Last Flight to Stalingrad by Graham Hurley (novels to read .txt) 📕

planes weren’t looked after properly, especially the engines, and you lived in dread for the moment when the propeller stopped and you looked down from the cockpit and the Volga was more than a glide away.

‘That’s what happened today?’

‘No. I got shot down. That was my fault.’ He looked at the blood still caked on his hands. ‘You know what we pilots say? Here? In Stalingrad?’

‘Tell me.’

‘We say that our life is like a child’s shirt. Short and covered with shit.’

Schultz had been doing his best to follow the interview, now it was in Russian. This bit he appeared to understand. He checked with Nehmann and then rocked with laughter before giving the pilot a pat on the shoulder.

‘Any more stories like that,’ he said, ‘and we might have to give you something to drink.’

*

Nehmann despatched this story, too, but over the days to come he heard nothing from the Promi. When he caught the familiar beat of the Tante-Jus landing at Pitomnik, he occasionally wondered whether one of the envelopes in the Luftpost bag might have his name on, but nothing turned up, neither from Goebbels nor Maria. By late October, both sides had re-engaged, and the battle was as fierce as ever and, as the days slipped past, Nehmann recognised the way this city, this experience, closed around you, making everything else so remote that it became meaningless.

By now, he was translating regularly for Schultz in prisoner interrogations, especially when the captives were officers, and he began to detect a pattern in their guarded accounts of life on the Soviet front line. They called the political officers Commissars. These were the party fanatics who’d dedicated their lives to the Bolshevik cause and their task was to root out the slightest hint of deviance from the Communist line. By and large the officers agreed that the Commissars were a pain in the arse and completely unnecessary because the very presence of the Germans on Soviet soil was enough to persuade most Russians to fight to the death, but one of the consequences of the battle was an outbreak of genuine equality between the men and their officers. They faced the same risks, ate the same shit food, suffered together, laughed together, and all this in a world where rank seemed to matter less and less. The key word was tovarisch.Comrade? Yes. But mate, first.

‘The Commissars hate it,’ one officer said. ‘They think standing by your fellow soldiers is some kind of conspiracy. Share a cigarette with some Tatar animal from fuck knows where? That’s grounds for arrest. And why? Because the Commissars haven’t been through it, not the way we have, day after day, night after night. The Tatars are the best fighters we have. They’re like the night witches. They get the harmonica out and sing at night before they crawl into your trenches and slit a throat or two. Be honest. Germans are terrified of them. How do I know? Because we are, too.’

More notes. More stories. Then, in early November, Nehmann – via Schultz – got wind of a dinner party to be held in the church the Feldgendarmerie had made their base. The thickness of the church’s walls was as close to a guarantee of safety as the remains of the city could guarantee and Schultz had heard rumours of foal’s liver dumplings with boiled potatoes. As the Abwehr’s senior officer in Stalingrad, he proposed to acquire an invitation and thought that Nehmann should come, too. The dinner, he said, was being held to celebrate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Toasts would naturally be drunk to the death of Stalin and the defeat of Ivans everywhere.

That same day, Nehmann at last got a letter from Berlin. Expecting a missive from the Promi passing judgement on the reports he’d so far submitted, he found himself reading a letter from Maria. The news, she said, wasn’t good. She’d come back to Berlin from a concert tour in Franconia to find everything in Guram’s apartment torn apart: mattresses and chairs sliced open, floorboards lifted, cupboards emptied. Worse still, the piano had been attacked with a sledgehammer, the top stove in, the keyboard splintered.

Naturally, she’d made contact with Goebbels who’d promised to send an aide to see for himself. Maria had slept that night on a nest of blankets and torn sheets in a corner of the bedroom and the aide had arrived the following morning, making a brief tour of the apartment, stepping from room to room, shaking his head in disapproval. Berlin, he told her, was in the middle of an epidemic of burglaries, evidence that morale in the city was beginning to sink. He promised to find her somewhere else to stay but her concert bookings had mysteriously come to an end and she’d heard nothing from either the aide or Goebbels since.

In the meantime, she’d moved in with her father in a tiny room at the back of the bookshop and she was glad to report that life was sweet again. He really liked you, she wrote at the end of the letter. Which makes two of us. In a brief postscript, she told him not to worry about anything because she’d taken care of it. Potsdam, she added, was a trip she knew they’d never forget.

Anything? Taken care of it? Nehmann thought hard about the postscript. They’d never been to Potsdam, not once, but he knew this had to be code as well. Maria was clever. She’d fled Warsaw and she’d survived. She knew that letters to and from certain correspondents were routinely screened by a special department at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse because he’d told her so, and she must have suspected that Nehmann’s name, and maybe her own, would be on that list.

Nehmann took a hard look at the envelope. The postmark was smudged, possibly on purpose, but he thought he could make out the figure 10 which would indicate it had been posted in October. Now, it was already 6 November. He held