He found Omar beside the wire amongst a small mountain of old newspapers, kneading the sheets of paper together in a metal bathtub by the light of a hurricane lamp.
The boy grinned happily at him.
‘Show me,’ Gus ordered.
Cheerfully, Omar lifted the pulped paper from the bathtub. Gus doubted the boy, in his cut-short life as a kid, had ever played with papier-mache. Childhood had been denied him. The water splashed down the boy’s arms and over his battledress and he held up the shape of a man’s head… The face was without features.
‘The cat, Mr Gus – while it dries, before we paint it – tell me about the observer and the cat.’
‘Major Hesketh-Prichard wanted to write about the importance of the observer. He thought too much emphasis was given to the sniper, and not enough credit to the observer.’
‘I am the observer, so I am important.’
‘Don’t interrupt. I thought you wanted to hear it. This young lieutenant of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment was watching a German trench that was thought to be disused and he saw this big cat. It was a tortoiseshell, orange and black and white, a fine well-fed animal, and it was sitting on some sandbags sunning itself. Many others had studied that section of trench, but the lieutenant was the first to see the cat and realize its importance.
Rats plagued the British trenches as well as the German ones. The lieutenant decided that this fine cat could only belong to a senior officer, at least a major, and had been brought to the trench to kill the rats. If the cat belonged to a major then the bunker over which the cat was sunning itself must be a command post. The lieutenant spoke to the artillery and the next morning there was a barrage of howitzers, the bunker was blown up and all the officers in it were killed. That shows the importance of a good observer, Omar… Oh, Major Hesketh-Prichard said the cat survived, it wasn’t killed.’
‘I think tomorrow, Mr Gus, many will be killed.’
He looked at the drying features of the shape, which by the morning would have been given a painted face.
Chapter Eight
By the hurricane lamp’s light, Omar daubed the dried face with paints liberated from the wrecked school building: grey, red and white for the flesh on the face, brown for the moustache and the eyebrows, a pink mix for the lips, grey and blue for the eyes.
When the paint set, Gus sent him to find a scarf in khaki or olive green, a good strong stick and a combat shirt. The boy disappeared into the darkness. Gus should have been sleeping, resting and regaining the strength he would need in the morning. He wondered if Meda slept, or Haquim. Beyond the wire, in front of him, the night held its silence.
While the boy had made a face and while he had told him how to paint it, he thought that a great game was played out, but that he was only a small part of it. The painted face was not that of his enemy, it was his own.
‘So, I find the sniper…’ a voice boomed, then a cascade of laughter. Gus peered back, and saw the Russian.
‘I am told you are English. I bow to an English gentleman.’
‘What do you want?’
‘To pass the night hours in the company of civilization.’
Gus growled, ‘Find it somewhere else.’
‘Are you frightened?’
‘I am not frightened.’
‘Let me tell you, Mr Gentleman, about myself. Then when you have heard me with English politeness, I will ask the question of you again. I am from Volgograd, but then it had the name of our great leader, Stalin. I was two years old when the Germans came to Stalingrad. My father and my uncle fought there, my mother was in the cellars and basements with her baby son. It was a battle without etiquette or regulation, a fight for survival… Perhaps you believe, if this battle goes badly, you can still go back to the green pleasant land of England. There was no retreat for my father, my uncle and my mother from Stalingrad. Across the river were fifteen thousand troops whose military task was to prevent retreat – they shot those who fell back.’
‘I have no interest in the battle for Stalingrad.’
‘Listen to me. The battlefield bred the great snipers of history, and great sport for those who watched. Which would you prefer to see: a boxing fight, a race around a stadium, a football game, or two men with rifles hunting for each other? The sport at Stalingrad was to watch the duels of the snipers, and to bet on them – half a loaf on the Russian, a quarter of a chocolate bar on the German. The best of them were known throughout their armies. As soon as a sniper became famous he was tracked by an enemy who was also a celebrity… And you tell me you are not frightened. You are, Mr English Gentleman, already famous. The word spreads here, as in Stalingrad. Half a million men, in the third month of the battle, watched the fight to the death between the two master snipers.’
‘Your story is not relevant to me.’
‘You are famous. A man will have come because he has heard of your fame. The great duel was between Major Konings and Vasili Zaitsev. Zaitsev was a hunter from the Ural mountains, who had killed three hundred German soldiers in the battle for Stalingrad.
Konings, a major in charge of the sniper section of the School of Infantry Tactics at Wunstorf, was flown into the battle from Berlin to redress the balance of death.
‘Stalingrad was the pivotal battle of the war, Mr English Gentleman. You could say it was the turning-point in the history of the century, but at the very point of its fulcrum was the duel between Zaitsev and Konings.’
‘Come on, how did it finish?’ Beside him the boy had knotted the scarf around the papier-mache head, rammed a stick up its throat and had buttoned a tunic across its neck.
Rybinsky smiled. ‘You make a face of paper – an old tactic. For a full week Zaitsev took a place near where his friends, Morozov and Sheykin, had been shot, and he watched and saw nothing. Zaitsev took Kulikov with him as his observer, but they could not identify Konings’ position. On the seventh day of the fourth week of the month after Konings had come to Stalingrad, Kulikov saw the flash from a speck of glass in the rubble of no man’s land – a telescope or the sight on a rifle – but they could not see Konings. They used the old tactic, as old as the one you use. Kulikov raised his helmet on a stick. Perhaps Konings was tired, perhaps uncomfortable, perhaps he wanted to piss, but he made the mistake and fired at the helmet. If the helmet had only dropped back, Konings would not have exposed himself – but Kulikov screamed, as if he were hit.
Konings’ mistake was that the scream aroused his vanity. He thought he had killed Zaitsev. He raised his head to see his success. It was all Zaitsev needed… Are you frightened that you don’t know whether you are Zaitsev or Konings?’
Gus pushed himself up. There was the murmur of voices behind him and the sounds of weapons being armed, and the squeal of the wheels that carried the heavy machine-gun.
He said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Rybinsky, but I don’t care to give myself that significance.’
‘Is he there? Has Major Konings come from Berlin?’
Gus sighed hard. ‘Yes. Yes, he has travelled. If you stick around, you’ll have the grandstand seat.’
Gus and Omar joined the great silent column moving away into the night, and far ahead of them the bright flame burned.
Major Aziz sat in a doorway at the front of a hardware shop. The door behind him, and every other door in the town, was locked, bolted.
He looked down the street in front of him: like every other street in the town, it was barricaded and empty.
He sat with his rifle loose across his knees, fed biscuits to his dog, and waited.
Ken Willet took the key that was passed to him.
Ms Manning had planted her buttocks against the cleared desk. Her arms were folded across her chest and she gazed back defiantly at the source of the tirade that had been halted in its tracks, briefly, to offer up the key.
‘I don’t know what sort of pressure you people, spooks and whatever, have to endure, but if you think you’re hard done by then try half a day in here.’