Sonya retook her seat and sighed. After a moment to gather her energy, she turned to the knitting stand beside her chair, picked up a torn sock, her needle and thread, and a porcelain darning egg that she tucked into the sock’s heel to pull the fabric taut. I watched her bony fingers at work. She was a pretty girl, but her hands were like the Reaper’s, fleshless and pale. She knew how to mend a sock, though. The needle flashed in the lamplight as it dipped in and out, in and out, lulling me close to sleep.
“You know who’s a vile little cunt?” asked Kolya out of nowhere. “Natasha Rostov.”
The name was familiar, but I couldn’t place it right away.
Sonya frowned but did not look up from her knitting. “The girl in War and Peace?”
“I can’t stand that bitch. Everyone falls in love with her—all of them, even her brothers—and she’s nothing but a vapid twit.”
“Maybe that’s the point,” said Sonya.
I was half asleep but I smiled. In spite of all his irritating qualities, I couldn’t help liking a man who despised a fictional character with such passion.
Sonya closed the holes in the sock with her deft, skeletal hands. Kolya drummed his pants legs with his fingers, scowling at the thought of Natasha Rostov and the unfairness of it all. Darling shivered in the warm room, trying to retract her beaked head into her body, as if she dreamed she were a turtle.
The playwright Gerasimov spoke on the radio: “Death to cowards! Death to panic mongers! Death to rumor spreaders! To the tribunal with them. Discipline. Courage. Firmness. And remember this: Leningrad is not afraid of death. Death is afraid of Leningrad.”
I snorted and Kolya looked over at me.
“What’s wrong? You don’t like old Gerasimov?”
“What’s to like?”
“He’s a patriot, anyway. He’s right here in Piter, not safe somewhere with Akhmatova and her lot.”
“I’m with Lev,” said Sonya, tossing another handful of wood chips into the oven. The embers shone on her blond hair and for a second her little ears were crimson and translucent. “He’s a salesman for the Party, that’s all.”
“He’s worse than that,” I said, and I could hear the anger entering my voice. “He calls himself a writer, but he hates writers—he just reads them to see if they wrote anything dangerous, anything insulting. And if he decides they did, well, that’s it; he denounces them in the Litburo, he attacks them in the newspaper, on the radio. Somebody on some committee somewhere says, ‘Well, Gerasimov says the man’s a threat, and Gerasimov’s one of us, so the man must be a threat . . .’ ”
I stopped talking in the middle of the sentence. My embittered voice seemed to echo in the small apartment, though I think it was my imagination, my embarrassment at revealing too much, too soon. Sonya and Kolya stared at me—she seemed worried for me, while he seemed impressed, as if all this time he had thought I was a deaf-mute and just now realized I could form words.
“Your father was Abraham Beniov.”
I said nothing, but Kolya hadn’t been asking a question. He nodded as if everything was suddenly clear to him.
“I should have figured it out quicker. I don’t know why you’d want to hide something like that. The man was a poet, a real poet, there aren’t many of them. You ought to be proud.”
“You don’t have to tell me to be proud of him,” I snapped back. “If you’re asking me a bunch of stupid questions and I don’t want to answer them, that’s my business. I don’t talk about my family with strangers. But don’t ever tell me to be proud of my father.”
“All right,” said Kolya, holding up his hands, “all right, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant we’re not strangers anymore.”
“I feel like an idiot,” said Sonya. “Forgive me, Lev—I haven’t heard of your father. He was a poet?”
“A great one,” said Kolya.
“Fair to middling, he always said. He told me for his generation there was Mayakovsky and everyone else, and he was right there in the center section with everyone else.”
“No, no, don’t listen to him. He was a fine writer. Truly, Lev, I’m not saying this to be kind. ‘An Old Poet, Once Famous, Seen at a Café.’ Wonderful poem.”
That was the poem in all the anthologies, at least all the anthologies printed before 1937. I had read it dozens of times since they took my father, but it had been years since I’d heard another voice speak the title.
“And he was . . . he was . . .” Here Sonya made a motion with her chin, an over there motion. It could mean anything: sent to Siberia, shot in the back of the head, silenced on orders of the Central Committee. The specifics were never known. He was removed? she was asking, and I nodded.
“I have that poem memorized,” said Kolya, but he did me a favor and didn’t recite it.
The apartment door opened and Timofei, one of the surgeons I’d met the previous night, walked over to warm his hands by the stove. When he noticed Darling sitting in her nesting box, he crouched and inspected her, his hands on his knees.
“Where did this come from?”
“Kolya and Lev got him from a boy near the Narva Gate.”
Timofei stood and grinned at us. He pulled two large onions from the pockets of his overcoat.
“Got these at the hospital. Wasn’t planning on sharing, but seems to me we’ve got the possibility of a beautiful soup tonight.”
“Darling’s not for the pot,” said Kolya. “We need her for the eggs.”
