City of Thieves

5

If you had something you wanted to buy, sell, or barter, you went to the Haymarket. Before the war the street stalls were considered the poor man’s Nevsky Prospekt. After the blockade began, when the fancy shops closed one by one, when the restaurants chained shut their doors and the butchers had no more meat in their lockers, the Haymarket thrived. Generals’ wives traded their amber necklaces for sacks of wheat flour. Party members haggled with peasants who had snuck in from the countryside, arguing over how many potatoes a set of antique silverware should purchase. If the negotiations lasted too long, the peasants would wave their hands dismissively and turn away from the city folk. “So eat your silverware,” they would say with a shrug. They almost always got their asking price.

We walked from stall to stall, eyeing the stacks of leather boots, some still bloody from the feet of the previous owners. Tokarev rifles and pistols were cheap, easily bought with a few rubles or two hundred grams of bread. Lugers and grenades were more expensive, but available if you asked the right person. One stall sold glasses of dirt for one hundred rubles each—Badayev Mud, they called it, taken from the ground under the bombed food warehouse and packed with melted sugar.

Kolya stopped at a stall where a gaunt, stooped man with an eyepatch and an unlit pipe in his mouth sold unlabeled bottles of clear liquor.

“What’s this?” asked Kolya.

“Vodka.”

“Vodka? Made from what?”

“Wood.”

“That’s not vodka, friend. That’s wood alcohol.”

“You want it or not?”

“This isn’t what we’re here for,” I told Kolya, who ignored me.

“Stuff makes a man blind,” he said to the stall keeper.

The one-eyed man shook his head, bored with the ignorance but willing to exert some minimal effort to make a sale.

“You pour it through linen,” he said. “Seven layers. After that, it’s safe.”

“Sounds like an elixir for the gods,” said Kolya. “You should call it Seven-Layer Sin. That’s a good name for a drink.”

“You want it?”

“I’ll take a bottle if you drink some with me.”

“It’s too early for me.”

Kolya shrugged. “I see you take a nip, I’ll buy the bottle. Otherwise, what can I tell you, the war’s made me a cynic.”

“Two hundred rubles a bottle.”

“One hundred. Let’s drink.”

“What are you doing?” I asked him, but he didn’t even glance at me.

The one-eyed man placed his cold pipe on the table, found a tea glass, and searched around his stall for a bit of cloth.

“Here,” said Kolya, handing over a white handkerchief. “It’s clean. Relatively.”

We watched the man fold the handkerchief three times and drape it over the mouth of the tea glass. He poured the liquor slowly. Even outdoors, with the wind gusting, the stuff smelled like poison, like a cleaning agent used on a factory floor. The one-eyed man set aside the handkerchief, which was now flecked with a soapy residue. He lifted the glass, sipped it, and set it back down on the table, his expression never changing.

Kolya inspected the level of the liquid in the cup, making sure the vendor had truly taken a sip. Satisfied, he picked up the glass and saluted us.

“For Mother Russia!” He downed the wood alcohol with a gulp, slammed the glass down on the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gagged. He grabbed my shoulder, trying to support himself, his eyes wide open and tearing.

“You murdered me,” he said, barely able to get the words out of his throat, pointing an accusing finger at the one-eyed man.

“I didn’t tell you to drink it fast,” he replied, unimpressed, putting the pipe back in his mouth. “One hundred rubles.”

“Lev… Lev, are you there?” Kolya’s face was turned toward mine, but his eyes were unfocused, looking straight through me.

“Very funny.”

Kolya grinned and stood straight. “Can’t trick a Jew, I should have known. Very good, pay the man.”

“What?”

“Go ahead,” he said, gesturing to the waiting vendor. “Give the man his money.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t try to cheat me, boy!” roared Kolya, grabbing the collar of my greatcoat and shaking me till I felt my bones rattling. “I am a soldier of the Red Army and I won’t stand for any thievery!”

