“You were good,” I said. “Very quick.”
“I think he wanted to fuck me, to be honest. He had that look.”
“What I said before about Jews,” whispered Vika, touching my knee in the darkness, “just so you know—anyone the Nazis hate so much is a friend of mine.”
“He’s only half a Jew,” said Kolya. He meant it as a compliment.
“The better half,” I replied. Vika laughed. Until that moment I hadn’t known she was capable of laughter and it was a strange sound, but not because there was anything odd about her laugh. She laughed like a normal girl.
“What were you doing before the war?” I asked her.
“I was a student.”
“Mm,” said Kolya. I was hoping he would fall asleep, but he sounded alert, ready for a long conversation. “So was I. What did you study? Agriculture?”
“Why agriculture?”
“Aren’t you from a collective?”
“Do I look like I’m from a fucking collective? I’m from Archangel.”
“Ah, a northern girl. That explains everything.” He elbowed me in the side. “She really is Viking spawn. So you’re in the university up there? Studying wood sap and beavers?”
“Astronomy.”
“I’m a literature man, myself. Leningrad State.”
He rambled on about Shchedrin and Turgenev and their flaws for a few minutes before abruptly falling asleep, his long legs stretched out in front of him, forcing me to keep my own legs doubled up against my chest. The peasants began to drop off, too, though here and there I could still hear a whispered argument.
The heat from all the huddled bodies kept the shed warm enough. Before they shoved us inside I had managed to grab a few handfuls of snow to sip at in the darkness. I hadn’t eaten anything since the trapper’s cabin, where Kolya and I had shared a pocketful of walnuts we’d taken from the farmhouse, but a full day without food was nothing new. During the siege all of us in Piter became hunger experts, with different techniques to distract ourselves from our want. Back in my apartment in the Kirov I had spent many famished nights studying Tarrasch’s Three Hundred Chess Games. “Always put the rook behind the pawn,” he instructed his students. “Except when it is incorrect to do so.”
Without a chess book to study or a radio to listen to, I had to find another way to occupy my brain during the long wait for sleep. As the shed grew quieter, I became more and more aware of Vika’s body pressed up against mine. When she shifted her head to take a gulp of air from the gap in the wallboards, her hair brushed against my nose. She smelled like a wet dog. I had been raised to be finicky— my mother never tolerated a dirty dish in the sink, an unfolded towel in the bathroom, or an unmade bed. When we were little and she scrubbed us in the bathtub, her rough sponging left my skin raw. Sometimes, if my mother was getting dinner ready for a party, my father would bathe me, and it was like a reprieve from a whipping as he splashed warm water at me, distracted by whatever story he was telling. I loved “The Tale of Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea” and he would give it to me from memory time and again.
I was raised to be clean and it bothered me when others were not, when the Antokolsky twins had dirt under their nails or a teacher at school had a soup stain on his collar. But Vika’s wet dog smell did not offend me. All of us were slathered in grime by that point, of course—I must have stunk like week-old fish myself—but this wasn’t about being inured to foul odors. The tang off her body made me want to lick her clean.
“Do you think they’ll really take us to Estonia?” I asked her. Thinking about Vika had been a distraction from my hunger; now I needed a distraction from my distraction. I was not sitting in a comfortable position to have the thoughts I was having.
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve never been to Archangel. It must be very cold up there.”
In the silence of her nonanswer, I considered the possibility that I was a very boring person. Who else but a boring person would utter such meaningless trifles? If a brilliant pig, the prodigy of the barn-yard, spent his entire life learning Russian, and on finally becoming proficient the first words he heard were my own, he would wonder why he had wasted his best years when he could have been lolling in the mud, eating slop with the other dumb beasts.
“You studied astronomy?”
“Yes.”
“All right, so I have a question. There are billions of stars in the universe, right? We’re surrounded by stars. And all of them emit light, and the light travels forever. So why—”
“Why isn’t the sky bright at night?”
