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

They ran in their own footprints for two hundred meters away from the bunker. Safely distant, the snipers and the puffing commissar dropped behind cover. Zaitsev paused to catch his breath, then crawled ahead, telling them to follow in five minutes.

Tania leaned her head back to look into the falling snow. She felt dizzy, as though, instead of the flakes wafting down to her, she were flying upward into them. She let the flakes rest on her nose and eyelashes to melt on her hot, oiled skin. She cast her thoughts back over the past ten minutes. Images came to her out of order: the powerful quivering of the submachine gun, Danilov on his back, Zaitsev’s bloody hands, the slivers of the berths on the bunker floor.

The umbrella. What actual color was it?

She opened her eyes. Damn, she thought. I forgot to look.

CHEKOV LAY SPREAD-EAGLED, SNORING. AN EMPTY bottle stood watch beside him like a pet glass cat.

Zaitsev slipped under the blanket behind Tania, followed by Kulikov and Shaikin. Danilov had left their group the moment they’d scrambled back behind Russian lines, rushing to write the story of the latest sniper strike. This time the story was not about the distant and silent delivery of death by the hares. Tonight the snipers had crawled into an officers’ bunker and massacred them in their beds. Tonight reeked of rabid brutality, of the abattoir, of revenge. And Danilov had been there, not just reporting events but for once making the news in person.

Zaitsev nudged the sleeping Chekov with his boot. The man snorted but did not wake up.

“Anatoly.” Zaitsev slipped the toe of his boot under Chekov’s side and lifted up, then let him roll back.

Zaitsev turned to Shaikin. “Take him back to the Lazur, Ilya.” Then he smiled at Tania. “Viktor will kill him if he comes back and finds him in our bunker snoring like that.”

Kulikov joined Shaikin. “We’ll have to carry him, Ilya. I’ll help you.”

Together they lifted Chekov across Shaikin’s shoulders. Kulikov picked up the three men’s rifles and packs. Tania moved the blanket aside for them to stagger out the doorway.

She was alone now in the bunker with Zaitsev.

“Good night,” she said.

“Wait. I’ll walk partway with you.”

Together they stepped out past blanket. Ahead of them, Chekov continued to snore, swaying atop Shaikin’s thin shoulders. Kulikov slapped Chekov on his upside-down head. “Shut up,” Kulikov told him.

Tania reached into her pack for a cloth to wipe the grease from her eye sockets, cheeks, and neck. She rubbed fresh snow into her face, grinding the cold crystals like icy sand over her skin. Zaitsev watched Kulikov and Shaikin walk away with their drunken load into the tumbling snow and muffled night.

A breeze crossed her wet brow and chin, cooling her like a breath of mint. She looked at Zaitsev’s face, still smudged with grease. He brought his eyes to hers. She looked down to his hands.

“You’re covered in blood,” she said. “Here.” She scooped up another handful of snow. “Give me your hand.”

She rubbed the snow over the back of his hand, digging it in with her palm. She scraped away the grease and blood. The flakes turned burgundy. His pale Siberian skin and high blue veins rose through the browning slush.

When she’d scoured both his hands clean, she daubed his face with the cloth. Zaitsev stood still, blinking under the cloth passing over his eyes.

Turmoil rose in Tania’s breast. What am I doing, she thought? I’m cleaning him like a mother with a dirty child. She tried to rein in her hands, but stopping would only hasten the moment when they stood in the falling snow, face-to-face, with no nervous action between them to stall their words or give innocent purpose to the connection in their eyes. She knew this was the moment she’d waited for; standing with him now, so near to the coming touch. These few seconds alone had been rising with the heat of the evening’s events. Before the raid, at the meeting, Zaitsev had forgiven her, reinstated her by giving her the leadership of sector six. Then had come the tumult of the killing of the German officers. She remembered tingling while the bullets flew from her submachine gun and then running in the snow and dark. Touching Zaitsev, even through the cloth, alone with him now, she tingled the same way.

Will he speak to me when I drop this ruse of cleaning his hands and face? Or will he choose silence, moving me to choose also? Will I act, or will I say good night and stumble off under my own burden? He’ll speak to me when I drop my hands. He’s waiting for me to stop. He will say… what?

Tania willed her hands to slow. With one final sweep, she wiped the cloth under his bottom lip.

“There,” she said, smiling for an instant. She stuffed the cloth into her pack.

When she straightened and looked into his face, he was looking not at her but across the dim moonlit outlines of the ruins and the collecting snow down to the Volga. His reddened hands were tucked under his armpits.

“Tania, what did we do tonight?” He shook his head.

She did not understand what he was asking. She dug her own cold hands into her pockets. What’s this mood? she wondered. Where is he all of a sudden?

“What do you mean, Vasily?”

She’d never called him by his first name. It fell from her mouth. But curled up into himself, gazing around like a man lost and unsure how it had happened, he seemed to have made himself smaller. His glow, the aura of the hero, the vozhd of the hares, had waned as if she’d rubbed it off with the grease and blood. This was not Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev in front of her. This was Vasha. She could sense it. He was here, vulnerable, beside her in the snowy hush of the night.

She prodded him with her voice.

“What did we do?” She shrugged. “We killed a dozen enemy officers. We sent the Nazis a message.”

Zaitsev’s eyes leveled on her, though his sight still seemed far away. “What message did we send? Whom did we send it to? Who got it, us or them?”

What is he talking about? Those were invaders. What did it matter whether they were sleeping in their bunks, firebombing a peasant village, or executing civilians in a park? They were the same. They were vermin, sticks to be broken, marked for death. Any death, not just the clean and instant blackness from a sniper’s bullet. Chopped up, pulped by a thousand rounds from five meters away—let them be found like that in the morning, let them tell that story on the German side of the line at dawn.

Zaitsev pulled his hands from his armpits. He motioned and started to speak, then halted, his hands left waiting for the words. His eyes were locked on Tania’s.

“It’s not…” he said, and narrowed his eyes; Tania saw how he cared about his next words. “It wasn’t what I was taught. It’s not our way. It shouldn’t be. That wasn’t killing. It wasn’t even war.”

Tania pulled his hands down. She stepped to him to hold his hands. They were cold; she held them tightly.

“Yes, Vasha, it was killing,” she whispered, “it was war killing.”

She took a last step to him, to press her chest against his. She pulled his hands behind her and felt them link around her waist to hold her. Tania laid her head on his shoulder. She looked at his neck, his ear, his short-cropped hair with no sideburns. She whispered again.

“You’re right, Vasha. There was no honor in it.”

She raised her head off his shoulder. His face still held distance and loss.

“But,” she said, “there will be after Danilov writes it up.”

Zaitsev’s chest rustled in a short laugh. Tania pulled her arms tighter around his waist.

“Leave the killing to the rest of us,” she breathed. “We’ll kill for you. I’ll kill for you. You hunt, Vasha. You hunt.”