City of Thieves

9

Sonya had collected a basket of wood chips from the splintered roof beams of a bomb-blasted nursing school on Vasilevsky Island; her stove burned hot as we sat in front of it, drinking weak tea and staring at the feeble chicken. We had fashioned a makeshift nesting box from an old cookie tin and a bed of shredded newspaper. The chicken huddled there, head against her chest, ignoring the teaspoonful of ground millet we’d sprinkled on the scraps of editorial, Muscovites imploring us to stand strong. Fucking Moscow. The general feeling around Piter was that if the siege had to happen, better it happen to us, because we could survive anything, while the porcine bureaucrats in the capital would probably surrender to the nearest Oberstleutnant if they couldn’t get their weekly ration of sturgeon. “They’re as bad as the French,” Oleg used to say, though even Oleg knew that was going too far.

Kolya had nicknamed the chicken Darling, but there was no affection in her eyes as she stared back at us, stupid and suspicious.

“Doesn’t she have to have sex before she lays eggs?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” said Sonya, picking at a crust of dried skin on her lip. “I think the males fertilize the eggs, but she lays them on her own. My uncle manages a poultry collective in Mga.”

“So you know about chickens?”

She shook her head. “I’ve never even been to Mga.”

We were all children of the city. I had never milked a cow or shoveled manure or baled hay. Back in the Kirov we always made fun of the peasants from the collectives, their bad haircuts and freckled necks. Now the country folk were having their laugh, feasting on fresh-killed rabbit and boar while we tried to survive on moldy ration bread.

“She won’t lay twelve eggs by Thursday,” I said. “She won’t even live till Thursday.”

Kolya sat on a backless steel stool, his long legs spread out in front of him, scrawling notes in his notebook with his ever-smaller stub of pencil.

“Don’t give up on her yet,” he said, not looking up from his writing. “She’s a Leningrad chicken—she’s tougher than she looks. The Germans thought they’d celebrate Christmas in the Astoria, didn’t they?”

The Nazis had printed thousands of invitation cards to a grand victory party Hitler intended to throw at the Astoria Hotel after conquering what he had called, in a speech to his torch-bearing storm troopers, “the birthplace of Bolshevism, that city of thieves and maggots.” Our soldiers had found a few of the invitations on the bodies of fallen Wehrmacht officers. They had been reprinted in the newspapers, copied by the thousands, and nailed to walls all over the city. The Politburo hacks could not have devised better propaganda. We hated the Nazis for their stupidity as much as anything else—if the city fell, we wouldn’t leave any hotels where the Germans could sip schnapps in the piano bar and bed down in deluxe suites. If the city fell, we’d bring her down with us.

“Maybe she’s shy,” said Sonya. “Maybe she doesn’t want to lay eggs with all of us watching.”

“Maybe she needs to drink something.”

“Mm, that’s smart. Let’s get her some water.”

No one moved. We were all hungry and tired and hoping someone else would stand and fill a cup with water. Outside the light was already fading from the sky. We could hear the drone of searchlights warming up, their massive filaments slowly brightening. A lone Sukhoi circled above the city, the hum of its propeller steady and reassuring.

“She’s an ugly little turd, isn’t she?”

“I think she’s sweet,” said Sonya. “She looks like my grandmother.”

“Maybe we should shake her, see if they fall out.”

“She needs water.”

“Yes, get her some water.”

Another hour passed. Finally, Sonya lit the oil lamps, turned on the radio, and spilled a little river water from a jug onto a saucer, which she placed in Darling’s box. Darling glared at her but made no effort to sip the water.

Sonya retook her seat and sighed. After a moment to gather her energy, she turned to the knitting stand beside her chair, picked up a torn sock, her needle and thread, and a porcelain darning egg that she tucked into the sock’s heel to pull the fabric taut. I watched her bony fingers at work. She was a pretty girl, but her hands were like the Reaper’s, fleshless and pale. She knew how to mend a sock, though. The needle flashed in the lamplight as it dipped in and out, in and out, lulling me close to sleep.

“You know who’s a vile little cunt?” asked Kolya out of nowhere. “Natasha Rostov.”

The name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it right away.

Sonya frowned but did not look up from her knitting. “The girl in War and Peace?”

“I can’t stand that bitch. Everyone falls in love with her—all of them, even her brothers—and she’s nothing but a vapid twit.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” said Sonya.

I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn’t help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion.

Sonya closed the holes in the sock with her deft, skeletal hands. Kolya drummed his pants legs with his fingers, scowling at the thought of Natasha Rostov and the unfairness of it all. Darling shivered in the warm room, trying to retract her beaked head into her body, as if she dreamed she were a turtle.

