City of Thieves

3

An hour after dawn two new guards opened the cell door, rousted us from bed, and clamped handcuffs on our wrists. They ignored my questions but seemed amused when Kolya asked for a cup of tea and an omelet. Jokes must have been rare in the Crosses, because it wasn’t such a good joke, but the guards grinned as they shoved us down the hallway. Somewhere someone was moaning, a low and endless moan, a ship’s horn heard from a great distance.

I didn’t know if we were heading for the gallows or an interrogation chamber. The night had passed without sleep; save for a swig from the German’s flask, there hadn’t been a sip to drink since the rooftop of the Kirov; a lump the size of an infant’s fist had swelled where my forehead had cracked the ceiling—it was a bad morning, really; among my worst—but I wanted to live. I wanted to live and I knew I could not face my execution with grace. I would kneel before the hangman or the firing squad and plead my youth, detail my many hours served on the rooftop waiting for the bombs, all the barricades I had helped to build, the ditches I had dug. All of us had done it, we were all serving the cause, but I was one of Piter’s true sons and I didn’t deserve to die. What harm had been done? We drank a dead German’s cognac—for this you want to end me? You want to tie rough hemp around my skinny neck and shut down my brain forever because I stole a knife? Don’t do this, comrade. I don’t think there is greatness in me, but there is something better than this.

The guards led us down a stone staircase, the steps beaten smooth by hundreds of thousands of boot heels. An old man with a heavy gray scarf wrapped twice around his throat sat on the far side of the iron bars that blocked the bottom of the staircase. He gave us a gummy grin and unlocked the gate. A moment later we walked through a heavy wooden door into the sunlight, emerging from the Crosses intact and alive.

Kolya, unimpressed by our apparent reprieve, scooped up a palmful of clean snow with his shackled hands and licked it. The boldness of the maneuver made me jealous, as did the thought of cold water on my tongue. But I didn’t want to do anything to anger the guards. Our escape from the Crosses seemed like an odd mistake and I expected to be shoved inside again if I did something wrong.

The guards escorted us to a waiting GAZ, its big engine grumbling, exhaust pipes spewing dirty vapor, two soldiers sitting in the front seat watching us with zero curiosity, their fur-lined hats pulled down low on their foreheads.

Kolya hopped into the backseat without waiting for an order.

“Gentlemen, to the opera!”

The guards, standards diminished by years of working the Crosses, gave Kolya another good laugh. The soldiers did not. One of them turned and inspected Kolya.

“You say another word and I’ll break your fucking arm. It were up to me, you’d already have a bullet in your head. Fucking deserter. You”—and this was addressed to me—“get in.”

Kolya’s mouth was already open and I knew violence was on the way; the soldier did not look like a bluffer and Kolya, clearly, was incapable of heeding a simple threat.

“I’m not a deserter,” he said. With his manacled hands he managed to push up the left sleeve of his greatcoat, the left sleeve of his army sweater, the left sleeves of the two shirts beneath it, and offered his forearm to the soldier in the front seat. “You want to break the arm, break it, but I’m not a deserter.”

For a long count nobody spoke—Kolya stared at the soldier, the soldier stared back, and the rest of us watched and waited, impressed by this match of wills and curious to see who would win. Finally, the soldier conceded defeat by turning away from Kolya and barking at me.

“Get in the car, you little cunt.”

The guards grinned. This was their morning’s entertainment. They had no torture scheduled, no teeth to wrench, no nails to pluck from a screaming man’s nail beds, so they got their fun watching me, the little cunt, scurry into the backseat next to Kolya.

The soldier drove very fast, caring not at all about the slicks of ice on the road. We sped along the banks of the frozen Neva. I had my collar upturned so I could hide my face from the wind that blasted in beneath the canvas roof. Kolya didn’t seem bothered by the cold. He stared at the spire of the Church of John the Baptist across the river and said nothing.

We turned onto the Kamennoostrovsky Bridge, the old steel of its arches rimed with frost, the lampposts bearded with icicles. Onto Kamenny Island, slowing only a bit to circle around a bomb crater that had shattered the center of the road, pulling into a long driveway lined with the stumps of lime trees, and parking in front of a magnificent wooden mansion with a white-columned portico. Kolya studied the house.

“The Dolgorukovs lived here,” he said, as we stepped out of the car. “I suppose none of you have heard of the Dolgorukovs.”

