“On the endless fucking march to here. You learn how to jerk it on the move when you’re in the army. Hand in the pocket, it’s no big trick.”
“You jerked off to Vika while we were walking last night?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you. You were sleepwalking half the night, I was bored, I had to do something. Now you’re angry. Don’t be angry with me.”
“Of course I’m not angry.”
The driver hit the brakes hard and Kolya would have tumbled off the backseat if I hadn’t been holding him. I sat up and peered through the windshield. We had reached the edge of the sprawling Kirov Works, a city in itself, where tens of thousands labored night and day. Artillery shells and Luftwaffe bombs had flattened some of the brick-walled machine shops; empty windows throughout the complex had been covered with plastic tarps; ice-filled craters pockmarked the yards. But even now, with thousands of workers evacuated and thousands more dead or waiting to die on the front lines, even now the chimneys still smoked, the alleyways bustled with women pushing carts filled with coal, the air was loud with the clamor of whirring lathes and rolling mills and hydraulic presses shaping steel.
A line of newly completed T-34 tanks had trundled out of an assembly shop as big as an airplane hangar. Eight of the tanks, their steel unpainted, rumbled slowly over the dirty snow, blocking off the road.
“Why did we stop?” Kolya asked. His voice sounded much weaker than it had a minute before and it made me afraid to hear him like that.
“Some tanks are going by.”
“T-thirty-fours?”
“Yes.”
“Good tanks.”
Finally, the tanks passed and we shot forward. The driver had a heavy foot on the accelerator, a sure hand on the wheel, and he knew the Works well—cutting through back alleys behind turbine shops; blasting down unpaved paths alongside the workers’ housing, tin-roofed sheds with squat little stovepipes—but even with an expert it took time to get to the far side of the rambling factory town.
“There,” said the lieutenant at last, pointing to a brick warehouse that had been converted into the local hospital. He turned in his seat and looked at Kolya. When he couldn’t see Kolya’s face, he looked at me, questioning. I shrugged to say, I don’t know.
“Devils!” shouted the driver, slapping the steering wheel and hitting the brakes again. A small locomotive chugged across the tracks that bisected the Works, tugging boxcars loaded with scrap metal for the foundry.
“Lev?”
“Yes?”
“Are we close?”
“I think we’re very close.”
Kolya’s lips had gone blue, his breathing rapid and shallow.
“Is there any water?” he asked.
“Does anyone have water?” My voice broke as I asked the question. I sounded like a frightened child.
The gunner passed forward a canteen. I unscrewed the cap, shifted Kolya’s head sideways, and tried to pour water in his mouth, but it ended up spilling onto the seat. He managed to lift his head a little and I got some down his throat, but he choked and spat it up. When I tried to give him more, he refused with a slight shake of the head and I handed the canteen back to the gunner.
Realizing Kolya’s head must be cold, I tore off my hat and put it on him, ashamed that I hadn’t thought to do that before. Even though he shivered, his face was damp with sweat, his skin pale and mottled with coin-size scarlet patches.
I could see the doors of the hospital, less than a hundred meters away, through the gaps between the rolling boxcars. Our driver sat hunched forward in his seat, his arms draped around the wheel, nodding his head impatiently as he waited. The lieutenant kept glancing back at Kolya, more and more worried.
“Lev? You like the title?”
“What title?”
“The Courtyard Hound.”
“It’s a good title.”
“I could just call it Radchenko.”
“The Courtyard Hound is better.”
“I think so, too.”
He opened his eyes, those pale blue Cossack eyes, and smiled at me. We both knew he was going to die. He trembled, lying on the backseat beneath his greatcoat, his teeth very white against his blue lips. I have always believed that smile was a gift for me. Kolya had no faith in the divine or the afterlife; he didn’t think he was going to a better place, or any place at all. No angels waited to collect him. He smiled because he knew how terrified I was of dying. This is what I believe. He knew I was terrified and he wanted to make it a little easier for me.
“Can you believe it? Shot in the ass by my own people.”
I wanted to say something, to make some stupid joke to distract him. I should have said something, I wish that I had, even though I still can’t think of the right words. If I told him that I loved him, would he have winked and said, “No wonder your hand’s on my ass?”
