City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  “Of course we would have,” said Nina.

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They went out looking for her, Abendroth and the others. He’s their, well, I don’t know the ranks. Major?” She looked at Nina, who shrugged. “The major, I think. He’s not the oldest, but he gives the orders. He must be good at what he does. And he always had her first, every time he came, didn’t matter if they brought a colonel from somewhere, he’d take her for himself. When he was done with her, he’d come sit by the fire and drink his plum schnapps. Always plum schnapps for him. His Russian is perfect. And his French— He lived in Paris for two years.”

  “Hunting down the Resistance leaders,” said Nina. “One of the others told me. He was so good at it they made him the youngest major in the Einsatzgruppen.”

  “He likes to play chess with me,” said Lara. “I can play a decent game. Abendroth spots me a queen, sometimes a queen and a pawn, and I never last more than twenty moves, even when he’s drunk, and he’s usually drunk. If I’m . . . if I’m busy, he sets up the board and plays both sides himself.”

  “He’s the worst of them,” said Nina.

  “Yes. I didn’t think so at first. But after Zoya, yes, he’s the worst of them. So they got their dogs and they followed her tracks and they went into the woods to find her. It only took them a few hours. She hadn’t gotten far. She was so weak. . . . She’d been little to begin with, and she’d barely eaten a thing since she’d been here. They brought her back. They’d torn all the clothes off her. She looked like a wild animal, filthy, dead leaves in her hair, bruised all over her body where they’d hit her. They’d tied her wrists together and her ankles. Abendroth made me get the saw from out by the woodpile. When Zoya ran, she took my coat and my boots, so they figured I was the one helping her. He told me to get the saw. I don’t know what I thought, but I wasn’t thinking that . . . maybe I thought they’d use it for the rope. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt her because they liked her so much.”

  I heard a muffled cry and looked over to see Nina scratching her forehead, her palm covering her eyes, her lips pressed together as she willed herself silent.

  “Four of them held her down by her hands and her feet. She wasn’t fighting them, not then. How could she fight them? All forty kilograms of her. . . . She thought they were going to kill her and she didn’t care; she wanted it, she was waiting for it. But they didn’t kill her. Abendroth made me give him the saw. He didn’t take it from me; he made me put it in his hands. He wanted me to know that . . . that I gave it to him. We were all in this room, Nina and Galina and Olesya and me. They made us stay. They wanted us to watch, that was our punishment. We helped this girl try to escape and now we had to watch. All the Germans were smoking—they’d been out in the cold looking for her and now they were smoking their cigarettes—the room was full of their smoke. Zoya looked peaceful, like she might even smile. She was so far beyond them now, they couldn’t touch her. But she was wrong about that. Abendroth got down next to her and whispered something in her ear. I don’t know what he said. He took the wood saw and he put the teeth of it against her ankle and he began sawing. Zoya . . . Maybe I’ll live a long time, I doubt it, but maybe I will, and I’ll never get that scream out of my brain. Those were four strong men holding her down, and she was nothing but bones, but she fought them, now she fought them, and you could see them straining to keep her down. He sawed off her one foot and he moved to the next. One of the Germans ran out of the room . . . do you remember that, Nina? I forget his name. He never came back here. Abendroth sawed off the other foot and Zoya never stopped screaming. I thought that’s it, I can’t be sane again after seeing this, this is too much now, this is too much. And when he stood up, his uniform was covered with her blood—her blood was on his hands, on his face—and he gave us a little bow. Do you remember that? Like he’d just performed for us. He said, ‘This is what happens to little girls who walk away.’ They all left, that was it, left us with their cigarette smoke and Zoya moaning on the floor. We tried to wrap up her legs, stop the bleeding, but there was too much.”

  When Lara stopped talking, the house was hushed. Nina wept quietly, brushing her nose with the back of her hand. A knot popped in the fireplace and a flock of sparks flew up the chimney. The larch branches brushed against the wood-shingled roof. Bombs fell in the distant west, felt more as a vibration than heard as a sound, a tremor in the windows, a shudder in the water glass.

  “They come at midnight?” asked Kolya.

  “Most nights.”

  According to the porcelain mantel clock, we had six hours. My body was battered from marching through the snow all day, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, not after hearing the story of Zoya, not when officers from the Einsatzgruppe were coming here soon.

  “Tomorrow morning,” Kolya told Lara and Nina, “I want you all to head for the city. I’ll give you the address of a place to stay.”

  “We’re safer here than in the city,” said Nina.

  “Not after tonight.”

  15

  Lara brought us to a small bedroom in the back of the house, where I imagined the valets slept in the time of the emperors. She carried a brass candelabrum with two lit candles, which she rested on the little writing desk. The pine-paneled walls were unadorned, the bunk bed had no sheets on the mattresses, and I almost tripped on the warped floorboards, but the room was warm enough. The narrow windows offered a view of a moonlit toolshed and a wheelbarrow lying on its side in the snow.

