City of Thieves

15

Lara brought us to a small bedroom in the back of the house, where I imagined the valets slept in the time of the emperors. She carried a brass candelabrum with two lit candles, which she rested on the little writing desk. The pine-paneled walls were unadorned, the bunk bed had no sheets on the mattresses, and I almost tripped on the warped floorboards, but the room was warm enough. The narrow windows offered a view of a moonlit toolshed and a wheelbarrow lying on its side in the snow.

I sat on the lower mattress and ran my finger over a name carved in the wall. ARKADIY. I wondered how long ago Arkadiy stayed in this room, and where he was now, an old man shivering somewhere in the cold night or just bones in the churchyard. He had been good with the knife, his ARKADIY was a delicate filigree in the dark wood, slants and curlicues, a strong slash underlining the name.

Lara and Kolya came up with a code—banging pots with serving spoons—that would allow her to signal to us how many Germans showed up for their late-night entertainment. When she left, Kolya pulled out his pistol and began taking it apart, neatly arranging the various parts on the writing desk, checking them for damage and wiping them off with the sleeve of his shirt before reassembling the weapon.

“Have you ever shot anybody?” I asked.

“Not that I know about.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I shot my rifle a hundred times, maybe a bullet hit someone, I don’t know.” He slapped the magazine back into the butt of the automatic. “When I shoot Abendroth, I’ll know it.”

“Maybe we should just leave now.”

“You’re the one who wanted to come in here.”

“We needed to rest. We needed food. I feel a lot better now.”

He turned and looked at me. I was sitting on the bed with my hands under my legs, my overcoat spread out behind me.

“There could be eight of them coming,” I said. “We’ve got one gun.”

“And one knife.”

“I can’t stop thinking about Zoya.”

“Good,” he said. “Keep thinking about her when you stick the knife in his gut.”

He threw his overcoat onto the top mattress and clambered up there, sitting cross-legged with his pistol beside him. He pulled his journal from the pocket of his overcoat. His stub of pencil had shrunk to the size of a thumbnail, but he jotted down notes with his usual speed.

“I don’t think I can do it,” I said, after a long silence. “I don’t think I can stick a knife in anyone.”

“Then I’ll have to shoot them all. What’s it been now, eleven days since I had a shit? What do you think the record is?”

“Probably a lot longer than that.”

“I wonder what it’s going to look like when it finally comes out.”

“Kolya… why don’t we just go now? Take the girls and go back to the city. We’d make it. They’ve got plenty of food we could bring. We’ve got our blood flowing again. Bring some extra blankets—”

“Listen to me. I know you’re afraid. You’re right to be afraid. Only an idiot would be calm sitting in a house knowing the Einsatzgruppen are coming. But this is what you’ve been waiting for. This is the night. They’re trying to burn down our city; they’re trying to starve us to death. But we’re like two of Piter’s bricks. You can’t burn a brick. You can’t starve a brick.”

I watched the candles gutter in the candelabrum, watched the shadows dance across the ceiling.

“Where’d you hear that?” I finally asked him.

“Which part, the bricks? My lieutenant. Why? You’re not inspired?”

“It was going along all right until then.”

“I like the bricks. ‘You can’t burn a brick. You can’t starve a brick.’ It’s nice. It has nice rhythm.”

“This is the same lieutenant who stepped on a land mine?”

“Yes. Poor man. Well, forget about the bricks. I promise you, little lion, we’re not dying out here. We’re going to kill a few Nazis and we’re going to find those eggs. I have a little Gypsy blood in me; I can read the future.”

“You don’t have any Gypsy blood.”

“And I’ll insist the colonel invites us to his daughter’s wedding.”

“Ha. You love her.”

“I do. I believe I am truly in love with that girl. She is quite possibly an idiot bitch, but I love her. I want to marry her and she never has to say a word. She doesn’t have to cook for me; she doesn’t have to carry my babies. Just skate naked on the Neva, that’s all I want. Do a little spin above my open mouth.”

