War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (42 page)

“Nikolay,” he asked, “how did you get hit?”

Kulikov looked again at Baugderis. “Sniper.”

Zaitsev’s jaw tightened.

Kulikov struggled to sit up. “The attack came just after dawn. No way we could stay here. But ...” He snorted, almost in a somber laugh. “I guess we did anyway.”

Zaitsev waited for Kulikov to gather himself.

“We figured we’d head out from this end of the trench. Maybe we could make it to the icehouses if we ran. We moved this way, tugging on the strings one last time. We didn’t wait long, just enough to see what we could flush out. We got one more.”

Nikolay touched his cheek. His fingers trembled over the lumps of blood built up like gathered wax. He brushed his hair at the temple and found it packed hard.

He grunted when his fingertips neared the wound.

“Leave it,” Zaitsev told him. “We’ll get it fixed soon.”

Kulikov dropped his hand and chuckled painfully, nervously, at his good luck.

He continued. “Once we got here, I pulled the string and spotted. We were in a hurry at this point. Nothing happened, and we were about to move to the last position. Then, and I can’t tell you why, I saw a German poke his head up. I called Zviad into the shot. He fired, and just like that he got hit.”

On the top of the trench, lying in the dirt where it had been when the bullet struck, was Baugderis’s Moisin-Nagant. Zaitsev pulled the rifle down and gasped.

The telescopic sight was shattered. A bullet had gone into it, smashing through the tube into Baugderis’s right eye.

Baugderis had not had even the two seconds it took to fire and look away from the scope before the German killed him.

Zaitsev pulled back the rifle’s bolt to pop out the spent casing. He hadn’t had a chance to move a muscle, he thought. Baugderis fired, watched his bullet hit, and died on his feet.

“I didn’t see where it came from,” Kulikov said, shaking his head. “I ... I was so . . . when he got hit, it came out of nowhere. It scared the shit out of me, Vasha. I guess I must have stood up.”

Zaitsev nodded. “Just for a second,” he mumbled, more to himself than to Kulikov.

Thorvald. He was here. And the bastard wants me to know it.

“Just for a second,” Kulikov echoed. “There must have been two or three of them. We . . . we stayed too long.”

Kulikov’s eyes grew shiny. He looked again at Baugderis. A tear dripped a glossy trail over his bloody cheek.

“We were making a game out of it, Vasha,” he whispered. “There was no reason. We should have left last night. But we stayed. Just for the fucking kills.”

Zaitsev nodded. He understood. This was Nikolay Kulikov crying, one of the best and cleverest hares. This was a sniper, a trained and focused assassin, in tears, lamenting the killing. Zaitsev knew what Kulikov had witnessed: he’d seen his own soul. He’d caught the stain of murder on it and recoiled in horror. This was what the charnel house had done to Kulikov and was doing to the men of both armies. It turned them first into righteous killers for their country, then into predators for sport and entertainment, or for vengeance. How many times can you pull a trigger and destroy a life before the realities switch on you, until the thing you are doing is killing your own spirit?

Kulikov had put bullets into close to a hundred men, Zaitsev almost twice that many. Kulikov and Baugderis had turned the art and need and ugliness of killing into a game to ease the days. Zaitsev thought back to the slaughter in the Nazi officers’ bunker. That night, troubled by the senselessness of the act and its utter lack of military necessity, he’d been lucky. He, too, had felt the malady of his murders, as sharply as Kulikov felt his now. But Zaitsev had been near the flame of Tania to melt the ice in his heart, to tame his pain until he could bridle it. Now Kulikov sat in this trench staring over his bloody shoulder at the fruit of his own. sport, the death mask of Baugderis, and rued the rot of Stalingrad in his soul.

Whose fault is it? Zaitsev wondered to Kulikov’s sobs. Isn’t this what we’re told to do, every moment? Kill the Nazis. Beat them into the ground, bite them, claw them, blow them up, stab, shoot, kill them until they are no longer on our soil. We’re in a frenzy, all of us, we’re rabid, all of us. Every word we hear and read, in
In Our Country’s Defense
and
Red Star,
kill the Germans. The
politrooks,
kill the Germans or die. The vodka which never seems to dry up for us, stay drunk, stay dim-witted and numb, kill the Germans. Wherever you find them, in battle, taking a piss, sleeping in their bunks, they’re never less than what they are: invading, miserable, stinking Nazis, the enemies of Communism, never forgiven, never pitied, never saved. Kill the Nazis or die.

Zaitsev laid the rifle across the dead Georgian’s lap. He unbuttoned the coat and ran his hand to the inside pocket to pull out Zviad Baugderis’s Komsomol card.

“Let’s go, Nikolay. Can you stand?”

Kulikov struggled to his feet. Zaitsev steadied him. He pressed on the wounded man’s back to remind him to stay low.

Zaitsev picked up Kulikov’s periscope. He looked around on the trench floor.

“Where’s your rifle?”

Kulikov looked down also. “It’s right . . . where is it?”

The rifle was gone.

Zaitsev felt as if he had fallen amidst the floes in the Volga. Cold needles nicked at his skin.

He’s been here, he thought. He’s been in this trench.

In his mind’s eye, Zaitsev saw the high black boots of the Nazi colonel walking where he now stood.

Perhaps he left a clue? No, not him.

He looked one last time at Baugderis. This isn’t enough? he thought. The bastard is making his own sport now, collecting trophies of his kills.

Or no, wait. Not trophies. He knew he’d shot two snipers today, didn’t he? He had to come see if one of them was me. That’s his assignment. When he kills me, he goes home.

He’s got my picture from
In Our Country’s Defense.