Abruptly he released me, shoving his hands into my coat pockets, pulling out scraps of paper, a bit of string and lint, nothing close to money. Kolya sighed and turned to the vendor.

“Apparently we have no money. I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel the transaction.”

“You think because you’re a soldier,” said the one-eyed man, opening his coat to show us the hilt of a Finnish dagger, “I won’t carve you up?”

“I’ve got a glass of poison in my belly already. So why don’t you try?”

Kolya smiled at the man and waited for a response. There was nothing behind Kolya’s blue eyes, neither fear nor anger nor excitement about the prospect of a fight—nothing. This, I came to learn, was his gift: danger made him calm. Around him people would deal with their terror in the usual ways: stoicism, hysteria, false joviality, or some combination of the three. But Kolya, I think, never completely believed in any of it. Everything about the war was ridiculous: the Germans’ barbarity, the Party’s propaganda, the crossfire of incendiary bullets that lit the nighttime sky. It all seemed to him like someone else’s story, an amazingly detailed story that he had stumbled into and now could not escape.

“Move on or I’ll cut your lips off,” said the one-eyed man, chewing the stem of his unlit pipe, hand on the hilt of his dagger. Kolya saluted and marched off to the next stall, relaxed and unworried as if the entire transaction had been clean and easy. I followed behind, heart thumping within my rib cage.

“Let’s just find the eggs,” I said. “Why do you have to go around provoking people?”

“I needed a sniff, I took a sniff, now I feel alive again.” He took a deep breath and exhaled through pursed lips, watching the condensation rise into the air. “We both should have died last night. Do you understand that? Do you understand how lucky we are? So enjoy it.”

I stopped at a stall where an old peasant woman wearing a headscarf sold patties of pale gray meat. Kolya and I stared at the meat. It looked fairly fresh, glistening with fat, but neither of us wanted to know what sort of animal it had been.

“Do you have any eggs?” I asked the old woman.

“Eggs?” she asked, leaning forward to hear. “Not since September.”

“We need a dozen,” said Kolya. “We can pay good money.”

“You can pay a million rubles,” she said, “there are no eggs. Not in Piter.”

“Where?”

She shrugged, the lines creasing her face so deep they seemed carved. “I have meat. You want meat, it’s three hundred for two patties. No eggs.”

We went from stall to stall, asking everyone if they had eggs, but no one in the Haymarket had seen any since September. A few people had theories on where they could be found: high-ranking army officers had them flown in from Moscow; farmers outside the city gave them to the Germans, along with butter and fresh milk, in exchange for their lives; an old man who lived near the Narva Gate kept chickens in a rooftop coop. This last rumor seemed obviously absurd, but the boy who told us insisted it was true.

“You kill a chicken, maybe it will last you a week. But you keep it alive, well, an egg a day, along with your rations, that will get you by till summer.”

“You have to feed a chicken,” said Kolya. “Who’s got food for a chicken?”

The boy, his black curly hair spilling out from beneath an old Imperial Navy cap, shook his head as if it were a silly question.

“Chickens eat anything. A spoonful of sawdust, that’s all they need.”

The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city’s books were disappearing like the pigeons.

“And you’ve seen these chickens?” asked Kolya.

“My brother has. The old man sleeps in the coop at night with a shotgun. Everyone in the building wants those chickens.”

Kolya glanced at me and I shook my head. We all heard ten different siege myths a day, stories of secret meat lockers stocked with chilled haunches of beef, of larders crammed with caviar tins and veal sausages. It was always someone’s brother or cousin who had seen the treasure. People believed in the stories because it matched their conviction that someone, somewhere, was feasting while the rest of the city starved. And they were right, of course—the colonel’s daughter might not be eating roasted goose for dinner, but she was eating dinner.

“The old man can’t stay in the coop all the time,” I told the boy. “He has to get his rations. He has to get water and use the toilet. Someone would have grabbed the chickens months ago.”

“He pisses off the roof. When it’s coming out the other side, I don’t know, maybe that’s what he feeds the chickens.”

