City of Thieves

24

An hour later we still looked over our shoulders, listening for tracked vehicles, but the deeper into the woods we went, the more likely our escape began to seem. We sucked on icicles snapped off pine branches, but the night was so cold we couldn’t bear to keep ice in our mouths for very long. The stump of my finger began to throb in time with my pulse.

Kolya had unbuttoned his army coat and shoved the straw-stuffed box under his sweater to keep the eggs from freezing. Over the last few kilometers he had slapped my shoulder repeatedly, grinning wildly beneath his stolen down cap with the silly drawstring tied beneath his chin.

“You really showed me something back there,” he told me four separate times.

Now I was a killer of men and the German knife stuffed in my boot was an actual weapon, not just a boy’s memento. Perhaps it would reflect better on me to tell you I felt a certain sadness, a solidarity with the dead men despite the necessity of the violence. The mole-strewn face of the dead boy stayed with me for a long time, until finally I forgot what he actually looked like and could remember only the memory. The Sturmbannführer crawling toward nowhere is an image still vivid in my mind. I could mouth all sorts of pieties to convince you that I’m a sensitive man, and I believe that I am a sensitive man. Even so, that night I felt nothing but exhilaration about my actions. I had acted, against all expectation, against my own history of cowardice. In the end, killing Abendroth had nothing to do with avenging Zoya or eliminating a vital Einsatz officer. I had kept Kolya and Vika alive. I had kept myself alive. Our warm breath rising above our heads, our grunts as our boots sunk deep in the snow, every sensation we experienced on our long march—experience itself—all of it was because finally, my back against the wall, I had shown a bit of courage. The proudest moment of my life came when we paused to catch our wind and Vika, checking my finger to make sure the bleeding had stopped, whispered in my ear, “Thank you.”

At one point Vika and Kolya argued about which direction to walk. Vika ended the discussion with an impatient shake of her head, marching off without checking to see if we would follow. After the Mga debacle I had no faith in Kolya’s ability to navigate; I followed her. Kolya held his ground for all of eight seconds before hurrying after us.

Somewhere along the way I told her the true story of why Kolya and I had snuck out of Piter, crossed enemy lines, and eventually stumbled onto the farmhouse beneath the larches. I kept my voice low so Kolya would not hear, though I couldn’t imagine whom I was betraying. I told her about the colonel’s daughter, skating on the Neva; the cannibals and their grisly wares hanging from the ceiling chains; the dying boy Vadim and his rooster, Darling; the antitank dog bleeding in the snow; and the dead Russian soldier rooted in the ice. When I finished the story, Vika shook her head but said nothing, and I worried that I had told her too much.

Watching her march through the woods, silent and tireless, the submachine gun strapped to her shoulder, I remembered what Kolya had told me the previous morning. The war had changed everyone, but still, it was difficult to believe she had been an astronomy student seven months earlier.

“May I ask you something?”

She kept walking, not bothering to answer. She didn’t have time for inane questions like “May I ask you something?”

“Kolya says you’re NKVD.”

“Are you asking?”

“I guess so.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but the moment I spoke the words I realized I did know. “I think he’s right.”

She peered through the darkness, looking for some kind of landmark to clarify which way we were going.

“Does it bother you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because of my father.” I realized she didn’t know what happened to my father, so I added, quietly, “They took him.”

For nearly a minute we walked in silence, climbing a slowly sloping hill. I began to pant, the weakness returning to my legs as we moved farther from the victory at Krasnogvardeysk.

“Your father was a writer, yes? Then the odds are very good other writers turned him in. The police were just doing their jobs.”

“Yes. And the Einsatz, as well. Of course, they chose their jobs.”

“If it changes anything, they took my father, too.”

“Really? Was he a writer?”

“No. He was NKVD.”

Cresting the long hill took us nearly an hour and stole all the spring from my legs, but when we finally got to the top of the treeless rise, I saw why Vika had chosen to come this way. The half-moon shone across the outstretched hectares of forest and farmland, all of it shimmering beneath a layer of frost and snow.

“Look,” she said, pointing north. “Do you see it?”

Far beyond the valley below us, past the hills that blocked the horizon in the shadowy distance, a slender pillar of light rose to the sky, bright enough to spotlight the cloud far above. The powerful beam began to move, a brilliant saber carving the night, and I realized I was looking at an antiaircraft searchlight.

“That’s Piter,” she told us. “You get lost on your way home, that’s your North Star.”

I turned to look at her. “You’re not coming with us?”

“There’s a band of partisans outside of Chudovo. I know the commander. I’ll try to connect with them.”

“I’m sure the colonel can give us an extra ration card if you come with us. I’ll tell him you helped us and he’ll—”

She smiled and spat on the ground. “Fuck the ration card. Piter’s not my city. I’m needed out here.”

“Don’t get killed,” said Kolya. “I think the boy is in love.”

“Stay off the roads on your way back. And be careful getting into the city. We’ve got mines everywhere.”

Kolya extended his gloved hand. Vika rolled her eyes at the formality but shook it. “I hope we meet again,” he told her. “In Berlin.”

She smiled and turned to me. I knew I would never see her again. When she saw the look on my face, something human entered those wolfish blue eyes. She touched my cheek with her gloved hand.

“Don’t look so sad. You saved my life tonight.”

I shrugged. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would say something mawkish and stupid, or worse, that I would start to cry. Five years had passed since I had cried, but I had never lived through a night like this one, and I was convinced that the sniper from Archangel was the only girl I would ever love.

Her gloved hand still rested on my cheek. “Tell me your last name.”

“Beniov.”

“I’ll track you down, Lyova Beniov. All I need is the name.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Her mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss.

A moment later she walked away from us, head down, rabbit fur cap brimmed low, chin tucked into her scarf, her little body in the oversize coveralls dwarfed by the ancient pines around her. I knew she would not look back at me, but I watched her anyway until she was gone.

“Come,” said Kolya, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “We have a wedding to attend.”