City of Fate (2 page)

‘Come here, baby.’ Anna assumed the same position against her mother’s shoulder.

‘Okay, Yuri. Stay here until it’s completely quiet outside. Do your best to keep clean, look after your clothes. It could be a while before you get new ones.’ She was talking very quickly.

Hoisting the strap of the bag onto her other shoulder, his mother turned to leave, taking a few steps forward before Yuri thought to ask, ‘But, where are you going?’

Anna’s eyes were now closed. He didn’t know what he envied more, his sister’s spot at their mother’s shoulder, or his mother’s firm clasp of the sleeping baby.

His mother looked surprised by his question and, for a couple of seconds, he thought she wasn’t going to answer it, but then she shrugged and said, ‘I don’t know, Yuri, wherever they take us, I suppose.’

PETER

A
bout two weeks later, summer had bowed out of Stalingrad. The nights grew chilly, the temperature contributing to the grim atmosphere throughout the city. Yuri was doing his best to sound as if he was fast asleep but it was no use; a small boy was leaning over him, whispering his name as loudly as he dared, ‘Yuri. Yuri, I need to go to the toilet!’

Pretending to be thoroughly absorbed in sleep and
pleasant
dreams, Yuri turned on his side, with his back to the boy, silently begging the child to leave him alone.

‘Please, Yuri, I have to go now!’

Making a face that no one could see, Yuri sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his bleary eyes, ‘Are you sure, Peter? You only went a while ago. You can’t need to go again already.’

Peter nodded that he could need to go again; in fact he did need to go again, though Yuri could not have seen that. It was too dark in the tunnel, the night air thick and musky with
the sweet and sour smell of farting and the sweating bodies of the twenty or so that were squashed together in sleep.

In any case, Yuri assumed from the silence that there was no point in arguing further, ‘Oh, come on, then. Don’t trip on anyone.’ Even before Yuri got fully to his feet, Peter’s hand was already in his, reminding him why he didn’t leave the boy to wet himself. He used to have a mother and father, but that was all changed now. Now he just had Yuri, who just had him.

They carefully made their way to the front of the tunnel, where Peter instinctively huddled against his friend as they stopped to listen for anything at all, footsteps, voices, gunfire. The fog hadn’t cleared for days now, maybe it never would. Although maybe it wasn’t even fog, only cold, wet smoke from the shattered buildings; there wasn’t many of them left burning at this stage.

The city had been on fire all summer. Bloody Germans! Now that it was almost winter, the once scorching buildings stood silent, cold and empty as shadows, thanks to missing roofs, windows, doors and even walls. It was creepy really. This wasn’t a city anymore, not Stalingrad; it was nothing, a big pile of nothing, apart from miles of broken and burnt bricks.

Peter’s elbow dug into Yuri’s side, making him jump.

‘Sorry!’ The small boy began to scratch his head through his wool cap.

Knowing that the child was capable of scratching for ten minutes or more, Yuri swiftly issued an order, ‘Stop that. Will you just go and pee?’

Peter was surprised to have to explain the obvious. ‘But it’s itchy!’

Yuri felt a need to lead by example and was therefore obliged to ignore the maddening itchiness of his own
lice-ridden
scalp, assuring both himself and the little boy, ‘They’ll stop moving around when they feel the cold.’

There was a tiny patch of grass nearby, with two bushes covered in dust and ashes; they had been christened many times over by Yuri and Peter. They found it vaguely
comforting
to see the bit of green; even if it was blackened and faded. Most of the city’s trees were gone now, having been torched during those awful weeks when the German planes dropped their bombs.

‘Yuri, can we go for a walk?’

Honestly
, Yuri thought to himself,
where did he get his ideas
? ‘Don’t be daft, and I thought you were dying to go?’

Yuri stood beside Peter, deliberately not watching him fumble for his ‘pee-pee’ from beneath his layers of clothes, most of which were far too big for him. He had reason to believe that if he showed the slightest interest, he would be asked to help find it. Yuri could never decide whether the child was lazy or simply liked to be babied, though maybe the two possibilities amounted to the same thing. Staring
off into the distance, Yuri waited, and then waited some more. Nothing happened. He groaned, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind again?’

‘It’s gone away,’ Peter announced, cheerful-like, not one bit sorry. ‘Can we go for a walk now?’

Yuri opened his mouth to complain but closed it
immediately
on hearing voices – Russians – although, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Some of the soldiers were fierce angry men who travelled about in gangs, looking for vodka and ‘fun’, whatever that meant. Hardly daring to breathe, Yuri reached out for Peter and pulled the child to him, all the while doing his best to see through the fog. It sounded like an argument.

‘Keep it down, for pity’s sake!’

‘Pity? What do you mean by “pity”? Why are we here, Daniel? Tell me. Please!’