Kolya nodded, impressed by the old man’s clever means of keeping the birds alive, though I was convinced the kid was making this up as his lips moved.

“When was the last time you had a shit?” Kolya asked me, abruptly.

“I don’t know. A week ago?”

“It’s been nine days for me. I’ve been counting. Nine days! When it finally happens, I’ll have a big party and invite the best-looking girls from the university.”

“Invite the colonel’s daughter.”

“I will, absolutely. My shit party will be much better than this wedding she’s planning.”

“The new ration bread hurts coming out,” said the curly-haired boy. “My father says it’s all the cellulose they’re putting in.”

“Where do we find the old man with the chickens?”

“I don’t know the address. If you walk toward Stachek Prospekt from the Narva Gate, you’ll pass his building. There’s a big poster of Zhdanov on the wall.”

“There’s a poster of Zhdanov on half the buildings in Piter,” I said, getting a little irritated. “We’re going to walk another three kilometers to find a bunch of chickens that don’t exist?”

“The boy’s not lying,” said Kolya, patting the kid on his shoulder. “If he is, we’ll come back here and break his fingers. He knows we’re NKVD.”

“You’re not NKVD,” said the boy.

Kolya pulled the colonel’s letter from his coat pocket and slapped the boy’s cheek with it.

“This is a letter from an NKVD colonel authorizing us to find eggs. What do you think about that?”

“You got another one from Stalin, authorizing you to wipe your ass?”

“He’ll have to authorize me to shit first.”

I didn’t stay long enough to learn how the conversation ended. If Kolya wanted to tramp all over the city looking for the fabled chickens, that was his business, but nightfall was coming and I wanted to go home. I hadn’t slept in thirty-some hours. I turned and walked toward the Kirov, trying to remember how much bread I had stashed under the loose tile in the kitchen. Maybe Vera had something for me. She owed me after the way she ran, never looking back even though I’d rescued her. It occurred to me that Vera and the others must have thought I was dead. I wondered how she had reacted, whether she had cried, hiding her face in Grisha’s chest as he comforted her, or maybe pushing him away, angry, because Grisha had fled, abandoned her, while I stayed behind and saved her from certain execution. And Grisha would say, “I know, I know, I’m a coward, forgive me,” and she would forgive him, because Vera forgave Grisha everything, and he would wipe away her tears, and tell her they would never forget me, my sacrifice. But of course they would—within a year they wouldn’t be able to picture my face anymore.

“You there. You the one looking for eggs?”

Obsessed with my pitiful fantasy, it took me a moment to realize the question was meant for me. I turned and saw a bearded giant staring back at me, arms folded across his chest, rocking back and forth on his boot heels. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen, far taller than Kolya and broader in the chest. His bare hands looked big enough to crack my skull like a walnut shell. His beard was thick and black and shined as if oiled. I wondered how much food a man that big needed to eat every day, how he could possibly keep the meat on his titanic frame.

“You have eggs?” I asked, blinking up at him.

“What do you have for me?”

“Money. We have money. Wait, let me get my friend.”

I ran back through the Haymarket. For the first time since I’d met him, I was happy to see Kolya’s blond head. He was still joking with the curly-haired boy, probably describing his dream of a glorious shit.

“Hello, there he is!” he shouted when he saw me. “I thought you’d run off without me.”

“There’s a man who says he has eggs.”

“Excellent!” Kolya turned to the boy. “Son, it has been a great pleasure.”

We walked back the way I’d come, passing the stalls now shutting for the night. Kolya handed me a wrapped library candy.

“Here you are, my friend. Tonight we feast.”

“The kid gave it to you?”

“Gave it to me? He sold it to me.”

“How much?”

“One hundred for two.”

“One hundred!” I glared up at Kolya as he unwrapped his bar and took a bite, grimacing at the flavor. “So we have three hundred left?”

“Correct. Impressive arithmetic.”

“That money is for the eggs.”

“Well, we can’t go egg hunting without a little something to keep us going.”

