War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (31 page)

In the bunker, the lantern’s dim glow strained to reach through the smoke. The berths were shot to pieces. The white innards of the splintered wood showed in a thousand holes. The dirt walls glimmered as if splashed with fresh wet tar. The lantern’s small flame reflected off the walls in wet red dots. An uncountable number of shell casings littered the floor, mixed with shards of wood and tufts of bloodied mattress cotton.

In the raw aftermath, the blasts only now fading in her head, Tania’s nerves jangled. A movement to her left made her jump. Kulikov stumbled out the doorway. Zaitsev was behind him, pushing. A hand grabbed her wrist. Shaikin turned her out past the blanket. Danilov was already in the trench.

Zaitsev spoke to her face; she could not hear him through the ringing in her ears. Shaikin, still holding her arm, began to run, pulling her along until she sped on her own. She followed Shaikin to the end of the trench. At the wall, he jumped up and flopped onto his belly to scramble to his knees. She handed up her submachine gun, feeling the heat of the barrel. She climbed out after Shaikin, then ran behind him through the white falling curtain against the backdrop of night. Her world was silent; the guns had stuffed her ears. She ran in the midst of the hares with the portly Danilov, knowing the Germans could be screaming at her, bullets flying by her, and she would not hear the rifles nor even see the bullets biting the ground around her. She ran, thrilled at escaping death by dashing through it.

They ran in their own footprints for two hundred meters away from the bunker. Safely distant, the snipers and the puffing commissar dropped behind cover. Zaitsev paused to catch his breath, then crawled ahead, telling them to follow in five minutes.

Tania leaned her head back to look into the falling snow. She felt dizzy, as though, instead of the flakes wafting down to her, she were flying upward into them. She let the flakes rest on her nose and eyelashes to melt on her hot, oiled skin. She cast her thoughts back over the past ten minutes. Images came to her out of order: the powerful quivering of the submachine gun, Danilov on his back, Zaitsev’s bloody hands, the slivers of the berths on the bunker floor.

The umbrella. What actual color was it?

She opened her eyes. Damn, she thought. I forgot to look.

* * * *

CHEKOV LAY SPREAD-EAGLED, SNORING. AN EMPTY bot
tle stood watch beside him like a pet glass cat.

Zaitsev slipped under the blanket behind Tania, followed by Kulikov and Shaikin. Danilov had left their group the moment they’d scrambled back behind Russian lines, rushing to write the story of the latest sniper strike. This time the story was not about the distant and silent delivery of death by the hares. Tonight the snipers had crawled into an officers’ bunker and massacred them in their beds. Tonight reeked of rabid brutality, of the abattoir, of revenge. And Danilov had been there, not just reporting events but for once making the news in person.

Zaitsev nudged the sleeping Chekov with his boot. The man snorted but did not wake up.

“Anatoly.” Zaitsev slipped the toe of his boot under Chekov’s side and lifted up, then let him roll back.

Zaitsev turned to Shaikin. “Take him back to the Lazur, Ilya.” Then he smiled at Tania. “Viktor will kill him if he comes back and finds him in our bunker snoring like that.”

Kulikov joined Shaikin. “We’ll have to carry him, Ilya. I’ll help you.”

Together they lifted Chekov across Shaikin’s shoulders. Kulikov picked up the three men’s rifles and packs. Tania moved the blanket aside for them to stagger out the doorway.

She was alone now in the bunker with Zaitsev.

“Good night,” she said.

“Wait. I’ll walk partway with you.”

Together they stepped out past blanket. Ahead of them, Chekov continued to snore, swaying atop Shaikin’s thin shoulders. Kulikov slapped Chekov on his upside-down head. “Shut up,” Kulikov told him.

Tania reached into her pack for a cloth to wipe the grease from her eye sockets, cheeks, and neck. She rubbed fresh snow into her face, grinding the cold crystals like icy sand over her skin. Zaitsev watched Kulikov and Shaikin walk away with their drunken load into the tumbling snow and muffled night.

A breeze crossed her wet brow and chin, cooling her like a breath of mint. She looked at Zaitsev’s face, still smudged with grease. He brought his eyes to hers. She looked down to his hands.

“You’re covered in blood,” she said. “Here.” She scooped up another handful of snow. “Give me your hand.”

She rubbed the snow over the back of his hand, digging it in with her palm. She scraped away the grease and blood. The flakes turned burgundy. His pale Siberian skin and high blue veins rose through the browning slush.

When she’d scoured both his hands clean, she daubed his face with the cloth. Zaitsev stood still, blinking under the cloth passing over his eyes.

Turmoil rose in Tania’s breast. What am I doing, she thought? I’m cleaning him like a mother with a dirty child. She tried to rein in her hands, but stopping would only hasten the moment when they stood in the falling snow, face-to-face, with no nervous action between them to stall their words or give innocent purpose to the connection in their eyes. She knew this was the moment she’d waited for; standing with him now, so near to the coming touch. These few seconds alone had been rising with the heat of the evening’s events. Before the raid, at the meeting, Zaitsev had forgiven her, reinstated her by giving her the leadership of sector six. Then had come the tumult of the killing of the German officers. She remembered tingling while the bullets flew from her submachine gun and then running in the snow and dark. Touching Zaitsev, even through the cloth, alone with him now, she tingled the same way.

Will he speak to me when I drop this ruse of cleaning his hands and face? Or will he choose silence, moving me to choose also? Will I act, or will I say good night and stumble off under my own burden? He’ll speak to me when I drop my hands. He’s waiting for me to stop. He will say . . . what?

