The reporter said to Antonov: ‘It must have been dangerous crossing the river to see your girl.’
Other journalists waited expectantly, pencils poised. ‘Dangerous? Everyone would give a year’s pay to get away from the west bank.’
A voice in the background said: ‘I’m sure I don’t have to remind you that Yury is exhausted; that some of what he says shouldn’t be quoted.’
The reporter with the bunchy hair said: ‘When are you going to get Meister?’
‘Soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘When I’m ready,’ and someone said: ‘“When I’m ready,” that’s great.’
The reporter with the bunchy hair asked Tasya: ‘What does it feel like to be engaged to a future Hero of the Soviet Union?’
Engaged?
Tasya squeezed his hand. ‘It doesn’t matter whether he’s a hero or not,’ she said. ‘I always hoped that one day Yury and me …’
Antonov looked back through the weeks and saw a youth, a stranger, kissing Tasya after a Komsomol meeting and the stranger was himself.
‘Did you hope that Comrade Antonov?’
‘I hoped many things.’
‘When you’ve killed Meister do you intend to get married immediately?’
‘He hasn’t asked me yet,’ Tasya said coyly.
‘But I thought –’
‘We had an understanding.’
‘So?’ The reporter looked at Antonov.
‘I’ve got to kill Meister first,’ Antonov said.
‘Of course.’ A severely dressed woman journalist with a bosom like a bookshelf smiled understandingly. ‘Are you close to Meister? Do you think the same way?’
‘You would have to get a second opinion – from him.’ Remarkable how he was beginning to use words.
‘I was asking how you felt.’
‘We’re both snipers. We’re both trying to kill each other. We must have something in common.’
‘That wasn’t what I was asking you,’ the woman said, ‘and you know it,’ but she didn’t pursue it.
‘What special qualities does a sniper have?’ another journalist asked and Antonov told him because that was nearly always the first question anyone asked him. His replies were a recitation.
On the other side of the river he heard a German Ishak mortar, explosions like the neighing of a horse.
A plump reporter from Izvestia asked: ‘Do you have a message for the Soviet people?’
The room was filling with smoke. Antonov could never understand why anyone wanted to suck smoke into their lungs; in the mornings you could hear soldiers coughing and retching; sometimes the Germans picked up the sound and lobbed a few mortars into the trench.
‘I asked you a question young man.’
‘A message? Of course I have a message. We’re giving the Fritzes a run for their money.’
‘He means, of course,’ intoned the anonymous voice in the background, ‘that we’re going to smash them. Chase them out of the Soviet Union all the way back to Berlin.’
The emphasis was always on driving the Germans out of Russia. As though their intrusion was worse than the destruction they had wreaked, the misery they had inflicted.
Gunfire erupted on the west bank, calling him back. Other soldiers had reported that, after a few days of convalescence, they yearned to get back to the fight; as Chuikov had implied it became a habit, the sharing and the killing.
Why bother to ask him questions when the voice in the background answered them for him? The voice was faintly familiar. He turned. Pokrovsky, in the act of rubbing one pointed ear, smiled at him.
‘How long will it take you to kill Meister?’
‘I’ve answered that already.’ He had already acquired the serviceman’s faint contempt for the civilian.
‘Do you know anything about him? Education, background, family?’
‘Only what I’ve read translated from Signal.’
‘What will your feelings be when you kill him? Isn’t he very similar to you?’ It was the woman with the enormous breasts again.
Pokrovsky said: ‘Pride that he has struck a blow against Fascism.’
‘Have you and Meister had any exchanges yet?’
‘One or two.’
‘Close calls?’
‘Very.’ Like nearly having my head shot off outside the toy factory.
‘Does Yury write regularly to you?’ the reporter with the bunchy hair asked Tasya.
‘Every week,’ she lied.
‘And you to him?’
‘Sometimes twice a week.’
Tasya, who hadn’t written to him since he arrived in Stalingrad, smiled at him blandly.
A few questions later Pokrovsky called a halt. ‘I think,’ he announced, ‘that these two young people would like to be alone.’
Knowing smiles.
When the journalists had gone Pokrovsky said: ‘The house is yours. You have two hours.’
He winked.
***
On the table in the bedroom stood a bottle of pink champagne, Tsimlyanskoye, and two glasses.
Antonov levered off the cork with his thumb; it hit the ceiling and he lost a quarter of the bottle in a gush of pink foam. They laughed, clinked glasses and sipped the champagne; Antonov had never tasted it before; it tasted like cherryade, disappointing.
He glanced at his watch. ‘So we have one hour and three-quarters left.’
She stared into her glass. Then: ‘Everything’s different in war, isn’t it. Before the war we would never have thought about this,’ glancing at the double bed with the coverlet drawn back. ‘Well, we might have thought about it but …’
He had thought about it all right: Antonov remembered his imagination slavering the morning after the Komsomol meeting, the morning they had come for him. He had been ashamed of the fertility of his imagination, a perplexing combination of farmyard knowledge and chivalrous respect. But since then he had heard the crude way soldiers referred to women; at first it had shocked him; no longer; however crude their language they still kept creased photographs of wives and girlfriends in their wallets and if anyone made a suggestive remark about those then beware … Look what happened to the Muscovite at Akhtubinsk.
