City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  The man beside him turned out to be Vika. Unlike Kolya, she had held on to her fur cap; it was pulled down to her eyebrows and even from a distance I could see her wolfish blue eyes roving just below the fringe of rabbit fur. Whatever Kolya said did not amuse her. She did not even seem to be listening. She turned every few paces to check for pursuers.

  My run could not have lasted very long (twenty minutes? ten?), but the inside of the trapper’s cabin seemed like a memory stolen from a stranger. Real terror—the genuine belief that your life is about to end violently—erases everything but itself from the brain. So even after I saw Kolya and Vika and Markov, even though their three faces seemed to me the most beautiful faces in all of Russia, I wasn’t able to call their names or wave my hand. The shadow beneath the sagging arms of the larch tree was my safe place. Nothing evil had happened to me since I got there. The Germans had not found me. I hadn’t seen anyone’s jawbone blasted off his face, leaving nothing but puzzled eyes over slop from a butcher shop’s floor. I could not beckon to Kolya, even though in four days he had become my best friend.

  Maybe I shifted my position slightly or shivered—I must have made some slight noise because Vika swiveled toward me, the stock of her rifle pressed against her shoulder, the muzzle pointed at my head. Even then I wasn’t able to speak quickly enough to save my life. I could have cried out her name. Any Russian sentence might have helped.

  But somehow, though I sat in deep shade, obstructed from view by snow-covered branches, Vika recognized my face and stayed her trigger finger.

  “It’s your little friend,” she told Kolya. “Maybe he’s wounded.”

  Kolya ran over to me, pushing aside the larch branches, seizing the lapels of my greatcoat and tilting my whole body left and then right, searching for bullet holes.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I shook my head.

  “Come on, then.” He lifted me to my feet. “They’re not far behind.”

  “It’s too late,” said Vika. She and Markov had joined us in the cloistered shadows and she gestured uphill with the barrel of her rifle.

  Germans in white anoraks had crested the hilltop, less than two hundred meters away, rifles at the ready, advancing cautiously as they scouted the terrain for ambush sites. Only a few soldiers at first, picking their way through the snow, but more and more came bobbing over the rise, until the hillside above swarmed with men who wanted to kill us.

  Markov pulled a pair of field glasses from a pocket in his coveralls. He watched the advance scouts descending the hill.

  “First Gebirgsjäger Division,” he whispered, offering the field glasses to Vika. “You see the edelweiss insignia?”

  She nodded, waving away the glasses. Between the lines of uniformed soldiers marched a herd of prisoners, their heads down. Red Army men, their uniforms filthy, trudged alongside stunned civilians, who wore whatever they had managed to grab when the Germans raided their villages. Some poor souls marched in their shirtsleeves, without coats or gloves or hats. They sloshed through the snow, never looking up or saying a word, heading directly for us.

  “Looks like a whole company coming this way,” said Markov, pocketing the field glasses and readying his rifle. “Figures it happens now, when I’ve got a pocketful of gold.”

  Vika put a hand on Markov’s arm. “You’re so quick to be a martyr?”

  He glanced at her, the steel sights of his rifle already lined up on the closest Nazi.

  “Shooting infantry,” she said, “that’s nothing. We’re after Einsatz.”

  He scowled and pushed away her hand as if she were a crazy woman on the street who had come begging for money.

  “We don’t get to choose. All I see is mountain rangers.”

  “Einsatzgruppe A travels with the First Gebirgsjäger. You know that. Abendroth has to be close.”

  Kolya and I glanced at each other. Last night we had heard the name Abendroth for the first time; the syllables were already edged with dread. I could not expel the mental image of Zoya writhing on the floor beside her severed feet. The man himself I could not picture, the girls had not described him, but I imagined his hands— freckled with blood, the nails filed and immaculate—as he rested the saw on the wood floor of the farmhouse.

  “It’s over,” said Markov. “No more running.”

  “I never said anything about running. They’ve got more than a hundred prisoners. We mix in with them—”

  “Have you gone soft, you silly cunt? You think you walk out there with your rifle in the air, Fritz will let you surrender?”

