Vika scrambled down from the boulder. Korsakov walked over to confer with her. As he passed us he muttered to Kolya, “So much for Novoye Koshkino.”
“We’re not going?”
“Why would we? The whole point was to get there before sunrise and hunt for Einsatz. You smell that smoke? The Einsatz are hunting us.”
18
The partisans kept a safe house a few kilometers inland from Lake Ladoga, a long-deserted trapper’s cabin on a hillside dense with fir trees. We finally got there an hour before dawn, the sky shifting patiently from black to gray, a light snow falling as the air brightened. Everyone seemed to think the snow was a good omen, covering our tracks and signaling a warmer day.
On the way to the cabin we had walked along a ridgeline overlooking another burning village. The fire was silent, the little houses collapsing into the flames without complaint, flocks of sparks rising to the sky. At a distance it seemed beautiful, and I thought it was strange that powerful violence is often so pleasing to the eye, like tracer bullets at night. As we passed the village we heard a burst of gunfire, no more than a kilometer away, seven or eight machine guns firing in concert. We all knew what the shots signified and we all kept walking.
The trapper’s cabin looked like it had been hammered together from old planks and rusted nails by a man with little skill for carpentry and no patience for the job. The door hung crooked on its hinges. There were no windows, just a pipe jutting out of the rooftop to vent smoke, and no floor but hard-packed dirt. Inside the smell of human shit was almost too much to stand. The walls were gouged as if by claws, and I wondered if the ghosts of all the skinned martens and foxes still haunted the place, eager to flay their guests alive when the candles burned out.
As cold as it was outside, inside offered only respite from the wind and no added warmth. Korsakov elected one unlucky man to take the first guard shift. The partisan in the Finnish ski patrol uniform removed his pack and set up a little “bourgeois stove,” filling it with scraps of wood that they had left in the cabin earlier. When the stove was lit, all of us crowded as close together as we could, thirteen men and a woman—or twelve men, a woman, and a boy, if we were being honest about it. I wondered, for the hundredth time that night, what she would look like with the filthy coveralls stripped off, her pale dirty skin stretched taut over the blue tracery of her veins. Did she have breasts or was she flat chested as a boy? Her hips were as narrow as mine, I was fairly sure of that, but even with her cropped hair and mud-stained neck there was something undeniably feminine about that proud jutting lower lip. Did the other men in the group lust for her, too, or did they all see her as Korsakov saw her, as a sexless sniper with an uncanny eye? Were they idiots or was I?
The shit stench made my eyes water, but soon smoke from the stove camouflaged the worst of the smell, and the fire and our body heat made the cabin comfortable enough. At that point I could have slept anywhere, and with my father’s navy coat laid flat beneath me and my folded scarf as a pillow, for once I slipped into unconsciousness within seconds of resting my head.
A moment later Kolya nudged me.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, are you awake?”
I kept my eyes clenched shut, hoping he would leave me alone.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked. His mouth was next to my ear, allowing him to whisper directly into my skull without bothering any of the others. I wanted to punch him to make him shut up, but I did not want him to punch me back.
“No,” I said. “Go to sleep.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you. Even if I thought we were dead, it doesn’t matter. It was wrong of me.”
“Thank you,” I told him, and shifted onto my side, hoping he would get the hint.
“You like the title, though? The Courtyard Hound? Do you know what it means?”
“Please . . . please let me sleep.”
“I’m sorry. Sleep, of course.”
Thirty seconds passed in silence, but I could not relax because I knew he was fully awake, staring at the ceiling, waiting to ask me another question.
“You want to know the truth, don’t you? About why I left my battalion.”
“You can tell me tomorrow.”
“I hadn’t been with a girl in four months. My balls were ringing like a couple of church bells. You think I’m joking? I’m not like you. I don’t have your discipline. I fucked my first girl three days after the first time I came. Twelve years old, didn’t have a hair on my sack, but I stuck it in Klava Stepanovich down in the boiler room, boing boing boing.”
Boing boing boing?
“I get this hunger, I’m telling you. I go a week without it and I can’t concentrate, my brain doesn’t work, I’m walking around the trenches with a hard-on out to here.”
