City of Thieves

2

If you grew up in Piter, you grew up fearing the Crosses, that gloomy redbrick stain on the Neva, a brutish, brooding warehouse of the lost. Six thousand convicts lived there in peacetime. I doubt a thousand were left by January. Hundreds imprisoned for petty crimes were released into Red Army units, released into the meat grinder of the German Blitzkrieg. Hundreds more starved in their cells. Each day the guards dragged the skin-draped skeletons out of the Crosses and onto sledges where the dead were stacked eight high.

When I was small, it was the silence of the prison that frightened me most. You walked by expecting to hear the shouts of rough men or the clamor of a brawl, but no noise escaped the thick walls, as if the prisoners inside—most of them awaiting trial or a trip to the gulag or a bullet in the head—hacked out their own tongues to protest their fate. The place was an antifortress, designed to keep the enemies inside, and every boy in Leningrad had heard the phrase a hundred times: “You keep on with that and you’ll end up in the Crosses.”

I had seen my cell only for a second when the guards shoved me inside, their lamps shining on the rough stone walls, a cell two meters wide and four meters long, with bunk beds for four and all of them empty. I was relieved at that, I didn’t want to share the darkness with a stranger with tattooed knuckles, but after a time— minutes? hours?—the black silence began to feel tangible, something that could get into your lungs and drown you.

Darkness and solitude generally didn’t frighten me. Electricity was as rare as bacon in Piter those days, and my apartment in the Kirov was empty now that Mother and Taisya had fled. The long nights were dark and quiet, but there was always noise somewhere. Mortars fired from the Germans lines; an army truck motoring down the boulevard; the dying old woman upstairs moaning in her bed. Awful sounds, really, but sounds—something to let you know you were still in this world. That cell in the Crosses was the only truly silent place I’d ever entered. I could hear nothing at all; I could see nothing. They had locked me in death’s waiting room.

As siege-hardened as I believed I was before my arrest, the truth was that I had no more courage in January than I had in June— contrary to popular belief, the experience of terror does not make you braver. Perhaps, though, it is easier to hide your fear when you’re afraid all the time.

I tried to think of a song to sing, a poem to recite, but all the words were stuck inside my head like salt in a caked shaker. I lay on one of the top bunks, hoping whatever heat existed within the Crosses would rise and find me. Morning promised nothing but a bullet in the brain and yet I longed for daylight to seep inside. When they dumped me in the cell, I thought I had seen a sliver of barred window near the ceiling, but now I couldn’t remember. I tried counting to a thousand to pass some time but always got lost around four hundred, hearing phantom rats that turned out to be my own fingers scratching the torn mattress.

The night was never going to end. The Germans had shot down the fucking sun, they could do it, why not, their scientists were the best in the world, they could figure it out. They had learned how to stop time. I was blind and deaf. Only the cold and my thirst reminded me that I was alive. You get so lonely you start longing for the sentries, just to hear their footsteps, smell the vodka on their breath.

So many great Russians endured long stretches in prison. That night I learned I would never be a great Russian. A few hours alone in a cell, suffering no torture other than the darkness and the silence and the absolute cold, a few hours of that and I was already half broken. The fierce souls who survived winter after winter in Siberia possessed something I did not, great faith in some splendid destiny, whether God’s kingdom or justice or the distant promise of revenge. Or maybe they were so beaten down they became nothing more than animals on their hind legs, working at their masters’ command, eating whatever slop he threw down for them, sleeping when ordered and dreaming of nothing but the end.

At last there was noise, footsteps, several sets of heavy boots clomping in the corridor. A key turned in the lock. I sat up in bed and cracked my skull against the ceiling, hard enough that I bit through my lip.

Two guards—one of them holding an oil lamp, the prettiest light I ever saw, better than any sunrise—escorted a new prisoner, a young, uniformed soldier who glanced around the cell like a man viewing an apartment he’s considering for rent. The soldier was tall and stood very straight; he towered over the guards, and though they had pistols in their holsters and the soldier was unarmed, he seemed ready to give orders. He held his Astrakhan fur hat in one hand and his leather gloves in the other.

He looked at me just as the guards left, shutting the cell door and bolting it from the outside, taking their light with them. His face was the last thing I saw before the darkness resumed, so it stuck in my mind: the high Cossack cheekbones, the amused twist of the lips, the hay-blond hair, the eyes blue enough to please any Aryan bride.

I sat on the bed and he stood on the stone floor and from the perfect silence I knew neither of us had shifted position—we were still staring at each other in the darkness.

“Are you a Jew?” he asked.

“What?”

“A Jew. You look like a Jew.”

“You look like a Nazi.”

“I know. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, too. I volunteered to be a spy, but nobody listened to me. So, you are a Jew?”

“Why do you care?”

“Don’t be ashamed of it. I don’t have a problem with Jews. Emanuel Lasker is my second-favorite chess player. Just a rung under Capablanca…. Capablanca is Mozart, pure genius; you can’t love chess and not love Capablanca. But Lasker, nobody’s better in the endgame. You have any food?”

