City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  “I’m being cruel,” he admitted. “Talking to you about things of this nature . . . it’s sadistic. Like talking about Velázquez with a blind man. Let’s change the subject.”

  “You don’t want to talk about ballerinas you didn’t sleep with for the next thirty-nine kilometers?”

  “Three boys go to a farm to steal chickens,” he began in his joke-telling voice. He used a different accent for jokes, though I couldn’t tell what kind of accent it was supposed to be or why he thought it made things funnier.

  “The farmer hears them and rushes over to the farmhouse. So the boys jump into three potato sacks and hide.”

  “Is this going to be a long joke?”

  “The farmer kicks the first sack and the boy inside says, ‘Meow!’ pretending to be a cat.”

  “Oh, he was pretending to be a cat?”

  “I just said that,” said Kolya, looking back at me to see if I was starting trouble.

  “I know he’s pretending to be a cat. Once he says, ‘Meow,’ it’s obvious he’s pretending to be a cat.”

  “You’re surly again because I slept with Sonya? Are you in love with her? Didn’t you have a nice time with what’s his name? The surgeon? You looked so cute curled up together by the stove.”

  “And what’s that accent you’re doing? Is it supposed to be Ukrainian?”

  “What accent?”

  “Every time you tell a joke you use some stupid accent!”

  “Listen, Lev, my little lion, I’m sorry. I know it’s not easy for you, lying there all night, your meat in your hand, listening to her happiness—”

  “Just tell your dumb joke.”

  “—but I promise you, before you hit eighteen—when’s your birthday?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “I’m going to find you a girl. Calculated neglect! Don’t forget.”

  All this time he continued to walk atop the steel rail, one foot in front of the other, never losing his balance, never looking down, going faster than I could walk in the usual way.

  “Where was I? Ah, the farmer, he kicks the first sack, ‘Meow,’ and so on. He kicks the second sack, and the boy inside says, ‘Woof!’ Pretending to be—”

  Kolya pointed at me to finish the sentence.

  “A cow.”

  “A dog. When he kicks the third sack, the boy inside says, ‘Potatoes!’ ”

  We walked in silence.

  “Well,” said Kolya at last, “other people think it’s funny.”

  On the outskirts of the city, the apartment blocks were no longer stacked one on top of the other. The concrete and brick was now broken by stretches of frozen marsh and snow-covered lots where future buildings were meant to rise before the war ended all construction. The farther we walked from the city center, the fewer civilians we saw. Army trucks with chains on their tires rattled past, the weary soldiers in the flatbeds staring at us with no interest as they motored toward the front.

  “Do you know why it’s called Mga?” Kolya asked.

  “Somebody’s initials?”

  “Maria Gregorevna Apraksin. One of the characters in The Courtyard Hound is based on her. Heiress to a long line of field marshals, peculators, and royal toilet lickers. She’s convinced her husband is trying to murder her so he can marry her sister.”

  “Is he?”

  “Not at first, no. She’s completely paranoid. But she never shuts up about it and then he does start to fall in love with the sister. And he realizes life really would be better without his wife around. So he goes to Radchenko for advice, but he doesn’t know that Radchenko’s been fucking the little sister for years.”

  “What else did he write?”

  “Hm?”

  “Ushakovo,” I said. “What other books did he write?”

  “The Courtyard Hound, that’s it. It’s a famous story. The book came out, it was a failure. There was only one review and the critic absolutely blasted it. Called it vulgar and despicable. Nobody read it. Ushakovo worked on that book for eleven years. Eleven years, can you imagine that? And it disappears like it was dropped into the ocean. But he starts all over again, a new novel; his friends who see pieces of it say it’s his masterpiece. Except Ushakovo’s getting more and more religious, spending time with this church elder who convinces him that fiction is Satan’s work. And one night Ushakovo becomes convinced that he’s going to hell; he’s in a complete panic; he tosses the manuscript in the fire. Poof, gone.”

  This sounded strangely familiar.

  “But that’s exactly what happened to Gogol.”

  “Well, no, not exactly. Very different in the particulars. But an interesting parallel, I agree.”

