City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  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.

  6

  You really laid her out,” I told Kolya as we trudged north past the clock tower of the Vitebsk Station, grandest of all Leningrad’s train stations, even now, when no train had run in almost four months and the stained glass windows were boarded over.

  “It was a solid shot, wasn’t it? Never hit a woman before, but it seemed like the right move.”

  That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn’t let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn’t admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.

  The curfew alarm hadn’t sounded yet, but there wasn’t much time left. We had decided to spend the night in the Kirov, where I knew I had enough scrap wood for a decent fire, and a full pot of river water for tea. It wasn’t such a long walk, but now that my panic was gone I felt like an old man, the muscles of my legs aching from the running. Breakfast with the colonel had been beautiful at the time, but it also served to stretch out my stomach, and the hunger had returned. Now it was mixed with nausea, because I couldn’t get the image of the child’s rib cage out of my head. When I nibbled on the frozen library candy, I thought it tasted like dried skin, and I had to force myself to swallow the stuff.

  Kolya limped along beside me, his legs as shot as mine, but in the moonlight he looked as worry free as ever, unburdened by any unpleasant thoughts. Maybe his mind was more peaceful because he had reacted bravely, with strength and decisiveness, while I cowered on the dark staircase, waiting to be saved.

  “Look, I feel that I . . . I want to say I’m sorry. I ran away and I’m sorry. You saved my life.”
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  “I told you to run.”

  “Yes, but . . . I should have come back. I had the knife.”

  “You had the knife, sure.” Kolya laughed. “Lot of good it would have done you. You should have seen yourself, swinging at him. David and Goliath, ha. He was getting ready to eat you raw.”

  “I left you alone in there. I thought they were going to kill you.”

  “Well, they thought so, too. But I told you I had quick fists.” He fired a few jabs into the air, grunting like a boxer: huuunnh! huuunnh!

  “I’m not a coward. I know I looked like one back there, but I’m not.”

  “Listen to me, Lev,” he said, draping his arm around my shoulders, forcing me to match his long strides. “You didn’t want to go up to that apartment. I was the country fool who insisted on it. So you don’t owe me an apology. And I don’t think you’re a coward. Anyone with a spoonful of sanity would have run.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Quod erat demonstrandum,” he said, pleased with his simple Latin.

  I felt a little better about everything. Kolya had told me to run. The giant could have poked a hole in my skull as easily as a child sticks his thumb through a cherry pie. Maybe I hadn’t acted heroically, but I hadn’t betrayed the nation, either.

  “It really was a terrific punch.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be chewing on any children for a while.”

  Kolya grinned at the phrasing, but the grin didn’t last for long. His words brought our minds back to that pale meat, the plastic sheeting wet with drippings. We were living in a city where witches roamed the streets, Baba Yaga and her sisters, snatching up children and hacking them to pieces.

  A siren sounded, that long, lonely wail, and soon all the sirens in the city were echoing its cry.

  “Here comes Fritz,” said Kolya, and we increased our pace, forcing our tired bodies to move faster. We could hear the shells landing to the south, a distant beat of timpani, as the Germans began their nightly attack on the great Kirov Works, where half of Russia’s tanks and airplane engines and heavy guns were built. Most of the men working there were out on the front lines now, but women had taken over on the lathes and presses and the Works never lost a step, coal always burning in the furnaces, smoke always rising from the redbrick smokestacks, the factories never shutting down, even when bombs fell through the roof, even when dead girls had to be carried from the assembly lines, cold hands still clutching their tools.

  We hustled past the fine old buildings of Vitebsky Prospekt, with their white stone facades, ram-horned satyr heads grinning down at us from the pediments, carved in the days of the emperors. Each of these buildings would have a bomb shelter in its basement; citizens would be huddled down there, dozens of them clustered around a single flickering lamp, waiting for the all clear. The shells were landing close enough now that we could hear them whine in the air. The wind was louder, shrieking through the broken windows of abandoned apartments, as if God and the Germans were conspiring to blow down our city.

  “On the front lines, you get good at judging where the shells will land,” said Kolya, his hands jammed into the pockets of his greatcoat, as he walked into the wind that had been behind us a moment before. “You listen to them and you know: that one’s falling a hundred meters to the left; that one’s going in the river.”

  “I can tell a Junkers from a Heinkel the second I hear it.”

  “I should hope so. A Junkers sounds like a lion and a Heinkel is a mosquito.”

  “Well, a Heinkel from a Dornier, then. I captained the firefighting crew on the—”

  Kolya held up his hand for me to shut up. He stopped walking and I stopped beside him.

  “You hear that?”

  I listened. I couldn’t hear anything beyond the winter wind that seemed to come from every direction at once, gathering its strength over the Gulf of Finland and howling down all the side streets. I thought Kolya heard a shell coming our way and I looked skyward, as if I could spot our death winging toward us, as if I could dodge it if I had. The wind finally calmed, gasping more quietly now, a child at the end of his tantrum. Shells exploded to the south, several kilometers away from the sound of it, but close enough to make the pavement shudder beneath us. But Kolya wasn’t listening to the wind or the mortars. Someone inside the old building was playing the piano. I couldn’t see any lights through the windows, no candles or lamps burning. The other residents must have gone down to the basement shelter (unless they were too weak from hunger or too old to care), leaving behind this stray genius to play in the darkness, impudent and precise, showing off with thundering double fortissimos immediately followed by fragile little pianissimos, as if he were having an argument with himself, the bullying husband and the meek wife all at once.

