War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (58 page)

Nikki felt only the nearness of death. It was like a neighbor you watch day and night, to whom you have never said hello. He was unable to cross the distance, the little alley, to death, to sit with it and embrace it. He was cursed with being a watchman at death’s house. He saw the beginning of the end of everything. The war, the soldiers, the nations, all will die, he thought. Everything will die but time. This left him empty, exhausted. Time and me. We will not die. Time and I will go on and on, watching lonely death reap his fields, come and go.

I see now that I have been assigned to time’s regiment. Just as well. I have no other duty at hand.

He walked to his basement in the bakery. He did not duck behind cover or stop to listen to the yapping of small-arms fire the way he and the colonel had done on their return trips. All the way, until his head lay on his pack, Nikki carried the sensation of being atop a horse that knew its way home. He believed he could have closed his eyes and walked straight from Thorvald’s body to his bedroll.

* * * *

NIKKI WOKE AND GLANCED AT HIS WATCH. PAST ELEVEN
o’clock, almost afternoon. He walked across the street to Lieutenant Ostarhild’s office. It was empty. The desk was a mess, covered with maps and transcripts of prisoner interrogations. Nikki sat in the lieutenant’s chair. The vantage point gave him a sense of the friendly young officer; he was harried, obsessive, a worrier. The world viewed from behind this desk was closing in.

Nikki pushed through the stacks of papers. Below the first layer of sheets was a calendar opened to the day’s date, November 19, 1942. Ostarhild, or someone, had been at this desk early that morning and had left in a hurry, in a flurry of paper.

Hunger snagged at Nikki like a nail catching his clothes. He pondered pulling out the lieutenant’s desk drawers to find a snack but thought better of it when footsteps fell in the hall.

He rose quickly. Before he could reach the door, a captain entered. Nikki came to attention but did not salute.

“Sir,” he said.

The officer, an older man with a bald pate and glasses, waved in a combination of salute and dismissal. He moved with haste to Ostarhild’s chair. He busied himself in the papers.

Without looking up, the captain said, “Yes, Corporal?”

“Sir, do you know where Lieutenant Ostarhild is?”

The captain found one report he was looking for.

“Are you one of his spotters?”

“Yes, sir. Corporal Mond, sir.”

The captain set down the page and looked up. His face was as wrinkled and white as balled-up paper. The chair and the desk did this to him, made him fret, just as they did to Ostarhild.

“Your officer is out on the steppe right now, Corporal. Go about your duties.”

Nikki did not move. He had no assignment now that the colonel was dead. He wanted to report the end of Thorvald to someone, to conclude the business.

“Sir, I have no duties at the moment. I have just been—”

“Corporal,” the captain broke in, “I cannot speak with you right now. But since you’re one of Ostarhild’s boys, I’ll tell you this so you won’t hear it secondhand and get it wrong. Maybe you can help keep the panic down.”

Nikki shifted his stance. The Russians. Here it comes. The end, the finish of everything.

“At oh-seven-thirty this morning, heavy Red forces counterattacked from Serafimovich in the northwest. Several thousand artillery pieces opened up on the Rumanian Third Army. At oh-eight-fifty, waves of Red tanks and infantry attacked out of the fog. The Rumanians broke ranks and are in retreat. Ostarhild is out there trying to assess the damage.”

The captain seemed to be out of information. Nikki waited.

“It appears,” the captain said with finality, “the Reds are trying to encircle us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now you know what I know, Corporal. Dismissed.”

Nikki looked at the captain for several seconds. The officer returned his gaze, admitting his helplessness.

Nikki shrugged. “Dismissed to where, sir?”

“You know best, Corporal, I’m sure.” The captain looked again into the papers.

Nikki reached the door. Behind him the captain spoke in a voice wrung dry as salt.

“Try to stay alive, son,” he said. “That’s the best I can tell you.”

* * * *

TWENTY-NINE

TANIA SAT IN ZAITSEV’S CORNER, WAITING FOR THE
party to begin.

A dozen snipers milled about the bunker. Atai Chebibulin delivered a ringing crate of vodka bottles and a stack of chocolate bars, then departed humbly into the night, asking Tania to congratulate the Hare on his victory.

Viktor said again, “He’ll be back from his meeting with Chuikov any minute. All of you, keep your hands off the vodka.”

Tania took her sniper journal from her backpack. The booklet’s bent black cover showed its usage. It had been inscribed forty-eight times.

She stopped at a page bearing Zaitsev’s signature. She ran her thumb over the ink of his name, feeling his hands on the page. Nowhere else in his body, she thought, is Vasha’s strength so clear, so expressed, as in his hands. Sometimes in his eyes, yes, but they are closed when we make love. Always in his hands. He says he’s powerful like a bear cub, which before it’s one year old can break a man’s arm. He’s an artless lover, Vasha is. We probably both are, grappling on the floor under so many coats. But he’s a strong lover and sincere, and I give him all I have. He loves me, though he doesn’t say it. I trust him with my life. Would I die for him? I don’t know. Would I die alongside him? Yes.

Zaitsev’s victory. If Danilov were here, it would’ve been described in grander terms, Communism over fascism, Russian will over German arrogance, good triumphs against evil. Is it so great, so momentous, that Vasha killed the Headmaster? One stick, one rifle erased from Stalingrad? Does that warrant cheers and toasts? Yes. Thorvald was the Nazis’ best, their generals’ handpicked hope, and he was crushed. Yes, we can drink to the death of hope for all the Nazis.

