City of Thieves

by David Benioff

I pulled out of his grip and continued shoveling with my hands. He grabbed me again and this time he held my arm tight, so I couldn’t pull away.

  “There’s no one alive down there.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Look,” he said quietly, pointing at a number of small red stakes that had been shoved into the rubble in various spots. “They’ve already been here digging. The building must have gone down last night.”

  “I was here last night.”

  “You were in the Crosses last night. Come. Come with me.”

  “People survive. I’ve read about it. People survive for days sometimes.”

  Kolya surveyed the wreckage. The wind whipped up miniature storms of concrete dust.

  “If anyone’s alive in there, you won’t be able to pull them out with your bare hands. And if you stay here all night trying, you won’t make it to morning. Come on. I have friends nearby. We need to get inside.”

  I shook my head. How could I abandon my home?

  “Lev . . . I don’t need you to think right now. I just need you to follow me. Understand? Follow me.”

  He tugged me down from the hill of rubble and I was too weak to resist, too tired for grief or anger or defiance. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to eat. We walked away from the Kirov’s remnants and I could not hear my footsteps. I had become a phantom. There was no one left in the city who knew my full name. I felt no great misery for myself, just a kind of dull curiosity that I still seemed to be alive, my exhalations still visible in the moonlight, this son of Cossacks still marching beside me, looking at me from time to time to make sure I kept moving, checking the night sky for bombers.

  7

  Come in,” she said, “come in. You’re both frozen.”

  You could see that Kolya’s friend had been beautiful before the siege: her dirty blond hair hung to the middle of her back; her lips were still full; and she had a crescent-shaped dimple that creased her left cheek every time she smiled. There was no corresponding dimple on the right cheek, which seemed odd, and I noticed that I kept waiting for her to smile so I could see the solitary dimple again.

  Kolya had kissed both her cheeks when she opened the door and the blood had flooded her face, making her look healthy for a second.

  “They said you were dead!”

  “Not yet,” said Kolya. “This is my friend Lev. He won’t tell me his patronymic or his family name, but maybe he’ll tell you. I’ve got a feeling you’re his type. Lev, Sonya Ivanovna. One of my early conquests and still a dear friend.”

  “Ha! Bit of a short-lived conquest, wasn’t it? Napoleon in Moscow?”

  Kolya grinned at me. He still had an arm around Sonya, holding her close to him. She had swaddled herself in a man’s greatcoat and three or four sweaters, but even beneath all that bulk I could see there wasn’t much left of her.

  “This one was a classic seduction. Met her in art history class. Explained to her all the perversions of the masters, from Michelangelo’s boys to Malevich’s feet—did you know about this? He used to sketch his housekeeper’s feet in the morning and jerk off to the drawings at night.”

  “Such a lie. No one else in the world has heard this story,” she confided to me.

  “She learned all about these lusty painters, got her juices flowing, couple of shots of vodka, that was it. I came, I saw, I conquered.”

  She leaned closer to me, touching the sleeve of my overcoat, and told me with a stage whisper: “He came, anyway. I’ll give him that much.”

  I wasn’t used to hearing women speak about sex. The boys I knew never shut up on the subject, though none of them seemed like great authorities, but the girls saved those talks for their own closed covens. I wondered if Grisha had laid Vera yet, before remembering that Grisha and Vera were both dead, buried beneath tombstones of broken concrete.

  Sonya saw the miserable look on my face and assumed I was flustered by their brassy conversation. She gave me a warm smile, flashing that crescent dimple.

  “Don’t worry, darling. None of us are nearly as bohemian as we think we are.” She turned to Kolya. “He’s a sweet one. Where’d you find him?”

  “He lived in the Kirov. Over on Voinova.”

  “The Kirov? That’s the one that went down last night? I’m so sorry, sweet boy.”

  She gathered me in her arms. It was like being embraced by a scarecrow. I couldn’t feel any body beneath her clothing, just layer after layer of smoky wool. Still, it felt good to have a woman showing concern. Even if she was just being polite, it felt good.