The bearded man waited for us at the edge of the Haymarket, arms still folded. He appraised Kolya as we came nearer, sizing him up the way a boxer takes the measure of his opponent.

“It’s just the two of you?”

“How many of us do you need?” asked Kolya in return, smiling at the giant. “I hear you sell eggs.”

“I sell everything. What do you have for me?”

“We have money,” I said, fairly sure we had already gone over this.

“How much?”

“Enough,” said Kolya. “We need a dozen eggs.”

The bearded man whistled. “You’re in luck. That’s all I have.”

“You see that?” said Kolya, gripping my shoulder. “This wasn’t so hard.”

“Follow me,” said the giant, crossing the street.

“Where are we going?” I asked as we followed.

“I keep everything inside. It isn’t safe out here. Soldiers come down every few days, steal everything they want, anyone says anything, they shoot him.”

“Well, the soldiers are out there defending the city,” said Kolya. “They can’t fight if they’re starving.”

The giant glanced at Kolya’s army coat, his regulation boots.

“Why aren’t you defending the city?”

“I’m on a mission for a certain colonel. Nothing you need to worry about.”

“This colonel sent you and the boy on a mission for some eggs, is that it?” The giant grinned down at us. His teeth gleamed like unmarked dice within his black beard. He didn’t believe Kolya, of course. Who would?

We walked alongside the frozen Fontanka Canal, the ice littered with abandoned corpses, some covered with shrouds weighted down with stones, others stripped for their warm clothes, their white faces staring up at the darkening sky. The wind was beginning to wake for the night and I watched a dead woman’s long blond hair blow across her face. She had taken pride in that hair once, washed it twice a week, brushed it out for twenty minutes before going to bed. Now it was trying to protect her, to shield her decay from the eyes of strangers.

The giant led us to a five-story brick building, all the windows boarded over with plywood. A massive poster, two stories high, portrayed a young mother carrying her dead child from a burning building. DEATH TO THE BABY KILLERS! read the text. After fishing in his coat pocket for his key, the giant unlocked the front door and held it open for us. I grabbed Kolya’s sleeve before he could enter.

“Why don’t you bring the eggs down here?” I asked the giant.

“I’m still alive because I know how to run my business. And I don’t do business on the street.”

I could feel my scrotum tightening, my timid balls creeping closer to my body. But I was born and raised in Piter, I wasn’t a fool, and I tried to keep my voice steady as I spoke.

“I don’t do business in strangers’ apartments.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Kolya, smiling broadly. “No need for all the suspicion. A dozen eggs. Name your price.”

“A thousand.”

“A thousand rubles? For a dozen eggs?” I laughed. “Are they Fabergé?”

The black-bearded giant, still holding the door open, glowered down at me. I stopped laughing.

“They’re selling glasses of dirt back there for a hundred rubles,” he told me. “Which is better, an egg or a glass of dirt?”

“Listen,” said Kolya, “you can stand here all day haggling with my little Jewish friend, or we can talk like honest men. We have three hundred. That’s all we have. Is it a deal?”

The giant continued to stare at me. He hadn’t liked me from the start; now that he knew I was a Jew I could tell he wanted to peel the skin from my face. He held out his massive palm to Kolya, beckoning for the cash.

“Ah, no, at this point I must side with my companion,” Kolya said, shaking his head. “First the eggs, then the money.”

“I’m not bringing them out here. Everyone’s starving and everyone’s got a gun.”

“You’re an awfully big man to be so afraid,” teased Kolya.

The giant eyed Kolya with something like curiosity, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was hearing the insult. Finally, he smiled, flashing those dice-white teeth.

“There’s a man facedown out there,” he said, gesturing with his chin to the Fontanka Canal. “Wasn’t hunger that got him, wasn’t the cold. His skull got smashed in with a brick. You want to ask me how I know?”

“I take your point,” said Kolya, quite agreeable. He peered into the darkness of the building’s vestibule. “Well, for what it’s worth, a brick is quicker.”