“No.”

“Put out your hand.”

This seemed like some sort of trap, a game children played to snare morons. He would slap my palm or just let it hang there till I realized my stupidity. But no offer of food could be refused, even the least likely, so I stretched my hand into the darkness and waited. A moment later a sliver of something cold and greasy sat on my palm. I don’t know how he found my hand, but he did, without any fumbling.

“Sausage,” he said. And then, after a pause, “Don’t worry. It’s not pork.”

“I eat pork.” I sniffed at the sausage and then nibbled off a bit. It was as far from real meat as ration bread from real bread, but there was fat in it, and fat was life. I chewed on the sliver as slowly as I could, trying to make it last.

“You chew loudly,” he told me, a reprimand from the dark. I heard the creak of bedsprings as he sat on one of the lower bunk beds. “And you’re supposed to say thank you.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. What’s your name?”

“Lev.”

“Lev what?”

“What do you care?”

“It’s just manners,” he said. “For instance, if I introduce myself, I say, ‘Good evening, my name is Nikolai Alexandrovich Vlasov, my friends call me Kolya.’”

“You just want to know if I have a Jewish name.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Ah.” He sighed happily, pleased to hear his instincts confirmed. “Thank you. Don’t know why you’re so afraid of telling people.”

I didn’t answer. If he didn’t know why, there was no point explaining it.

“So why are you here?” he asked.

“They caught me looting a dead German on Voinova Street.”

This alarmed him. “The Germans are already on Voinova? So it’s begun?”

“Nothing’s begun. He was a bomber pilot. He ejected.”

“The AA boys got him?”

“The cold got him. Why are you here?”

“Sheer idiocy. They think I’m a deserter.”

“So why didn’t they shoot you?”

“Why didn’t they shoot you?”

“Don’t know,” I admitted. “They said I was a good one for the colonel.”

“I’m not a deserter. I’m a student. I was defending my thesis.”

“Really? Your thesis?” It sounded like the dumbest excuse in the history of desertion.

“An interpretation of Ushakovo’s The Courtyard Hound, through the lens of contemporary sociological analysis.” He waited for me to say something, but I had nothing to say to that. “You know the book?”

“No. Ushakovo?”

“Miserable how bad the schools have gotten. They should have you memorizing passages.” He sounded like a crotchety old professor, though from my one look at him I would have guessed he was twenty. “‘In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs.’ First line. Some say it’s the greatest Russian novel. And you’ve never heard of it.”

He sighed extravagantly. A moment later I heard a strange scratching sound, as if a rat were sharpening its claws on the mattress ticking.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Hm?”

“You don’t hear that noise?”

“I’m writing in my journal.”

I could see no farther with my eyes open than with them closed and this one was writing in his journal. Now I could tell the scratching was a pencil on paper. After a few minutes the journal slapped closed and I heard him stuff the book into his pocket.

“I can write in the dark,” he said, punctuating the sentence with a light burp. “One of my talents.”

“Notes on The Courtyard Hound?”

“Exactly. How’s this for strange? Chapter six: Radchenko spends a month in the Crosses because his former best friend… Well, I don’t want to give it away. But I have to say, it seemed like fate when they brought me here. I’ve been every other place Radchenko visited—every restaurant and theater and graveyard, the ones that are still around, anyway—but I’ve never been inside here. A critic could argue that until you spend a night in the Crosses, you can’t understand Radchenko.”

“Pretty lucky for you.”

“Mm.”

“So you think they’ll shoot us in the morning?”

“I doubt it. They’re not preserving us for the night just to shoot us tomorrow.” He sounded quite jaunty about it, as if we were discussing a sporting event, as if the outcome wasn’t particularly momentous no matter which way it went.

“I haven’t had a shit in eight days,” he confided. “I’m not saying a good shit—it’s been months since I’ve had a good shit—I mean no shit at all for eight days.”

We were quiet for a moment, considering these words.

“How long do you think a man can last without shitting?”

It was an interesting question and I was curious to know the answer myself, but I didn’t have one for him. I heard him lie down, heard him yawn happily, relaxed and content, his piss-stained straw mattress as comfortable as a feather bed. The silence lingered for a minute and I thought my cell mate had fallen asleep.

“These walls must be four feet thick,” he said at last. “This is probably the safest place in Piter to spend a night.” And then he did fall asleep, shifting from speech into snores so quickly that at first I thought he was faking.

I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. I was born an insomniac and that’s the way I’ll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way longing for unconsciousness, longing for a rubber mallet to crack me in the head, not so hard, not hard enough to do any damage, just a good whack to put me down for the night. But that night I didn’t have a chance. I stared into the blackness until the blackness blurred into gray, until the ceiling above me began to take form and the light from the east dribbled in through the narrow barred window that existed after all. Only then did I realize that I still had a German knife strapped to my calf.