Meister viewed it through his sights. Meister thought that Lanz, peering from beneath his steel helmet, looked like a tortoise.
‘Time for breakfast?’ Lanz asked.
‘When we get to the square,’ mildly surprised to hear himself, a soldier as raw as a grazed knuckle, giving orders to a corporal.
The bullet smacked into the flaking trunk of the tree above Meister’s head. He and Lanz hit the ground.
After a few seconds Lanz said: ‘Antonov?’
‘Antonov wouldn’t have missed.’
Holding his rifle, a Karabiner 98K fitted with a ZF 41 telescopic sight, Meister edged behind the bole of the tree to wait for the second shot.
The marksman, amateurish or, perhaps, wounded, was firing from the wreckage of a wooden church across the street. The fallen dome lay in the nave, a giant mushroom.
Meister, peering through his sights, looked for the sniper’s cover. If I were him … the altar just visible past the dome. He steadied the rifle, disciplined his breathing, took first pressure on the trigger.
River-smelling mist drifted along the street but it was thinning.
The second shot spat frozen mud into Lanz’s face. The marksman, whose fur hat had risen in Meister’s sights, reared and fell behind the altar.
‘Twenty-four,’ Lanz said.
They ate breakfast in a cellar in Ninth of January Square where in September Sergeant Pavlov and sixty men barricaded in a tall house had held up the German tanks for a week.
They ate bread and cheese and drank ersatz coffee handed over reluctantly by a group of soldiers when Lanz showed them a chit signed by the commanding officer of the 3rd Battalion, 194th Infantry Regiment, to which Meister was attached.
The infantrymen looked very young and they were trying to look tough; instead they looked bewildered and Meister felt much older and decided that it was his singleness of purpose, his detachment from the overall battle, that made this so.
One of them, eighteen or so with smooth cheeks and soft stubble on his chin, said: ‘So you’re Meister. What makes you tick?’ his accent Bavarian, and another, leaner faced, with a northern intonation: ‘They say you’ve killed 23 Ivans. True, or is it propaganda?’
Lanz answered him. ‘Correction. Twenty-four. He just killed one round the corner,’ making it sound as though Meister had won a game of skat.
‘I don’t know what makes me tick,’ Meister said to the Bavarian.
‘Do you enjoy killing Russians?’
‘I do my job.’
‘What sort of answer is that?’
‘Do you enjoy what you’re doing?’
‘Are you crazy?’ the northerner asked. ‘Before I came to Russia I’d never even heard of Stalingrad. It’s like fighting on the moon.’
Meister drank some bitter coffee. His mother had made beautiful coffee and in the mornings its breakfast smell had reached his bedroom and when he had opened his window he had smelled pastries from the elegant patisserie next door, a refreshing change from the smell of perfume from his father’s factory that permeated the elegant house in Hamburg.
‘What’s it like being a hero?’ the Bavarian asked.
‘Great,’ Lanz answered.
‘I suppose you’ll get an Iron Cross if you kill Antonov,’ the Bavarian said ignoring Lanz. ‘And a commission and a reception in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin.’
If kill him,’ Meister said. ‘But in any case I don’t want any of those things,’ and Lanz said: ‘How do you know about the Adlon?’
‘I’ve been around,’ the Bavarian said. He produced a looted bottle of vodka from his tunic and poured some down his throat. ‘Great stuff. Better than schnapps.’ He choked and turned away.
‘Come on,’ Lanz said to Meister, ‘move yourself – you’ve got an appointment with Comrade Antonov.’
‘Look out for mines,’ the northerner warned them. ‘We’ve been using dogs to explode them. The lieutenant lost his Dobermann that way. Where are you going anyway?’
‘Mamaev Hill,’ Meister told him.
‘Shit. Are you sure it’s ours? It could have changed hands again – the Russians shipped a lot of troops across the river in the mist.’
‘Then Antonov will be early for his appointment,’ Lanz said.
***
By 10 am the frost had melted and the mist had lifted and galleons of white cloud sailed serenely in the autumn-blue sky above Mamaev Hill which was still in German hands.
From a shell-hole on the hill, once a Tartar burial ground, more recently a picnic area, now a burial ground again, Meister could see the industrial north of Stalingrad and, to the south, the commercial and residential quarter. And he could make out the shape of the city, a knotted rope, twenty or more miles long, braiding this, the west bank of the Volga. It was rumoured that the German High Command hadn’t anticipated such an elastic sprawl; nor, it was said, had they envisaged such a breadth of water, splintered with islands and creeks.
Through his field-glasses he could see the Russian heavy artillery and the eight and twelve-barrelled Katyusha launchers spiking the fields and scrub pine on the far bank. He scanned the river, clear today of timber and bodies because, although they had used flares, the German gunners hadn’t been able to see the Russian relief ships in the mist-choked night.
Where was Antonov?
Meister swung the field-glasses to the north where only factory chimneys remained intact, fingers prodding the sky. He wouldn’t be there: snipers don’t prosper in hand-to-hand fighting.
He looked south. To the remnants of the State Bank, the brewery, the House of Specialists, Gorki Theatre. No, Antonov would be nearer to the hill than that, moving cautiously towards Mamaev, Stalingrad’s principal vantage point. Scanning it with his field-glasses …
Meister shrank into the shell-hole. Lanz handed him pale coffee in a battered mess tin. ‘Where is he?’
‘Down there.’ Meister pointed towards the river bank. ‘Somewhere near Crossing 62. In No Man’s Land.’
‘Will you be able to get a shot at him?’
‘Not a chance. He won’t show himself, not while I’m up here.’
‘He knows you’re here?’
‘He would be up here if the Russians still held Mamaev. It’s the only place where you can see how the battle’s going. Who’s holding the vantage points.’
‘You’ll be a general one day,’ Lanz said.
‘I wanted to be an architect.’
‘I
