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Authors: David Benioff

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BOOK: City of Thieves
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“You’re strolling along like a couple of faggots, chatting about books. You realize we’ve got German camps within two kilometers of where we stand? You want to end up in a ditch with all the Communists and Jews, that’s your business, but I plan on seeing Berlin next year.”
“He’s a Jew,” said Kolya, jabbing at me with his thumb, ignoring the angry look I directed his way.
“Are you? Well, you’re the first dumb Jew I ever met. Either turn around and go back to Piter or else shut your mouths and follow our rules. There’s a reason we haven’t lost a man in two months. Now go on, move.”
With a hand on each of our backs she shoved us forward and we resumed our places in the single file, nine strides between us, shamed into silence.
I thought about the nonexistent author Ushakovo and his nonexistent masterpiece,
The Courtyard Hound
. For some reason I wasn’t angry at Kolya. It was a strange lie but a harmless one, and the farther I walked the more I understood his motivation. Kolya seemed fearless, but everyone has fear in them somewhere; fear is part of our inheritance. Aren’t we descended from timid little shrews who cowered in the shadows while the great beasts stomped past? Cannibals and Nazis didn’t make Kolya nervous, but the threat of embarrassment did—the possibility that a stranger might laugh at the lines he’d written.
My father had many friends, most of them writers, and they chose our apartment as their clubhouse because of my mother’s cooking and my father’s unwillingness to throw anyone out. My mother complained that she was running the Hotel Literati. The place stank of cigarette smoke and the butts were everywhere, in the potted plants and half-drunk glasses of tea. One night an experimental playwright stuck dozens of the butts into gobs of melted candle wax on the kitchen table, representing Roman and Carthaginian forces, so he could demonstrate Hannibal’s double envelopment maneuver at the battle of Cannae. My mother griped about the noise, the broken glasses, the rugs stained with cheap Ukrainian wine, but I knew she liked hosting the crowds of poets and novelists, loved it when they devoured her stews and raved about her cakes. When she was young, she was a pretty woman, and if she wasn’t a flirt herself she liked it when good-looking men flirted with her. She would sit beside my father on the sofa and listen to the debates and rants and decrials, saying nothing but hearing everything, saving it all for the debriefing she would have with my father when the last drunk finally staggered out the door. She was not a writer herself, but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments. When one of the great men came to the apartment, a Mandelstam or Chukovksy, she didn’t treat them with any special favors, but I could tell she watched them more carefully, evaluating how they behaved with my father. In her mind the literary community was ranked as precisely as the army; the ranks might not have titles and insignia, but they were ranks all the same, and she wanted to know where my father stood.
Sometimes, when enough bottles of wine had been drained, a poet would stand, swaying slightly as if a strong wind were blowing, and recite a new poem he had written. As an eight-year-old peering into the living room from the hallway, knowing I’d be caught soon and hoping it would be my father to catch me (he was almost impossible to anger, while my mother was quick with a hard hand to the backside), the poems meant nothing to me. Most of the poets wanted to be Mayakovsky, and while they couldn’t match his talent they could mimic his opacity, shouting out verses that made no sense to me at eight and probably made just as little sense to everyone else in the room. But even if the poems didn’t impress me, the performances did—these huge men with their shaggy eyebrows, always holding cigarettes between their fingers, the long stems of ash breaking and drifting toward the floor whenever they gestured too wildly. On rare occasions a woman would rise and face the staring eyes—once even Akhmatova herself, according to my mother, though I don’t remember seeing her.
Sometimes the poets read from scribbled notes, sometimes they spoke from memory. When they were finished, too conscious of all the faces watching them, they reached for the nearest glass of wine or vodka—not only for the drink’s support, but to give themselves something to do, a simple action to occupy the hands and eyes while waiting for the crowd’s reaction. This was an audience of fellow professionals, competitors, and the usual response was modest approval, signaled by nodding heads, smiles, slaps on the back. Once or twice I saw these jaundiced men of letters erupt with euphoria, so moved by the power of the work that they forgot their jealousy as they shouted out, “Bravo! Bravo!” and charged at the dazed, happy poet, kissing his cheeks with sloppy wet lips, mussing his hair, repeating their favorite lines, and shaking their heads with admiration.