  “We’re not surrendering.” She wrapped one gloved hand around a low-hanging branch, pulled herself up, and wedged her rifle into the gap between trunk and branch. Lowering herself to the ground, she slapped the snow from her gloves and motioned for Markov to hide his rifle, too.

  “We’re going to mix in with the prisoners and wait for the right moment. They’ve already searched those sheep for weapons. You’ve got a pistol on you somewhere, don’t you? Come on, hurry. Get rid of the rifle.”

  “They might search them again.”

  “They won’t.”

  The closest Germans were less than one hundred meters away, their hoods cinched tight over their field caps. Markov stared at them, their pink faces easy targets for a skilled marksman.

  “They’ll kill half those prisoners by nightfall.”

  “So we’ll be in the other half.”

  Kolya smiled and nodded, warming up to the idea. It was the kind of ludicrous scheme he might have devised himself and it didn’t surprise me he was pleased with it.

  “It’s worth trying,” he whispered. “If we get in with the rest of them, there’s still a chance. And if they spot us, all right, we’ll have our shoot-out then. It’s a good plan.”

  “It’s a horseshit plan,” said Markov. “How are we going to get in there without them seeing us?”

  “You still have a few grenades, don’t you?” asked Vika.

  Markov stared at her. He looked like the kind of man who had been punched in the face many times, his nose flat as a boxer’s, half his teeth missing from the lower row. Finally, he shook his head, strapped his rifle to the hilt of a broken branch, and peered out at the approaching column.

  “You’re a real cunt louse, you know that?”

  “Take off your whites,” she replied. “You look like a ski soldier. They’ll notice you.”

  Markov quickly unbuttoned his coveralls, sat in the snow, and pulled them over his boots. Below his whites he wore a quilted canvas hunting vest, several layers of woolen sweaters, and a pair of paint-splattered workman’s pants. He pulled a stick grenade from a canvas pouch, unwrapped a cigarette-size fuze, and inserted it into the head of the grenade.

  “We’ll have to time it just right,” he said.

  We huddled around the broad larch trunk, crouched and still, holding our breath as the first German soldiers passed by less than twenty meters away.

  Nobody had bothered consulting with me, which made sense because I hadn’t opened my mouth to offer any suggestions. I hadn’t said a word since running out the door of the trapper’s cabin and now it was too late.

  I didn’t like either of the options. A final shoot-out might have been fine for a hardened guerrilla like Markov, but I wasn’t ready for a suicide mission. Posing as a prisoner seemed a bizarre miscalculation—how long did prisoners survive these days? If anybody had asked me, I would have urged either another run, though I wasn’t sure if I could run much farther, or to try climbing the tree and waiting while the Germans passed beneath us. Hiding in the branches seemed like a better and better idea as the front end of the Gebirgsjäger company passed by without spotting us.

  When the first ranks of Russian prisoners trudged past our tree, Vika nodded at Markov. He took a deep breath, walked toward the edge of the larch’s shadow, and hurled the grenade as far as he could.

  From my vantage point I couldn’t tell if any of the Germans noticed the grenade flying overhe
ad. I didn’t hear any shouted warnings. The grenade landed with a muffled thwup in the snow thirty meters away. For several seconds I was convinced it must have been a dud, until it exploded with enough force that snow showered down on us from the shaken larch branches.

  Everyone marching with the company, mountain rangers and prisoners alike, crouched in momentary panic, looking to the left where a great geyser of snow had shot into the air. We slipped out of the tree’s shadow and walked unseen toward the ragged throng of Russians as the German officers began shouting orders, peering into the far woods with their field glasses, looking for snipers in the trees. We were so close to our captive countrymen: fifteen meters away, fourteen, thirteen, stepping softly, resisting the impulse to sprint the last short span. The Germans thought they saw movement in the distant bushes; there was a clamor of cries and directives, fingers pointing, soldiers dropping to their bellies, ready to fire from the prone position.

