THIRTEEN

 

 

TANIA LOOKED UP FROM HER JOURNAL AT THE SOUND OF metal clanging against the bunker. A tin mess plate clattered on the dirt floor. Sidorov, a young private with the sniper unit for only two weeks, had thrown the plate at Shaikin.

 

The two men’s voices swelled. She stared across the room at them, both standing, ready for blows.

 

Zaitsev and Kulikov jumped to the two antagonists. Chekov did not move.

 

Kulikov took Shaikin’s arm to pull him back. Zaitsev stepped between the two flushed faces.

 

“Shut up! Both of you!” Zaitsev shouted over them. He turned to Shaikin. “Ilya! What’s going on?”

 

Shaikin yanked his arm out of Kulikov’s grip. He rammed his finger at Sidorov. “I’ve had enough of this bastard! He’s got seventy kills and he thinks it makes him a hotshot. He’s over here running his mouth. But he’s padding his kills.”

 

Sidorov laughed. “You’re a jealous son of a bitch.” He said to Zaitsev, “He’s only got thirty-six and he’s mad at me. He ought to be mad at himself.”

 

Shaikin snatched his sniper journal off the floor and shoved it at Zaitsev. “Here,” he seethed, “look for yourself. Every one is a machine gunner, a spotter, a sniper, or an officer. Every one a priority target!” Shaikin glared at Sidorov. “Go ahead, hotshot! Show him your journal.”

 

Shaikin wheeled on Zaitsev. “You know what he does? He shoots foot soldiers during an attack instead of machine gunners or officers. He’s supposed to be protecting the troops, but he’s just racking up kills for himself. He’s a fucking menace.”

 

Zaitsev faced Sidorov. He asked quietly, “And?”

 

The skinny private’s eyes blinked with his own anger.

 

“That’s crap!” He pointed out through the bunker wall to the battlefield. “The machine guns aren’t operating in my sector. I shot one gunner a week ago and they haven’t replaced him. This lying dick is just too slow to get seventy kills, and he’s mad at me about it.”

 

Zaitsev handed Shaikin’s journal back to him without looking through it.

 

“Go sit down, Ilya.”

 

Shaikin slumped on the floor next to Tania. He slapped his hands in his lap.

 

Zaitsev spoke now with Sidorov. “You have seventy kills. That’s excellent. You know I have twice that many.”

 

“Excellent for you as well, Chief Master Sergeant.”

 

“And what do you think,” Zaitsev asked, “of Shaikin’s thirty-six kills? Truthfully.”

 

Sidorov shrugged as if to say he would have chosen diplomacy but the Hare specified he wanted the truth.

 

“I cannot say the same, Chief Master Sergeant.”

 

“Shaikin is not excellent?”

 

Shaikin tensed. He moved to push himself off the floor. Tania laid a hand on his arm.

 

Sidorov shook his head with dramatic reluctance.

 

“Comrade Sidorov,” Zaitsev said, raising his chin, “you will transfer from this unit immediately.”

 

Sidorov stepped back as if pushed. “Chief Master Sergeant, what? . . .”

 

“There’s no room for your attitude in the hares, Sidorov. We are a small group and we are Communists. We do not bicker over personal achievements. Excellence is not measured in numbers or scores. Private Shaikin doesn’t need seventy kills to be as good a sniper as you. Dismissed.”

 

Zaitsev stared at the private. He and Sidorov were close in size, but Zaitsev seemed by far the bigger man.

 

“Dismissed, private.”

 

Zaitsev waited for Sidorov to collect his journal, rifle, and pack and leave beneath the blanket hanging over the doorway. Shaikin got to his feet after Sidorov left. Tania stood also. She knew Shaikin to be a reliable and resourceful sniper. For the past three weeks, since they’d graduated from the sniper school, the two had worked the same sector. Almost half the kills in Shaikin’s journal bore her signature as spotter and witness. In turn, Shaikin had witnessed twenty-three of her thirty-one kills.

 

With Sidorov’s departure, there were now twenty-two hares and bears left of the original thirty. Zaitsev said that when the snipers got down to twenty, he would teach ten more to keep the strength of the unit always between twenty and thirty. He’ll be teaching another class soon, Tania thought. Kostikev died last night, blown apart. He stepped on a mine during a commando raid deep behind German lines. Kostikev had been the mission’s point man, their creeping assassin in the lead. The reputation of the hares was growing; their members were being requested throughout the division for special duties with squads outside the sniper cadre. Kostikev had been hurrying back; he was just south of the Lazur when he tripped the mine. Shaikin and Tania had tipped a bottle of vodka for Kostikev, the brave, gold-toothed killer whose mouth always flashed but rarely spoke.

 

Sidorov was the first in either the hares or the bears to be asked to leave. This was shameful. The others who’d departed their ranks had done so only by giving up their lives.

 

Zaitsev spoke to Shaikin. “Sidorov’s sector bordered on yours, didn’t it?”

 

Shaikin nodded. Sidorov had been one of four snipers assigned to an area on the eastern slope of Mamayev Kurgan, about twenty-five hundred square meters. Zaitsev and Medvedev had divided the entire front line into fifteen such sectors. Two two-man teams were assigned by the sergeants to work those areas with the most combat activity or to support Red troop movements whenever word came down from Command.

 

The sectors were reviewed nightly for shifts in combat activity. At all times, a minimum of ten sectors were manned with capable and experienced snipers. Zaitsev tried not to move the teams too frequently; he wanted them to get familiar with the terrain in their areas.

 

Shaikin and Tania had been shuttled between sector five, their current sector, and sector six, swapping with Sidorov’s unit. Both were on the eastern base of Mamayev Kurgan.

 

Each unit was assigned a leader; Shaikin, Kulikov, and Chekov were the heads of their sectors, as Sidorov had been in his. These leaders met nightly, whenever they could attend, here in the bunker Zaitsev shared with Medvedev. Tania had recently begun to attend these evening meetings with Shaikin, at her request. Shaikin, her friend and partner, agreed to let her come to the meetings, but only as an observer. Afterward, the two designed their next day’s strategy together.

 

Now Zaitsev turned to Tania. He’d kept his distance since her costly error two weeks earlier. He had rarely addressed her in that time, communicating her assignments through Shaikin. For the first week, she was allowed only to spot for Shaikin. Finally, she was granted permission by Zaitsev to shoot. She set herself the goal of learning Shaikin’s care and patience in the hunt, to gain better control over her passions when a Nazi was in her sights. She’d done so with deadly, gratifying results.

 

Tania thought constantly about the day Fedya had been killed. She knew she’d disgraced herself. After the incident, a chill had spread between her and Zaitsev like the ice growing in the Volga. Standing before him now, looking at his flat face, his hands, his body, all under such control, like a fox or a gliding bird, she wanted him to call her “partisan” again, to look in her journal and see how controlled she had been, what a good hare she’d become. She wanted to swallow vodka with him again in the trenches, to hunt with him, to be with him at dawn, to be in his eyes.

 

“Private Chernova,” Zaitsev said to her, “you will take over Sidorov’s place. He’s been working with Redinov, Megolin, and Dyenski. You know the bounds?”

 

Tania nodded. “Yes, Chief Master Sergeant.”

 

This was the moment she’d been piecing together in her heart, bit by bit like a puzzle. Now it was complete. She was renewed. Zaitsev had put her in charge of sector six. The probation, dating from the moment he’d struck her, was done.

 

Zaitsev looked at her sternly. “There are several German snipers working in that sector. Mamayev Kurgan is hot.”

 

Shaikin, still standing beside her, spoke up.

 

“It’s been hot for weeks, Chief Master Sergeant. Tania has dueled with a dozen German snipers. They’re all in her journal with my signature.”

 

Zaitsev smiled at her. The first smile from the Hare in too long a time.

 

Call me “partisan,” Tania wished, but he did not.

 

Zaitsev asked Shaikin to make do for a few more days until he could assign him someone to replace Chernova in his sector.

 

Shaikin elbowed Tania in the side. “Better send two.”

 

Tania felt the urge to go out right then, in the dark and blowing cold, to hunt. She touched Shaikin on the arm for his trust in her.

 

A bellow erupted from outside the doorway.

 

“Bullets and borscht!”

 

The blanket to the bunker swept aside. An icy wind followed the broad back of Atai Chebibulin, a burly old Bashkir from the village of Chishma in Turkmenia. Atai was the sniper unit’s courier, the man who brought them ammo and rations.

 

Tania rarely heard Atai speak to the snipers other than to announce his arrival with his preamble “Bullets and borscht,” and to say “T’ank you” in his halting Turkic dialect. But on one occasion the week before, Atai had come into the bunker earlier than usual, near dusk, when Tania was alone, waiting for more cartridges. She talked to him then. He told her he was a Moslem and that his son Sakaika had died here in Stalingrad.

