by David Bishop
Yatsko was the worst kind of bully, enjoying any opportunity to torment anyone weaker than himself, while Borodin's greatest weakness was his fear. In any combat situation we had shared, his hands shook so much he couldn't reload his own weapon. Uralsky was still an enigma to me, but he gave little sign of being interested in anything beyond the aim of his rifle. As for Antonov and Eisenstein, they shared a nobility that dissuaded me from suspecting either man of being a sexual predator. No, out of all the men in the shtrafroty, there was only one obvious candidate.
"If Grigori is going to castrate anybody, I suggest he start with Strelnikov," I observed dryly. "He is the logical choice. Strelnikov derives far too much pleasure from inflicting pain. Rape is not usually a symptom of sexual desire. It's more often about power and violence and control. Strelnikov rejoices in all of those." I realised Antonov was looking at me strangely. "Psychology was one of the subjects I dabbled in at Berlin."
"We will have to keep watch around her, make sure she isn't left alone with Strelnikov," he replied.
When we got back to our camp, the captain was reaching much the same conclusion. He wanted to send Sophia back to Leningrad, but she refused to leave, pointing out that she would be guilty of disobeying a direct order from a superior officer.
"That's how I ended up here. If I go back now, they'll have me shot."
Brodsky could not deny the logic of her argument, something that frustrated him further. He sent her to examine the malfunctioning radio we had been dragging for weeks from one posting to another. The bulky device hadn't worked properly since I arrived, having been shot apart by a German sniper. Kamarov, the penal company's previous radio operator, died while trying to rescue his precious equipment. A functioning radio was one of the few things we had been unable to scavenge since they were jealously guarded on both sides of the blockade.
When Eisenstein returned from a patrol and saw the newcomer, he too questioned the wisdom of having a woman in the company. The captain quickly cut him short.
"Once she gets the radio working, her first task will be calling HQ for a new posting," Brodsky vowed. "Someone in Leningrad is toying with us, seeing how far they can push us before we'll crack. But we'll show them! Yes, we'll show them," the captain muttered, wandering back to his quarters.
Strelnikov and Yatsko appeared a few minutes later, returning from a last daylight sortie along the Moscow railway line. They saw the new arrival and immediately began making crude remarks about the uses to which she could be put.
Eisenstein stepped closer to me and whispered in my left ear. "Zunetov, go and talk to this woman and keep her distracted. I'll deal with these two."
I nodded and walked towards Sophia, feeling slightly naked for no reason I could deduce. I patted my hands across the equipment attached to my uniform and realised the Nagant pistol was missing from its holster on my left hip. Eisenstein must have borrowed it without my even noticing. I smiled, imagining what was coming next for Strelnikov and Yatsko. It was no less than either of them deserved.
I stopped beside Sophia. She was crouched over the radio, having prised off its inspection hatch to peer inside. As I watched, a tear slid down her face and fell into the equipment. She cursed under her breath and wiped a tear from her other cheek.
"You'd think I would be used to their kind by now," she grimaced, "but it's always the same. Don't let them see me like this, please?"
"Don't worry, Eisenstein will sort them out."
"I thought your captain's name was Brodsky?"
"It is, but Eisenstein keeps the shtrafroty together. The captain is struggling to keep himself together lately."
Sophia managed a thin smile. "I noticed. His breath stinks of schnapps."
"We liberated some from a German outpost last week."
She finished adjusting the radio, then snapped its inspection hatch back into position. Within a few seconds the sound of crackling static crept from the battered machine.
"Child's play," Sophia said triumphantly.
"Only if you know what you're doing," I observed. "My name's Victor Zunetov, by the way."
Her brow furrowed. "The kommisar who slapped the ballerina?"
I grimaced before telling her the company policy about past crimes remaining in the past. She had no qualms about saying what she had done to be sent to the shtrafroty.
"I was a signals operator with the MPVO. A senior Party official came through on a visit and took a fancy to me. He said if I didn't give him what he wanted, he would have me reassigned to the front line."
