War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (57 page)

He exhaled. The wind was in his lungs again. He grabbed up a small stone and bounced it hard off his friend’s chest.

“You son of a bitch! You’re not dead!”

Kulikov played at taking his own pulse. He shook his head.

Zaitsev threw another pebble to make his friend cover his face with his arms.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to jump up like that?” Zaitsev asked. “It scared the shit out of me!”

Nikolay tilted his head. More rust-colored dust trickled onto his shoulder. He took off the helmet and dumped broken bits of brick into his lap.

“I thought,” said Kulikov, “it might buy you another second or two if I made a show of it. Maybe the Headmaster would stop and admire his handiwork. I don’t know, it seemed like the thing to do at the moment.”

“At the moment,” Zaitsev grumbled, pretending to be vexed. But Nikolay might have been right. The Headmaster had not gotten off his second shot in three, even four seconds.

“Well,” Kulikov asked, “did you get him?”

“I don’t know.” Zaitsev shrugged.

Kulikov swept dust from his shoulders.

The Hare laughed. His happiness surfaced at seeing Nikolay unscathed.

“Here.” Kulikov tossed Zaitsev a flattened gray slug he’d sifted out of the shards of brick in his lap. “This was sent for you. I think it came out of my rifle.”

Zaitsev fingered the lump of lead. He felt the Headmaster’s hands on it, just as he’d sensed his presence in the hole beneath the metal. He looked into the sky and tried to understand what had happened, whom he had just faced. The Headmaster. A phenomenal, fearsome man with a rifle. Thorvald has a strong spirit. So do I. That’s what we hunted in each other, how he called me and how I heard him in this massive boneyard of Stalingrad. Thorvald’s spirit is like tar; if you touch it, your hands will be smeared with it. The bullet in Zaitsev’s palm, which might have ended up in his head, felt black as pitch, almost sticky with the death it might have been. He tossed it away.

He looked at the puncture in the front of Kulikov’s helmet, an ebony dot directly in the middle of the forehead. Thorvald’s shot had been perfect.

Zaitsev reached into his pack for a loaf of black bread.

“We’ll wait until tonight, Nikolay,” he said, bringing the dark crust to his lips. “Maybe we’ll get our chance to drag the Headmaster out by his feet.”

“And if he’s not in there?” Nikolay asked, reaching for the bread.

“Then,” the Hare said, sitting back, “I don’t know.”

* * * *

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE PUNCH OF GUNFIRE KNOCKED AWAY NIKKL’S DROWS
INESS.

No! They’re shooting at me. Coming fully awake, he tensed to roll over and run. Blood bounded in his temples. He realized suddenly he’d heard only an echo off the high ruined walls.

The shot had not issued from the colonel’s hole only ten meters away. The bang wasn’t muffled; there was instead a crispness to it, like a field of banners snapping. The shot came from the other side of the park.

Zaitsev. He has fired.

Nikki pressed his chest against the wall. If Zaitsev has at last pulled his trigger, it can only mean the colonel has flushed him out with some trick or other. Thorvald will be answering in another moment. Here it comes. And away we go, home.

Seconds passed, ten perhaps. The quiet kicked at Nikki’s stomach. Shoot, Colonel. Kill him. What are you waiting for? Nikki wanted to cry out around the broken back of the wall. Shoot! Get him!

Nikki laid his palms against the stones. He dug his nails into the mortar as if climbing the wall from his knees. Shoot, Colonel. Please.

The answering shot burped out of Thorvald’s den. The report broke Nikki’s grip on the wall. He released his fingers from the stones and sank back to his knees. He brought his hands to his face and bent his head, almost prayerful. “Yes,” he whispered.

Four seconds later, an echo bounced again off the ruins from the opposite side of the park, from the Red snipers,

Nikki’s head jerked out of his hands.

