Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  How could they miss seeing him?

  A flare went up and he hugged the ground, pushing in against the corporal, with the rotting sourness of the sergeant on his other side. He shut his eyes tight against a bullet that never came. After a minute’s brightness, he sensed darkness return and night shuffle in from the shadows.

  ‘What’s that then?’

  Pyotr rested the rifle casually in the corner.

  ‘What do you think?’ He weighed the watch and the cigarette case in his hands, changing his mind about using the watch as a bribe. This left the question: which did he want? The watch was gold, with a dial that was white and shiny, but the silver cigarette case held cigarettes, black ones with a gold band above each filter.

  ‘Here,’ Pyotr Dennisov said, throwing Kyukov the watch.

  His friend flashed him a grateful grin.

  Later that night, after Kyukov had set his watch to what Pyotr thought was roughly the right time, they sat with their backs to the wall, smoking a German cigarette between them, and Kyukov suggested a way out of there.

  ‘Across the river,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll be shot by our side.’

  ‘Then let’s go by land.’

  ‘And be shot by Germans? No, stick with me. I’ll get us out of here.’

  Kyukov would stick with him, they both knew that.

  They were just talking.

  A cigarette against the darkness, and talk to fill silences that were almost more unnerving than the shelling and the crack of sniper fire.

  First thing next day the Germans launched an attack on the siding and were beaten back. Their bombers came that afternoon, a long line of grey planes with black crosses on the wings. They started dropping their load half a mile back and the line of explosions ran straight towards the hut.

  ‘We stay,’ Pyotr said.

  The older boy looked at him, his eyes uncharacteristically mutinous.

  ‘We stay together. We stay here.’

  ‘Pyotr …’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do to us if they discover we’ve been hiding in here since yesterday?’ They both knew he was talking about their own side.

  ‘They might feed us first.’

  Pyotr took that as surrender.

  Kyukov sat with his back to the approaching bombers, his arms wrapped around himself as if that could provide protection. And then, when the planes were past, the last of the German bombs falling into the Volga, he vomited.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

  ‘We’re both hungry.’

  ‘I bet they have food.’ He jerked his head towards the Nazi side. ‘They said they had food.’

  ‘They were probably lying.’

  No one attacked next day and no bombers flew over the sidings, and all that happened was that Pyotr and Kyukov smoked the last of the stolen cigarettes. The day after that, they watched a German sniper in the ruins of a factory opposite kill half a dozen Soviet soldiers in a communication trench.

  ‘We need to move,’ Kyukov said.

  He said it so often Pyotr barely noticed.

  It was three days since they’d eaten, almost as long since they’d felt close to warm and Pyotr was regretting sharing his cigarettes. Crawling to the shell hole, he peered out. ‘Something’s happening.’

  NCOs were gathering, Soviet conscripts being manhandled into a line. Political officers tugged their collars and gripped their megaphones as they began to rehearse their words.

  ‘Look at that,’ Kyukov said.

  Out of sight of the enemy, two Red Army soldiers lugged a machine gun. When one slipped, her cap fell away to reveal blonde hair. The other helped his comrade up, then picked up the gun again. They were young, obviously a couple.

  Kyukov grinned. ‘Let’s go down there.’

  ‘And get killed? We wait …’

  The whistle went and the troops raced up the icy bank towards the tracks, the two with their machine gun at the rear. As a German gun opened up, and soldiers at the front stumbled, they fell too. It was a ruse. Dropping into a crater, they slotted a circular magazine on top of the gun and opened fire the moment the last of those in front fell, the black magazine spinning like a record.

  Its burst was brief.

  The boy lunged forward to remove the disk and replace it. The next magazine burned out as fast and was replaced as quickly. They were lucky or well trained or simply desperate, because the enemy machine gun suddenly stilled. Pyotr thought that a fresh wave would charge from his side but all that happened was that those screaming kept on screaming and the enemy gun remained silent.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Kyukov said.

  A mortar arced high from the German side.

  It exploded the moment it landed; the boy busy replacing the disk jerked sideways, half the skin and all of his uniform ripped from his shoulders. The girl simply shuddered, her cap coming away again.

  ‘Fucking, fucking fuck!’

  It was the angriest Pyotr had ever seen his friend.

  Grabbing the big rifle from the corner, Kyukov jerked at its bolt, which jammed. He hammered at the weapon with such fury that its magazine dropped away. The round that fell from the clip was fatter than Pyotr’s thumb.

  ‘Wait,’ Pyotr said.

  ‘Why would I fucking wait?’

  ‘A bullet bigger than your dick deserves better.’

  The sky was dark that night; the moon hidden by cloud and no flares lit their brutal little section of the city. An owl hooted from the factory opposite. How it survived and why it didn’t simply leave was a question asked by more than the two hiding in the signal hut. They were the only ones to hear the whimpering from no-man’s-land though. Both machine gunners had survived. If not being dead yet could be called surviving.

  Between the moans of the injured, Pyotr and Kyukov’s hunger and the eerie hoots of the owl, it was their worst night in the signal box yet. They were out of cigarettes, they’d had no food to start with and the tiny room stank from where they’d shat in one corner until neither had anything left to shit.

