City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  “Patriotic bowels.”

  “Every part of me is patriotic. My cock whistles the ‘Soviet Hymn’ when it comes.”

  “Whenever I hear you two talking, it’s always cocks and asses,” said Vika. She had crept up behind us in her usual silent way, startling me when she spoke. “Why don’t you both strip naked and get it over with?”

  “It’s not me he wants to strip naked,” Kolya said with a leer.

  I felt a rush of anger and embarrassment, but Vika ignored the comment, keeping an eye out for watchful guards and other prisoners as she slipped us both half slices of her good rye bread.

  “You see the officers’ cars at the end of the convoy?” she asked, looking in that direction but not raising a hand to point.

  “That’s the best bread I’ve had since summer,” Kolya said, his portion already devoured.

  “You see the Kommandeurwagen with the swastika fender pendants? That’s Abendroth’s car.”

  “How do you know?” I asked her.

  “Because we’ve been tracking him for three months. I almost had a shot at him outside Budogoshch. That’s his car.”

  “What’s the plan?” asked Kolya, picking at a caraway seed stuck between his teeth.

  “When the convoy starts moving again, I’ll wait till he’s close and I’ll take my shot. Shouldn’t be hard.”

  I looked up and down the road. We stood in the middle of what seemed like a full battalion, surrounded by hundreds of rifle-toting Germans on foot and in armored vehicles. Vika’s pronouncement meant that we would die in a few minutes, whether or not she hit her target.

  “I’ll take the shot,” said Kolya. “You and Lev stand over there with those cretins from the collective. No point bringing us all down.”

  Vika curled her lips in her half smile and shook her head. “I’m the better shooter.”

  “You’ve never seen me shoot.”

  “True. And I’m the better shooter.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told them. “Both of you shoot, what difference does it make? You think they’ll let any of us live after that?”

  “The boy has a point,” said Kolya. He surveyed the illiterate prisoners standing around us, shuffling their feet and clapping their hands to keep warm, most of them farmers who had never before traveled more than a few kilometers from their collectives. A few Red Army privates were mixed into the lot. One or two of them, I was sure, could read just as well as I could.

  “How many prisoners did they say? Thirty-eight?”

  “Thirty-seven now,” said Vika. She saw me staring at her and she stared right back with those pitiless blue eyes. “How long do you think you’ll last before one of these peasants notices you’re missing a few bits down there”—and here she pointed at my crotch—“and turns you in for an extra bowl of soup?”

  “Thirty-seven. . . . It seems like too many to sacrifice for one German,” said Kolya.

  “Thirty-seven prisoners headed to the steel mills? These men aren’t Russian assets anymore,” she said in her quiet, uninflected tone. “They’re German labor. And Abendroth is worth sacrificing for.”

  Kolya nodded, peering at the Kommandeurwagen in the distance.

  “We’re pawns and he’s a rook, that’s what you’re saying.”

  “We’re less than pawns. Pawns have value.”

  “If we can take a rook, we have value, too.”

  Saying this, Kolya blinked and looked at me. He flashed a sudden and certain smile; his whole Cossack face lit up with the grandeur of a new idea.

  “Maybe there’s another way. Wait here a minute.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Vika, but it was too late; he had already started toward the closest cluster of troopers. The Germans narrowed their eyes when they saw him coming and moved their fingers toward their trigger guards, but Kolya held up his hands and began chattering to them in their native tongue, as cheerful and relaxed as if we were all gathered together to watch a parade. After thirty seconds they were laughing at whatever jokes he was telling. One of the troopers even let him take a long drag off the man’s cigarette.

  “He has charm,” said Vika. She sounded like an entomologist discussing a beetle’s carapace.

  “They probably think he’s their long-lost Aryan brother.”

  “The two of you are a strange couple.”

  “We’re not a couple.”

  “I don’t mean it like that. Don’t worry, Lyova. I know you like girls.”