Tania heard footsteps outside the bunker. She put her journal away and stood. Vasha entered. He endured the cheers and thumps on his shoulder blades with his eyes locked on Tania’s.

She folded her legs and sat again in his corner to tell him to accept the praise: Take the center, Vasha. We’ll have our moments later, you and I, in private.

A bottle was thrust into his hand. He held it up to show it off as if holding Thorvald’s head and tipped it into a big swallow. He gulped deeply, and the snipers applauded. He swept the bottle from his mouth and leaped up at Viktor to grab him around the neck in a headlock. He buried his nose in the Bear’s scalp and inhaled, then gasped out the burn and pep of the vodka.

The others snatched bottles from Chebibulin’s box and raised them. Tania laughed and clapped her hands at the toasts.

When the last tribute had been offered, Nikolay Kulikov stepped to the middle of the bunker.

“This,” he said, pivoting slowly in the dirt, his palms facing the gathering, “this is the story of the Hare versus the Headmaster. Vasha, if I tell any lies, you shoot me.”

“How would I know if I’d hit you?” Zaitsev laughed. “You’d fake it.”

This private joke between the two revealed the end of Kulikov’s account. He scowled at Zaitsev.

Kulikov told the story: how the Headmaster had been sent by the German high command to kill the Hare. How several comrades— brave Morozov, crazy Baugderis, handsome Shaikin—painted a map in their blood of the spot where the Headmaster waited, across Ninth of January Square. Then, of all unlikely heroes, the pug Danilov had been the key, getting himself shot but giving Vasha the inspiration for the plank of wood and the white glove. The flare at night, scanning the empty tank and bunker and craters and then, finally, the metal sheet across the park where they guessed the viper kept his nest. The subterfuge the next morning with the hollow mortar shell, Kulikov’s decoy shot at the bunker, then the Headmaster’s answering round striking the brick beneath Nikolay’s helmet. How he got the sudden impulse to stand and throw out his wings like a bagged mallard.

“Like this.” Kulikov beat his arms in the air for the rapt snipers. “Aaaaargh. He got me!”

With his hands in the air, freezing this moment of his tale in time, Kulikov whispered, “The Headmaster was confused. He hesitated.” Nikolay pointed at
Zaitsev
behind him. Zaitsev laughed. Quiet Kulikov was a wonderful storyteller.

“Vasha zeroed in on the blue flash of the Headmaster’s muzzle deep in the dark hole.” He let his voice climb. “Firmly, calmly, as only a true hunter could do, the Hare let a few seconds pass, to allow the Nazi’s head to settle. The Headmaster was setting up his second shot. He’d got me, and now he was bringing back his bolt for the bullet that would come for Vasha. But Vasha waited with courage until the last possible moment, when he repaid the Headmaster’s first and only mistake, the one he made under the Hare’s crosshairs. Vasha fired his lone bullet of the duel into the blackness and blasted the Headmaster’s unseen head into his sniper journal. Which I signed as witness, of course.”

The snipers clapped. Nikolay wasn’t finished. At the end of the story was the German’s white body and the blackened, blasted face lying in the hole under the metal sheet.

“We pulled the metal sheet back like we were opening a tin of caviar. And I took back my rifle”—he knocked his chest with his fist— “completing my victory.”

The snipers waited. Kulikov lifted his bottle. “To Vasha. The best of us all.”

The others, even Viktor, repeated the toast and drank.

Zaitsev rose. He thanked Nikolay and the snipers for their help and their own victories against the enemy. Then he made his report to them as their leader.

“Let me tell you what General Chuikov told me tonight. Right now, there are seven hundred and fifty thousand Germans surrounded on the steppe. Yesterday and this morning, a million Russian soldiers, thirteen thousand artillery pieces, and nine hundred tanks staged a counterattack to isolate the German army from its supply lines. The enemy is trapped in an area fifty kilometers long by thirty-five kilometers wide. The Germans are calling it
der Kessel,
the ‘cauldron.’

“Stalingrad is the eastern boundary of the cauldron. And though the Nazis have got ninety-five percent of downtown, it’s our job to keep them here until they can be finished off or Stalin can force a surrender.”

Viktor stood. “Sounds like we still have a job to do, boys.” The Bear glanced at Tania and smiled. He did not correct himself to add “and girls.” Tania stuck out her tongue. Viktor made a show of pocketing his vodka bottle to take the celebration out into the night with him and to lead the others to do the same.

The snipers rose and filed out, except Tania. She made no attempt to hide the fact that she was staying behind while the others shook the Hare’s hand one more time.

Zaitsev sat next to her.

“While Nikolay was talking,” he said, “I wondered just how good Thorvald really was. He must have been phenomenal.”

Tania snorted, impatient with this sort of humility, that Vasha would actually pause to admire a German. Vasha marveled that he had somehow beaten the Headmaster. And why not. He was right: Thorvald never missed. The butcher’s bill the Headmaster had rung up during his one week in Stalingrad was frightful. But Vasily Zaitsev was the most dangerous man in the Russian army, perhaps the most lethal with a rifle in the world. Was Thorvald better? They would never know, Tania thought. The Headmaster was dead, and that was the measure of his skills on this day.

Zaitsev took her hand. His fingers were warm from all the congratulations. Tania preferred his hands cool at the beginning, fresh to her touch, so she could warm them herself.