In Europe

evening in my quiet, sedate Intourist hotel, an underground existence begins, most of which eludes me. The lobby fills with girls in their Sunday best, and the phone beside my bed rings no less than three times: ‘You need girl?’ When I say no for the last time – I was just dreaming of Katyushas and tank manoeuvres – the voice says in surprise ‘Why not?’, as though I were suffering from some disease.
    An old woman is standing near the station. She is wearing sturdy boots, heavy stockings, a dark-grey skirt and knitted vest. Her grey head is a little bowed, she covers it with a brown cloth, her skin is red, her teeth almost gone. Once – in 1955 perhaps, or in 1942 – she must have been pretty, very pretty in fact, you can tell by her eyes. Now she's been standing here all afternoon. She's trying to sell five bunches of onions and two bottles of Fanta.
    That winter in Stalingrad she may have been a nurse, or one of those spirited girls at the anti-aircraft guns, or one of the few thousand mothers with children who, hidden away in cellars and shafts, lived through the whole struggle from beginning to end.
    The fighting in the city soon had nothing more to do with mattersof strategy or the art of warfare. It was, as the Germans put it, a
Rattenkrieg
. The Soviets fought with commando groups of six to eight men, armed with sub-machine guns, but also with knives or sharpened spades, all the better to kill without a sound. At one point, in a huge brick warehouse on the Volga, there were both Russians and Germans, a different foe on each floor, piled up on top of each other like a wedding cake. The Russians stacked frozen corpses around their foxholes to serve as sandbags. Commandos from both armies fought each other in the sewers with flame-throwers. At night, Soviet soldiers in white camouflage suits crept outside to lay antitank mines. They were very successful at it, even though their losses were the highest among all the specialists. Their motto was: ‘One mistake, and you'll never eat with your hands again!’
    Without their realising it, Stalingrad had served as a gigantic piece of bait for the Germans. The most important task of the Soviet troops was defending the city and, at the same time, engaging the Germans and keeping them from moving on. Meanwhile, in deepest secrecy, a Soviet force of almost a million men was being assembled to free Stalingrad.
    After almost three months, on the icy, misty morning of Thursday, 19 November, 1942, Commander Alexander Vasilevsky sprung the trap. The first bombardments and artillery salvoes were so intense that German troops forty-five kilometres away were wakened by what seemed to be an earthquake. Amid the pounding, the citizens in their shelters in Stalingrad that morning heard a new sound, a strange whining. Suddenly they knew, these were the Stalin Organs, these were their own troops’ Katyushas. Their liberation had begun.
    From that day on Stalingrand was surrounded by a twin siege: the Germans held the city itself in their grip, while the Soviets banded together around them. After a while the stretch of steppe between the two armies was full of dead horses and infantrymen frozen black, and when the front was quiet for a moment, tango music would come blaring across the shadowy expanse of snow: the Soviets had discovered that this music was what made the Germans most melancholy.
    At first the Soviets had no idea how many Germans were at their mercy. The staff thought it was about ten divisions, a little under 90,000 men. It turned out to be almost the entire 6th Army, plus several tensof thousands of Italians and Rumanians: some 300,000 men in all. The area around the city was like Verdun all over again. With one difference: this battle would not end in a draw.
    In this same flat countryside, now green and yellow with summer, a few scars of the battle can still be seen from the air: shell craters, trenches, the remains of old barricades. A taxi driver takes me across the dusty steppe to a little monument. I recognise the outlines of a trench. ‘At least 10,000 men were killed here,’ the driver says, pointing to the surrounding fields full of rape and cornflowers. ‘They're still here, in the ground. We never had money for neat war cemeteries.’
    The memorial is a plain one, it lacks the stateliness of all those parks and statues in the city, it is a monument erected by wives and mothers. In the middle of it is a scorched, dead tree that somehow