Katyusha mortar rockets fired from the far bank of the Volga exploded in German-held rubble. A German field gun replied. Antonov longed for the snow-silence of the steppe or its stunned summer stillness or the breathing quiet of its nights.
‘And I suppose you know what he’s doing?’ Razin, an old soldier of twenty-eight, pulled at the ragged droop of his moustache and pushed his steel helmet onto the back of his cropped hair.
‘Eating probably. It’s lunchtime. Sausage? Bread? Maybe an apple if he’s lucky.’ Antonov removed a flake of ash from Razin’s cigarette from the barrel of the Mosin-Nagant.
‘Beer? Schnapps?’
‘No liquor. He needs a steady hand.’
‘Like you?’
‘Like me,’ Antonov agreed.
‘And he knows what you’re doing?’
‘If he were asked he’d probably answer: “Cleaning his gun.” It’s a good bet.’
‘You’re like twins and yet you want to kill each other.’
‘We don’t want to. We have to.’
‘I wonder.’ Razin, a Ukrainian with a furrowed smile and wary eyes who had been ordered to protect Antonov, rolled the creased cardboard tube of his yellow cigarette between thumb and forefinger. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to kill him?’
Antonov considered the question carefully. When he hunted animals – deer, elk, lynx – yes, he wanted to kill; that was sport and it was senseless to deny its pleasures. But to want to kill a man, no. Antonov shook his head vigorously. That was duty. ‘I’m sure,’ he told the Ukrainian.
‘You shook your head as if you wanted to get rid of your brains. A little too energetically, comrade?’
‘Meister’s special. Maybe that’s why I over-react.’
‘And the other Fritzes you killed … Weren’t they special to their parents, wives, girls?’
Antonov who had shot and killed twenty-three Germans since he arrived in Stalingrad three weeks earlier, each with one bullet, said: ‘You know what I mean.’
‘Maybe he wants to kill you.’
Did he? Antonov doubted it: Meister, with his special talents, was merely serving his country. Like me. Hitler instead of Stalin. It wasn’t until he had been ordered to kill Meister that it had occurred to him that the motives of enemies could be the same. The knowledge worried him. He placed his rifle on a plank, covering the sights with the rag.
A machine-gun coughed nearby and two soldiers jumped into the shell-hole. Razin cocked his pistol because when the enemy lines were only a couple of hundred metres away, when positions could be captured and recaptured within minutes, it was wise to check out visitors. They were both young, Slav faces smudged with exhaustion. One of them tugged a flask from his tunic, took a swig of vodka from it and passed it around. Russia’s fuel, Antonov thought. Where would we be without it?
‘You don’t drink firewater?’ The owner of the flask looked astonished.
‘When did you last eat?’ Antonov always tried to redirect attention from his abstinence.
‘Eat?’ The second soldier, once-plump cheeks sagging into pouches, used his hands like an actor. ‘This year perhaps: I can’t remember. When did we last eat, Sergei?’
‘I don’t know but these two look well fed.’ He touched a blood-stained bandage above his knee-length boot. ‘Why so glossy, comrades? Dead men’s rations?’
Razin, offering his cigarettes, said: ‘We’re privileged. In a classless society there’ll always be some of us. Or hadn’t you noticed?’
‘Are you political?’
‘You know better than that. Military commissars had their teeth drawn on October the ninth on the Boss’s orders.’
True, but Antonov could understand the soldier’s suspicion: although the commissars’ powers had been curtailed to reduce friction in the army, NKVD units were posted on the west bank of the Volga to stop the faint-hearted escaping to the safety of the east.
Was Razin in any way political? Antonov doubted it. During their brief but congested relationship Razin had emerged as an escapist, a stunted intellectual who had sought refuge from responsibility in the army.
Antonov reached into an ammunition box containing black bread, an onion, cheese and raw fish blown out of the Volga with hand-grenades.
The soldier with the pouched cheeks spoke to his colleague with his hand. ‘Careful,’ the hand said with a loose-wristed shake. ‘These men could be dangerous.’ But he took the food, pulling it apart with his fingers and handing the larger portion to his partner. They ate ravenously.
The machine-gun opened up again, a longer burst this time, welded explosions like ripping calico. More Katyushas. An aching pause. Then the cries of wounded men.
Razin swigged from the flask. ‘Good stuff.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘The best,’ the soldier with the wounded leg agreed. ‘Ahotnichaya, hunters’ vodka.’
The cries of the wounded faded without arousing comment in the shell-hole. Suffering had become unremarkable and yet one soldier would still give another the larger of two crusts of bread. There were many values among the soldiery that puzzled Antonov. Indeed from the beginning it had been the relationships between men at war rather than the cannonade of battle that had disturbed him most. He found it difficult to share with them.
Hunger satisfied, the once-plump soldier became wary again; he reminded Antonov of a Bolshevik during the Revolution interrogating a prisoner suspected of Czarist sympathies, truculence tempered by grudging deference. ‘So,’ the soldier said, ‘where have you two been fighting? In the cookhouse?’
‘Nowhere much,’ Razin told him. ‘I was with the 258th Rifle Division in a small skirmish – the Battle of Moscow. Were you there?’
‘Rostov.’
‘Ah yes,’ Razin said. ‘You lost Rostov: we saved Moscow.’
‘We heard that when you saved Moscow the war was as good as over. What went wrong?’
The other soldier said: ‘Rostov was a victory,’ and when Razin laughed: ‘I mean it, Rostov was the turning point. It was after Rostov that Stalin said: “Not a step back.’”
‘And we haven’t taken any steps back?’
‘We’ll hold the bastards here. Stalingrad. This is the one.’
Razin, nipping the glowing tip off his cigarette and, pouring the residue of tobacco into a tin that had contained throat lozenges, said: ‘I was in Moscow when Panfilov’s men held the Fritzes.’
The two soldiers fell silent as Razin retold the story that had already acquired the lustre of a legend.
As the German offensive faltered outside Moscow in late 1941, nearly a year ago, twenty-eight anti-tank gunners commanded by an officer named Panfilov had defied the mailed fist of a panzer attack on the Volokolamsk Highway. They had fought with guns and grenades and petrol bombs and the political officer, mortally wounded, had grabbed a clutch of hand grenades and thrown himself under a German tank. The battle had lasted four hours. The Germans lost eighteen tanks and failed to break through.
Ah, such sacrifice. Even when Razin had finished the tale Rodina, Mother Russia, lingered in the crater and briefly Panfilov and his men with their petrol-filled bottles were more real than the outrage that was Stalingrad.
Razin said: ‘At the end of the battle for Moscow you couldn’t help feeling sorry for the Fritzes. It was so cold that the oil in their guns froze and the poor bastards were still wearing summer uniforms – greatcoats and boots