The gunfire had ended abruptly. The car engine still hummed, but I couldn’t hear the wheels turning. The German voices had gone silent as suddenly as the bullets. Kolya glanced at me and slowly pulled the door open, just enough to peer through. The moon was high and bright, lighting the brutal landscape: Einsatzkommandos in white anoraks sprawled facedown in the snow and a Kübelwagen rolling slowly down the unshoveled driveway, windows shot out, engine block smoking. The dead man in the passenger seat sagged halfway out of the side window, his fingers still wrapped around his machine pistol. A second Kübel, parked at a jaunty angle beside the farmhouse, had never moved. Two Germans lay halfway between it and the house, their skulls pouring dark junk onto the snow. I had just enough time to register the precision of the shots, the superb accuracy of the sniper, when a bullet flew through the gap between Kolya’s head and mine, twanging in the air like a plucked string.
Both of us tumbled backward and Kolya kicked the door shut with his boot. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled toward the shattered window beside the front door.
“We’re Russians! Hey! Hey! We’re Russians!”
For a few seconds there was silence, before a distant voice responded: “You look like a fucking Fritz to me!”
Kolya laughed, punching me in the shoulder in his happiness.
“My name is Nikolai Alexandrovich Vlasov!” he shouted toward the window. “From Engels Prospekt!”
“There’s an original name! Any Nazi with a few years of Russian could come up with that!”
“Engels Prospekt!” shouted another voice. “There’s an Engels Prospekt in every fucking town in the country!”
Still laughing, Kolya grabbed hold of my coat and shook me, for no other reason than his blood was spiked with adrenaline, he was alive and happy and he needed to shake something. He crawled closer to the broken window, skirting the shards of broken glass lying on the floor.
“Your mother’s cunt has a peculiar tubular shape!” he yelled. “Nonetheless I tolerate its effluvium and enthusiastically lick its inner folds whenever she demands!”
A very long silence followed this sentence, but Kolya did not seem concerned. He was chuckling at his own joke, winking at me like an old veteran of the Turkish war exchanging insults with his buddies at the bathhouse.
“How about that?” he added at the top of his lungs. “You think anyone with a few years of Russian could come up with that?”
“Which one of our mothers are you describing?” The voice sounded closer now.
“Not the one who shoots so well. One of you is a genius with the rifle.”
“You have a gun on you?” asked the voice outside.
“A Tokarev pistol.”
“And your little friend?”
“Just a knife.”
“Both of you step outside. Keep your hands up high or my friend will shoot your tiny balls off.”
Lara and Nina had crawled into the front hallway during this conversation, their nightshirts sequined with bits of glass from the blown-out windows.
“Did they kill them?” whispered Nina.
“All six,” I told her. I thought the girls would be pleased, but when they heard the news they exchanged worried looks. Their life of the past few months was over now. They would have to run without knowing where their next meal would come from or where they would sleep. Millions of Russians could say the same, but things were worse for the girls. If the Germans caught them again, they would suffer a harsher punishment than Zoya had.
As Kolya reached for the doorknob, Lara put her hand on his leg, making him wait for a moment.
“Don’t,” she said. “They won’t trust you.”
“Why wouldn’t they trust me? I’m a soldier of the Red Army.”
“Yes, and they’re not. There isn’t a Red Army unit within thirty kilometers of here. They’ll think you’re a deserter.”
He smiled and covered her hand with his own.
“Do I look like a deserter to you? Don’t worry. I have papers.”
Papers did not impress Lara. As Kolya reached again for the doorknob, she crawled closer to the broken window.
“Thank you for rescuing us, comrades!” she shouted. “These two in here are our friends! Please don’t shoot them!”
“You think I would have missed his fat blond head if I wanted to hit it? Tell the joker to come outside.”
Kolya opened the door and stepped outside, his hands held high in the air. He squinted across the snow, but the fighters were still out of sight.
“Tell the little one to come out here, too.”