 

Chebibulin knelt. He slid the harness for the large tin soup canister off his back. He laid the container in the center of the floor and took from a gunnysack a dozen boxes of cartridges. From his coat pocket a bottle of vodka appeared. This he handed to Chekov, who dove forward for it.

 

Since her first sight of Chebibulin weeks ago, while still a sniper trainee, Tania had been amazed at the Bashkir’s ability to produce food every night for the snipers. He never arrived empty-handed; he was always burdened, grunting under the weight of ammo and rations. Chebibulin carried no rifle or grenades. All his strength was used to deliver whatever the snipers needed. If Atai were a sniper, thought Tania, he would certainly be a bear. He moves like an ox, with his banging tin canister and bowls and his shy mumble.

 

Chekov tipped the vodka bottle back like a circus sword eater. After several gulps he called out, “Donkey! It’s not borscht again, is it? I hate cold soup. It was cold last night.”

 

Atai turned his back to Chekov, who busied himself again with the bottle.

 

Zaitsev walked to Chekov and reached for the vodka.

 

“Eat some soup, Anatoly, before it gets cold on you again.”

 

Chekov handed Zaitsev the bottle and moved to the canister. He flipped open the flimsy top and kneeled to inhale the steam from the soup.

 

“Ah, the Donkey ran here fast tonight,” he said, looking at Chebibulin’s back. “Potato soup.”

 

Shaikin said to Chekov. “That’s enough, Anatoly.”

 

Tania added her voice. “That’s enough.”

 

Chekov looked up from the cauldron. The vodka had already reddened his eyes.

 

“What’s the matter? You two taking sides with the Donkey?”

 

Before Tania could answer, Chebibulin turned on Chekov.

 

“Donkey! Why Donkey! Why you call me that?”

 

The graying Bashkir’s body was tensed, his big hands working at his sides. He blew out from under his large, drooping moustache. His chin, stippled with a dense salt-and-pepper stubble, worked as though he were chewing on his growing anger, trying to swallow it.

 

Chekov looked at Tania and Shaikin. Kulikov muttered and put his head back into his journal. Zaitsev, in his corner, ran his fingers up and down the vodka bottle.

 

“Come on, Tanyushka, Ilyushka, all this old man does is carry food back and forth,” Chekov muttered. “He’s no soldier. He doesn’t fight. Don’t give me a hard time sticking up for him. He plods back and forth. He’s a donkey. So what? Let’s eat.”

 

Tania put her hand on Chebibulin’s thick shoulder. “Atai, tell me again about Sakaika. I want the others to hear it.”

 

Chebibulin stared at the ground, chewing his mustache.

 

Tania watched Chekov spoon some of the white potato soup into a battered bowl.

 

“His name is not Donkey, Anatoly. It’s Atai Chebibulin. And if you weren’t such a mean drunk, you might have a little more respect. This man’s son—”

 

Chebibulin raised his thick hands. “No, I,” he said to her. “Is OK. I tell.”

 

Tania sat next to Shaikin. Chekov stepped aside, reaching out his open hand in a gesture to the old man, ceding him the stage. He bowed with open sarcasm.

 

Chebibulin sat cross-legged in the center of the room with his back to Chekov. He grunted as he folded his legs.

 

“Three month ago, I take Sakaika, is my boy, to train in Chishma. He in army. I take him down in cart, long way. At train, I see army horses eating hay, drinking water. I think OK, I get free drink and hay for my horse, too. I tie him to post with army horses. Train crowded, many army. I lose Sakaika. I go in every car, calling boy’s name. No answer. I lose.”

 

The old Bashkir narrowed his eyes. His hand scratched his matted, graying hair.

 

“OK, I say myself, I say goodbye already. Sakaika know. I go back to horse, he gone. Army put him on train with rest of horses. I got no way home, no horse to pull cart. I need horse for farm. I go up and down, shouting, ‘Army stole my horse!’ I call horse name, Prinza, and I hear him stomp. Brrrrr.”

 

Chebibulin blew through his moustache to make the flapping, rattling horse noise.

 

“I jump on train, find my horse with army horses. I go to soldier. ‘Hey, this my horse.’ Soldier shake his head, he say no can help. Another soldier, another, and no can help. Then train move and I try jump off. One soldier grab me. He say, ‘Hey, where you going, old man?’ I say I jumping off, you keep my horse, I walk home, OK. Man say we need you in army, all Russians fight. I say, ‘Where Sakaika?’ This soldier, he help find. I talk with Sakaika, we say OK, we go fight, we go father and son. Army give back my horse, one more horse and new cart. Me and Sakaika, we go in same regiment, Thirty-ninth Guards. Come to Stalingrad. Many fighting. Many dead. Day and night I going with dead boys to river, always coming back with bullets and borscht.”

 

Chebibulin smiled beneath his moustache at his signature phrase. Then, knowing the end of the story, his smile fell. He looked down again into his lap and shook his head.

 

“Two week after we come Stalingrad, I find Sakaika. He got bullet in chest at fight for river landing. I put him in cart, drive like crazy man to hospital. Then big bomb kill my horses.”

 

The old man looked up now, at Zaitsev. “I pull cart myself but too slow. Sakaika dead.”

 

His eyes stayed fixed on Zaitsev. Tania sensed Chebibulin’s determination that Zaitsev, head of the snipers, command respect for him from Chekov. It was not Atai’s way to challenge a man to his face.

 

“I put Sakaika on boat myself. He got buried on other side. I go over there sometime, later, when war here over. First I go back to regiment, tell captain I fight for Sakaika, I got his gun. Captain tell me no, Atai, I get you new horse, you too important man for just bullets. You man for bullets and borscht.”

 

Chebibulin rose. “Then,” he said, “I meet Danilov. Fat little Danilov. Communist, OK? He ask me to take care of you, take care of snipers, important soldiers. You the best, he say to me, I the best. I take care of you,” he said, looking now for the first time at Chekov, “and you call me Donkey. I not Donkey. I Atai Chebibulin, father of hero Sakaika.”

 

Chebibulin fell silent. After a moment, he moved to the canister and began to pour soup into the tin bowls. Chekov walked to Zaitsev and took the vodka bottle.

 

“Chebibulin?” Chekov spoke, holding the bottle out to the kneeling old man.

 

The Bashkir shook his head. “No. Is sin to drink spirits. Not Moslem way.”

 

Chekov knelt beside Chebibulin to set the bottle on the ground. He held out his empty bowl. He let the old man pour another helping into it.

 

“Here,” Chekov said, offering it.

 

“No, I not take your food. You soldiers.”

 

Chekov pushed the soup at Chebibulin.

 

“And you are Atai Chebibulin,” he said, “father of hero Sakaika. Here.”

 

Chebibulin looked into Chekov’s eyes. Tania watched closely. She saw the fearlessness of age in the old man’s face. She understood the nature of his courage, knew it to be simple resignation. He had nothing left to lose now that he had lost his son, nothing left except the days that make up a life that has given up its gravity. Tania looked at Chekov. She saw him match the old man’s stare, the daring of youth in his eyes, with not enough of life seen yet to understand what he stood to lose. She knew the hearts of both men, believed she had both of them beating inside her. She imagined that these two men kneeling in the center of the bunker, facing each other, were the two sides of a magic mirror. These are my two sides, she thought; I want to live, I want to die. She closed her eyes.

 

“No,” she heard Chebibulin say, “I not take your food. Tell me I not Donkey.”

 

Zaitsev answered. “You are not Donkey, Atai,” he said. “I make you a hare. You are fast and brave, and a friend.”

 

Tania opened her eyes. She smiled at Zaitsev, who was not looking at her.

 

“Yes?” Chebibulin looked at Chekov.

 

Chekov shrugged. “Yes.”

 

“Then I give you this.” Chebibulin reached into his coat for another bottle of vodka. He sat it on the floor.

 

Kulikov snapped his fingers. He popped his index finger against his throat, the Russian signal for vodka thirst. Chekov tossed the bottle to him. Kulikov pulled out the rag cork and tipped the bottle up.

 

Chebibulin lifted the empty soup canister, leaving the filled bowls on the floor. He hefted the container over his back and pushed the blanket aside, making to leave.

 

“Good night, hare,” Zaitsev said. “Travel safely.”

 

With his hand holding up the blanket, Chebibulin looked back at Zaitsev. “With all this drinking in your hares,” he said, “it’s OK. I stay Donkey. T’ank you.”

 

* * * *

 

CAPTAIN IGOR DANILOV WALKED UNDER THE RLANKET, letting it slide off him as he stepped sideways into the bunker. He kept his hands jammed in his pockets, shaking his shoulders from the night chill outside. Tania was surprised to see the speed with which the little commissar could shimmy his body. He was like a horse or a Tatar dancing girl. She smiled at the image of a round, dark, and hairy Danilov in a veil.

