Red Moth

As moonlight glinted

As moonlight glinted off the shattered windows of the Catherine Palace, Stefanov surveyed the damage he had done. It was not only windows he had broken while blazing away with the anti-aircraft gun. The walls and doors and railings also bore the scars of bullet strikes. He had expected Commissar Sirko to say something about it‚ but all the commissar had done was to place the building off limits. The man seemed much more concerned about the plane Stefanov had brought down, and had even scrounged up a small pot of paint and a brush for Stefanov to paint a white band on the barrel of his gun, signifying their first kill.

Wrapped in the oil-stained blanket of his rain cape, Stefanov climbed out of his foxhole. Out in the darkness, he could see the little cooking fires of the other gun crews, and the glow of burning cigarettes. The rough smell of machorka tobacco reached him on the still night air.

He walked over to the tiny crater Barkat had dug for himself. ‘Barkat,’ whispered Stefanov.

‘What is it?’

‘I was thinking we might take a look around the palace.’

‘What? Now?’

‘Why not?’

‘You mean walk around the outside?’

‘We could maybe take a look inside as well.’

Now Ragozin appeared from his foxhole where, also unable to sleep, he had been eavesdropping on the conversation. ‘What’s this? You can’t go inside the palace. Commissar Sirko has forbidden it.’

Barkat sighed irritably. ‘Were you like this as a child, Ragozin? Did you tell on people in the school yard?’

‘Commissar Sirko-’ Ragozin began.

Barkat didn’t let him finish. ‘Is not here! He’s wandered off somewhere and found himself a bed in which to sleep. Now are you coming to look around the palace or aren’t you?’ he demanded, as if it had been his idea all along.

‘There might be food,’ added Stefanov, removing from his mess kit a piece of Russian army bread which had been steeped in grease and allowed to congeal, forming it into a waxy brick. Contemptuously, he tossed it into Ragozin’s lap. ‘Better than this stuff.’

‘Food,’ Barkat egged on Ragozin. ‘I bet they’ve got everything in there.’ Thoughtfully, he set a strand of grass between his teeth. It hung from his mouth like the tongue of a snake.

‘Shut up,’ Ragozin told him. ‘You know I am starving to death.’

‘The Romanovs could have anything they wanted,’ Barkat assured him.

Ragozin huffed. ‘They’ve been gone a long time.’

‘But who knows what they left behind, eh?’ Barkat broke in.

‘Oh, fine!’ Ragozin threw up his hands. ‘You realise we’ll all probably end up in a penal battalion because of this. Still‚ it would be worth it as long as we can scrounge up something better than the canned pig skin I’ve been living off ever since I joined the Red Army!’

Cloaked in the darkness, the three men set out across the park.