War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (13 page)

If they did encounter a suspicious patrol, she’d told Fedya to act retarded, drool, and mumble. She would use hand signals to somehow tell the soldiers that the city asylum had been blown up and the large boy was just a harmless inmate. She’d found him in the streets and was leading him to the Russian rear for evacuation. They were covered in shit because they’d fallen into a ruptured sewer, latrine, whatever. If Fedya could act the fool, the Germans ought to buy it—at least until she could concoct a better plan.

“But don’t worry,” she assured Fedya, “they won’t stop us. We’re unarmed. We’re walking around in the open, no threat to them. And besides, we’re covered in shit, remember?”

“Oh. I keep forgetting that,” he said. “Wonderful. I think I’ll wear shit for the rest of the war. It’s the safest way to go, don’t you think? Like armor.”

They zigzagged through the ruins into the afternoon. A German squad passed them, the soldiers clopping and jingling in their heavy boots and packs. She cursed in a mad, high-pitched Byelorussian dialect while Fedya whooped like an idiot. Only one soldier in the patrol looked at them. He held his nose. The squad jogged into the shell of a building and disappeared up a stairwell.

Ahead, three hundred meters away across a desolate boulevard, was a railroad yard littered with the twisted steel curlicues of torn-up track and burned-out train cars. Just east of the tracks was a large building, five stories high and two blocks long. The windows had been blown out, and streaks of soot showed above each broken window frame, evidence of a gutting fire. Blackened German tanks cluttered the terrain. From where Tania and Fedya stood, the base of the ravaged building, across the open rail yard, was no less than eight hundred meters away.

Tania looked back at the building into which the Nazi patrol had run. Gun muzzles bristled from several windows, all facing west across the tracks.

This is the front line, she thought. No-man’s-land.

She looked up at the afternoon sun. It would be too dangerous to cross the tracks in daylight. They could easily be caught in a crossfire or mistaken for deserters or spies by either side. Across the boulevard sat a brick railman’s shed. Tania tugged on Fedya’s sleeve.

“We’ll wait in that shed. After dark we’ll crawl across the tracks.” She pointed to the five-story building across from them. “That’s where the Red Army is.”

Fedya looked over the rail yard. “How do you know?”

Tania walked toward the shed. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the enemy in the building behind her. She heard the clacking and scrambling as they set up their mortars and tripods in the windows.

“They know.”

Behind the shed’s wooden door, empty shelves held only dust and broken glass. Screws and greasy clamps littered the floorboards. The window was broken, but the roof was intact.

Along the wall crouched a spring bed frame and a cotton mattress. The bedding was covered with glass and dirt. Tania flipped the mattress to a cleaner side. It showed powder blue and gray pinstripes with russet stains. The air was close, reeking of oil and emptiness. Tania struck the mattress with the flat of her hand. She backed away from a billow of dust.

“Some curtains, some flowers in the window.” She turned to Fedya in the doorway. “I could plant us a garden for fresh vegetables.”

“Comfy.” He entered and sat on the bed. “A writer’s cottage by the tracks. Trains have always been a romantic topic for me.”

Tania stood in front of him. “Take off that miserable shirt. It stinks, and it makes me think of poor Yuri.”

She tugged on the crusted tunic. Fedya raised his arms. She slid the shirt off him and flung it out the window.

“Boots.” She pointed at his feet. “You can take those off yourself.”

Fedya untied the laces. Tania undid her jacket and kicked it into a corner. Her blouse was of a rough spun flax, the color of straw. Sweat stains darkened the armpits and collar. She reached for the top button.

Fedya looked up from his boots. She followed his eyes to the points of her breasts.

“Tania,” he said quietly. “I, um . . .” His eyes went to her hands poised at her neck. “Are you going to undo your shirt?”

“Yes, I am.” She unfastened the first button, then another. “We can’t go anywhere until after dark. I’m tired, and I’m sure you are, too. I thought we’d get some sleep.”

She sat beside him and bounced. The springs squeaked.

Fedya gazed out to the rail yard. “Is anyone going to bother us in here? Should we both sleep at the same time?”

“The only one who’s going to bother you in here,” she said, leaning down to untie her own laces, “is me.”

She sent the boots flying into the corner to land on her coat, then reached behind Fedya to run her palm over his broad back. He leaned forward, chin in hand, elbows on knees. She kneaded the muscles along his shoulder blades.

“Ah,” he whispered, closing his eyes, “that is magnificent. Really. After the day we’ve had.”

She dropped her hand from his back, and he opened his eyes. She saw the quizzical, bothered look on his face.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly. “Today . . . today was nothing.”

She pulled back her hair so he could see her face, all of it. She didn’t know if he could see what was in her eyes. Did it come through? Could she ever show it to him, or even express it? The months of running, fighting, killing, and surviving. Surviving for what? To live more scarred years, to turn the pages on fifty more calendars, marking anniversaries of hatred without respite, stretching onward to her own death? Hatred without compassion, humanity, or morality; hatred stripped clean of all else, like bones in the sun? This was her dowry; this was what awaited her, even if she survived Stalingrad. She could never outrun or outlive it. It would follow her even if she carried it back to bright America someday. But could she show Fedya, anyone, ever? Or was it just hers, alone, to the grave?

