City of Thieves

11

The Moscow line had been cut only four months before, but the rails were already beginning to rust. Most of the ties had been pried from the ground and split for firewood, though they were impregnated with creosote and dangerous to burn. Kolya walked atop of one rail, a gymnast on the balance beam, hands held out to the side. I trudged along behind him, in the center of the tracks, unwilling to play his game, partly because I was angry with him, partly because I knew I’d lose.

The rails ran east past redbrick apartment blocks and three-story department stores, past the Kotlyarov streetcar barns, past abandoned factories that had built things nobody could use or afford during wartime. A crew of young women wearing overalls below their winter coats, under the supervision of an army engineer, labored to convert a post office into a defensive position. The corner of the sturdy old building had been demolished to make way for a machine-gun nest.

“Great body on that one,” said Kolya, indicating a woman wearing a blue headscarf lugging sandbags from an idling truck.

“How can you tell?”

It was a ludicrous claim. The woman was at least fifty meters away; her jacket was heavily padded and she wore several layers beneath it.

“I can tell. She has a dancer’s posture.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t give me your ah. I know ballerinas. Believe me. I’ll bring you to the Mariinsky Theater some night, take you backstage. Let’s just say I have a reputation.”

“You never shut up about your reputation.”

“There is very little in this world that makes me happier than a ballerina’s thighs. Galina Ulanova—”

“Oh, stop.”

“What? She’s a national treasure. Her legs should be bronzed.”

“You never slept with Galina Ulanova.”

He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.

“I’m being cruel,” he admitted. “Talking to you about things of this nature… it’s sadistic. Like talking about Velázquez with a blind man. Let’s change the subject.”

“You don’t want to talk about ballerinas you didn’t sleep with for the next thirty-nine kilometers?”

“Three boys go to a farm to steal chickens,” he began in his joke-telling voice. He used a different accent for jokes, though I couldn’t tell what kind of accent it was supposed to be or why he thought it made things funnier.

“The farmer hears them and rushes over to the farmhouse. So the boys jump into three potato sacks and hide.”

“Is this going to be a long joke?”

“The farmer kicks the first sack and the boy inside says, ‘Meow!’ pretending to be a cat.”

“Oh, he was pretending to be a cat?”

“I just said that,” said Kolya, looking back at me to see if I was starting trouble.

“I know he’s pretending to be a cat. Once he says, ‘Meow,’ it’s obvious he’s pretending to be a cat.”

“You’re surly again because I slept with Sonya? Are you in love with her? Didn’t you have a nice time with what’s his name? The surgeon? You looked so cute curled up together by the stove.”

“And what’s that accent you’re doing? Is it supposed to be Ukrainian?”

“What accent?”

“Every time you tell a joke you use some stupid accent!”

“Listen, Lev, my little lion, I’m sorry. I know it’s not easy for you, lying there all night, your meat in your hand, listening to her happiness—”

“Just tell your dumb joke.”

“—but I promise you, before you hit eighteen—when’s your birthday?”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I’m going to find you a girl. Calculated neglect! Don’t forget.”

All this time he continued to walk atop the steel rail, one foot in front of the other, never losing his balance, never looking down, going faster than I could walk in the usual way.

“Where was I? Ah, the farmer, he kicks the first sack, ‘Meow,’ and so on. He kicks the second sack, and the boy inside says, ‘Woof!’ Pretending to be—”

Kolya pointed at me to finish the sentence.

“A cow.”

“A dog. When he kicks the third sack, the boy inside says, ‘Potatoes!’”

We walked in silence.

“Well,” said Kolya at last, “other people think it’s funny.”

On the outskirts of the city, the apartment blocks were no longer stacked one on top of the other. The concrete and brick was now broken by stretches of frozen marsh and snow-covered lots where future buildings were meant to rise before the war ended all construction. The farther we walked from the city center, the fewer civilians we saw. Army trucks with chains on their tires rattled past, the weary soldiers in the flatbeds staring at us with no interest as they motored toward the front.

“Do you know why it’s called Mga?” Kolya asked.

“Somebody’s initials?”

“Maria Gregorevna Apraksin. One of the characters in The Courtyard Hound is based on her. Heiress to a long line of field marshals, peculators, and royal toilet lickers. She’s convinced her husband is trying to murder her so he can marry her sister.”

“Is he?”

“Not at first, no. She’s completely paranoid. But she never shuts up about it and then he does start to fall in love with the sister. And he realizes life really would be better without his wife around. So he goes to Radchenko for advice, but he doesn’t know that Radchenko’s been fucking the little sister for years.”

“What else did he write?”

“Hm?”

“Ushakovo,” I said. “What other books did he write?”

“The Courtyard Hound, that’s it. It’s a famous story. The book came out, it was a failure. There was only one review and the critic absolutely blasted it. Called it vulgar and despicable. Nobody read it. Ushakovo worked on that book for eleven years. Eleven years, can you imagine that? And it disappears like it was dropped into the ocean. But he starts all over again, a new novel; his friends who see pieces of it say it’s his masterpiece. Except Ushakovo’s getting more and more religious, spending time with this church elder who convinces him that fiction is Satan’s work. And one night Ushakovo becomes convinced that he’s going to hell; he’s in a complete panic; he tosses the manuscript in the fire. Poof, gone.”