  Sometime after midnight Pyotr made his decision.

  ‘I’m going out,’ he said.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘You stay here and keep guard.’

  Kyukov shook his head fiercely. ‘I know where you’re going. I know what you’re going to do. I’m starving. I’m near dead with cold. You don’t leave me behind this time.’

  A man had to eat …

  That was how Pyotr Dennisov justified himself.

  He wasn’t to know until later that cannibalism was rife on both sides, with bodies being stripped of their entrails before being buried, and sometimes going missing altogether. You had to have been cold and desperate and on the edge of starvation to understand. He doubted if his friend had any such qualms. But then Kyukov marched to the sound of his own invisible drum.

  Pyotr sharpened the knife. Kyukov used it.

  That was their friendship in a nutshell.

  Neither spoke later of what they’d done out there, under the cover of darkness, in the hollow of a crater, in a wasteland that barely merited being called a siding.

  ‘No bones,’ Pyotr had said. Nothing was to be left at the end that might be used as evidence. So Kyukov had cut flesh from the boy’s flank, and peeled skin from his shoulder, rolling it tightly so that it looked like a fancy document tube.

  ‘I’m done,’ Kyukov hissed.

  ‘Give me a moment …’

  ‘What if they send up another flare?’

  Before dawn, Pyotr crawled out again.

  The girl was as he’d left her, her uniform badly buttoned, recently dead and her eyes now turned to the sky. Her flesh, when he undid the buttons, was as white as he remembered, white as ice and already cold enough to make him shiver.

  He’d removed her hair. All of it.

  He was glad he’d left the rest of her uncut.

  Kyukov’s boy had been enough to feed his cruder hungers.

  An hour later, furious
at the loss of their machine gun, frustrated by their failure to take the siding, the Germans brought up a Panzer that announced itself by smashing down the wall that had concealed its approach. It was huge, frightening, with the Balkenkreuz, the iron cross of the Wehrmacht, stark on its side.

  ‘Fuck,’ Kyukov said.

  ‘Fuck nothing.’ The tank got off one shot before Pyotr jacked an anti-tank bullet into his anti-tank rifle and emptied the entire magazine, all five rounds, straight through the turret’s roof where it was thinnest.

  Few soldiers who retreated from a battlefield in Stalingrad were allowed to live. Pyotr Dennisov and Rustam Kyukov were among that number. Buoyed up by the destruction of the Panzer, the Red Army attacked again, crossing the tracks and overrunning the factory. The battle to take the ruined building lasted thirty-six hours and was fought room by room and floor by floor.

  When it was over, the Red Army set up machine guns on the far side of the factory, anti-aircraft posts on its roof and brought in sappers to repair the rails. By then, Dennisov and Kyukov were across the river and behind the lines, waiting to see a small man who’d recently arrived from Moscow to put some backbone into the Soviet forces.

  ‘What if he asks how we survived without food?’

  ‘We starved, we survived on patriotism, on love of the Motherland, on a desire to do our duty. Eat the damn soup and look grateful.’

  The first thing the fat little man asked was why they’d been cowering in a signal box for days. Because they were traitors? Because they were spineless, gutless cowards? The major with him, the comrade commissar who’d come to their school, actually smiled when Pyotr said that they’d found the big rifle right at the beginning and kept themselves hidden, waiting for something worth shooting.

  ‘What are you grinning at?’ the man asked.

  Kyukov grinned some more. ‘I’m alive. They’re not.’

  At a nudge from his friend, the Tartar explained in atrocious Russian how the Comrade Major had come to the school, how inspiring he’d been, how he and Dennisov had simply wanted to do their duty. How they’d survived on patriotism, on love of the Motherland.

  And the little man listened, his mouth twisting, and finally sighed as if to say as answers went theirs would do. They were to be promoted and given medals. The comrade major would assign them to their next posts. Before that, someone from the army newspaper wanted to talk to them. They were to stand up straight, speak clearly and be sure to say that any man here would have done the same.

  The man from the paper had a camera with a flashgun.

  He took photographs, asked them to spell their names, ordered them to stare heroically into the distance, then told them to look shyly at the camera, and took one final photograph of them with their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  After which, at Kyukov’s suggestion, he gave them his packet of cigarettes and looked shocked when Pyotr produced a silver cigarette case.

  ‘Took this off a Nazi officer.’

  When Kyukov glanced across, his friend smiled. ‘I took it. My friend took his watch. We killed the bastard between us. We’re going to hand them in so they can be sold or melted down to help towards victory.’

  Putting down his camera, the man dug into his pocket for a notebook, licked the stub of his pencil and made a note, nodding approvingly.

  52

  The White Wolf

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Alex stood half naked in falling snow, on the roof of a gymnasium, on an island in the middle of a river, in the middle of winter, swaying from hunger, and wincing at every step Tom made her take. He meant, beyond that …

  Tom was impressed when she simply nodded.

  ‘Tell me if you’re not.’

  Crouching low, he headed for the rear of the roof, keeping close to the edge of the parapet. When he sensed that Alex wasn’t following, he looked back.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  When he gestured her closer, she refused again.