“Yes! You’ve thought about it, too?”
“People have been thinking about it for a long time.”
“Oh. I thought maybe I was the first.”
“No,” she said, and from the way she said it I knew she was smiling.
“So how come it’s dark at night?”
“The universe is expanding.”
“Really?”
“Mm.”
“No, I mean I knew the universe was expanding,” I lied. How could the universe expand? Wasn’t the universe everything? How does everything stretch out any farther? What does it stretch into? “I just don’t see how that explains the starlight.”
“It’s complicated,” she said. “Open your mouth.”
“What?”
“Shh. Open your mouth.”
I did as I was told and she slipped a crust of rye bread through my lips. Unlike the tooth-breaking loaves given out as rations in Piter, this tasted like real bread, like caraway seeds and yeast and scalded milk.
“Good?”
“Yes.”
Piece by piece she fed me a full slice of the bread. When she was finished, I licked my lips and waited for more, even though I knew no more was coming.
“That’s it. I have to save the rest for tomorrow. Your friend will be hungry.”
“Thank you.”
She grunted in response and shifted her position, trying to get comfortable.
“His name is Kolya. Just so you know. And I’m Lev.”
She seemed to respond to only half the comments I made and this wasn’t one of them. I had hoped she would say, ‘I’m Vika,’ so I could reply, ‘Yes, I know. Short for Viktoriya, is it?’ For some reason I thought that would be a clever remark, even though every Vika is a Viktoriya.
I listened to her breathing, trying to judge whether or not she had fallen asleep. I tested her by whispering one last question.
“So if you were an astronomy student, I don’t really understand. . . . How did you become a sniper?”
“I started shooting people.”
That sounded like the end of the conversation to me, so I shut my mouth and let her sleep.
Later in the night I woke up when one of the old peasants on the other side of the shed had a coughing fit. Listening to him hacking up phlegm that had probably been inside his lungs since the reign of Alexander III, I realized that Vika had slipped against me in her sleep, her cheek resting on my shoulder. I could feel her chest rise and fall, the tick of the inhale, the tock of the exhale. For the rest of the night I stayed as still as I possibly could, trying not to disturb her, trying very hard to keep her close.
22
The Germans woke us by prying the nails out of the planks they had hammered over the doorway. Sunlight shot through the gaps in the wallboards, tiny spotlights shining on a greasy forehead, a leather boot with the sole curling away from the toe, the horn buttons of an old man’s coat.
Vika sat next to me, chewing on her fingernails. She chewed methodically, not an anxious person with a nervous habit but a butcher sharpening his knives. At some point in the night she had moved away from me and I hadn’t felt her leave. She looked up when she sensed I was watching and there was no trace of affection in her eyes. Any glimmer of intimacy I felt in the darkness was gone in the daylight.
The door opened, the Germans shouted at us to move, and the peasants disentangled themselves fro
m one another. I saw the old man Edik press a gnarled forefinger against one nostril and blow a gob of snot to the floor, barely missing another man’s face.
“Ah,” grumbled Kolya, wrapping his scarf around his neck, “don’t you wish you grew up with our comrade farmers on a collective?”
As the prisoners began to file out the door, a man on the far side of the shed cried out. Those around him turned to see what had frightened him and soon they were anxiously whispering among themselves. From our corner all we could see were peasants’ backs. Kolya and I stood, curious about the commotion. Vika, uninterested, headed for the door.
We stepped to the other side of the shed, sidled around the muttering peasants, and looked down at the man still lying there. It was Markov’s accuser, his throat slashed, the blood long drained from his body, and his face chalk white. He must have been murdered in his sleep or we would have heard him cry out, but his eyes had popped open when the knife cut his skin; they bulged from their sockets, staring with horror at our downturned faces.
