War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01]

by David Robbins

  All the men were awake now, all staring at the floor. Nikki pictured the race beneath the surface, wondering who was in the lead and by what distance, afraid that two meters below him a cask of dynamite sat sizzling.

  “If the Reds stop singing,” Mercker called, “have a tune ready. And loud. Understand?” Everyone nodded. Mercker disappeared into the hole.

  The race was on. The men dug with a desperate strength. They worked under cover of the Russians’ singing as long as it lasted, an hour or so at a time, then picked up their own chorus whenever the Reds stopped. When their voices flagged, the enemy burst into song.

  Through the night, Nikki’s company did most of the singing. They gauged, the race in the tunnels by who flung the most verses across the corridor. We must be catching up, Nikki thought. We’ve even added a harmonica. The Reds don’t have a harmonica.

  Flickering lamplight glimmered from the tunnel. Silhouettes descended and the bent, blackened shapes of others staggered out. The round, glowing hole in the middle of the floor looked to Nikki like a threshold to the netherworld with its shadowy demons coming and going.

  At dawn, Mercker emerged, his face streaked with muddy sweat. He sat and motioned for Nikki.

  The man looked exhausted. He spoke in a rasping voice, his head hung.

  “The sappers say we’ve got one more hour of digging. Tell the men to get into their groups of ten.”

  Nikki nodded. The captain tugged Nikki’s tunic with a blackened hand. “You’re in the first group. Secure that trench. Hold there until I get the rest of us out.”

  Gathering their rifles, Nikki’s patrol moved to the windows. The guard nodded, and Nikki leaned out to search the debris-riddled street. He jumped down and waved for his men to follow. One by one they landed, and he pushed them toward the trench.

  The Russians stopped singing. Nikki smiled at the guard in the window. “Give them some opera,” he said. He turned and ran.

  Ten meters from the trench, a roaring wave swept over him. The ground rose, then jerked down to trip him. The air reached for him. He was caught in the grip of a powerful, careless force that knocked him down, lifted him, and flung him in a somersault away from the exploding building.

  He landed on his back and skidded on his shoulders. The part of the building held by his company leaped out from its foundation, walls bulging hideously. Deafened, his skin reddened by the blast, Nikki scrambled for the trench to tumble into the arms of his men while a massive fireball gathered behind him, orange and blue, and erupted. The side of the building burst with a shattering boom, then fell straight down as if a trap door had opened. It dissolved until the last grinding bits came to rest. Above the devastation, a mushroom of smoke and dust curled and shifted, forming a gray and ghostly marker where the walls had stood seconds before.

  My company is dead, Nikki thought. Mercker, all of them. No chance.

  On the morning breeze, a song seemed to come from everywhere at once. It merged with the sounds of the embattled city, bouncing off the empty, broken walls on all sides, ringing from the dead ruins.

  The song was in Russian.

  * * * *

  SEVEN

  TANIA FLAILED TO THE SURFACE OF THE ICY RIVER.

  She looked back at the burning wreckage of the barge. The stern and bow had been cleaved into separate pieces. They pointed up into the night to pirouette in slow, smoky circles.

  A touch at the back of her neck made her spin around. The outstretched hand of a dead soldier bobbed into her face. She swung wildly at the corpse and backpedaled. Another hand fell on her shoulder. This grasp was firm and alive—Fedya, the writer. Treading water beside him was Yuri.

  She could not make out what Fedya was saying. Her ears felt stuffed by the explosion. She knew she was surrounded by sound— the cries of the wounded thrashing in the water, the bombs seeking the rest of the fleet upriver, even the shouts of Fedya and Yuri—but all were like mumblings trapped in a bottle.

  A timber floated past. Yuri grabbed it. Already they’d drifted far south of the Tractor Factory landing stage. The shore was four hundred meters off. Tania estimated the current would beach them near the city center if they kicked hard. She wondered who would control the land they stepped onto.

  Gripping the beam, Tania stared at Stalingrad. She ignored the nervous, quiet chattering of the two men clinging to the timber with her; she could not hear them clearly, and soon they stopped talking. Inside this isolation she balled her fists and cast a vow into the ruins, driving it like a spike into the heart of every Nazi hiding in the rubble.

  She swore to renew her war against the Germans, a vendetta begun over a year earlier when the occupation army in Minsk had murdered her grandparents, a doctor and his ballet-teacher wife.

  Tania had come to visit her grandparents only two months before their deaths, from the Manhattan apartment of her parents. She’d arrived to convince the two beloved elder folks with whom she’d spent several summers to come live in America and escape the gathering storm in Europe. There was not much time, she warned; Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Stalin was a farce, and they shouldn’t believe it. She brought money from her father, Alexander, the son of the Chernovs. She could take them away. But the doctor and his beautiful dancing wife, both of them gray—though not in the manner of ashes, not cold and old but shining—would not leave Minsk. There was work to be done there, they told her, bodies for them to heal and children to teach. There was family for them to protect, two daughters and grandchildren, and there was family history in Minsk, graves and relics and memories. Stalin was too strong for Hitler, they answered, Russia too strong; Hitler knew this.