  The rails veered away from the road, past stands of birch saplings too slender for firewood. Five white bodies lay facedown in the white snow. A family of winter dead, the dead father still clutching his dead wife’s hand, their dead children sprawled a short distance away. Two battered leather suitcases lay open beside the corpses, emptied of everything but a few cracked picture frames.

  The family’s clothes and boots had been stripped away. Their buttocks had been hacked off, the softest meat, easiest for making patties and sausages. I couldn’t tell if the family had been murdered by gunfire, or knives, or an exploding shell, by German artillerymen or Russian cannibals. I didn’t want to know. They had been dead a long time, at least a week, and their bodies had started to become part of the landscape.

  Kolya and I continued east along the Vologda line. He didn’t tell any more jokes that morning.

  A little before noon we reached the edge of the Leningrad defenses: thickets of barbed wire, trenches three meters deep, dragon’s teeth, machine-gun nests, antiaircraft batteries, and KV-1 tanks covered with white camouflage netting. The soldiers we had seen earlier had ignored us, but now we were too far east to be civilians, and too strange of a pair to be Army. As we walked along the tracks a band of young privates, hauling the tarpaulin off a 6x6 truck, turned to stare at us.

  Their sergeant walked toward us, not pointing his carbine at us, precisely, but not pointing it away, either. He had the posture of a lifelong Army man and the high cheekbones and narrow eyes of a Tartar.

  “You two have papers?”

  “We do,” said Kolya, reaching inside his jacket. “We have excellent papers.”

  He handed over the colonel’s letter and nodded toward the truck.

  “That the new-model Katyusha?”

  The tarpaulin had been flung to the ground, revealing racks of parallel rails jutting skyward, waiting to be loaded with rockets. According to what we heard on the radio, the Germans feared the Katyusha more than any other Soviet weapon—they called it Stalin’s organ, after the rockets’ low and mournful howls.

  The sergeant glanced at the rocket launcher and back to Kolya. “Never mind about that. Which Army are you with?”

  “The Fifty-fourth.”

  “The Fifty-fourth? You’re supposed to be in Kirishi.”

  “Yes,” said Kolya, giving the sergeant an enigmatic smile and nodding at the letter in the man’s hand. “But orders are orders.”

  The sergeant unfolded the letter and read. Kolya and I watched the privates position the finned-tail rockets on the Katyusha’s rails.

  “Give them hell tonight!” shouted Kolya. The soldiers on the truck glanced at us and said nothing. They looked like they hadn’t slept in days; it took all their concentration to load the rockets without dropping them, there was no energy to waste on madmen.

  Unwilling to be ignored, Kolya began to sing. He was a baritone with a strong, confident voice.

  “On the bank Katyusha starts singing, of a proud gray eagle of the steppe, of the one Katyusha loves deeply, of the one whose letters she’s kept.”

  The sergeant finished the letter and refolded it. The colonel’s message had clearly impressed him; he looked at Kolya now with genuine respect, nodding his head in time with the old song.

  “That’s the stuff. I heard Ruslanova herself sin
g it during the Winter War. Gave her a hand when she was coming offstage, think she had one glass too many. You know what she said to me? ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘You look like a man who knows how to use his hands.’ What do you think of that? Always the hell-raiser, Ruslanova. But it’s a beautiful song.”

  He slapped Kolya on the chest with the letter, giving it back, smiling at both of us.

  “Sorry I had to stop you boys. You know how it is. . . . They say there’s three hundred saboteurs inside Leningrad and more coming every day. But now I know what you’re up to, working for the colonel. . . .”

  He gave Kolya a wink.

  “I know all about it, organizing the partisans, that’s the stuff. You let us regulars take ’em from the front, you boys plug ’em from the back, we’ll be leaving hot turds in the Reichstag come summer.”

  Kolya had read the colonel’s letter aloud the day we got it and it didn’t mention partisans—it said only that we should not be detained or harassed as we were operating under the discretion of the colonel himself—but the newspapers were full of stories about simple country folk who had been trained to fight as deadly guerrillas by NKVD specialists.

