by David Bishop
Tretyakov's corpse coughed, making Strelnikov and me jump backwards in shock. A trickle of blood poured listlessly from the major's mouth, pooling on the ice beneath his head.
"Help me," he whispered, the words leaking from his ravaged larynx. "Please, help me..."
"He was dead!" I protested to Strelnikov. "I saw those wolves tear him apart. He shouldn't even be able to speak!"
The pinch-faced convict nodded, one hand reaching for the entrenching tool hanging from a leather hook on his waist belt. "I know."
Tretyakov raised a quivering hand, one finger pointing accusingly at me. "You did this to me... You left me... to die..."
I stepped back, haunted by this ghastly parody of life and its words of blame. "I'm sorry. I didn't know what would happen. I couldn't know!"
Strelnikov moved between the major and me, letting me see the edge of his tool, the sharpened blade glinting in the dull light. "We're here to help you," Strelnikov said loudly. "We can still get you to a field hospital if you want, major."
"Yes, I would like that," Tretyakov replied, his voice becoming ever more sibilant and sinister. I peered over Strelnikov's shoulder and saw the major smiling, his lips drawing back to reveal two elongated fangs. "Come closer, and let me thank you for your concern, soldier..."
"My pleasure," Strelnikov said, smirking to me. He spun round and stabbed the entrenching tool down through Tretyakov's neck, slicing the head free. It rolled away across the ice, an inhuman screech rending the air. On the horizon the black clouds parted and sunlight burst forth once more. The glare it created off the frozen lake's surface dazzled my eyes. When I could focus once more, the major was gone, his place taken by a pile of black ash on the white ice. A chill wind gusted past us, taking the ash with it, away towards Osinovets.
Eisenstein returned at noon, at first a distant dot on the western horizon, but slowly getting larger as he came nearer. By then we had burned all the remains and were preparing to send the convoy survivors on their way. Eisenstein nodded his approval for all we had done, then sent the bulk of the trucks on to their final destination. Antonov had kept one back for our use. He volunteered to drive, with taciturn Uralsky and Eisenstein keeping him company. I climbed into the back of the vehicle, joining Strelnikov, Borodin and Yatsko among the three cattle carcasses we had requisitioned as payment for our intervention.
"Isn't this stealing?" I asked, and the others laughed at my words.
"Bojemoi, where did they find you?" Yatsko sneered. "A convent school?"
"You're in a penal company," Strelnikov added. "You're one of the cursed now, nobody gives a damn about what happens to us or about what we do. We have to fend for ourselves, but Brodsky also lets us choose our own battles."
"He couldn't give a shit whether we live or die," Borodin agreed.
"No, he definitely wants us dead," Yatsko retorted. "Then he can get himself a proper command like his father and live up to the general's reputation."
Strelnikov nodded bitterly. "Our beloved leader will gladly sacrifice us on the altar of his pathetic ambitions. Don't believe for a second he cares about anyone except himself. We're cannon fodder to him, nothing more, nothing less."
The truck jerked sideways as it turned off the Doroga Zhizni and headed south-west, back towards our base in Porogi. I tilted my head towards Eisenstein sitting up front in the cab.
"I thought he was in charge, the way he orders you around," I said.
"Nobody is in charge of me," Yatsko said, his eyes ablaze with anger in the freezing cold. "I do what I want, when I want."
Strelnikov grinned. "Ivan here has a problem with authority figures. That's how he ended up in the shtrafroty. He beat an officer half to death for ordering him to pick up something another man had dropped."
"Shut your mouth," Yatsko warned.
"Who's going to make me, you?"
Yatsko launched himself at Strelnikov, clenching a fist round the smaller man's throat as if he was wringing the neck of a chicken.
"You think you're so smart, with your sneering remarks. They should have cut your balls off when they had the chance, you podonok!" Yatsko reached his spare hand into his knapsack and pulled out a dagger, holding it in front of Strelnikov's terrified eyes. "What say I perform a little surgery of my own now, huh?"
