the grey October sky was metallic-bright, but the breath of winter was unmistakable.
To a Siberian, that is.
Razin pulled him down to the planks laid in a square around the stove. ‘Have you gone crazy? Why don’t you do the job properly, stick a wreath on your helmet?’
‘He couldn’t see me.’ Antonov picked up his rifle and with a rag massaged yellow oil into the stock beneath the telescopic sight.
‘Couldn’t see you?’ Razin took a crumpled pack of papirosy from his faded brown tunic, squatted beside the stove and lit one from its flanks; specks of tobacco sparked and died on the glowing metal. ‘You have his eyes?’
‘There’s no cover for him out there.’ Antonov jerked his thumb in the direction of the mangled rail tracks, known to the Germans as the Tennis Racquet, separating the river from the tooth-stump ruins of Stalingrad.
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
