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

Dark squads known as the Black Crows began to kick on doors in the city. Soon they came into the Chernovs’ neighborhood, at first to the homes of the Jewish families, then to others, even the respected ones. Three weeks after the city’s occupation, Dr. and Mrs. Chernov were taken from their small apartment as they sat at dinner with Tania. Tania herself was clubbed with the butt of a Nazi rifle when she resisted the kidnapping. Before she could rouse herself from the bludgeoning, her grandparents were marched to the city square only three blocks away and executed. The two stood accused of collaborating with the underground, a claim supported only by the fact that Dr. Chernov had treated many patients who bore the marks of the Nazis’ brutal inquisitions. At the rifles’ reports, Tania jerked off the floor. Bloodied and wobbling, she ran outside to the sound and arrived in the square, smelling the cordite smoke of the bullets. Neighbors she did not recognize held her back, screaming. That night, Tania went to the home of her aunt Vera and told her what had happened. Tania’s tears flowed, squeezed from her in a spasm. When she was done, she was finally dry, without tears. Vera must have seen this in her young niece’s swollen eyes, for she said, “Stay here with me. Don’t go.” Tania said only, “I’m leaving the city to find the resistance.”

The older woman put her arms around the girl. Before closing the door, Vera whispered, “Then fight hard, my Russian niece.”

She left the city and for a week followed the sounds of fighting in the forests and villages. In the hamlet of Vianka, sleeping in a barn, she was approached by a dark cast of men, hunting rifles crooked over their arms. She was interrogated and allowed to join them.

Among the resistance fighters, Tania soon lost the tastes of her former privileged life in Manhattan and Minsk. She came to know the skills of the partisan for the taking of lives. She laid mines and rigged dynamite along tracks and under transports; she learned to fire a rifle and pistol and the ways to use a stiletto or bare hands for close-in killing. She shared a kinship with the guerrillas: they were linked by pain. Each man and woman in the cadre had suffered some blow of Nazi cruelty. Tania put her loathing of the Nazis in place of her grief for her grandparents and her anger at her own mother and father; fighting the Germans became her mourning and her apology for what she felt was a stain of cowardice on her American clan. After a year of freezing and killing and running in the forests, of exulting over the smallest victories, Tama walked out of the woods to join a passing column of army regulars. She had long before thrown away her American papers. She claimed residency in Minsk, at her grandparents’ address. She was given papers for the 284th Division, climbed on a truck, and rode five hundred kilometers south to Stalingrad.

Now, in the freezing waters of the Volga, Tania’s feet finally dragged onto a sandbar. She let go of the timber and splashed toward the shore, followed by Fedya and Yuri. Her ears had cleared, and the noises of battle reached her from far upstream. Nothing else broke the dark quiet.

The three crouched, dripping and cold, on the cool shore. The beach was littered with abandoned machinery and crates. Tania decided the safest direction to travel would be not into silence but north, toward the fighting in the factory district. There they would find Russians.

They’d floated downstream several kilometers. We could walk to the factories before dawn, she thought, if we’re not caught. But if the Germans have taken the city center, there’ll be patrols operating on the riverbank to stop infiltrators.

Tania whispered, “Follow me. We’ll go north.”

Fedya moved behind her. Yuri hesitated. “Tell me your name again,” Yuri asked.

“Private Tania Chernova.”

“Tania, then. Tania, I cannot follow a girl. Not even an American girl. I will lead the way.”

She showed the old man an empty face. She had nothing to prove to Yuri. He’d seen her thrash away from the corpse in the water, but he knew nothing of the partisan who’d sliced a dozen throats or laid mines under a supply train, then walked among the wounded completing the job with her pistol. He’d not seen the doctor’s granddaughter garrote a prisoner after he spilled his secrets to her guerrilla cadre, or hide all day until she could fire a rifle to kill at three hundred meters.

But the old farmer was with her now and he was here to kill Germans. For that alone she would try to keep him alive. Let him die being useful, not stupid, she thought.

“Yuri, I’ve spent the last year in the resistance. I’ve been fighting in the forests of Byeloruss, not pushing a plow in the fields. I know the Nazis and I know how to keep us alive. I’ll lead or I’ll go alone.”

She turned to Fedya. “You, too.”

Tania walked up the beach. From behind came quiet but firm words, then the crunching footsteps of the two men.

After an hour of starting and stopping at every noise, it was clear they would not reach the factories before dawn. Tania looked for a place where they could wait out the coming daylight, to continue their trek later under darkness.

They walked for another hour, searching the cliffs for an abandoned cave or bunker. With first light playing at the fringe of the horizon, a foul odor wafted out of the night. Tania wrinkled her nose and stepped faster. A tall pipe emerged in the darkness; it ran the short distance from the base of the cliff to the river. The pipe was two meters high. Fetid air tumbled from its mouth, a stench Tania felt through her skin.

Fedya gasped, “It’s a sewer drain.”

Yuri and Tania locked eyes. Both nodded.

Fedya stepped back, repulsed by the idea. “Oh, my God, you’re kidding. We can’t go in there. That’s shit! There’s shit all over the place in there. We can’t… there’s no way!”

Tania moved closer to Fedya. She put her fingers to her lips. “We don’t have any choice. It’ll be light soon.”

Yuri stepped forward. “It’s just shit, Fedya. We throw it on the fields every day. It’ll make you grow.”

“It’ll make me puke!”

Tania moved to the lip of the pipe. She turned to Fedya. “In here, no one will notice. Come on.”

She took her first steps through the sewer pipe as if leaning into a gale. She brought the inside of her elbow up to her nose to filter the filth through her tunic. Even so, the smell crept in through her eyes and ears.

She looked back at Yuri and Fedya. Yuri laid his arms across his chest to walk with his head held high, as though he might lift his nose above the odor. Fedya took large, slow steps, flapping his arms and shaking his hands like a tightrope walker.

“Walk, Fedya,” Tania whispered, “we’ve only just started.”

“Oh, God,” he mumbled.

Twenty meters from the mouth of the sewer, the dim light from the opening receded to leave them wrapped in total blackness. Tania ran her hand along the slimy wall to guide her steps. She felt a brush of cool air against her cheek. “There’s an opening ahead,” she said.

Her hand slid off the wall into open space. Another pipe had linked with the main line. “This seems to head north. We’ll walk until it’s past dawn. Then we’ll look for a manhole and climb out. With luck we’ll be behind our own lines.”

Tania shook her boots. Excrement clung to them and her pants legs. She felt the muddy damp where it had splashed onto her thighs. Behind her, Fedya made very few splashes. He was probably on tiptoes, she thought, as if there were a way to avoid stepping on shit in a sewer.

“Tania,” Yuri called, “tell us about America.”

Tania licked her lips, sweat salting her tongue. She did not want to talk, but she recognized that Yuri was only trying to quell their fear.