“The eggs?” Timofei looked at us, at Darling, back to us. He seemed to think we were joking.
“Everyone’s quitting on Darling,” Kolya continued, “but I think she’s got it in her. Do you know anything about chickens? You think she can lay a dozen by Thursday?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
The surgeon seemed more and more irritated. Kolya glared back at him, insulted by the man’s tone.
“Don’t you speak Russian? We’re waiting for the eggs!”
For a moment I thought the conversation would turn violent, which would have been a bad thing for the Red Army; we needed our surgeons and Kolya would have splattered the man with a single punch. But Timofei finally laughed, shaking his head, waiting for us to laugh with him.
“Laugh all you want,” I told him. “You’re not touching the chicken.”
“It’s not a chicken, you idiot. It’s a rooster.”
Kolya hesitated, not sure if this was a joke the surgeon was playing or a trick to get us to throw Darling into the soup. I leaned forward in my chair and peered at the bird. I don’t know why I thought peering would help. What was I looking for, little balls?
“You’re saying she won’t lay eggs?” asked Kolya, watching Timofei carefully.
The surgeon spoke slowly, as if he were conferring with morons.
“It’s a he. And the odds aren’t good.”
10
That night the soup tasted like June, like the dinners we remembered from before the siege. An admirer of Sonya’s, a pilot in the VVS, had given her an unspoiled potato. Kolya protested that he didn’t want to eat the gift of another lover, but his complaints were ignored, as he had hoped, and the Darling soup was thick with potato and onion and plenty of salt. Happily for us, the other surgeons were spending the night somewhere else. Sonya traded a wing and a cup of the broth to her neighbor for a bottle of drinkable vodka; the Germans lobbed only a few lazy shells at the city, as if to remind us they were still there but had better things to do on this particular evening; by midnight we were drunk, our bellies full, Kolya and Sonya fucking in the bedroom while I played speed chess with Timofei by the light of the stove.
Halfway through the second game I moved my knight; Timofei stared at the board, burped, and said, “Oh. You’re good.”
“You just figured it out? I mated you in sixteen moves last game.”
“Thought it was the drink. . . . I’m fucked, aren’t I?”
“You’re still alive. Won’t be long, t
hough.”
He tipped over his king and burped again, pleased with his burping, pleased there was food in his stomach.
“Not much point in that. Ah, well. You can’t tell a chicken from a rooster, but you know chess.”
“I used to be better.” I right-sided his king and played his move for him, trying to see how long I could extend the endgame.
“You used to be better? When you were an embryo? What are you, fourteen?”
“Seventeen!”
“Are you shaving yet?”
“Yes.”
Timofei looked skeptical.
“I shaved my mustache. . . . It grows slower in the winter.”
Sonya gasped in the other room and began to laugh, forcing me to picture her, her head tilted back, her throat exposed, her nipples hard on her small breasts.
“I don’t know where they get the energy,” said Timofei, lying back on the layered blankets and stretching his arms. “Give me chicken soup every night and I’ll never need another woman as long as I live.”
He closed his eyes and soon he was asleep, another of the fast sleepers, leaving me alone to listen to the lovers.
Kolya woke me before dawn, handing me a cup of tea as he studied the abandoned chessboard. Timofei still slept on his back, his mouth open, his arms stretched above his head as if he were surrendering to the enemy.
“Who was playing black?”
“Me.”
“You had him in six.”
“I had him in five. Unless he made a mistake, and then I had him in three.”
Kolya frowned, looking at the pieces until he figured it out.
“You know how to play.”
“You still want to make that bet? What was it, nude pictures of French girls?”
He smiled, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“I should just give them to you as a favor. Show you where all the parts are. Come on, get your boots on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Mga.”
Kolya might have been a deserter, but he had enough natural authority in his voice that my boots were half laced before I thought to question his directive. He had already slipped on his greatcoat and leather gloves; he looped his scarf twice around his neck and checked his teeth in a small mirror hanging over the samovar.
“Mga’s fifty kilometers away.”
“Good day’s walk. We had a big dinner last night, we can make it.”
Slowly I awakened to the insanity of this proposition.
“That’s behind German lines. Why do we have to go to Mga?”
“It’s Monday, Lev. We need the eggs by Thursday and we’re not going to find any in Piter. Sonya’s uncle runs that poultry collective out there, right? I’m betting the Germans kept it going. They like their eggs, too.”
“That’s our plan? We’re going to walk fifty kilometers, right past the Germans, to a poultry collective that maybe didn’t get burned down, grab a dozen eggs, and come home?”
“Well, anything would sound ridiculous if you said it with that tone of voice.”
“Tone of . . . I’m asking you a question! That’s our plan? Sonya’s never even been there! How are we supposed to find it?”
“It’s in Mga! How hard can it be to find anything in Mga!”
“I don’t even know how to find fucking Mga!”
“Ah,” said Kolya, grinning now as he put on his Astrakhan fur hat. “That one’s easy. It’s on the Moscow line. We just follow the tracks.”
