City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  “Finding the eggs is the best outcome, I agree. Doesn’t mean I can’t consider my options. Maybe there are no eggs in the city. Then what? You still have family in Piter?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. That’s one good thing. Only have to worry about our own skins.”

  Signs were posted on the walls of fire-gutted warehouses: HAVE YOU SIGNED UP YET FOR THE PEOPLE’S VOLUNTEERS? There were no residential buildings in this area and the street was empty, no one else walking beneath the colorless sky. We could have been the last two survivors of the war, the last two defenders of the city, with only my stolen knife and Kolya’s purportedly quick fists to fight off the Fascists.

  “The Haymarket’s our best chance,” said Kolya. “I was there a few months ago. They still had butter and cheese, a little caviar, maybe.”

  “So how come the colonel’s men couldn’t find any eggs?”

  “It’s the black market. Half that stuff is stolen. You’ve got people trading their ration cards, all sorts of lawbreaking. They’re not going to sell to anyone in a uniform. Especially not an NKVD uniform.”

  It seemed like a reasonable argument. Kolya whistled some tuneless song of his own invention and we walked south toward the Haymarket. Things were looking up. Execution was not imminent. I had more food in my stomach than I’d had for weeks, and the strong black tea provided an extra spark. My legs felt strong enough to propel me wherever I needed to go. Someone, somewhere, had a dozen eggs, and we’d find them eventually. In the meantime I enjoyed a vivid fantasy of the colonel’s daughter skating naked on the Neva, her pale ass shining in the sun.

  Kolya slapped my back and gave me a lewd grin, as if he had stared right through my glass skull.

  “Remarkable girl, wasn’t she? You’d like to take a shot at that?”

  I said nothing, but Kolya seemed long practiced at carrying on one-sided conversations.

  “The secret to winning a woman is calculated neglect.”

  “What?”

  “Ushakovo. It’s a line from The Courtyard Hound. Oh wait, you never read The Courtyard Hound.” Kolya sighed, weary of my great ignorance. “Your father was a member of the literati and he left you illiterate. A little sad.”

  “Why don’t you shut up about my father?”

  “Radchenko, the protagonist, is a great lover. People come from all over Moscow to get his advice on wooing. He never leaves his bed, he just lies there, drinking tea—”

  “Like Oblomov.”

  “Nothing like Oblomov! Why does everyone always say, ‘Like Oblomov’?”

  “Because it sounds exactly like Oblomov.”

  Kolya stopped walking and looked down at me. He was taller by a head and twice as broad in the shoulders, and he loomed over me now, threatening with his eyes.

  “Every university fool knows Goncharov wasn’t half the writer Ushakovo was. Oblomov is nothing. Oblomov is a morality lesson for the bourgeoisie, a little trifle you make your kids read so they don’t grow up lazy. Now, Radchenko—Radchenko is one of the great heroes of the language. Him and Raskolnikov and Bezukhov and, I don’t know, Chichikov, maybe.”

  “You’re spitting on me.”

  “Well, you deserve to be spat on.”

  I continued walking south and Kolya, irritated as he was, soon fell into stride. Fate had shoved us together, that seemed beyond argument. Until Thursday, we were married.

  Across the snow-dusted ice of the Neva the golden angel still sat atop the gilded spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral even though people said the Wehrmacht had promised an Iron Cross to the artilleryman who knocked it down. Kolya gestured toward the Petrograd Side with his chin.

  “I was stationed at the fortress when the zoo was bombed.”

  “I heard there were baboons running around the city, and a Siberian tiger—”

  “That’s a fairy tale,” he said. “None of them got out.”

  “Maybe a few did. How do you know?”

  “None of them got out. If you want to tell yourself something sweet to help you sleep, go ahead, but it’s a lie.” He spat on the ground. “Fritz burned the whole place to the ground. Betty the elephant . . . I loved that elephant. I’d go look at her all the time when I was a kid. The way she washed, sucking up water in her trunk and showering herself . . . She was graceful. You wouldn’t think so, she was so damned big, but she was.”

  “She died?”

  “What did I just tell you? They all died. Took Betty hours, though. The way she moaned . . . I was on guard duty and all I wanted to do was run over and shoot her in the heart. Just end it. You never want to hear an elephant dying.”

