City of Thieves

14

Despite the rough start, it didn’t take us long to make peace with the girls. We needed one another. They hadn’t spoken to another Russian in two months, they didn’t have a radio, and they were desperate to hear news about the war. When they heard about the victories outside of Moscow, Galina, the young brunet, smiled at her sister, Nina, and nodded, as if she had predicted such a thing. The girls asked about Leningrad, but they weren’t interested in how many people died in December or how much ration bread was now allotted per month. The little country villages they were from had suffered even more than Piter, and stories of the unconquered city’s misery only bored them. Instead they wanted to know if the Winter Palace still stood (it did), if the Bronze Horseman had been moved (it had not), and whether a certain shop on the Nevsky Prospekt, apparently famous for selling the finest shoes in Russia, had survived the attacks (neither Kolya nor I knew or cared).

We didn’t ask the girls too many questions. We knew the story well enough without the details. The men from their towns had been slaughtered. Many of the young women had been sent west, to work as slaves in German factories. Others fled to the east, walking hundreds of kilometers with their babies and their family icons, hoping they could move faster than the Wehrmacht. The prettiest girls were not allowed to follow their sisters east or west. They were reserved for the invaders’ pleasure.

We all sat on the floor near the fireplace. Our socks and gloves rested on the mantel, getting warm and dry. In exchange for information, the girls gave us cups of scalding hot tea, slices of black bread, and two baked potatoes. The potatoes had already been split open for us. Kolya took a bite and looked at me. I took a bite and looked at Galina, sweet faced and plump armed. She sat with her back against the stone ledge of the fireplace, her hands tucked under her bare legs.

“Is that butter?” I asked her.

She nodded. The potatoes tasted like real potatoes, not the sprouted, shriveled, bitter lumps we ate in Piter. A good potato with butter and salt could buy you three hand grenades or a pair of leather-and-felt boots in the Haymarket.

“Do they ever bring eggs?” asked Kolya.

“One time,” said Galina. “We made an omelet.”

Kolya tried to make eye contact with me, but I only cared about my buttered potato.

“They have a base near here?”

“The officers are in a house near the lake,” said Lara, the girl who looked Chechen but was actually half Spanish. “In Novoye Koshkino.”

“That’s a town?”

“Yes. That is my town.”

“And the officers definitely have eggs?”

Now I looked up at him. I had decided to chew the potato very slowly, to make the experience last. We had been lucky for dinner two nights in a row, the Darling soup and now these potatoes. I didn’t expect our luck to last for three nights. I chewed with precision and watched Kolya’s face for any sign of stupid intentions.

“I don’t know if they have them right now,” said Lara, laughing a little bit. “You’re really hungry for eggs?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling back at her, dimples creasing his cheeks. Kolya knew which smile flaunted his dimples best. “I’ve been craving eggs since June. Why do you think we’re out here? We’re looking for eggs!”

The girls laughed at this strange joke.

“Are you organizing the partisans?” asked Lara.

“We can’t discuss our orders,” said Kolya. “But let’s just say it’s going to be a long winter for Fritz.”

The girls glanced at one another, unimpressed by the swaggering talk. They had seen the Wehrmacht at closer range than Kolya had; they had formed their own opinions about who was going to win the war.

“How far is Novoye Koshkino?” he asked.

Lara shrugged. “Not far. Six, seven kilometers.”

“Might be a good target,” he said to me, chewing a slice of black bread, self-consciously nonchalant. “Pick off a bunch of Wehrmacht officers, leave them with a headless brigade.”

“They’re not Wehrmacht,” said Nina. Something about the way she spoke made me look up at her. She was not a fearful girl, but what she was saying frightened her. Her sister, Galina, stared into the fire, chewing on her lower lip. “They’re Einsatzgruppen.”

Russians had gotten a crash course in German since June. Dozens of words had entered our everyday vocabulary overnight: Panzers and Junkers, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, Blitzkrieg and Gestapo, and all the other capitalized nouns. Einsatzgruppen, when I first heard it, didn’t have the same sinister tang as some of the others. It sounded like the name of a finicky accountant in a bad nineteenth-century stage comedy. But the name no longer seemed funny, not after all the articles I’d read, the radio reports, and the overheard conversations. The Einsatzgruppen were Nazi death squads, killers handpicked from the ranks of the regular army, the Waffen-SS, and the Gestapo, chosen for their brutal efficiency and their pure Aryan blood. When the Germans invaded a country, the Einsatzgruppen would follow behind the combat divisions, waiting until the territory was secured before hunting down their chosen targets: Communists, Gypsies, intellectuals, and, of course, Jews. Every week Truth and Red Star printed new photographs of ditches piled high with murdered Russians, the men all shot in the back of the head after they had dug their own communal graves. There must have been high-level debates in the newspapers’ editorial offices on whether or not to run such potentially demoralizing pictures. But as morbid as the images were, they crystallized matters: this was our fate if we lost the war. These were the stakes.