The playwright Gerasimov spoke on the radio: “Death to cowards! Death to panic mongers! Death to rumor spreaders! To the tribunal with them. Discipline. Courage. Firmness. And remember this: Leningrad is not afraid of death. Death is afraid of Leningrad.”

I snorted and Kolya looked over at me.

“What’s wrong? You don’t like old Gerasimov?”

“What’s to like?”

“He’s a patriot, anyway. He’s right here in Piter, not safe somewhere with Akhmatova and her lot.”

“I’m with Lev,” said Sonya, tossing another handful of wood chips into the oven. The embers shone on her blond hair and for a second her little ears were crimson and translucent. “He’s a salesman for the Party, that’s all.”

“He’s worse than that,” I said, and I could hear the anger entering my voice. “He calls himself a writer, but he hates writers—he just reads them to see if they wrote anything dangerous, anything insulting. And if he decides they did, well, that’s it; he denounces them in the Litburo, he attacks them in the newspaper, on the radio. Somebody on some committee somewhere says, ‘Well, Gerasimov says the man’s a threat, and Gerasimov’s one of us, so the man must be a threat…’”

I stopped talking in the middle of the sentence. My embittered voice seemed to echo in the small apartment, though I think it was my imagination, my embarrassment at revealing too much, too soon. Sonya and Kolya stared at me—she seemed worried for me, while he seemed impressed, as if all this time he had thought I was a deaf-mute and just now realized I could form words.

“Your father was Abraham Beniov.”

I said nothing, but Kolya hadn’t been asking a question. He nodded as if everything was suddenly clear to him.

“I should have figured it out quicker. I don’t know why you’d want to hide something like that. The man was a poet, a real poet, there aren’t many of them. You ought to be proud.”

“You don’t have to tell me to be proud of him,” I snapped back. “If you’re asking me a bunch of stupid questions and I don’t want to answer them, that’s my business. I don’t talk about my family with strangers. But don’t ever tell me to be proud of my father.”

“All right,” said Kolya, holding up his hands, “all right, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant we’re not strangers anymore.”

“I feel like an idiot,” said Sonya. “Forgive me, Lev—I haven’t heard of your father. He was a poet?”

“A great one,” said Kolya.

“Fair to middling, he always said. He told me for his generation there was Mayakovsky and everyone else, and he was right there in the center section with everyone else.”

“No, no, don’t listen to him. He was a fine writer. Truly, Lev, I’m not saying this to be kind. ‘An Old Poet, Once Famous, Seen at a Café.’ Wonderful poem.”

That was the poem in all the anthologies, at least all the anthologies printed before 1937. I had read it dozens of times since they took my father, but it had been years since I’d heard another voice speak the title.

“And he was… he was…” Here Sonya made a motion with her chin, an over there motion. It could mean anything: sent to Siberia, shot in the back of the head, silenced on orders of the Central Committee. The specifics were never known. He was removed? she was asking, and I nodded.

“I have that poem memorized,” said Kolya, but he did me a favor and didn’t recite it.

The apartment door opened and Timofei, one of the surgeons I’d met the previous night, walked over to warm his hands by the stove. When he noticed Darling sitting in her nesting box, he crouched and inspected her, his hands on his knees.

“Where did this come from?”

“Kolya and Lev got him from a boy near the Narva Gate.”

Timofei stood and grinned at us. He pulled two large onions from the pockets of his overcoat.

“Got these at the hospital. Wasn’t planning on sharing, but seems to me we’ve got the possibility of a beautiful soup tonight.”

“Darling’s not for the pot,” said Kolya. “We need her for the eggs.”

“The eggs?” Timofei looked at us, at Darling, back to us. He seemed to think we were joking.

“Everyone’s quitting on Darling,” Kolya continued, “but I think she’s got it in her. Do you know anything about chickens? You think she can lay a dozen by Thursday?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

The surgeon seemed more and more irritated. Kolya glared back at him, insulted by the man’s tone.

“Don’t you speak Russian? We’re waiting for the eggs!”

For a moment I thought the conversation would turn violent, which would have been a bad thing for the Red Army; we needed our surgeons and Kolya would have splattered the man with a single punch. But Timofei finally laughed, shaking his head, waiting for us to laugh with him.

“Laugh all you want,” I told him. “You’re not touching the chicken.”

“It’s not a chicken, you idiot. It’s a rooster.”

Kolya hesitated, not sure if this was a joke the surgeon was playing or a trick to get us to throw Darling into the soup. I leaned forward in my chair and peered at the bird. I don’t know why I thought peering would help. What was I looking for, little balls?

“You’re saying she won’t lay eggs?” asked Kolya, watching Timofei carefully.

The surgeon spoke slowly, as if he were conferring with morons.

“It’s a he. And the odds aren’t good.”