 

“Mail call,” the commissar said. “The Hare has a letter.” He held up two wrinkled envelopes and dropped one in Zaitsev’s lap. According to Red Army custom, letters were to be read aloud so the gathered soldiers could share in the sentiments from home. The reader was allowed to edit bad news or sensitive words but was obliged to read out the bulk of the letter. Though mail was rare here on the front, Shaikin’s wife had managed to get several letters through. She and his children had been transported from their home in Georgia to the far east, to Novosibirsk in Siberia, part of Stalin’s industrial migration to save the Soviet Union’s factories from the Germans. She had become Tania’s favorite correspondent, telling her husband and, unwittingly, many in the sniper unit, about her garden, the poor quality of fabric available for the children’s clothes, the ominous beauty of the Siberian autumn and other details of life far from the fighting. Now Tania leaned forward in interest to learn who was writing to Vasily Gregorievich Zaitsev.

 

He fingered the envelope, seeming to admire it for the ardors of its journey to him. He held the letter with both hands.

 

“It’s from my unit in the Pacific navy. From Vladivostok.” All eyes were on him and his first letter. The Hare read:

 

“Dear Vasha:

 

We have been reading about you in In Our Country’s Defense. Who could have foretold our little friend, the clerk, would become such a hero?”

 

Zaitsev’s glare darted above the paper. The snipers looked at each other. Tania looked quickly from Shaikin to Kulikov. Both dammed back laughter.

 

“Yes,” Zaitsev said calmly, “I was a clerk. That means I can add and subtract and I know the entire alphabet. Do you mind?”

 

Zaitsev cleared his throat for silence. “. . . such a hero,” he repeated, looking up once more.

 

“We are here on the rim of the world, remembering you with affection and drinking toasts in your name. We keep up with your accomplishments through the newspaper and have a tally sheet posted on the kitchen wall. Every time you are mentioned in the paper, we drink that night to the latest number of your Nazi kills. You have gotten us all very drunk, Vasha, but we can stand more. We read where you still wear your navy shirt. Never forget, Vasha, you are a sailor like us. Your strength comes from the blue waves and the white foam, no matter how far from us you are fighting. We know you and your comrades will stop the Nazis in Stalingrad. Victory will be won. Good luck. We embrace you here.”

 

Zaitsev folded the letter into the envelope. According to custom, the snipers applauded. Tania thought, He’s not embarrassed by the attention. He’s gotten used to the spotlight.

 

Zaitsev sat, and Danilov stepped to the middle of the room, holding high the second, unclaimed letter.

 

“I have a letter here from a girl in Chelyabinsk. She has written on the envelope instructions that this must go to the bravest soldier. Who would that be?”

 

Tania looked around the bunker. Her eyes settled on Anatoly Chekov. He, like her, had not received a letter since leaving his home. His family was in the Ukraine, behind German lines. Anatoly often talked with Tania about his worries, knowing that she, too, had family in an occupied republic. Lately he’d shown signs of strain. The ripples of tension circled his eyes and played on his brow and lips. The ugly scene with Chebibulin; that was not the brave, easygoing poacher. Chekov was cracking. Tania and Shaikin had talked about it just the morning before, how his drinking had increased and his moods swung unpredictably. They spoke of the solitary regimen of the sniper, how it was so different from the foot soldiers’. Not enough sleep, constant assignments into danger along the front line, the brooding presence of competition amongst the snipers—despite Zaitsev’s and Danilov’s attempts to keep the unit free of it and dedicated to socialist ideals— and the killing. Even silently, from a great distance, you saw the magnified blood, the flailing of the unsuspecting. All this tired the spirit. Tania knew how barren was the place inside where the sniper turned for relief. It was as jagged and bleak as the bombed city waiting outside in the cold night. There was no break in the pressure, no release other than pulling the trigger. Over the past few weeks, Chekov had quelled the visions by trapping them in a bottle. Yet all the hares liked him despite his drinking. The liquor never quenched his courage even when it clouded his good humor.

 

“Anatoly!” Tania called out. “The letter is his, of course.” Heads nodded, Zaitsev’s, too.

 

Danilov walked to Chekov’s place on the floor. His legs were splayed in front of him; the toes of his boots shook nervously. Danilov handed down the letter and motioned Chekov to rise.

 

Chekov fingered the envelope. After a halting glance at the snipers, he tore the letter open.

 

“ ‘Dear brave soldier.’ “ He paused and looked behind him at the vodka bottle resting next to his journal.

 

“Read, Anatolushka,” Shaikin prompted him. “We want to hear what your new girlfriend says.”

 

Chekov licked his lips and continued:

 

“My name is Hannah. I do not know who is reading this letter, but I am sure you are the bravest one if it was given to you.

 

I am seventeen years old. If that makes me your daughter, then I will call you father. If not, I will call you brother. The girls in my plant have gathered presents for the defenders of Stalingrad. We know it is hard for you in the trenches and our hearts are with you. We work and live only for you. Even though I am far behind, the Urals, I have hopes of returning to my native Smolensk. I can hear my mother crying in the kitchen. Kill the Nazis so we can go home. Let their families wear mourning in their motherland, not ours. Let their families wet themselves with tears. I am just a girl, and I stand in a line assembling parts for trucks and tanks. But I feel I am fighting, too, just by staying alive, just by hating the Germans every minute. I do not like to hate; it is not natural for a Russian, don’t you think? But we must, until they are gone. Fight hard, my father, my brother, and I will, too.”

 

Chekov rolled his head back, turning his gaze to the beams supporting the bunker’s ceiling. His chest worked; the thin letter shook in his hand.

 

Kulikov applauded twice, then stopped, embarrassed. No one else had clapped. Chekov was clearly troubled by the letter. Tania wondered how Kulikov could not have seen it.

 

Chekov handed Danilov the sheet.

 

“Keep this for me. I’ll lose it.”

 

He walked to a corner, picked up a bag of grenades, and grabbed his submachine gun off a hook on the wall. He left the bunker without looking around.

 

Danilov looked at Zaitsev. “Where is he going?”

 

Zaitsev motioned sharply to Kulikov.

 

Kulikov jumped up. Tania rose to go along. Zaitsev told her to sit. Kulikov was a good friend to Chekov. He’d bring him back.

 

Heavy silence lay on the snipers. Danilov refused to sit, pacing in short strides. His stubby hands barely reached each other behind his back. Then Chekov came through the doorway. Behind him, Kulikov carried the sack of grenades and the gun.

 

Chekov slumped near the vodka bottle. He eyed it and rubbed his chin, grimacing as if he were composing a response to a comment the bottle had made.

 

Kulikov stepped to the middle of the room. “Chekov has a plan,” he announced. “It’s a good plan, and I propose we carry it out. It’s a raid on a German officers’ bunker.”

 

“Where is it?” Zaitsev asked from his corner.

 

“Sector six.”

 

That had been Sidorov’s sector. Now it was Tania’s.

 

Kulikov looked at Tania. “Do we have your permission?”

 

Tania set down her journal and stood.

 

“I go.” She met Zaitsev’s eyes.

 

“Of course.” The Hare stood. He was going, too.

 

Zaitsev asked Kulikov, “Do you know how to find the bunker?”

 

Kulikov pointed at Chekov, who was still staring at the vodka bottle. “I think Anatoly should lead us. It was his plan.”

 

Zaitsev stood over Chekov.

 

“Anatoly, can you point out the location on a map?”

 

“I want to go.” Tears welled in Chekov’s eyes.

 

“No, friend, you stay here. Get some sleep, have a drink. Show me on the map.”

 

Zaitsev spread out a map of sector six. The sad little sniper rubbed his nose on his sleeve while Zaitsev waited.

 

“Here.” Chekov pointed at the southwestern corner of the sector at the end of a long run of trenches, one kilometer beyond the Russian forward positions.

 

One kilometer, Tania thought. Not so great a distance for a single pair of snipers to operate, especially under cover of night and snow. But to mount a guerrilla action that far into the German rear? Getting in is simply a matter of staying out of sight, a specialty of the hares. Getting out is different. Once the noise starts, the sticks know you’re there.

 

Shaikin stepped forward. “I know every meter of sector six. I can get us there through sector five ...” Shaikin ran his finger over the map. “. . . then down behind these shacks. There’s a German trench here that Sokolov’s Forty-fifth took last week. It’s not on the map. But I know it. It goes right there.”

 

“Nikolay,” Shaikin said, looking up from the map to Kulikov, “is it still snowing?”

 

“Harder than ever.”

 

Shaikin looked back to Zaitsev, excited. “Good. Vasha, we can move as silently as snowflakes.”