For a few seconds he helped me forget the fear, but it never left for long. I could not remember when I was not afraid, but that night it came on stronger than ever before. So many possibilities terrified me. There was the possibility of shame, of cowering again on the fringe of the action while Kolya fought the Germans—except this time, I knew he would die. There was the possibility of pain, suffering through the kind of torture Zoya suffered through, the saw teeth biting through my skin, muscles, and bone. And there was the excellent possibility of death. I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the most absurd beauty.

I heard the bedsprings creaking and looked up to see Kolya leaning over the side of the top mattress, his upside-down face peering at me, his blond hair hanging in filthy clumps. He looked like he was worried about me, and all at once I felt like crying. The only one left who knew how frightened I was, the only one who knew I was still alive and that I might die tonight, was a boastful deserter I’d met three nights before, a stranger, a child of Cossacks, my last friend.

“This will cheer you up,” he said, dropping a deck of cards in my lap.

They seemed like ordinary playing cards until I flipped them over. Each presented a different photographed woman, some naked, some wearing garter belts and lace corsets, their heavy breasts tumbling from their cupped hands, their lips slightly parted for the camera.

“I thought I had to beat you at chess to get these.”

“Easy with that, easy. Don’t crease the corners. Those came all the way from Marseille.”

He watched me shuffle through the nudes, smiling when he saw me give certain models closer looks.

“What about the girls here, eh? Four beauties. We’re going to be heroes after tonight, you realize this, yes? They’ll be falling all over us. So which one do you want?”

“We’re going to be dead after tonight.”

“Truly, my friend, truly you have to stop speaking like this.”

“I guess I like the little one with the chubby arms.”

“Galina? All right. She looks like a veal calf, but all right, I understand.”

He was quiet for a moment while I studied a picture of a shirt-less woman wearing jodhpurs, cracking a bullwhip.

“Listen, Lev, after this is over tonight, promise me you’ll talk to your little calf. Don’t run away like the shy boy you are. I’m very serious about this. She likes you. I saw her looking at you.”

I knew for a fact that Galina had not been looking at me. She had been looking at Kolya, as they all had, as he knew very well.

“What happened to calculated neglect? You said that according to The Courtyard Hound, the secret to winning a woman—”

“There’s a difference between ignoring a woman and enticing her. You entice her with mystery. She wants you to come after her, but you keep circling. It’s the same with sex. Amateurs yank down their pants and shove it in there like they’re trying to spear a fish. But the man with talent knows it’s all about teasing, circling, coming close, and moving away.”

“This one’s nice,” I said, holding up a card featuring a woman posed as a bullfighter, holding a red cape and wearing nothing but a montera.

“That’s my favorite one. When I was your age, I must have filled twenty socks staring at her.”

“Truth for Young Pioneers says that masturbation defeats the revolutionary spirit.”

“Without a doubt. But as Proudhon said—”

I never found out what Proudhon said. The double clang of a copper spoon against a copper pot interrupted Kolya. We both sat up in our beds.

“They came early,” he whispered.

“Only two of them.”

“They picked the wrong night to travel light.” The moment those words were in the air the spoon struck the pot again—once, twice, three times, four.

“Six,” I whispered.

Kolya swung his legs over the side of the mattress and quietly lowered himself to the floor, pistol in his hand. He blew out the candles and squinted out the window, but we were on the wrong side of the house and there was nothing to see. We heard car doors slamming shut.

“This is what we do,” he told me, his voice low and calm. “We wait. Let them relax, warm up, have a few drinks. They’ll take their clothes off, with any luck they won’t be near their guns. Remember, they’re not here to fight. They’re here to have a good time, enjoy the girls. You hear? We have the advantage.”