“A bunch of aristocrats who got their necks snapped,” said one of the soldiers, gesturing with the barrel of his rifle for us to walk toward the front door.

“Some of them,” admitted Kolya. “And some of them slept with emperors.”

In the daylight Kolya looked like he could have stepped out of one of the propaganda posters pasted on walls throughout the city; the angles of his face were heroic—the strong chin, the straight nose, the blond hair that fell across his forehead. He was a fine-looking deserter.

The soldiers escorted us onto the porch, where sandbags had been piled four feet high to form a machine-gun nest. Two soldiers sat near their gun, passing a cigarette between them. Kolya sniffed the air and stared longingly at the hand-rolled butt.

“Real tobacco,” he said, before our armed guides pushed open the front door and herded us inside.

I had never been inside a mansion before, had only read about them in the novels: the dances on the parquet floors, the servants ladling soup from silver tureens, the stern patriarch in his book-lined study warning his weeping daughter to stay away from the lowborn boy. But while the old Dolgorukov home still looked magnificent on the outside, the revolution had come to the interior. The marble floor was tracked with a thousand muddy boot prints, unwashed for months. The smoke-stained wallpaper curled away from the baseboards. None of the original furniture had survived, none of the oil paintings and Chinese vases that must have lined the walls and rested on teak shelves.

Dozens of uniformed officers hurried from one room to the next, hustled up a curving double staircase missing its balustrade and all the balusters, probably torn down for firewood weeks ago. The uniforms were not Red Army. Kolya noticed me staring.

“NKVD. Maybe they think we’re spies.”

I didn’t need Kolya to tell me the men were NKVD. Since I was little I had known what their uniforms looked like, with their peaked blue-and-maroon caps and their holstered Tokarevs. I had learned to dread the sight of their Packards idling outside the gates of the Kirov, the Black Ravens, waiting to carry some unlucky citizen away from his home. The NKVD arrested at least fifteen men from the building while I lived there. Sometimes those taken returned after a few weeks, their heads shaved and their faces pale and lifeless, avoiding my eyes in the stairwell as they limped up to their apartments. The broken men who came home must have known how rare and lucky they were, but they took no apparent joy in their survival. They knew what happened to my father and they could not meet my eyes.

The soldiers kept prodding us forward till we entered a sunroom at the very rear of the house, the tall French windows offering a fine vantage of the Neva and the grim, stolid apartment buildings of the Vyborg section on the far side of the river. An older man sat alone at a simple wood desk set down in the middle of the sunroom. He had a telephone receiver nestled between his face and his shoulder so he could scribble with a pen on a pad of paper as he listened.

He glanced at us as we waited at the entryway. He looked like an ex-boxer with his thick neck and crooked, flattened nose. The shadows below his hooded eyes were deep, as were the furrows that crossed his forehead. His gray hair was shaved very close to the scalp. He might have been fifty years old, but he looked like he could rise from his chair and beat us all down without mussing his uniform. Three metal stars shone on the collar tabs of his jacket. I didn’t know precisely what three stars signified, but they were three stars more than anyone else in the mansion.

He tossed his pad of paper on the desk and I could see that he hadn’t been taking notes, as I’d thought, but simply drawing X’s, over and over again, till the entire sheet of paper was covered with them. For some reason this frightened me more than his uniform or his brawler’s face. A man who drew pictures of tits or dogs seemed like a man I could understand. But a man who drew nothing but X’s?

He was watching us, Kolya and me, and I knew that he was judging us, condemning us for our crimes and sentencing us to death, all while listening to a voice traveling across wires.

“Good,” he said at last, “I want it done by noon. No exceptions.”

He hung up the phone and smiled at us, and the smile was as incongruous on his face as the man and his plain wood desk were in the gorgeous sunroom of the old noble house. The colonel (for I assumed now that this was the colonel the soldiers had spoken of the night before) had a beautiful smile, his teeth surprisingly white, his brutal face shifting instantly from menace to welcome.

“The deserter and the looter! Come, come closer, we don’t need the cuffs. I don’t think these boys will cause any trouble.” He gestured to the soldiers, who reluctantly pulled out their keys and removed our manacles.

“I’m not a deserter,” said Kolya.