Far more common, though, was the reaction of disdainful silence, nobody willing to meet the poet’s eye, to feign interest in the subject matter, or halfheartedly compliment the use of a jaunty metaphor. When a reading failed, the poet knew it quickly. He would down his glass of alcohol, the red flush of shame spreading across his face as he wiped his mouth dry with his sleeve and shuffled off to the far side of the apartment, taking great interest in the books on my father’s bookshelves—Balzac and Stendhal, Yeats and Baudelaire. The defeated man would leave the party soon, but leaving too quickly would seem like bad sportsmanship, a sulking form of cowardice, so he would wait an agonizing twenty minutes while everyone around him studiously avoided mentioning his poem, as if it were a brutal fart that no one was rude enough to acknowledge. Finally he would thank my mother for her food and hospitality, smiling but not looking her in the eye, and hustle out the door, knowing that the minute he left everyone would joke about the atrocity he’d unveiled, what a horror, what a lumpy sack of pretension and artifice.
Kolya protected himself by inventing Ushakovo. The make-believe writer gave cover so that Kolya could test his opening line, his protagonist’s philosophy, even the title of the book, gauging my reaction without fear of derision. As scams go it wasn’t the most elaborate one, but he had pulled it off nicely, and I decided that Kolya could probably write a decent novel someday, if he survived the war and ditched the bombastic first sentence.
The talk with Kolya and the encounter with Vika had jolted me awake again and I peered around the forest, hoping the men in front of me and behind me had better eyes for the darkness than I did. The moon had drifted below the tree line; the sun would not rise for hours; the night was truly black now. Twice I nearly walked into trees. The stars were out in their millions, but they were only for decoration, and I wondered why those distant suns appeared as pinpricks of light. If the astronomers were right and the universe is clogged with stars, many of them far larger than our sun, and if light traveled forever without slowing or fading, why didn’t the sky shine every minute of the day? The answer must have been obvious, but I couldn’t figure it out. For thirty minutes I didn’t worry about the Einsaztkommandos and their leader Abendroth; I forgot about the muscles cramping in my legs; I didn’t notice the cold. Were stars like flashlights, unable to project past a certain distance? From the rooftop of the Kirov I could spot a soldier’s glowing flashlight from a few kilometers away, even though the beam could not illuminate my face from that distance. But then again, why did a flashlight’s beam lose power over distance? Did the light particles spread out like pellets in a shotgun blast? Was light even made of particles?
My semilucid wonderings finally ended when I collided with Kolya’s back, banging my nose and crying out in surprise. A dozen voices shushed me. Squinting at the dim shapes in front of me, I saw that everyone had gathered beside a massive, snow-crusted boulder. Vika was already on top of the rock; I don’t know how she managed to clamber up its slick, frozen sides in the dark.
“They’re burning the villages,” she called down to Korsakov.
The moment she spoke the words I smelled smoke in the air.
“They found the bodies,” said Korsakov.
The Germans had made their philosophy of retribution very clear to the civilians in occupied territory. They nailed posters to the walls; they issued proclamations in their Russian-language radio broadcasts; they spread the word through their collaborators: kill one of our soldiers and we’ll kill thirty Russians. Tracking down partisans was difficult work, but rounding up large numbers of old men, women, and children was easy, even now with half the nation on the run.
If Korsakov and his men were bothered by the knowledge that their raid earlier in the night had triggered a slaughter of innocents, I heard no indication in their whispered exchanges. The enemy had declared total war when they invaded our country. They had vowed, repeatedly and in print, to incinerate our cities and enslave the populace. We could not fight them in moderation. We could not fight total war with half war. The partisans would continue picking off Nazis; the Nazis would continue massacring noncombatants; and eventually the Fascists would learn that they could not win the war even if they killed thirty civilians for every one of their dead soldiers. The arithmetic was brutal, but brutal arithmetic always worked in Russia’s favor.