"You refused?"
Sophia nodded. "I shoved a knee so far into his groin, the bastard will need a search party to find his balls any time soon."
Eisenstein appeared beside us, offering my pistol back to me. "I've had a few quiet words with the others," he told Sophia. "The first one to lay an unwanted hand on you will find it cut off."
She stood to face him, her hands clenching into fists. "I can look after myself," she muttered. "I don't need your protection."
"Maybe not," he agreed, "but we don't need the distraction of a woman in our company. I want everyone thinking with their brains, not their groins."
"Trust me, I wouldn't touch any of these scum with a bayonet."
"Good. Let's hope the feeling is mutual," Eisenstein replied. He looked past her at the radio. "Brodsky says you are to call HQ and ask for a new posting. He doesn't want you here any more than I do."
I was doing my best to look invisible but Eisenstein noticed me lurking nearby. "Zunetov, you should be out on patrol with Borodin by now. Get moving!" I scurried away, leaving the two of them glaring at each other with ill-disguised distrust.
Borodin and I spent the night watching the graveyard where the little girl's corpse had been stolen. We found a sheltered place to hide in the shadows of the abandoned church, protected from the elements by an outcrop overhead. Borodin spent the long, cold hours stripping and reassembling his Moisin in the dark with his eyes closed. Finally, he tired of the exercise and put the rifle down.
"I can prepare a weapon to fire faster than anyone else in the company," he whispered, "as long as nobody's shooting at us. Put me into battle and it's all I can do to aim at the enemy. Why do my hands shake so much?"
I shrugged, having no easy answer. "We're all afraid, you know."
"But you don't show it like I do." He yawned, trying to rub the sleep from his weary eyes. "I can't remember the last time I slept in a real bed."
"The thirty-first of December last year," I said, smiling briefly. "My orders to join a convoy crossing Lake Ladoga had come through and I knew I might never make it back. So I made certain I spent one final night at home, in my own bed."
"It must have been the night before I got caught," Borodin decided. "We were starving to death, the rations had been cut again and I couldn't stand to see my sisters wasting away to nothing. So I broke into a canteen at one of the factories in Leningrad, planning to steal a loaf of bread. I couldn't believe it when I saw all the food stored there: row after row of canned meat and vegetables.
"I spent ten minutes trying to smash the lid from a tin of peaches on the corner of a table, instead of taking it home where we had an opener. It was the noise from the tin that got me caught. The officer who sent me here, he had the tin opened and made me eat every peach inside it. My body couldn't cope with that much fruit all at once, so I threw it back up again. They usually executed anyone caught stealing food then, but I was about to turn eighteen, so the officer sent me here instead."
Sent to this hell for trying to steal a loaf of bread, I thought. Antonov was right, there was more than one kind of monster within the blockade. Before I could mention this to Borodin, the sound of footsteps nearby caught our attention. Two figures appeared in the pale moonlight, one carrying a shovel, the other a pickaxe. They walked fearlessly through the graveyard; tiny glowing lights in front of their faces showing that both of them were smokers. The pair stopped at a freshly buried grave and began t
o dig, first using the pickaxe to loosen the soil, then the shovel to remove it.
Borodin picked up his rifle, ready to move against the thieves, but I stopped him.
"We wait," I whispered.
"Why? We have all the evidence we need," he whispered back.
"Let them take what they came for, then we can follow them and see where they go. With any luck, these two may lead us to others like them."
"But the poor soul they're digging up..."
"Has long since left that body," I insisted. "We can bring the corpse back later, before anyone knows it has been stolen."
Borodin eventually agreed with me and we concentrated on watching the grave robbers. They were efficient at their chosen profession, no doubt from plenty of practice. The pair reached the coffin within thirty minutes, using the tip of the pickaxe to prise it open. The body of a young boy was quickly removed and shoved into a sack. Satisfied with what they had, the robbers retrieved their tools and climbed out of the desecrated grave.