The Headmaster waited for the German attack to move past, then he came out behind it. Now he knows he missed me. And he took the Moisin-Nagant as a bonus. It’s better than his Mauser, and he knows that, too.

Zaitsev ducked lower in the trench and pushed Kulikov ahead of him. Is Thorvald still in those buildings? Is he dug in and waiting for me to come to the rescue of one of my hares? Is this a trap? Is Nikolay a bait? Or did he leave Kulikov alive to tell me how incredible his shooting was?

“Come on, Nikolay,” he said. “Let’s go. Quickly.”

* * * *

NINETEEN

THORVALD ROLLED HIS WHITE CAMOUFLAGE SLEEVE
down over his wristwatch. Nikki had been gone for close to an hour.

He looked again out the window through the dust and smoke wheeling under the swelling sun. He lay back. His body recalled the night spent there, the tongue-and-groove flooring unyielding to his back. The boy certainly moves carefully, he thought. Four hundred meters out, four hundred back, and it takes him an hour to do it. Patience as a tool, a weapon. Nikki understands. Nikki has the stuff of a sniper. I may train him myself when we get back to Berlin.

Thorvald wrapped his arms again around his rifle to rest them on his chest. He’d lain like this since Nikki left, like a corpse clutching a rifle instead of a lily. He raised his head to gaze down his white canvas tunic and pants to his boots. He clicked his toes together once, enjoying the slapstick of the move. Still alive, he thought. Still kicking. He touched his nose to the rifle barrel. The gun had grown metallic cold now, the warmth of the two spent bullets long drifted out of its black skin. The smell of oil and smoke, of flash and speed, trickled from the opening onto his cheek. Thorvald hugged the gun. He rubbed the bottom of his stubbled chin against the nub of the open sight at the end of the barrel. The rifle in his arms represented all that he was not. It was the missing part of him, the hardness and clarity not in his own flesh. The gun holds its spirit well, he thought. It smells of the kill, it feels of its nature: deadly, cold, hard. It is complete, resolved.

The sounds of the German attack flitted in the window. Before he left, Nikki had said that it probably wasn’t Zaitsev lying out there in the trench. The Hare wouldn’t have made those mistakes, wouldn’t have stayed to the bitter end just for the kills. That’s beneath him, not worthy of the legend. Bad form. No, Thorvald thought, this Zaitsev is not a sportsman, no mere marksman like me. He’s a hunter. He likes his prey in the wild.

Thorvald looked into the charred rafters. He focused on a sliver of ceiling plaster, hanging by some thin force, swinging in the moving chill. He was learning more every day about Zaitsev even as he learned about Stalingrad. The two, he thought, the man and the city, are clearly inseparable. They are exact opposites and thus perfect complements. The city is a cruel, indiscriminate battleground. It is misery incarnate, with its lice, filth, and terrible faces, death and injury infecting every shadow. Stalingrad is a fallen thing, jagged and ugly. It screeches and shakes with each thrust of pain like an old dying mule. But Zaitsev, he stays silent under the city’s screams. He is the solid, quiet ice and dicing cold of the Russian dawn. He has will. He’s not stripped naked like the city. He’s clothed in pride with his muttlike Siberian determination to endure. This sergeant with the forest in his veins, he doesn’t even know where he is. He thinks he’s still in the damned woods, somewhere in the mountains. He doesn’t realize the colors are gone. The forest has burned down, and in that blaze the first victims were preordained: honor, order, and mercy, the very traits that elevate us above Zaitsev’s precious wild beasts. As told in the great operas of Wagner, the ethics of Schopenhauer, the superman of Nietzsche, we are lifted above the animals, we are the more noble creatures. But in vicious battle, where men yearn only to kill each other, the raging heat of their hatred cremates their humanity. They become no more than savage, frightened brutes. Zaitsev hunts their animalness; he finds them by it and destroys them for it.

Zaitsev won’t wake up, him and his one-man-one-bullet credo, his morality; he’s sleepwalking. Ridiculous, the notion of killing with honor—it’s an oxymoron. So there it is. The Hare is so different from Stalingrad that the city masks him, even protects him, because in some way, some intuitive hunter’s way of being
in
but not actually
of
the forest, the city cannot even touch him.

No. That is not Vasily Zaitsev dead in the trench. Not yet.

* * * *

NIKKI CALLED UP THE STAIRS. THORVALD HAD NOT
heard him approach.

“Colonel, I’m back. Come down.”

Thorvald rose stiffly to his feet. His joints ached from the ninety minutes of cold and inactivity. “Well?” he asked, descending the steps. “How did we do?”

Nikki hefted a long Russian rifle with a scope. “There were two snipers down, sir. No Zaitsev.”

“Hmmm. Well, no surprise there. I suppose we’ll have to be good instead of lucky, eh, Nikki?”

Thorvald pointed at the Moisin-Nagant. He’d seen plenty of them at Gnössen, had taught on them. They were good rifles, dependable in rough conditions if a little slow.

“If there were two dead,” he asked, pointing at the Moisin-Nagant, “why only one rifle?”

Thorvald handed his Mauser to Nikki in exchange for the Moisin-Nagant. The Russian weapon was heavier. It felt awkward, crude, like a plow horse, he thought. But plow horses, the Russians understand, don’t break down.

“Well, Corporal,” he prodded, “where’s the other rifle?”

“The other rifle,” Nikki said, his face distant, perhaps back in the trench seeing something again, “was no good. I left it.”

“That’s fine. No need carrying damaged guns across that rail yard. You know, and I did mention it before you left, I thought something might be wrong with one of those Russian rifles.”