 

Zaitsev handed Shaikin the map. Tania saw on his face that he was still considering the merits and dangers of the mission. It’s spontaneous, she thought. This is not on orders; this is just for us, for the sorrow in Chekov’s red eyes and in all us snipers. Will Zaitsev risk it?

 

She looked at Chekov curled on the floor. This man should be home in the Ukraine, chopping chicken necks and poaching quail on the state’s property, not here in a dirt bunker, drunk and destroying himself even while the war destroys him. She looked at quiet, handsome Kulikov, so willing to fight, so eaten up inside by something she’d never heard him speak of, some blood in his past, that he could only cover it with more and more German blood. There stood skinny Shaikin, away from his children and wife. And behind them, in the air like corpses in catacombs, lay the dead. And all the dead to come.

 

“All right,” Zaitsev said. “Everyone bring a submachine gun. Leave the rifles here.” He walked to where Chekov sat sniffling.

 

“Anatoly,” he told him, laying his hand on the man’s head, “stay here. We can talk later. We’ll do it right for you.”

 

Chekov blinked, troubled and ashamed. Tania looked away before she could pity him more. She took Medvedev’s submachine gun from the corner; she hadn’t yet used a machine gun in Stalingrad. But it felt good in her hands; it was a weapon.

 

Zaitsev dug into his pack for the tin of grease. He tossed it to Shaikin. “Let’s go.”

 

Shaikin opened the tin and headed for the doorway.

 

“Wait.”

 

Danilov, who until now had stood aside watching the dynamics of the hares, had both hands on his hips. The posture made him resemble a big gray sugar bowl.

 

“I’m going.”

 

Zaitsev looked at the little commissar. He sighed, lowering his head in thought.

 

Danilov cut through the silence. “Don’t waste your time finding a respectful way to tell me I cannot come. I’m not going to stay here and nursemaid your drunken sniper. I want to see this action for myself. I am coming.”

 

Zaitsev raised his head. A thin smile was there, though his eyes told of his displeasure.

 

“Comrade,” he said, “this is very dangerous. You are not trained for this type of maneuver.”

 

Danilov, without moving, without even losing his smile, invoked his power. It was a dark force; it seemed to come from his jowls, which rose on his face while his neck lengthened out of his chest like a snapping turtle’s. The commissar’s single black brow gnarled over his eyes.

 

“Comrade Hare,” he said in a voice murky with malevolence, “I do not want to remind you of the dangers I am trained in.” Danilov glowered about the bunker. “The Communist Party will be present at this raid. That is . . . understood?”

 

With that pause and final word, Danilov released his hold on the room. His smile beamed genuine again.

 

“Comrade Zaitsev, I will put myself completely under your orders until we return. Is that sufficient?”

 

Zaitsev nodded.

 

“Besides,” Danilov chuckled, his coat shaking up and down on his sliding belly, his small hands on his buttons, “this won’t be dangerous for me. I’m with the hares. You are the best.

 

“Now,” he said to Shaikin, “toss me the greasepaint pot.”

 

* * * *

 

A WOMAN’S UMBRELLA KEPT THE FALLING SNOW OFF THE soldier huddled behind the heavy machine gun. Tania could not tell the exact color of the umbrella. In the moonlight drifting down with the flakes, it looked pink. He doesn’t use that during the day, she thought. Russian snipers would crawl through hell for shots at a German machine gunner under a pink umbrella.

 

The gun was mounted behind a high revetment of sandbags in the center of a twenty-meter-long trench. At one end of the trench, to the gunner’s left, was a bunker entrance blocked by a blanket. The bunker was covered in debris to disguise it.

 

Shaikin had guided them here in under two hours, on a straight line through sector five, passing two Russian machine gun positions with sector five passwords. They’d entered this corner of sector six through a long, empty trench under the silence and limited visibility of the night and the snow, moving with near invisibility. Shaikin scurried in the lead, followed by Kulikov, Danilov, then Zaitsev. Tania brought up the rear, the place for the second in command. Zaitsev allowed her the proper prerogative. Sector six was hers.

 

In a crater twenty-five meters from the gunner, Danilov lay on his back catching his wind with deep breaths, his own hand over his mouth. His greatcoat was wet with snow, his shiny black boots were checked, and the knees of his pants were soaked through.

 

Zaitsev ducked at the lip of the crater, Shaikin at his shoulder. Zaitsev whispered something, then handed his submachine gun over. He slid out under the fine lace of hissing snowfall.

 

Tania moved beside Shaikin and watched. Kulikov crept up, too. Danilov rolled over and tried to crawl beside Tania, but there was no room and she shoved him back.

 

Lying on his back, the commissar tugged at her foot. Tania slid down and brought her greased face close.

 

“Comrade,” she whispered, “while he is gone, I’m in command. You will stay low, understand?”

 

She did not wait for a reply but turned and resumed her spot next to Shaikin.

 

In the dark, Tania saw the outline of the Nazi soldier’s head behind the gun, under the umbrella, but no more detail. She’d lost sight of Zaitsev slipping into the enemy trench. She could only imagine the Hare’s movements along the wet floor of the trench, waiting, holding his breath, feeling ahead for debris that might creak or snap to give him away. In her mind she waited with him, held her own breath, flexed her fingers as his must have to dig through the cold dirt and mounting snow. She widened her eyes to increase her night vision with his. She came up behind the guard with Zaitsev, saw the soldier standing behind the machine gun, one leg up perhaps to ease his back; they waited for the man to yawn or stretch or rub his eyes. Then they sprang, slapped their left hand over the guard’s mouth and slashed the blade held in the right fist down and across the neck, cutting the windpipe, deflating the lungs, keeping the left hand clamped over the gasping mouth, then thrusting the knife through the ribs into the heart or the aorta. They leaned the body against the trench, putting a piece of wood or a pipe under the chin to keep the head up. They righted the umbrella, settling it back into the snow, still wondering what color it was in the murky night.

 

A snowball landed in front of the crater with a quiet thump. Tania nodded to Shaikin. He rose out of the crater, not crawling but walking quickly, bent over. Tania followed. Behind her, Kulikov helped Danilov to his feet and over the crater rim.

 

Tania slid into the enemy trench behind Shaikin. Zaitsev met them. The Hare took back his submachine gun from Shaikin. Tania saw the blood darkness glistening on his hands, staining his sleeves. Kulikov and Danilov arrived and Zaitsev wagged his finger to send Kulikov and Shaikin to the far end of the trench to check for more sentries. Zaitsev squatted on his haunches on the trench floor, Tania next to him. Danilov sat in the snow.

 

Shaikin and Kulikov returned. Tania stood next to Zaitsev. She was glad for the cover granted by the dark and snow, but she knew that whatever kept the hares from sight could also hide the enemy.

 

At Zaitsev’s signal, the group moved. They passed the standing dead sentry under the umbrella and moved to the end of the trench, to the blanket in the doorway.

 

Suddenly, Danilov elbowed his way past Zaitsev to stand in front before the hanging blanket. In his hand was a pistol. He pushed the blanket aside and stepped into the bunker.

 

Zaitsev ducked in quickly beside Danilov. His machine gun was leveled and ready. Shaikin, Tania, and Kulikov followed.

 

Inside the bunker, a lantern dangled from a rafter. The lamp’s light was low, yellowing the still air and the earthen walls. On pegs beside the doorway were hung several submachine guns. Under the guns were helmets and flashlights.

 

Along the walls were three rows of berths, stacked four to a wall. Uniforms showing the stripes and bars of officers were folded and tucked on shelves. Snoring, easy breathing, and a sleepy mumble greeted the Russians while they formed a firing line.

 

Tania braced the stock of her submachine gun against her waist. Her barrel was level with the guns of Zaitsev, Kulikov, and Shaikin. The Russian PPSh submachine gun had a rate of fire of nine hundred rounds per minute. She ground her teeth and planted her feet firmly in the dirt.

 

Danilov raised himself at the shoulders and spoke. “For the ruthless murders of children and mothers, you Nazi predators are sentenced to death.”

 

Danilov lifted his pistol and fired into the berths. The report filled the bunker. Tania breathed the smoke of the powder. Heads and bodies in the berths sprang up, their voices buried in the hanging bang of the pistol. Before the others could react, Tania squeezed her trigger.

 

The submachine gun leaped in her hands. The barrel jerked above the berths to spit bullets up the bunks into the ceiling. Tania let go of the trigger to bring the barrel level again.

 

In that lapse, Zaitsev’s gun roared, joined by Kulikov’s and Shaikin’s. Tania gripped hard and fired again. Danilov stepped back and the four gunners, side by side, blew a gale of lead into the berths.