  “Come,” she said, taking my hand, leather glove on leather glove. “This is your home now. If you need to sleep here for a night, a week, this is where you sleep. Tomorrow you can help me carry some water up from the Neva.”

  “We’ve got work to do tomorrow,” said Kolya, but she ignored him, ushering us into the sitting room. A band of six sat in a semicircle around a wood-burning stove. They looked like university students, the men still sporting elaborate sideburns and mustaches, the women wearing their hair cut short and Gypsy earrings. They shared several heavy blankets, sipped cups of tea, and watched us newcomers without saying a word of welcome. I understood their displeasure. Strangers were an irritation at best and fatal at worst— even if they meant no harm, they always wanted food.

  Sonya introduced us all, naming everyone in the circle, but no one else spoke until Kolya made friends by unwrapping his library candy and passing it around. It was impossible to take much pleasure chewing the stuff, but it was something to eat, something to get the blood moving, and soon the conversation restarted.

  Her friends, it turned out, were surgeons and nurses, not university students. They had just finished a twenty-four-hour shift, amputating arms and legs, plucking bullets from shattered bones, trying to patch together mutilated soldiers without the help of anesthetic or spare blood or electricity. They didn’t even have enough hot water to properly sterilize their scalpels.

  “Lev here lived in the Kirov,” said Sonya, indicating me with a sympathetic tilt of her head. “That building on Voinova that was hit last night.”

  There were murmured apologies, small nods to indicate condolence.

  “Were you inside when the bomb hit?”

  I shook my head. I glanced at Kolya, who was scrawling notes with a stub of pencil in his journal, not paying any attention to us. I glanced back at the doctors and nurses, who waited for a reply. These people were strangers. Why burden them with the truth?

  “I was staying with friends.”

  “A few of them got out,” said one of the surgeons, Timofei, a painterly-looking fellow wearing rimless glasses. “I heard someone talking about it at the hospital.”

  “Really? How many?”

  “Don’t know. Wasn’t listening too closely. Sorry, it’s just . . . buildings go down every night.”

  The rumor of survivors lifted my spirits. The bomb shelter in the basement seemed sturdy—if people got there in time, they might have made it. Vera and the twins always rushed down to the shelter with their families when the sirens went off. Zavodilov the gangster, on the other hand—I don’t remember ever seeing him in the shelter. He slept through the sirens as he slept through the mornings, with a cold washcloth draped over his forehead and a naked girl by his side. Or at least that’s the way I imagined it. No, he wouldn’t have made it to the shelter, but then again, Zavodilov spent many nights away from the Kirov, taking care of his mysterious business or drinking in some other criminal’s apartment.

  Sonya poured two more glasses of weak tea and handed one to me and one to Kolya. I took off my wool mittens for the first time since eating breakfast in the colonel’s office. The warm glass felt like a living thing between my palms, a small animal with a heartbeat and a soul. I let the steam rise to my face and didn’t realize for a moment that Sonya had asked me a question.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said, was your family in the building?”

  “No, they got out of the ci
ty in September.”

  “That’s good. So did mine. My little brothers went to Moscow.”

  “And now the Germans are at the gates of Moscow, too,” said Pavel, a ferret-faced young man who stared at the iron stove and never made eye contact with anyone. “They’ll take it in a few weeks.”

  “Let them take it,” said Timofei. “We’ll play a Rostopchin on them, burn everything down and retreat. Where will they find shelter? What will they eat? Let the winter take care of them.”

  “Play a Rostopchin . . . ech.” Sonya made a face as if she smelled something nasty. “You make him sound like a hero.”

  “He was a hero. You shouldn’t take your history from Tolstoy.”

  “Yes, yes, good Count Rostopchin, friend to the people.”

  “Don’t put politics into it. This is about warfare, not the class struggle.”

  “Don’t put politics into it? Who has to put politics into it? You think politics doesn’t enter into warfare?”

  Kolya silenced the bickering when he spoke up. He was looking into his cup of tea, holding it in both hands.

  “The Germans won’t take Moscow.”

  “According to which expert is this?” asked Pavel.

