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Yury Antonov, waiting for Razin to return from a command post, dozed in a tunnel leading to the river.
He saw sunflowers with blossoms like smiling suns crayoned by children and he heard the insect buzz from the taiga shouldering the wheatfields and he smelled the red polish that his mother used in the wooden cottage.
It had been a languorous Sunday early in September when they had come for him. He had been lying fully clothed on his bed picturing the naked breasts of a girl named Tasya who lived in the next village. His younger brother, Alexander, was sitting on the verandah drinking tea with his father and his mother was in the kitchen feeding the bowl of borsch bubbling on the stove.
After a Komsomol meeting the previous evening he had walked Tasya home. He had kissed her awkwardly, feeling the gentle thrust of her breasts against his chest, and ever since had been perturbed by the intrusion of lascivious images into the purity of his love.
He was almost eighteen, exempt from military service because of a heart murmur triggered by rheumatic fever, and she was seventeen. He was worried that, like other girls, she might be intoxicated by the glamour of the other young men departing to fight the Germans. A farm labourer wasn’t that much of a catch. But at least he was here to stay.
He considered the contents of his room. A small hunting trophy, the glass-eyed head of a lynx, on the wall beside a poster of a tank crushing another tank adorned with a Hitler moustache – he dutifully collected anti-Nazi memorabilia but here on the steppe the war seemed very far way – his rifle, a red Young Pioneer scarf from his younger days, a book of Konstantin Simenov’s poems … Yury himself often conceived luminous phrases but he could never utter them.
He heard a car draw up outside. A tractor was commonplace, a car an event. He peered through the lace curtains. A punished black Zil coated with dust. Two men were climbing out, an Army officer in a brown uniform and a civilian in a grey jacket and open-neck white shirt. Fear stirred inside Yury, although he couldn’t imagine why.
His father called from the verandah: ‘Yury, you’ve got visitors.’ Yury could hear the apprehension in his voice. He changed into a dark blue shirt, slicked his hair with water and went outside.
They were sitting on the rickety chairs beside the wooden table drinking tea. The officer was a colonel; he had a bald head, startling eyebrows and a humorous mouth. The civilian had dishevelled features and pointed ears; he popped a cube of sugar into his mouth and sucked his tea through it. Alexander was walking towards the silver birch trees at the end of the vegetable garden.
The colonel said: ‘I’m from Stalingrad, Comrade Pokrovsky is from Moscow. Have you ever been to Moscow, Yury?’
Yury shook his head. He wondered if Pokrovsky was NKVD.
‘Or Stalingrad?’
‘No, Comrade colonel.’
‘Ah, you Siberians. You’re very insular – if that’s the right word for more than 4 million square miles of the Soviet Union. What’s the farthest you’ve been from home?’
‘I’ve been to Novosibirsk,’ Yury told him.
‘Novosibirsk! Forty miles from here. Well, I have news for you Yury. You’re going farther afield. To Akhtubinsk, eighty miles east of Stalingrad. Please explain, Comrade Pokrovsky.’
The civilian swallowed the dissolved sugar and said to Yury: ‘You are going to serve your country. God knows, you might even become a Hero of the Soviet Union.’
Yury’s father interrupted. ‘He has a bad heart. I have the documents …’ The weathered lines on his face took on angles of worry.
‘Heart condition? According to my information he has a heart murmur. A murmur, comrade! What is a murmur when Russia cries out in anguish?’
The colonel said to Yury’s father: ‘Of course I realise that farm work is just as important as military service,’ and Pokrovsky said: ‘Not that there seems to be much work going on round here. Haven’t you heard about the war effort?’
‘We’ve just finished harvesting one crop. Tomorrow we start on the wheat.’ He spoke with dignity, pointing at the golden fields stroked by a breeze.
‘You Siberians,’ the colonel remarked. ‘You don’t stay on the defensive long, do you? Ask the Germans, you’ve taught them a lesson or two.’
Yury, his emotions competing – apprehension complicated by faint arousal of bravado – waited to find out what the two men wanted.
Pokrovsky spoke. ‘Siberians? Very courageous.’ He stroked one crumpled cheek. ‘But don’t forget the glorious example given by the Muscovites. And by Comrade Stalin. Did you read his speech on November 7th last year?’ Pokrovsky looked quizzically at Yury.
Yury tried to remember some dashing phrase from the speech on the 24th anniversary of the Revolution. It had certainly been a stirring address.
Pokrovsky said: ‘I was in Red Square when he spoke. What a setting. Troops massed in front of the Kremlin, German and Russian guns rumbling forty miles away and Stalin, The Boss, inspired.’
His voice was curiously flat for such an evocation. Then he began to quote. ‘“Comrades, Red Army and Red Navy men, officers and political workers, men and women partisans! The whole world is looking upon you as the power capable of destroying the German robber hordes! The enslaved peoples of Europe are looking upon you as their liberators … Be worthy of this great mission.’”
Yury imagined the little man with the bushy moustache standing on Lenin’s tomb. Heard his Georgian accents on a breeze stealing through the Urals.