 

Tania swept the gun across the bunks, shattering them, ripping everything in front of her, wood, mattresses, flesh, dirt. She could not tell where her bullets struck, mingling them with the pounding rounds spewed by the men at her sides. The bodies in the berths, still shrouded in the shredding blankets, rocked against the walls and spasmed on the beds. The jarring seconds passed and the room filled with noise like a bottle filling with water, the air shoved out and replaced with clattering explosions, smoke, and splinters.

 

Zaitsev reached out and pushed Tania’s weapon down. She released the trigger. The others had stopped shooting. The room was thick with an acrid haze. Tania’s hearing was blunted by the screams of the submachine guns in the small room. Her head throbbed; the only sound was a heartbeat coming strong in her temples.

 

The five stood still. Then Kulikov raised the blanket to let the oily cloud roil into the trench.

 

In the bunker, the lantern’s dim glow strained to reach through the smoke. The berths were shot to pieces. The white innards of the splintered wood showed in a thousand holes. The dirt walls glimmered as if splashed with fresh wet tar. The lantern’s small flame reflected off the walls in wet red dots. An uncountable number of shell casings littered the floor, mixed with shards of wood and tufts of bloodied mattress cotton.

 

In the raw aftermath, the blasts only now fading in her head, Tania’s nerves jangled. A movement to her left made her jump. Kulikov stumbled out the doorway. Zaitsev was behind him, pushing. A hand grabbed her wrist. Shaikin turned her out past the blanket. Danilov was already in the trench.

 

Zaitsev spoke to her face; she could not hear him through the ringing in her ears. Shaikin, still holding her arm, began to run, pulling her along until she sped on her own. She followed Shaikin to the end of the trench. At the wall, he jumped up and flopped onto his belly to scramble to his knees. She handed up her submachine gun, feeling the heat of the barrel. She climbed out after Shaikin, then ran behind him through the white falling curtain against the backdrop of night. Her world was silent; the guns had stuffed her ears. She ran in the midst of the hares with the portly Danilov, knowing the Germans could be screaming at her, bullets flying by her, and she would not hear the rifles nor even see the bullets biting the ground around her. She ran, thrilled at escaping death by dashing through it.

 

They ran in their own footprints for two hundred meters away from the bunker. Safely distant, the snipers and the puffing commissar dropped behind cover. Zaitsev paused to catch his breath, then crawled ahead, telling them to follow in five minutes.

 

Tania leaned her head back to look into the falling snow. She felt dizzy, as though, instead of the flakes wafting down to her, she were flying upward into them. She let the flakes rest on her nose and eyelashes to melt on her hot, oiled skin. She cast her thoughts back over the past ten minutes. Images came to her out of order: the powerful quivering of the submachine gun, Danilov on his back, Zaitsev’s bloody hands, the slivers of the berths on the bunker floor.

 

The umbrella. What actual color was it?

 

She opened her eyes. Damn, she thought. I forgot to look.

 

* * * *

 

CHEKOV LAY SPREAD-EAGLED, SNORING. AN EMPTY bottle stood watch beside him like a pet glass cat.

 

Zaitsev slipped under the blanket behind Tania, followed by Kulikov and Shaikin. Danilov had left their group the moment they’d scrambled back behind Russian lines, rushing to write the story of the latest sniper strike. This time the story was not about the distant and silent delivery of death by the hares. Tonight the snipers had crawled into an officers’ bunker and massacred them in their beds. Tonight reeked of rabid brutality, of the abattoir, of revenge. And Danilov had been there, not just reporting events but for once making the news in person.

 

Zaitsev nudged the sleeping Chekov with his boot. The man snorted but did not wake up.

 

“Anatoly.” Zaitsev slipped the toe of his boot under Chekov’s side and lifted up, then let him roll back.

 

Zaitsev turned to Shaikin. “Take him back to the Lazur, Ilya.” Then he smiled at Tania. “Viktor will kill him if he comes back and finds him in our bunker snoring like that.”

 

Kulikov joined Shaikin. “We’ll have to carry him, Ilya. I’ll help you.”

 

Together they lifted Chekov across Shaikin’s shoulders. Kulikov picked up the three men’s rifles and packs. Tania moved the blanket aside for them to stagger out the doorway.

 

She was alone now in the bunker with Zaitsev.

 

“Good night,” she said.

 

“Wait. I’ll walk partway with you.”

 

Together they stepped out past blanket. Ahead of them, Chekov continued to snore, swaying atop Shaikin’s thin shoulders. Kulikov slapped Chekov on his upside-down head. “Shut up,” Kulikov told him.

 

Tania reached into her pack for a cloth to wipe the grease from her eye sockets, cheeks, and neck. She rubbed fresh snow into her face, grinding the cold crystals like icy sand over her skin. Zaitsev watched Kulikov and Shaikin walk away with their drunken load into the tumbling snow and muffled night.

 

A breeze crossed her wet brow and chin, cooling her like a breath of mint. She looked at Zaitsev’s face, still smudged with grease. He brought his eyes to hers. She looked down to his hands.

 

“You’re covered in blood,” she said. “Here.” She scooped up another handful of snow. “Give me your hand.”

 

She rubbed the snow over the back of his hand, digging it in with her palm. She scraped away the grease and blood. The flakes turned burgundy. His pale Siberian skin and high blue veins rose through the browning slush.

 

When she’d scoured both his hands clean, she daubed his face with the cloth. Zaitsev stood still, blinking under the cloth passing over his eyes.

 

Turmoil rose in Tania’s breast. What am I doing, she thought? I’m cleaning him like a mother with a dirty child. She tried to rein in her hands, but stopping would only hasten the moment when they stood in the falling snow, face-to-face, with no nervous action between them to stall their words or give innocent purpose to the connection in their eyes. She knew this was the moment she’d waited for; standing with him now, so near to the coming touch. These few seconds alone had been rising with the heat of the evening’s events. Before the raid, at the meeting, Zaitsev had forgiven her, reinstated her by giving her the leadership of sector six. Then had come the tumult of the killing of the German officers. She remembered tingling while the bullets flew from her submachine gun and then running in the snow and dark. Touching Zaitsev, even through the cloth, alone with him now, she tingled the same way.

 

Will he speak to me when I drop this ruse of cleaning his hands and face? Or will he choose silence, moving me to choose also? Will I act, or will I say good night and stumble off under my own burden? He’ll speak to me when I drop my hands. He’s waiting for me to stop. He will say . . . what?

 

Tania willed her hands to slow. With one final sweep, she wiped the cloth under his bottom lip.

 

“There,” she said, smiling for an instant. She stuffed the cloth into her pack.

 

When she straightened and looked into his face, he was looking not at her but across the dim moonlit outlines of the ruins and the collecting snow down to the Volga. His reddened hands were tucked under his armpits.

 

“Tania, what did we do tonight?” He shook his head.

 

She did not understand what he was asking. She dug her own cold hands into her pockets. What’s this mood? she wondered. Where is he all of a sudden?

 

“What do you mean, Vasily?”

 

She’d never called him by his first name. It fell from her mouth. But curled up into himself, gazing around like a man lost and unsure how it had happened, he seemed to have made himself smaller. His glow, the aura of the hero, the vozhd of the hares, had waned as if she’d rubbed it off with the grease and blood. This was not Chief Master Sergeant Zaitsev in front of her. This was Vasha. She could sense it. He was here, vulnerable, beside her in the snowy hush of the night.

 

She prodded him with her voice.

 

“What did we do?” She shrugged. “We killed a dozen enemy officers. We sent the Nazis a message.”

 

Zaitsev’s eyes leveled on her, though his sight still seemed far away. “What message did we send? Whom did we send it to? Who got it, us or them?”

 

What is he talking about? Those were invaders. What did it matter whether they were sleeping in their bunks, firebombing a peasant village, or executing civilians in a park? They were the same. They were vermin, sticks to be broken, marked for death. Any death, not just the clean and instant blackness from a sniper’s bullet. Chopped up, pulped by a thousand rounds from five meters away—let them be found like that in the morning, let them tell that story on the German side of the line at dawn.

 

Zaitsev pulled his hands from his armpits. He motioned and started to speak, then halted, his hands left waiting for the words. His eyes were locked on Tania’s.

 

“It’s not . . .” he said, and narrowed his eyes; Tania saw how he cared about his next words. “It wasn’t what I was taught. It’s not our way. It shouldn’t be. That wasn’t killing. It wasn’t even war.”

 

Tania pulled his hands down. She stepped to him to hold his hands. They were cold; she held them tightly.

 

“Yes, Vasha, it was killing,” she whispered, “it was war killing.”

 

She took a last step to him, to press her chest against his. She pulled his hands behind her and felt them link around her waist to hold her. Tania laid her head on his shoulder. She looked at his neck, his ear, his short-cropped hair with no sideburns. She whispered again.

 

“You’re right, Vasha. There was no honor in it.”