Tania willed her hands to slow. With one final sweep, she wiped the cloth under his bottom lip.

“There,” she said, smiling for an instant. She stuffed the cloth into her pack.

When she straightened and looked into his face, he was looking not at her but across the dim moonlit outlines of the ruins and the collecting snow down to the Volga. His reddened hands were tucked under his armpits.

“Tania, what did we do tonight?” He shook his head.

She did not understand what he was asking. She dug her own cold hands into her pockets. What’s this mood? she wondered. Where is he all of a sudden?

“What do you mean, Vasily?”

She’d never called him by his first name. It fell from her mouth. But curled up into himself, gazing around like a man lost and unsure how it had happened, he seemed to have made himself smaller. His glow, the aura of the hero, the
vozhd
of the hares, had waned as if she’d rubbed it off with the grease and blood. This was not Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev in front of her. This was Vasha. She could sense it. He was here, vulnerable, beside her in the snowy hush of the night.

She prodded him with her voice.

“What did we do?” She shrugged. “We killed a dozen enemy officers. We sent the Nazis a message.”

Zaitsev’s eyes leveled on her, though his sight still seemed far away. “What message did we send? Whom did we send it to? Who got it, us or them?”

What is he talking about? Those were invaders. What did it matter whether they were sleeping in their bunks, firebombing a peasant village, or executing civilians in a park? They were the same. They were vermin, sticks to be broken, marked for death. Any death, not just the clean and instant blackness from a sniper’s bullet. Chopped up, pulped by a thousand rounds from five meters away—let them be found like that in the morning, let them tell that story on the German side of the line at dawn.

Zaitsev pulled his hands from his armpits. He motioned and started to speak, then halted, his hands left waiting for the words. His eyes were locked on Tania’s.

“It’s not . . .” he said, and narrowed his eyes; Tania saw how he cared about his next words. “It wasn’t what I was taught. It’s not our way. It shouldn’t be. That wasn’t killing. It wasn’t even war.”

Tania pulled his hands down. She stepped to him to hold his hands. They were cold; she held them tightly.

“Yes, Vasha, it was killing,” she whispered, “it was war killing.”

She took a last step to him, to press her chest against his. She pulled his hands behind her and felt them link around her waist to hold her. Tania laid her head on his shoulder. She looked at his neck, his ear, his short-cropped hair with no sideburns. She whispered again.

“You’re right, Vasha. There was no honor in it.”

She raised her head off his shoulder. His face still held distance and loss.

“But,” she said, “there will be after Danilov writes it up.”

Zaitsev’s chest rustled in a short laugh. Tania pulled her arms tighter around his waist.

“Leave the killing to the rest of us,” she breathed. “We’ll kill for you. I’ll kill for you. You hunt, Vasha. You hunt.”

* * * *

FOURTEEN

ZAITSEV TURNED THE LANTERN DOWN, ALMOST TOO FAR.
Before the flame could gutter and go out, he raised the wick. Deep shadows gouged the dirt walls and floor of the snipers’ bunker.

What am I risking? he asked himself. He looked at his watch: 2:30 in the morning. Viktor rarely returns before dawn.

He pulled Tania into the bunker. She held on to his hand as if hanging off a cliff: strong, tight, for her life. His mind was dispatched through his own hand into her long fingers. The strength in her grip made her real to him then, for the first time. Even when she’d held him outside moments before, he still hadn’t been able to sense her. He’d looked above her, his mind on honor, death, war. What they’d done that night in the German bunker was acceptable to the soldier but terrible and foreign to the hunter. His grandfather would’ve beaten him for that. It was not done in the taiga, to kill wantonly.

He thought of Tania, submachine gun squalling, eyes blinking through the flying chips of wood and hammering noise. Tania gritting her teeth, running near me through the ruins and the night. Tania touching me through the snow cupped in her hands, the warm, dirty cloth on my face. Tania holding me. He looked at her now, in the center of the room, at the end of his arm. Her blond hair, thick as a wheat field, cast her shoulders and face in shadow. Only the tip of her nose was lit. He turned her so that the light played full on her face to bloom in her blue eyes.

From her first day as a recruit, Tania had been a distraction, even a worry, just as he’d predicted to Danilov. Indeed, she was Danilov’s experiment, one that Zaitsev had thought would not last long. She was hot, eager, stupid with her emotions. She became a woman to him only when he joked with Viktor as men do, about her ass or her hair or whether Fedya, the big boy, dead now, had been getting any, or when he saw her with Shaikin, touching him in the meetings. But away from her, he did not think about Tania Chernova.

Now he sneaked into his own bunker like a thief. Why? Just because he had a woman by the hand? He was awash in sensation. What am I risking? he asked himself again.

If someone walks in, I’ll laugh about it. I’ll tell Viktor how I seduced the girl; she was good, and once was enough. He should try next, I’ll say. But if we’re left uninterrupted to hold each other, to be slow, to rock in each other’s arms, to kiss and talk quietly, I don’t know. I control all events now. What will I do with a situation I cannot shape? Do I want this?

Stop thinking, he told himself. This isn’t up to you, anyway. You knew it from the moment she touched you outside.

Tania let go of his hand and turned her face away from the light. He watched her walk to his corner.

With her back to him, she unbuttoned her coat. She lowered her arms and the coat slid off to crumple on the floor, sleeves out, hood up, like a body melting into the dirt Her hands moved to her neck. Elbows out, her wrists flicked, opening the buttons of her tunic. She leaned over to untie her boot laces. The lines of her pantaloons pulled tight against her bottom.