How could it be? Two shots from across the park? But the Hare is dead. The colonel drew him out, made him fire first, then punished him, killed him. Who’s shooting now? Thorvald missed? No. Thorvald hit somebody when he fired, that’s certain. He never misses. It must be the Hare’s assistant, yes, that’s who it is, firing back wildly in a vengeful rage, the Hare dead beside him, the Hare’s brains splattered on his cheek.

Nikki wanted to holler into Thorvald’s cell: You got him, Colonel! Are we going home tomorrow? How many sandwiches are left, eh? Let’s eat them all!

Nikki turned his back to the wall. He hugged his knees for warmth and gazed up at the mute, mangled buildings across the boulevard. The sun shone brightly on their empty faces. Sad, he thought, these giant husks, remnants of life that can’t fall down, dead and still standing. I wish I knew what they know, how to be dead and stay on my feet. It might make dying easier to take. Are you alive enough, buildings, to tell me what you heard, what you saw? Did Thorvald get the Hare? I’m small and behind this wall, I don’t know what’s happened.

The black windows of the buildings kept a watch like buzzards in a line; they would not wink at Nikki to give him a clue who had survived, the Hare or the Headmaster.

Nikki lowered himself into the well of sleep. There’s nothing I can do, he thought. I can’t call to the colonel. He dislikes interruptions. He won’t speak to me all day, it’s just his way. He’s probably napping in there; the action’s over for the day, maybe longer.

The November sun weighed on the chilly air. Sit still, he thought. Huddle behind this wall and block the breeze. The stones will warm during the day. Nikki took off his gloves and unwrapped a sandwich.

Time, he thought. Time has a heaviness you can feel when there’s nothing you can do but wait, when it sits across your shoulders like a yoke.

* * * *

NIKKI’S MIND RACED FOR AN HOUR. THE SUN DIPPED be
low the horizon. The quiet around him went undisturbed.

Thorvald’s hole is the most silent, the blackest part of the world, Nikki thought. What is he doing in there? Is he asleep? Should I wake him? Maybe the colonel has set up another trick to nab the Hare, something in the night. Yes, something to surprise Zaitsev. Thorvald has deciphered some Russian tactic that’s going to take place tonight, and he’s lying in ambush. That’s why we’re still here. But the colonel has never worked after the sun goes down; we always leave the park the minute it gets dark. The temperature drops, and I know how he hates the cold. He grumbles like an old woman about it. What is he doing in there?

Nikki kicked his boots on the ground to sting his heels. He rolled to his knees and bounced in a crouch. His hips ached from the cold ground.

The afternoon had been sunny, almost comfortable at Nikki’s post facing into the light. Now the heat slipped away from the wall’s stones and the earth beneath him, sucked out into the night. The next morning was going to be foggy. Over his father’s pastures, fog often followed a starry, cool night. Am I going home? he wondered. How far am I from home? Two thousand kilometers. Come get me in Russia tomorrow morning, fog; land around me, and I’ll walk away from Stalingrad under you. I’ll walk all the way home at dawn. The fog will cover me, no one will see me. I know where the creek lies on the edge of our property, even in the fog. If you follow the creek, it widens and flows east to the River Elbe. The river flows through low, easy hills that roll like green over young bones. I’ll jump all the way over the creek this time. I’m older now. I fell in up to my knees the day before I left for the army. I could jump it easily now, even carrying a pack on my back. The dog will try, too, but he never makes it, misses by a meter. He’ll splash in, then swim over and shake. He’ll run ahead, scaring up the cows, announcing my homecoming. I’ll walk right up out of the haze. The dog’s barking will hide my footsteps, so my father won’t hear me coming until I’m on the front stoop. He’ll send for my sister at the hospital, and while we wait for her we’ll eat breakfast together, and we’ll talk, not about the war, but about the cows and the dog.

A rumble like a small peal of thunder tapped at Nikki’s senses. Not thunder. It was metal, a sheet of metal being jiggled and moved.

Thorvald is pushing aside his metal roof. What’s going on?

Nikki crept to the edge of the wall and leaned his head around the stones enough to see the colonel’s cell. Two wraiths under the moonlight, men in white camouflage, gripped the sheet above Thorvald’s cell and slid it aside. One carried a rifle with a scope. He pointed it down into the hole.