  “You keep ’em dancing with the organ here,” said Kolya—I didn’t know if he was mimicking the sergeant’s speech intentionally or not—“and we’ll make sure they can’t get any more strudel from the Vaterland.”

  “There you go, there you go! Cut off the supply lines, let ’em starve in the woods, it’ll be 1812 all over again.”

  “But no Elba for Hitler.”

  “No, no, not for him, no Elba for Hitler!”

  I wasn’t entirely sure the sergeant knew what Elba was, but he was adamant that Hitler wouldn’t get it.

  “We’ll give him a bayonet in the balls, but no Elba!”

  “We should keep moving,” said Kolya. “We have to make Mga by nightfall.”

  The sergeant whistled. “That’s a long way. Stay to the woods, you hear? Fritz owns the roads, but a Russian doesn’t need a road to walk on, does he? Ha! You have enough bread? No? We can spare some. Ivan!”

  The sergeant shouted at a scruffy young private standing beside the truck.

  “Find some bread for these boys. They’re going behind lines.”

  12

  Outside of Leningrad the trees still grew, crows muttered on birch branches, squirrels raced between the firs. The squirrels looked fat and innocent, easy targets for a man with a pistol. They were lucky to live in occupied Russia.

  We marched through the woods, through open fields of cold sunshine, keeping the train tracks visible to our left. The snow was hard packed, scattered with pine needles, decent for walking. We were in German-controlled territory, but there was no indication of a German presence, no sign at all of war. I was strangely happy. Piter was my home, but Piter was a graveyard now, a city of ghosts and cannibals. Walking in the countryside I felt a physical change, as if I were breathing pure oxygen after months at the bottom of a coal mine. The tangles in my gut uncoiled, my ears unclogged, I had strength in my legs I hadn’t felt for months.

  Kolya seemed affected in the same way. He squinted in the glare off the snow, pursing his lips to blow great gusts of vapor, as delighted by this trick as a five-year-old.

  Spotting a green scrap of paper near the trunk of a grand old birch, he bent down to pick it up. It looked normal enough, a ten-ruble banknote, Lenin’s eyes glaring at us from beneath his broad bald head—except that ten-ruble notes were gray, not green.

  “Counterfeit?” I asked.

  Kolya nodded, pointing to the sky with one finger as he scrutinized the bill.

  “Fritz drops them by the bushel. The more counterfeit notes floating around, the less the real ones are worth.”

  “But it’s not even the right color.”

  Kolya flipped the note around and read aloud the printed text on the other side.

  “The prices for food items and the necessities of daily life have increased enormously and the black market in the Soviet Union is florishing. ‘Flourishing’ is spelled wrong, by the way. Party functionaries and Jews are working dark deals at home while you at the front have to sacrifice your life for these criminal. ‘These criminal,’ that’s nice. They occupy half the country and they can’t even find someone who speaks the language? Soon you will see the reason, so keep this ten-ruble note. It will guarantee your safe return to a free Russian after the war.”

  Kolya grinned and glanced up at me. “You working some dark deals, Lev Abramovich?”

  “I wish.”

  “They think these things will turn us? Don’t they understand? We invented propaganda! All this is bad tactics; they’re irritating the people they’re trying to convert. Young man thinks he’s found a ten-ruble note, he’s happy, maybe he can buy an extra slice of sausage. But no, it’s not money, it’s a poorly spelled surrender coupon.”

  He speared the note to a tree branch and set it on fire with his lighter.

  “You’re burning your chance to come back to a free Russian after the war,” I told him.

  Kolya smiled as he watched the note blacken and curl. “Come on. We have a long way to go.”

  After another hour slogging through the snow, Kolya prodded me in the shoulder with his gloved fingers.

  “Do Jews believe in the afterlife?”

  The day before the question would have annoyed me, but right then it seemed funny, so perfectly Kolya, asked with genuine curiosity and apropos of nothing.

  “It depends on the Jew. My father was an atheist.”

  “And your mother?”

  “My mother’s not Jewish.”

  “Ah, you’re a half-breed. No shame in that. I’ve always thought I had Gypsy blood in me from somewhere up the stream.”