  My father had called me Lyova and hearing the nickname coming from her mouth—so unexpected but so natural, as if she had been calling me that for years—almost made me want to cry.

  “He made you angry before, didn’t he? When he said that about wanting to see me naked.”

  “He says a lot of stupid things.”

  “So you don’t want to see me naked?”

  Vika wore her mocking smile now, standing with her feet wide apart, her hands jammed into the pockets of her coveralls.

  “I don’t know.” Yes, it was a stupid and cowardly response, but I could not handle the morning’s peaks and valleys. One moment I thought I had a few minutes left to live; the next a sniper from Archangel was flirting with me. Was she flirting with me? The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening. German corpses fell from the sky; cannibals sold sausage links made from ground human in the Haymarket; apartment blocs collapsed to the ground; dogs became bombs; frozen soldiers became signposts; a partisan with half a face stood swaying in the snow, staring sad-eyed at his killers. I had no food in my belly, no fat on my bones, and no energy to reflect on this parade of atrocities. I just kept moving, hoping to find another half slice of bread for myself and a dozen eggs for the colonel’s daughter.

  “He told me your father was a famous poet.”

  “He wasn’t that famous.”

  “Is that what you want to be? A poet?”

  “No. I don’t have any talent for it.”

  “What do you have talent for?”

  “I don’t know. Not everybody has talent.”

  “That’s true. Despite what they always told us.”

  From the look of things, Kolya was delivering a grand lecture to the troopers arrayed around him in a semicircle, making elaborate hand gestures to punctuate his sentences. He pointed at me and I felt my throat constrict as the German soldiers turned and glanced my way, curious and amused.

  “What the hell is he telling them?”

  Vika shrugged. “He’ll get himself shot if he’s not careful.”

  The troopers seemed doubtful, but Kolya kept cajoling them and finally one of them, shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe he was listening to this lunatic Russian, adjusted the strap of his MP40 and hustled toward the back of the convoy. Kolya nodded to the remaining men gathered around him, made some final joke that had them grinning again, and ambled back to us.

  “The Nazis adore you,” said Vika. “Were you quoting Mein Kampf?”

  “Tried to read it once. Very dull.”

  “What did you say to them?”

  “I told them I had a wager for Herr Abendroth. That my friend here, a fifteen-year-old boy from the less-fashionable side of Leningrad, could play without a queen and still beat the Sturmbannführer in a game of chess.”

  “I’m seventeen.”

  “Oh. Well, fifteen is more of an insult.”

  “Is this a joke?” asked Vika, head tilted to one side, watching Kolya and waiting for him to smile and explain that he had done no such stupid thing.

  “No joke.”

  “You don’t think he’ll wonder how you knew he was here? Knew his rank, knew that he played chess?”

  “I think he’ll wonder all of those things. And that will make him curious, and that will make him come to us.”

  “What’s the bet?” I asked him.

  “If he wins, he can shoot us dead on the spot.”

  “He can shoot us dead wheneve
r he wants, you thick-headed fool.”

  “That’s what the troopers said. Of course he can. But I told them that the Sturmbannführer is a man of honor, a man of principle. I told them I trust his word and I trust his spirit of competition. They love all that blood and honor horseshit.”

  “What do we get if I win?”

  “First, he sets all three of us free.” He saw our expressions and cut us off before we could speak. “Yes, yes, you think I’m an idiot, but you two are the slow ones. We can’t play now, with the convoy moving. With any luck the game happens tonight, inside, away from all of this.” Kolya waved his hand, indicating the German soldiers standing in loose circles, chatting and smoking; the half-tracks loaded with provisions; the heavy artillery.

  “He’ll never set us free.”

  “Obviously he’ll never set us free. But we’ll have a much easier shot at him. And if the gods are smiling, maybe we’ll even have a chance to run.”

  “ ‘If the gods are smiling,’ ” said Vika, mocking Kolya’s pomposity. “Have you been paying attention to this war?”

