I was so dazzled by the sight of the dancing girls that I didn’t realize for a moment they were not alone. Two more girls lay on their bellies on a black bearskin rug in front of the fireplace. Both had their chins propped on their hands, their elbows on the rug, watching the dance with serious expressions on their faces. One looked Chechen, her black eyebrows nearly meeting above her nose, her lips painted bright red, her hair piled up in a wet towel above her head, as if she had just bathed. The other girl had the long, elegant neck of a ballerina, her nose a perfect right angle in profile, her brown hair tied back in tight pigtails.
The interior of the farmhouse looked more like a hunting lodge. The heads of dead animals festooned the walls of the great room: brown bear, wild boar, an ibex with massive curling horns and a scruffy chin beard. A stuffed wolf and lynx flanked the fireplace, posed in mid prowl, their mouths open and fangs glistening white. Candles burned in wall sconces.
Kolya and I crouched outside the window and stared at the scene until the song ended and the Chechen-looking girl got up to change the record.
“Play that one again,” said the blonde. Her voice was muffled by the glass, but it was still easy to hear her.
“Not again! Please,” said her partner, “something I know. Put on the Eddie Rozner.”
I turned to look at Kolya. I expected him to be grinning, ecstatic about this surreal vision we’d stumbled across in the middle of the snowy wasteland. But he looked grim, his lips pressed together, something angry in his eyes.
“Come on,” he said, standing and leading me back around to the front of the house. A new record had started playing, more jazz, a trumpeter leading his band in a merry charge.
“We’re going in? I think they had food in there. I thought I saw some—”
“I’m sure they have plenty of food.”
He knocked on the front door of the farmhouse. The music stopped playing. A few seconds later the blond girl appeared behind the mullioned window next to the doorway. She stared at us for a long time without saying anything or making any move toward the door.
“We’re Russian,” said Kolya. “Open the door.”
She shook her head. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I know,” he said, holding up the pistol so the girl could see it. “But we are, so open the door, goddamn your mother.”
The blonde looked back toward the great room. She whispered something to someone standing out of sight and listened to the response. Nodding, she turned to look at us again, took a deep breath, and opened the door.
Stepping inside the farmhouse felt like entering the belly of the whale, the warmest place I’d been in months. We followed the blonde into the great room, where her three friends stood in an uneasy line, fingers fidgeting with the hems of their nightshirts. The little brunet with the chubby arms looked ready to cry; her lower lip quivered as she stared at Kolya’s pistol.
“Is anyone else here?” he asked.
The blonde shook her head.
“When are they coming?” he asked.
The girls exchanged glances.
“Who?” asked the one who looked Chechen.
“Don’t play with me, ladies. I’m an officer in the Red Army, I’m on special orders—”
“Is he an officer, too?” asked the blonde, looking at me. She wasn’t smiling, quite, but I could see the amusement in her eyes.
“No, he’s not an officer, he’s an enlisted man—”
“An enlisted man? Really? How old are you, sweetness?”
All the girls were looking at me now. In the warmth of the room, under the weight of their stares, I could feel the blood rushing to my face.
“Nineteen,” I said, standing very straight. “Twenty in April.”
“Tssk, you’re little for nineteen,” said the Chechen girl.
“Fifteen at best,” said the blonde.
Kolya racked the pistol’s slide, chambering a bullet—a dramatic sound in the quiet room. The gesture seemed overly theatrical to me, but Kolya had a way of pulling off theatrical gestures. He kept the pistol pointed at the floor and looked into each girl’s face, taking his time with each one.
“We’ve come a long way,” he said. “My friend here is tired. I’m tired. So I’ll ask you again, one last time, when are they coming?”
“They usually come around midnight,” said the chubby brunet. The other girls watched her closely but said nothing. “After they’re finished with the shelling.”
“Is that right? So after the Germans get bored firing their artillery at all of us in Piter, they come here for the night and you take care of them?”