  I looked up at him, his eyes as blue as a husky’s, a smattering of blond hair showing from beneath the black fur cap.

  “You don’t have Gypsy blood.”

  “What, the eyes? Plenty of blue-eyed Gypsies in the world, my friend. Anyway, the New Testament’s very clear about the whole thing. You follow Jesus, you go to heaven; you don’t, you’re off to hell. But the Old Testament . . . I don’t even remember if there is a hell in the Old Testament.”

  “Sheol.”

  “What?”

  “The underworld is called Sheol. One of my father’s poems is called ‘The Bars of Sheol.’ ”

  It was very odd to speak openly about my father and his work. The words themselves seemed unsafe, as if I were confessing a crime and the authorities might hear. Even here where the Litburo had no sway, I worried about getting caught, worried about spies lurking in the larches. If my mother were around, she would have silenced me with a look. Still, it was good to talk about him. It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.

  “What happens in Sheol? They punish you for your sins?”

  “I don’t think so. Everybody goes there, doesn’t matter if you were good or bad. It’s just dark and cold and nothing’s left of us but our shadows.”

  “Sounds about right.” He scooped up a handful of clean snow and took a bite, let it melt in his mouth. “A few weeks ago I saw a soldier with no eyelids. He was a tank commander, his tank broke down somewhere in the worst of it, and by the time they found him, the other boys in the tank were dead from the cold and he had frostbite over half his body. Lost some toes and fingers, a bit of his nose, his eyelids. I saw him sleeping in the infirmary, thought he was dead, his eyes wide open. . . . I don’t know if you call them ‘open’ if there’s no way to shut them. How do you stay sane with no eyelids? You have to go the rest of your life without ever once closing your eyes? I’d rather be blind.”

  I had not seen Kolya morose before; the sudden shift in his mood made me anxious. Both of us heard the howling at the same time; we turned and looked through the crooked avenues of birch trees.

  “Is that a dog?”

  He nodded. “Sounds like it.”
/>   A few seconds later we heard the howl again. There was something terribly human in its loneliness. We needed to keep walking east, we needed to reach Mga by nightfall, but Kolya headed off toward the crying dog and I followed without arguing.

  The snow was deeper here and soon we were wading through thigh-high drifts. The energy I had felt ten minutes before began to seep away. I was tired again, battling for each step forward. Kolya slowed his pace so that I could keep up. If he was impatient with me, he didn’t show it.

  I had my head down so I could choose each footfall—a twisted ankle was certain death now—and I saw the tread marks before Kolya. I grabbed his sleeve to stop him. We were at the edge of a vast clearing in the woods. The glare of sunlight off the hectares of snow was bright enough that I had to shield my eyes with my hand. The snow had been corrugated by dozens of tank treads, as if an entire Panzer brigade had passed through. I didn’t know treads the way I knew airplane engines, couldn’t tell a German Sturmtiger’s from a Russian T-34’s, but I knew these weren’t our tanks. We would have already broken the blockade if we had this much armor in the woods.

  Gray and brown heaps lay scattered across the snow. At first I thought they were discarded coats, but I saw a tail on one, an outstretched paw on another, and I realized they were dead dogs, at least a dozen of them. We heard another howl and finally we saw the howler, a black-and-white sheepdog dragging itself off the field, its front legs doing the work its hind legs could not. Behind the wounded animal was a blood-smeared trail more than a hundred meters long, a red brushstroke slapped across a white canvas.

  “Come on,” said Kolya, stepping into the field before I could stop him. The tanks were gone, but they had been here recently; the tracks were still cleanly defined in the snow, unblurred by wind. The Germans were near, in force, but Kolya didn’t care. He was already in the middle of the clearing, marching toward the sheepdog, and as usual I hurried to catch up.

  “Don’t get too close to any of them,” he told me. I didn’t know why he told me that. Was he worried about disease? Did he think a dying dog might bite me?

  When we got closer to the sheepdog, I could see that a wood box was strapped to its back, held in place with a leather harness. A wood post extended straight up from the box. I glanced around the field and saw that all the other dogs wore the same contraptions.