  The mechanics had reset the track on the self-propelled howitzer. The driver and his crew hopped into the hatch. Moments later the engine coughed back to life and the long-turreted beast groaned into motion, cracking through the ice that had formed around its cast-steel track pads. The infantrymen didn’t seem in any rush to get back to their trucks, but after their final hoarse-voiced good-byes, with the officers shouting and the convoy beginning to snake forward, they took long last drags on their cigarettes, flicked them away, and hopped back onto the tarpaulin-covered flatbeds.

  The trooper who had set off with the message for Abendroth jogged back to his unit. When he saw us watching him, he nodded and smiled. His face was pink and hairless, his cheeks round, and it was easy to picture him as a baby bald and bawling. He hollered at us, a single German word, before catching up to his already rolling truck, reaching out a hand, and letting one of his compatriots haul him onboard.

  “Tonight,” said Kolya.

  Our guards had already barked at us, knowing we didn’t understand and not caring. The message was simple enough. The prisoners formed into lines again, Vika drifted away from us, and we waited for the long convoy to pass. When the Kommandeurwagen motored by, I tried to spot Abendroth, but the window glass was frosted over.

  I remembered something that had been bothering me and I turned to Kolya.

  “What’s the second thing you asked for?”

  “Hm?”

  “You said if I win, first he sets us free. So what’s the second thing you asked for?”

  He looked down at me, his eyebrows tilted toward each other, incredulous that I could not guess.

  “Isn’t it obvious? A dozen eggs.”

  23

  That evening we sat with the other prisoners in a sheep barn just outside of Krasnogvardeysk. The air smelled of wet wool and dung. The Germans had given us a few twigs for firewood and most of the men were gathered around a timid little fire in the center of the barn. Tonight they were too tired to talk of escape. They complained with little vigor that the Germans hadn’t fed us since the morning biscuit, they muttered predictions about the next day’s weather, and soon all of them were sleeping on the cold ground, spooned together for warmth. Vika, Kolya, and I sat with our backs against the splintering wood wall, shivering, debating whether or not the game would happen.

  “If he sends for us,” Vika said, “if they bring us to him, I promise you, they will search us for weapons.”

  “They already searched the prisoners. What are they going to think, we found guns in the sheep barn?”

  “The man knows he’s a target. He’s very careful. They’ll find the guns.”

  Kolya responded with a mournful fart, low and solemn as a single note from a baritone horn. Vika shut her eyes for a few seconds, breathing through her mouth. I studied her pale red lashes in the firelight.

  “All the same,” she said at last, “they will find the guns.”

  “So what should we do, strangle the man?”

  She reached into her coveralls, pulled her Finnish knife from the sheath on her belt, and began carving a little grave in the frozen dirt. When it was deep enough, she buried her pistol and held out her hand for Kolya’s.

  “I want to keep it.”

  She waited with her outstretched hand and finally he handed it over. When both pistols were covered with soil, she unbuttoned her coveralls and unbuckled her belt. Kolya gave me a little nudge. The coveralls had slipped off Vika’s shoulders; beneath them she wore a heavy wool woodcutter’s shirt and two layers of long underwear, but for a moment I saw her collarbone shifting beneath skin speckled with dirt. I had never before given any conscious thought to another human’s collarbone; hers looked like the wings of a gliding seagull. She yanked off her canvas belt, lifted her woodcutter’s shirt and the two undershirts to just below her breasts, held the shirts in place with her chin, and strapped the belt to her bare skin. The knife sheath now rested against her sternum, and when she pulled down the undershirts and the woodcutter’s shirt and rebuttoned her coveralls, it was impossible to detect its shape.

  She took my hand and placed it against her chest. “Do you feel anything?”

  I shook my head and Kolya laughed. “Wrong answer.”

  Vika smiled at me. My hand still rested on her padded chest. I was scared to move it and scared to keep it there. “Don’t listen to him, Lyova. He was born from his mother’s ass.”

  “You two want some privacy? I could cuddle up with old Edik over there. He looks lonely.”

