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
Ninety-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.