David Robbins - War of the Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad

On the other side of the hall the Russian voices struck up another song. “Goddammit.” Mercker’s eyes were still shut. “Can’t there be five minutes without a blasted song?”

The captain’s eyes sprang open. He sat off the wall, his face close to Nikki. “No,” he hissed, “there can’t.”

Mercker jumped to his feet. He grabbed a pickax and handed it to a soldier who was not yet dirty. “Get in there! Dig!” He motioned one of the sappers into the hole. He pointed at another soldier and handed him a pick.

“Let’s go. There’s no resting now,” he said urgently. “We can’t wait.”

Mercker carried the last shovel to the middle of the room. He pointed the tool across the hall at the singing Russians. “Those bastards are trying to blow us up, too!”

Nikki thumped his head against the wall. Of course. Damn. The Reds have a head start on us, maybe two hours.

All the men were awake now, all staring at the floor. Nikki pictured the race beneath the surface, wondering who was in the lead and by what distance, afraid that two meters below him a cask of dynamite sat sizzling.

“If the Reds stop singing,” Mercker called, “have a tune ready. And loud. Understand?” Everyone nodded. Mercker disappeared into the hole.

The race was on. The men dug with a desperate strength. They worked under cover of the Russians’ singing as long as it lasted, an hour or so at a time, then picked up their own chorus whenever the Reds stopped. When their voices flagged, the enemy burst into song.

Through the night, Nikki’s company did most of the singing. They gauged, the race in the tunnels by who flung the most verses across the corridor. We must be catching up, Nikki thought. We’ve even added a harmonica. The Reds don’t have a harmonica.

Flickering lamplight glimmered from the tunnel. Silhouettes descended and the bent, blackened shapes of others staggered out. The round, glowing hole in the middle of the floor looked to Nikki like a threshold to the netherworld with its shadowy demons coming and going.

At dawn, Mercker emerged, his face streaked with muddy sweat. He sat and motioned for Nikki.

The man looked exhausted. He spoke in a rasping voice, his head hung.

“The sappers say we’ve got one more hour of digging. Tell the men to get into their groups of ten.”

Nikki nodded. The captain tugged Nikki’s tunic with a blackened hand. “You’re in the first group. Secure that trench. Hold there until I get the rest of us out.”

Gathering their rifles, Nikki’s patrol moved to the windows. The guard nodded, and Nikki leaned out to search the debris-riddled street. He jumped down and waved for his men to follow. One by one they landed, and he pushed them toward the trench.

The Russians stopped singing. Nikki smiled at the guard in the window. “Give them some opera,” he said. He turned and ran.

Ten meters from the trench, a roaring wave swept over him. The ground rose, then jerked down to trip him. The air reached for him. He was caught in the grip of a powerful, careless force that knocked him down, lifted him, and flung him in a somersault away from the exploding building.

He landed on his back and skidded on his shoulders. The part of the building held by his company leaped out from its foundation, walls bulging hideously. Deafened, his skin reddened by the blast, Nikki scrambled for the trench to tumble into the arms of his men while a massive fireball gathered behind him, orange and blue, and erupted. The side of the building burst with a shattering boom, then fell straight down as if a trap door had opened. It dissolved until the last grinding bits came to rest. Above the devastation, a mushroom of smoke and dust curled and shifted, forming a gray and ghostly marker where the walls had stood seconds before.

My company is dead, Nikki thought. Mercker, all of them. No chance.

On the morning breeze, a song seemed to come from everywhere at once. It merged with the sounds of the embattled city, bouncing off the empty, broken walls on all sides, ringing from the dead ruins.

The song was in Russian.

TANIA FLAILED TO THE SURFACE OF THE ICY RIVER.

She looked back at the burning wreckage of the barge. The stern and bow had been cleaved into separate pieces. They pointed up into the night to pirouette in slow, smoky circles.

A touch at the back of her neck made her spin around. The outstretched hand of a dead soldier bobbed into her face. She swung wildly at the corpse and backpedaled. Another hand fell on her shoulder. This grasp was firm and alive—Fedya, the writer. Treading water beside him was Yuri.