“No? Go,” he ordered the soldiers, not bothering to look at them. The soldiers obeyed, leaving us alone with the colonel. He stood and walked toward us, the pistol on his waist holster slapping against his hip. Kolya stood very straight, at attention for the officer’s inspection, and I, not knowing what to do, followed his lead. The colonel kept coming until his battered face nearly touched Kolya’s.

“You’re not a deserter and yet your unit reported you missing and you were picked up forty kilometers from where you were supposed to be.”

“Well, there’s a simple explanation—”

“And you,” he continued, turning to me. “A German paratrooper falls on your block and you don’t notify the authorities. You decide to enrich yourself at the city’s expense. Is there a simple explanation for that, too?”

I needed water. My mouth was so dry it felt scaly, like the skin of a lizard, and I had begun to see bright little sparks of light swimming in the peripheries of my vision.

“Well?”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re sorry?” He looked at me a moment longer and laughed. “Ah, well, you’re sorry, all right then, that’s fine. As long as you’re sorry, that’s the important thing. Listen, boy, do you know how many people I’ve executed? I don’t mean on my orders, I mean done it myself, with this Tokarev—” Here he slapped the holstered pistol. “Do you want to guess? No? Good, because I don’t know. I’ve lost count. And I’m the kind of man who likes to know. I keep track of things. I know exactly how many women I’ve fucked, and it’s quite a few, believe me. You’re a handsome boy,” he said to Kolya, “but trust me, you won’t catch up with me, even if you live to a hundred, and that seems doubtful.”

I glanced at Kolya, expecting him to say something stupid and get us both killed, but Kolya, for once, had nothing to say.

“Sorry is what you say to the schoolmaster when you break a piece of chalk,” the colonel continued. “Sorry doesn’t work for looters and deserters.”

“We thought he might have a little food on him.”

The colonel stared at me for a long moment.

“Did he?”

“Just some cognac. Or brandy… schnapps, maybe.”

“We shoot a dozen people every day for forging ration cards. You know what they tell us, before we put bullets in their brains? They were hungry. Of course they were hungry! Everyone is hungry. That won’t stop us from shooting thieves.”

“I wasn’t stealing from Russians—”

“You stole state property. Did you take anything from the body?”

I hesitated as long as I dared.

“A knife.”

“Ah. The honest thief.”

I knelt, unstrapped the sheath from my ankle, and handed it to the colonel. He stared at the German leather.

“You had this on you all night? No one searched you?” He exhaled with a soft curse, weary of the incompetence. “No wonder we’re losing the war.” He pulled out the blade and studied the inscription. “BLOOD AND HONOR. Ha. May God fuck those whoresons in the ass. You know how to use it?”

“What?”

“The knife. Slashing,” he said, slashing the air with the steel blade, “is better than stabbing. Harder to block. Go for the throat, and if that’s not working, go for the eyes or the belly. Thigh’s good, too, big veins in the thighs.” All this instruction was accompanied by vigorous demonstration. “And never stop,” he said, dancing closer, the steel flashing, “never let up; keep the knife moving, keep him on the defensive.”

He sheathed the blade and tossed it to me.

“Keep it. You’ll need it.”

I stared at Kolya, who shrugged. All of this was too strange to understand so there was no point straining the mind, trying to sort out where we stood. I got back on one knee and strapped the knife to my ankle again.

The colonel had moved to the French windows, where he watched yesterday’s snow blowing across the frozen Neva.

“Your father was the poet.”

“Yes,” I admitted, standing straight and staring at the back of the colonel’s head. No one outside my family had mentioned my father in four years. I mean this literally. Not a word.

“He could write. What happened was… unfortunate.”

What could I say to that? I stared at my boots and knew that Kolya was squinting at me, trying to figure out which unfortunate poet sired me.

“Neither of you has eaten today,” said the colonel, not asking a question. “Black tea and toast, how does that sound? Maybe we can find some fish soup somewhere. Borya!”

An aide stepped into the sunroom, a pencil tucked behind his ear.

“Get these boys some breakfast.”

Borya nodded and disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared.

Fish soup. I hadn’t had fish soup since summer. The idea of it was wild and exotic, like a naked girl on a Pacific island.

“Come over here,” said the colonel. He opened one of the French doors and stepped into the cold. Kolya and I followed him along a gravel path that led through a frost-blasted garden, down to the banks of the river.