  Music was an important part of my childhood, on the radio and in the concert halls. My parents were fanatic in their passion; we were a family with no talent for playing but great pride in our listening. I could identify any of Chopin’s twenty-seven etudes after hearing a few bars; I knew all of Mahler, from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen to the unfinished Tenth. But the music we heard that night I had never heard before and have never heard since. The notes were muffled by window glass and distance and the unending wind, but the power came through. It was music for wartime.

  We stood on the sidewalk, beneath a powerless streetlamp cob-webbed with hoarfrost, the great guns firing to the south, the moon veiled by muslin clouds, listening until the final note. When it ended, something seemed wrong: the performance was too good to go unacknowledged, the performer too skilled to accept no applause. For a long moment we were silent, staring up at the dark windows. Finally, when it seemed respectful to move again, we resumed our march.

  “It’s lucky no one’s chopped up his piano for firewood,” said Kolya.

  “Whoever that is, nobody’s chopping up his piano. Might have been Shostakovich himself. He probably lives around here.”

  Kolya glared at me and spat on the sidewalk.

  “They evacuated Shostakovich three months ago.”

  “That’s not true. He’s on all the posters, wearing that fire warden’s helmet.”

  “Yes, the great hero, except he’s in Kuybishev, whistling those Mahler tunes he plagiarized.”

  “Shostakovich did not plagiarize Mahler.”

  “I thought you’d take Mahler’s side,” said Kolya, glancing down at me with that amused twist of his lips that meant, I now knew, he was about to say something irritating. “Don’t you prefer the Jew over the Gentile?”

  “They’re not on different sides. Mahler wrote great music. Shostakovich writes great music—”

  “Great? Ha. The man is a hack and a thief.”

  “You’re an idiot. You don’t know anything about music.”

  “I know that Shostakovich was on the radio in September talking about our great patriotic duty to fight Fascism, and three weeks later he’s in Kuybishev, eating porridge.”

  “It’s not his fault. They don’t want him dead so they made him go. Think how bad it would be for morale—”

  “Oh, of course, think of the tragedy,” said Kolya, adopting the professorial tone he used for high sarcasm. “We can’t let the great ones die. If I were in charge, I’d push the other way. Put the famous on the front lines. Shostakovich takes a bullet to the head? Think of the outrage across the nation! Across the world! RENOWNED COMPOSER MURDERED BY NAZIS. Anna Akhmatova, she was on the radio, too. You remember? Telling all the women of Leningrad to be brave, to learn how to fire a rifle. Now where is she? Shooting at Germans? Hm, no, I believe not. At the Works, grinding shell casings? No, she’s in fucking Tashkent, pumping out more of that narcissistic verse that made her famous.”

  “My mother and sister left, too. Doesn’t make them traitors.”

  “Your mother and sister weren’t on the radio telling us all to be brave. Look, I don’t expect composers and poets to be heroes. I just don’t like hypocrites.”

  He rubb
ed his nose with the back of his gloved hand and glanced back to the south, at the artillery bursts lighting the sky.

  “Where is this goddamned building of yours, anyway?”

  We had just turned the corner onto Voinova and I raised my hand to point out the Kirov. I was pointing at nothing, but for a long time I didn’t even think to lower my hand. Where the Kirov had stood there was now rubble, a steep hill of broken concrete slabs, a scree of masonry and twisted steel rods and sprays of glass dust glittering in the moonlight.

  If I had been alone, I would have stared at those ruins for hours without comprehension. The Kirov was my life. Vera and Oleg and Grisha. Lyuba Nikolaevna, the spinster on the fourth floor who read palms and mended dresses for all the women in the building, who saw me reading an H. G. Wells novel in the stairwell one summer night and the next day gave me a box filled with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens. Anton Danilovich, the janitor, who lived in the basement and shouted at us whenever we threw stones in the courtyard or spat off the rooftop or built lewd snowmen and snowwomen with carrots for cocks and pencil erasers for nipples. Zavodilov, rumored to be a gangster, missing two fingers on his left hand and always whistling at the girls, even if they were homely, maybe whistling louder at the homely girls to keep their spirits up—Zavodilov who had parties that lasted till dawn, playing the latest jazz records, Varlamov and his Hot Seven or Eddie Rozner; men and women with half-buttoned shirts laughing and dancing out into the hallway, infuriating all the old folks, thrilling the kids who decided if we had to grow up, at least we could grow up to be like Zavodilov.

  It was an ugly old building that always stank of disinfectant, but it was my home and I never thought it would fall. I waded into the tumble of debris, bending down to toss aside hunks of concrete. Kolya grabbed my arm.

  “Lev . . . come with me. I know another place we can spend the night.”