City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  “I don’t take orders from that motherless pig. You saw how he treated the girls.”

  “You’re the one who was getting so chummy with him.”

  “We need him right now. And his little friend . . . I saw you staring at her back there by the fireplace. You’d like to take a shot at the sniper, eh? Eh? Ha!”

  I shook my head, too tired even to groan at his miserable joke.

  “Have you ever been with a redhead? Oh wait, what am I saying, you’ve never been with anyone. The good news is they’re demons between the sheets. Two of the three best fucks of my life were redheads. Two of four, anyway. But the other side of the coin, they hate men. A lot of anger there, my friend. Beware.”

  “All redheads hate men?”

  “Makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Any redhead you meet out here, chances are she’s descended from some Viking who ran around hacking people’s arms off before raping her ancestral grandmother. She’s got the blood of the pillagers in her.”

  “That’s a good theory. You should tell her about it.”

  On every stride I tried to step into the boot prints of the partisan who walked eighteen strides ahead of us. Stepping into crushed snow took less energy than stepping into fresh powder, but the man in front had long legs, and I was having a hard time matching him.

  “And just so I’m clear,” I began, panting a little and ducking beneath an out-flung branch laden with pine needles, “we’re marching to Novoye Koshkino to find the house where the Einsatzgruppe is headquartered because they might have some eggs there?”

  “That’s what we’re doing for the colonel. But for us, and for Russia, we’re marching to Novoye Koshkino to kill the Einsatz because they need to be killed.”

  I lowered my head so that most of my face was shielded from the wind by the upturned collar of my father’s greatcoat. What was the point of further discussion? Kolya considered himself a bit of a bohemian, a free thinker, but in his own way he was as much a true believer as any Young Pioneer. The worst part about it was that I didn’t think he was wrong. The Einsatzkommandos needed to be destroyed before they destroyed us. I just didn’t want to be the one responsible for destroying them. Was I supposed to sneak into their lair with only a knife for protection? Five days ago an account of this expedition would have seemed like the great adventure I’d been waiting for since the war began. But now, in the middle of it, I wished I’d left in September with my mother and sister.

  “Do you remember the end of book one of The Courtyard Hound? When Radchenko sees his old professor stumbling down the street, muttering at the pigeons?”

  “Worst scene in the history of literature.”

  “Oh, forgive me, you’ve never read the book.”

  There was something oddly comforting in Kolya’s consistency, his willingness to make the same jokes—if you could call them jokes—over and over again. He was like a cheerful senile grandfather who sat at the dinner table with beet soup splattered on his collar, telling once more the story of his encounter with the emperor, though everyone in his family could recite it now from memory.

  “One of the most beautiful passages in literature, you know. His professor had been a famous writer back in his day, but now he’s completely forgotten. Radchenko feels ashamed for the old man. He watches him through his bedroom window—Radchenko never leaves his apartment; remember, he hasn’t left in seven years—he watches the professor walk out of sight, kicking at the pigeons and cursing them.” Kolya cleared his throat and switched to his declamatory tone. “Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She’s beautiful; when you’re with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she’s been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.”

  Kolya’s apparent immunity to exhaustion aggravated and amazed me. I could keep moving only by sighting a distant tree and promising myself that I would not quit before I reached it—and when we got to that tree, I would find another and swear this was the last one. But Kolya seemed capable of traipsing through the woods, orating with a stage whisper, for hours at a time.

  I waited a moment to make sure he was finished before I nodded. “That’s nice.”

  “Isn’t it?” he said quickly, pleased to hear it. The way he responded made me study his moonlit face.

  “You’ve got most of the book memorized?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. Passages here and there.”

  The snow was deeper as we crossed a ridge, making each step more of a chore, and I huffed and wheezed like an old man with one lung as I staggered toward the next tree.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “You just did,” he said, with his annoyingly pleased smile.

  “What do you write when you write in your journal?”

  “Depends on the day. Sometimes just notes on what I’ve seen. Sometimes I hear someone say something, a line or two, and I like the way it sounds.”

  I nodded and experimented by keeping one eye closed for ten seconds, then the other, alternating in a bid to give them some rest and spare them from the wind.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I think you’re writing The Courtyard Hound.”

  “You think . . . you mean a critique of The Courtyard Hound? Well, I am. I told you that. Someday I’ll give lectures on the book. Maybe seven men in Russia know more about Ushakovo than I do.”

  “I don’t think there is an Ushakovo.” I pushed up my cap so I could get a better look at him. “You keep telling me it’s this classic and I’ve never heard of it. And you were very happy when I told you I liked that bit, you were proud of it. If I quoted Pushkin for you, and you said the writing was good, it wouldn’t make me proud, would it? They’re not my lines.”

  Kolya’s expression never changed. His face admitted nothing, denied nothing. “But you did like it?”

  “It’s not bad. You just came up with that?”

  “Over the last few hours. You know what inspired me? That poem of your father’s. ‘An Old Poet, Once Famous, Seen at a Café.’ ”

  “That was another clue. You robbed him blind.”

  He laughed, blowing a great gust of vapor into the frigid air.