“‘… Death to the German Invaders. Long live our glorious country, its freedom and independence. Under the banner of Lenin – onward to victory.’”
Without changing his tone, Pokrovsky said: ‘Do you believe in those qualities, Yury? Freedom for instance?’
‘Of course,’ Yury replied, surprised.
‘Of course, he’s a Siberian,’ said the colonel who was apparently obsessed with their matchless qualities.
Pokrovsky seemed satisfied. ‘As you may have guessed it is your abilities as a hunter that interest us. I understand you’re the best shot in the Novosibirsk oblast?’
‘Second best,’ Yury said promptly. ‘My father is the champion.’
His father took off his black peaked cap and rotated it slowly on his lap.
‘But a little too old to fight, eh?’ The colonel smiled, offering commiseration.
As the sun reached inside the verandah through the fretted eaves steam rose from the dew-soaked floorboards. A tractor clattered lazily in the distance.
Pokrovsky said: ‘There are ten of you. The best shots in the Soviet Union. You will all be reporting to Akhtubinsk. There will be a competition.’
He paused. He enjoyed effect. The colonel took over and Yury sensed that there was little harmony between the two of them. As he talked creases on his forehead pushed at the baldness above them.
‘The other nine are Red Army. Marksmen. But you apparently are exceptional. Your prowess reached the ears of the military commander of the area and he told us about you.’
Yury’s mother peered from the doorway. She was smoothing her dress, printed with blue cornflowers, and her plump features were anxious.
Her husband waved her away. ‘You will forgive me, comrades,’ he said in a tone that didn’t seek forgiveness, ‘but would you please tell me what this is all about?’
Pokrovsky popped another lump of sugar into his mouth. He seemed to be debating with himself. Finally he said: ‘As you know, the Germans attacked Stalingrad last month. The battle is still being fought fiercely and I have no doubt we shall win. But the Germans have introduced a new tactic …’
The colonel explained: ‘The Germans are very good at propaganda. They know we are going to win the Battle of Stalingrad’ – he didn’t sound quite as convinced as Pokrovsky – ‘and so they have to find a hero to bolster their faith. Well, they’ve found one. His name is Meister and he’s a sniper. The best. Ten Russians killed, each with one bullet, in one week. Very soon the German people will be hearing about this young Aryan warrior with eyes like a hawk.’ The colonel smiled. ‘We have to beat the propagandists to the draw.’
Emotions not entirely unpleasant expanded inside Yury. ‘But surely these other marksmen from the Red Army are better than me?’
‘That,’ Pokrovsky said, standing up, ‘is what we are going to find out at Akhtubinsk. Come, pack your things, we haven’t much time.’
Yury’s father said: ‘Do you have any authority, any papers?’
‘Authority?’ Pokrovsky spun out another pause. Then: ‘Oh, we have authority all right. From the Kremlin. After all, the duel will be fought in the City of Stalin.’
***
A rat ran past Antonov, pausing at the mouth of the tunnel, a disused sewer, before jumping into the mud-grey waters of the Volga to swim to the east bank where there was still plenty of food. Antonov doubted whether it would make it: the Red Army had trouble enough getting across.
Where was Razin?
He shivered. The wet-cold of the tunnel had none of yesterday’s expectancy about it. Antonov yearned for snow, but according to the locals – there were said to be 30,000 still on the west bank – it wouldn’t settle until November.
These people professed to dread winter. Antonov suspected that, like Siberians, they deluded themselves. Summer was merely a ripening: winter was truth – the steppe, white and sweet, cold and lonely, animal tracks leading you into the muffled taiga, the song of cross-country skis on polished snow, blue-bright days with ice dust sparkling on the air, and in the evenings kerosene lamps and a glowing stove beckoning you home.
Antonov felt that when his parents had waved goodbye to him outside the cottage, Alexander beside them smiling tremulously, they should have been framed in falling snow. Instead the snapshot in his mind was glazed with late-summer heat. Just the same, whenever he studied the photograph, he felt as though a dressing had just been removed from a wound.
He heard a disturbance at the other end of the tunnel that had been fractured by a shell. He reached for his rifle. ‘Razin?’
No reply. He aimed his rifle into the darkness and a young voice said: ‘Don’t shoot,’ although there wasn’t any fear in it.
The boy reached the light from the river exit and offered Antonov a bucket. ‘Thirsty? It’s been boiled.’ One of the water boys who quenched the Russian soldiers’ thirst and fed them scraps of food. They also fraternised with the Germans, subsequently describing uniforms and positions to the commanders of the encircled 62nd Army.
‘No thanks.’ Antonov grinned at him; his face was sharp and starved; Antonov had read Dickens at school and he reminded him of a pickpocket in Oliver Twist. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Misha.’
‘Shouldn’t you be on the other side of the river, Misha?’
Although he was only eighteen Antonov felt paternal. He had discovered that war confused age.
‘No point. I can only help over here. In any case the kids on the other side have got families.’