Kolya’s hot breath was on my ear and I tried to turn farther away, but we were all squeezed together on the earth floor like cigarettes in a pack.
“We had a party planned for New Year’s Eve, the whole battalion. There was vodka; there was going to be some singing; I heard a rumor someone found a few pigs stashed away in a barn somewhere and we were going to roast them. All-night affair, right? So I figured, this is good, let them celebrate with their vodka and their pigs, I’ve got other business. We were less than an hour from Piter, by car. I had a friend delivering messages to headquarters. He was going to be in the city for three, four hours. Perfect. So I ride with him, he drops me off at a friend’s building—”
“Sonya?”
“No, a girl named Yulia. Not the most beautiful girl in the world, not even pretty, really. But listen, Lev, this girl made me hard when she filed her nails. Her pussy was magic. It really was. She lived on the sixth floor and the whole way up I’m getting myself ready. Already decided the position—just toss her over the back of the sofa, ass in the air, go in deep. I don’t know if you’ve got much going on downstairs, by the way, but if you don’t, that’s a good position for you. Gets you all the way in. Anyway, I finally get to her apartment, I’m starting to unbuckle my belt, I bang on the door, an old woman opens up. Barely bigger than a midget this woman, looks about two hundred years old. I tell her I’m a friend of Yulia’s and she says, ‘God forgive me, Yulia’s been dead a month now.’ God forgive me! Fuck! So I say my sorrys to this crone, give her a piece of bread because she’s barely able to stand up, and run downstairs. Time’s running out. There’s another girl who lives close by, one of the ballerinas I told you about. A little bit of an ice queen, but the best legs in Piter. I have to climb over a gate to get into her building, nearly get an iron spike up my asshole, but I make it, get to her apartment door, bang on it, ‘It’s me, Nikolai Alexandrovich, let me in!’ Door opens, her fat rat-eyed husband’s staring me down. Vile turd’s never home, except this time. Party man, of course, usually down at the offices figuring out new regulations for the Army, but tonight he decides to stay home and torture his wife for New Year’s. ‘Who are you? What is this?’ he says to me, indignant, as if I’ve somehow insulted him by banging on his door and demanding his wife’s wet twat on a plate. I wanted to knock him on his dimpled ass, but that would have been the end of me, so I give him a salute, the civilian cunt, tell him I knocked on the wrong door, and disappear. Now I’m fucked. The only other girl I know on that side of town is Roza, but she’s a professional and I’ve got no money on me. But I’m a good customer, maybe she trusts me, maybe she’ll take whatever food I’ve got left in exchange, right? It’s a couple of kilometers away. I’m sprinting now, sweating, first sweat since October. There’s not much time left before my friend’s driving back. I make it there, out of breath, up four flights to Roza’s apartment; door’s unlocked, I let myself in, and there’s three soldiers waiting in her kitchen, passing around a bottle of vodka. I can hear her groaning away in the other room and these drunk morons are singing peasant songs and slapping each other on the back. ‘Don’t worry,’ says the one who’s last in line, ‘I’ll be quick.’
“I offered them money to cut the li
ne, except I didn’t have any money and they weren’t such morons they were going to take a note from me. I told them I had to get back to battalion and one of them said, ‘It’s New Year’s Eve! They’re all drunk! Long as you get back by morning you’ll be fine.’ That sounded right to me, and they kept passing the bottle around, so I drank with them and pretty soon I was singing their fucking peasant songs louder than all of them. And an hour later I finally got to lie down with Roza. She’s a sweet girl—I don’t care what anyone says about whores—she let me in for the rest of the bread I had in my pocket, and it wasn’t a lot. But she said her pussy was hurting so she sucked me off instead. Fifteen minutes later I’m ready again, she grins and says, ‘Oh, I love you young ones,’ and lets me go inside her, very slow, very gentle. And then again, half an hour later. I must have sprayed a liter of come inside her, north and south.”
I had the uncomfortable feeling that Kolya was making himself aroused all over again as he told the story.
“So you missed your ride back.”