A girl in a fox fur coat skated on the Neva. In a normal winter you’d see hundreds of girls skating on a weekend afternoon, but this wasn’t a normal winter. The ice was solid and had been for weeks, but who had the strength for figure eights? Standing on the frozen mud at the river’s edge, Kolya and I stared at her the way you’d stare at a monkey riding a unicycle down the street. She was freakishly lovely, her dark hair parted in the middle and tied up in a loose bun, her wind-whipped cheeks flushed and full and healthy. It took me a few seconds to realize why she looked so strange, and then it was obvious—even at a distance you could tell that the girl was well fed. There was nothing pinched and desperate about her face. She had an athlete’s casual grace; her pirouettes were tight and fast; she never got winded. Her thighs must have been magnificent—long, pale, and strong—and I could feel my prick hardening for the first time in days.

“She’s getting married next Friday,” said the colonel. “A piece of meat she’s marrying, I say, but all right. He’s a Party man, he can afford her.”

“That’s your daughter?” asked Kolya.

The colonel grinned, his white teeth splitting his brawler’s face.

“You don’t think she looks like me? No, no, she got lucky there. She got her mother’s face and her father’s temper—this one will conquer the world.”

Only then did I realize that the colonel’s teeth were false, a bridge that seemed to encompass the entire upper row. And I knew, suddenly but surely, that the man had been tortured. They had brought him in during one purge or another, called him a Trotskyite or a White or a Fascist sympathizer, pried the teeth from his mouth, and beaten him till his eyes bled, till he pissed blood and shat blood, till the order came from whatever Moscow office: we have rehabilitated the man, let him alone now, he is one of us again.

I could picture it because I had pictured it often, whenever I wondered about my father’s last days. He had the misfortune of being a Jew and a poet and mildly famous, friends once with Mayakovsky and Mandelstam, bitter enemies with Obranovich and the others he considered tongues of the bureaucracy, the slingers of revolutionary verse who labeled my father an agitator and a parasite because he wrote about the Leningrad underworld, though— officially—there was no Leningrad underworld. More than this, he had the temerity to title his book Piter, the city’s nickname, the name every native used, but banned from all Soviet text because “Saint Petersburg” was a czar’s arrogance, named for the old tyrant’s patron saint.

One summer afternoon in 1937 they took my father from the offices of the literary magazine where he worked. They never gave him back. The call from the Moscow office never came for him; rehabilitation was not an option. An intelligence officer might hold future value for the state, but a decadent poet did not. He might have died in the Crosses or in Siberia or somewhere in between, we never learned. If he was buried, there is no marker; if he was burned, there is no urn.

For a long time I was angry with my father for writing such dangerous words; it seemed stupid that a book was more important than sticking around and slapping the back of my head when I picked my nose. But later I decided he hadn’t chosen to insult the Party, not consciously, not the way Mandelstam had (Mandelstam with his crazy bravery, writing that Stalin had fat fingers like slugs, a mustache like two cockroaches). My father didn’t know that Piter was dangerous until the official reviews were written. He thought he was writing a book five hundred people would read, and maybe he was right, but at least one of those five hundred denounced him and that was that.

The colonel had survived, though, and looking at him I wondered if he found it strange that he had been so close to the shark’s jaws and somehow fought his way back to shore, that he who had waited for another’s mercy could now decide for himself whether to grant it. He didn’t seem troubled at the moment; he watched his daughter skate, he clapped his busted-knuckled hands as she spun.

“So, the wedding is Friday. Even now, even in the middle of all of this—” said the colonel, gesturing with his hands to indicate Leningrad, the famine, the war, “—she wants a real wedding, a proper wedding. This is good, life must continue, we’re fighting barbarians but we must remain human, Russian. So we will have music, dancing… a cake.”

He looked at us each in turn as if there were something momentous about the word cake and he needed us both to understand.

“This is the tradition, says my wife, we need a cake. It is terrible luck, a wedding with no cake. Now, I’ve been fighting all my life against these peasant superstitions, the priests used them to keep people stupid and afraid, but my wife… she wants the cake. Fine, fine, make the cake. For months she’s been hoarding her sugar, her honey, flour, all the rest.”

I thought about this, the sacks of sugar, the jars of honey, the flour that must have been real flour, not moldy salvage from a torpedoed barge. Half the Kirov could probably survive two weeks on her batter alone.