  So he went back to get her and she still wouldn’t move.

  ‘There’s a wolf watching us,’ she said.

  He looked where she pointed but the earth was white, drifts of falling snow putting the dark huts in and out of focus. Nothing out there looked like a wolf to him. He saw Kyukov’s vehicle though, parked to one side.

  ‘We need to get to the Jeep,’ he said.

  It represented their only real hope of escaping from Kyukov.

  As Alex opened her mouth to say something, a yell came from below and she shrivelled inside herself, her shoulders hunching and her face closing down.

  ‘They know we’ve gone,’ she said.

  There was the crash of something being thrown over, followed by the rapid shots of a pistol being emptied into a wall. Someone was taking Alex’s disappearance badly. Wrapping his arm round her shoulders, Tom steered Alex towards the rear of the roof, half holding her up.

  ‘There was a wolf,’ she insisted angrily.

  ‘Did they inject you with anything?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wondered.’

  ‘It was white,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sure it was.’

  Her face set in a scowl and she became, just for a second, the girl Tom remembered from the embassy party; only now she was dressed in his coat, with its collar up and her shoulders hunched, her feet bare and her legs barely covered by the makeshift skirt. She needed clothes. She needed shoes.

  ‘What size are your feet?’

  Alex stumbled to a stop. She looked bemused.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Four,’ she said. ‘They’re four.’

  His were no use then, not that Tom had expected them to be.

  ‘I’ll find you shoes soon,’ he promised.

  She looked up, puzzled. ‘Where?’

  At the rear of the gym was a workshop. That was good. So was the fact that it had a flat roof. She’d be less likely to slip from a flat roof. Beyond that was a walled garden, with ruined greenhouses and rows of snow-covered trees. The garden looked as if it belonged to another building entirely, the demolished monastery perhaps.

  Lowering himself from the parapet, Tom dropped as lightly as he could on to the workshop roof, breathing out when it held. He caught Alex round the hips, felt her slip through his grip and land on her knees.

  She was crying. ‘I’m cold,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll find you some proper clothes too.’

  She nodded uncertainly.

  ‘Keep to the middle,’ Tom suggested.

  They’d crossed the workshop roof and were staring down at the garden when the gym door banged open behind them, the noise sharp on the wind.

  ‘If we go down there,’ Alex whispered, ‘they’ll find us.’

  ‘We have to get to the Jeep.’

  Dropping to the ground, Tom held up his hands to catch her.

  ‘I can do it,’ she said crossly.

  He let her try, furious with himself when she fell.

  ‘I’m okay. I’m okay.’

  Fresh tears gave the lie to her words, and her thin shoulders shook so fiercely that Tom grabbed her, holding her tight for a moment. Her feet were purple and her fingers blue. The ridiculous skirt he’d fashioned provided no warmth. He wasn’t surprised that she looked terrified.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘We should move.’

  Tom smiled. She was right, they should.

  Unbroken snow stretched between them and the garden, with only the scuffs they’d made on landing to show that they’d been here. But the first steps they took would betray them. Falling snow or not, the general and Kyukov would have no trouble following their trail.

  ‘They must have been hungry.’

  ‘What?’ Tom said.

  He followed her gaze to the walled garden, with its heavy wrought-iron gate rusted open. Broken glass topped the walls where snow had slipped away. Alex was right. If you needed glass to keep orphans out of a vegetable garden, they
must have been hungry.

  Mind you, in the 1930s the whole country had been hungry.

  ‘See the arch?’ Tom said. ‘You go first.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Going first is lucky.’

  ‘You mean I have less chance of being shot?’

  Tom sighed. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘What happened to your shoulder?’

  Tom glanced down. He’d forgotten the scar was even there. Although to remember it was to realize it was hurting again. ‘Someone shot me with a crossbow.’

  ‘Who?’ she asked.

  ‘Vladimir Vedenin.’

  Alex’s face tightened.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Tom told her.

  ‘You promise? Really promise.’

  ‘He’s dead and buried. I went to his funeral.’

  ‘Good,’ Alex said. And in her fierceness Tom could see the spark that still burned inside her, the one he hoped would help carry her through this. ‘Did you come to find me?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said, ‘I came to find you.’

  ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘Fox,’ Tom said. ‘Major Tom Fox.’

  He held out his hand, feeling foolish.

  Alex shook it, her fingers purple with cold, her grip childishly weak and her whole body trembling. All the same, she looked him in the eyes. ‘Alexandra Masterton,’ she said. ‘Well, Alexandra Powell, really. It’s complicated. You’re the man who was horrid to me at the party, aren’t you?

  ‘Do you think you can run to that arch?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Please,’ Tom said, ‘try.’

  She limped off, clearing the gap without shots or shouts.

  Tom followed, halting just inside the arch and looking back. Falling snow would fill the tracks they’d made, just not fast enough to hide them. It would, however, help keep them both hidden.

  ‘I need to …’ Alex said.

  He kept guard as she headed for a ruined greenhouse; its sloped roof an uneven board of white squares and black gaps where glass had fallen in. When she reappeared, she was smoothing her makeshift skirt back into place.