“Oh, I missed it by hours. But I wasn’t worried, I’d find another car heading back to the battalion. I knew most of those boys delivering messages, it wouldn’t be a tough trick. You should have seen me walking out of Roza’s building. Different human being from the one who walked in. Relaxed, big smile on my face, bit of bounce in my stride. I step out the front door, I’m practically skipping down the sidewalk, and an NKVD patrol, four of the dirty bitches, stops me. Man asks to see my LOA papers. I don’t have any LOA papers, I tell him. I’m delivering messages for General Stelmakh—the man’s planning a battle, he needs rifles, he needs mortars, he doesn’t have time to sign some shit-stained LOA. Stelmakh’s one of your tribe, I think. Did you know that?”
“Does this story ever end? Are you going to keep talking for the rest of my life?”
“This little glorified policeman interrogating me, he’s still got a Hitler mustache. You’d think everyone in Russia with a Hitler mustache would have shaved it by now, but no, this dank cunt thinks it’s a good look for him. He asks me why I’m delivering messages from General Stelmakh to an apartment building in the Vyborg section. I decide a little bit of truth never hurt, decide to appeal to the man’s humanity. I give him a wink, tell him I got myself a bit of ass while I waited for my ride back to the general’s HQ. You’d think he’d grin and slap my back and tell me to get my LOA in order next time I left my battalion. Four months I’d been on the front line while this mustachioed dwarf minced around Piter, arresting soldiers for bringing a bit of meat home to their parents, a bag of rice. This was my mistake. I appealed to a bureaucrat’s humanity. He has his men slap the manacles around my wrists and then he gives me this little superior smile and tells me General Stelmakh is in Tikhvin, two hundred kilometers away, he’s just won an important battle.”
“You shouldn’t have said Stelmakh. That was stupid of you.”
“Of course it was stupid! My cock was still wet!” Several of the partisans muttered at Kolya to shut up and he lowered his voice. “My brain wasn’t working right. I couldn’t believe this man was accusing me. Do you understand how fast it changes? I was a soldier in good standing in the afternoon, and there I am, five hours later, accused of desertion. I thought they’d shoot me right there in the street. But they took me to the Crosses instead. And then I met you, my moody little Hebrew.”
“How did Yulia die?”
“What? I don’t know. I suppose she starved.”
We lay quietly for several minutes, listening to the men around us sleep, some of them quiet, some rasping and nasal, some shooshing like wind in a chimney. I tried to distinguish Vika’s breathing from the others’, curious what sounds she made in the night, but it was impossible to tell.
I had been annoyed with Kolya for keeping me awake with his endless talk, but in the silence I was suddenly lonely.
“Are you asleep?” I asked.
“Hm?” he murmured, groggy, the fast sleeper—his story told— already sailing away into his dreams.
“Why is it dark at night?”
“What?”
“If there are billions of stars, and most of them are just as bright as the sun, and light travels forever, how comes it’s not bright all the time?”
I wasn’t really expecting an answer. I figured he would snort and tell me to go to sleep, or give some pat reply like, “It’s dark at night because the sun is down.” Instead he sat up and stared down at me. I could see the frown on his face by the fluttering light of the bourgeois stove.
“That’s an excellent question,” he said. He thought about it some more, peering into the darkness outside of the stove’s circle of light. Finally, he shook his head, yawned, and lowered himself to the ground again. Ten seconds later he was asleep, snoring, the whoosh of his inhalations followed by the chuffing of his exhales.
I was still awake when the guard outside came in from his shift, woke up his replacement, refilled the stove with some twigs he’d gathered, and lay down in the circle of huddled bodies. For another hour I listened to the wood knots popping, thinking about starlight and Vika, until I finally fell asleep and dreamed of a sky raining fat girls.
19
The partisan on guard duty woke us before noon, crashing in through the cabin door, trying to keep his voice down despite his panic.
“They’re coming,” he said. We were on our feet before he could get his second sentence out, gathering our gear, instantly alert with the news of real danger. We had slept in our boots and were ready to move. “Looks like a whole company. With prisoners.”
