“To Lady Death and her pack of devils,” Kitsenko answered, raising his own mug. “I’ve never seen anything in my life as terrifying as you lot melting out of the trees this morning with your rifles. Well, except the time I walked into the latrine and saw Dromin’s bare ass shining like a searchlight; that’ll drive a man screaming into the night.”
A laugh went around the rock, and we bolted the brandy as one. It fired its way down to my stomach, and I closed my eyes in dreamy peace as the first spoonful of soup slipped down my throat, and the jokes and laughter began to fly. I could die here, I found myself thinking. I could die here and at least I would be happy. And I opened my eyes, drinking the rest of my soup and wondering when it was that I’d started to think of death as something not just possible, but inevitable.
The men were ahead of me, done with their soup and now sucking down the sardines, chins slick with oil. The brandy had clearly gone to Vartanov’s head; he was proclaiming, “ ’S easy to find your way among trees, even you townies . . . trees are like people, each has its own soul . . .” When the last scrap had been eaten, Fyodor stripped to his undershirt and rose to challenge one of the reconnaissance soldiers to a wrestling match as catcalls rose. I smiled and rummaged further into the German major’s pack, gnawing on a bar of chocolate as I turned over the packet of papers.
“What did you find?” Kitsenko leaned to look over my shoulder.
The spiky German script was hard to read, but I could make out the man’s name. “Klement Karl Ludwig von Steingel.” His decorations spoke of a career that had led through Czechoslovakia, France, Poland.
“That’s a lot of war under one man’s belt,” Kitsenko said. “All that, and then he came here.”
“Here he came, and here he stays,” Kostia said from my other side.
“Kostia!” someone called from the campfire. “Come give Fyodor a run, you mangy wolf—”
“Who are you calling mangy?” Kitsenko challenged even as my partner rose and began stripping off his jacket. “Tear his arms off, Kostia! Just you wait,” the lieutenant added low-voiced to me. “Everyone will bet on that ox Fyodor because he’s twice as big.”
The two stepped in to circle each other, my partner smiling faintly. “I’ll wager a chocolate bar the young ox takes it!” Vartanov called across the fire.
“I’ll take that bet,” Kitsenko called back, adding for my ears, “Now watch our wolf eat him alive.”
“You’ve played this game before,” I said as Kostia began to circle round Fyodor, hands poised, eyes alert. Fyodor was the size of a boulder, but he was fleshy and rash; my sparely built partner wasn’t much taller than me, but he was made out of tungsten and patience.
“You know how many classmates we rooked out of their pocket money with this game when we were students? Every Moscow golden boy with a Party bigwig for a daddy thought he could wipe the floor with the skinny kid from Siberia.” Kitsenko rested his elbows on his drawn-up knees. “By the time they spat out a tooth or two and learned how wrong they were, we’d have raked in bets at five-to-one.”
I watched Kostia side-slip a rush from Fyodor and come back in an armlock that doubled his opponent’s wrist up behind his back. “So you were the bookie and he took the punches?”
“Oh, we both took the punches. Moscow golden boys with Party bigwig daddies don’t like losing, so usually Kostia and I would end up in another fight when the official one was over. But we’d still come out of it with more rubles than bruises.”
I smiled. “That’s friendship.”
“The best.”
His glance held mine just a touch too long. Don’t flirt with officers, I reminded myself, and was glad when Kitsenko jumped up to shout encouragement to my partner: “Go for his knees, Kostia!” Kostia threw a bow back, and I smiled. I couldn’t help but like Kitsenko for bringing such an unexpected light side out of my taciturn other half.