 

She raised her head off his shoulder. His face still held distance and loss.

 

“But,” she said, “there will be after Danilov writes it up.”

 

Zaitsev’s chest rustled in a short laugh. Tania pulled her arms tighter around his waist.

 

“Leave the killing to the rest of us,” she breathed. “We’ll kill for you. I’ll kill for you. You hunt, Vasha. You hunt.”

 

* * * *

 

FOURTEEN

 

 

ZAITSEV TURNED THE LANTERN DOWN, ALMOST TOO FAR. Before the flame could gutter and go out, he raised the wick. Deep shadows gouged the dirt walls and floor of the snipers’ bunker.

 

What am I risking? he asked himself. He looked at his watch: 2:30 in the morning. Viktor rarely returns before dawn.

 

He pulled Tania into the bunker. She held on to his hand as if hanging off a cliff: strong, tight, for her life. His mind was dispatched through his own hand into her long fingers. The strength in her grip made her real to him then, for the first time. Even when she’d held him outside moments before, he still hadn’t been able to sense her. He’d looked above her, his mind on honor, death, war. What they’d done that night in the German bunker was acceptable to the soldier but terrible and foreign to the hunter. His grandfather would’ve beaten him for that. It was not done in the taiga, to kill wantonly.

 

He thought of Tania, submachine gun squalling, eyes blinking through the flying chips of wood and hammering noise. Tania gritting her teeth, running near me through the ruins and the night. Tania touching me through the snow cupped in her hands, the warm, dirty cloth on my face. Tania holding me. He looked at her now, in the center of the room, at the end of his arm. Her blond hair, thick as a wheat field, cast her shoulders and face in shadow. Only the tip of her nose was lit. He turned her so that the light played full on her face to bloom in her blue eyes.

 

From her first day as a recruit, Tania had been a distraction, even a worry, just as he’d predicted to Danilov. Indeed, she was Danilov’s experiment, one that Zaitsev had thought would not last long. She was hot, eager, stupid with her emotions. She became a woman to him only when he joked with Viktor as men do, about her ass or her hair or whether Fedya, the big boy, dead now, had been getting any, or when he saw her with Shaikin, touching him in the meetings. But away from her, he did not think about Tania Chernova.

 

Now he sneaked into his own bunker like a thief. Why? Just because he had a woman by the hand? He was awash in sensation. What am I risking? he asked himself again.

 

If someone walks in, I’ll laugh about it. I’ll tell Viktor how I seduced the girl; she was good, and once was enough. He should try next, I’ll say. But if we’re left uninterrupted to hold each other, to be slow, to rock in each other’s arms, to kiss and talk quietly, I don’t know. I control all events now. What will I do with a situation I cannot shape? Do I want this?

 

Stop thinking, he told himself. This isn’t up to you, anyway. You knew it from the moment she touched you outside.

 

Tania let go of his hand and turned her face away from the light. He watched her walk to his corner.

 

With her back to him, she unbuttoned her coat. She lowered her arms and the coat slid off to crumple on the floor, sleeves out, hood up, like a body melting into the dirt Her hands moved to her neck. Elbows out, her wrists flicked, opening the buttons of her tunic. She leaned over to untie her boot laces. The lines of her pantaloons pulled tight against her bottom.

 

When she straightened, her hands worked at her waist. She turned to face him: all the barriers to her body had been unlocked. Her shirt hung aside from her breasts, the points firm beneath the gray-green undershirt. Her sleeves were unbuttoned at the wrists. Her belt was undone. The zipper to her pantaloons was down and her boots flapped open.

 

Tania kicked off the boots to stand in her socks. Her face was a white moon in the lantern light. Her eyes shone at him, reflecting the lamp in twin dots turned azure.

 

Zaitsev stepped toward her; he watched his shadow climb her legs, then shade her body and face. He reached to her shoulders to push the unbuttoned shirt back. She raised her head at his touch; her hair was heavy on the backs of his hands. Her collar opened and slid away. The tunic fell back and a scent rose from her undershirt, arms, and neck. The tang of sweat mingled with the smell of soil. He thought of the sweet loam on the floor of the birch forest. The shirt fell behind her. Tania stood between the coat and the shirt in a circlet of arms and buttons.

 

She raised her hands in the air. Her breasts pushed up against the undershirt, flattening and rounding. Zaitsev laid his open palms on her to feel her nipples. He pulled the thin cotton shirt over her head and dropped it at her feet.

 

Zaitsev reached for her waist, but Tania stopped him, pushing his hands down by his sides. She reached for his waist and unlatched the brass of the Red Army belt he wore outside his coat. She tossed the belt into the shadows where it rattled on the floor. The girl’s hands moved to his chest. Her bare breasts and shoulders were ivory ovals in the hard linear shadows of the bunker. She undid the buttons of his coat and tugged the shoulders back to let the coat tumble.

 

She flipped open the buttons on his jersey. All the time, she avoided his eyes; she watched her own hands move on him.

 

The buttons freed. Zaitsev pulled his tunic and navy shirt over his head. He dropped them onto the growing heap.

 

Keeping her hands by her sides, she laid her breasts against his bare chest. She exhaled when her flesh pressed against him. Her breath was warm, full as fur against his cheek.

 

Tania locked onto his eyes. She sat on the floor before him, rolling her head back to hold his gaze. She pulled off her pants and socks and reached behind Zaitsev to gather in his coat and shirt, bunching them with her own clothes to form a mound at her back.

 

Zaitsev stepped out of his boots. He slid off his pants and dropped them to Tania, who made a show of adding them to the mix.

 

He sank to his knees on the stack of clothes. Tania pointed at his socks.

 

“Trust me,” he murmured, breaking the silence, “they’re better off where they are.”

 

Tania giggled. Zaitsev was wrapped in her laugh, feeling it heat the cool bunker floor. Her laughter was like arms that moved his chest in front of hers and pulled him down over her.

 

Tania did not collapse back onto the cushion of clothes. She pressed hard against him with her chest. Her hands and arms stayed braced against the ground. This surprised Zaitsev and excited him. He covered her mouth with his to push her down in a kiss as though setting the spring of a trap. She allowed herself to sink back bit by bit, then relaxed and flung her arms about his neck. He laid his hands in the curves of her hips, then ran them up her sides, over her ribs, and behind her neck. She moved under him in a rolling wave.

 

He pulled his hand from the soft weight of her hair and looked into his palms and at his fingers. The hand was rough, callused from months of crawling through the ruins of Stalingrad. Dried blood from the night’s murder clung beneath his nails. This is not a proper hand, he thought, to touch a woman.

 

Gently, Zaitsev pulled his other hand from beneath her neck. He rose up on an elbow.

 

“Give me your hand,” he said.

 

Looking down at her closed eyes, Zaitsev put his hand on top of hers. Slowly he guided her fingers to her breast; he felt the question in her wrist. She relaxed the hand and entrusted it to him. He worked her forefinger in a small circle over the swollen nipple. Tania inhaled in a gasp, then let go in a murmured sigh. Zaitsev slipped her hand off her breast and led it into the cleft between the two mounds, then down onto the white plain of her belly. He moved her hand in languorous circles, pressing and releasing; her hips stirred under their hands. He led her touch down between her legs, sensing no resistance. She moved with him, taking his directions; her fingers began to swirl and glide under him on their own, on her skin, into herself.

 

He looked into her face and breathed with her sighs. He no longer led her hand but rode it, going where she pleased; he was saddled to her movements.

 

Zaitsev watched Tania bring herself to a climax. In a climbing quiver, she reached up with her free hand and pulled him down to kiss his face in the rhythms of her body. She pushed her stomach higher, pressing her thighs together over their hands. Within moments, her back flexed into an arch until she lay back with a heaving chest.

 

She opened her eyes. In her stillness, he felt the attention his own body clamored for now.

 

“Vasha,” she whispered, “go with me tomorrow.”

 

He looked down her length. Her knees were up. The smoothness of her legs ached inside him, pushing to come out.

 

“That’s the way of the taiga,” he whispered. He moved above her, sliding his knees between hers.

 

“The animals mate.” He lowered himself. “Then they hunt.”

 

* * * *

 

MAMAYEV KURGAN’S SCARS SHOWED UNDER THE MORNING light. The snow, which had fallen until dawn, did not hide the slashes of trenches or fill the craters that gave its eastern slope the look of a moonscape. The frost glistened diamond flashes in Zaitsev’s scope while his crosshairs glided over sector six.

 

“Look at the top of the hill,” Tania said. “There’s no snow on it. I hear it’s because the ground stays so warm up there from all the shelling.”