Borodin and I let them leave the graveyard, then hurried after them, taking care to move as quietly as possible. Weeks of moving back and forth across no-man's-land had trained us well, so keeping the thieves in our sights without being noticed was little challenge.
They led us through the bombed-out remnants of Kolpino, moving swiftly between the battered buildings where few citizens remained. The settlement was well within range of the German artillery stationed along the southern edge of the blockade, and had been mercilessly bombarded for many months. The thieves paused by the exterior of a shattered hospital, looking around guiltily. I pushed Borodin back into the shadows, not wanting us to be seen. When I looked out once more, the grave robbers had vanished.
"Dubiina!" I cursed, running to where I had last seen our quarry, Borodin hard at my heels.
"I told you we should have dealt with them in the graveyard," he said.
"Be quiet," I spat back at him under my breath, slowing to a walk. I stopped when we reached the spot where the thieves had been, motioning for Borodin to be quiet and listen. Someone was hitting something nearby, a dull thudding sound audible in the early morning hush. I concentrated on trying to identify where the noise was coming from. The muffled nature of the sound made it difficult to place, until I realised it must be emanating from below ground. Swivelling round in a slow circle, I noticed a glimmer of weak light on a staircase that led beneath the ruined hospital. I waved at Borodin, pointing towards the basement. He nodded and we crept down the steps, picking our way past fallen masonry and shards of glass from broken windows.
Ahead of us was a solid metal door, tinted blue by the moonlight. As we got closer to it I began to sense a familiar, tangy odour invading my nostrils. Twice a year my grandmother would take delivery of a slaughtered cow, bought directly from a farm outside the town where she lived. My grandfather would spend the best part of a day carving this beast into different cuts of meat: steaks, roasts, brisket and shanks. Nothing was wasted, each part of the animal being cooked and cured later. Once the best of the flesh was removed, the rest of the remains were boiled for stock in a huge copper pot outside. That smell of boiling broth hung like an invisible fog for weeks afterwards, every nearby surface coated by a fine, clinging film of animal fat.
As soon as I recognised the smell, my mouth began to water and my stomach rumbled hungrily in response. I tried not to think about what must be making the smell, hoping against hope that I was wrong in my suspicions. Behind me, Borodin was also sniffing the air.
"Bojemoi," he said. "You don't think that's-"
I pressed a finger against his lips to silence him, then switched my PPSh to fully automatic firing. Borodin swallowed hard then nodded his readiness to go in. I leaned back slightly, and then smashed the heel of my right boot against the metal door. It buckled beneath my weight, swinging slowly inwards to reveal a scene straight from some medieval charnel house. The basement was lined with greasy, grey tiles on its floor, walls and ceiling. Seven kerosene lamps were ranged around the room, the glass shade of each one smeared with soot, providing just enough light to see. The underground room must have been the hospital's kitchen.
Strung around the walls were a dozen different cuts of meat, each of them miniature versions of what my grandfather used to produce. He had proudly hung fatty haunches of brisket and leg joints on hooks in the smokehouse. This room was lined by sections of flesh and bone cut from much smaller corpses; frail limbs and portions of meat severed from stolen bodies. Along the far wall of the kitchen were bubbling cauldrons of brown liquid, all too familiar bones protruding from the surface of the sickly soup. In the centre of this chamber of horrors stood the butchers: two obese women wearing blood-spattered aprons, machetes poised in their hands as they stared at us.
Standing next to the butchers were the two figures we had followed to this hellish place. One of them was an elderly man, his balding pate and white hair revealed now he had taken off his scarf and hat. Beside him was a woman whose face I already knew: the grieving mother who had cried by the empty grave of her daughter, Sasha. They were paused in the process of stripping the clothes from a dead boy's body, startled by our arrival. For a long, agonising moment, we all stood quite still and stared at each other, each side unable to grasp what they were seeing. Then the shouting and shooting began.
One of the butchers reacted first, her face becoming a snarl of hate as she threw her machete across the basement at us. It hit the side of my submachine gun, knocking the weapon from my hands. I cursed and dropped to my knees to retrieve the PPSh, narrowly avoiding having my head cleaved in two by the second machete. It stabbed into the wall a few centimetres away from Borodin's head, accompanied by a torrent of abuse.