  “According to me. Fritz was thirty kilometers from the city at the beginning of December. Now he’s one hundred kilometers away. The Wehrmacht has never retreated before. They don’t know how to do it. Everything they’ve trained for, everything they’ve studied in their books is attack. Attack, attack, attack. Now they’re going backward and they won’t stop till they’re lying on their backs in Berlin.”

  No one said a word for a long count. The women in the group stared at Kolya, their eyes a little brighter in their gaunt faces. They were all a little in love with him.

  “Forgive me for asking, comrade,” said Pavel, putting an ironic lilt into comrade. “But if you’re such an important figure in the army, privy to such critical conversations, why are you sitting here with us?”

  “I can’t discuss my orders,” Kolya said, unruffled by the surgeon’s insulting tone. He took a sip of tea and let the warm water sit in his mouth for a moment. He noticed that Sonya was still watching him and he smiled at her. The group was silent. Nobody had moved, but the dynamic had shifted, with Kolya and Sonya onstage in the spotlight and the rest of us silent spectators, wondering if we’d see a bit of skin. The foreplay had already begun, even though they sat apart from each other, even though both were wrapped within layer after layer of wool. I wished that someday some girl would stare at me that way, but I knew it would never happen. This narrow-shouldered frame, these eyes as watchful and fearful as a rodent’s—I wasn’t the type to inspire lust. Worst of all was my nose, my hated nose, that beak of a thousand insults. It was bad enough to be a Jew in Russia, but to be a Jew with a nose from an anti-Semitic caricature, well, it inspired a good deal of self-loathing. Most of the time I was proud to be Jewish, but I didn’t want to look Jewish. I wanted to look Aryan, blond haired and blue eyed, broad in the chest and strong jawed. I wanted to look like Kolya.

  Kolya winked at Sonya and finished off his cup of tea. He sighed, staring at the dregs in the bottom of his cup.

  “Do you know I haven’t had a shit in nine days?”

  That night all of us slept in the sitting room except for Kolya and Sonya, who jointly stood on some unseen signal and disappeared into the bedroom. The rest of us shared the blankets. We lay close together for warmth, so even though the stove ran out of fuel sometime in the night, I wasn’t shivering too badly. The cold actually bothered me less than Sonya’s muffled little yelps. Her cries were impossibly happy, as if Kolya were fucking away all the misery of the last six months, fucking away the hunger and the cold and the bombs and the Germans. Sonya was lovely and kind, but her pleasure was awful to listen to—I wanted to be the one who could transport a pretty girl away from the siege with my cock. Instead I was lying on the floor of a stranger’s apartment next to a man I didn’t know, who twitched in his sleep and smelled like boiled cabbage.

  I can’t imagine the sex lasted very long—who had the energy for it?—but it seemed to go on half the night, Sonya yelping, Kolya speaking in low tones that I couldn’t hear through the thin walls. He sounded very calm, as if he were reading to her from a newspaper article. I wondered what the hell he was telling her. What do you say to a girl you’re fucking? It seemed like an important thing to know. Maybe he was quoting that writer he was always raving about. Maybe he was telling her about fighting the cannibal and the cannibal’s wife, but that seemed unlikely. I lay in the darkness listening to them, as the wind shook the windows in their frames and the last embers popped in the stove. The loneliest sound in the world is other people making love.

  8

  The next morning we stood outside a building two blocks from the Narva Gate, staring up at a towering poster of Zhdanov. “This must be it,” said Kolya, stamping his feet to keep them warm—though it didn’t seem possible, it was colder than it had been the day before. Only a single fish skeleton of cloud interrupted the endless blue sky. We headed for the front door of the building. It was locked, of course. Kolya banged on it, but no one came. We stood there like idiots, slapping our gloved hands together, our chins buried beneath the folds of our scarves.

  “So now what do we do?”

  “Someone will go in or out, eventually. What’s wrong with you today? You seem a little grumpy.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me,” I said, but even I could hear the grumpiness in my tone. “Took us an hour to get here, we’re going to wait another hour to get inside, and there won’t be any old man with a coop full of chickens.”