The first soldier spoke again, sounding fed up, ‘Oh, Ivan, give it a rest. You’re a fool when you drink too much.’

Yuri heard a match being struck and glimpsed a tiny, yellow flame about ten feet away from them. Hopefully Peter would understand that the men were stopping for a cigarette and it was best if they simply stayed where they were. Any movement, especially at night in the middle of a thick fog, might frighten the already tense soldiers into shooting in their direction. This was war after all.

‘Konstantin panicked, that’s all. He just stopped for a
second, but he wasn’t a coward. He would have started
running
again. They never gave him a chance to run again.’

It sounded like a stone was being kicked or pebbles were scuffed back and forth by a sulky boot as the cigarette was passed between the two of them. The same soldier, Ivan, spoke again, ‘Not one step back! Not one bloody step back! But he didn’t take a step backwards, did he? He just stopped for a second.’

The tiny glow dropped to the ground where it was
immediately
rubbed out.

The other soldier’s voice came out of the darkness. ‘But that’s all it takes, Ivan. Our superiors have orders to shoot any of us who act cowardly, even for a second. Come on. Try and sober up. You have to forget about Konstantin, or you’ll get yourself into the same trouble he did. We’ll write to his family, but we have to be careful with our words. All our
letters
are being censored.’

Peter stayed absolutely quiet for the entire conversation.
Thank goodness,
thought Yuri, who was never too sure of how much the five-year-old understood. Eventually the soldiers shuffled off into the distance, the first one still muttering under his breath about ‘Poor Konstantin’. Sure enough, as soon as they were gone, Peter put his hand back into Yuri’s and repeated his question from earlier, ‘Can we go for a walk now?’

MR BELOV'S CLASSROOM

N
inety-two miles north of Stalingrad, in a small village, Vlad Chevola sat at his desk, watching his teacher, Mr Belov, write on the blackboard:

Some of the boys copied down the sentence while the rest of them stared in worried silence. It was a small room, just about big enough for the thirty boys and their mess of school bags and coats. The morning sun shone in through the window, and the light bounced off the only decoration, a large photograph of Russia's leader, Josef Stalin, making it seem like a halo was glowing over the thick grey hair,
bulging
forehead and kindly eyes. The country's leader would
have approved of the effect.

‘Now, Misha, tell me, how big was Napoleon's army?'

Misha, a skinny sixteen-year-old, with scattered pimples, shot out of a daydream to find his teacher looking straight at him.

‘Sir?'

Usually this would be enough to set Mr Belov off on one of his weary monologues about students needing to
concentrate
and listen in order to learn. Today was different, though. Today, the teacher merely shrugged and moved onto
someone
else, ‘Vlad, perhaps you can give me the answer to my simple question?'

‘Half a million men,' said Vlad, without even trying, and then adding, before Mr Belov could ask, ‘and we beat them in under six months.'

‘We'll do it again! We'll beat Hitler's armies, won't we, sir?' Misha wanted to make up for earlier.

The teacher stopped for a moment and looked over his class. The letter from the NKVD, the special police,
ordering
him to bring the whole class to enrol for the army, sat on top of his desk. How many would he see again? Feeling themselves to be scrutinised, some of the boys retreated into their own thoughts. They suddenly seemed very young, too young for what was being asked – no, demanded, of them. Mr Belov shivered slightly, angry with himself for betraying his own fear. He shrugged helplessly and said, ‘Watch over
one another, won't you.' That was all he could offer them now, useless advice.

The classroom was deathly quiet, a very different sort of quiet from when they merely listened, or dozed, to their lessons.

Vlad, for one, felt a dull panic somewhere inside of him, yet when Mr Belov gazed at him, he mustered up all the bluff he could find and managed a smile for a sort of reply. He worried that he might be a coward, but he couldn't help it; he wished with all his heart that it was a normal day and that he could go home after school, help his father in his workshop and wonder what was for tea. ‘We have to go?' The words were out before he realised.

Anton Vasiliev, a greasy, black-haired boy, given to
sneering
a lot, was impatient to join his big brother in the thick of battle. ‘What do you mean? Are you daring to question our orders? Our country is being invaded by filth and you ask if we have to go?'

When did you start using a word like “filth”?
At least, that's what Vlad wanted to say. Instead, he felt his insides crumble as he said quickly, ‘It wasn't a question: we have to go!'

It was unwise to question anything to do with the
government
in front of Anton. A rumour, which refused to go away, was that his father had a direct line to the NKVD and enjoyed passing on bits of dangerous gossip. In other words, he informed on his neighbours and, yes, even relatives. Surely that was why his family were living in a spacious apartment
that once belonged to Anton's Uncle Avgust, a somewhat successful lawyer who was arrested one night, never to be seen again. At least Avgust's wife and children were allowed to reside in the garden shed. Never let it be said that the Vasiliev family did not help their own. The rest of Anton's classmates shared small, humble homes with various relatives and even other families. That was the Russian way; the
government
decided how much you could have and, mostly, it was never really enough.