‘You haven’t?’
‘My parents were killed on the thirteenth.’
The thirteenth of September, a Sunday, was the day when the Germans had launched an all-out assault on the city. One month ago and the boy spoke as though he had lost his parents when he was in the cradle. War also confused time.
‘I’m sorry,’ Antonov said.
Misha said: ‘My father was a baker. He used to bake bread for the militia. What was your father?’
‘He’s still alive,’ Antonov said. ‘He works on a State farm. We grow a lot of grain. Maybe some of it found its way into your father’s bread.’
Misha shook his head. ‘Our flour came from the steppe near here. But the Fritzes flattened all the corn. Soon we’ll flatten theirs. Won’t we?’ he asked.
‘Of course. How old are you, Misha?’
The boy said he was nine and then, as though ashamed of the admission, picked up his bucket and crawled back along the tunnel.
Where was Razin?
***
Before departing for the Red Army transit camp Antonov had been allowed to see Tasya.
‘In the bad old days of serfdom,’ the colonel told him in the back of the Zil, ‘it was a punishment to be drafted. But you were allowed seven days in which to drink and fornicate before you left. Today you’ve got time for a kiss.’
‘But today it’s an honour to serve in the army,’ Pokrovsky reminded both of them. ‘Life in the barracks is as good as anywhere else. And life is good everywhere in the Soviet Union,’ he reminded himself. ‘You have a good education, good food, fair wages, paid holidays …’ Pokrovsky had a tendency to recite.
Yury who had never doubted any of this nodded as he watched his home recede in the distance. A lone horseman stood on the brow of a sloping wheatfield.
Tasya was wearing a white blouse embroidered in silk with red and blue daisies. Her flaxen hair was polished and thickly coiled and he realised she had been expecting him. The driver of the Zil, it materialised, was also a photographer and it just happened that he had a camera and plates with him.
Yury kissed Tasya, feeling her lips part slightly. But the farewell wasn’t complicated by any of the carnal visions that had visited him that morning.
Twenty-four hours later he was in the Red Army. Bewildered by the casual and coarse attitudes of his new comrades, shocked by instant antagonisms, discovering what he had always known but never appreciated, that the Soviet Union consists of many races.
Of the other nine marksmen assembled at Akhtubinsk one was a lieutenant, evacuated from beleaguered Leningrad and billeted in a separate hut, one was a scheming Georgian, four were Muscovites and full of it, two were Ukrainians and one was an Uzbek from Samarkand who looked like a Bedouin.
On the first day Antonov, the only new recruit in the group, was given an ill-fitting uniform, a Mosin-Nagant, mess tin and irons, two grey blankets and a mattress filled with straw. The food was uneatable but by the second day he was wolfing it down.
On that day the ten competitors went to the range. In the truck taking them there the Muscovites kept themselves to themselves but talked about Antonov.
‘I hear he uses barleycorn for sights.’
‘Shoots with a flintlock.’
‘Good at shooting bears – if they’re big enough.’
As Antonov’s rivals had been in the Army for some time they were familiar with the heavy Mosin-Nagants whereas he had only used a light hunting rifle.
He and the lieutenant scored the least points.
On the third day he had his hair cropped and his wallet stolen from his tunic while he was shaving in the communal wash-house. The wallet was returned later; nothing was missing, but a photograph of Tasya, taken on the day of his departure, had been embellished with pudenda and balloon breasts. A scrawled caption compared her to a cow about to fornicate with a yokel.
Antonov sat quietly on the edge of his bed for a while, unable to comprehend such grossness. They were all Soviets so why should there be such hostility to someone from the steppe? However that sort of antagonism narrowed the field; the perpetrator had to be from a city. He glanced at the four Muscovites who had formed an enclave at one end of the billet; two looked faintly embarrassed, one was smiling, the fourth, grey-faced and built like a wrestler, lay on his back, hands behind his head, scrutinising the corrugated-iron ceiling.
Antonov who had never experienced physical violence walked over to his bed and showed him the photograph. ‘Did you do this?’
Yawning, the Muscovite commented obcenely on the photograph.
Antonov pulled him up by his tunic and drew back his fist to hit him but suddenly he wasn’t there and then he was attacking with fists, and booted feet. Antonov fell against the wall, hands in front of his face to protect himself from the fusillade of blows.
‘Of course we have Don Cossack blood in our veins,’ his father said as, guns in their hands, they waited for movement in the snow-quiet taiga.
And now his fist was a rifle and he was peering through the sights, lowering the barrel, deviating to allow for evasive tactics. And now the fist was a bullet, on target. The Muscovite staggered back, hit the far wall and slid bloodily to the floor.
After that no one commented upon Antonov’s rustic background.
‘I hear,’ Pokrovsky said later, ‘that you’ve been brawling.’
Antonov, standing to attention in front of Pokrovsky’s desk in a small hut that smelled of carbolic, didn’t reply: his split lip and swollen cheeks answered the question.
‘We should think ourselves lucky he didn’t damage your eyes.’
We?