  It was a long walk to the Haymarket, six kilometers maybe, over the Liteiny Bridge, past the Summer Gardens where the elms and the oaks had been hacked down with hatchets, past the Church on Spilled Blood, with its glazed tile facade and soaring onion domes, built on the spot where Hryniewiecki splattered himself and the emperor. The farther south we walked, the more crowded the streets; everyone bundled in three layers, leaning into the wind as they walked, their faces pinched and wasted and pallid from lack of iron. On Nevsky Prospekt all the shops had been closed for months. We saw two women in their sixties walking very close together, their shoulders touching, eyes on the sidewalk looking for the patch of ice that could kill them. A man with a glorious walrus mustache carried a white bucket filled with black nails. A boy, no more than twelve, tugged a sled with a length of rope. A small body wrapped in blankets lay on the sled, a bloodless bare foot dragging along the hard-packed snow. Dragon’s teeth studded the street, reinforced concrete blocks arrayed in rows to hinder the movement of enemy tanks. A printed sign on the wall read WARNING! THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS THE MOST DANGEROUS DURING THE BOMBING.

  Nevsky before the war was the heart of the city, built to rival the grand promenades of London and Paris, sidewalk kiosks hawking cherry blossoms and chocolates, the aproned old men behind the counter in Eliseyev’s slicing smoked sturgeon and sable, the clock tower of city hall rising above all the clamor, letting everyone know how late they were for whatever came next. Black Packards would whip past, horns blaring, carrying Party members from one meeting to another. Even if you had no money to buy anything and nowhere important to go, Nevsky was always a good place to walk. In June the sun didn’t set till midnight and nobody wanted to waste the light. You could watch the prettiest girls in Piter staring through the bright windows of the fancy shops, their eyes appraising the newest dresses for sale, studying the cut so they could make the dress at home if they managed to snatch enough material from work. Even if you never said anything to these girls, even if you always watched from a distance—

  “You’re a virgin, aren’t you,” said Kolya, interrupting my thoughts with such eerie timing it startled me.

  “Me?” I asked, stupidly. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about the fact that you’ve never had sex.” Sometimes you know there’s no point in lying; the game is over before it’s begun.

  “What do you care?”

  “Listen, Lev, what if we try to be friends? What do you think about that? We’re going to be together until we find these eggs, we might as well get along, right? Now, you seem like an interesting boy, a bit ornery, a bit moody in the Jewish way, but I like you. And if you weren’t so fucking resistant all the time, I could probably teach you something.”

  “About girls?”

  “About girls, yes. About literature. About chess.”

  “What are you, nineteen? How come you always talk like you’re such an expert at everything?”

  “I’m twenty. And I’m not an expert at everything. Just girls, literature, and chess.”

  “That’s all.”

  “Mm. And dancing. I’m an excellent dancer.”

  “What do you want to bet on a game of chess?”

  Kolya glanced at me and smiled. He exhaled, his breath rising in vapor above his head.

  “I’ll take that German knife of yours.�
��

  “And what do I get?”

  “You won’t get anything. You’re not going to win.”

  “But let’s say I do.”

  “I’ve got maybe another hundred grams of that sausage—”

  “Hundred grams of sausage for a German pilot’s knife? I don’t think so.”

  “I have some pictures. . . .”

  “What kind of pictures.”

  “Pictures of girls. French girls. You’d learn things you need to learn.”

  Pictures of French girls seemed like a prize worth playing for. I wasn’t worried about losing the knife. There were plenty of people in Piter who could beat me at chess, but I knew all their names. My father had been city champion when he was still in university; he used to take me with him on Thursdays and Sundays to the Spartak Chess Club at the Palace of the Pioneers. When I was six, the club coach declared me a talent. For several years I was one of the top-ranked young players, winning little ribbons and medals at tournaments throughout Leningrad Oblast. This made my father proud, though he was too much of a bohemian to admit to caring about competitions and he never let me display my prizes in our apartment.

  When I was fourteen, I quit the club. I had learned that I was a good player but would never be a great one. Friends of mine at Spartak, whom I had beaten consistently when we were younger, had left me far behind, advancing to a plane I could not access no matter how many games I played, how many books I read, how many endgame problems I worked on in bed at night. I was like a well-trained pianist who knows which notes to hit but can’t make the music his own. A brilliant player understands the game in a way he can never quite articulate; he analyzes the board and knows how to improve his position before his brain can devise an explanation for the move. I didn’t have the instincts. Quitting the club disappointed my father, but I wasn’t sad about it. Chess became far more fun once I no longer had to worry about my citywide ranking.

