War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] (62 page)

“You won’t be any help to her if you pass out from hunger, Sergeant. I’ll send you some bread and cheese. Please eat.”

Zaitsev accepted the food from an orderly, though he ate with only his free hand. Tania lay motionless beside him. Her shallow breathing and her hand, which several times trembled, were the only clues to her clinging life.

He searched for ways to send messages to her. He laid his head down and spoke softly in her ear to tell her stories: of hunts they’d shared, the first time he’d laid eyes on her in the Lazur and how beautiful she’d looked, the icehouse they’d blown up, the first time they’d made love. That he wished she’d been beside him when he’d dueled Thorvald, that it probably would have been the partisan and not the Hare who killed the Headmaster. .

With his finger he drew pictures on her palm of deer and wolves; he sketched bull’s-eyes and faces and the rising sun of Florida, America. He squeezed her hand in rhythms. He held her hand to his cheek and his lips. He wiped away his tears with her thumb.

Every few hours, Zaitsev felt under the blanket for moisture, the way the doctor had done. Each time, when he found her dry, he felt parched himself. It’s such a simple thing, Tanyushka, he thought. Just make water and save your life.

The first time he held up the blanket, he touched her bandages. He remembered the pink and red turmoil he’d seen beneath them, the bits of her sliced away and tossed into a bucket. He lowered the blanket and wept.

Tania’s coma crossed into a second night. Zaitsev rested his head on the bed. Once, an orderly jiggled his arm to wake him, then lifted a half-f urinal left beside Zaitsev’s chair. The orderly smiled hopefully, but Zaitsev shook his head. The urine was his, not Tania’s.

Zaitsev was dozing when her hand twitched. Without lifting his head, he pressed back. When her fingers imitated the squeeze, he raised his face to see her looking at him.

“Hello, Vashinka.”

He had no words ready.

“Tania, I . . .” He stared in wonder. Pink had chased some of the pallor from her face. “How long have you been awake?”

“Not long.”

He held her hand in both of his. “I stayed here, Tania. I never left.”

She tried to bring her other hand around to cover his, but something stopped her. The effort made her wince, but she said through it,

“I know.”

Tania opened one of his palms. She dragged her finger around it in two circles and dotted the center for a bull’s-eye.

Zaitsev brought his lips over hers. Her lips were dry.

She whispered into his cheek. “I’m in a lot of pain, Vasha. Am I dying?”

Zaitsev buried his eyes in her hair. He nuzzled her. If she’s dying, the doctor said, it cannot be stopped.

“I don’t know, Tania.” He wasn’t sure what to tell her. “You lost a lot of blood. They took out one of your kidneys.”

Tania looked at the ceiling. She nodded as if she knew what he would say next. He remembered she was a doctor’s granddaughter.

“We’ve been waiting for the other kidney to start working.”

Two orderlies entered the ward bearing a wounded captain to the bed farthest from Tania. His neck and shoulder were wrapped in fresh white gauze. The man was conscious.

“Careful,” he said to the orderlies lowering his stretcher. The officer propped himself up on his good arm to help the orderlies shift him from the stretcher to the bed.

“Damn,” the man said through gritted teeth. He sucked air.

“Vasha . . .” Tania licked her lips. “I’m thirsty.”

Zaitsev stood to get an orderly’s attention. His hand left hers. She grabbed for him, grunting in pain.

“Vasha. Don’t . . .”

He looked into her wracked face. He wrapped his fingers around hers and felt her rising strength.

“Tania?”

She smoothed the ache in her eyes. “Don’t ... let go.”

Zaitsev smiled and sat. Time and the fates, he thought. I want to stay. To never let her go. How long will the fates let me stay? Do they care what I want?

“Orderly. Some water here.”

One of the orderlies beside the wounded captain left to fetch the water. The other one folded the officer’s stretcher.

The captain lurched to his good shoulder to lie so that he could look at Zaitsev and Tania. His big head was shaved slick, and light reflected off his pate. The man had a large jaw like a horse.

“Damned unlucky,” he said. “She going to be all right?”

“Yes, sir,” Zaitsev answered.

“Me, too. Bullet went clean through.” The captain looked around the ward. “Glad just to keep my arm in this place.” The man grimaced and lay on his back. He kept talking. “Took twenty thousand prisoners yesterday. Germans were damned surprised when we jumped up behind them.”

The orderly came with a cup of water. Zaitsev held Tania’s head up to drink. Water dribbled down her chin when she swallowed. He dried her gently with his sleeve.

Tania laid her head on the pillow. Her eyes were closed.

“We’re winning,” the captain said, then fell silent.

* * * *

THREE

THE CAULDRON

* * * *

THIRTY-ONE

“EVERY SEVEN SECONDS A GERMAN SOLDIER DIES IN
Stalingrad. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five ... six . . . seven. Every seven seconds a German soldier dies in Stalingrad. One . . . two . . . three . . .”

The man beside Nikki got to his feet. He walked to the radio, which sat on a workbench. He tuned in the other military station.

None of the dozen soldiers on the factory floor moved. They sat, each man huddled into himself. The station came in.

“. . . five . . . six . . . seven. Every seven seconds . . .”