  “What about my knife?” I asked her.

  “I forgot about your knife.”

  “Let me have it,” said Kolya. “I know how to use it.”

  “No,” said Vika. “They’ll search you the most carefully. You’re the only one who looks like a soldier.” She leaned forward and I pulled away my hand, certain that I had somehow missed an opportunity even if I didn’t know what it was or where it went. She unclipped the sheath from my boot and hefted it in her hand for a moment, pondering its size and shape. Finally, she slipped it deep inside my boot, under my sock. She examined the boot again. Nothing was visible. She patted the leather and seemed satisfied.

  “Can you walk normally?”

  I stood and took a few steps. I could feel the sheath point digging into my foot, but it seemed secure, held firmly in place by my sock and my boot.

  “Look at him,” said Kolya. “The silent killer.”

  I sat down beside Vika again. She touched the soft spot below my ear and drew her finger across my throat, stopping below the other ear.

  “You cut that open,” she told me, “and no one can ever close it.”

  The senior officers of Einsatzgruppe A had commandeered the Krasnogvardeysk party headquarters, a grubby warren of small offices with peeling linoleum floors above the blackened husk of the police station. The building stank of smoke and diesel fumes but the Germans had already restored electricity and fired up the furnaces; the second floor was warm and comfortable, aside from the occasional brushstroke of dried blood on the walls. A few hours after we buried the pistols, two troopers from the Gebirgsjäger battalion escorted the three of us into the conference room, where before the town fell the planning committee members had met to discuss orders from above and commands for below. Four-paned windows overlooked the unlit main street of Krasnogvardeysk. Posters of Lenin and Zhdanov still hung from the walls, unmolested, as if their stern expressions bothered the Germans so little they weren’t worth tearing down or defacing.

  Abendroth sat at the far end of the long table, drinking clear liquor from a cut-crystal tumbler. He nodded when we walked into the room, but made no move to stand. His gray peaked hat—banded in black, with a silver death’s head below the German eagle—rested on the tabletop. A traveling chessboard, the pieces already arranged, waited between the hat and an unlabeled, nearly empty bottle of liquor.

  I had been expect
ing a slender aesthete, a professorial type, but Abendroth was a big man, built like a hammer thrower, his collar digging into the veins of his thick neck. The heavy tumbler seemed dainty as a doll’s cup in the palm of his hand. He didn’t look older than thirty, but the close-cropped hair on the sides of his head was white, as was the stubble on his chin. SS lightning bolt runes gleamed on his right collar tab; four silver pips indicated his rank on the left tab; and a black-and-silver Knight’s Cross hung in between.

  He was at least a little drunk, though his movements remained perfectly coordinated. I had learned at an early age how to spot a drunk, even the skillful drunks who held their liquor well. My father wasn’t a big drinker, but his friends all were, poets and play-wrights who had never gone to bed sober in their adult lives. Some were sloppy with their affection, kissing my cheeks and mussing my hair while they told me what a lucky little man I was to have a father like him. Others were cold and distant as orbiting moons, waiting for me to return to the room I shared with my sister, to leave the adults alone so they could resume their debates about the Litburo or Mandelstam’s latest provocation. Some slurred their words after a single glass of vodka and some became articulate only after draining their first bottle.

  Abendroth’s eyes shined a little too brightly. He smiled from time to time for no apparent reason, amused by whatever joke he told himself. He watched us and didn’t say a word until he had finished his glass of liquor, wiped his hands together, and shrugged.

  “Plum schnapps,” he told us, his Russian quite precise, though like his fellow Einsatz officer at the schoolhouse he made no effort to approximate the accent. “An old man I know makes it by hand, best stuff in the world, and now I bring a case with me wherever I go. One of you speaks German?”

  “I do,” said Kolya.

  “Where did you learn it?”

  “My grandmother was from Vienna.” Whether this was true or not I had no idea, but he said it with such conviction Abendroth seemed to accept it.