  Kolya stopped at the Kvissisana Café and stared through a plate glass window covered with taped crosses. The restaurant inside was empty, all the tables removed, nothing but a linoleum floor and a chalkboard on the wall still marked with August’s specials.

  “I took a girl here once. Best lamb cutlets in the city.”

  “And then you took her home and made love to her?” I said, deeply sarcastic but immediately fearing that he had done exactly that.

  “No,” said Kolya, checking his reflection in the window and brushing some stray blond hair back under his black fur cap. “We made love before dinner. After dinner we had a drink at the Europa. She was mad for me, but I liked a friend of hers better.”

  “So why didn’t you take the friend to dinner?”

  Kolya smiled, a superior’s kind smile for his simple subordinate.

  “Calculated neglect. You need an education.”

  We kept walking down Nevsky. It was one in the afternoon, but the winter sun was already drifting low in the western sky, our shadows elongating in front of us.

  “So let’s start slow,” he said, “let’s start with basics. Is there a girl you like?”

  “No one special.”

  “Who said she needs to be special? You’re a virgin, you need warm thighs and a heartbeat, not Tamara Karsavina.”

  “There’s a girl named Vera who lives in my building. But she likes someone else.”

  “Fine. Step one, let’s not worry about someone else. Let’s worry about Vera. What’s special about her? Why do you like her?”

  “I don’t know. She lives in my building.”

  “That’s something. Anything else?”

  “She plays the cello.”

  “Beautiful instrument. What color eyes does she have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t like the girl. You don’t know what color eyes she has, you don’t like her.”

  “I do like her, but all she cares about is Grisha Antokolsky, so what’s the point?”

  “Fine,” said Kolya, very patient with his dull charge, “you think you like her because she doesn’t like you. It’s very understandable, but I’m telling you, you don’t like her. Let’s forget about Vera.”

  Forgetting about Vera didn’t seem hard to do. I had spent the last three years trying to imagine what she looked like naked, but only because she lived two floors below me and once, at the youth center swimming pool, I had seen her nipples when her swimsuit straps slipped off. If it weren’t for Vera’s panicked tumble by the Kirov’s gate, I wouldn’t have been wandering the streets of Piter with a lunatic deserter, looking for eggs. She never looked back when the soldiers grabbed me. She was probably grubbing with Grisha in one of the Kirov’s dark corridors while I was locked up in the Crosses.

  “The colonel’s daughter was pretty. I like her.”

  Kolya glanced at me, amused.

  “Yes, the colonel’s daughter is pretty. I like your optimism. But that one’s not for you.”

  “She’s not for you, either.”

  “You might be wrong about that. If you saw the look she gave me.”

  We walked past a group of young boys with stepladders and pails of whitewash who were busy painting over street signs and building numbers. Kolya stopped and stared at them.

  “Hey!” he shouted at the closest boy, who wore so many layers of wool you would have thought he was fat, unless you saw the drawn skin of his face, his eyes shining and black above shadows as deep as an old man’s. Very few children this young were left in the city; most had been evacuated back in September. The ones who remained tended to be very poor, many of them war orphans with no family in the east.

  “What the devil are you doing?” asked Kolya. He turned to me, stunned by this disrespect. “Little bastards are vandalizing the Prospekt. Hey! Boy!”

  “Suck my cock and make a wish,” said the black-eyed boy, whiting out the number on the door of a watch repair shop.

  Even Kolya seemed taken aback by this directive. He walked over to the boy, took him by the shoulders, and turned him around.

  “You’re talking to a soldier of the Red Army, boy—”

  “Kolya,” I started.

  “You think this is the time for pranks? You and your little Gypsy friends want to run around—”

  “You better take your hands off me,” said the boy.

  “Now you’re threatening me? I’ve been shooting at Germans the last four months and now you want to threaten me?”

  “Kolya,” I repeated, louder this time. “They’re on orders. If Fritz gets inside the city, he won’t know where he’s going.”

  Kolya looked from the black-eyed boy to the whitewashed street signs and over to me.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I was doing it two days ago.”

  Kolya released the boy, who glared up at him a moment longer before resuming his work.

  “Well, it’s damn clever,” said Kolya, and we kept on toward Haymarket.

  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 d
irt 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.