One of the peasants yanked off the dead man’s boots; a second took his sheepskin gloves; a third pulled the tooled leather belt from the belt loops on his pants. Kolya knelt down and snatched the quilted down cap before anyone else could. I turned and saw Vika adjusting her own rabbit fur cap, setting it very low on her forehead. She looked back at me for a second and walked out of the toolshed. A moment later a German trooper stepped inside, angry at the delay, ready to fire his weapon. He saw the corpse, the gaping throat, the bloodstain that started under the dead man’s back and spread across the floorboards like a pair of monstrous black wings. The murder irritated the trooper—this required an explanation for the officers. He asked a question in German, more to himself than any of us, not expecting an answer. Kolya cleared his throat and replied. I couldn’t judge Kolya’s German, but the trooper seemed amazed to hear his own language spoken by a prisoner.
The German shook his head, gave a curt response, and gestured with his thumb for us to leave the shed. When we were outside, I asked Kolya what he had said.
“I told him the peasants hate the Jews even more than your people do.”
“And what did he say?”
“ ‘There is a proper way of doing things.’ Very Germanic.” He was trying to fit his new cap onto his bare head; it wasn’t really big enough, but he managed to yank the earflaps down far enough so he could tie the drawstrings together.
“You think it’s smart to let them know you speak German? After what they did yesterday?”
“No, I think it’s dangerous. But at least now they won’t ask any more questions.”
The prisoners had been organized into a single-file line; we shuffled forward, squinting in the bright morning sun, toward a hulking, hungover trooper, his eyes still crusted with sleep, who handed each of us a single round biscuit, hard and dry as a lump of coal.
“A good sign,” muttered Kolya, tapping at his biscuit with his fingernail.
Soon we were marching south with the Gebirgsjäger company, heads bowed against the wind. Today we walked on the road, though the pavement was hidden beneath layers of tread-marked snow. A few kilometers from the schoolhouse we passed a sign for Mga and I pointed it out to Kolya.
“Huh. What day is today?”
I had to think about it, counting backward in my head to Saturday.
“Wednesday. We’re supposed to show up with the eggs tomorrow.”
“Wednesday. . . . I haven’t shit in thirteen days. Thirteen days. . . . What happens to it all? It’s not like I haven’t eaten anything. Darling soup and some sausages, those buttered potatoes with the girls, ration bread . . . What’s it doing, just sitting in my belly, a fucking lump?”
“You want to shit?” asked Edik, the old bearded peasant, who had heard Kolya’s complaints and now turned to give advice. “Boil some buckthorn bark and drink the water. Never fails.”
“Wonderful. You see any buckthorns around here?”
Edik glanced at the roadside pines and shook his head. “I’ll give a whistle if we pass any.”
“Many thanks. Maybe you can find me the boiling water, too.”
Edik had already faced front and resumed his place in the line, mindful that one of the troopers had looked our way.
“Stalin goes to visit one of the collectives outside of Moscow,” began Kolya in his joke-telling voice. “Wants to see how they’re getting on with the latest Five-Year Plan. ‘Tell me, comrade,’ he asks one farmer. ‘How did the potatoes do this year?’ ‘Very well, Comrade Stalin. If we piled them up, they would reach God.’ ‘But God does not exist, Comrade Farmer.’ ‘Nor do the potatoes, Comrade Stalin.’ ”
“Old one.”
“Jokes only get old if they’re good. Otherwise, who keeps telling them?”
“People like you who aren’t funny?”
“I can’t help it if you never laugh. I make the girls laugh, that’s what matters.”
“You think she did it?” I asked him. He glanced at me, confused for a moment, until he saw that I was watching Vika, who marched apart from us today, near the front of the procession.
“Of course she did it.”
“I just . . . She was squeezed up against me all night. When I fell asleep, her head was on my shoulder—”
“That’s as close to sex as you’ve ever been. You see that? You’ve listened to me, you’ve learned.”