  By the time they realized there were no enemies to the left, we had infiltrated from the right. A few of the prisoners noticed us joining in with them. They gave no sign of camaraderie or welcome. They didn’t seem surprised that four newcomers had joined their ranks; the captives, soldiers and civilians both, were so defeated they probably thought it was natural that Russians would emerge from the woods and secretly surrender to the enemy.

  All of the prisoners were male, from young boys with missing teeth and frozen strands of snot clinging to their upper lips to old men with crooked backs and white stubble dusting their jaws. Vika had pulled her rabbit fur cap even lower; in her formless coveralls she looked enough like an adolescent boy that nobody glanced at her twice.

  At least two of the Red Army men wore no boots, only their torn wool socks to keep their feet warm. The Germans considered a pair of Soviet-issue felt-lined leather boots a great prize, far warmer and more durable than their own footwear. The soldiers’ wool socks must have been soaked through with melted snow. When the temperature dropped and the socks froze, the two of them would have to walk with blocks of ice on their feet. I wondered how much farther they could go, how many kilometers, the numbness spreading from their toes to their calves to their knees. Their eyes were as dull and miserable as the eyes of the draft horses that dragged sledges through the snowy streets of Piter before the food ran out and the horses were slaughtered for their meat.

  The Germans chattered in their own tongue. None of them seemed badly wounded by the fragmentation, though one young trooper with a thin red gash across his cheek had pulled off his glove so he could dab at the blood with his thumb and show it to his comrades, pleased with his first war wound.

  “They think it was a land mine,” Kolya whispered. He squinted as he listened to the officers’ commands. “They must be Tyrolean. The accents are tricky. Yes, they’re saying it was a land mine.”

  The orders from the officers trickled down to the troopers, who turned back to the meekly waiting prisoners and signaled with their rifles for the march to continue.

  “Wait!” shouted one of the Russians, a thick-lipped civilian in his forties wearing a quilted down cap, the earflaps tied under his chin. “This man is a partisan!”

  He pointed at Markov. Everyone else on the hillside had gone silent.

  “He came to my house a month ago, stole all my potatoes, every bit of food in the place, said they needed it for the war! You hear? He is a partisan! He has killed many Germans!”

  Markov stared at the civilian, his head cocked to one side like a fighting dog.

  “Shut your mouth,” he said, keeping his voice low, his face bright red with anger.

  “You don’t tell me what to do anymore! You don’t tell me what to do!”

  A Leutnant stomped over, trailed by three troopers, shoving through the crowd of prisoners that had circled around Markov and his accuser.

  “What is this?” he bellowed. He was clearly the translator for the company, speaking Russian with a Ukrainian accent. He looked like a fat man who had recently lost all the fat, his broad cheeks deflated, the heavy skin hanging slack across the bones of his face.

  The accuser stood there with his finger pointing, an overgrown child with his earflaps and his trembling lips, addressing the Leutnant but never looking away from Markov.

  “He is a murderer, this man! He has murdered your people!”

  Kolya opened his mouth to speak out in Markov’s defense, but Vika jabbed him in the belly with a sharp elbow and Kolya kept silent. I could see his hand digging into his overcoat pocket, readying the Tokarev in case it was needed.

  Markov shook his head, a strange, ugly smile splitting his lips.

  “I shit on your mother.”

  “You don’t look so brave now! You don’t look so hard! Sure, you’re the tough man when you’re stealing potatoes from common people, but now what are you? Eh? What are you?”

  Markov snarled and snatched a small pistol from the pocket of his hunting vest. Burly as he was, he drew with the speed of an American gunslinger, raising the muzzle as his accuser stumbled backward and the prisoners gathered around dove out of the way.

  The Germans were even faster. Before Markov could pull the trigger, a burst of automatic fire from the troopers’ MP40s punched a cluster of little holes through the front of his vest. He stumbled, frowning as if he’d forgotten an important name, and toppled backward, landing in the soft snow, wisps of down floating up from the perforated quilting of his vest.