Lara and Nina looked frightened for me, but Lara nodded, telling me with an encouraging nod that it would be all right. I felt a brief surge of anger for the girl: why couldn’t she step outside? Why did they have to be here at all? If the farmhouse had been empty, Kolya and I could have slept through the night and left in the morning, rested and dry. The thought passed through my head, immediately followed by guilt for its absurdity.
Nina squeezed my hand and smiled at me. She was easily the finest-looking girl who had ever smiled at me. I imagined describing the scene for Oleg Antokolsky: Nina’s little white hand gripping mine, her pale eyelashes fluttering as she stared at me, worried for my safety. Even as the moment passed I was narrating it for my friend, forgetting for the moment that Oleg would probably never hear the story, that the odds were strong he lay buried beneath the rubble on Voinova Street.
I tried to smile back at Nina, failed, and walked out the door with my hands in the air. Since the war began I had read hundreds of accounts of the country’s heroes in action. All of them refused to acknowledge they were heroes. They were honest citizens of the Motherland, protecting her from the Fascist rapists. When asked in interviews why they had rushed the pillbox, or clambered onto a tank to drop a grenade down the hatch, all responded that they hadn’t even thought about it, they were just doing what any other good Russian would have done.
Heroes and fast sleepers, then, can switch off their thoughts when necessary. Cowards and insomniacs, my people, are plagued by babble on the brain. When I stepped out of the door, I thought, I am standing in the front yard of a farmhouse outside Berezovka and partisans are pointing their rifles at my head.
Judging from the broad smile on Kolya’s face, he thought nothing at all. We stood side by side while our unseen interrogators looked us over. Our overcoats were back in the farmhouse and we shivered in the night air, the cold reaching down to our bones.
“Prove you’re one of us.” The voice seemed to come from beside one of the snow-covered hay bales, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I could see a man kneeling in the shadows, a rifle raised to his shoulder. “Shoot each of the Germans in the head.”
“That’s not much of a test,” said Kolya. “They’re already dead.”
The man’s ability to make a bad situation worse no longer surprised me. Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?
“We’re still alive,” said the partisan in the shadows, “because we shoot them even when we think they’re dead.”
Kolya nodded. He walked over to the idling Kübel, which had finally rolled to a stop, its tires buried in a meter of snow.
“We’re watching you,” advised the partisan. “A bullet in every head.”
Kolya shot the dead driver and the dead passenger, the muzzle flashing in the night like a photographer’s camera. He turned and walked through the snow, stopping to shoot the Germans lying in their awkward poses.
At the sixth man, as he stooped to press the pistol to the fallen Einsatzkommando’s skull, he heard something. He got down on his knees and listened for a moment before standing up and calling out.
“This one’s still alive.”
“That’s why you’re going to shoot him.”
“Maybe he has something useful to tell us.”
“Does he look like he’s able to talk?”<
br />
Kolya turned the German onto his back. The man moaned softly. Pink foam bubbled from his mouth.
“No,” said Kolya.
“That’s because we shot his lungs out. Now do him a favor and end him.”
Kolya stood, aimed his pistol, and shot the dying man in the forehead.
“Holster your gun.”
Kolya did as he was told and the partisans emerged from their hiding places, stepping out from behind the hay bales, climbing over the low stone walls separating the farm fields, trudging through the snow at the edge of the woods. A dozen men in long coats, their rifles in their hands, their breath rising above their heads as they closed in on the farmhouse.
Most of them looked like farmers, fur-lined hats pulled down to their eyebrows, faces broad and flat and unfriendly. There was no common uniform. Some wore Red Army leather boots, others walked in gray felt; some wore tan overcoats, others gray. One man was dressed in what looked like a Finnish ski troop’s winter whites. Walking in front was the man I took to be their leader, a week’s worth of beard darkening his jaw, an old hunting rifle strapped to his shoulder. Later that night we learned his name was Korsakov. If he had a first name and a patronymic, we never heard them. Korsakov probably wasn’t his real name, anyway—the partisans were notoriously paranoid about their identities, with good reason. The Einsatzkommandos responded to local resistance by publicly executing the families of known resisters.