“—and somehow she managed to get away from me, and I’m a very light sleeper, crawl around thirty peasants in total darkness, cut the man’s throat, and come back? Without waking a single person?”
Kolya nodded, still watching Vika, who walked alone, scanning the roadside and the position of the German troops.
“She’s a talented killer.”
“Especially for an astronomer.”
“Ha. Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“You think she’s lying?”
“I’m sure she went to university for a while. That’s where they recruit. But come, little lion, you think she learned to shoot like that in astronomy class? She’s NKVD. They have agents in every partisan cell.”
“You don’t know that.”
He stopped for a few seconds to kick one boot against the other, knocking off snow trapped in the sole, holding my arm to balance himself.
“I don’t know anything. Maybe your name isn’t Lev. Maybe you’re the greatest lover in the history of Russia. But I consider the facts and I make an educated guess. The partisans are local fighters. That’s why they’re so effective—they know the land better than the Germans ever will. They have friends in the area, family, people who can give them food, a safe place to sleep. Now, tell me, how far are we from Archangel?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know, either. Seven, eight hundred kilometers? The German border is probably closer. You think the local partisans just decided to trust some girl who showed up out of nowhere? No, she was sent to them.”
She plodded through the snow ahead, her hands jammed into the pockets of her coveralls. From behind she looked like a twelve-year-old boy wearing a stolen mechanic’s uniform.
“I wonder if she has any tits,” said Kolya.
His crudity annoyed me, though I had wondered the same thing. Judging her body beneath the oversize coveralls was impossible, but from what I could tell she was curveless and slender as a blade of grass.
He noticed the expression on my face and smiled.
“Did I offend you? I apologize. You really like this one, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I won’t talk about her that way anymore. Will you forgive me?”
“You can talk about her any way you want.”
“No, no. I understand now. But listen, this isn’t an easy fish to hook.”
“Are you going to give me more advice from your made-up book?”
“Just listen. Make your jokes, fine, but I know more about these things than you. My guess is she was a little bit
in love with that Korsakov. And he was a tougher man than you, so you can’t impress her with toughness.”
“She wasn’t in love with him.”
“Just a little bit.”
“I never thought I was going to impress her with toughness. Do you think I’m that stupid?”
“So the question is, what do you impress her with?”
Here Kolya went silent for a long time, eyes scrunched up, forehead creased with worry lines as he pondered my assets. Before he could think of any we heard shouts behind us and turned to see the troopers waving us to the side of the road. A convoy of Mercedes half-tracks with tarpaulin-covered flatbeds rumbled past, hauling provisions and materiel to the front lines. We stood watching for five minutes and still there was no end to the slow-rolling convoy. The Germans could not have cared less about impressing their prisoners, but I was impressed. Fuel rationing in Piter meant that I rarely saw more than four or five moving vehicles in a day. I had already counted forty of the hybrid trucks, with their rubber tires in front and tank tracks in the rear, three-pointed stars on their grilles and white-bordered black crosses painted on their backsides.
Behind the half-tracks came eight-wheeled armored cars, caterpillar-tracked heavy mortars, and light trucks carrying troopers seated on parallel benches, faces weary and unshaven, rifles strapped to their shoulders, huddled up in their white anoraks.
We heard curses from the front of the convoy, drivers leaning out of their windows to find out what the trouble was. One of the self-propelled artillery pieces had slipped a tread, and while its operators scurried to fix it, the howitzer blocked everything behind it. The infantrymen took the opportunity to jump out of their trucks and piss along the side of the road. Soon there was a line of several hundred troopers and half-track drivers and artillerymen stamping their boots and hollering to their friends, leaning back to see who could launch their stream the farthest. Steam rose from the yellow snow.
“Look at these ass-lickers pissing on our land,” muttered Kolya. “They won’t be laughing so loud when I squat down to shit in the middle of Berlin.” The thought cheered him. “Maybe that’s why I can’t squeeze one out. My bowels are waiting for victory.”