I nodded. Despite what he said, the arithmetic seemed very bad to me. Six Germans and two of us. Would the girls try to help us? They hadn’t lifted a hand for Zoya, but what could they have done for Zoya? Six Germans and eight bullets in the Tokarev. I hoped Kolya was a good shot. Fear coursed through me, electric, forcing my muscles to twitch and my mouth to go dry. I felt more awake than I ever had before, as if this moment, in the farmhouse outside of Berezovka, was the first true moment of my life and everything that came before was a fitful sleep. My senses seemed amplified, extraordinary, responding to the crisis by giving me all the information I needed. I could hear the crunch of jackboots on packed snow. I could smell pine needles burning in the fireplace, that old trick to perfume the house.

The rifle shot startled us. We stood quietly in the darkness, trying to understand what was happening. After a few seconds, several more rifles echoed the first. We heard the Germans shouting to each other, panicked, their voices overlapping.

Kolya ran for the door. I wanted to tell him to wait, that we had a plan and the plan called for waiting, but I didn’t want to be alone in there while the rifles fired outside and the Germans screamed their ugly words.

We ran to the great room and threw ourselves onto the floor when a bullet smashed through one of the mullioned windows. All four girls were already lying belly-down on the floor, their arms up by their faces to protect themselves from flying glass.

I had been living in a war for half a year, but I had never been this close to a gunfight and I had no idea who was fighting. I could hear the chuffing cough of machine guns fired just outside the house. The rifle cracks seemed to come from farther away, the edge of the woods, possibly. Bullets hammered the stone walls of the farmhouse.

Kolya crawled up to Lara and jostled her.

“Who’s shooting at them?”

“I don’t know.”

Outside we heard a car engine igniting. Doors slammed and the car accelerated, tires spinning in the snow. The rifles fired even faster now, one on top of the other, bullets ripping through sheet metal, a very different sound from bullet on stone.

Kolya rose to a crouch and crept to the front door, keeping his head below the window line. I followed. We kneeled with our backs against the door. Kolya checked his pistol one last time. I pulled the German knife from my ankle sheath. I knew I looked silly holding it, the way a young boy looks holding his father’s shaving razor. Kolya grinned at me as though he was about to start laughing. This is all very strange, I thought. I am in the middle of a battle and I am aware of my own thoughts, I am worried about how stupid I look with a knife in my hand while everyone else came to fight with rifles and machine guns. I am aware that I am aware. Even now, with bullets buzzing through the air like angry hornets, I cannot escape the chatter of my brain.

Kolya put his hand on the doorknob and turned it slowly.

“Wait,” I said. We stayed very still for a few seconds. “It’s quiet.”

The gunfire had ended abruptly. The car engine still hummed, but I couldn’t hear the wheels turning. The German voices had gone silent as suddenly as the bullets. Kolya glanced at me and slowly pulled the door open, just enough to peer through. The moon was high and bright, lighting the brutal landscape: Einsatzkommandos in white anoraks sprawled facedown in the snow and a Kübelwagen rolling slowly down the unshoveled driveway, windows shot out, engine block smoking. The dead man in the passenger seat sagged halfway out of the side window, his fingers still wrapped around his machine pistol. A second Kübel, parked at a jaunty angle beside the farmhouse, had never moved. Two Germans lay halfway between it and the house, their skulls pouring dark junk onto the snow. I had just enough time to register the precision of the shots, the superb accuracy of the sniper, when a bullet flew through the gap between Kolya’s head and mine, twanging in the air like a plucked string.

Both of us tumbled backward and Kolya kicked the door shut with his boot. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled toward the shattered window beside the front door.

“We’re Russians! Hey! Hey! We’re Russians!”

For a few seconds there was silence, before a distant voice responded: “You look like a fucking Fritz to me!”

Kolya laughed, punching me in the shoulder in his happiness.

“My name is Nikolai Alexandrovich Vlasov!” he shouted toward the window. “From Engels Prospekt!”

“There’s an original name! Any Nazi with a few years of Russian could come up with that!”

“Engels Prospekt!” shouted another voice. “There’s an Engels Prospekt in every fucking town in the country!”

