Derek Lambert - Vendetta

‘I never thought that,’ Meister said.

‘It was your sort of people that got us into this. Prussians, Junkers.’

‘The French got us into this,’ said Meister, resurrecting the lectures at college. ‘And the British. The Treaty of Versailles that bled us white.’

‘What I meant,’ Lanz said, choosing his words with drunken care, ‘was that it was your sort got us into the first war. If that hadn’t happened there wouldn’t have been a Treaty of Versailles. And maybe we would never have heard of this arschloch of a place.’

But the last war was too long ago for argument.

‘Were you a successful thief?’ Meister asked.

‘Watch your wallet,’ Lanz said.

‘They say the Russians have got a division of criminals in the 62nd Army.’

‘The 112th. Beware of them. They won’t get any medals but they’ll survive. Like me.’ Lanz picked up a toy soldier and pocketed it. ‘For my son,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know you were married.’

‘I’m not.’ Lanz slipped another soldier into his pocket. ‘They tell me Antonov has got a nanny too. An old soldier from the Ukraine. Old soldiers, they’re survivors too.’

Meister picked up his field-glasses and peered through a shell-hole in the wall. He saw a woman in black pushing a pram filled with rubble; she was obviously crazy but, Meister wondered, had she been sane before the battle began? He saw a Persian cat picking its way around a crater and the rotting corpse of a Russian soldier smiling at him from beneath a cloud of flies.

He focussed the field-glasses on the fighting. A ragged line of German soldiers was advancing into the smoke. A young officer was urging them forward.

And for a moment it seemed to him that the officer and his men were probing the cordite mists for some truth to which they hadn’t yet been introduced.

The Katyusha that exploded in their midst must have killed them all.

Then a breeze crossed the Volga breaching gaps in the smoke and through one of them Meister saw Antonov.

Antonov, searching for Meister in the vacuum behind the German attack, felt naked as the smoke parted around him.

He looked to his left. A factory of sorts built on a rise, long and squat, roofless and windowless, walls pocked by shells and bullets. Good cover, good vantage…

He threw himself to the ground taking Razin with him. The bullet hit the street lamp at the level where their heads had been. Glancing up, Antonov saw the bright wound in the green-painted metal.

The last thing he noticed before smoke swathed them again was a woman pushing a pram, searching, it occurred to him, for the past.

Back in the tunnel Razin’s rat was waiting for them. Its name was Boris and Razin maintained that it was shell-shocked; it had wandered into the tunnel but, unlike its fellows, had shown no inclination to swim the Volga; instead it had circled the two of them, sitting down from time to time to favour them with a pink-eyed stare. It had impudent whiskers and protruding teeth and at times Antonov felt that Razin was more concerned about its welfare than the outcome of the vendetta with Meister.

Throwing Boris crumbs of black bread, Razin said: ‘A much maligned beast, Comrade Rat. Why? Because he’s small and quick and he gets hungry. Now if he were an elephant he would be venerated. And yet one elephant can do more damage in five minutes than a rat can do in a lifetime.’

Antonov said: ‘Elephants provide ivory; rats spread the plague.’

‘Not Boris.’ Razin threw him a morsel of cheese. ‘Story-tellers through the ages have a lot to answer for. If an animal isn’t physically attractive then it’s the villain. What sort of philosophy is that to teach the young? Small wonder the school bully beats up the poor little bastard with buck teeth and muscles in the wrong places.’

The rat’s whiskers moved busily as it ate the cheese.

‘What about poor old Reynard?’ Razin warmed to his theme. ‘Just because he’s got a long nose and likes chicken for dinner he’s the devil incarnate. But everyone is supposed to love pussy cats. And what do they do? They catch birds and tease them till they die.’

‘Foxes steal,’ Antonov said.

‘Steal?’ Razin, pulling at his drooping moustache, looked incredulously at Antonov. ‘Do you think Reynard knows the meaning of steal ? He just spots a good meal and gets it the best way he can. He’s clever: the story-tellers have made him cunning.’

The tunnel shook as a shell exploded near by. A brick fell from the curved roof but the rat nibbled on.

Razin extended an eloquent, battle-dirty hand. ‘And what will the tellers of tales make of all this?’ long fingers clasping Stalingrad in the palm of his hand. ‘Glory, that’s what. Heroism. Knights in shining armour. And not just the story-tellers, the writers of school history books too. Because, you see, that’s where all this begins,’ holding his hand aloft. ‘In the schoolroom. Did you ever read about the misery of war in the classroom?’

Antonov cast his mind back to the rows of desks with their pencilled grooves, inkwells filled with purple ink made from powder and water; heard the scratch of chalk on blackboard, smelled disinfectant and modelling-clay and pencil sharpenings. He shook his head. No, war had always been glorious, especially the Civil War.

‘Small wonder we grow up the way we do. The next revolution should be in the schoolroom.’

Faintly they heard German voices chanting: ‘Russians, you’ll soon be blowing bubbles in the Volga.’

‘But surely,’ Antonov protested, ‘war brings out the best in people. Bravery, sacrifice…’ Antonov tried to free the words that were always imprisoned inside him.

‘Try survival,’ Razin said. He laid his head on a red cushion he had removed from a wrecked house. ‘Isn’t that why we’re cowering in a sewer with Boris?’

Antonov rested his back against the wall of the tunnel. The tunnel was a telescope and through one end he saw a wooden balcony float past on the river with an old man clinging to the balustrade.

He said: ‘I can’t understand why you’re here at all. You know, with the prospects you had.’

‘What do you want from me? Unhappy childhood? Young life permanently scarred? Son of a great man unable to emulate his father?’

Antonov who wanted none of these things began to clean his rifle.

‘I had a happy childhood,’ Razin told him. ‘I collected stamps,’ as though that summed it up and in a way it did. ‘We lived in a neat little house in Kiev, in Lipki, with a white fence round it and when I close my eyes I can hear the breeze in the lime trees and feel the stickiness on the leaves and smell the river, the Dnieper, and hear the bells on the trams and, do you know, it’s more real than this. They say that when you grow old the past is more real than the present so maybe I’ve got older quicker than most. Old soldiers do, I suppose.’

Razin’s voice aged.

‘And I remember the poplars – lots of trees in my memories — and the chestnuts candlelit in spring and the wide skies, and window-shopping with my parents although there wasn’t much in the windows but it didn’t matter – that’s where people make mistakes about upbringing, deprivation doesn’t mean a damn thing – and funnily enough the breathy smell from the metro station, Mayakovskaya. Have you heard the proverb, “If you use your tongue you’ll get to Kiev”?’

When Antonov said he hadn’t Razin said: ‘To be honest I never knew what it meant. But when Russians are stumped for an explanation for anything they make up a proverb. Proverbs and superstitions, the clues to our souls.’

Antonov wiped a drop of oil from the trigger of the rifle. He pressed the butt into his shoulder and the rifle became part of him.