ‘Did you do this?’

Yawning, the Muscovite commented obcenely on the photograph.

Antonov pulled him up by his tunic and drew back his fist to hit him but suddenly he wasn’t there and then he was attacking with fists, and booted feet. Antonov fell against the wall, hands in front of his face to protect himself from the fusillade of blows.

‘Of course we have Don Cossack blood in our veins,’ his father said as, guns in their hands, they waited for movement in the snow-quiet taiga.

And now his fist was a rifle and he was peering through the sights, lowering the barrel, deviating to allow for evasive tactics. And now the fist was a bullet, on target. The Muscovite staggered back, hit the far wall and slid bloodily to the floor.

After that no one commented upon Antonov’s rustic background.

‘I hear,’ Pokrovsky said later, ‘that you’ve been brawling.’

Antonov, standing to attention in front of Pokrovsky’s desk in a small hut that smelled of carbolic, didn’t reply: his split lip and swollen cheeks answered the question.

‘We should think ourselves lucky he didn’t damage your eyes.’

We?

‘I’m out of the competition,’ Antonov said.

Pokrovsky touched one pointed ear, ran his fingers down his lined cheek. ‘I have arranged for you to be given one more chance,’ he said. ‘The day after tomorrow. Just nine of you. The lieutenant has departed.’ He paused. ‘But don’t be misled by regional differences. We have more than fifty languages in the Soviet Union but we speak with one tongue.’ He slipped an oblong of sugar into his mouth and drank some tea. ‘Now to business.’

He told Antonov that he had one day in which to make an ally of his Mosin-Nagant. He pointed at an ammunition box containing yellow-tipped 7.62 mm ammunition. ‘Yours. There’s a forest five kilometres from here. Not unlike the taiga near your home.’ Pokrovsky almost smiled.

Sitting in the Zil beside Pokrovsky who was driving, Antonov decided that he had glimpsed an unsuspected truth. That kindness is not necessarily selfless. But none the worse for that, he supposed.

The forest, cathedral vaults of pine and congregations of silver birch, was similar to the taiga and he shot all day, taking one break, eating black bread smeared with caviar and drinking Narzan mineral water while Pokrovsky drank beer, until the gun was part of him and the yellow-tipped bullets were punching out the hearts of the black and white targets, buckling the cans that Pokrovsky threw into the air.

On the following day he and the Muscovite with whom he had fought finished ahead of the other competitors. It had to be him, of course. When the two of them shot it out Antonov won by one point.

Afterwards the Muscovite shook his hand and Antonov learned another truth although he wasn’t sure what it was.

When Razin returned to the tunnel he told Antonov that a Russian sniper had been shot between the eyes in a church near Ninth of January Square. ‘Meister must have been on his way to Mamaev Hill,’ Razin said.