Korsakov slipped his rifle strap over his shoulder. “Infantry?”
“Didn’t see any armor.”
Thirty seconds later we streamed out the crooked door into the hostile sunshine. The windowless cabin had been dark as a crypt and I could barely open my eyes in the noontime glare. We followed Korsakov and the unspoken order was simple: run.
We never had a chance. Even before the last man was out of the cabin I could hear German voices shouting. I became like an animal, with no thoughts in my head, nothing but fear to drive me. The air had grown warmer and the snow was heavy and wet, grabbing at my boots, sucking me down.
When I was nine, a delegation of famous French Communists visited Piter and the Party spruced up the streets. Workmen with cigarettes dangling from their lips poured fresh tar onto Voinova Street and leveled it with long-handled trowels, making my street look like a boulevard of melted chocolate. I had been watching all morning with the Antokolsky twins, just in front of the Kirov gates. I don’t remember anything triggering our collective decision. Without saying a word, without even a glance at one another, we pulled off our shoes, tossed them into the courtyard, and sprinted across the street. We could have burned the soles off our feet, but we didn’t care; we left our footprints in the soft road and kept running when we reached the far side, while the workmen cursed and shook their trowels at us, not caring enough to chase us, knowing we could never be caught.
My mother needed an hour that night to scrub my feet clean, angrily scouring them with soap and pumice. My father stood by the window, his hands behind his back, suppressing a smile as he looked down at Voinova. Beneath the streetlights the road was glossy and perfect, save for three pairs of little footprints marring the surface like seagull tracks on the wet sand.
Running across drying tar was not like running through the melting snow; I don’t know why the memories linger side by side, but they do.
Gunshots echoed among the firs. One whistled past, so loud and close I touched the side of my head to see if I’d been hit. I saw the man in front of me tumble to the ground and I could tell from the way he fell that he would never stand again. I could not move any faster and I could not be more afraid; watching the man go down changed nothing in me. At that moment I was no longer Lev Abramovich Beniov. I did not have a living mother in Vyazma or a dead father in some unmarked patch of dirt. I was not descended from black-hatted Torah scholars on my father
’s side or petit bourgeois Muscovites on my mother’s. If a German had caught me by the collar at that moment, shaken me, and demanded my name in perfect Russian, I could not have answered him, could not have framed a single sentence to plead for mercy.
I saw Korsakov turn to fire at our pursuers. Before he could let off a shot, a bullet cleaved his lower jaw from his skull. He blinked, his eyes still alert though half his face was gone. I ran past him, up a steep ravine and down the other side, where a stream had formed in a narrow gully, the meltwater gurgling as it snaked past tumbled rocks and fallen branches.
Following some unarticulated instinct, I veered off my course to follow the stream, running downhill along the slippery stones, faster now that I was out of the snow. My body waited for the inevitable bullet, the railroad spike hammered between my shoulder blades, slamming me face-first into the cold water. Despite everything, I was strangely nimble, my feet picking their next step without consulting my brain, my boots splashing in icy water, never stumbling.
I don’t know how long I ran or how far, but finally I had to stop. I ducked behind the trunk of an ancient larch, its drooping branches heavy with melting snow, and sat in the shadows trying to breathe. My legs would not stop trembling even after I pressed my mittened hands down on my thighs to calm them. When my lungs stopped hurting, I peered around the trunk and looked uphill.
Three men were coming my way, rifles in hand, jogging at a deliberate rate. None of them wore German uniforms. The closest man wore a ski soldier’s winter whites, and I realized it was the partisan I had seen sucking a dead man’s wedding ring off his finger. Markov, the others had called him. I loved him at that moment, loved his blunted red face, the deep-set eyes that had seemed murderous the night before.
Behind him came Kolya and I laughed aloud at the sight of him. I had met him on Friday night and didn’t even like him until Monday, and now, Tuesday afternoon, seeing him alive made me want to cry with happiness. He had lost his Astrakhan hat during his flight and his blond hair hung over his forehead until he pushed it back. He turned to say something to the man beside him, grinning as he spoke, and I knew he thought he was making a very funny joke.