Kolya patted me on the back and stepped inside.

Everything I knew told me to run. This man was leading us into a trap. He had practically just confessed to being a murderer. Kolya had stupidly admitted exactly how much money we had on us. It wasn’t much, but three hundred rubles and two ration cards— which the giant must have assumed we still had—were easily enough to get killed over these days.

But what was the other choice? Head down to the Narva Gate and find some fabled old man and his chicken coop? We were risking our lives walking into the building, but if we didn’t find the eggs soon, we were dead anyway.

I followed Kolya. The front door closed behind us. It was gloomy inside, with no electricity for the bulbs and only the last of the daylight peeking in through gaps in the plywood covering the windows. I heard the giant moving behind me and I dropped to one knee, ready to unsheathe my knife. He passed by me and climbed the stairs, two at a time. Kolya and I glanced at each other. When Blackbeard was out of sight, I pulled out the German knife and slipped it into my coat pocket. Kolya raised his eyebrows, possibly impressed by the act, possibly mocking me. We headed up the stairs, taking them one by one but still panting by the time we reached the second floor.

“Where do you get the eggs?” asked Kolya, calling out to the giant who was already a flight above us. The big man was untroubled by the climb. He and the colonel’s daughter were the two fit-test people I’d seen in Piter in months. I wondered again where he got his energy.

“There’s a peasant I know, he works on a farm near Mga.”

“I thought the Germans took Mga.”

“They did. The Germans like their eggs, too. They come every day and grab all they can find, but my friend hides a few. Can’t hide too many or they’ll figure it out.”

The giant stopped on the fourth floor and rapped on an apartment door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me,” he said. “With a couple of customers.”

We heard a deadbolt slide back and the door opened. A woman wearing a man’s fur hat and a bloodied butcher’s apron blinked at Kolya and me, wiping her nose with the back of her gloved hand.

“What I was wondering,” said Kolya, “is how you keep the eggs from freezing. Because frozen eggs won’t do us much good, I’m afraid.”

The woman stared at Kolya as if he were speaking Japanese.

“We keep them by the samovar,” said the giant. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”

He gestured for us to enter the apartment. The silent woman stepped to the side to let us pass and Kolya walked right in, not a care in the world, looking around with a smile as if he’d just been invited into a new girlfriend’s place. I waited by the door until the giant put his hand on my shoulder. He didn’t shove me, exactly, but with a hand that big the effect was the same.

Wick lamps lit the small apartment and our long shadows crept across the walls, across the frayed rugs on the floor, the brass samovar in the corner, and a white sheet hanging on the far side of the room—partitioning off a sleeping area, I assumed. When the giant closed the door, the sheet billowed like a woman’s dress in the wind. In the moment before it settled down I saw what lay behind it—not a bed, no furniture at all, just slabs of white meat hanging from hooks, suspended from a heating pipe by heavy chains, with plastic sheeting on the floor to collect the drippings. Maybe for half a second I thought it was pig, maybe my brain tried to convince my eyes that they weren’t looking at what they were looking at: a flayed thigh that could only be a woman’s thigh, a child’s rib cage, a severed arm with the hand’s ring finger missing.

The knife was in my hand before I realized I wanted it— something moved behind me and I wheeled and slashed, crying out, unable to form any words, throat constricted. The giant had pulled a foot-long section of steel pipe from his coat; he danced away from me, far quicker than a man that big should be, easily dodging the German steel.

The giant’s wife drew a cleaver from her apron pouch. She was quick, too, but Kolya turned out to be quickest of all, pivoting on his back foot and hitting the woman with a right cross to the jaw. She crumpled to the floor.

“Run,” said Kolya.

I ran. I thought the door would be locked, but it wasn’t; I thought the giant’s pipe would crush my skull, but it didn’t; and I was out in the hallway, hurtling down the staircase, jumping nearly the entire flight to the landing below. I heard a great shout of pure un-worded fury and the thud of the giant’s hobnailed boots on the floorboards as he charged across the room. I stopped there with my hand on the banister, unable to catch my breath, unwilling to run farther away, unable to climb the dark stairs back to the cannibals’ apartment. I heard the terrible sound of steel slamming into skull or plywood.