Vika scrambled down from the boulder. Korsakov walked over to confer with her. As he passed us he muttered to Kolya, “So much for Novoye Koshkino.”
“We’re not going?”
“Why would we? The whole point was to get there before sunrise and hunt for Einsatz. You smell that smoke? The Einsatz are hunting us.”
18
 
The partisans kept a safe house a few kilometers inland from Lake Ladoga, a long-deserted trapper’s cabin on a hillside dense with fir trees. We finally got there an hour before dawn, the sky shifting patiently from black to gray, a light snow falling as the air brightened. Everyone seemed to think the snow was a good omen, covering our tracks and signaling a warmer day.
On the way to the cabin we had walked along a ridgeline overlooking another burning village. The fire was silent, the little houses collapsing into the flames without complaint, flocks of sparks rising to the sky. At a distance it seemed beautiful, and I thought it was strange that powerful violence is often so pleasing to the eye, like tracer bullets at night. As we passed the village we heard a burst of gunfire, no more than a kilometer away, seven or eight machine guns firing in concert. We all knew what the shots signified and we all kept walking.
The trapper’s cabin looked like it had been hammered together from old planks and rusted nails by a man with little skill for carpentry and no patience for the job. The door hung crooked on its hinges. There were no windows, just a pipe jutting out of the rooftop to vent smoke, and no floor but hard-packed dirt. Inside the smell of human shit was almost too much to stand. The walls were gouged as if by claws, and I wondered if the ghosts of all the skinned martens and foxes still haunted the place, eager to flay their guests alive when the candles burned out.
As cold as it was outside, inside offered only respite from the wind and no added warmth. Korsakov elected one unlucky man to take the first guard shift. The partisan in the Finnish ski patrol uniform removed his pack and set up a little “bourgeois stove,” filling it with scraps of wood that they had left in the cabin earlier. When the stove was lit, all of us crowded as close together as we could, thirteen men and a woman—or twelve men, a woman, and a boy, if we were being honest about it. I wondered, for the hundredth time that night, what she would look like with the filthy coveralls stripped off, her pale dirty skin stretched taut over the blue tracery of her veins. Did she have breasts or was she flat chested as a boy? Her hips were as narrow as mine, I was fairly sure of that, but even with her cropped hair and mud-stained neck there was something undeniably feminine about that proud jutting lower lip. Did the other men in the group lust for her, too, or did they all see her as Korsakov saw her, as a sexless sniper with an uncanny eye? Were they idiots or was I?
The shit stench made my eyes water, but soon smoke from the stove camouflaged the worst of the smell, and the fire and our body heat made the cabin comfortable enough. At that point I could have slept anywhere, and with my father’s navy coat laid flat beneath me and my folded scarf as a pillow, for once I slipped into unconsciousness within seconds of resting my head.
A moment later Kolya nudged me.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, are you awake?”
I kept my eyes clenched shut, hoping he would leave me alone.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked. His mouth was next to my ear, allowing him to whisper directly into my skull without bothering any of the others. I wanted to punch him to make him shut up, but I did not want him to punch me back.
“No,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you. Even if I thought we were dead, it doesn’t matter. It was wrong of me.”
“Thank you,” I told him, and shifted onto my side, hoping he would get the hint.
“You like the title, though?
The Courtyard Hound?
Do you know what it means?”
“Please . . . please let me sleep.”
“I’m sorry. Sleep, of course.”
Thirty seconds passed in silence, but I could not relax because I knew he was fully awake, staring at the ceiling, waiting to ask me another question.
“You want to know the truth, don’t you? About why I left my battalion.”
“You can tell me tomorrow.”
“I hadn’t been with a girl in four months. My balls were ringing like a couple of church bells. You think I’m joking? I’m not like you. I don’t have your discipline. I fucked my first girl three days after the first time I came. Twelve years old, didn’t have a hair on my sack, but I stuck it in Klava Stepanovich down in the boiler room,
boing boing boing.