Antonov watched the bubbles exploding on the surface of his champagne: he finished the glass, replenished it; the exploding bubbles synchronised with the gunfire on the other side of the river. He gazed speculatively at Tasya, knowing what was expected of him.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘Just eighteen. You know that.’
He felt no desire. This worried him: he had no intention of making love to her – their situation was too contrived – but surely he should have been aroused. He recalled a joke he had heard in the trenches about a Ukrainian – they had a reputation for being henpecked – who couldn’t achieve an erection unless he was wearing an apron.
Antonov look a long pull on his champagne.
Tasya kissed him under the ear. ‘Don’t drink too much,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’ And then, picking up a blue case, disappeared into the bathroom. He heard the bolt slide home.
Antonov patrolled the lavender-scented room, agonising about his indifference. Panicking about an act that he wasn’t going to perform. Stupid!
When she emerged from the bathroom wearing a filmy white nightdress he began to tremble. ‘I’ve left the hot water running for you,’ she said and he went into the bathroom carrying his glass of champagne. When he took a swallow the bubbles frothed noisily in his mouth.
Bath towel round his waist, he re-emerged. She was curled up beneath the sheets, eyes wide open; she had removed her make-up and she reminded him of a child waiting for a bedtime story.
He decided to slip into the bed and kiss her and perhaps caress her and explain that he didn’t want to make love because they had both been pushed into it although, God knows, he wanted to, and yes, one day, when they weren’t being manipulated, they would make love and it would be wonderful. And h
e would continue his agonising when she had gone.
But when he got into bed he discovered that there was no need to agonise ever again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The journey from the west bank of the river to the east had been relatively uneventful; the return trip made up for it.
They departed at Crossing 62 at dusk when, according to the pundits of whom there was no shortage, the German gunners took a break because visibility was confused and it wasn’t dark enough for flares. The experts were right until the ferry was half way across.
The flares went up first, rekindling daylight, followed by mortars that sent gouts of water over the bows of the ferry, a dowager, with a tall funnel.
Antonov, sitting in the stern beside a political commissar with soap-shined cheeks and vodka breath, remembered the ships he had seen blown out of the water. Bodies had splashed into the water among the debris. In early September the Borodino, with 1,000 wounded soldiers on board, and the Yosif Stalin, carrying a similar number of civilian refugees, had been sunk.
Soldiers following the passage of a ship under fire took bets on its chances of reaching its destination.
A yellow flare lit the sky.
‘Do you think they’re looking for you?’ the commissar asked.
Antonov, regarding him with astonishment, saw the features of a man schooled never to accept anything straightforward; the face, he realised at this burgeoning time of awareness, of someone who would never understand that a subtlety of life is sometimes the obvious.
‘They don’t want me to die here,’ he told the commissar. ‘They want Meister to get me. If they heard in Berlin that I had been killed by a mortar heads would roll.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’ The commissar rubbed his shiny cheeks with the tips of his fingers. ‘What’s it like to be so important?’
Antonov glanced at him again; he had the naked air of someone accustomed to wearing spectacles. Without them he was divested of importance. ‘Where are your glasses?’ he asked.
‘I trod on them,’ the commissar said.
‘Bad luck.’ Authority was reaching him every day, but from where he knew not.
‘Oh yes, it was bad luck all right.’ The commissar peered at the advancing bank of the river.
A mortar engulfed them with water so that, for a long moment, Antonov thought they had been thrown into the river. But when they surfaced they were still sitting on the wooden benches where workers and trippers and lovers, parents and children asking when they were going to reach the other side, had once sat.
Troops crammed on to the slatted benches stared at them curiously.
A dripping soldier said: ‘Who are you with?’
Antonov told him.
‘So you’ve been in Stalingrad?’
‘A couple of weeks.’
‘Is it always like this?’ as another mortar showered them with water.
‘Always. Who are you with?’
‘One hundred and thirty-eighth division. Lyudnikov’s mob. The rearguard.’
‘Glad to have you on board.’ Antonov grinned despite everything.
The mortars stopped firing.
‘Shit,’ said a voice. ‘Here it comes.’ As machine-gun bullets ripped through the compressed bodies. But no one had warned the newcomers from Lyudnikov’s 138th and the bullets hit them at shoulder level.
Crouching, watching blood mingle with water on the deck in the false daylight, Antonov felt the beginnings of panic ripple through the troops: they had been prepared to fight in the streets but not to be floating targets. In pamphlets handed out as they boarded the ferry they had been advised to hit the ground and make for the nearest cover. Here, the only escape was the river.
The commissar and other political officers, pistols drawn, had taken up positions on the rails. One was shouting through a megaphone: ‘Keep calm, another fifty metres and they can’t touch us.’
Which was true: when a ship got within a certain distance of the steep shoreline the Germans couldn’t bring their guns to bear on it. Antonov had watched this happen and heard soldiers on the shore who had won their bets cheer. But fifty metres was a long way under fire and a MG 34 could fire a lot of bullets in that distance.