She could not make out what Fedya was saying. Her ears felt stuffed by the explosion. She knew she was surrounded by sound— the cries of the wounded thrashing in the water, the bombs seeking the rest of the fleet upriver, even the shouts of Fedya and Yuri—but all were like mumblings trapped in a bottle.

A timber floated past. Yuri grabbed it. Already they’d drifted far south of the Tractor Factory landing stage. The shore was four hundred meters off. Tania estimated the current would beach them near the city center if they kicked hard. She wondered who would control the land they stepped onto.

Gripping the beam, Tania stared at Stalingrad. She ignored the nervous, quiet chattering of the two men clinging to the timber with her; she could not hear them clearly, and soon they stopped talking. Inside this isolation she balled her fists and cast a vow into the ruins, driving it like a spike into the heart of every Nazi hiding in the rubble.

She swore to renew her war against the Germans, a vendetta begun over a year earlier when the occupation army in Minsk had murdered her grandparents, a doctor and his ballet-teacher wife.

Tania had come to visit her grandparents only two months before their deaths, from the Manhattan apartment of her parents. She’d arrived to convince the two beloved elder folks with whom she’d spent several summers to come live in America and escape the gathering storm in Europe. There was not much time, she warned; Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Stalin was a farce, and they shouldn’t believe it. She brought money from her father, Alexander, the son of the Chernovs. She could take them away. But the doctor and his beautiful dancing wife, both of them gray—though not in the manner of ashes, not cold and old but shining—would not leave Minsk. There was work to be done there, they told her, bodies for them to heal and children to teach. There was family for them to protect, two daughters and grandchildren, and there was family history in Minsk, graves and relics and memories. Stalin was too strong for Hitler, they answered, Russia too strong; Hitler knew this.

Tania urgently wrote her parents in New York, begging them to come and beg themselves. But there was only one response, a telegram instructing Tania to return immediately to New York, and wishing the grandparents luck in the coming hard days. Tania’s father had been upset when she left; it was dangerous, he’d said. She was only nineteen years old. Tania told him to give her money, enough to rescue the old ones, or she would go without his money and earn it there to bring them back. Alexander, a young scientist who had brought his new bride to America in 1912 in the waning days of the czar, drawn by the promise shouting out of America as if from a carnival hawker of a new and comfortable life for the couple and for the child they hoped to bear one day, cried when that child hefted her baggage down the stairs to a waiting taxi. Tania cried, too, tears of anger at her parents who had raised her to speak and love everything Russian, to jeer at the memory of the toppled Russian royals, to rejoice at the surging Soviet Communist power as the salvation of the Russian peoples, to be proud of her heritage. She took her parents’ rhetoric seriously. She joined the American Communist Party as a teenager and visited, their native land as often as she could. She grew to love the faraway places and the people and the myths that milled in her own blood. Minsk and Soviet Russia became her spiritual sanctuaries, and her grandparents there became avatars of Russian simplicity and courage. Now her own mother and father were revealed as two-faced, big thinkers and storytellers who were Russian by birth only, not spirit. They hunkered in their wealth and hearth, secure in New York, smug in their mail-order intellectual loyalty to Russia. But when it came time for them to stand up, to rise for the sake of their papushka and mamushka, they would not. They cowered in their brownstone, their Americanness, their freedom. Slamming the taxi door, Tania swore that her tears would be the last she would shed until she returned with her grandparents or saw them safe somehow. She did not understand then how she would soon weep at their deaths. On July 22, 1941, six weeks after her arrival in Minsk, three million German troops swarmed across the Russian border. Two weeks later, Minsk was encircled and captured, with over 150,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner. German tanks took up sentry positions on every street. Electricity and water ran uninterrupted in the city, market stalls remained open, but wings had folded over Minsk. Heads everywhere in the city were heavy; feet dragged, eyes darted. Where was the Red Army, where was deliverance?