  “This is literature. We don’t call it robbery; we call it homage. What about the first line of the book? You like that, too?”

  “I don’t remember the first line of the book.”

  “In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs.”

  “A little melodramatic, isn’t it?”

  “What’s wrong with drama? All these contemporary writers are such timid little fish—”

  “Melodrama, I said.”

  “—but if the subject demands intensity, it should get intensity.”

  “So this whole time . . . Why didn’t you just tell me you were writing a novel?”

  Kolya stared at the moon, sinking now toward the fringe of pine tops. Soon it would be down and we’d be walking in true darkness, tripping over roots and slipping on patches of black ice.

  “The truth is, that first night I met you? In the Crosses? I thought they were going to shoot us in the morning. So what did it matter what I told you? I said whatever popped into my head.”

  “You told me they weren’t going to shoot us!”

  “Well, you seemed a little frightened. But come on, think about it: a deserter and a looter? What were our chances?”

  The next tree I had chosen as a way station seemed impossibly far away, a silhouetted pine that loomed above its brothers, a silent sentinel older than all the rest. While I panted, Kolya sipped tea from his canteen, a naturalist out for an evening hike. Army rations greatly exceeded civilian rations—that was my rationale for his su
perior energy, ignoring the fact that we had eaten the same meals for the last several days.

  “You said you left your unit so you could defend your thesis on Ushakovo’s The Courtyard Hound,” I said, pausing between each sentence to regain my breath. “And now you’re admitting there is no Ushakovo and there is no Courtyard Hound. ”

  “But there will be. If I live long enough.”

  “Why did you leave your unit?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You two about to fuck in the bushes?”

  Kolya and I wheeled around. Vika had crept up behind us without a sound, close enough that I could have reached out and touched her cheek. She glared into our faces with contempt, obviously disgusted to be in the company of such miserable soldiers.

  “You were told to march single file with a nine-stride gap.” Her voice was very low for such a small girl, hoarse, as if she had been sick the week before and her larynx hadn’t recovered yet. She was a practiced whisperer, able to enunciate each quiet word so that we could understand everything yet anyone standing five meters away would not hear a thing.

  “You’re strolling along like a couple of faggots, chatting about books. You realize we’ve got German camps within two kilometers of where we stand? You want to end up in a ditch with all the Communists and Jews, that’s your business, but I plan on seeing Berlin next year.”

  “He’s a Jew,” said Kolya, jabbing at me with his thumb, ignoring the angry look I directed his way.

  “Are you? Well, you’re the first dumb Jew I ever met. Either turn around and go back to Piter or else shut your mouths and follow our rules. There’s a reason we haven’t lost a man in two months. Now go on, move.”

  With a hand on each of our backs she shoved us forward and we resumed our places in the single file, nine strides between us, shamed into silence.

  I thought about the nonexistent author Ushakovo and his nonexistent masterpiece, The Courtyard Hound. For some reason I wasn’t angry at Kolya. It was a strange lie but a harmless one, and the farther I walked the more I understood his motivation. Kolya seemed fearless, but everyone has fear in them somewhere; fear is part of our inheritance. Aren’t we descended from timid little shrews who cowered in the shadows while the great beasts stomped past? Cannibals and Nazis didn’t make Kolya nervous, but the threat of embarrassment did—the possibility that a stranger might laugh at the lines he’d written.

  My father had many friends, most of them writers, and they chose our apartment as their clubhouse because of my mother’s cooking and my father’s unwillingness to throw anyone out. My mother complained that she was running the Hotel Literati. The place stank of cigarette smoke and the butts were everywhere, in the potted plants and half-drunk glasses of tea. One night an experimental playwright stuck dozens of the butts into gobs of melted candle wax on the kitchen table, representing Roman and Carthaginian forces, so he could demonstrate Hannibal’s double envelopment maneuver at the battle of Cannae. My mother griped about the noise, the broken glasses, the rugs stained with cheap Ukrainian wine, but I knew she liked hosting the crowds of poets and novelists, loved it when they devoured her stews and raved about her cakes. When she was young, she was a pretty woman, and if she wasn’t a flirt herself she liked it when good-looking men flirted with her. She would sit beside my father on the sofa and listen to the debates and rants and decrials, saying nothing but hearing everything, saving it all for the debriefing she would have with my father when the last drunk finally staggered out the door. She was not a writer herself, but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments. When one of the great men came to the apartment, a Mandelstam or Chukovksy, she didn’t treat them with any special favors, but I could tell she watched them more carefully, evaluating how they behaved with my father. In her mind the literary community was ranked as precisely as the army; the ranks might not have titles and insignia, but they were ranks all the same, and she wanted to know where my father stood.