 

Mamayev Kurgan commanded a view of the city and the Volga. Three months earlier, in August, Red soldiers standing atop the water towers on the hill’s crest first saw the dust of the German army’s advance tanks speeding over the steppe. This morning, Zaitsev knew, Nazi spotters were in command of the summit. The two armies had traded the hill several times, never keeping it for long, always attracting the worst the enemy had to dish out in order to regain the crest. The hill had been peppered with artillery shells so often and with such ferocity that the ground of Mamayev Kurgan carried within it an extra, pregnant heat.

 

Zaitsev and Tania hunkered down in a trench on the western edge of no-man’s-land. Before them was an impossible maze of broken machinery, abandoned guns, and pitted earth. Bodies lay under the hummocks of small snowdrifts.

 

Zaitsev pulled the periscope from his backpack to scan deeper into the rising field in front of them. He thought, I’ve got to make something happen. He knew the hunting would be slow on Mamayev Kurgan. The fighting had been so intense, so nonstop that anyone left alive here probably knew how to stay that way. He didn’t want to spend days with Tania helping her get her first kill as sector leader.

 

For a silent hour he peered through the periscope at the German breastworks. Tania crawled fifty meters away to look from a different angle and to avoid being conspicuous. The shadows shortened with the sun rising at their backs. The reflections from the glistening snow dulled. Twice, Zaitsev saw what might have been sniper movement. A wisp of cigarette smoke disappeared quickly; it might have been snow drifting on the wind. Moments after, near the same spot, he thought he glimpsed a helmet bobbing once, then twice, above the trench. This, too, vanished before he could focus on it.

 

Zaitsev was acquainted with waiting. But something about Chernova drove him at a faster clip. Her eager energy distracted him from his discipline, though she made no overt demands or even showed any hints of impatience with him. She has a heat, he thought, like a stove or the top of Mamayev Kurgan. Things boil up around her.

 

He set down the periscope and lit a cigarette, breaking a major rule of sniper engagement. He felt aggravated, restless.

 

Well, he thought, there’s something I’ve been wanting to try for a while. Why not this morning?

 

He shouldered his rifle and crawled to where Tania squatted below her periscope. She did not look away from the eyepiece when he approached.

 

“You’re smoking,” she said.

 

“Stay here. I’m going to get Danilov.”

 

Tania’s head snapped around. “What? Why do that? He’s no good up here. Leave him alone.”

 

“I have a plan. Stay here.” Zaitsev raised a finger at her. “And don’t shoot a fucking thing. Understand?”

 

He wagged his finger at her hard to make his point and turned to steal back to the Lazur.

 

* * * *

 

“SET IT UP RIGHT HERE.”

 

Zaitsev stacked more bricks on the two piles he’d built above the trench. He stepped out of the way for Danilov to place the loudspeaker behind the brick mound on the left. The commissar let the bell of the speaker stick out a few centimeters to the right and pointed it up the hill toward the German lines.

 

Danilov unrolled the coiled cord between the microphone and the speaker. He sat on the trench floor with an effort and clicked the trigger on the microphone twice. The speaker blared to loud, tinny life.

 

“Wait.” Zaitsev held up his hand. “Wait for my signal, as we discussed.”

 

Zaitsev crawled on all fours to Tania. She stared at him, the rifle and periscope across her lap.

 

“So?” she asked.

 

Zaitsev made a quick study of her face. Her checks were flushed with the chill. A ring from the periscope showed around her right eye. Her lips held no smile but were left sour and pouting, the remnants of her one-word question to him: so?

 

He paused, appreciating her effect on him, her combination of beauty and will. He’d left her for ninety minutes on his trek back to the Lazur for Danilov. She’d had all that time to do nothing but stare up the slope. The stove, he thought, has warmed while I was gone.

 

He whispered. “Just do what I tell you, partisan.” He glanced back at Danilov. “Our little commissar is really quite good at his job, you know. And his job is agitating. In a minute, he’s going to get on his bullhorn and read some very nasty leaflets in German his brother politrooks have prepared. I suspect Danilov’s German is not so good, but it’s probably good enough to make every Nazi within earshot angry as hornets. Maybe just with his pronunciation, who can tell?”

 

Zaitsev grinned at his own jest. The corners of Tania’s mouth lifted. A small blue wave broke in her eyes.

 

“My guess,” he continued, “is that we’re going to be in a shooting gallery soon after he turns it up. You go twenty meters to the left, and I’ll stay near Danilov. If there’s sniper fire, it’ll probably be in my direction. I’ll be set up for it; I’ve got a little trick I’m going to try. Anything else, machine guns probably, I think you’ll see first. Any shots you get, take them. We move one minute after the first shot, either yours or mine.”

 

“Vasha.” Tania held out her hand, palm up as if to accept a coin. “You always say a sniper must guard the secrecy of his position.” She pointed at Danilov to demand an explanation for the commissar and his loudspeaker.

 

“Exactly.” Zaitsev grinned. “And that’s why today we try the unexpected.” He reached into her lap for her periscope. He laid it across her open hand, dropping his smile with the scope. “You wanted a hunt. Let’s hunt.”

 

He crawled away to set up his subterfuge, the stuffed cotton dummy he’d carried from the Lazur. He propped the dummy up behind the second, right-hand pile of bricks, moving it forward and to the left just far enough so that its helmet would be visible only in a roughly twenty-degree span to the southwest. Finally, he stuck a pipe behind the dummy’s back to hold it in place.

 

Zaitsev had not been a frequent user of the dummies. No one in the hares was. The opposite was their specialty, as Tania had correctly cited: the hares strove to be invisible. A dummy was designed to draw attention to itself, a feint. The dummies were better for Viktor’s line of work; the bears’ style was a more confrontational one. He’d actually heard of Viktor’s boys leaping out of their shooting cells during combat and charging. Not the way snipers should work, Zaitsev thought, but he would never tell Viktor Medvedev how to hunt or what to teach. But charging and shouting were not for Zaitsev’s little, lithe assassins. Still, the dummies were always available. Their production had become an underground cottage industry for the thousand or so native Stalingrad women left in the city. Zaitsev held a mental picture of them sitting in a circle beneath a lantern in a covered shell hole or a basement, stitching dummies out of old blankets, stuffing them with mattress filling, giving the dummies names. This was how these old women fought, with needle and thread. Zaitsev was glad now to use one of their creations. He named it Pyotr and patted it on the shoulder.

 

Satisfied with the setup, Zaitsev took a position ten meters to the right of the dummy. With his pack shovel, he dug a slit in the lip of the trench. He placed a brick on either side of the channel for an embrasure. He laid his tied-up gloves in the trough and his rifle on top of them to face the twenty-degree arc he’d baited with the head of the dummy, Pyotr’s head. He gave a thumbs-up to Danilov, who waited on the trench floor.

 

The commissar flicked the switch on the microphone and blew into it. The speaker pitched a noise into the air like a tree splitting. He had it turned up very loud.

 

The commissar arranged a few pages in his lap and brought the microphone close to his mouth to begin the propaganda. Zaitsev listened to the foreign tongue spit out through the loudspeaker. He’d never encountered German before he came to Stalingrad. When he’d finally heard it from prisoners and deserters, or on the lips of the dying, or screamed during close combat in the houses downtown, he’d judged it an ugly language, a battle tongue. German was spoken back in the throat, bitten and chewed with the teeth. By contrast, he considered Russian to be liquid; it was a language to be cradled on the lips, swirled in the mouth like cognac. Russian could be whispered through a keyhole to a lover on the other side to stroke her into unlocking the door. German was the language to knock the door down. It was how you spoke to your dog or cleared your throat.

 

Zaitsev looked past Danilov to Tania. She surveyed the field from behind cover through her periscope. He chose to scan through his rifle scope. The 4X rifle sight offered a smaller range than the periscope, but the optics were better for clearer definition. He swiveled slowly across his expected target range. Though the morning was aging, the sun was still behind him.

 

Danilov’s amplified voice tore the air. The hard German consonants, sharpened by the loudspeaker, banged out an edgy echo flung against the hillside. That’s obnoxious, thought Zaitsev, even if they can’t understand a word he’s saying.

 

The pamphlets in Danilov’s lap were of the sort used by both sides, usually dropped from the air over the battlefield. The leaflets were a common sight, blowing across the ground between the two facing armies as if scurrying out of the way.

 

Zaitsev looked up from his scope. The rising landscape seemed void of life. Danilov’s voice sailed over it like cawing electric buzzards. No movement at all. But Zaitsev knew that the depressions and gashes on all sides of him held soldiers and guns, German and Russian. He’d learned months ago never to be deceived by calm in Stalingrad.

 

He brought his eye back down to his scope. After a few moments of searching, he noted the barely visible barrel of a Nazi machine gun 350 meters away. It was not manned. That meant nothing. It could have been jammed and abandoned. It could just as easily be a fake position made of wood; it might also be a working machine gun with its crew hidden in the trench while a camouflaged spotter kept watch. Nothing is what it seems out here, thought Zaitsev. The softness of the snow is just a sheath over a jagged hillside. The stillness, seemingly blind, has a hundred eyes. Danilov’s crackling voice even appears to come from a man’s form that is actually a stuffed dummy.