Still laughing, Kolya grabbed hold of my coat and shook me, for no other reason than his blood was spiked with adrenaline, he was alive and happy and he needed to shake something. He crawled closer to the broken window, skirting the shards of broken glass lying on the floor.

“Your mother’s cunt has a peculiar tubular shape!” he yelled. “Nonetheless I tolerate its effluvium and enthusiastically lick its inner folds whenever she demands!”

A very long silence followed this sentence, but Kolya did not seem concerned. He was chuckling at his own joke, winking at me like an old veteran of the Turkish war exchanging insults with his buddies at the bathhouse.

“How about that?” he added at the top of his lungs. “You think anyone with a few years of Russian could come up with that?”

“Which one of our mothers are you describing?” The voice sounded closer now.

“Not the one who shoots so well. One of you is a genius with the rifle.”

“You have a gun on you?” asked the voice outside.

“A Tokarev pistol.”

“And your little friend?”

“Just a knife.”

“Both of you step outside. Keep your hands up high or my friend will shoot your tiny balls off.”

Lara and Nina had crawled into the front hallway during this conversation, their nightshirts sequined with bits of glass from the blown-out windows.

“Did they kill them?” whispered Nina.

“All six,” I told her. I thought the girls would be pleased, but when they heard the news they exchanged worried looks. Their life of the past few months was over now. They would have to run without knowing where their next meal would come from or where they would sleep. Millions of Russians could say the same, but things were worse for the girls. If the Germans caught them again, they would suffer a harsher punishment than Zoya had.

As Kolya reached for the doorknob, Lara put her hand on his leg, making him wait for a moment.

“Don’t,” she said. “They won’t trust you.”

“Why wouldn’t they trust me? I’m a soldier of the Red Army.”

“Yes, and they’re not. There isn’t a Red Army unit within thirty kilometers of here. They’ll think you’re a deserter.”

He smiled and covered her hand with his own.

“Do I look like a deserter to you? Don’t worry. I have papers.”

Papers did not impress Lara. As Kolya reached again for the doorknob, she crawled closer to the broken window.

“Thank you for rescuing us, comrades!” she shouted. “These two in here are our friends! Please don’t shoot them!”

“You think I would have missed his fat blond head if I wanted to hit it? Tell the joker to come outside.”

Kolya opened the door and stepped outside, his hands held high in the air. He squinted across the snow, but the fighters were still out of sight.

“Tell the little one to come out here, too.”

Lara and Nina looked frightened for me, but Lara nodded, telling me with an encouraging nod that it would be all right. I felt a brief surge of anger for the girl: why couldn’t she step outside? Why did they have to be here at all? If the farmhouse had been empty, Kolya and I could have slept through the night and left in the morning, rested and dry. The thought passed through my head, immediately followed by guilt for its absurdity.

Nina squeezed my hand and smiled at me. She was easily the finest-looking girl who had ever smiled at me. I imagined describing the scene for Oleg Antokolsky: Nina’s little white hand gripping mine, her pale eyelashes fluttering as she stared at me, worried for my safety. Even as the moment passed I was narrating it for my friend, forgetting for the moment that Oleg would probably never hear the story, that the odds were strong he lay buried beneath the rubble on Voinova Street.

I tried to smile back at Nina, failed, and walked out the door with my hands in the air. Since the war began I had read hundreds of accounts of the country’s heroes in action. All of them refused to acknowledge they were heroes. They were honest citizens of the Motherland, protecting her from the Fascist rapists. When asked in interviews why they had rushed the pillbox, or clambered onto a tank to drop a grenade down the hatch, all responded that they hadn’t even thought about it, they were just doing what any other good Russian would have done.

Heroes and fast sleepers, then, can switch off their thoughts when necessary. Cowards and insomniacs, my people, are plagued by babble on the brain. When I stepped out of the door, I thought, I am standing in the front yard of a farmhouse outside Berezovka and partisans are pointing their rifles at my head.

