Blitzfreeze (2 page)

‘I’d rather die than surrender,’ whispers Jelena hoarsely.

‘Don’t be too sure of that. Death doesn’t seem so frightening at a distance. But up close even the bravest lose courage and choose life – if they have a choice at all. But who’s to say we two’ll
have
any choice. We haven’t met
Hitler’s SS yet. They’re a thousand times worse than our own NKVD.’

‘Impossible,’ in a frightened groan from the girl. ‘Nobody could be crueller than Beria’s men.’

‘You’ll learn better! Wait till you meet the men with the skull on their caps. They kill for the love of it. It’s said they get a pint of blood to drink every morning. Soviet blood, Jelena Vladimirovna.’

‘It’s said too, that they eat young children,’ she mumbles, paling.

‘Half a million babies disappeared in Berlin alone. Jewish babies,’ she added after a moment.

‘No, not Jewish, the SS definitely wouldn’t eat them!’ he protests – indignantly.

‘Do you really think we’re losing the great patriotic war?’

‘We
have
lost it, Jelena Vladimirovna, God help and pity us!’

‘You believe in God, Oleg? A Soviet officer passed out of Frunse Academy?’

‘Yes, since the battle of Minsk I believe in God. He is our only hope. Jelena Vladimirovna, I love you! I’ve loved you from the moment you joined the regiment, and were put in my unit. Come on, girl! There’s a war on. Who knows if we’ll still be alive by evening?’

‘Stop it, I can’t, I won’t! I’m engaged!’

‘No you bloody well aren’t,’ he shouts mockingly. ‘I know there’s something between you and Captain Anna Skrjabina. The whole brigade knows it. They say a T-34 is what’ll come out of it.’ He throws back his head with a roar of laughter. ‘You’re Captain Anna Skrjabina’s mistress. Everybody knows that cow’s crazy about girls. But did you know, too, that they disappear but fast when the old witch gets tired of them? She’ll soon be finished with the unit at Sampolit. Colonel Botapov doesn’t like her.’

‘He can’t touch Anna. She has connections right up to the
Stavka
.’
⁵

‘You’re in love with her!’

‘So what? Do I have to get my section commander’s permission?’

‘What do you do with one another?’

‘Do you think I’m perverse?’

‘No, just a lesbian. You nauseate me, Jelena Vladimirovna.’

‘Good, then let me go,
tovaritsch
lieutenant! They certainly didn’t hand out manners together with medals at Suomussalmi.’

‘Are you knocking the Order of the Red Banner?’

‘Report me, if you want to. I can answer for myself! If I’m to be stood up against a wall I’ll see to it I get you for company!’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll get by, Jelena. Just crawl into Anna’s little bed. She’s the one who handles all the reports.’

‘You’re an animal. I curse you tenfold – by the Holy Mother of Kazan!’

‘I’m sorry, Jelena, I didn’tmean it but you drive me mad. I
will
have you, cost what it may!’

‘No, I tell you I won’t I won’t have anything to do with you. Not like that!’

Suddenly he is on top of her. The maize sways. The thick stalks snap noisily.

‘I’m going to have you now, if it’s the last thing I do in my life! Fritz’ll be here before sundown, and that’ll be it. The orders are “stand and die”’ With one movement he rips off her summer blouse. ‘Afterwards you can go running to Anna and tell the old witch that it’s a lot better having it with a man!’

‘Fuckin’ arseholes!’ rumbles Tiny in his deep belly bass. ‘It’s enough to get a jack up on a neutered nigger with a paralysed pisspin! See the way that traitor to the Soviet’s gettin’ across her
now
! And him as ’as doubts about the final victory. Ought to be stuck up in front of a firin’ squad! Bleedin’ dog’s dinner like ’im want perforatin’!’

‘It’s the bitch who’s gonna get perforated,’ sniggers Porta delightedly. ‘If they knew who was lying here taking the piss out of them! War’s a terrible thing! Just one shocking thing after another!’

‘Christ, now he’s moving up into the jungle,’ whispers Stege ecstatically, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

‘Cut it out, you lecherous monkeys,’ rasps the Old Man, moving forward his LMG,
⁶
one of the new type with a bayonet for close-quarter fighting.

Barcelona Blom chuckles lasciviously and screws the cover off a hand-grenade.