  The accuser stared down at Markov’s body. He must have known what his denunciation would lead to, but now that the act was done he seemed stunned by the outcome. The Leutnant considered him briefly, trying to decide whether to reward or punish the man. In the end he snatched up Markov’s pistol for a souvenir and walked away, leaving the whole mess behind. His young troopers followed behind him, glancing briefly at Markov’s body, wondering, perhaps, which one of them had fired the shot that actually killed him.

  Soon the company was marching again. A change had been made, however. Six Russians now walked in the front, ten meters ahead of the closest Germans, serving as human minesweepers. Each step was a harrowing experience for them, waiting for the snapped tripwire, the sprung spring. It must have been tempting to run, but they wouldn’t have gotten three steps before the troopers gunned them down.

  Nobody walked near Markov’s accuser. He was a man infected, a carrier of plague. He talked quietly to himself, a long and unheard argument, his eyes flashing left and right as he waited for reprisal.

  I was a dozen men behind him, slogging through the slush between Vika and Kolya. If any of the prisoners spoke loudly enough for the Germans to hear, one of the troopers would snap, “Halts Maul!” Nobody needed a translator to understand the sentiment and the Russian in question would quickly shut his mouth, lower his head, and walk a little faster. Still, it was possible to carry on a conversation if you kept your voice very low and one eye on the guards.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” I murmured to Vika.

  She kept walking without answering or acknowledging that she had heard me. I thought I might have offended her.

  “He seemed like a good man,” I added. Both sentences were utterly banal, the kind of lazy sentiments you might use at the funeral of a distant relative you never really liked. I couldn’t blame her for ignoring me.

  “He wasn’t,” she said at last. “But I liked him anyway.”

  “That traitor ought to be dangling from a tree,” whispered Kolya, dipping his head so his voice wouldn’t carry. He glared at the back of the betrayer’s head. “I could break his neck with my bare hands. I know how to do it.”

  “Leave it alone,” said Vika. “He doesn’t matter.”

  “He mattered to Markov,” I said.

  Vika glanced up at me and smiled. It wasn’t the cold carnivorous smile I had seen before. She seemed surprised by my comment, as if she had just heard a mongoloid whistle Für Elise without missing a note.

  “Yes, he mattered to Markov. You’re a strange
one.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a twisty little devil,” said Kolya, giving me an affectionate punch in the kidney. “But he plays a nice game of chess.”

  “Why am I a strange one?”

  “Markov’s not important,” she said. “I’m not important. You’re not important. Winning the war, that’s the only important thing.”

  “No,” I said, “I disagree. Markov was important. So am I and so are you. That’s why we have to win.”

  Kolya raised his eyebrows, impressed that I was standing up to the little fanatic.

  “I’m especially important,” he announced. “I’m writing the great novel of the twentieth century.”

  “You two are half in love,” she said. “Do you know that?”

  The grim procession of weary men had bogged down in front of us, the foot traffic stalled, confused prisoners trying to figure out why we weren’t moving anymore. One of the bootless Russian soldiers had stopped walking. Other men from his captured unit begged him to move, pleading and cursing. He shook his head, never saying a word, his feet rooted in the snow. A friend tried to shove him forward, but it was useless; he had chosen his spot. When the troopers rushed over, waving their submachine guns and hollering in their own language, the Red Army men reluctantly backed away from their doomed comrade. He smiled at the Germans and raised one hand in a mock Nazi salute. I looked away just in time.

  20

  An hour before sunset the company halted beside a forbidding redbrick schoolhouse, one of the People’s Projects built during the second Five-Year Plan, the lead glass windows narrow as medieval embrasures. Two-foot-high bronze letters above the front door spelled out Lenin’s famous line: GIVE US THE CHILD FOR EIGHT YEARS AND IT WILL BE A BOLSHEVIK FOREVER. One of the Russophone invaders had scrawled a rejoinder in white paint that had dripped before the words had dried: GIVE US YOUR CHILDREN FOR EIGHT SECONDS AND THERE WILL BE NO MORE BOLSHEVIKS.