Judging from the broad smile on Kolya’s face, he thought nothing at all. We stood side by side while our unseen interrogators looked us over. Our overcoats were back in the farmhouse and we shivered in the night air, the cold reaching down to our bones.

“Prove you’re one of us.” The voice seemed to come from beside one of the snow-covered hay bales, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I could see a man kneeling in the shadows, a rifle raised to his shoulder. “Shoot each of the Germans in the head.”

“That’s not much of a test,” said Kolya. “They’re already dead.”

The man’s ability to make a bad situation worse no longer surprised me. Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?

“We’re still alive,” said the partisan in the shadows, “because we shoot them even when we think they’re dead.”

Kolya nodded. He walked over to the idling Kübel, which had finally rolled to a stop, its tires buried in a meter of snow.

“We’re watching you,” advised the partisan. “A bullet in every head.”

Kolya shot the dead driver and the dead passenger, the muzzle flashing in the night like a photographer’s camera. He turned and walked through the snow, stopping to shoot the Germans lying in their awkward poses.

At the sixth man, as he stooped to press the pistol to the fallen Einsatzkommando’s skull, he heard something. He got down on his knees and listened for a moment before standing up and calling out.

“This one’s still alive.”

“That’s why you’re going to shoot him.”

“Maybe he has something useful to tell us.”

“Does he look like he’s able to talk?”

Kolya turned the German onto his back. The man moaned softly. Pink foam bubbled from his mouth.

“No,” said Kolya.

“That’s because we shot his lungs out. Now do him a favor and end him.”

Kolya stood, aimed his pistol, and shot the dying man in the forehead.

“Holster your gun.”

Kolya did as he was told and the partisans emerged from their hiding places, stepping out from behind the hay bales, climbing over the low stone walls separating the farm fields, trudging through the snow at the edge of the woods. A dozen men in long coats, their rifles in their hands, their breath rising above their heads as they closed in on the farmhouse.

Most of them looked like farmers, fur-lined hats pulled down to their eyebrows, faces broad and flat and unfriendly. There was no common uniform. Some wore Red Army leather boots, others walked in gray felt; some wore tan overcoats, others gray. One man was dressed in what looked like a Finnish ski troop’s winter whites. Walking in front was the man I took to be their leader, a week’s worth of beard darkening his jaw, an old hunting rifle strapped to his shoulder. Later that night we learned his name was Korsakov. If he had a first name and a patronymic, we never heard them. Korsakov probably wasn’t his real name, anyway—the partisans were notoriously paranoid about their identities, with good reason. The Einsatzkommandos responded to local resistance by publicly executing the families of known resisters.

Korsakov and two of his comrades approached us while the other partisans searched the dead Germans, taking their machine pistols and ammunition, their letters and flasks and wristwatches. The man in the ski outfit knelt beside one of the bodies and tried to tug a gold wedding band from the corpse’s ring finger. When it wouldn’t come off, the partisan stuck the finger in his mouth. He saw me staring at him and winked, pulling the wet finger from his lips and sliding the ring free.

“Don’t worry about them,” said Korsakov, when he saw what I was watching. “Worry about me. Why are you two here?”

“They’re here to organize the partisans,” said Nina. She and Lara had stepped out of the farmhouse in their bare feet, their arms wrapped around themselves, the wind blowing their hair.

“Is that right? Do we seem unorganized?”

“They’re friends. They were going to kill the Germans if you didn’t show up.”

“Were they? How kind.” He turned away from her and called out to the partisans searching the dead men in the car. “What do we have?”

“Small fish,” a bearded partisan shouted back, holding up the insignia he’d torn from the officer’s collars. “Leutnants and Oberleutnants.”

Korsakov shrugged and shifted his gaze back to Nina, appraising her pale calves and the shape of her hips below her nightshirt.

“Get back inside,” he told her. “Put some clothes on. The Germans are dead; you can quit being a whore.”

“Don’t you call me that.”