  Tania urgently wrote her parents in New York, begging them to come and beg themselves. But there was only one response, a telegram instructing Tania to return immediately to New York, and wishing the grandparents luck in the coming hard days. Tania’s father had been upset when she left; it was dangerous, he’d said. She was only nineteen years old. Tania told him to give her money, enough to rescue the old ones, or she would go without his money and earn it there to bring them back. Alexander, a young scientist who had brought his new bride to America in 1912 in the waning days of the czar, drawn by the promise shouting out of America as if from a carnival hawker of a new and comfortable life for the couple and for the child they hoped to bear one day, cried when that child hefted her baggage down the stairs to a waiting taxi. Tania cried, too, tears of anger at her parents who had raised her to speak and love everything Russian, to jeer at the memory of the toppled Russian royals, to rejoice at the surging Soviet Communist power as the salvation of the Russian peoples, to be proud of her heritage. She took her parents’ rhetoric seriously. She joined the American Communist Party as a teenager and visited, their native land as often as she could. She grew to love the faraway places and the people and the myths that milled in her own blood. Minsk and Soviet Russia became her spiritual sanctuaries, and her grandparents there became avatars of Russian simplicity and courage. Now her own mother and father were revealed as two-faced, big thinkers and storytellers who were Russian by birth only, not spirit. They hunkered in their wealth and hearth, secure in New York, smug in their mail-order intellectual loyalty to Russia. But when it came time for them to stand up, to rise for the sake of their papushka and mamushka, they would not. They cowered in their brownstone, their Americanness, their freedom. Slamming the taxi door, Tania swore that her tears would be the last she would shed until she returned with her grandparents or saw them safe somehow. She did not understand then how she would soon weep at their deaths. On July 22, 1941, six weeks after her arrival in Minsk, three million German troops swarmed across the Russian border. Two weeks later, Minsk was encircled and captured, with over 150,000 Soviet soldiers taken prisoner. German tanks took up sentry positions on every street. Electricity and water ran uninterrupted in the city, market stalls remained open, but wings had folded over Minsk. Heads everywhere in the city were heavy; feet dragged, eyes darted. Where was the Re
d Army, where was deliverance?

  Dark squads known as the Black Crows began to kick on doors in the city. Soon they came into the Chernovs’ neighborhood, at first to the homes of the Jewish families, then to others, even the respected ones. Three weeks after the city’s occupation, Dr. and Mrs. Chernov were taken from their small apartment as they sat at dinner with Tania. Tania herself was clubbed with the butt of a Nazi rifle when she resisted the kidnapping. Before she could rouse herself from the bludgeoning, her grandparents were marched to the city square only three blocks away and executed. The two stood accused of collaborating with the underground, a claim supported only by the fact that Dr. Chernov had treated many patients who bore the marks of the Nazis’ brutal inquisitions. At the rifles’ reports, Tania jerked off the floor. Bloodied and wobbling, she ran outside to the sound and arrived in the square, smelling the cordite smoke of the bullets. Neighbors she did not recognize held her back, screaming. That night, Tania went to the home of her aunt Vera and told her what had happened. Tania’s tears flowed, squeezed from her in a spasm. When she was done, she was finally dry, without tears. Vera must have seen this in her young niece’s swollen eyes, for she said, “Stay here with me. Don’t go.” Tania said only, “I’m leaving the city to find the resistance.”

  The older woman put her arms around the girl. Before closing the door, Vera whispered, “Then fight hard, my Russian niece.”

  She left the city and for a week followed the sounds of fighting in the forests and villages. In the hamlet of Vianka, sleeping in a barn, she was approached by a dark cast of men, hunting rifles crooked over their arms. She was interrogated and allowed to join them.

  Among the resistance fighters, Tania soon lost the tastes of her former privileged life in Manhattan and Minsk. She came to know the skills of the partisan for the taking of lives. She laid mines and rigged dynamite along tracks and under transports; she learned to fire a rifle and pistol and the ways to use a stiletto or bare hands for close-in killing. She shared a kinship with the guerrillas: they were linked by pain. Each man and woman in the cadre had suffered some blow of Nazi cruelty. Tania put her loathing of the Nazis in place of her grief for her grandparents and her anger at her own mother and father; fighting the Germans became her mourning and her apology for what she felt was a stain of cowardice on her American clan. After a year of freezing and killing and running in the forests, of exulting over the smallest victories, Tama walked out of the woods to join a passing column of army regulars. She had long before thrown away her American papers. She claimed residency in Minsk, at her grandparents’ address. She was given papers for the 284th Division, climbed on a truck, and rode five hundred kilometers south to Stalingrad.

  Now, in the freezing waters of the Volga, Tania’s feet finally dragged onto a sandbar. She let go of the timber and splashed toward the shore, followed by Fedya and Yuri. Her ears had cleared, and the noises of battle reached her from far upstream. Nothing else broke the dark quiet.

  The three crouched, dripping and cold, on the cool shore. The beach was littered with abandoned machinery and crates. Tania decided the safest direction to travel would be not into silence but north, toward the fighting in the factory district. There they would find Russians.