Borodin rapped his knuckles against the back of the cab. The truck slid to a halt on the ice and Eisenstein emerged from the front of the vehicle. "Yatsko, put your blade away. Until we're back at full strength, we need every man we can get, even vile serpents like Strelnikov.'
Yatsko took a long, deep breath, then spat into his captive's face before moving back to where he had been sitting before. Coughing and gasping for breath, Strelnikov jumped down from the back of the truck. Eisenstein asked Uralsky to get out of the cab.
"Knowing Strelnikov, he won't be able to resist goading Yatsko again before we get back. Better if he sits up front with me and stays alive, yes?"
Still rubbing the red marks on his neck, Strelnikov climbed into the cab through the passenger door. As Eisenstein let him pass, I caught a glimpse of what was hidden inside the collar of his uniform. A thin silver chain was strung round his neck, with a small pendant suspended from the chain. It was a six-pointed symbol I had seen many times outside a synagogue near my family's home in Moscow. Eisenstein was wearing the Star of David round his neck, the emblem that symbolised the Jewish faith. He saw my eyes staring at the metal pendant as he pushed it back inside his uniform. Eisenstein grimaced, then got back inside the truck. I sensed his frustration at my discovery, knowing that eventually he would have an explanation to make, but not yet.
The truck resumed its journey to the south-west, away from the Doroga Zhizni. With Uralsky in the back, all attempts at conversation died after a few sentences. He was taciturn to the point of being monosyllabic, his mere presence enough to murder small talk before it could get started. He stretched out in the winter sunshine, pilotka cap tipped forward over his face, his sniper's rifle hugged to his side like a lover.
Within a few minutes Uralsky was gently snoring and I realised how exhausted I was. We had been on the move for more than twenty-four hours. My limited experience of this war had taught me one thing: to grab any opportunities for rest whenever they arose. The chances for sleep were few and far between. I followed Uralsky's example and closed my eyes. All the questions I was desperate to ask could wait.
Chapter Four
When I returned to Porogi with the shtrafroty, I expected to be taken into their confidence. Instead I found myself treated with greater suspicion than before, as if I had become more of an outsider, not less. I had fought alongside the others, and I had even saved Eisenstein from one of the wolves on Lake Ladoga, yet the penal company's members refused to trust me.
We spent the rest of March constantly shifting from place to place along the blockade's front line south of Leningrad, never spending more than a night in the same location, as if searching for something or someone. Whenever I tried to get an answer from the other convicts, they were evasive or abusive. What wrong had I committed to be kept at arm's length like this? Had Eisenstein told the others to punish me for discovering his background? Whatever the reason, my isolation was as all-encompassing as the German siege. After three weeks I gave up asking, frustrated by the lack of trust shown to me. What did I have to do to earn respect from the shtrafroty?
Brodsky regarded me with even more suspicion than the men under his command. After we returned from Lake Ladoga, I noticed Eisenstein taking the captain aside and whispering something to him. Both men stared at me, Brodsky with disbelief and then utter contempt. After that he frequently refused to acknowledge my existence. Even the usually cheerful Antonov fell silent whenever I got within earshot of him, his smile dissolving. I took to eating alone, sick of the glares and glances the others gave me as I gulped down my soup and kasha.
As March became April, the vicious winter that had gripped Leningrad chose to relent. The ice and snow was
beginning to thaw, even if the hostility from my comrades in the shtrafroty did not. We had engaged in more than a dozen missions since that fateful night on the ice, but they had been relatively mundane affairs, mostly scouting expeditions into no-man's-land to assess the German front line positions. With summer coming, a new assault from the enemy was widely expected, so one of the thankless tasks given to us was watching for any increase in troop numbers or movement near the front line. Rarely on these missions did we engage the enemy, the Germans remaining firmly entrenched in their winter positions.