Korsakov and two of his comrades approached us while the other partisans searched the dead Germans, taking their machine pistols and ammunition, their letters and flasks and wristwatches. The man in the ski outfit knelt beside one of the bodies and tried to tug a gold wedding band from the corpse’s ring finger. When it wouldn’t come off, the partisan stuck the finger in his mouth. He saw me staring at him and winked, pulling the wet finger from his lips and sliding the ring free.
“Don’t worry about them,” said Korsakov, when he saw what I was watching. “Worry about me. Why are you two here?”
“They’re here to organize the partisans,” said Nina. She and Lara had stepped out of the farmhouse in their bare feet, their arms wrapped around themselves, the wind blowing their hair.
“Is that right? Do we seem unorganized?”
“They’re friends. They were going to kill the Germans if you didn’t show up.”
“Were they? How kind.” He turned away from her and called out to the partisans searching the dead men in the car. “What do we have?”
“Small fish,” a bearded partisan shouted back, holding up the insignia he’d torn from the officer’s collars. “Leutnants and Oberleutnants.”
Korsakov shrugged and shifted his gaze back to Nina, appraising her pale calves and the shape of her hips below her nightshirt.
“Get back inside,” he told her. “Put some clothes on. The Germans are dead; you can quit being a whore.”
“Don’t you call me that.”
“I’ll call you whatever I want. Get back inside.”
Lara took Nina’s hand and dragged her back to the farmhouse. Kolya watched them go and turned to the partisan leader.
“You’re unkind, comrade.”
“I’m not your comrade. And if it weren’t for me, they’d have German cocks halfway up them right now.”
“All the same—”
“Shut your mouth. You’re wearing an Army uniform, but you’re not with the Army. You’re a deserter?”
“We’re here on orders. I have papers in my coat, inside the house.”
“Every collaborator I ever met had papers.”
“I have a letter from Colonel Grechko of the NKVD, authorizing us to come here.”
Korsakov grinned and turned to his men.
“And Colonel Grechko, he has authority out here? I love these policemen in the city, giving us orders.”
One of the men standing beside him, a rangy fellow with close-set eyes, laughed loudly, showing us his bad teeth. The other man did not laugh. He wore winter camouflage coveralls patterned with brown and white swirls, a trompe l’oeil of dead leaves. His eyes peeked out below the fringe of his rabbit fur cap. He was small, smaller than me, and young, with no trace of stubble on his pink cheeks. His features were very fine, the bones of his face precisely defined, his lips full, twisted into a smirk now as he stared back at me.
“You see something strange?” he asked, and I realized it wasn’t a man speaking at all.
“You’re a girl,” Kolya blurted out, staring at her. I felt stupid for both of us.
“Don’t look so shocked,” said Korsakov. “She’s our best shot. Those Fritzes over there with half their heads? That’s because of her.”
Kolya whistled, glancing from her to the dead Germans to the fringe of woods at the edge of the farm fields.
“From over there? What is that, four hundred meters? On moving targets?”
The girl shrugged. “You don’t have to lead them so much when they’re running through snow.”
“Vika’s after Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s record,” said the man with the under bite. “She wants to be the number-one woman sniper.”
“How many is Mila up to now?” asked Kolya.
“Red Star says two hundred,” Vika replied with a little roll of her eyes. “The Army gives her a confirmed kill every time she blows her nose.”
“That’s a German rifle, isn’t it?”
“K ninety-eight,” she said, slapping the barrel with her palm. “Best rifle in the world.”
Kolya nudged me with his elbow and whispered under his breath. “I’ve got a little bit of a hard-on.”
“What’s that?” asked Korsakov.
“I said my cock’s going to fall off if we stand out here much longer—pardon my language.” He gave Vika an old-fashioned bow before turning back to Korsakov. “You want to see my papers, let’s go inside and see the papers. You want to shoot your countrymen here in the snow, all right, shoot us. But enough of this standing in the cold.”