  I sat on the lower mattress and ran my finger over a name carved in the wall. ARKADIY. I wondered how long ago Arkadiy stayed in this room, and where he was now, an old man shivering somewhere in the cold night or just bones in the churchyard. He had been good with the knife, his ARKADIY was a delicate filigree in the dark wood, slants and curlicues, a strong slash underlining the name.

  Lara and Kolya came up with a code—banging pots with serving spoons—that would allow her to signal to us how many Germans showed up for their late-night entertainment. When she left, Kolya pulled out his pistol and began taking it apart, neatly arranging the various parts on the writing desk, checking them for damage and wiping them off with the sleeve of his shirt before reassembling the weapon.

  “Have you ever shot anybody?” I asked.

  “Not that I know about.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I shot my rifle a hundred times, maybe a bullet hit someone, I don’t know.” He slapped the magazine back into the butt of the automatic. “When I shoot Abendroth, I’ll know it.”

  “Maybe we should just leave now.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to come in here.”

  “We needed to rest. We needed food. I feel a lot better now.”

  He turned and looked at me. I was sitting on the bed with my hands under my legs, my overcoat spread out behind me.

  “There could be eight of them coming,” I said. “We’ve got one gun.”

  “And one knife.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about Zoya.”

  “Good,” he said. “Keep thinking about her when you stick the knife in his gut.”

  He threw his overcoat onto the top mattress and clambered up there, sitting cross-legged with his pistol beside him. He pulled his journal from the pocket of his overcoat. His stub of pencil had shrunk to the size of a thumbnail, but he jotted down notes with his usual speed.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” I said, after a long silence. “I don’t think I can stick a knife in anyone.”

  “Then I’ll have to shoot them all. What’s it been now, eleven days since I had a shit? What do you think the record is?”

  “Probably a lot longer than that.”

  “I wonder what it’s going to look like when it finally comes out.”

  “Kolya . . . why don’t we just go now? Take the girls and go back to the city. We’d make it. They’ve got plenty of food we could bring. We’ve got our blood flowing again. Bring some extra blankets—”


  “Listen to me. I know you’re afraid. You’re right to be afraid. Only an idiot would be calm sitting in a house knowing the Einsatzgruppen are coming. But this is what you’ve been waiting for. This is the night. They’re trying to burn down our city; they’re trying to starve us to death. But we’re like two of Piter’s bricks. You can’t burn a brick. You can’t starve a brick.”

  I watched the candles gutter in the candelabrum, watched the shadows dance across the ceiling.

  “Where’d you hear that?” I finally asked him.

  “Which part, the bricks? My lieutenant. Why? You’re not inspired?”

  “It was going along all right until then.”

  “I like the bricks. ‘You can’t burn a brick. You can’t starve a brick.’ It’s nice. It has nice rhythm.”

  “This is the same lieutenant who stepped on a land mine?”

  “Yes. Poor man. Well, forget about the bricks. I promise you, little lion, we’re not dying out here. We’re going to kill a few Nazis and we’re going to find those eggs. I have a little Gypsy blood in me; I can read the future.”

  “You don’t have any Gypsy blood.”

  “And I’ll insist the colonel invites us to his daughter’s wedding.”

  “Ha. You love her.”

  “I do. I believe I am truly in love with that girl. She is quite possibly an idiot bitch, but I love her. I want to marry her and she never has to say a word. She doesn’t have to cook for me; she doesn’t have to carry my babies. Just skate naked on the Neva, that’s all I want. Do a little spin above my open mouth.”

  For a few seconds he helped me forget the fear, but it never left for long. I could not remember when I was not afraid, but that night it came on stronger than ever before. So many possibilities terrified me. There was the possibility of shame, of cowering again on the fringe of the action while Kolya fought the Germans—except this time, I knew he would die. There was the possibility of pain, suffering through the kind of torture Zoya suffered through, the saw teeth biting through my skin, muscles, and bone. And there was the excellent possibility of death. I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the most absurd beauty.

  I heard the bedsprings creaking and looked up to see Kolya leaning over the side of the top mattress, his upside-down face peering at me, his blond hair hanging in filthy clumps. He looked like he was worried about me, and all at once I felt like crying. The only one left who knew how frightened I was, the only one who knew I was still alive and that I might die tonight, was a boastful deserter I’d met three nights before, a stranger, a child of Cossacks, my last friend.

  “This will cheer you up,” he said, dropping a deck of cards in my lap.

  They seemed like ordinary playing cards until I flipped them over. Each presented a different photographed woman, some naked, some wearing garter belts and lace corsets, their heavy breasts tumbling from their cupped hands, their lips slightly parted for the camera.

  “I thought I had to beat you at chess to get these.”

  “Easy with that, easy. Don’t crease the corners. Those came all the way from Marseille.”

  He watched me shuffle through the nudes, smiling when he saw me give certain models closer looks.

  “What about the girls here, eh? Four beauties. We’re going to be heroes after tonight, you realize this, yes? They’ll be falling all over us. So which one do you want?”