“She has everything she needs, all except the eggs.” Again the portentous look. “Eggs,” said the colonel, “are hard to find.”

For several seconds we all stood silently, watching the colonel’s daughter twirl.

“The fleet might have some,” said Kolya.

“No. They don’t.”

“They have tinned beef. I traded a pack of playing cards for some tinned beef from one of the sailors—”

“They don’t have eggs.”

I don’t think I’m stupid, but it was taking me a very long time to understand what the colonel was asking, and a longer time to fire up my courage to ask him.

“You want us to find eggs?”

“A dozen,” he said. “She only needs ten, but I figure, one might break, a couple might be rotten.” He saw our confusion and he smiled his wonderful smile, gripping our shoulders hard enough to make me stand straighter. “My men say there are no eggs in Leningrad, but I believe there is everything in Leningrad, even now, and I just need the right fellows to find it. A pair of thieves.”

“We’re not thieves,” said Kolya, very righteous, staring into the colonel’s eyes. I wanted to punch him. By all rights we should have been dead and frozen, piled onto a sledge with the rest of the day’s corpses. We had our reprieve. Our lives had been returned in exchange for a simple task. A strange task, perhaps, but simple enough. And now he was going to ruin it—he was asking for his bullet, which was bad, but he was asking for my bullet, too, which was far worse.

“You’re not thieves? You abandoned your unit—no, no, shut up, don’t say anything. You abandoned your unit and the moment you did that you forfeited your rights as a soldier in the Red Army— your right to carry your rifle, to wear that coat, those boots. You’re a thief. And you, Big Nose, you looted a corpse. It was a German corpse so it doesn’t personally offend me, but looting is theft. Let’s not play games. You’re both thieves. Bad thieves, that’s true, incompetent thieves, absolutely, but you’re in luck. The good thieves haven’t been caught.”

He turned and walked back toward the house. Kolya and I lingered, watching the colonel’s daughter, her fox fur flashing in the sun. She must have seen us by now, but she never acknowledged us, never glanced our way. We were two of her father’s lackeys and therefore entirely boring. We watched her as long as we could, trying to etch the image into our brains for future masturbation, until the colonel barked at us and we hurried after him.

“You have your ration cards?” he asked, taking long strides, his respite finished, ready again for the long day’s work. “Hand them over.”

I kept mine pinned to the inside pocket of my coat. I unpinned it and saw Kolya pull his from his folded sock. The colonel took them from us.

“You bring me the eggs by sunrise Thursday, you get them back. You don’t, well, you’ve got all of January to eat snow, and there won’t be any cards waiting for you in February, either. That’s assuming one of my men doesn’t find you and kill you before then, and my men are very good at that.”

“They just can’t find eggs,” said Kolya.

The colonel smiled. “I like you, boy. You won’t live a long life, but I like you.”

We stepped inside the sunroom. The colonel sat down at his desk and stared at the black telephone. He raised his eyebrows, remembering something, opened the desk drawer, and pulled out a folded letter. He held it out for Kolya.

“That’s a curfew waiver for the two of you. Anyone gives you trouble, show them that, you’ll be on your way. And here, this, too….”

He pulled four 100-ruble notes from his wallet and gave them to Kolya, who glanced at the letter and the rubles and slipped them into his pocket.

“That would have bought me a thousand eggs in June,” said the colonel.

“And it will again next June,” said Kolya. “Fritz won’t last the winter.”

“With soldiers like you,” said the colonel, “we’ll be paying for eggs with deutsche marks soon.”

Kolya opened his mouth to defend himself, but the colonel shook his head.

“You understand this is a gift? You bring me a dozen eggs by Thursday, I give you your lives back. You understand the rareness of this gift?”

“What day is today?”

“Today is Saturday. You deserted your unit on a Friday. When the sun rises tomorrow it is Sunday. Can you keep track from this point forward? Yes? Good.”

Borya returned with four slices of toast on a blue plate. The toast had been slathered with something oily, lard maybe, glistening and fatty and luscious. Another aide stepped into the sunroom behind him, carrying two cups of steaming tea. I waited for a third aide carrying bowls of fish soup, but he never came.

“Eat quick, boys,” said the colonel. “You’ve got a lot of walking to do.”