  They’d floated downstream several kilometers. We could walk to the factories before dawn, she thought, if we’re not caught. But if the Germans have taken the city center, there’ll be patrols operating on the riverbank to stop infiltrators.

  Tania whispered, “Follow me. We’ll go north.”

  Fedya moved behind her. Yuri hesitated. “Tell me your name again,” Yuri asked.

  “Private Tania Chernova.”

  “Tania, then. Tania, I cannot follow a girl. Not even an American girl. I will lead the way.”

  She showed the old man an empty face. She had nothing to prove to Yuri. He’d seen her thrash away from the corpse in the water, but he knew nothing of the partisan who’d sliced a dozen throats or laid mines under a supply train, then walked among the wounded completing the job with her pistol. He’d not seen the doctor’s granddaughter garrote a prisoner after he spilled his secrets to her guerrilla cadre, or hide all day until she could fire a rifle to kill at three hundred meters.

  But the old farmer was with her now and he was here to kill Germans. For that alone she would try to keep him alive. Let him die being useful, not stupid, she thought.

  “Yuri, I’ve spent the last year in the resistance. I’ve been fighting in the forests of Byeloruss, not pushing a plow in the fields. I know the Nazis and I know how to keep us alive. I’ll lead or I’ll go alone.”

  She turned to Fedya. “You, too.”

  Tania walked up the beach. From behind came quiet but firm words, then the crunching footsteps of the two men.

  After an hour of starting and stopping at every noise, it was clear they would not reach the factories before dawn. Tania looked for a place where they could wait out the coming daylight, to continue their trek later under darkness.

  They walked for another hour, searching the cliffs for an abandoned cave or bunker. With first light playing at the fringe of the horizon, a foul odor wafted out of the night. Tania wrinkled her nose and stepped faster. A tall pipe emerged in the darkness; it ran the short distance from the base of the cliff to the river. The pipe was two meters high. Fetid air tumbled from its mouth, a stench Tania felt through her skin.

  Fedya gasped, “It’s a sewer drain.”

  Yuri and Tania locked eyes. Both nodded.

  Fedya stepped back, repulsed by the idea. “Oh, my God, you’re kidding. We can’t go in there. That’s shit! There’s shit all over the place in there. We can’t . . . there’s no way!”

  Tania moved closer to Fedya. She put her fingers to her lips. “We don’t have any choice. It’ll be light soon.”

  Yuri stepped forward. “It’s just shit, Fedya. We throw it on the fields every day. It’ll make you grow.”

  “It’ll make me puke!”

  Tania moved to the lip of the pipe. She turned to Fedya. “In here, no one will notice. Come on.”

  She took her first steps through the sewer pipe as if leaning into a gale. She brought the inside of her elbow up to her nose to filter the filth through her tunic. Even so, the smell crept in through her eyes and ears.

  She looked back at Yuri and Fedya. Yuri laid his arms across his chest to walk with his head held high, as though he might lift his nose above the odor. Fedya took large, slow steps, flapping his arms and shaking his hands like a tightrope walker.

  “Walk, Fedya,” Tania whispered, “we’ve only just started.”

  “Oh, God,” he mumbled.

  Twenty meters from the mouth of the sewer, the dim light from the opening receded to leave them wrapped in total blackness. Tania ran her hand along the slimy wall to guide her steps. She felt a brush of cool air against her cheek. “There’s an opening ahead,” she said.

  Her hand slid off the wall into open space. Another pipe had linked with the main line. “This seems to head north. We’ll walk until it’s past dawn. Then we’ll look for a manhole and climb out. With luck we’ll be behind our own lines.”

  Tania shook her boots. Excrement clung to them and her pants legs. She felt the muddy damp where it had splashed onto her thighs. Behind her, Fedya made very few splashes. He was probably on tiptoes, she thought, as if there were a way to avoid stepping on shit in a sewer.

  “Tania,” Yuri called, “tell us about America.”

  Tania licked her lips, sweat salting her tongue. She did not want to talk, but she recognized that Yuri was only trying to quell their fear.

  “Do you read, old farmer?” “Yes, of course.”

  “What do you read about America?”

  “That it is a country of decadence. Bright lights, whores, businessmen squeezing money from the poor. Gangsters. Riches.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Only the parts about the riches and the whores. The good stuff.”

  Thi
s made Tania laugh, and she closed her mouth to stop from telling Yuri he was wrong, that he had left out so much more, good and bad stuff. America was a giant land of peace and opportunity and, yes, decadence. That it was America the beautiful, especially for those who were white and male with English surnames. That America was a bully. That America was afraid of this war with the Germans, just like her parents. And that she was Russian; she would fight for Russia and she would hate the Nazis if America would not.

  Tania wanted to divert the attention from herself. “Fedya,” she said, echoing over their sloshing footsteps, “tell us one of your poems.”

  “Yes, good.” Yuri picked this up. “Tell us a favorite.”

  “Here? Now?” Fedya sounded shocked. “I mean . . . you want me to tell you a poem? I can barely breathe in here.”

  “Oh, come on. When will you have better acoustics?”

  Good, Tania thought, Yuri is distracting the frightened boy from Moscow.

  “My God,” Fedya answered. “All right, but I never said I was good.”