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

Nikki stood; he was high above Thorvald now, the first time he’d felt this. He sensed no danger standing up in the park. The Hare was gone. The colonel was gone. All the guessing, the gamesmanship, the paranoia, the intent watching, all the twists and bends of the sniper duel—all was ended. The park had reverted to a part of Stalingrad; it was no longer a strange place filled with sweeping, deadly crosshairs but something tired, dismal, and familiar.

He looked at the moon, remote and white, the same moon glowing over his home far away. He wanted to leap away from this corpse in its uncovered crypt. He’d catch the rim of the moon, pull himself in, and crawl through the pearly tunnel in the sky over Russia and Poland and into Germany until he was above the meadows of Westphalia. He’d jump down and ride the snowflakes into the pastures like the gnomes of fairy tales.

Thorvald had been Nikki’s only hope of going home. For the week since he’d met Thorvald at the Gumrak airfield, Nikki had dreamed of his father, his sister, and their farm. Nightly his father walked to him and held him with the warm touch of a wish. He looked now at the real city, its dark and evil walls, broken streets, every bit of it a citadel for death, and he realized that this was the home Thorvald had bequeathed him.

Nikki’s heart fell into the hole with Thorvald. His dream of home was nothing more now than the moon, a small white token hung against the great blackness over Stalingrad. He turned, resisting his urge to reach down and take the colonel’s sandwich sack.

He walked into the night, along the route he and the colonel had taken each of the past three evenings to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s office. His steps were solitary without Thorvald on some side of him. He searched for his portion of grief over the colonel’s death, for the officer who’d shown him some trust and kindness. There was nothing, only disappointment. Nikki recognized again the growing ease with which he accepted death; it had crossed his path so often, a groove was worn in him. But the colonel had been special, if only for a week. He’d been a spyglass to let Nikki see far beyond Stalingrad, with stories of German high life, elite ways, and sandwiches made from still-fresh Berliner cheeses, the opera in evening gowns and dress blacks, the trap-shooting crowd and their oiled shotguns. Nikki wanted to know if he could still feel the passing of a man who’d touched his life before dying. If only he could reach death inside him and lay his hands on it, he could fight it with emotion, drive it away with tears, pound its spell out of his breast with his fists. But the death of Colonel Thorvald did not lift him up out of his soul, just as the white-clad body lying in the park would not rise from its hole.

Nikki felt only the nearness of death. It was like a neighbor you watch day and night, to whom you have never said hello. He was unable to cross the distance, the little alley, to death, to sit with it and embrace it. He was cursed with being a watchman at death’s house. He saw the beginning of the end of everything. The war, the soldiers, the nations, all will die, he thought. Everything will die but time. This left him empty, exhausted. Time and me. We will not die. Time and I will go on and on, watching lonely death reap his fields, come and go.

I see now that I have been assigned to time’s regiment. Just as well. I have no other duty at hand.

He walked to his basement in the bakery. He did not duck behind cover or stop to listen to the yapping of small-arms fire the way he and the colonel had done on their return trips. All the way, until his head lay on his pack, Nikki carried the sensation of being atop a horse that knew its way home. He believed he could have closed his eyes and walked straight from Thorvald’s body to his bedroll.

NIKKI WOKE AND GLANCED AT HIS WATCH. PAST ELEVEN o’clock, almost afternoon. He walked across the street to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s office. It was empty. The desk was a mess, covered with maps and transcripts of prisoner interrogations. Nikki sat in the lieutenant’s chair. The vantage point gave him a sense of the friendly young officer; he was harried, obsessive, a worrier. The world viewed from behind this desk was closing in.

Nikki pushed through the stacks of papers. Below the first layer of sheets was a calendar opened to the day’s date, November 19, 1942. Ostarhild, or someone, had been at this desk early that morning and had left in a hurry, in a flurry of paper.

Hunger snagged at Nikki like a nail catching his clothes. He pondered pulling out the lieutenant’s desk drawers to find a snack but thought better of it when footsteps fell in the hall.

He rose quickly. Before he could reach the door, a captain entered. Nikki came to attention but did not salute.

“Sir,” he said.

The officer, an older man with a bald pate and glasses, waved in a combination of salute and dismissal. He moved with haste to Ostarhild’s chair. He busied himself in the papers.

Without looking up, the captain said, “Yes, Corporal?”

“Sir, do you know where Lieutenant Ostarhild is?”

The captain found one report he was looking for.

“Are you one of his spotters?”

“Yes, sir. Corporal Mond, sir.”

The captain set down the page and looked up. His face was as wrinkled and white as balled-up paper. The chair and the desk did this to him, made him fret, just as they did to Ostarhild.

“Your officer is out on the steppe right now, Corporal. Go about your duties.”

Nikki did not move. He had no assignment now that the colonel was dead. He wanted to report the end of Thorvald to someone, to conclude the business.

“Sir, I have no duties at the moment. I have just been—”

“Corporal,” the captain broke in, “I cannot speak with you right now. But since you’re one of Ostarhild’s boys, I’ll tell you this so you won’t hear it secondhand and get it wrong. Maybe you can help keep the panic down.”

Nikki shifted his stance. The Russians. Here it comes. The end, the finish of everything.

“At oh-seven-thirty this morning, heavy Red forces counterattacked from Serafimovich in the northwest. Several thousand artillery pieces opened up on the Rumanian Third Army. At oh-eight-fifty, waves of Red tanks and infantry attacked out of the fog. The Rumanians broke ranks and are in retreat. Ostarhild is out there trying to assess the damage.”

The captain seemed to be out of information. Nikki waited.

“It appears,” the captain said with finality, “the Reds are trying to encircle us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now you know what I know, Corporal. Dismissed.”

Nikki looked at the captain for several seconds. The officer returned his gaze, admitting his helplessness.

Nikki shrugged. “Dismissed to where, sir?”

“You know best, Corporal, I’m sure.” The captain looked again into the papers.

Nikki reached the door. Behind him the captain spoke in a voice wrung dry as salt.

“Try to stay alive, son,” he said. “That’s the best I can tell you.”

TANIA SAT IN ZAITSEV’S CORNER, WAITING FOR THE party to begin.

A dozen snipers milled about the bunker. Atai Chebibulin delivered a ringing crate of vodka bottles and a stack of chocolate bars, then departed humbly into the night, asking Tania to congratulate the Hare on his victory.

Viktor said again, “He’ll be back from his meeting with Chuikov any minute. All of you, keep your hands off the vodka.”

Tania took her sniper journal from her backpack. The booklet’s bent black cover showed its usage. It had been inscribed forty-eight times.

She stopped at a page bearing Zaitsev’s signature. She ran her thumb over the ink of his name, feeling his hands on the page. Nowhere else in his body, she thought, is Vasha’s strength so clear, so expressed, as in his hands. Sometimes in his eyes, yes, but they are closed when we make love. Always in his hands. He says he’s powerful like a bear cub, which before it’s one year old can break a man’s arm. He’s an artless lover, Vasha is. We probably both are, grappling on the floor under so many coats. But he’s a strong lover and sincere, and I give him all I have. He loves me, though he doesn’t say it. I trust him with my life. Would I die for him? I don’t know. Would I die alongside him? Yes.