“I’ll call you whatever I want. Get back inside.”

Lara took Nina’s hand and dragged her back to the farmhouse. Kolya watched them go and turned to the partisan leader.

“You’re unkind, comrade.”

“I’m not your comrade. And if it weren’t for me, they’d have German cocks halfway up them right now.”

“All the same—”

“Shut your mouth. You’re wearing an Army uniform, but you’re not with the Army. You’re a deserter?”

“We’re here on orders. I have papers in my coat, inside the house.”

“Every collaborator I ever met had papers.”

“I have a letter from Colonel Grechko of the NKVD, authorizing us to come here.”

Korsakov grinned and turned to his men.

“And Colonel Grechko, he has authority out here? I love these policemen in the city, giving us orders.”

One of the men standing beside him, a rangy fellow with close-set eyes, laughed loudly, showing us his bad teeth. The other man did not laugh. He wore winter camouflage coveralls patterned with brown and white swirls, a trompe l’oeil of dead leaves. His eyes peeked out below the fringe of his rabbit fur cap. He was small, smaller than me, and young, with no trace of stubble on his pink cheeks. His features were very fine, the bones of his face precisely defined, his lips full, twisted into a smirk now as he stared back at me.

“You see something strange?” he asked, and I realized it wasn’t a man speaking at all.

“You’re a girl,” Kolya blurted out, staring at her. I felt stupid for both of us.

“Don’t look so shocked,” said Korsakov. “She’s our best shot. Those Fritzes over there with half their heads? That’s because of her.”

Kolya whistled, glancing from her to the dead Germans to the fringe of woods at the edge of the farm fields.

“From over there? What is that, four hundred meters? On moving targets?”

The girl shrugged. “You don’t have to lead them so much when they’re running through snow.”

“Vika’s after Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s record,” said the man with the under bite. “She wants to be the number-one woman sniper.”

“How many is Mila up to now?” asked Kolya.

“Red Star says two hundred,” Vika replied with a little roll of her eyes. “The Army gives her a confirmed kill every time she blows her nose.”

“That’s a German rifle, isn’t it?”

“K ninety-eight,” she said, slapping the barrel with her palm. “Best rifle in the world.”

Kolya nudged me with his elbow and whispered under his breath. “I’ve got a little bit of a hard-on.”

“What’s that?” asked Korsakov.

“I said my cock’s going to fall off if we stand out here much longer—pardon my language.” He gave Vika an old-fashioned bow before turning back to Korsakov. “You want to see my papers, let’s go inside and see the papers. You want to shoot your countrymen here in the snow, all right, shoot us. But enough of this standing in the cold.”

The partisan clearly preferred the idea of shooting Kolya to looking at his papers, but killing an Army man was no small matter, especially with so many witnesses. He didn’t want to give in too quickly, either, and lose face in front of his men. So the two of them stood there glaring at each other for another ten seconds while I bit my lip to keep my teeth from chattering.

Vika broke the stalemate. “These two are falling in love,” she said. “Look at them! They can’t decide if they want to fight each other or roll naked in the snow.”

The other partisans laughed and Vika walked toward the farmhouse, ignoring Korsakov’s glare.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Those girls in there look like they’ve been eating pork chops all winter.”

The men followed her, carrying their loot, eager to get out of the cold and into the house. I watched Vika stomping her boots in front of the door, ridding her soles of snow, and I wondered what her body looked like beneath those winter camouflage coveralls, beneath the layers of wool and felt.

“Is she yours?” Kolya asked Korsakov, after Vika had stepped inside the farmhouse.

“Are you joking? That one’s more boy than girl.”

“Good,” said Kolya, punching me in the arm. “Because I think my friend here has a crush.”

Korsakov glanced at me and began to laugh. I always hated when people laughed at me, but this time I welcomed his amusement. I knew he wasn’t going to kill us.

“Best of luck to you, boy. Just remember, she can shoot your eyes out from half a kilometer.”