  Sometimes, when enough bottles of wine had been drained, a poet would stand, swaying slightly as if a strong wind were blowing, and recite a new poem he had written. As an eight-year-old peering into the living room from the hallway, knowing I’d be caught soon and hoping it would be my father to catch me (he was almost impossible to anger, while my mother was quick with a hard hand to the backside), the poems meant nothing to me. Most of the poets wanted to be Mayakovsky, and while they couldn’t match his talent they could mimic his opacity, shouting out verses that made no sense to me at eight and probably made just as little sense to everyone else in the room. But even if the poems didn’t impress me, the performances did—these huge men with their shaggy eyebrows, always holding cigarettes between their fingers, the long stems of ash breaking and drifting toward the floor whenever they gestured too wildly. On rare occasions a woman would rise and face the staring eyes—once even Akhmatova herself, according to my mother, though I don’t remember seeing her.

  Sometimes the poets read from scribbled notes, sometimes they spoke from memory. When they were finished, too conscious of all the faces watching them, they reached for the nearest glass of wine or vodka—not only for the drink’s support, but to give themselves something to do, a simple action to occupy the hands and eyes while waiting for the crowd’s reaction. This was an audience of fellow professionals, competitors, and the usual response was modest approval, signaled by nodding heads, smiles, slaps on the back. Once or twice I saw these jaundiced men of letters erupt with euphoria, so moved by the power of the work that they forgot their jealousy as they shouted out, “Bravo! Bravo!” and charged at the dazed, happy poet, kissing his cheeks with sloppy wet lips, mussing his hair, repeating their favorite lines, and shaking their heads with admiration.

  Far more common, though, was the reaction of disdainful silence, nobody willing to meet the poet’s eye, to feign interest in the subject matter, or halfheartedly compliment the use of a jaunty metaphor. When a reading failed, the poet knew it quickly. He would down his glass of alcohol, the red flush of shame spreading across his face as he wiped his mouth dry with his sleeve and shuffled off to the far side of the apartment, taking great interest in the books on my father’s bookshelves—Balzac and Stendhal, Yeats and Baudelaire. The defeated man would leave the party soon, but leaving too quickly would seem like bad sportsmanship, a sulking form of cowardice, so he would wait an agonizing twenty minutes while everyone around him studiously avoided mentioning his poem, as if it were a brutal fart that no one was rude enough to acknowledge. Finally he would thank my mother for her food and hospitality, smiling but not looking her in the eye, and hustle out the door, knowing that the minute he left everyone would joke about the atrocity he’d unveiled, what a horror, what a lumpy sack of pretension and artifice.

  Kolya protected himself by inventing Ushakovo. The make-believe writer gave cover so that Kolya could test his opening line, his protagonist’s philosophy, even the title of the book, gauging my reaction without fear of derision. As scams go it wasn’t the most elaborate one, but he had pulled it off nicely, and I decided that Kolya could probably write a decent novel someday, if he survived the war and ditched the bombastic first sentence.

  The talk with Kolya and the encounter with Vika had jolted me awake again and I peered around the forest, hoping the men in front of me and behind me had better eyes for the darkness than I did. The moon had drifted below the tree line; the sun would not rise for hours; the night was truly black now. Twice I nearly walked into trees. The stars were out in their millions, but they were only for decoration, and I wondered why those distant suns appeared as pinpricks of light. If the astronomers were right and the universe is clogged with stars, many of them far larger than our sun, and if light traveled forever without slowing or fading, why didn’t the sky shine every minute of the day? The answer must have been obvious, but I couldn’t figure it out. For thirty minutes I didn’t worry about the Einsaztkommandos and their leader Abe
ndroth; I forgot about the muscles cramping in my legs; I didn’t notice the cold. Were stars like flashlights, unable to project past a certain distance? From the rooftop of the Kirov I could spot a soldier’s glowing flashlight from a few kilometers away, even though the beam could not illuminate my face from that distance. But then again, why did a flashlight’s beam lose power over distance? Did the light particles spread out like pellets in a shotgun blast? Was light even made of particles?

  My semilucid wonderings finally ended when I collided with Kolya’s back, banging my nose and crying out in surprise. A dozen voices shushed me. Squinting at the dim shapes in front of me, I saw that everyone had gathered beside a massive, snow-crusted boulder. Vika was already on top of the rock; I don’t know how she managed to clamber up its slick, frozen sides in the dark.

  “They’re burning the villages,” she called down to Korsakov.

  The moment she spoke the words I smelled smoke in the air.

  “They found the bodies,” said Korsakov.

  The Germans had made their philosophy of retribution very clear to the civilians in occupied territory. They nailed posters to the walls; they issued proclamations in their Russian-language radio broadcasts; they spread the word through their collaborators: kill one of our soldiers and we’ll kill thirty Russians. Tracking down partisans was difficult work, but rounding up large numbers of old men, women, and children was easy, even now with half the nation on the run.

  If Korsakov and his men were bothered by the knowledge that their raid earlier in the night had triggered a slaughter of innocents, I heard no indication in their whispered exchanges. The enemy had declared total war when they invaded our country. They had vowed, repeatedly and in print, to incinerate our cities and enslave the populace. We could not fight them in moderation. We could not fight total war with half war. The partisans would continue picking off Nazis; the Nazis would continue massacring noncombatants; and eventually the Fascists would learn that they could not win the war even if they killed thirty civilians for every one of their dead soldiers. The arithmetic was brutal, but brutal arithmetic always worked in Russia’s favor.