The machine-gun opened up again. Men whimpered. Russian big guns on the east bank began to fire, the shells slithering overhead before exploding somewhere in the gathering darkness. To the west the sky was a gentle violet, everywhere else it was brilliant.
A soldier tried to climb onto the rail but a political officer pulled him back. ‘Keep calm, not much further –’
Bullets cut through the soldiers again. You could hear their impact on flesh and bone and now some of them were screaming and trying to fight their way to the rail. One political officer fired his pistol into the air.
‘Don’t panic, only twenty metres –’
Another flare, white this time, lit the sky. A banner of sparks flowed from the funnel of the ferry. Fluorescent feathers of water reared to the starboard as the machine-gun overshot. But the gunner soon corrected his aim: a few feathers rose to the port, then the bullets were among the men again.
Antonov turned to the soldier from Lyudnikov’s 138th. ‘They’re right,’ he said. ‘A few more metres and we’re safe.’ But the soldier didn’t reply; blood trickled from his mouth and his eyes were closed. He looked like a man who had grown up in the country, Antonov decided; perhaps he was a Siberian who had dreamed of a wooden cottage in the snow-quiet taiga; reassuringly, Antonov patted the dead man’s shoulder.
At the rails the political officers were fighting with soldiers trying to jump. Antonov watched with dispassionate interest. Why did they bother? The men were only taking evasive action, adapting the instruction in the pamphlets.
Only a few more metres. Another burst of bullets tore into the bows of the ferry. Lower this time, entering between the lower rail and the deck, ploughing through the mêlée of legs; but even when they were hit the men didn’t fall, such was the congestion.
One man was standing on the rail now. The commissar grabbed his legs but the soldier kicked him in the face and dived and by this time two more were on the rails; one jumped, one fell back as a political officer seized one of his legs. Other soldiers climbed on to the rails, rolling, jumping, diving into the water; through the rails Antonov saw them threshing, sinking, surfacing.
He saw the commissar level his pistol at the frantic figures in the water. Impossible. The enemy was over there, finger on the trigger of an MG 34. ‘We’re all Russians,’ he wanted to shout but his lips were frozen, tongue paralysed.
He saw the pistol jerk in the commissar’s hand. He gazed into the crowded water. It was turning pink. He looked up again. The commissar was still firing; so were the other political officers. And when a soldier on the deck thrust his way through the bodies and hurled himself at one of them another shot him in the head and kept his pistol levelled at the rest of them.
Suddenly the machine-gun stopped firing; the ferry had reached the shelter of the cliffs. The pistols continued to fire for a few seconds, then they stopped.
The political officers stared at their guns. The men stared at the political officers. Antonov heard the slap of small waves against the hull of the ferry. He screamed but no sound issued from his throat.
***
What will your feeling be when you kill him?
Antonov, sitting in the tunnel, stared at Razin who was feeding his rat with peanuts.
Antonov wasn’t sure that he wanted to kill Meister: he would rather have shot the commissar with the soap-shiny cheeks.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I’ve only got one piece of advice for you – don’t marry a girl unless you laugh at the same things.’
‘What if you haven’t got any sense of humour?’
‘Don’t get married at all.’
Meister, hearing his father’s voice, smiled and Lanz, zipped into a sleeping bag on Platform One in the Central Railway Station, asked: ‘Was she good?�
��
‘Was who good?’ Meister stirred sleepily in his bag.
‘The girl you were dreaming about.’
‘I was dreaming about my father.’ A quirky dream because humour wasn’t his strong suit.
Meister shielded his eyes against the dawn light shining through the space where the roof had been, then closed them and tried to summon his father back to the dream.
After a while he returned but now he was a clown in a circus and other clowns were pouring water over him, bucket after bucket of it, and the white paint was being washed from his face and the water streaming down his cheeks was tears and the spectators laughing at his discomfort were all Jews and Meister found that he, too, was laughing. And crying.
And, watched by his mother holding a parasol, he was flying a kite, a dragon with a green tail, on the clipped grass on the banks of the Aussenalster. At first the kite wouldn’t leave the ground; then his father, pointed beard wagging, made an adjustment to the tail and the kite took off taking Meister with it.
When he let go he fell towards the lake but a gust of wind blew him towards the Historical Museum to the south-west of Hamburg and he tumbled into an old-fashioned rifle range. He peered along the barrel of a musket and, beyond the primitive sights, saw Antonov, but when he squeezed the trigger he disappeared in a puff of smoke.
Meister awoke with a jerk.
Lanz, squatting on his sleeping bag peeling an apple, said: ‘You dreamt you were falling? When you hit the ground you’re dead.’
Meister sat up and looked round the shell of the station. Sleeping soldiers lay on the platforms and the concourse; a black locomotive lay on its side – as though it had been slapped; the station clock had stopped at 4.20; the stalls in the men’s lavatory stood exposed; a crooked nameplate at the end of the platform where he and Lanz were camped indicated that a train had once stood there panting, waiting to depart for Rostov – Meister wondered if it had got there. The station had changed hands many times in the early days of the battle, five times in one morning, and there were dark stains on the concrete between the two sleeping bags.
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