In certain ways I am deeply stupid. I don’t say this out of modesty. I believe that I’m more intelligent than the average human being, though perhaps intelligence should not be looked at as a single gauge, like a speedometer, but as a full array of tachometers, odometers, altimeters, and the rest. My father taught me how to read when I was four, which he always bragged about to his friends, but my inability to learn French or remember the dates of Suvorov’s victories must have troubled him. He was a true polymath, able to recite any stanza of Eugene Onegin at command, fluent in French and English, good enough at theoretical physics that his professors at the university considered his abdication to poetry a minor tragedy. I wish they had been more charismatic, his professors. I wish they had taught him the consolation of physics, explained to their star student why the shape of the universe and the weight of light were more important than unrhymed verses on the swindlers and abortionists of Leningrad.
My father would have known what was happening in that farmhouse the moment he looked through the window, even at seventeen. So I felt like an idiot when I finally realized why these girls were here, who was feeding them and making sure they had enough firewood stacked beneath the eaves.
The blond girl glared at Kolya, her nostrils flaring, her skin flushing beneath her freckles.
“You . . . ,” she said, and for a moment she couldn’t say anything else, her anger was too intense to articulate. “You walk in here and condemn us? The Red Army hero? Where have you been, you and your army? The Germans came and burned everything, and where was your army? They shot my little brothers, my father, my grandfather, every man in my town, while you and your friends cowered somewhere else. . . . You come here and point your gun at me?”
“I’m not pointing my gun at anybody,” said Kolya. It was a strangely meek comment coming from him, and I knew he had already lost the fight.
“I would do anything to protect my sister,” she continued, nodding at the chubby brunet. “Anything at all. You were supposed to protect us. The glorious Red Army, Defenders of the People! Where were you?”
“We’ve been fighting them—”
“You can’t protect anybody. You abandoned us. If we don’t live in the city, we can’t be important, is that it? Let them have the peasants! Is that it?”
“Half the men in my unit died fighting for—”
“Half? If I was the general, all of my soldiers would die before we let a single Nazi into our country!”
“Well,” said Kolya, and for several seconds he said nothing else. Finally he pocketed his automatic. “I’m glad you’re not the general.”
14
Despite the rough start, it didn’t take us long to make peace with the girls. We needed one another. They hadn’t spoken to another Russian in two months, they didn’t have a radio, and they were desperate to hear news about the war. When they heard about the victories outside of Moscow, Galina, the young brunet, smiled at her sister, Nina, and nodded, as if she had predicted such a thing. The girls asked about Leningrad, but they weren’t interested in how many people died in December or how much ration bread was now allotted per month. The little country villages they were from had suffered even more than Piter, and stories of the unconquered city’s misery only bored them. Instead they wanted to know if the Winter Palace still stood (it did), if the Bronze Horseman had been moved (it had not), and whether
a certain shop on the Nevsky Prospekt, apparently famous for selling the finest shoes in Russia, had survived the attacks (neither Kolya nor I knew or cared).
We didn’t ask the girls too many questions. We knew the story well enough without the details. The men from their towns had been slaughtered. Many of the young women had been sent west, to work as slaves in German factories. Others fled to the east, walking hundreds of kilometers with their babies and their family icons, hoping they could move faster than the Wehrmacht. The prettiest girls were not allowed to follow their sisters east or west. They were reserved for the invaders’ pleasure.
We all sat on the floor near the fireplace. Our socks and gloves rested on the mantel, getting warm and dry. In exchange for information, the girls gave us cups of scalding hot tea, slices of black bread, and two baked potatoes. The potatoes had already been split open for us. Kolya took a bite and looked at me. I took a bite and looked at Galina, sweet faced and plump armed. She sat with her back against the stone ledge of the fireplace, her hands tucked under her bare legs.
“Is that butter?” I asked her.
She nodded. The potatoes tasted like real potatoes, not the sprouted, shriveled, bitter lumps we ate in Piter. A good potato with butter and salt could buy you three hand grenades or a pair of leather-and-felt boots in the Haymarket.
“Do they ever bring eggs?” asked Kolya.
