The Company of Strangers. Robert Thomas Wilson

school, sport not being one of Karl’s strengths and, having too many brains for everybody’s comfort, life could have been hell without a brother three years older and a golden boy, too. So Karl was taking his turn to watch over his brother.

      The German position was not as strong as it might first appear. The Russians had trussed up ten divisions in and around the city in bloody and brutal street-to-street fighting since September and now, unless they could hammer home the death blow in the next month, it looked as if the rest of the German army would be condemned to spend another winter out in the open. More men would die and there would be little chance of the Sixth Army being reinforced until the spring. The situation was doomed to a four-month deep-frozen stalemate.

      The door to the situation room crashed open, cannoned off the wall and slammed shut. It opened more slowly to reveal Weber standing in the frame.

      ‘That’s better,’ he said, trying to put some lick on to his lips, clearly drunk, steaming drunk, his forehead shining, his eyes bright, his skin blubber. ‘I knew I’d find you in here, boring the maps again.’

      Weber swaggered into the room.

      ‘You can’t bore maps, Weber.’

      ‘You can. Look at them, poor bastards. Insensate with tedium. You don’t talk to them, Voss, that’s your problem.’

      ‘Piss off, Weber. You’re ten schnapps down the hole and not fit to talk to.’

      ‘And you? What are you doing? Is the brilliant, creative military mind of Captain Karl Voss going to solve the Stalingrad problem…tonight, or do we have to wait another twenty-four hours?’

      ‘I was just thinking…’

      ‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You were just thinking about what the Reichsminister Fritz Todt said to you before his plane crash…’

      ‘And why shouldn’t I?’

      ‘Because it’s morbid in a man of your age. You should be thinking about…about women…’ said Weber and, placing both hands on the table, he began some vigorous, graphic and improbable thrusting.

      Voss looked away. Weber collapsed across the table. When Voss looked back, Weber’s face was right there, giving him the wife’s-eye view, head on the pillow, husband sweaty, lurid, tight, pink skin and wet-eyed.

      ‘You shouldn’t feel guilty just because Todt spoke to you,’ said Weber, licking his lips again, eyes closed now as if imagining a kiss coming to him.

      ‘That’s not why I feel guilty. I feel…’

      ‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,’ said Weber, sitting up and shunning him with a hand. ‘Bore your maps, Voss. Go on. But I’ll tell you this,’ he came in close again, devil breath, ‘Paulus will take Stalingrad before Christmas and we’ll be in Persia by next spring, rolling in sherbet. The oil will be ours, and the grain. How long will Moscow last?’

      ‘The Romanians on the River Don front have reported huge troop concentrations in their north-west sector,’ said Voss, flat and heavy.

      Weber sat up, dangled his legs and gave Voss the gab, gab, gab with his hand.

      ‘The fucking Romanians,’ he said. ‘Goulash for brains.’

      ‘That’s the Hungarians.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Who eat goulash.’

      ‘What do Romanians eat?’

      Voss shrugged.

      ‘Problem,’ said Weber. ‘We don’t know what the Romanian brain consists of, but if you ask me it’s yoghurt…no…it’s the whey from the top of the yoghurt.’

      ‘You’re boring me, Weber.’

      ‘Let’s have a drink.’

      ‘You’re stinking already.’

      ‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Voss around the shoulders and barging him out of the door, their cheeks touching as they went through, horrid lovers.

      Weber slashed the lights out. They put on their coats and went back to their quarters. Weber crashed about in his own room while Voss moved the chess game, which he was playing against his father by post, away from the bed. Weber appeared, triumphant, with schnapps. He crashed down on to the bed, hoicked a magazine out from under his buttocks.

      ‘What’s this?’

      ‘Die Naturwissenschafen.’

      ‘Fucking physics,’ said Weber, hurling the magazine. ‘You want to get into something…’

      ‘…physical, yes, I know, Weber. Give me the schnapps, I need to be braindead to continue.’

      Weber handed over the bottle, bolstered his wet head with Voss’s pillow, whacking it into position with his stone cranium. Voss sipped the clear liquid which lit a trail down to his colon.

      ‘What’s physics going to do for me?’ burped Weber.

      ‘Win the war.’

      ‘Go on.’

      ‘Give us endless reusable energy.’

      ‘And?’

      ‘Explain life.’

      ‘I don’t want life explained, I just want to live it on my own terms.’

      ‘Nobody gets to do that, Weber…not even the Führer.’

      ‘Tell me how it’s going to win us the war.’

      ‘Perhaps you haven’t heard talk of the atom bomb.’

      ‘I heard Heisenberg nearly blew himself up with one in June.’

      ‘So you’ve heard of Heisenberg.’

      ‘Naturally,’ said Weber, brushing imaginary lint from his fly. ‘And the chemist Otto Hahn. You think I don’t stick my ear out in that corridor every now and again.’

      ‘I won’t bore you then.’

      ‘So what’s it all about? Atom bombs.’

      ‘Forget it, Weber.’

      ‘It goes in easier when I’m drunk.’

      ‘All right. You take some fissionable material…’

      ‘I’m lost.’

      ‘Remember Goethe.’

      ‘Goethe! Fuck. What did he say about “fissionable material”?’

      ‘He said: “What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.’”

      ‘Gloomy bastard,’ said Weber, snatching back the bottle. ‘Start again.’

      ‘There’s a certain type of material, a very rare material, which when brought together in a critical mass – shut up and listen – could create as many as eighty generations of fission – shut up, Weber, just let me get it out – before the phenomenal heat would blow the mass apart. That means…’

      ‘I’m glad you said that.’

      ‘…that, if you can imagine this, one fission releases two hundred million electron bolts of energy and that would double eighty times before the chain reaction would stop. What do you think that would produce, Weber?’

      ‘The biggest blast known to mankind. Is that what you’re saying?’

      ‘A whole city wiped out with one bomb.’

      ‘You said this fissionable material’s pretty rare.’

      ‘It comes from uranium.’

      ‘Aha!’ said Weber, sitting up. ‘Joachimstahl.’

      ‘What about it?’

      ‘Biggest