Timofei grunted in his dreams and rolled onto his side. I’d learned that doctors and soldiers could sleep through any non-life-threatening ruckus; my argument with Kolya might have been a softly sung lullaby, judging from the look of peaceful contentment on Timofei’s face. I looked at him and I hated him, hated him for getting to sleep on his bed of wool blankets, warm and comfortable and well fed, with no grandson of Cossacks to harass him, no NKVD colonel sending him out to the wilderness to find ingredients for a wedding cake.
I turned back to Kolya, who was adjusting his hat to a properly heroic angle with the help of the mirror. I hated him even more, the cheerful swaggering brute, happy and fresh at six in the morning as if he’d just returned from a two-week holiday at the Black Sea. I imagined that he still stank of sex, though the truth was I couldn’t smell anything at all so early in the day, with the apartment so cold. My mighty nose was all show, a good target for bullies’ taunts but strangely bad at picking up scents.
“You think it’s so crazy,” he said, “but every one of those peasant swindlers selling potatoes for two hundred rubles in the Haymarket brought them in from outside the city. People make it past the lines every day. Why can’t we?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Off a quarter a bottle of vodka? I don’t think so.”
“There has to be somewhere closer than Mga.”
“So tell me.”
He was swaddled now for the weather, his jaw bristling with four days’ worth of blond beard. He waited for me to propose my alternative to his stupid plan, but as the seconds ticked past I realized I didn’t have one.
He smiled at me, a smile fine enough for a Red Fleet recruitment poster.
“The whole thing’s a fucking joke, I agree. But it’s a pretty good joke.”
“Yes, it’s a wonderful joke. And the funniest part is that we’re going to die out there and the colonel’s daughter won’t get her cake and nobody will ever know what we were doing in Mga.”
“Calm yourself, my morbid little Israelite. I won’t let the bad men get you—”
“You can eat shit.”
“—but we have to move now. If we want to make it there with any daylight left.”
I could have ignored him and gone back to sleep. The stove had gone cold in the night, the last of the wood chips burned through, but it was still warm enough under all the piled blankets. Sleeping made more sense than marching out to Mga—where the Germans waited in their thousands—in search of chickens. Anything made more sense than that. Still, no matter how much I protested the idea, I knew from the first that I would follow. He was right: there were no eggs in Leningrad. But that wasn’t the only reason for following. Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny. This wasn’t the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn’t. I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews, two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still, if there wasn’t greatness in me, maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others, even in the most irritating others.
I stood, grabbed my coat off the floor, slipped it on, and followed Kolya to the front door, which he held open for me with grave courtesy.
“Wait,” he said, before I could cross the threshold. “We’re going on a journey. We should sit.”
“I didn’t know you were superstitious.”
“I like the traditions.”
There were no chairs so we sat on the floor beside the open door. The apartment was quiet. Timofei snored from his spot near the stove; the windows shuddered in their frames; the radio broadcast its endless metronome, signaling that Leningrad remained unconquered. Outside someone nailed posters to boarded windows with quick, efficient hammer strikes. Instead of picturing a man hanging posters, though, I imagined a coffin maker at work, fashioning a casket from planks of pinewood. The vision was intense and detailed: I could see the calluses on the coffin maker’s palms, the black hairs sprouting between his thick eyebrows, the sawdust on his sweaty forearms.
I took a deep breath and looked at Kolya. He was looking righ
t back at me.
“Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.”
I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.
11
The Moscow line had been cut only four months before, but the rails were already beginning to rust. Most of the ties had been pried from the ground and split for firewood, though they were impregnated with creosote and dangerous to burn. Kolya walked atop of one rail, a gymnast on the balance beam, hands held out to the side. I trudged along behind him, in the center of the tracks, unwilling to play his game, partly because I was angry with him, partly because I knew I’d lose.
The rails ran east past redbrick apartment blocks and three-story department stores, past the Kotlyarov streetcar barns, past abandoned factories that had built things nobody could use or afford during wartime. A crew of young women wearing overalls below their winter coats, under the supervision of an army engineer, labored to convert a post office into a defensive position. The corner of the sturdy old building had been demolished to make way for a machine-gun nest.
“Great body on that one,” said Kolya, indicating a woman wearing a blue headscarf lugging sandbags from an idling truck.
“How can you tell?”
It was a ludicrous claim. The woman was at least fifty meters away; her jacket was heavily padded and she wore several layers beneath it.
“I can tell. She has a dancer’s posture.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t give me your ah. I know ballerinas. Believe me. I’ll bring you to the Mariinsky Theater some night, take you backstage. Let’s just say I have a reputation.”
“You never shut up about your reputation.”
“There is very little in this world that makes me happier than a ballerina’s thighs. Galina Ulanova—”
“Oh, stop.”
“What? She’s a national treasure. Her legs should be bronzed.”
“You never slept with Galina Ulanova.”
He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.
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