“One time,” said Galina. “We made an omelet.”
Kolya tried to make eye contact with me, but I only cared about my buttered potato.
“They have a base near here?”
“The officers are in a house near the lake,” said Lara, the girl who looked Chechen but was actually half Spanish. “In Novoye Koshkino.”
“That’s a town?”
“Yes. That is my town.”
“And the officers definitely have eggs?”
Now I looked up at him. I had decided to chew the potato very slowly, to make the experience last. We had been lucky for dinner two nights in a row, the Darling soup and now these potatoes. I didn’t expect our luck to last for three nights. I chewed with precision and watched Kolya’s face for any sign of stupid intentions.
“I don’t know if they have them right now,” said Lara, laughing a little bit. “You’re really hungry for eggs?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling back at her, dimples creasing his cheeks. Kolya knew which smile flaunted his dimples best. “I’ve been craving eggs since June. Why do you think we’re out here? We’re looking for eggs!”
The girls laughed at this strange joke.
“Are you organizing the partisans?” asked Lara.
“We can’t discuss our orders,” said Kolya. “But let’s just say it’s going to be a long winter for Fritz.”
The girls glanced at one another, unimpressed by the swaggering talk. They had seen the Wehrmacht at closer range than Kolya had; they had formed their own opinions about who was going to win the war.
“How far is Novoye Koshkino?” he asked.
Lara shrugged. “Not far. Six, seven kilometers.”
“Might be a good target,” he said to me, chewing a slice of black bread, self-consciously nonchalant. “Pick off a bunch of Wehrmacht officers, leave them with a headless brigade.”
“They’re not Wehrmacht,” said Nina. Something about the way she spoke made me look up at her. She was not a fearful girl, but what she was saying frightened her. Her sister, Galina, stared into the fire, chewing on her lower lip. “They’re Einsatzgruppen.”
Russians had gotten a crash course in German since June. Dozens of words had entered our everyday vocabulary overnight: Panzers and Junkers, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, Blitzkrieg and Gestapo, and all the other capitalized nouns. Einsatzgruppen, when I first heard it, didn’t have the same sinister tang as some of the others. It sounded like the name of a finicky accountant in a bad nineteenth-century stage comedy. But the name no longer seemed funny, not after all the articles I’d read, the radio reports, and the overheard conversations. The Einsatzgruppen were Nazi death squads, killers handpicked from the ranks of the regular army, the Waffen-SS, and the Gestapo, chosen for their brutal efficiency and their pure Aryan blood. When the Germans invaded a country, the Einsatzgruppen would follow behind the combat divisions, waiting until the territory was secured before hunting down their chosen targets: Communists, Gypsies, intellectuals, and, of course, Jews. Every week Truth and Red Star printed new photographs of ditches piled high with murdered Russians, the men all shot in the back of the head after they had dug their own communal graves. There must have been high-level debates in the newspapers’ editorial offices on whether or not to run such potentially demoralizing pictures. But as morbid as the images were, they crystallized matters: this was our fate if we lost the war. These were the stakes.
“It’s the Einsatzgruppen officers who come here at night?” Kolya asked.
“Yes,” said Nina.
“I didn’t know they bothered with artillery,” I said.
“They don’t, not usually. It’s a game they play. They make bets. They aim for different buildings in the city and the bomber pilots tell them what they hit. That’s why we asked about the Winter Palace. That’s the one they all want to hit.”
I thought about the fallen Kirov, about Vera Osipovna and the Antokolsky twins, whether they had been crushed by tumbling masonry or had survived the building’s collapse, trapped beneath great slabs of reinforced concrete, only to die slowly, begging for help, as smoke and gas choked them in the rubble. Maybe they were dead because a German in the forest, sipping from a passed flask of schnapps and joking with his fellow officers, gave a young gunner the wrong coordinates, and the seventeen-centimeter shells meant for the Winter Palace fell on my ugly gray apartment building instead.
“How many come?”