Nikki held his breath. With the metal gone, the moonlight showed only the scuffed bottoms of the colonel’s boots. They were stacked; he lay on his side. The soldier with the rifle stepped over the bricks into the hole and kicked. Thorvald’s boots rolled over, the black tips pointed now to the night sky. The second soldier reached down and tugged to withdraw a handful of papers. He brought them close to his face beneath his hood and the speckled moon. He released a few of the pages and kept the rest, nodding to the other. This man took Thorvald’s rifle, the Russian Moisin-Nagant. With the papers and rifle in their hands, the two figures bent low and jogged back into the park, donning the darkness over their white outfits.

Nikki watched the two soldiers fade. Even if he’d brought his rifle with him, he would not have shot at them. He could have killed at least one. Perhaps it would have been the Hare. No matter. It was over.

He walked around the wall to look down into the hole. Thorvald lay on his back in the Russian dirt, his right arm raised as if volunteering for something, hailing a cab or waving farewell from a distance. The hollow in the ground, exposed now from above, the broken rocks and bricks lining the wall, the sandwich sack and thermos, a scattering of white papers, all made Thorvald appear to be a relic dug up at an excavation, a well-preserved corpse lying in the middle of his personal effects. The colonel’s white parka was unzipped; his coat within had been rifled. The left arm lay at his side. The upper half of his right arm, where his shattered head had come to rest after the blast of the bullet, was blotched. A large discolored patch of earth lay beneath the elbow. The white moon looking down with Nikki worked a vulgar alchemy, drawing the color out of the dried blood, turning red to black.

Nikki stood; he was high above Thorvald now, the first time he’d felt this. He sensed no danger standing up in the park. The Hare was gone. The colonel was gone. All the guessing, the gamesmanship, the paranoia, the intent watching, all the twists and bends of the sniper duel—all was ended. The park had reverted to a part of Stalingrad; it was no longer a strange place filled with sweeping, deadly crosshairs but something tired, dismal, and familiar.

He looked at the moon, remote and white, the same moon glowing over his home far away. He wanted to leap away from this corpse in its uncovered crypt. He’d catch the rim of the moon, pull himself in, and crawl through the pearly tunnel in the sky over Russia and Poland and into Germany until he was above the meadows of Westphalia. He’d jump down and ride the snowflakes into the pastures like the gnomes of fairy tales.

Thorvald had been Nikki’s only hope of going home. For the week since he’d met Thorvald at the Gumrak airfield, Nikki had dreamed of his father, his sister, and their farm. Nightly his father walked to him and held him with the warm touch of a wish. He looked now at the real city, its dark and evil walls, broken streets, every bit of it a citadel for death, and he realized that this was the home Thorvald had bequeathed him.

Nikki’s heart fell into the hole with Thorvald. His dream of home was nothing more now than the moon, a small white token hung against the great blackness over Stalingrad. He turned, resisting his urge to reach down and take the colonel’s sandwich sack.

He walked into the night, along the route he and the colonel had taken each of the past three evenings to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s office. His steps were solitary without Thorvald on some side of him. He searched for his portion of grief over the colonel’s death, for the officer who’d shown him some trust and kindness. There was nothing, only disappointment. Nikki recognized again the growing ease with which he accepted death; it had crossed his path so often, a groove was worn in him. But the colonel had been special, if only for a week. He’d been a spyglass to let Nikki see far beyond Stalingrad, with stories of German high life, elite ways, and sandwiches made from still-fresh Berliner cheeses, the opera in evening gowns and dress blacks, the trap-shooting crowd and their oiled shotguns. Nikki wanted to know if he could still feel the passing of a man who’d touched his life before dying. If only he could reach death inside him and lay his hands on it, he could fight it with emotion, drive it away with tears, pound its spell out of his breast with his fists. But the death of Colonel Thorvald did not lift him up out of his soul, just as the white-clad body lying in the park would not rise from its hole.