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

ZAITSEV TURNED THE LANTERN DOWN, ALMOST TOO FAR. Before the flame could gutter and go out, he raised the wick. Deep shadows gouged the dirt walls and floor of the snipers’ bunker.

What am I risking? he asked himself. He looked at his watch: 2:30 in the morning. Viktor rarely returns before dawn.

He pulled Tania into the bunker. She held on to his hand as if hanging off a cliff: strong, tight, for her life. His mind was dispatched through his own hand into her long fingers. The strength in her grip made her real to him then, for the first time. Even when she’d held him outside moments before, he still hadn’t been able to sense her. He’d looked above her, his mind on honor, death, war. What they’d done that night in the German bunker was acceptable to the soldier but terrible and foreign to the hunter. His grandfather would’ve beaten him for that. It was not done in the taiga, to kill wantonly.

He thought of Tania, submachine gun squalling, eyes blinking through the flying chips of wood and hammering noise. Tania gritting her teeth, running near me through the ruins and the night. Tania touching me through the snow cupped in her hands, the warm, dirty cloth on my face. Tania holding me. He looked at her now, in the center of the room, at the end of his arm. Her blond hair, thick as a wheat field, cast her shoulders and face in shadow. Only the tip of her nose was lit. He turned her so that the light played full on her face to bloom in her blue eyes.

From her first day as a recruit, Tania had been a distraction, even a worry, just as he’d predicted to Danilov. Indeed, she was Danilov’s experiment, one that Zaitsev had thought would not last long. She was hot, eager, stupid with her emotions. She became a woman to him only when he joked with Viktor as men do, about her ass or her hair or whether Fedya, the big boy, dead now, had been getting any, or when he saw her with Shaikin, touching him in the meetings. But away from her, he did not think about Tania Chernova.

Now he sneaked into his own bunker like a thief. Why? Just because he had a woman by the hand? He was awash in sensation. What am I risking? he asked himself again.

If someone walks in, I’ll laugh about it. I’ll tell Viktor how I seduced the girl; she was good, and once was enough. He should try next, I’ll say. But if we’re left uninterrupted to hold each other, to be slow, to rock in each other’s arms, to kiss and talk quietly, I don’t know. I control all events now. What will I do with a situation I cannot shape? Do I want this?

Stop thinking, he told himself. This isn’t up to you, anyway. You knew it from the moment she touched you outside.

Tania let go of his hand and turned her face away from the light. He watched her walk to his corner.

With her back to him, she unbuttoned her coat. She lowered her arms and the coat slid off to crumple on the floor, sleeves out, hood up, like a body melting into the dirt Her hands moved to her neck. Elbows out, her wrists flicked, opening the buttons of her tunic. She leaned over to untie her boot laces. The lines of her pantaloons pulled tight against her bottom.

When she straightened, her hands worked at her waist. She turned to face him: all the barriers to her body had been unlocked. Her shirt hung aside from her breasts, the points firm beneath the gray-green undershirt. Her sleeves were unbuttoned at the wrists. Her belt was undone. The zipper to her pantaloons was down and her boots flapped open.

Tania kicked off the boots to stand in her socks. Her face was a white moon in the lantern light. Her eyes shone at him, reflecting the lamp in twin dots turned azure.

Zaitsev stepped toward her; he watched his shadow climb her legs, then shade her body and face. He reached to her shoulders to push the unbuttoned shirt back. She raised her head at his touch; her hair was heavy on the backs of his hands. Her collar opened and slid away. The tunic fell back and a scent rose from her undershirt, arms, and neck. The tang of sweat mingled with the smell of soil. He thought of the sweet loam on the floor of the birch forest. The shirt fell behind her. Tania stood between the coat and the shirt in a circlet of arms and buttons.

She raised her hands in the air. Her breasts pushed up against the undershirt, flattening and rounding. Zaitsev laid his open palms on her to feel her nipples. He pulled the thin cotton shirt over her head and dropped it at her feet.

Zaitsev reached for her waist, but Tania stopped him, pushing his hands down by his sides. She reached for his waist and unlatched the brass of the Red Army belt he wore outside his coat. She tossed the belt into the shadows where it rattled on the floor. The girl’s hands moved to his chest. Her bare breasts and shoulders were ivory ovals in the hard linear shadows of the bunker. She undid the buttons of his coat and tugged the shoulders back to let the coat tumble.

She flipped open the buttons on his jersey. All the time, she avoided his eyes; she watched her own hands move on him.

The buttons freed. Zaitsev pulled his tunic and navy shirt over his head. He dropped them onto the growing heap.

Keeping her hands by her sides, she laid her breasts against his bare chest. She exhaled when her flesh pressed against him. Her breath was warm, full as fur against his cheek.

Tania locked onto his eyes. She sat on the floor before him, rolling her head back to hold his gaze. She pulled off her pants and socks and reached behind Zaitsev to gather in his coat and shirt, bunching them with her own clothes to form a mound at her back.

Zaitsev stepped out of his boots. He slid off his pants and dropped them to Tania, who made a show of adding them to the mix.

He sank to his knees on the stack of clothes. Tania pointed at his socks.

“Trust me,” he murmured, breaking the silence, “they’re better off where they are.”

Tania giggled. Zaitsev was wrapped in her laugh, feeling it heat the cool bunker floor. Her laughter was like arms that moved his chest in front of hers and pulled him down over her.

Tania did not collapse back onto the cushion of clothes. She pressed hard against him with her chest. Her hands and arms stayed braced against the ground. This surprised Zaitsev and excited him. He covered her mouth with his to push her down in a kiss as though setting the spring of a trap. She allowed herself to sink back bit by bit, then relaxed and flung her arms about his neck. He laid his hands in the curves of her hips, then ran them up her sides, over her ribs, and behind her neck. She moved under him in a rolling wave.

He pulled his hand from the soft weight of her hair and looked into his palms and at his fingers. The hand was rough, callused from months of crawling through the ruins of Stalingrad. Dried blood from the night’s murder clung beneath his nails. This is not a proper hand, he thought, to touch a woman.

Gently, Zaitsev pulled his other hand from beneath her neck. He rose up on an elbow.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

Looking down at her closed eyes, Zaitsev put his hand on top of hers. Slowly he guided her fingers to her breast; he felt the question in her wrist. She relaxed the hand and entrusted it to him. He worked her forefinger in a small circle over the swollen nipple. Tania inhaled in a gasp, then let go in a murmured sigh. Zaitsev slipped her hand off her breast and led it into the cleft between the two mounds, then down onto the white plain of her belly. He moved her hand in languorous circles, pressing and releasing; her hips stirred under their hands. He led her touch down between her legs, sensing no resistance. She moved with him, taking his directions; her fingers began to swirl and glide under him on their own, on her skin, into herself.

He looked into her face and breathed with her sighs. He no longer led her hand but rode it, going where she pleased; he was saddled to her movements.