City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  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, frien
ds 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.”

  4

  Big Nose. I like that. Who was your father, Big Nose?”

  “You wouldn’t know him.”

  “If he was a published poet, I know him.”

  “Just leave it alone.”

  “
You’re a moody one, aren’t you?”

  We were crossing the Kamennoostrovsky Bridge again, this time on foot. Kolya stopped at the midpoint, gloved hands on the balustrade, looking down the river toward the Dolgorukov mansion. The colonel’s daughter no longer skated her figures, but Kolya watched for a moment anyway, hoping for an encore.

  “She smiled at me,” he said.

  “She didn’t smile at you. What are you talking about? She didn’t even look at us.”

  “Perhaps you’re jealous, my friend, but she definitely gave me a smile. I think I’ve seen her before, at the university. I have a reputation.”

  “As a deserter?”

  Kolya turned away from the balustrade and glared at me. “I’ll knock your teeth out if you call me a deserter again.”

  “I’ll shove my knife in your eye if you try it.”

  Kolya considered this and turned back to his river view.

  “I’d get to you before you could pull the knife. I’m very quick when I need to be.”

  I thought about pulling the knife now, just to prove him wrong, but he didn’t seem angry anymore and I wanted to keep moving.

  We crossed the bridge, back to the mainland, and headed south on Pesochnaya, the river to our right, the rusted rails of the Finland line to the left. No trains had run since September, when the Germans encircled the city and cut the tracks of every line—Finland, Moscow, Vitebsk, Warsaw, Baltic—all severed and useless. The city’s only connection now with the rest of Russia was by air, and few planes could make it through the Luftwaffe patrols.

  “We could run for it, of course. Tough without ration cards, though.” He considered the problem. “The NKVD boys don’t worry me much. In the army they say the police can’t find pussy in a whorehouse. But not having ration cards . . . tricky.”

  “We have to find the eggs,” I told him. We were walking in the sunlight and breathing the air because of the colonel’s command; if the payment for this reprieve was a dozen eggs, we would find a dozen fucking eggs. There was no room for negotiation or maneuvering.