‘All right.’ Ivanov heaved himself up again and sat white-faced on the horse.
‘Try to hold on this time,’ said Panka, who made a soft kissing noise – and the horse bucked off Ivanov once more.
The Criminals whooped as Ivanov thwacked on to the sand where he lay groaning.
‘Not so easy, is it?’ said Panka. ‘No wonder they call you Cut and Run!’
Afterwards Benya realized that Panka could get any horse to throw its rider. He spoke horse language – amongst many others. ‘Who’s next? You’ – and he pointed to Fats Strizkaz.
‘Fats Strizkaz was once a Chekist torturer,’ gabbed a voice next to Benya. It was Koshka – ‘the Cat’ – bilious, scurfy and rail-thin, an Uzbek thief who liked telling tales about prisoners. ‘Just saying.’
‘Keep your stories to yourself,’ said Benya, who knew that stories were dangerous, that gossip could kill you. Best to say nothing and hear nothing.
‘Ivanov once killed a whole family in their beds,’ said Koshka. ‘Just saying.’
The training was exhausting: reveille at 4 a.m., first duty to groom the horses, then exercises, day after day, loping, cantering, trotting, galloping, learning to charge, ride in squadron. How to saddle and feed the horses, check their fetlocks and hooves. Each man was issued with a Red Army sabre and they were taught how to sharpen it, how to slash and pierce sacks on posts – to simulate human bodies – how to stab on the charge. Benya was a ‘townie’ but he had learned to ride when he’d covered the civil war in Spain and he’d spent many hours on horseback. But this was real riding. He learned quickly, or, as Panka put it, ‘Benya Golden can ride. Perhaps he is a Zhid with a Cossack mother!’
The horses made their long hours of training a joy, and Benya’s companions, most of whom were Cossacks, who had lived on horseback since childhood, took every chance to show off their skills. As they rode they sang songs of the Don under their breath. Panka arranged contests and soon the Cossacks were vaulting on to their mounts, slipping on to the side of their horses to shoot over their backs, picking up a glove at the gallop, ordering their horses to lie on their sides so that they could rest their rifles on their flanks. ‘Speedy’ Prishchepa could run up, mount his horse, gallop and shoot a bullseye. They lived on horseback. Benya came to love the smell of leather, the jingle of spurs and snaffles, and the sweat of the horses, which enveloped their clothes. Before long, it seemed to him that he had almost become an extension of Silver Socks. At night they played accordions and sang the songs of the Don and Kuban and talked about horses with a mixture of love and cruelty, like men talking about their wives.
‘Spend a quarter of your day grooming and loving your mount,’ Panka told Benya as he groomed Silver Socks one evening. ‘Look after your Socks and she’ll look after you. Make her your heroine and she’ll be your saviour. Do you know how to caress a woman?’
‘I think I do,’ said Benya.
‘Do you know how to beat a woman?’
‘No.’
‘Ha, you townies treat your women far too soft. Well, with a horse you need to do both. That’s why we Cossacks are so good with horses and women. But when you want to reassure Socks, don’t pat her on the neck like most fools. She won’t understand that. These horses’ mothers nuzzle their necks right here at the withers when they are foals, so when you’re in the saddle, you roll back the blanket under the saddle and caress her there. That does the trick. And never take Socks for granted or she’ll bring you down to size!’
‘Sergeant, you’ve fought in many wars?’
‘A few. The Great War against the Kaiser, the Civil War, now this; yes, a few.’
‘Are you afraid of war?’
‘No! What’s there to be afraid of? When your ride is done, ’tis done. And that’s up to God and your horse.’ Panka chewed on his moustaches, his eyes so small they were almost invisible. ‘Until then it’s always sunny on the Don,’ he said as he walked off, bandy-legged, moulded in the saddle.
Benya took a growing pride in the beauty of Silver Socks. If her hooves seemed worn or ill-shod or sore, he called in ‘Tufty’ Grishchuk, the farrier with a patchy, crusty face. If she was not herself, he consulted Lampadnik, the battalion vet. He spent hours grooming her chestnut coat till it gleamed, and polishing her accoutrements – the pommel of her saddle and the handle of his sabre. There is, he thought, no tonic for being a ruined man, like the love of a horse. Sometimes he just sat in her stable and let her nuzzle him.
In the evenings, Melishko allowed them into the village and once the local girls heard they were Shtrafniki, they were even more impressed: ‘You’re bad boys,’ said the girls. Prishchepa, with his face like a cherub and shaven hair growing back like a harvest of gold, was their darling. But when they saw Benya, they giggled. ‘Who’s your dedushka, your granpa?’ they’d ask Prishchepa.
‘But I’m only forty-two!’ Benya protested.
Prishchepa chuckled. ‘He’s a bookworm, he knows nothing about girls!’
‘But he can at least perform,’ said Fats Strizkaz, ‘unlike Little Mametka, who’s a girl in disguise. In the Camps, we called him Bette Davis. Like the film star. Big eyes, nasty face – and a bitch!’
Now, as Benya, Prishchepa, Dr Kapto and Tonya stood at the railings of the paddock, they were joined by a few others, come to stroke their horses before sleep.
Prishchepa started to sing:
‘Dr Kapto?’ It was the colonel’s adjutant. ‘Colonel Melishko wishes to talk to you. Says it’s about his bunions and piles!’
Kapto smiled. ‘I’m coming.’
They looked back towards the buildings. The lights were shining brightly, and the staff would be working into the early hours. A Willys jeep, a Lend-Lease gift from the American allies, drove up and Benya saw senior officers getting out.
As Kapto walked back to the office, Benya wondered if their mission was settled, because somewhere, he knew, someone was deciding their fate.
VI
It was midnight in Moscow but Stalin was still presiding over the meeting in the Little Corner of the Kremlin.
‘We must counter-attack on all the southern fronts – relieve the pressure!’ said Stalin, standing at the table with the Chief of Staff General Vasilevsky, looking at the small flags on the map that marked the positions of his armies from the Finnish front in the north to the foothills of the Caucasus in the south – two thousand miles and ten million men. ‘We launch Operation Mercury in forty-eight hours with Operation Pluto launched in twenty-four hours.’ He looked back at the little T-shaped table attached to his desk where Beria, Satinov and Molotov were still sitting, like expectant – if ageing – school boys.
‘Operation Mercury is being prepared but there are few divisions available,’ replied Vasilevsky. ‘We’ve formed the available units into the 62nd and 64th Armies, thereby reconstituting the intact forces of the sector into a new Stalingrad Front.’
‘That’s all? Bring more forces across the Don to support the 62nd and 64th holding out there. We must exert pressure there right now. Attack in force. When can we launch these counter-attacks?’
‘We’re rushing in reinforcements to stop the retreat,’ said Vasilevsky patiently. ‘But we are short of tanks, artillery, men.’ Stalin’s constant demands for counter-attacks before adequate preparation had already brought many disasters, but that was the nature of the man. He was relentlessly aggressive.