PETER

About two weeks later, summer had bowed out of Stalingrad. The nights grew chilly, the temperature contributing to the grim atmosphere throughout the city. Yuri was doing his best to sound as if he was fast asleep but it was no use; a small boy was leaning over him, whispering his name as loudly as he dared, ‘Yuri. Yuri, I need to go to the toilet!’

Pretending to be thoroughly absorbed in sleep and pleasant dreams, Yuri turned on his side, with his back to the boy, silently begging the child to leave him alone.

‘Please, Yuri, I have to go now!’

Making a face that no one could see, Yuri sat up, rubbing the sleep out of his bleary eyes, ‘Are you sure, Peter? You only went a while ago. You can’t need to go again already.’

Peter nodded that he could need to go again; in fact he did need to go again, though Yuri could not have seen that. It was too dark in the tunnel, the night air thick and musky with the sweet and sour smell of farting and the sweating bodies of the twenty or so that were squashed together in sleep.

In any case, Yuri assumed from the silence that there was no point in arguing further, ‘Oh, come on, then. Don’t trip on anyone.’ Even before Yuri got fully to his feet, Peter’s hand was already in his, reminding him why he didn’t leave the boy to wet himself. He used to have a mother and father, but that was all changed now. Now he just had Yuri, who just had him.

They carefully made their way to the front of the tunnel, where Peter instinctively huddled against his friend as they stopped to listen for anything at all, footsteps, voices, gunfire. The fog hadn’t cleared for days now, maybe it never would. Although maybe it wasn’t even fog, only cold, wet smoke from the shattered buildings; there wasn’t many of them left burning at this stage.

The city had been on fire all summer. Bloody Germans! Now that it was almost winter, the once scorching buildings stood silent, cold and empty as shadows, thanks to missing roofs, windows, doors and even walls. It was creepy really. This wasn’t a city anymore, not Stalingrad; it was nothing, a big pile of nothing, apart from miles of broken and burnt bricks.

Peter’s elbow dug into Yuri’s side, making him jump.

‘Sorry!’ The small boy began to scratch his head through his wool cap.

Knowing that the child was capable of scratching for ten minutes or more, Yuri swiftly issued an order, ‘Stop that. Will you just go and pee?’

Peter was surprised to have to explain the obvious. ‘But it’s itchy!’

Yuri felt a need to lead by example and was therefore obliged to ignore the maddening itchiness of his own lice-ridden scalp, assuring both himself and the little boy, ‘They’ll stop moving around when they feel the cold.’

There was a tiny patch of grass nearby, with two bushes covered in dust and ashes; they had been christened many times over by Yuri and Peter. They found it vaguely comforting to see the bit of green; even if it was blackened and faded. Most of the city’s trees were gone now, having been torched during those awful weeks when the German planes dropped their bombs.

‘Yuri, can we go for a walk?’

Honestly, Yuri thought to himself, where did he get his ideas? ‘Don’t be daft, and I thought you were dying to go?’

Yuri stood beside Peter, deliberately not watching him fumble for his ‘pee-pee’ from beneath his layers of clothes, most of which were far too big for him. He had reason to believe that if he showed the slightest interest, he would be asked to help find it. Yuri could never decide whether the child was lazy or simply liked to be babied, though maybe the two possibilities amounted to the same thing. Staring off into the distance, Yuri waited, and then waited some more. Nothing happened. He groaned, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind again?’