Last Flight to Stalingrad Graham Hurley (sight word books .TXT) 📖

command HQ. I know you were. A fragment of conversation. A message on a desk. A whisper. Anything.’

Tovarisch. Comrade.

Kirile shook his head. This was beyond him. He was so frightened, so cold, so lost, he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t put a sentence together. Then came the nearby bark of a machine gun on automatic, rat-tat-tat, and he started to whimper.

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t. Please…’

Next came the flat, sharp, percussive blast of a grenade, just metres away. This had to be a blank, Nehmann thought. Even Schultz wouldn’t risk the real thing so close.

Kirile was crying now, his spare hand trying to hide the tears. Nehmann could see the child he must so recently have been, and he shook his head, knowing that this pantomime was deeply, deeply shaming.

He bent to the boy’s ear.

‘Can you hear me, Kirile?’

‘Da.’Yes.

‘You want all this to stop?’

‘Da.’

‘Then make it up.’

‘What?’ The word seemed to catch in his throat.

‘Make it up. Invent it.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand.’

‘There are hidden armies. Armies beyond the river. No one knows about them. Only Stalin. And Chuikov. And a handful of others. Including you.’

‘How? How do I know?’

‘You saw a message. Messages, plural. You have a friend. The friend loves you, wants you.’

‘Wants me?’

‘Invent, Kirile. It’s your life here, your life at stake. Go out there, into the darkness, and it’s over. You don’t need me to tell you that. You’ll be dead within the hour. And they might play games with you first. No mercy, isn’t that the phrase? Think about it. Then think about your friend.’

‘I can’t. I have no friend like that.’

‘Let’s give him a name, Kirile. Think of a name. Any name. Your favourite name. Go on. Do it.’

‘Sergei.’

‘What does he look like?’

‘Handsome.’

‘What else?’

‘Big Schwanz. Big hands. Big everything.’

‘And he loves you, ja?’

‘Da.’

‘Wants you, ja?’

‘Da.’

‘How badly?’

‘Very badly. Very, very badly. But he’s kind, too. And he says he loves me.’

‘What does he do? This Sergei?’

‘He works at headquarters. He knows everything about everything.’

‘Good. Excellent. Because he needs to impress you, doesn’t he? He needs you to believe that he’s big and important. Not just the Schwanz. But the secrets he knows.’

‘Da.’ The boy gulped, nodded. ‘And it’s worked.’

‘You’ve been with him.’

‘Many times.’

‘And he’s told you about the armies? Stalin’s armies? The armies no one else knows about?’

‘Da.’

‘Waiting.’

‘Da.’

‘To push the fucking Germans all the way back to Berlin.’ Nehmann paused. ‘Yes? You can remember all that?’

The boy nodded, said nothing, then Nehmann’s fingers were loosening the knot in the blindfold, pulling it off, revealing a wilderness of puddles and the shell of the church beyond.

Kirile stared at it for a long moment, then buried his head in Nehmann’s shoulder, wracked by sobs.

Schultz was standing in front of the lorry, his face a blur through the rain on the windscreen. Then, abruptly, he was climbing back into the cab.

A single glance at the pair of them was all he needed.

‘Alles gut?’ he queried.

‘Da.’Nehmann nodded. ‘What else did you expect?’

24

TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 27 SEPTEMBER 1942

Nehmann was en route back to Tatsinskaya a full week later in the hands of a taciturn Luftwaffe pilot who’d once flown the Bf-109 and had no time for the big old Tante-Ju. In the back of the aircraft were a dozen badly wounded infantrymen judged to be worth the expense of the journey west. They all occupied stretchers and most of them, thanks to hefty doses of morphine, were unconscious. After refuelling at Tatsinskaya, the aircraft would be flying further west to the comforts of a big field hospital.

Also, in the very back of the plane, were a number of mail sacks full of letters home. Nehmann sat among them. The seal on one of the sacks had failed and he stole a look at a number of the letters, curious to take the pulse of Paulus’s struggling army. Most of these missives did their best to soften the realities Nehmann had seen for himself. The Russians were getting weaker by the day. The food was OK, and the weather could be better, but everyone agreed that the Führer was right to be pushing so hard to knock the Ivans out of the war.

To a man, these correspondents were looking forward to a Christmas back home around a roaring log fire and a plump goose on the table. Only one hinted that things might be bleaker than they seemed. ‘The snow has gone for the time being,’ he’d written, ‘and yesterday I saw a woman drinking from a puddle in the road. These people know how to live on nothing. One day, if this lasts longer than we think, we might be as primitive as them.’

Nehmann sat back among the mail sacks. He’d written letters himself, all of them to Maria, mainly at night when he had a little privacy and the time to marshal his thoughts. These, in part, were love letters but they were something else, as well, maybe just as important. He needed to have someone else in his life, someone who didn’t know Stalingrad first-hand. He needed to be able to visualise Maria, to be close to her, to explain exactly how he felt about this shitty war, and this godforsaken city. Men in battle knew how to get by, understood the lies they had to tell themselves, developed a real talent for turning pain into sardonic laughter. That’s how men like Schultz got through. That’s what produced these letters of comfort to loved ones back home. The undeceived, he thought, tell the best lies.

Nehmann refolded the last of the letters, slipped it back into its envelope and returned it to the open sack of mail. Then he lay back against the bulging canvas, his eyes closing. This was why writing to Maria was so important, he told himself. She has to understand what’s really happening. She has to know.

*

Nehmann had brought two bottles of vodka and a cooked ham back to Tatsinskaya, all three items a present from a grateful Schultz. The Abwehr man had been delighted