She took his hand. “Today Yuri died. But he was already dead. He died last night when he came across that river. You died, too. I died a year ago in Minsk when the Nazis murdered my grandparents. I died of shame when my own parents would not come with me to save them. Do you understand?”

Fedya took her hand. The rims of his eyes reddened. He blinked. A tear welled in his eye.

“This is what the
politrooks
are telling us,” she continued. “The NKVD,
Red Star,
the Party—everywhere we turn, the message is the same. You are dead. You have no life. The Germans have taken it. They have trampled it.”

Tania reached to Fedya’s face, smearing the tear with her finger. “Fedushka, there’s nothing anymore for the individual. Not love. Not fear. Not family. We’re not alive. Nothing we do matters. We’re like ghosts who can’t touch anything. The only time we appear, the only time we’re real, is when we’re killing the Germans. When we’re not killing them, we do not exist.”

She pulled free from him to rub her hands along the sides of his face. She moved his face closer and kissed him.

Eyes shut, she listened to her own breath coming hard. She murmured under the strength of the kiss. Her senses felt along the length of her body, waiting for his caress, looking for it on her breasts, between her legs. She tasted salt from tears; whether they were her own or his, she did not know.

She moved the kiss upward and pulled his lip between her teeth. He sighed. She felt heat.

“We’re not alive, Fedya,” she whispered. “We’re not here in these bodies even though we feel them.”

Tania searched again for his touch on her body. She reached into his lap and moved one of his hands up to her chest. She squeezed her fingers around his, against her breast.

“Make love to me, Fedya.”

His hands were on her, one at her breast, the other on her stomach. She inhaled. A tightness in her loins came as if from outside, from above. She began to rise off the bed.

He pushed her away. “Tania. No.”

She opened her eyes, disoriented and swaying. She put her hands on his shoulders to push herself erect. Fedya lowered his arms while she gained control over her balance, away from him.

“Tania, no,” he said again, looking up. “It’s not . . .”

Her arms flew from her sides. “It’s not what? What’s wrong?”

Fedya got off the bed and stepped to face a wall. She sat in his place on the squeaking bed.

“Fedya, what’s the matter?”

He rubbed the wall with his boot and said nothing.

Tania sat on her hands. The bed squeaked again. She thought angrily about the noise they could have made on those springs.

“Fine,” she said, “don’t talk to me. Talk to that wall. If you want to stay up and guard me, go ahead. I’m going to sleep.”

Fedya leaned his back against the wall.

“It’s not right,” he said. “We shouldn’t do this.” He motioned to the corner where her coat and boots lay.

“Shouldn’t do what?” She pulled her hands from beneath her and slapped them down in her lap. “Shouldn’t make love? Here? On a battlefield? Is there something sacred about a battlefield?” She looked out the window at the blasted world. “Where else do we have, Fedya? This is it.”

Fedya moved in front of her. “I don’t agree with you. I don’t feel like you do, that I’m dead, like I don’t exist. But you! You act like you don’t care what happens to you, like there’s nothing left of you for them to kill.”

He pointed in the direction of the enemy lines. “Look at the chances you take! I remember you on the barge. You had to sit in the most dangerous spot. You wouldn’t move. Then after three hours in the water and six more in a sewer, you walk me straight into a Nazi mess tent! You screamed at a patrol of Germans ... in Ukrainian or something, I don’t even know what that was! And your idea of a precaution is to tell me to babble like a moron in case we get stopped. Great plan! Is every American that insane?”

As Fedya stomped back and forth, waving his arms, she resisted the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. He’s right, of course, she thought. But dear Fedya, he never loses his charm. Even in the sewer, afraid of the dark and the shit. Even now, here, afraid of me.

His pacing covered the short distance between walls in a few strides. He flapped his arms at every turn. Tania looked into her lap to hide her smile. He looked like a giant mad goose.

“I don’t think you put enough thought into these things,” he said. “You act like you’re invisible. That may be fine for you, but remember I’m right there behind you and I don’t want to get killed in a Nazi mess tent! They don’t give medals for that!”

He looked at the ceiling. “Oh, and I just can’t wait for tonight to get here!” He spun on his heels, raised his arms high and held them there. “Tonight, I finally get to crawl behind you across a no-man’s-land that is probably a minefield, worrying about who’s more likely to shoot me, the Russians or the Germans! But first we get to make love as if it’s something we ordered off a menu, like it doesn’t matter at all. It’s wrong, Tania. It’s wrong to act as if things don’t matter when they really do.”

Fedya lowered his arms. He sat at her feet and shook his head, holding her eyes with his own. “I don’t think I was ready for this. I joined the Red Army because Stalin said so, because, let’s face it, it was the only thing possible. I trained for four weeks and then got on a transport. I ended up crossing the Volga in the water, holding on to a piece of a boat. I’m not like you. I didn’t come to this war by choice. I didn’t live with the partisans for a year. I’m scared of everything. Yuri dying in the sewer like that, that mess tent with Germans all over the place . . . You’re wrong, Tania. This has been some day. And it mattered to me because it scared the shit out of me. Not that anyone would have noticed even if I had shit all over myself!”

He rubbed a finger behind his ear, looking away from her. “I’m not used to this. You might be, but I’m not.”