  “No, no, something is bothering you. You’re thinking about the Kirov?”

  “Of course I’m thinking about the Kirov,” I snapped back, angry with him for asking because I had not been thinking about the Kirov.

  “We had a lieutenant named Belak back in the fall. Army man to the bone, wore the uniform his whole life, fought against the Whites, all that. So one night he sees this kid Levin crying over a letter he just got. This was in a trench outside of Zelenogorsk, right before the Finns took it back. Levin couldn’t talk, he was bawling so hard. Someone was dead, killed by the Germans. I don’t remember if it was his mother, his father, maybe the whole family, I don’t know. Anyway, Belak took the letter, folded it very neatly, slipped it into Levin’s coat pocket, and said, ‘All right, get it out. But after this I don’t want to see you crying until Hitler’s hanging from a rope.’ ”

  Kolya stared into the distance, contemplating the lieutenant’s words. He must have thought they were profound. To me they sounded manufactured, the kind of line my father always hated, fake dialogue invented by some Party-approved journalist for one of those buoyant “Heroes at the Front!” articles Truth for Young Pioneers always ran.

  “So he stopped crying?”

  “Well, he stopped right then. Just sniffled for a bit. But that night he was at it again. That’s not really the point.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “There’s no time for grieving. The Nazis want us dead. We can cry about it as much as we want, but that won’t help us fight them.”

  “Who’s crying? I’m not crying.”

  Kolya wasn’t listening to me. Something was caught between his two front teeth and he tried to pry it out with his fingernail.

  “Belak stepped on a land mine a few days later. Nasty business, land mines. What they do to a man’s body. . . .”

  His voice trailed off, contemplating his old officer’s mangled body, and I felt bad that I had insulted the lieutenant in my mind. Maybe his words were clichéd, but he was trying to help the young soldier, to distract him from the tragedy at home, and that mattered more than original phrasing.

  Kolya banged on the building door again. He waited for a moment, sighed, stared at the solitary cloud drifting across the sky.

  “I’d like to live in Argentina for a year or two. I’ve never seen the ocean. H
ave you?”

  “No.”

  “You are grumpy, my Israelite. Tell me why.”

  “Go fuck a pig.”

  “Ah! There it is!” He gave me a little shove, danced away, moving his hands like a boxer, pretending to spar with me.

  I sat down on the doorstep. Even that small movement caused a swarm of sparks to fly across my vision. We had drunk more tea at Sonya’s when we woke up, but there was no food, and I was saving the rest of my library candy. I looked up at Kolya, who was now watching me with some concern.

  “What were you saying last night?” I asked him. “When you were, you know, when you were with her.”

  Kolya squinted, confused at the question.

  “With whom? With Sonya? What did I say?”

  “You were talking to her the whole time.”

  “When we made love?”

  The phrase itself was embarrassing. I nodded. Kolya frowned.

  “I didn’t know I said anything.”

  “You were talking the whole time!”

  “The usual stuff, I suppose.” A sudden smile lit his face. He sat beside me on the lintel step. “But of course, if you’ve never visited a country, you probably don’t know the customs. You want to know what to say.”

  “I was just asking a question.”

  “Yes, but you’re curious. Why are you curious? Because you’re a little bit nervous. You want to do things properly when you get the chance. This is very smart of you. I’m serious! Quit your scowling. You take compliments worse than anyone I know. Now, listen: women don’t like silent lovers. They’re giving you something precious and they want to know you appreciate it. Give me a little nod to show you’re listening.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Every woman has a dream lover and a nightmare lover. The nightmare lover, he just lies on top of her, crushing her with his belly, jabbing his little tool in and out till he’s finished. He’s got his eyes clenched shut, he doesn’t say a word; essentially he’s just jerking off in the poor girl’s pussy. Now the dream lover—”

  We heard the shush of sled runners on hard-packed snow and turned to see two girls dragging a sled loaded down with buckets of ice from the river. They were heading straight toward us and I stood, brushing off my coat, relieved that Kolya’s lecture had been interrupted. Kolya stood beside me.