The partisan clearly preferred the idea of shooting Kolya to looking at his papers, but killing an Army man was no small matter, especially with so many witnesses. He didn’t want to give in too quickly, either, and lose face in front of his men. So the two of them stood there glaring at each other for another ten seconds while I bit my lip to keep my teeth from chattering.
Vika broke the stalemate. “These two are falling in love,” she said. “Look at them! They can’t decide if they want to fight each other or roll naked in the snow.”
The other partisans laughed and Vika walked toward the farmhouse, ignoring Korsakov’s glare.
“I’m hungry,” she said. “Those girls in there look like they’ve been eating pork chops all winter.”
The men followed her, carrying their loot, eager to get out of the cold and into the house. I watched Vika stomping her boots in front of the door, ridding her soles of snow, and I wondered what her body looked like beneath those winter camouflage coveralls, beneath the layers of wool and felt.
“Is she yours?” Kolya asked Korsakov, after Vika had stepped inside the farmhouse.
“Are you joking? That one’s more boy than girl.”
“Good,” said Kolya, punching me in the arm. “Because I think my friend here has a crush.”
Korsakov glanced at me and began to laugh. I always hated when people laughed at me, but this time I welcomed his amusement. I knew he wasn’t going to kill us.
“Best of luck to you, boy. Just remember, she can shoot your eyes out from half a kilometer.”
16
Korsakov had given his men an hour to warm up and feed themselves, and now they were sprawled across the great room, their socks hanging from the fireplace screen, their overcoats spread out on the floor. Vika lay on her back on a horsehair sofa beneath the mounted ibex head, her ankles crossed, her fingers playing with the rabbit fur cap resting on her chest. Her dark red hair was cut short as a boy’s, so dirty it clumped together in spikes and whorls. She stared into the ibex’s gl
ass eyes, fascinated by the murdered animal—wondering about the hunt, I imagined, about the hunter’s shot, if it was a clean kill or if the wounded beast ran for miles, not understanding that death had already burrowed into his muscle and bone, a tumbling slug that could not be outrun.
I was sitting on a window ledge watching her and trying to make sure she didn’t know I was watching her. She had stripped off her coveralls to let them dry. She wore a heavy wool woodcutter’s shirt that once belonged to a man twice her size and two pairs of long underwear. Unlike most redheads, she didn’t have a single freckle. She worried at her upper lip with the bottom row of her crooked little teeth. I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was no man’s idea of a pinup girl—underfed as she was, looking like she’d spent the last week sleeping in the forest—but I wanted to see her naked. I wanted to unbutton the woodcutter’s shirt, toss it aside, and lick her pale belly, strip off the long underwear and kiss her thin thighs.
This graphic daydream was a departure for me. Had Kolya’s pornographic playing cards riled my imagination? Usually my fantasies were chaste, anachronistic—I’d envision Vera Osipovna, fully clothed, giving me a cello recital in the loneliness of her bedroom, and afterward I would praise her playing, impressing her with my eloquence and mastery of the musicians’ vocabulary. The fantasy would end with some strong kissing, Vera’s out-flung leg knocking over the music stand, her face hot and flushed as I flashed a mysterious smile and left her standing, her collar askew, one button of her shirt undone.
My fantasies generally ended before getting to the sex because I was afraid of sex. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t even know enough to fake knowing how to do it. I understood the basic anatomy, but the geometry of the act confused me, and without a father or an older brother or any close friends with experience, there was no one around to ask.
But there was nothing chaste in my hunger for Vika. I wanted to jump on her, my pants around my ankles. She could show me where everything went and once we were sorted, her fingers with their dirty, bitten nails would rake my shoulders; her head would tilt back, exposing her long white throat and the tremor of pulse below her jaw; her heavy eyelids would open wide, pupils constricting in the blue of her eyes until they were the size of the dot above the i.