For once Borodin forgot his fear, too shocked by what he had found in the basement. He opened fire with his rifle, shooting the first butcher through the forehead. She fell over backwards into a pot of boiling bones, tipping the searing liquid all over her corpulent body. Flames leapt from the disrupted fire, setting fire to her greasy hair. She went down still screaming, not aware she was already dead.
The two body snatchers bolted for an open door at the back of the kitchen, taking the boy's corpse with them as they fled. But the other butcher stayed, enraged by her colleague's death. She snatched a paring knife from the tabletop and advanced on us, slicing the air in front of her with grim determination.
"Shoot her!" I shouted at Borodin, still trying to retrieve my weapon from a floor now awash with human broth and floating bones. But a clicking noise behind me told its own story: Borodin's rifle had jammed and in his panicked state he was unable to clear the blockage. Realising that the enraged woman was almost upon us, I abandoned my PPSh and charged at her headfirst, hoping my steel helmet would deflect the blade she was wielding.
My shoulder slammed into her midriff and we both tumbled over into the scalding liquid, the butcher underneath me. She tried to raise her head from the searing soup but I smashed my helmet into her face, the impact reverberating down my spine. I heard a satisfying crack from her nose and she lay still. Could I have killed her? Apparently, the answer was yes. I watched her face but there was no movement, no sign of life. I tilted my head sideways to see how Borodin was doing when the woman lunged at me with her paring knife, stabbing it deep into my left shoulder before twisting it sideways.
I threw myself backwards, screaming in pain as the knife came free. The butcher lifted herself up from the brown broth to finish the job when a single shot punctured her right eyeball. She flopped back into the liquid, a pool of red quickly forming round her head. Borodin helped me back to my feet, handing me the slick and slimy barrel of my submachine gun.
"Are you alright? My rifle jammed and I couldn't get off a shot..." He saw the wound near my shoulder and fell quiet, his eyes bulging for a moment. "She did that to you?"
"Yes," I winced, pulling open my gymnastiorka to examine the damage. Blood was flowing freely from a small, jagged hole in my skin. By twistin
g the knife in my wound, the butcher woman had made certain the bleeding could not be easily stopped. I would need medical help soon or risk infection. "We need to stop the others. If they escape, they could start again elsewhere."
Borodin nodded but tried to prevent me coming with him. "You're in no state to chase anyone," he said.
"I'm not staying down here," I snapped. "The sooner we get out of this hellhole, the better for both of us. Come on!"
I marched to the back exit, gritting my teeth to distract from the pain in my shoulder. There was a staircase leading up and out of the kitchen, no doubt emerging somewhere inside the ruins of the hospital. As I reached the door I heard a shot being fired nearby, closely followed by two more. I ran as fast as I could up the stairs, Borodin close behind me. We emerged into an empty space, a few tumbledown walls the only suggestion there had once been a building there. Both of us gasped in the clear, fresh dawn air, glad to be out of the charnel house atmosphere.
"I said halt!" The voice shouting was Yatsko's, his gruff accent instantly recognisable. I could hear someone trying to run, and then heard another shot, closer than before. I hurried out of the hospital's ruins into the street and saw Yatsko standing over the woman from the graveyard. Her partner in crime was already dead on the ground and the corpse they had stolen was lying nearby, the boy's naked body bearing mute witness to their crimes.
"You sick, twisted bliatz!" Yatsko raised his rifle and took aim, preparing to fire from point blank range. I shouted at him as he shot. Instead of blowing the woman's head open, his bullet punctured her neck with a wet, popping sound.
Yatsko swung round, ready to shoot me for interfering. "Why did you do that?" he demanded.
"That's the woman Antonov and I found last week. Her daughter was one of the bodies stolen from the graveyards," I explained, moving closer to him. "I want to know why she's gone from grieving mother to grave robber so quickly."