This sounded strangely familiar.

“But that’s exactly what happened to Gogol.”

“Well, no, not exactly. Very different in the particulars. But an interesting parallel, I agree.”

The rails veered away from the road, past stands of birch saplings too slender for firewood. Five white bodies lay facedown in the white snow. A family of winter dead, the dead father still clutching his dead wife’s hand, their dead children sprawled a short distance away. Two battered leather suitcases lay open beside the corpses, emptied of everything but a few cracked picture frames.

The family’s clothes and boots had been stripped away. Their buttocks had been hacked off, the softest meat, easiest for making patties and sausages. I couldn’t tell if the family had been murdered by gunfire, or knives, or an exploding shell, by German artillerymen or Russian cannibals. I didn’t want to know. They had been dead a long time, at least a week, and their bodies had started to become part of the landscape.

Kolya and I continued east along the Vologda line. He didn’t tell any more jokes that morning.

A little before noon we reached the edge of the Leningrad defenses: thickets of barbed wire, trenches three meters deep, dragon’s teeth, machine-gun nests, antiaircraft batteries, and KV-1 tanks covered with white camouflage netting. The soldiers we had seen earlier had ignored us, but now we were too far east to be civilians, and too strange of a pair to be Army. As we walked along the tracks a band of young privates, hauling the tarpaulin off a 6x6 truck, turned to stare at us.

Their sergeant walked toward us, not pointing his carbine at us, precisely, but not pointing it away, either. He had the posture of a lifelong Army man and the high cheekbones and narrow eyes of a Tartar.

“You two have papers?”

“We do,” said Kolya, reaching inside his jacket. “We have excellent papers.”

He handed over the colonel’s letter and nodded toward the truck.

“That the new-model Katyusha?”

The tarpaulin had been flung to the ground, revealing racks of parallel rails jutting skyward, waiting to be loaded with rockets. According to what we heard on the radio, the Germans feared the Katyusha more than any other Soviet weapon—they called it Stalin’s organ, after the rockets’ low and mournful howls.

The sergeant glanced at the rocket launcher and back to Kolya. “Never mind about that. Which Army are you with?”

“The Fifty-fourth.”

“The Fifty-fourth? You’re supposed to be in Kirishi.”

“Yes,” said Kolya, giving the sergeant an enigmatic smile and nodding at the letter in the man’s hand. “But orders are orders.”

The sergeant unfolded the letter and read. Kolya and I watched the privates position the finned-tail rockets on the Katyusha’s rails.

“Give them hell tonight!” shouted Kolya. The soldiers on the truck glanced at us and said nothing. They looked like they hadn’t slept in days; it took all their concentration to load the rockets without dropping them, there was no energy to waste on madmen.

Unwilling to be ignored, Kolya began to sing. He was a baritone with a strong, confident voice.

“On the bank Katyusha starts singing, of a proud gray eagle of the steppe, of the one Katyusha loves deeply, of the one whose letters she’s kept.”

The sergeant finished the letter and refolded it. The colonel’s message had clearly impressed him; he looked at Kolya now with genuine respect, nodding his head in time with the old song.

“That’s the stuff. I heard Ruslanova herself sing it during the Winter War. Gave her a hand when she was coming offstage, think she had one glass too many. You know what she said to me? ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘You look like a man who knows how to use his hands.’ What do you think of that? Always the hell-raiser, Ruslanova. But it’s a beautiful song.”

He slapped Kolya on the chest with the letter, giving it back, smiling at both of us.

“Sorry I had to stop you boys. You know how it is…. They say there’s three hundred saboteurs inside Leningrad and more coming every day. But now I know what you’re up to, working for the colonel….”

He gave Kolya a wink.

“I know all about it, organizing the partisans, that’s the stuff. You let us regulars take ’em from the front, you boys plug ’em from the back, we’ll be leaving hot turds in the Reichstag come summer.”

Kolya had read the colonel’s letter aloud the day we got it and it didn’t mention partisans—it said only that we should not be detained or harassed as we were operating under the discretion of the colonel himself—but the newspapers were full of stories about simple country folk who had been trained to fight as deadly guerrillas by NKVD specialists.

“You keep ’em dancing with the organ here,” said Kolya—I didn’t know if he was mimicking the sergeant’s speech intentionally or not—“and we’ll make sure they can’t get any more strudel from the Vaterland.”

“There you go, there you go! Cut off the supply lines, let ’em starve in the woods, it’ll be 1812 all over again.”

“But no Elba for Hitler.”

“No, no, not for him, no Elba for Hitler!”

I wasn’t entirely sure the sergeant knew what Elba was, but he was adamant that Hitler wouldn’t get it.

“We’ll give him a bayonet in the balls, but no Elba!”

“We should keep moving,” said Kolya. “We have to make Mga by nightfall.”

The sergeant whistled. “That’s a long way. Stay to the woods, you hear? Fritz owns the roads, but a Russian doesn’t need a road to walk on, does he? Ha! You have enough bread? No? We can spare some. Ivan!”

The sergeant shouted at a scruffy young private standing beside the truck.

“Find some bread for these boys. They’re going behind lines.”