  “We’re going to be dead after tonight.”

  “Truly, my friend, truly you have to stop speaking like this.”

  “I guess I like the little one with the chubby arms.”

  “Galina? All right. She looks like a veal calf, but all right, I understand.”

  He was quiet for a moment while I studied a picture of a shirt-less woman wearing jodhpurs, cracking a bullwhip.

  “Listen, Lev, after this is over tonight, promise me you’ll talk to your little calf. Don’t run away like the shy boy you are. I’m very serious about this. She likes you. I saw her looking at you.”

  I knew for a fact that Galina had not been looking at me. She had been looking at Kolya, as they all had, as he knew very well.

  “What happened to calculated neglect? You said that according to The Courtyard Hound, the secret to winning a woman—”

  “There’s a difference between ignoring a woman and enticing her. You entice her with mystery. She wants you to come after her, but you keep circling. It’s the same with sex. Amateurs yank down their pants and shove it in there like they’re trying to spear a fish. But the man with talent knows it’s all about teasing, circling, coming close, and moving away.”

  “This one’s nice,” I said, holding up a card featuring a woman posed as a bullfighter, holding a red cape and wearing nothing but a montera.

  “That’s my favorite one. When I was your age, I must have filled twenty socks staring at her.”

  “Truth for Young Pioneers says that masturbation defeats the revolutionary spirit.”

  “Without a doubt. But as Proudhon said—”

  I never found out what Proudhon said. The double clang of a copper spoon against a copper pot interrupted Kolya. We both sat up in our beds.

  “They came early,” he whispered.

  “Only two of them.”

  “They picked the wrong night to travel light.” The moment those words were in the air the spoon struck the pot again—once, twice, three times, four.

  “Six,” I whispered.

  Kolya swung his legs over the side of the mattress and quietly lowered himself to the floor, pistol in his hand. He blew out the candles and squinted out the window, but we were on the wrong side of the house and there was nothing to see. We heard car doors slamming shut.

  “This is what we do,” he told me, his voice low and calm. “We wait. Let them relax, warm up, have a few drinks. They’ll take their clothes off, with any luck they won’t be near their guns. Remember, they’re not here to fight. They’re here to have a good time, enjoy the girls. You hear? We have the advantage.”

  I nodded. Despite what he said, the arithmetic seemed very bad to me. Six Germans and two of us. Would the girls try to help us? They hadn’t lifted a hand for Zoya, but what could they have done for Zoya? Six Germans and eight bullets in the Tokarev. I hoped Kolya was a good shot. Fear coursed through me, electric, forcing my muscles to twitch and my mouth to go dry. I felt more awake than I ever had before, as if this moment, in the farmhouse outside of Berezovka, was the first true moment of my life and everything that came before was a fitful sleep. My senses seemed amplified, extraordinary, responding to the crisis by giving me all the information I needed. I could hear the crunch of jackboots on packed snow. I could smell pine needles burning in the fireplace, that old trick to perfume the house.

  The rifle shot startled us. We stood quietly in the darkness, trying to understand what was happening. After a few seconds, several more rifles echoed the first. We heard the Germans shouting to each other, panicked, their voices overlapping.

  Kolya ran for the door. I wanted to tell him to wait, that we had a plan and the plan called for waiting, but I didn’t want to be alone in there while the rifles fired outside and the Germans screamed their ugly words.

  We ran to the great room and threw ourselves onto the floor when a bullet smashed through one of the mullioned windows. All four girls were already lying belly-down on the floor, their arms up by their faces to protect themselves from flying glass.

  I had been living in a war for half a year, but I had never been this close to a gunfight and I had no idea who was fighting. I could hear the chuffing cough of machine guns fired just outside the house. The rifle cracks seemed to come from farther away, the edge of the woods, possibly. Bullets hammered the stone walls of the farmhouse.

  Kolya cra
wled up to Lara and jostled her.

  “Who’s shooting at them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Outside we heard a car engine igniting. Doors slammed and the car accelerated, tires spinning in the snow. The rifles fired even faster now, one on top of the other, bullets ripping through sheet metal, a very different sound from bullet on stone.

  Kolya rose to a crouch and crept to the front door, keeping his head below the window line. I followed. We kneeled with our backs against the door. Kolya checked his pistol one last time. I pulled the German knife from my ankle sheath. I knew I looked silly holding it, the way a young boy looks holding his father’s shaving razor. Kolya grinned at me as though he was about to start laughing. This is all very strange, I thought. I am in the middle of a battle and I am aware of my own thoughts, I am worried about how stupid I look with a knife in my hand while everyone else came to fight with rifles and machine guns. I am aware that I am aware. Even now, with bullets buzzing through the air like angry hornets, I cannot escape the chatter of my brain.

  Kolya put his hand on the doorknob and turned it slowly.

  “Wait,” I said. We stayed very still for a few seconds. “It’s quiet.”