‘He’d better get a move on, that humpty-backed frog. It’ll be his last bang, before we come tapping on the door.’

The girl has pulled herself free again. Her breasts are bared. She is breathing heavily and smacks the lieutenant resoundingly across the face. But this only excites him even more. She aims a kick at his crutch.

‘She should’ve taken a course at the military academy judo school,’ opines Porta, ‘then she could’ve tossed that
alik
⁷
straight over to us.’

‘That’d stop ’is fartin’ in church,’ grins Tiny. ‘His nice little officer’s prick’d shrivel up at the sight of us, and ’e’d shoot a load about the size of a sparrer’s tear.’

The two wrestle briefly in the swaying corn. Her skirt has been torn away. The heavy Nagan and white frilly pants seem ludicrous in contrast.

Panting they fall to the grass. Something white flutters into the air and ends on a branch.

‘There go ’er arse-curtains,’ reports Tiny gleefully.

We grin delightedly, all except the Old Man and the Legionnaire. Porta emits a long shrill whistle.

‘What was that?’ asks Jelena nervously.

‘A reed warbler crying to its mate,’ Oleg calms her.

‘A Red warrior crying for his cunt, you bastard,’ Tiny grins unrestrainedly, his face pressed hard to the ground.

‘Right up,’ Porta laughs lustfully and scratches his crutch with his combat knife.

‘No!’ cries the girl hysterically, ‘why should I?’

‘To please me,’ he laughs.

‘I won’t! Can’t you hear? Leave me alone, I tell you!’

‘Just once, what difference can it make?’ he pleads.

There is silence for a moment. Betraying moans come from the bushes. A stifled scream. Jumbled words.

We are dumb with excitement, our breath comes pantingly, we stare greedy-eyed.

Porta wriggles forward to Tiny.

‘Holy Mother of Kazan,’ he whispers breathlessly. ‘Ain’t this something? Here we go knocking the Red Army, when in fact it’s us who’ve joined the wrong army. Ivan understands things. He takes uniformed cunt with him right into the thick of battle. Maybe us two hard-tried Prussian veterans ought to let the faded eagle take off and follow the Communist star? These men are fighting for a holy cause.’

‘Are they ’oly?’ asks Tiny disappointedly. His experience with the missions has been uniformly bad.

‘Like fuck they are,’ grins Porta. ‘No more than the devil is in the arse-part. But they’re made of rougher stuff than our Party bums who want to serve both God and the Devil, and try to keep the latter connection a secret like the Pharisee in the Bible. I’ve heard that every Communist Obergefreiter has a piece of
allotjka
⁸
to press his pants whenever her superior feels the need.’

‘If that’s true,’ mumbles Tiny with a hectic flush rising on his cheeks and eyes shining, ‘then we’ve already wasted too much of our time in Hitler’s connin’ army.’

‘Shall we let them finish before we turn it on?’ asks Stege in a whisper.

The Old Man makes no reply, pulls nervously at his ear and plays with the ‘stovepipe’. He is not interested in what is happening in the scrub in front of us.

The girl stands up and begins to order her uniform. Wraps her skirt around her. Now she is again a sergeant of the Guards in the Red Army’s tank arm.

‘I must go,’ she smiles, with a flash of white teeth, ‘but I’ll come back to you after roll-call.’

‘No you won’t,’ answers the lieutenant. ‘You’ll never come back to me!’

‘He must be a bloody fortune-teller,’ whispers Porta in amazement. ‘Can he know we’re here?’

‘I’ll come,’ laughs the girl and disappears into the maize. She goes over towards the four Russian BT-5s
⁹
standing behind the maize-stalks by the sunflower thicket. If they had been painted yellow like ours you couldn’t have seen them.

Russia is all yellow at this time of the year. Even the people seem to take on a slightly yellowish tinge when September is past. Now the green of the tanks shows up strongly against all the yellow and brown.

‘They ought to paint their vehicles four times a year like we do,’ mumbles Porta. ‘Twice ain’t enough in combat conditions.’