I was betraying Kolya, deserting him when he was weaponless and I had a good knife. I tried to will my feet to move, to carry me back to the battle, but I was shaking so hard I couldn’t keep my knife hand steady. More shouts, more thuds of pipe on what? Plaster flakes fell from the ceiling above me. I cowered on the stairs, certain that Kolya was gone, certain I could not run fast enough to escape the giant—his wife would carve me with a few expert chops of that heavy cleaver, and soon the parts of me would be hanging from steel chains as the last of my blood dripped onto the plastic sheeting.

The shouting continued, the walls shuddered, Kolya was not dead yet. I held the knife with both hands and put one foot on the step above me. I could sneak into the apartment while the cannibal was distracted, stick the knife in his back—but the blade seemed flimsy to me now, far too small for killing giants. It would prick him, draw a little blood, and he would turn, grab my face, and squeeze the eyeballs from my skull.

I took another step up and Kolya shot out of the apartment, his boots skidding on the floor as he nearly ran past the staircase. He made the turn, hurling himself down the flight, grabbing my collar, and tugging me along with him.

“Run, you little fool! Run!”

We ran, and whenever I faltered or nearly tripped on a slick step, Kolya’s hand was there to steady me. I heard the shouting above us, heard that monstrous heavy body thudding down the steps behind us, but I never looked back and I never ran faster. In the midst of all that terror, the shouts and the footfalls and the squeal of our heels on the wooden steps, there was something else, something strange. Kolya was laughing.

We made it out the front door of the building and into the dark street, the night sky already crisscrossed with roving searchlights. The sidewalks were empty; no one close by to help us. We ran into the middle of the street, sprinted three blocks, looking over our shoulders to see if the giant was still chasing us, never seeing him, never slowing down. Finally, we spotted an army car passing by and we ran into its path, arms raised, forcing the driver to hit the brakes, the tires skidding on the iced pavement.

“Get out of the road, you motherless shits!” shouted the driver.

“Comrade officers,” said Kolya, palms raised, speaking calmly and with his perpetual, freakish confidence, “there are cannibals in that building back there. We’ve just escaped them.”

“There are cannibals in every building,” said the driver. “Welcome to Leningrad. Now step aside.”

Another voice inside the car said, “Hold on a moment.” An officer stepped out. He looked more like a professor of mathematics than a military man, with his trim gray mustache and his frail neck. He studied Kolya’s uniform and then looked him in the eye.

“Why aren’t you with your regiment?” he asked.

Kolya pulled the colonel’s letter from his pocket and showed it to the officer. I could see the man’s expression change. He nodded at Kolya and gestured for us to get in the car.

“Show us.”

Five minutes later Kolya and I stepped back into the cannibals’ apartment, this time escorted by four soldiers aiming their Tokarev rifles into the corners of the room. Even surrounded by armed men my fear nearly drowned me. When I saw the rib cage dangling from its steel chain, the skinned thigh and arm, I wanted to shut my eyes and never open them again. The soldiers, tough as they were, accustomed to carrying their comrades’ mutilated corpses from the battlefield, even they turned away from the swaying chains.

The giant and his wife were gone. They’d left everything behind, the wick lamps still lit, the tea still hot in the samovar, but they had fled into the night. The officer shook his head, glancing around the apartment. Gaping holes yawned from the walls like open mouths where the steel pipe had struck.

“We’ll put their names on the list, cancel their ration cards, all that, but it will be dumb luck if they get caught. There isn’t much of a police force right now.”

“Where’s he going to hide?” asked Kolya. “He’s the biggest fucker in Piter.”

“Then you better hope you see him first,” said one of the soldiers, running his finger along the ragged edge of a hole punched in the wall.