War of The Rats - A Novel of Stalingrad - [World War II 01] by David Robbins Page B

live through it, too, she thought. She felt the sadness overtaking her, prodded by Fedya’s scolding. So badly I want to live. But I’m already dead. The Germans took my life, they took my homeland and my good grandparents. All I have left is this soulless body. And I’ve sworn on blood to hurl myself against them until my body breaks, or my life and my tears return one day when the sticks are gone. But I, Fedya, Yuri, this cook, Russia—we are all of us dead right now. And to live again we can only fight. We must not, cannot, do anything else.
     
    Fedya unfolded his arms. “We are not all so brave as you.”
     
    He reached for Tania and held her lightly. She laid her head on his chest, then pulled away.
     
    “You stink.”
     
    The cook returned with steaming plates of kraut and a thick brown hash. He set them on top of a garbage can.
     
    “The fighting comes mostly from that direction,” he said, pointing to a horizon of devastation. “The front line is three kilometers away. The other way is the Volga. Don’t go there. It’s patrolled.”
     
    The cook looked at Fedya and nodded. Fedya returned the courtesy. The little man’s eyes shifted quickly to Tania, unsure of what they would meet there.
     
    The cook spread his palms to her. His flabby chest shook under the splattered apron. He seemed about to cry.
     
    “You can’t understand,” he said.
     
    Fedya answered for her. “Who can?”
     
    The cook wiped his nose on his sleeve and turned to the kitchen. Fedya and Tania emptied their plates. They climbed out of the courtyard and entered the ruins to find the Russian lines. There was little movement in the streets. Nazi squads patrolled the shadows; sandbagged machine gun emplacements glared from the gaping wounds in the walls. Small packs of homeless, ragged citizens wandered trancelike through the charred, pocked, and eerily placid ruins. They dug into the debris to pocket bits of clothing and utensils to help them survive the holocaust of their city. The Germans left these mortal phantoms alone. Tania and Fedya hoped to be similarly ignored, counted among the forsaken.
     
    If they did encounter a suspicious patrol, she’d told Fedya to act retarded, drool, and mumble. She would use hand signals to somehow tell the soldiers that the city asylum had been blown up and the large boy was just a harmless inmate. She’d found him in the streets and was leading him to the Russian rear for evacuation. They were covered in shit because they’d fallen into a ruptured sewer, latrine, whatever. If Fedya could act the fool, the Germans ought to buy it—at least until she could concoct a better plan.
     
    “But don’t worry,” she assured Fedya, “they won’t stop us. We’re unarmed. We’re walking around in the open, no threat to them. And besides, we’re covered in shit, remember?”
     
    “Oh. I keep forgetting that,” he said. “Wonderful. I think I’ll wear shit for the rest of the war. It’s the safest way to go, don’t you think? Like armor.”
     
    They zigzagged through the ruins into the afternoon. A German squad passed them, the soldiers clopping and jingling in their heavy boots and packs. She cursed in a mad, high-pitched Byelorussian dialect while Fedya whooped like an idiot. Only one soldier in the patrol looked at them. He held his nose. The squad jogged into the shell of a building and disappeared up a stairwell.
     
    Ahead, three hundred meters away across a desolate boulevard, was a railroad yard littered with the twisted steel curlicues of torn-up track and burned-out train cars. Just east of the tracks was a large building, five stories high and two blocks long. The windows had been blown out, and streaks of soot showed above each broken window frame, evidence of a gutting fire. Blackened German tanks cluttered the terrain. From where Tania and Fedya stood, the base of the ravaged building, across the open rail yard, was no less than eight hundred meters away.
     
    Tania