The soldier shouted, “God in heaven! What happened to Lale Anderson’s show?”

Another soldier lifted his eyes. “The Reds jam the broadcasts. It comes and goes. She’ll be back on in a little while. Just sit down.”

“God in heaven,” the standing one mumbled again. He walked out the door into the neighboring shop room.

Nikki looked about him. Only that morning, Christmas Eve of 1942, he’d linked up with this motley squad in the depths of the Barricades factory. With these men, Nikki had spent the day improvising Christmas decorations. A small tree was fashioned out of metal rods wrapped together with wire. Cotton balls from medical kits served as bulbs. Stars cut out of colored paper hung from the iron boughs, and cups of oil and water with a wick of twisted threads served for candles beneath the tree.

The soldier who’d walked out in disgust at the jamming broadcast had arrived two hours ago. He, like Nikki, was one of the thousands of German nomads set loose over the city by the demise of their units. This soldier—Nikki did not know his name—had retreated from the outer reaches of the Cauldron on the steppe. In his platoon of engineers, he’d been the last man alive. He wandered east to the city center. When he could stand no more cold, the whipping weather drove him indoors. He walked through the Barricades, unsure of what he was searching for; feeling only a growing hunger and weariness. The men of this squad, as they had with Nikki, invited the engineer to join them for a Christmas Eve meal. Earlier that morning, they’d killed and cooked their two Doberman mascots. The rest of their original company, which had numbered over fifty a month earlier, when they were first assigned to the Barricades, were no longer alive to vote against the feast. The engineer settled into the ring of new comrades and accepted a smoke. He related without emotion the fate of his squad. They’d all died when their vehicle was hit by tank fire in one of the hundreds of skirmishes with the Reds on the rim of the
Kessel.
He’d been lucky; he was riding on the truck’s running board and was blown free of the explosion. He ended his tale with a shrug, repeating a word softly, with a somber laugh. “Lucky.”

Since Thorvald’s death five weeks before, Nikki had also become a battlefield wanderer. Lieutenant Ostarhild was presumed dead on the steppe, but Nikki’s assignment to the intelligence unit had not been countermanded, so he felt free to continue his expeditions around the city. He became a collector of forlorn tales. The men, from the ruins downtown and Mamayev Kurgan to the factories, all believed they’d been forsaken. Their hope that Hitler would rescue the Sixth Army before they were annihilated was being starved and bled out of them an hour at a time.

Despite the Russians’ commanding position on the steppe and the weakened state of the German troops there, the Reds never quit their harassing attacks in the city proper. Nikki understood the Russian tactic: if they can keep us on the defensive here in the city, we can’t switch to the offensive. We can’t break out of the
Kessel.
This is their aim, to eradicate the Sixth Army.

In the face of this constant onslaught, Nikki had witnessed courage and feats of determination that redefined what he knew of the human spirit. German soldiers—exhausted, demoralized, and without enough food, ammunition, or even hope-—had continued to fight with discipline across Stalingrad. The Reds gave them no rest, not even leaving their holiday radio broadcasts untouched.

But if Nikki was to give his intelligence report tonight, he would not tell of the fortitude and order of many of the German troops. He would describe scenes of horror. He’d seen black-eyed men, cannibals, circle like vultures waiting for the wounded to die, to snatch them away while still warm. These ghouls were hunted and shot on sight; special patrols had been organized to ferret them out. Even so, roving bands of human-flesh eaters, fatter and rosier of cheek than their starving comrades, haunted the corridors and rooms of the factories and houses. Their number was growing along with their boldness and desperation.

In his account of these last days in Stalingrad, Nikki would also tell of incredible, numbing stupidity. He’d watched He-IIIs, those few that could find breaks in the weather to fly over the
Kessel,
drop their supplies not on Sixth Army positions but on top of Russians who’d learned to mimic German signal flares. In other places inside the ring, Nikki saw famished German soldiers run to be the first under a parachute when it lowered its cargo to the ground. The men fought each other to tear at the collapsed chute, ripping the silk away to get at the pine crates, shoving like rude piglets. These men opened shipments not of the ham and milk powder, bullets and warm clothing that would keep them alive but tons of marjoram and pepper—this for troops who were killing rats and dogs and grilling them. Another time, the Luftwaffe made the men a gift of a thousand right boots. Nikki’s favorite story in all of Stalingrad this past awful month was the airborne delivery into the Cauldron of a million carefully wrapped Swedish contraceptives.

Mostly, Nikki would report upon doom. Each day over a thousand soldiers in the surrounded pocket died. Many succumbed to wounds suffered against the advancing Reds on the steppe. Others had taken their bullets fighting in the city. But by far, the vast number of corpses Nikki saw piled and protected from the cannibals by their sullen mates had been ravaged by frostbite, typhus, dysentery, or starvation. There was no fuel in the
Kessel
to run generators for heat or tanks for defense or trucks for transport out of the ring. As a Christmas gift to his remaining quarter million men, Paulus allowed the slaughter of the Sixth Army’s last four hundred horses. These were animals that were themselves withering away from too much duty and not enough food. The men, the weather, the fighting, and even the rare laughter were all spoiled and dying in Stalingrad. Everything inside the Cauldron, like a poisoned river, had been seasoned with doom.