Nina glanced at the other girls, but none of them returned her gaze. Galina picked at some unseen scab on the back of her hand. One of the burning logs tumbled off the andirons and Lara shoved it to the back of the fireplace with a poker. Olesya, the girl with the pigtails, hadn’t said a word since we entered the farmhouse. I never learned if she was shy, or born mute, or if the Einsatzgruppen had sliced her tongue from her mouth. She picked up our empty plates and teacups and carried them out of the room.
“It depends on the night,” Nina finally said. She spoke casually, as if we were discussing a game of cards. “Sometimes nobody comes. Sometimes two, or four. Sometimes more.”
“They drive?”
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“And they stay the night?”
“Sometimes. Not usually.”
“And they never come during the day?”
“Once or twice.”
“So, forgive me for asking, but what keeps you from walking away?”
“You think this is so easy to do?” asked Nina, annoyed by the question, by the implication.
“Not easy,” said Kolya. “But Lev and I, we left Piter at dawn and here we are.”
“These Germans you’re fighting, the ones who have taken half our country, you think they’re stupid? You think they would leave us here alone if we could just open the door and walk to Piter?”
“But why not? Why can’t you?”
I could see the affect of his questions on the girls, the anger in Nina’s eyes, the shame in Galina’s as she stared at her soft white hands. Knowing Kolya even for a few days, I believed he was genuinely curious, not trying to batter the girls with his interrogation— but still, I wished he would shut up.
“Tell them about Zoya,” Lara said.
Nina seemed annoyed by the advice. She shrugged and said nothing.
“They think we’re cowards,” Lara added.
“I don’t care what they think,” said Nina.
“Fine, I’ll tell them. There was another girl, Zoya.”
Galina stood, brushed off her nightshirt, and walked out of the great room. Lara ignored her.
“The Germans loved her. For every man who cam
e here for me, six came for her.”
Lara’s blunt telling made all of us uncomfortable. Nina clearly wanted to follow the other girls out of the room, but she stayed where she was, her eyes darting around, looking at everything except Kolya and me.
“She was fourteen. Her mother and father were both in the Party. I don’t know what they did, but I guess it was something important. The Einsatzgruppen found them and shot them in the street. They hanged the bodies from a lamppost so everyone in the town could see what happened to Communists. They brought Zoya here the same time they brought us, the end of November. Before that there were other girls. After a few months they get bored of us, you see. But Zoya was the favorite. She was so little and she was so afraid of them. I think they liked that. They would tell her, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, I won’t let them hurt you,’ things like that. But she’d seen her parents hanging from the lamppost. Any one of them who touched her, he could be the man who shot her mother and father, or ordered them shot.”
“We all have stories,” said Nina. “She panicked.”
“Yes, she panicked. She was fourteen; she panicked. It’s different for you; you have your sister. You’re not alone.”
“She had us.”
“No,” said Lara, “it’s different. Every night, after they left, she cried. For hours, I mean, until she fell asleep, and sometimes she didn’t sleep. The first week we tried to help her. We’d sit with her and hold her hand, tell her stories, anything to get her to stop crying. But it was impossible. Have you ever tried to comfort a baby with a fever? You try everything: you hold her in your arms, you rock her, you sing to her, you give her something cool to drink; doesn’t matter, nothing works. She never stopped crying. And after a week of this, we stopped feeling sorry for her. We got angry. What Nina says is true: all of us have stories. All of us lost family. None of us could sleep with Zoya crying. The second week she was here, we ignored her. If she was in one room, we went to another. She knew we were angry—she didn’t say anything, but she knew. And the crying stopped. All at once, as if she had decided that was enough. For three days she was very quiet, no more crying, just keeping to herself. And on the fourth morning she was gone. We didn’t even know until later, when the officers came. They waltzed in here drunk, singing her name. I think they used to make bets, and the winner got Zoya first. They would bring friends from other units to see her, they would take pictures of her. But she was gone and, of course, they didn’t believe us. We told them we had no idea but I would have called me a liar, too. I hope we would have lied, if we’d known. I hope we would have done that for her. I don’t know that we would have.”