“It’s the Einsatzgruppen officers who come here at night?” Kolya asked.

“Yes,” said Nina.

“I didn’t know they bothered with artillery,” I said.

“They don’t, not usually. It’s a game they play. They make bets. They aim for different buildings in the city and the bomber pilots tell them what they hit. That’s why we asked about the Winter Palace. That’s the one they all want to hit.”

I thought about the fallen Kirov, about Vera Osipovna and the Antokolsky twins, whether they had been crushed by tumbling masonry or had survived the building’s collapse, trapped beneath great slabs of reinforced concrete, only to die slowly, begging for help, as smoke and gas choked them in the rubble. Maybe they were dead because a German in the forest, sipping from a passed flask of schnapps and joking with his fellow officers, gave a young gunner the wrong coordinates, and the seventeen-centimeter shells meant for the Winter Palace fell on my ugly gray apartment building instead.

“How many come?”

Nina glanced at the other girls, but none of them returned her gaze. Galina picked at some unseen scab on the back of her hand. One of the burning logs tumbled off the andirons and Lara shoved it to the back of the fireplace with a poker. Olesya, the girl with the pigtails, hadn’t said a word since we entered the farmhouse. I never learned if she was shy, or born mute, or if the Einsatzgruppen had sliced her tongue from her mouth. She picked up our empty plates and teacups and carried them out of the room.

“It depends on the night,” Nina finally said. She spoke casually, as if we were discussing a game of cards. “Sometimes nobody comes. Sometimes two, or four. Sometimes more.”

“They drive?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“And they stay the night?”

“Sometimes. Not usually.”

“And they never come during the day?”

“Once or twice.”

“So, forgive me for asking, but what keeps you from walking away?”

“You think this is so easy to do?” asked Nina, annoyed by the question, by the implication.

“Not easy,” said Kolya. “But Lev and I, we left Piter at dawn and here we are.”

“These Germans you’re fighting, the ones who have taken half our country, you think they’re stupid? You think they would leave us here alone if we could just open the door and walk to Piter?”

“But why not? Why can’t you?”

I could see the affect of his questions on the girls, the anger in Nina’s eyes, the shame in Galina’s as she stared at her soft white hands. Knowing Kolya even for a few days, I believed he was genuinely curious, not trying to batter the girls with his interrogation— but still, I wished he would shut up.

“Tell them about Zoya,” Lara said.

Nina seemed annoyed by the advice. She shrugged and said nothing.

“They think we’re cowards,” Lara added.

“I don’t care what they think,” said Nina.

“Fine, I’ll tell them. There was another girl, Zoya.”

Galina stood, brushed off her nightshirt, and walked out of the great room. Lara ignored her.

“The Germans loved her. For every man who came here for me, six came for her.”

Lara’s blunt telling made all of us uncomfortable. Nina clearly wanted to follow the other girls out of the room, but she stayed where she was, her eyes darting around, looking at everything except Kolya and me.

“She was fourteen. Her mother and father were both in the Party. I don’t know what they did, but I guess it was something important. The Einsatzgruppen found them and shot them in the street. They hanged the bodies from a lamppost so everyone in the town could see what happened to Communists. They brought Zoya here the same time they brought us, the end of November. Before that there were other girls. After a few months they get bored of us, you see. But Zoya was the favorite. She was so little and she was so afraid of them. I think they liked that. They would tell her, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, I won’t let them hurt you,’ things like that. But she’d seen her parents hanging from the lamppost. Any one of them who touched her, he could be the man who shot her mother and father, or ordered them shot.”

“We all have stories,” said Nina. “She panicked.”

“Yes, she panicked. She was fourteen; she panicked. It’s different for you; you have your sister. You’re not alone.”

“She had us.”

“No,” said Lara, “it’s different. Every night, after they left, she cried. For hours, I mean, until she fell asleep, and sometimes she didn’t sleep. The first week we tried to help her. We’d sit with her and hold her hand, tell her stories, anything to get her to stop crying. But it was impossible. Have you ever tried to comfort a baby with a fever? You try everything: you hold her in your arms, you rock her, you sing to her, you give her something cool to drink; doesn’t matter, nothing works. She never stopped crying. And after a week of this, we stopped feeling sorry for her. We got angry. What Nina says is true: all of us have stories. All of us lost family. None of us could sleep with Zoya crying. The second week she was here, we ignored her. If she was in one room, we went to another. She knew we were angry—she didn’t say anything, but she knew. And the crying stopped. All at once, as if she had decided that was enough. For three days she was very quiet, no more crying, just keeping to herself. And on the fourth morning she was gone. We didn’t even know until later, when the officers came. They waltzed in here drunk, singing her name. I think they used to make bets, and the winner got Zoya first. They would bring friends from other units to see her, they would take pictures of her. But she was gone and, of course, they didn’t believe us. We told them we had no idea but I would have called me a liar, too. I hope we would have lied, if we’d known. I hope we would have done that for her. I don’t know that we would have.”