”
Boing boing boing?
“I get this hunger, I’m telling you. I go a week without it and I can’t concentrate, my brain doesn’t work, I’m walking around the trenches with a hard-on out to here.”
Kolya’s hot breath was on my ear and I tried to turn farther away, but we were all squeezed together on the earth floor like cigarettes in a pack.
“We had a party planned for New Year’s Eve, the whole battalion. There was vodka; there was going to be some singing; I heard a rumor someone found a few pigs stashed away in a barn somewhere and we were going to roast them. All-night affair, right? So I figured, this is good, let them celebrate with their vodka and their pigs, I’ve got other business. We were less than an hour from Piter, by car. I had a friend delivering messages to headquarters. He was going to be in the city for three, four hours. Perfect. So I ride with him, he drops me off at a friend’s building—”
“Sonya?”
“No, a girl named Yulia. Not the most beautiful girl in the world, not even pretty, really. But listen, Lev, this girl made me hard when she filed her nails. Her pussy was magic. It really was. She lived on the sixth floor and the whole way up I’m getting myself ready. Already decided the position—just toss her over the back of the sofa, ass in the air, go in deep. I don’t know if you’ve got much going on downstairs, by the way, but if you don’t, that’s a good position for you. Gets you all the way in. Anyway, I finally get to her apartment, I’m starting to unbuckle my belt, I bang on the door, an old woman opens up. Barely bigger than a midget this woman, looks about two hundred years old. I tell her I’m a friend of Yulia’s and she says, ‘God forgive me, Yulia’s been dead a month now.’ God forgive me! Fuck! So I say my sorrys to this crone, give her a piece of bread because she’s barely able to stand up, and run downstairs. Time’s running out. There’s another girl who lives close by, one of the ballerinas I told you about. A little bit of an ice queen, but the best legs in Piter. I have to climb over a gate to get into her building, nearly get an iron spike up my asshole, but I make it, get to her apartment door, bang on it, ‘It’s me, Nikolai Alexandrovich, let me in!’ Door opens, her fat rat-eyed husband’s staring me down. Vile turd’s never home, except this time. Party man, of course, usually down at the offices figuring out new regulations for the Army, but tonight he decides to stay home and torture his wife for New Year’s. ‘Who are you? What is this?’ he says to me, indignant, as if I’ve somehow insulted him by banging on his door and demanding his wife’s wet twat on a plate. I wanted to knock him on his dimpled ass, but that would have been the end of me, so I give him a salute, the civilian cunt, tell him I knocked on the wrong door, and disappear. Now I’m fucked. The only other girl I know on that side of town is Roza, but she’s a professional and I’ve got no money on me. But I’m a good customer, maybe she trusts me, maybe she’ll take whatever food I’ve got left in exchange, right? It’s a couple of kilometers away. I’m sprinting now, sweating, first sweat since October. There’s not much time left before my friend’s driving back. I make it there, out of breath, up four flights to Roza’s apartment; door’s unlocked, I let myself in, and there’s three soldiers waiting in her kitchen, passing around a bottle of vodka. I can hear her groaning away in the other room and these drunk morons are singing peasant songs and slapping each other on the back. ‘Don’t worry,’ says the one who’s last in line, ‘I’ll be quick.’
“I offered them money to cut the line, except I didn’t have any money and they weren’t such morons they were going to take a note from me. I told them I had to get back to battalion and one of them said, ‘It’s New Year’s Eve! They’re all drunk! Long as you get back by morning you’ll be fine.’ That sounded right to me, and they kept passing the bottle around, so I drank with them and pretty soon I was singing their fucking peasant songs louder than all of them. And an hour later I finally got to lie down with Roza. She’s a sweet girl—I don’t care what anyone says about whores—she let me in for the rest of the bread I had in my pocket, and it wasn’t a lot. But she said her pussy was hurting so she sucked me off instead. Fifteen minutes later I’m ready again, she grins and says, ‘Oh, I love you young ones,’ and lets me go inside her, very slow, very gentle. And then again, half an hour later. I must have sprayed a liter of come inside her, north and south.”