Our activities brought us into greater contact with other Red Army units, some of whom would grudgingly share their rations and resources with us. The officers, as always, considered us beneath contempt, but word had spread among the riflemen about the exploits of our company of the cursed. The shtrafroty might be the scum of the earth, but we had saved their fellow soldiers and that earned us some respect amongst the rank and file.
These units brought rumours about the Germans unleashing a new weapon of terror against Leningrad, a deadly force that only attacked after dark. It was said few ever survived such an attack and fewer still were willing to speak of what they had seen, unless, of course, their tongues were loosened by vodka, the eternal currency of Mother Russia.
I had liberated a small hip flask of the precious alcohol from a dead soldier. One night I shared some of the crudely made liquor with Vasily and Nina, two ruddy-cheeked recruits freshly arrived at the front line. They had spent most of the winter within the city as sentries inside the headquarters of the people's militia, the Leningradskoi Armii Narodnogo Opolchaniia.
Nina was a stern-faced woman who kept her brown hair pulled back in a bun on the back of her head. She had volunteered to fight when the Great Patriotic War began, but was only now getting to see some real action. Unlike our fascist invaders, the Red Army was more than willing to take female recruits into its ranks. Most served as medics, radio operators or in other useful roles, freeing more men for front line fighting. But as the blockade wore on, the presence of women in combat postings was becoming more frequent.
Vasily did not share his partner's ambitions to see action, preferring his time at LANO headquarters. He drunk thirstily from my hip flask, as if drinking water. Nina later confided to me that it was Vasily's drinking that had gotten both of them sent south. The pair had gleaned fragments of information about the new terror from conversations they overheard as officials moved between meetings. From that, Nina and Vasily knew enough to be fearful of spending any time outside the city after dark.
"Djavoli, that's what they call these creatures," Vasily slurred. "Fiends who attack under cover of night, leaving no trace behind, always taking their wounded when they retreat. Our best intelligence men were sent behind the fascist lines to find out more, but not one of them returned."
Nina nodded. "The officers are almost relieved Lake Ladoga is melting, that means the Doroga Zhizni will shut down soon. At first it was a safe way of smuggling reinforcements and supplies through the blockade at night. Then this new unit began targeting the convoys, sending bombers to stop the trucks before attacking them from the darkness. Once the ice has broken up, we'll be able to use boats on the lake. Our anti-aircraft units are winning the battle for the skies, so it should be safe to evacuate citizens across the lake in daylight. I heard tell only one in six German planes is getting past the women in the MPVO now."
I could not help smiling at the memory of my time as kommisar for the city's air defence squads. That felt like a lifetime away, when it was but a few months ago. I was gladdened to hear my former charges were doing well. I rescued the hip flask from Vasily before he emptied it.
"Has nobody a clue about the identity of this new squad the Germans are sending against us?" I asked.
Nina shrugged. "I saw an officer holding a patch torn from the uniform of one of these djavoli. The insignia wasn't from any German unit I recognised. From what the officers were saying, it probably came from a Rumanian officer." She described the markings on the patch of cloth: a bat with wings unfurled, its talons holding a swastika in a circle. Beneath that was a single triangle, something normally associated with mountain troops.
My mind raced back to my encounter with the hauptmann in January. He had spoken in German, but with an accent I could not place at the time. Could it have been Rumanian? Yes, that would make sense, I decided. They had joined the Axis forces when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. As a kommisar stationed in Moscow, I had been privy to information sent back from the front lines during the disastrous early days of our Great Patriotic War. For the most part Rumanian forces had been sighted bolstering Germany's Army Group South, but some mountain troop units had been seen in other areas.
A fragment of memory from my first encounter with the shtrafroty now rose to the surface of my thoughts. Eisenstein talked about how some of the hauptmann's kind were being sent to help Army Group North, and how Leningrad's long winter nights made the blockade a perfect hunting ground. None of this could be a coincidence, I decided. I was beginning to see a pattern among the disparate pieces of this puzzle. Once the drunken Vasily had stumbled off to his bedroll, I persuaded Nina to retell what she knew to Eisenstein. He was reluctant at first, no doubt because of my presence, but he did listen to what she had to say.