‘They really ought to be painted every month,’ was Stege’s opinion. ‘January snow is quite different from December snow, and the powdery snow in November can’t be compared with the old February snow, and in March there are five different shades of white. So you can see that even in winter when white is white, it’s only worth painting vehicles once. When you get to spring, the green is changing almost every week. What good is it riding around in a happy spring green wagon in the middle of all that tired-out old summer green. A wagon like that stands out like a young bint in the middle of a crowd of old men. No, if we really understood how to camouflage ourselves we’d live longer. Just look at our uniforms! Grey-green! Apart from the dust on the roads where do you find that colour? And the boys from the other FPO shag around in their winter khaki well into the spring. Uniform colours are chosen by idiots sitting in offices.’

‘In the old days they all wore red and blue,’ explains Tiny, shaking his head.

‘That was to frighten the enemy,’ says Barcelona. ‘A line of men with fixed bayonets advancing side by side in scarlet uniforms was enough to frighten the shit out of the bravest. It was like a wave of blood sweeping forward.’

‘If there was anybody barmy enough to attack like that, I’d soon have this ol’ chatter box tuned in to lullaby music an’ make a nice row o’ scarlet corpses,’ grins Tiny mockingly.

‘Dope,’ sneers Barcelona contemptuously, ‘they didn’t have automatic weapons then, only muskets that had to be loaded again every time.’

‘Wot, no SMGs?
¹⁰
asks Tiny unbelievingly. ‘Must’ve been a funny kind of war. Almost ‘armless. Didn’t they ’ave no mine-throwers nor mortars with jumpin’ jacks neither?’

‘Nah!’ answers Barcelona with a superior expression. ‘Nothing like that at all.’

‘Well, they’d ’ave a coupla naphtha bombs on ’and, I suppose, for if things got rough?’

‘Petrol wasn’t even discovered then,’ answers Barcelona.

‘Why the ’ell didn’t they stay at ‘ome? That wasn’t nothin’ to do with war, even if they did ’ave red jackets on. More like a bleedin’
demonstration
, like what we ’ad before the war when we wanted more money and ’ad to fight the Schupos,
¹¹
who ’ad green ’elmets on special for the day. You could put ’em out on it dead easy by givin’ ’em one on top o’ the elmet so it come down over their bleedin’ ears. I’m dead good at ’ammerin’ Schupo lids down. Easy as scratchin’ your arse in a beer-bar.’

The Russian lieutenant is lying on his back in the grass with a maize-straw waggling in his mouth. He laughs with satisfaction. His summer tunic is unbuttoned. A ladybird moves busily across the yellow star on his Boudionovka.
¹²
He has closed his eyes. Not until the Legionnaire’s shadow
falls across him does he realize that he is in danger. Then he is dead. A last frightened bubbling comes from the slashed throat. The Legionnaire wipes his Moorish knife casually on the lieutenant’s summer tunic. We hurry past with the Panzerfausts
¹³
over our shoulders. A smell of coffee comes from the Russian tank crew’s encampment.

‘Holy Moses!’ whispers Porta, eyes wide-open. ‘Coffee! Real coffee! These Communists’ve got every bloody thing! I am slowly beginning to like this: Workers of the world, unite!’ Porta loves coffee. He knows of nothing better. More than once he has jeopardized his life to get hold of coffee beans. The Old Man says Porta would sell the entire company for a pound of coffee. And he is probably not far from the truth. Porta is a coffee-maniac. Tiny, who is well in front of us with the heavy Panzerfaust nonchalantly under his arm, drops down suddenly into the maize and signals to us. Soundlessly we crawl forward to him. He points silently. A Russian tankman is sitting by a small fire, on which a large pot is steaming. Blissfully Porta inhales the penetrating coffee aroma. ‘Holy Guns!’ mumbles Julius Heide in a horrified tone. ‘Four BT-5s!’

‘Five,’ Porta corrects him. ‘There’s a KW-1
¹⁴
behind the stack, the command vehicle.’

‘Pissin’ arseholes,’ says Tiny ecstatically. ‘We’ll
smash
’em with one great lovely bang.’ He pats the magnetic grenade and pushes it into the Panzerfaust. ‘This’ll shove their ball-bearin’s up into their throats, so they’ll never be able to shag a soldier’s mare no more. Bleedin’ traitors, wot doubts the final victory! If Ol’ Joe in the Kremlin knew what we was up to ’e’d be tackin’ medals on us!’

‘It is forbidden to wear Soviet decorations, remember,’ Heide instructs him coldly.