 

Suddenly Zaitsev heard the thumping of bullets plow into the earth and bricks around the loudspeaker. The chattering of a machine gun flew past him. Danilov broke off his shouting; Zaitsev glanced from his scope quickly to the commissar, who was curled on the floor of the trench. He had dropped the microphone to shield his head with both hands from the brick shards and dirt falling on him while the machine gun raked the loudspeaker. In the heart of the action, Pyotr stood unscathed behind his bricks.

 

Zaitsev hunted to his left through the scope. The machine gun he’d seen moments before was still quiet. The gun firing at the loudspeaker must be operating to his right, outside his targeted killing zone. Before he could lift his rifle out of its slit, he heard Tania fire.

 

The machine gun fell silent.

 

Good. She got the bastard. One minute.

 

Zaitsev glanced at his watch.

 

Another machine gun came alive, aiming not at the loudspeaker but far to his left. Tania! They’ve spotted her.

 

Zaitsev rammed his eye against the scope and found the unmanned machine gun. It now had the head and hands of a soldier planted behind it, flailing away at Tania’s position. Another German was beside the gunner, binoculars up.

 

Zaitsev exhaled to push his pulse out of his head. He watched the gunner work, to let the target take over his thoughts, away from the battle pitch. Let him draw the bullet. Let him open up for it. There’s no hurry. Make it good. One shot. One squeeze.

 

Without anticipating it, the rifle jumped into his shoulder. He heard the loud report of the bullet on its way. This was how he accomplished his best shots: without telling himself “now” but simply thinking the bullet into the target, pulling the trigger on instinct, surprising himself a little.

 

In his scope, the gunner’s helmet whipped backward when he fell from the gun. One of the soldier’s hands caught in the grips. The gun swung upward under the hanging weight of the dead Nazi, still firing, bullets blasting into the air. The spotter pulled the snagged fingers free, then ducked behind the trench wall and, with the body of his comrade, dropped from sight.

 

Zaitsev gathered up his periscope and pack and scuttled to where Danilov sat dusting himself off. Bits of red brick and dirty snow lingered on his shoulders and fur hat.

 

Tania arrived, her rifle and gear in her hands, ready to go.

 

“Good work,” Zaitsev said, kneeling beside the commissar. Danilov smiled, gathering his spilled pages. He dug between his legs and pulled the microphone out of the dirt.

 

“That worked well,’ Zaitsev continued. “But we need to get out of here now.”

 

“Go? Why? I’m not finished.”

 

Danilov’s smile tightened and flattened like a pulled string. He pressed the microphone trigger and blew into it. The loudspeaker sizzled to life.

 

“I’ve got a bit more to say to you whores!” he shouted in Russian. His voice emerged from the battered bell with a buzz. Zaitsev was amazed the thing still worked.

 

“No. That’s not a good idea.” Zaitsev pushed the microphone down from the commissar’s lips. “Our game worked well. Very well. Now it’s time to go. Remember, we’re on the front line.”

 

“I know perfectly well where we are.”

 

“Then you know we’d better move, and now.”

 

As Zaitsev finished his sentence, his eyes locked onto Tania’s face on the other side of Danilov. She heard it, too. The whining, falling whistle of a mortar shell.

 

Zaitsev grabbed Danilov by the lapels of his coat. He flung the commissar onto his face on the trench floor and dug down beside him.

 

The ground bucked with the explosion. The first shell landed above them, blowing shrapnel and shock waves past the top of the trench. More eruptions followed. Dirt rained onto their backs, pattering on the crowns of their helmets.

 

They waited with faces in the dirt through six explosions. The ground shuddered with each shell. When he sensed the bombardment was finished, Zaitsev tugged on Tania’s leg. She raised her head.

 

Danilov reared up. Dirt and snow stuck to his mouth and eyebrows. He spit once to clear the debris from his lips.

 

“Comrade Zaitsev,” he said, “I agree. We should go.”

 

The three gathered their equipment. Danilov collected pages off the ground. Zaitsev grabbed at a few sheets to speed the commissar. He looked up at Pyotr. The dummy had stood through the barrage, the pipe firmly in his back.

 

With all his papers in hand, Danilov wound up the cord for the microphone and pocketed it. He reached his hand over the top of the trench to pull down the loudspeaker.

 

A bullet ricocheted off a brick lying just below the bell, splitting it into bits and dust. Danilov fell to the floor of the trench as if scalded. Tania and Zaitsev stooped quickly.

 

The commissar stared into Zaitsev’s eyes. “What was that? Who the hell’s shooting?”

 

“Stay low,” Zaitsev replied.

 

He snagged his backpack and scrambled with it to the right. He pulled out his periscope and hoisted the mirror and lens above the top of the trench. Surveying the field quickly, he saw nothing of note against the rumpled white slope but the two dead machine gun positions.

 

He lowered the periscope. Just a German sniper who got caught napping, he thought. We woke him up with the broadcast and artillery and now he wants to get in on the show a little late. He figured he’d wait for someone to retrieve the loudspeaker. Clever move. I would’ve done the same. But I wouldn’t have fired at a hand. I would’ve waited for a head.

 

Zaitsev decided to let the Nazi sniper have his fun. Maybe I’ll come back tomorrow with Tania and take care of him. Maybe not. He’s probably not worth it.

 

He looked up at Pyotr. Take him down, he thought, give the cotton boy a rest. Put him back up tomorrow and drill this snotty little sniper.

 

Zaitsev scooted over to Pyotr. He reached to pull the dummy down by the arm; suddenly, the cloth head snapped back. Pyotr’s helmet rang out and jerked, flying off to fall backward. It hung there, caught by the chin strap wrapped around the neck.

 

Zaitsev leaped away. He looked at Tania and Danilov, and the faraway sound of a rifle report skittered down the hillside. Their eyes were fixed on Pyotr’s head.

 

Zaitsev looked up at the dummy’s face. In the center of the once featureless visage was a hole. Stuffing peeked out to give Pyotr a ragged nose.

 

Zaitsev hoisted his periscope again. This sniper must be in my killing zone, he thought. He must be. There’s no other alley from which to see Pyotr’s head.

 

Before he could focus the periscope, another bullet ripped into the cloth face. The round clanged into the helmet strung behind the neck. Pyotr shivered but stood firm against the pipe.

 

Zaitsev was rocked. This bullet had struck within moments of the last, perhaps as fast as four seconds! The report of the rifle skipped by, faint and distant.

 

Another shot slammed into the helmet, fanning Zaitsev’s amazement. It followed the bullet before at an incredible clip. Maybe three seconds, three and a half. Pyotr’s head joggled back again as if in surprise himself.

 

Zaitsev flung his shoulder against the trench wall, lifting his periscope. He scanned the target zone furiously. The periscope had a range of 350 meters. This sniper must be inside 250 meters to have that kind of accuracy and speed, he thought. But the sounds of the reports were eroded, as if they’d rolled down from far up the hill.

 

Even if the enemy sniper was close, this quality of shooting was hard to explain. So fast to be so murderously accurate. Maybe it was a team of snipers taking turns with their shots.

 

Another bullet shook Pyotr. This one passed through the neck and cut the leather strap when it banged into the helmet. The helmet clattered to the floor of the trench, spilling the four spent slugs onto the trench floor. Zaitsev saw nothing. No muzzle blaze indicated a sniper’s position; no bobbing head or cigarette smoke, no movement against the icy backdrop betrayed any of the hill’s white secrets.

 

Shit, thought Zaitsev. Where is he? He’s got to be close. I must’ve missed him, looked right past him. Them.

 

This is ridiculous, he thought. He lunged to the pipe buttressing the dummy and yanked it down. Pyotr fell and tumbled across his lap. The wisps of stuffing protruding from the holes made a skewed pair of eyes, a nose, and a small, marveling mouth.

 

Zaitsev picked up the fallen helmet. He took from its bottom the four smashed bullets and hefted them in his hand.

 

Tania scooted over to him. She shook his outstretched leg.

 

“Let’s go, Vasha,” she said. “Somebody is crazy out there.”

 

Zaitsev did not move or take his eyes off the shells. Deep inside him, he caught a glimpse, just a flash, of the two gray eyes of fear glowing in the shadows. The eyes crouched; the fear snarled once.

 

He closed his fist over the spent bullets. Tania jerked again on his leg.

 

“Vasha, let’s go. We’re in somebody’s crosshairs. Somebody who’s very damn good.”

 

Zaitsev looked up at that. He licked his lips. His mouth had gone dry.

 

* * * *