“They call it socialist realism,” said Reilly. “Very big under Stalin. Art was for the purpose of celebrating and advancing the state. Many of the big moments are commemorated in artworks.”
“The guy sure was careful,” said Bob. “There’s four cooling slots in the sleeve of a PPSh-41, and damned if he hasn’t got all four of ’em. Also, he’s got the bolt back, which is how they’d carry it for fast shooting, and that opens the ejection port on the top for the empties to fly out, and dammit, he’s got the bolt back and the port open. He may have been a tommy gunner himself.”
“I’m sure the Ministry of Culture and Moral Improvement provided him with one to copy. They may have even blown up a bridge and crashed a locomotive so he could get it right.”
Swagger walked on, encountering dozens of perfect little war scenarios as depicted by state-sponsored artists of the day. Each one boasted the same immaculate research, the absolute perfection in equipment — T34Rs, not T34Cs, when appropriate — and the same crew of happy, handsome partisans celebrating this or that triumph over the German beast. The artists — it all looked like it was painted by the same very busy guy, but indeed there were at least a dozen in this hall — had the same range of attributes: a good mechanical draftsman’s sense of machinery, weapon, aircraft, structure, and vehicle, and a good feel for weather. Skies were mottled with storm clouds, snow scythed down horizontally so that you could feel the ice pellets stinging your face, the wind was cruel and cutting. The illusion broke down slightly at the humans, who seemed to share pretty much the same face and posture. Hands good, particularly when gripping weapons, torsos a bit awkward, as if he didn’t quite understand the underlying struts of the body, legs seeming to get in the way.
There was no fear, no squalor, no fatigue, no filth, no sweat, no despair, all common to Swagger’s experience of war. Also the snow was pristine where depicted, and since Russia was a wintry sort of hell, there was a lot of it depicted. No dogs or men had pissed in it, there wasn’t a sense of the eternal stench of war, which was a miasma of burned powder, blood, shit, sweat, and various kinds of rot and decomposition. No blood was seen anyplace, nor were any blasted bodies, nor grievous wounds to face or head or limb or gut.
“It’s all kind of phony to you, I suppose,” she said.
“Yeah, but I get it. You don’t want to tell people how it was but how they wanted it to be. Maybe the kid got a bayonet in the guts and it pulled his entrails out and he died three hours later. You don’t want to tell his folks that. So you tell them he got it clean between the eyes as he led the squad up the hill. The kid don’t care. It’s for the parents, to ease their pain, so I think it’s okay in the long run.”
“Too bad there’s not one for Mili,” she said. “The White Witch Slays Obersturmbannführer Von Totenkopf in the Town Square at Stalingrad, something like that.”
“No snipers,” he said, “it ain’t that popular.” He was thinking, The truth is, after the war is over, people get sort of nervous about snipers. Unlike taking the hill or blowing up the tank, the sniper works in cold blood. It’s murder. Yeah, I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago, and I never allowed myself to think of it that way, because it’s just the kind of doubt that’ll get you killed in war, but still and all, I know, I face it, it’s real, it’s just cold-blooded killing.
She nodded somewhat glumly.
“Okay,” he said, “that was a downer, wasn’t it? Let’s get out of here and get back to the hometown. Have a nice dinner. Then tomorrow we can go mountain climbing.”
“You got it.”
They turned and walked out, and then Reilly said, “You know what? That sort of sniper queasiness you just mentioned, that’s late, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean nobody felt that way after World War II. That was a Vietnam thing.”
“I suppose. After Vietnam, I got drunk for fifteen years or so, so I don’t exactly recall.”
“Maybe the same thing happened here after Afghanistan. Before, ‘partisan sniper’ was a popular subgenre, but as a new generation came along, the authorities or whoever decided to downplay it.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Maybe there’s a room in this very museum full of sniper art.”
“Well,” said Bob, “let’s find somebody to ask.”
CHAPTER 24
The tank lumbered closer, impervious to the clangs and prangs and dings of the parachutist bullets, which glanced off, harming only the dull green paint job. The T-34 was a monster, a thirty-six-ton concoction of steel domes resting on immense treads, capable of crushing anything it chose to roll itself over. Yet it, too, was vulnerable, with a tendency to burst into flame if appropriately pricked. But nobody had told this tank sergeant.
His vehicle ground onward, devouring the earth beneath it, setting it to shiver. Its hull machine gun mounted to the left of the center of the frontal armor plate fired spastically, sending out a fan of high-velocity destruction, though without much accuracy. Another flaw: the gunner didn’t have a lot of visibility when the tank was all buttoned up. Though a huge battle beast capable of massive destruction, it was hampered by poor visibility in close-quarters combat; it could destroy enemy panzers but a few scampering rats like the Green Devils, not so much. It felt its way toward the bridge, making corrections in angle every few yards. It was like the blinded Cyclops trying to kill Odysseus’s men by feel. But still, it was getting closer; it would crush them or machine-gun them to death if they ran.
“PANZERSCHRECK!” yelled Von Drehle.
Poor Hubner. He had to dislodge himself from whichever safe borough he had dipped into, lug the heavy tube of anti-tank rocket launcher to the bridge, as well as his STG-44—which bounced painfully against his body, to which it was roped by sling — then sprint the whole way over the triple arches to the sandbag fortification, which contained Von Drehle and a boy named Neuhausen, all under fire.
Yet good Green Devil that he was, that was exactly what he did, amid a storm of enemy ordnance that raised dust in clouds through which he raced. He arrived out of breath, not so much halting at destination as falling wretchedly. Ouch, that must have hurt. He lay there on his back, gulping at oxygen, oblivious to the ruckus, trying to regain dignity, clarity, and composure.
“Too bad we’re out of medals, Paul,” said Karl. “That deserves two or three.”
“I’ll take a three-day pass instead of another Iron Cross,” gulped Hubner.
“Me, too,” said Neuhausen. “Who needs medals?”
“Are you able to shoot?” said Karl. “Hit anyplace?”
“I think I’m okay. But I don’t want to shoot it. I don’t know how. I was never trained. I thought my job was just to carry it.”
“Can you shoot it, Neuhausen?”
“Sure, I can shoot it. But I’ve never shot one, either, so God knows what I’ll hit. Have you shot it, sir?”
“Officers don’t shoot in the German army,” said Karl.
“But aren’t we in the air force?” said Neuhausen.
“Excellent point,” said Karl. “All right, I guess I’m nominated. Is it loaded?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, ‘sort of’? I don’t like ‘sort of.’ ”
“The rocket is in, but the leads haven’t been connected. I’ll connect them when you get it on your shoulder.”
“I am full of confidence.”
Von Drehle somehow got the thing off the wheezing Hubner’s shoulder and transferred it to his own, settling in under it. It was not light, at twenty pounds, with a rocket inserted holding seven pounds of Cyclonite contained in an armor-piercing warhead. Its weight threw him off a bit, and he almost stumbled out of the protective lee of the sandbags. But then he had it.