I had the uncomfortable feeling that Kolya was making himself aroused all over again as he told the story.
“So you missed your ride back.”
“Oh, I missed it by hours. But I wasn’t worried, I’d find another car heading back to the battalion. I knew most of those boys delivering messages, it wouldn’t be a tough trick. You should have seen me walking out of Roza’s building. Different human being from the one who walked in. Relaxed, big smile on my face, bit of bounce in my stride. I step out the front door, I’m practically skipping down the sidewalk, and an NKVD patrol, four of the dirty bitches, stops me. Man asks to see my LOA papers. I don’t have any LOA papers, I tell him. I’m delivering messages for General Stelmakh—the man’s planning a battle, he needs rifles, he needs mortars, he doesn’t have time to sign some shit-stained LOA. Stelmakh’s one of your tribe, I think. Did you know that?”
“Does this story ever end? Are you going to keep talking for the rest of my life?”
“This little glorified policeman interrogating me, he’s still got a Hitler mustache. You’d think everyone in Russia with a Hitler mustache would have shaved it by now, but no, this dank cunt thinks it’s a good look for him. He asks me why I’m delivering messages from General Stelmakh to an apartment building in the Vyborg section. I decide a little bit of truth never hurt, decide to appeal to the man’s humanity. I give him a wink, tell him I got myself a bit of ass while I waited for my ride back to the general’s HQ. You’d think he’d grin and slap my back and tell me to get my LOA in order next time I left my battalion. Four months I’d been on the front line while this mustachioed dwarf minced around Piter, arresting soldiers for bringing a bit of meat home to their parents, a bag of rice. This was my mistake. I appealed to a bureaucrat’s humanity. He has his men slap the manacles around my wrists and then he gives me this little superior smile and tells me General Stelmakh is in Tikhvin, two hundred kilometers away, he’s just won an important battle.”
“You shouldn’t have said Stelmakh. That was stupid of you.”
“Of course it was stupid! My cock was still wet!” Several of the partisans muttered at Kolya to shut up and he lowered his voice. “My brain wasn’t working right. I couldn’t believe this man was accusing me. Do you understand how fast it changes? I was a soldier in good standing in the afternoon, and there I am, five hours later, accused of desertion. I thought they’d shoot me right there in the street. But they took me to the Crosses instead. And then I met you, my moody little Hebrew.”
“How did Yulia die?”
“What? I don’t know. I suppose she starved.”
We lay quietly for several minutes, listening to the men around us sleep, some of them quiet, some rasping and nasal, some
shooshing
like wind in a chimney. I tried to distinguish Vika’s breathing from the others’, curious what sounds she made in the night, but it was impossible to tell.
I had been annoyed with Kolya for keeping me awake with his endless talk, but in the silence I was suddenly lonely.
“Are you asleep?” I asked.
“Hm?” he murmured, groggy, the fast sleeper—his story told—already sailing away into his dreams.
“Why is it dark at night?”
“What?”
“If there are billions of stars, and most of them are just as bright as the sun, and light travels forever, how comes it’s not bright all the time?”
I wasn’t really expecting an answer. I figured he would snort and tell me to go to sleep, or give some pat reply like, “It’s dark at night because the sun is down.” Instead he sat up and stared down at me. I could see the frown on his face by the fluttering light of the bourgeois stove.
“That’s an excellent question,” he said. He thought about it some more, peering into the darkness outside of the stove’s circle of light. Finally, he shook his head, yawned, and lowered himself to the ground again. Ten seconds later he was asleep, snoring, the
whoosh
of his inhalations followed by the chuffing of his exhales.
I was still awake when the guard outside came in from his shift, woke up his replacement, refilled the stove with some twigs he’d gathered, and lay down in the circle of huddled bodies. For another hour I listened to the wood knots popping, thinking about starlight and Vika, until I finally fell asleep and dreamed of a sky raining fat girls.
BOOK: City of Thieves
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