Vlad glanced at his teacher, hoping that his feeble utterings had been enough to end this particular line of conversation.

Anton, however, wished to continue, ‘The Nazis are
butchering
our people, burning homes, imprisoning women and children. If Hitler thinks he can add Russia to his empire, he's a lunatic. He actually believes he can outwit Stalin, our generals and our soldiers. How dare he!'

This last line was said rather loudly indeed. Anton,
apparently
considering whether to stand, to finish his speech, looked to his teacher for guidance. For Anton, there were no grey areas, absolutely none at all. The Germans had invaded Russia, on 22 June 1941, working their way through
Leningrad
, Moscow and the Ukraine, and now, unbelievably, they were in Stalingrad. In the beginning Hitler had simply wanted oil, which Russia had in abundance. His army was merely to pass through Stalingrad to reach the oil fields of the Caucasus. Oil equalled money and power, as well as the
essential refuelling of German tanks and planes. But how could Hitler possibly resist the opportunity to rub Stalin's big nose in it and go after his pet city, the one he had given his very name to. Thus the city had become a deadly
tug-of-
war between two pompous, ambitious tyrants. Anton was just one of thousands of Russians who were prepared to do all that was demanded of them.

But it wasn't as simple as that, not for the old teacher who had known the boys since they were children, and whose brother had died on a battlefield in the Crimea. That letter, on the special official paper, screamed at him about his part in all of this. No matter how he tried to ignore it, one
dreadful
thought was determined to be inspected,
Am I to quietly lead them to their deaths?

Sensing he was no longer the centre of his teacher's
attention
, Anton said almost accusingly, ‘It was you who taught us about the Spartan women!'

Vlad couldn't help smiling at this sudden change in
conversation
; he even looked around to catch someone's eye. Leo obliged and winked at him.

Anton wasn't known for his interest in lessons. He was the sporty type, excelling in running, football and boxing his own shadow. Although maybe his favourite past-times were intimidating small children, lone small dogs and trying to kiss girls, but only the timid ones that didn't want to be kissed.

Leo's mother had a name for Anton, his big brother and
their father, ‘Bullies, the lot of them! That poor woman, I don't know how she puts up with them.'

Mrs Valisov was a short, messy-looking woman who never looked happy. The women in the town had an explanation for her anxious expression and quivering voice, ‘It's her nerves, of course. She's a wreck from living with such mean-tempered men.' Few dared to suggest that it might also be guilt about her hard-working brother and his bewildered family.

Mr Belov seemed as surprised as anyone else to hear Anton talk about Spartan women.

Anton grew impatient. ‘The Spartan mothers who told their sons that if they didn't win the battle they weren't to bother coming home?'

Leo, a hardy soul, who wasn't afraid of Anton and his little gang of desperados, coughed politely, a little ‘ahem', before saying, ‘I think you mean that they told their sons to come back on their shields. They could come back if they were dead, that is, they could come home beaten as long as they were lying dead on their shield. So they could be victorious and alive, or beaten and dead, but they were allowed home.'

‘Yeah?' scowled Anton, his face darkening. ‘That's what I said!' He swung around to find the source of barely heard titters. If he caught anyone laughing at him, he would have to punish them. His father had taught him that there was nothing worse than being laughed at. As a result, Anton had, not surprisingly, a rather poor sense of humour.

Before there could be an eruption, particularly of the
Anton-kind
, Mr Belov weighed in, ‘Very good, Anton, but you will have to enlighten me on your reference to the Spartan mothers.'

‘Huh?' Anton was distracted by some giggling that only he could hear.

‘What is your point, boy?' Mr Belov was starting to tire of everything.

‘Well', pouted the teenager, ‘in a way, you are … no, you should be like a Spartan mother.'

Leo snorted, prompting the others to forget themselves and laugh aloud. They expected their teacher to laugh with them, or even smile broadly, and gave him his cue. Instead, he stood up straight and tense, his lips hardly moving to spit out the word, ‘Pardon?'

Misinterpreting Mr Belov's sudden sternness as disgust for his classmates' treatment of him, Anton launched himself superbly, ‘What I mean, sir, is that you are our leader. We will take our leave of you at the registrar office, see? You will wave us off to battle, like those mothers, sending us off to become men. You have to tell us to be victorious or …'

The laughter died a sudden death when their teacher's
expression
of rage was duly noted by all the students.

‘You imbecile, Vasiliev! You stupid, stupid boy. You want me to tell you all to go and die?'

Utterly confused, poor Anton opened his mouth to say
something
but had no idea what.