Afterwards Eisenstein summoned Antonov from guard duty to hear Nina repeat what she knew for a third time. When she had finished, Eisenstein thanked her with more animation than I had seen from him in a fortnight. Nina returned to her unit, while I stayed to confront my fellow convicts.
I had been patient enough, I told them. Whatever wrong they thought I was guilty of, it could be no worse than whatever crimes we had all committed to get assigned to this company of the cursed. They knew more than they were telling me. If I was going to die helping their crusade, I deserved to know what I was dying for.
"Perhaps I was wrong about you," Eisenstein grudgingly admitted once my tirade had run out of steam. "But I need time to think. Yuri, take Zunetov back out on patrol with you for the rest of the night."
I tried to protest, but Eisenstein cut off my words with an angry glare. "Even if I told you the truth, that's no guarantee you'd believe it," he said. "I didn't believe it until I had seen the proof with my own eyes."
Antonov led me away, one of his heavy hands resting on my left shoulder. "Don't worry about Grigori, he'll come round in time. You've been doing the right thing. It takes a long time to earn his trust and respect, Victor. But once you have them, you have them for life." I pointed out that that might be of little use, since we were all living on borrowed time. "Da, but we die hard in this shtrafroty. When you've nothing left to lose, you've little left to fear."
We patrolled until dawn, constantly moving back and forth along the front line, our eyes searching for any sign of movement from the German positions. Our most recent relocation had moved us south-west to the outskirts of Kolpino, a settlement on the railway line between Leningrad and Moscow. As the first light of a new day appeared on the horizon, Antonov and I settled down in front of an abandoned church to watch the sun rise. I still had a little vodka left in my hip flask and shared that with my formidable comrade, hoping it might loosen his tongue.
After a few sips he began to hum a low, haunting lament, reaching the end of it with a sad smile on his lips. Antonov noted me observing him.
"My grandfather used to sing that as a lullaby on nights when I couldn't sleep. He was a fisherman, but before that he had been a merchant, travelling all over Eastern Europe selling his wares. Sometimes he told me tales of the things he had seen on his journeys stories to make your hair curl."
I waited, but Antonov did not continue. He tried to return the hip flask to me, but I refused it, so he took another sip.
"It will be summer soon. The days are getting longer, the nights shorter. The siege will take on a different character, but our true enemy still endures," Antonov murmured. "I do not fear dying - th
at comes to us all - but I want to rest easy in my grave. I think that is what scares me most about these monsters: that I might become like them." He smiled and handed back the hip flask. "You ask many questions, Victor Zunetov, but I notice you never talk much about yourself."
I shrugged. "There isn't much to tell. My life before the war was ordinary, commonplace. I was born, I grew up, I was educated."
"You studied in Berlin, your father is an important man in the Party, and you speak more than one language," Antonov replied. "Trust me, there is nothing ordinary about any of that. Before the war I had never been more than twenty kilometerss from my family's home. My father's opinion mattered to few people and I can hardly read one language, let alone talk in two. Each of us believes our lives are typical, but we are all different, all unique."
"I know, but..." Words failed me for a few seconds. "I feel as though my life only began when I stepped onto the ice of Lake Ladoga in January. Everything before that seems so far away, like a dream or something I imagined. I became a soldier the night you and Eisenstein and the others rescued the convoy from Constanta. I became a man."
Antonov roared with laughter at my comments.
"I fail to see what is so amusing," I barked at him.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But you reminded me of someone else then."
"Who?"
"Grigori. You two are more alike than either of you realise. He said much the same thing to me after killing his first vampyr. The scales had been lifted from his eyes..."
"Exactly," I agreed. "It was a moment of pure revelation. I had lived all my life up until that night believing the supernatural was nothing more than folk tales and superstitious nonsense used to frighten small children. But to discover these monsters were real..."