“Of course we would have,” said Nina.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They went out looking for her, Abendroth and the others. He’s their, well, I don’t know the ranks. Major?” She looked at Nina, who shrugged. “The major, I think. He’s not the oldest, but he gives the orders. He must be good at what he does. And he always had her first, every time he came, didn’t matter if they brought a colonel from somewhere, he’d take her for himself. When he was done with her, he’d come sit by the fire and drink his plum schnapps. Always plum schnapps for him. His Russian is perfect. And his French— He lived in Paris for two years.”

“Hunting down the Resistance leaders,” said Nina. “One of the others told me. He was so good at it they made him the youngest major in the Einsatzgruppen.”

“He likes to play chess with me,” said Lara. “I can play a decent game. Abendroth spots me a queen, sometimes a queen and a pawn, and I never last more than twenty moves, even when he’s drunk, and he’s usually drunk. If I’m… if I’m busy, he sets up the board and plays both sides himself.”

“He’s the worst of them,” said Nina.

“Yes. I didn’t think so at first. But after Zoya, yes, he’s the worst of them. So they got their dogs and they followed her tracks and they went into the woods to find her. It only took them a few hours. She hadn’t gotten far. She was so weak…. She’d been little to begin with, and she’d barely eaten a thing since she’d been here. They brought her back. They’d torn all the clothes off her. She looked like a wild animal, filthy, dead leaves in her hair, bruised all over her body where they’d hit her. They’d tied her wrists together and her ankles. Abendroth made me get the saw from out by the woodpile. When Zoya ran, she took my coat and my boots, so they figured I was the one helping her. He told me to get the saw. I don’t know what I thought, but I wasn’t thinking that… maybe I thought they’d use it for the rope. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt her because they liked her so much.”

I heard a muffled cry and looked over to see Nina scratching her forehead, her palm covering her eyes, her lips pressed together as she willed herself silent.

“Four of them held her down by her hands and her feet. She wasn’t fighting them, not then. How could she fight them? All forty kilograms of her…. She thought they were going to kill her and she didn’t care; she wanted it, she was waiting for it. But they didn’t kill her. Abendroth made me give him the saw. He didn’t take it from me; he made me put it in his hands. He wanted me to know that… that I gave it to him. We were all in this room, Nina and Galina and Olesya and me. They made us stay. They wanted us to watch, that was our punishment. We helped this girl try to escape and now we had to watch. All the Germans were smoking—they’d been out in the cold looking for her and now they were smoking their cigarettes—the room was full of their smoke. Zoya looked peaceful, like she might even smile. She was so far beyond them now, they couldn’t touch her. But she was wrong about that. Abendroth got down next to her and whispered something in her ear. I don’t know what he said. He took the wood saw and he put the teeth of it against her ankle and he began sawing. Zoya… Maybe I’ll live a long time, I doubt it, but maybe I will, and I’ll never get that scream out of my brain. Those were four strong men holding her down, and she was nothing but bones, but she fought them, now she fought them, and you could see them straining to keep her down. He sawed off her one foot and he moved to the next. One of the Germans ran out of the room… do you remember that, Nina? I forget his name. He never came back here. Abendroth sawed off the other foot and Zoya never stopped screaming. I thought that’s it, I can’t be sane again after seeing this, this is too much now, this is too much. And when he stood up, his uniform was covered with her blood—her blood was on his hands, on his face—and he gave us a little bow. Do you remember that? Like he’d just performed for us. He said, ‘This is what happens to little girls who walk away.’ They all left, that was it, left us with their cigarette smoke and Zoya moaning on the floor. We tried to wrap up her legs, stop the bleeding, but there was too much.”

When Lara stopped talking, the house was hushed. Nina wept quietly, brushing her nose with the back of her hand. A knot popped in the fireplace and a flock of sparks flew up the chimney. The larch branches brushed against the wood-shingled roof. Bombs fell in the distant west, felt more as a vibration than heard as a sound, a tremor in the windows, a shudder in the water glass.

“They come at midnight?” asked Kolya.

“Most nights.”

According to the porcelain mantel clock, we had six hours. My body was battered from marching through the snow all day, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, not after hearing the story of Zoya, not when officers from the Einsatzgruppe were coming here soon.

“Tomorrow morning,” Kolya told Lara and Nina, “I want you all to head for the city. I’ll give you the address of a place to stay.”

“We’re safer here than in the city,” said Nina.

“Not after tonight.”