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

Zaitsev said nothing, but his eyes betrayed that she’d been right. It was Thorvald. The Headmaster’s crosshairs had seared their mark on the dreams of the Hare. He was worried about the coming duel, even afraid of it, and she’d called him on it.

She’d been careless and forthright, had moved too close. Always rushing in, she thought, impatient and selfish. Not enough experience with men, not of this sort, anyway. Leave his ego intact, Tania. You can know his fears without making him say them out loud. Stupid.

“The light’s dying,” she said, to put words in the air and cover the mess she’d made. “What do you want to do?”

Zaitsev rose to his knees and shouldered his pack.

“Let’s go.” He didn’t look at her.

“You go ahead.” It was best to let him be alone for a while. Though innocently, she’d stung him. Let him walk away and curse her under his breath. She’d make it up to him that night.

“I’ll get Shaikin and Chekov and see you later,” she said.

Zaitsev gathered his sniper rifle.

She spoke while he turned from her. “I’ll see you tonight?”

Zaitsev pivoted. His eyes softened above the roots of a smile, and he nodded to her. He turned again to make his way down the trench. She heard him laugh quietly at some private mystery.

“I WANT TO GO.” TANIA FOLDED HER ARMS ACROSS HER chest.

“Tanyushka, you can’t!” Shaikin slapped his hand on his thigh. “It’s not proper.”

“Ha! Somehow it’s proper for you to go? What would your wife write in her next letter if she knew? ‘Dear Ilya Alexeyavich, I’m so glad you found a whorehouse in Stalingrad. I find it rather amazing, but I hope it helps ease the tension.’ Yes?”

Behind Shaikin, Chekov chuckled.

“I’m going,” she repeated.

“Ilyushka,” Chekov said, resting a hand on Shaikin’s shoulder, “let her come with us. Tania, do you promise to leave when we ask?”

“No. I’ll leave when I’m ready.”

“There!” shouted Shaikin, his arms flying up. “You see? She’ll spoil it for us.”

Tania kicked at the trench floor to shoot dirt over Shaikin’s boots. “What could I possibly do to spoil it? Two women are running a bordello in a cellar in the middle of a battlefield! What could I do to interrupt them? You think they’re shy? Or maybe I’ll break down and cry?”

Shaikin’s face hardened. Tania hadn’t expected such resistance. She changed her tone.

“Don’t worry, Ilya.” She leaned over to poke her friend in the ribs. “I’ll be long gone before you drop your pants. I just want to meet these women. I’m curious. Let me come with you. I’ll behave, I swear.”

Tania walked away to let her friends decide. The sun squatted in the ruins to the west. Behind the buildings, the crest of Mamayev Kurgan bore a raw glaze like sunburned skin. The snowless peak, warmed from the constant shelling, remained in German hands.

She peered across the ruins, contemplating a brothel nestled in the midst of it all. How contrary, how opposite. How perfect; sex drained of love, dirty men and women grunting and digging a hole, searching for something soft and comforting only to find nothing awaiting but more emptiness, more hole, more Stalingrad. And yet, like me, when I lie with Vasha, how precious, complex, and confusing, how hopeful and doomed all at once.

Shaikin’s suggestion that she might spoil their visit was ridiculous. She had no interest in watching or participating in sex with these women, and certainly not with her friends. She was merely fascinated by the notion, a little pleasure bunker in Stalingrad. But in her woman’s heart she felt there might be something more heroic about these two women who “entertained” Russian soldiers, as Chekov put it. She sensed something fatalistic about them. Were these two women not simply cheap mistresses but in fact goodly and sad women driven to the edge—as she herself had been—by the deaths of their own loved ones, their lives sundered by the Nazis? Had they then been born anew into pain and degradation? Or were they just loose harlots hedging their bets? Certainly, should the Germans take the city, local whores would be among the more comfortable of the survivors.

She was insulted at the men’s timid refusal to let her come along. Tania had dropped as many Germans as Shaikin. What would she see in a dirty cellar with two painted women lying about that would shock her? I won’t stay long, she thought, just enough to meet these whores, see what they’re like, maybe needle Shaikin and Chekov a bit. Then I’ll come back tonight for my own diversion, my apology, with Vasha.

Shaikin and Chekov scurried over. Shaikin swept the backs of his hands in the air at Tania to shoo her before him as though she were a sheep in the road. “Fine, fine,” he said in a high voice, “you want to come along, then fine. Go.” He fanned his fingers at her. “Go, go, go.”

Chekov moved past her in the trench. “It’s not too far, Tania. Follow me.”

He led them to the north end of the trench. On the count of one-two-three, the snipers jumped out and ran zigzag across twenty-five meters of open hillside to tumble into a crater.

Catching his breath, Chekov checked the sky.

“The sun’s pretty low,” he said. “We need to hurry.”

Tania rolled over. “Hurry? Why?”

“They close after dark.”

“You know these women well, Anatoly?”

Chekov’s grin became a toothy smirk. “Well enough.”

“Hmmm.” Tania grunted, coiling for more exertion. “Let’s go or you’ll blame me for being late.”

Chekov burst to his feet. He led them at a dead run for a kilometer, northeast from Mamayev Kurgan, across a wide boulevard and directly into the maze of workers’ dwellings on the rim of the factory district. The front line was only two hundred meters away, but Chekov was lighthearted, as if he were leading his friends to his own home to introduce them to his family.

Tania weighed the danger they faced just to visit the whores. Though they were behind their own lines, there was enough light left in the day for enemy mortar crews or snipers to bear down from any of the taller buildings to the west. The setting sun and their fast gait lowered the risk, but what if SS Colonel Thorvald was one of those peering down a scope right now, looking for targets? Were they running fast enough?

Chekov stopped at the base of a pockmarked stone wall. He grinned at Tania and panted, “Almost there.”

Another fifty meters among the burned and broken shacks of the workers’ settlement and they halted. Chekov signaled Shaikin and Tania to duck behind cover and wait. He disappeared around the debris of a rubbled house; its charred clapboard showed pale yellow with white gingerbread trim between the scorches.

Long afternoon shadows cut the snowy avenue into jagged patches. Blackened, naked trees stood dead beside torn-up sidewalks. Houses here were nothing more than junkyard heaps, their histories squeezed out of them like dried rinds. In this extinct neighborhood, the only life, the only candle kept burning, was in the hands of two prostitutes.

As she caught her breath Tania smiled at the wreckage, thinking of the women waiting beneath it. The pair were like wild seeds sending out shoots into the ashes after a forest fire. Life, she thought, is a hard thing to snuff out.

Beside her, Shaikin rapped his fingers on his leg.

“Where is he?” he asked. ‘It’s getting dark.”

Tania clucked her tongue at Shaikin to play with him and shame him a little. He raised his eyebrows at her and drummed his fingers on the stock of his machine gun.

“Don’t stare at me.” He shrugged irritably. “You don’t understand. You’re not a man.”