Even Kolya couldn’t hold the smile for long. He closed his eyes again. When he spoke, his mouth was very dry, his lips sticking together as he tried to form the words.
“It’s not the way I pictured it,” he told me.
26
Officers in uniform and stern-faced civilians hurried in and out of the mansion on Kamenny Island, shoving through the front door beneath the white-columned portico. Behind the old house the Neva lay coiled, frozen and dusted with snow, a white snake slithering through the broken city.
The bald lieutenant escorted me to one of the machine-gun emplacements in front of the mansion, where a band of soldiers sat behind stacked sandbags, sipping weak tea from tin cups. The sergeant in charge read the colonel’s letter, glanced at me, and said, “You have something for him?”
I nodded and he beckoned for me to follow him. The lieutenant turned and walked away, never looking back, eager to escape what had turned into an unfortunate morning for him.
We finally found Grechko downstairs in the mansion’s wine cellar. All the grand old bottles of wine had been drunk long ago, but the walls were still honeycombed with terra-cotta racks. The colonel stood beside one of his subordinate officers, who checked items off a list. Young soldiers opened wood crates with crowbars. They dipped their arms into the shredded paper protecting the contents, pulling out tins and jars and burlap sacks and calling out the contents.
“Two kilos of smoked ham.”
“Five hundred grams of black caviar.”
“Kilo of jellied beef.”
“Garlic and onions . . . no weight listed.”
“Kilo of white sugar.”
“Kilo salted herring.”
“Boiled tongue, no weight listed.”
For a minute I stood and watched as the pile of foodstuffs grew, all the ingredients for a legendary feast. Carrots and potatoes, plucked chickens and jars of sour cream, wheat flour, honey, strawberry jam, jugs of fermented cherry juice, canned borovik mushrooms, blocks of butter wrapped in wax paper, a two-hundred-gram bar of Swiss chocolate.
The sergeant escorting me whispered a word to the officer standing beside Grechko. The colonel heard him and turned my way. For a few seconds he frowned, unable to place me, the deep furrows splitting his forehead.
“Ah,” he said, his strange, beautiful smile emerging. “The looter! Where’s your friend, the deserter?”
I don’t know how my face reacted to this question, but the colonel saw and understood.
“Too bad,” he said. “I liked that boy.”
He waited for me to do something and for a long count I couldn’t remember why I was there. When it came back to me, I unbuttoned my coat, pulled the slatted, straw-stuffed box out from under my sweater, and handed it over.
“A dozen eggs,” I told him.
“Wonderful, wonderful.” He gave the box to his underling without looking at it and gestured to the delicacies heaped on the stone floor. “Airlifted some provisions in last night. Just in time. You know how many owed favors I had to spend on this wedding?”
The subordinate officer handed the egg box to one of the young
soldiers and made a mark in his book. “Another dozen eggs.”
I watched the soldier walk away with the box.
“You already have eggs?”
The subordinate checked his book. “That’s four dozen now.”
“The more the better,” said the colonel. “Now we can make fish pies. Here, give the boy a Grade One ration card. Ah, give him two; he might as well have his friend’s.”
The subordinate raised his eyebrows, impressed with this generosity. He pulled two ration cards from a leather wallet and signed them. He took an inkpad from his pocket and stamped the cards before handing them to me.
“You’ll be a popular boy,” he said.
I stared at the cards in my hand. Each one entitled me to an officer’s rations. I looked around the cellar. Kolya would have known which vineyards the Dolgorukovs preferred, the white they chose for sturgeon, the red best paired with venison. Or if he didn’t know, he would have made it up. I watched soldiers walk upstairs carrying sacks of rice and long strings of fat sausage.
When I turned toward the colonel, he stared right back at me. Again he understood my expression.
“Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.” He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. “And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life.”
27
On the night of January 27, 1944, more than three hundred cannon fired an hour-long fusillade of white, blue, and red rockets, the brilliant, glittering tails lighting up all of Leningrad, the Russian colors reflected in the gold dome of Saint Isaac’s and the two thousand windows of the Winter Palace. The siege was over.
I stood on the rooftop of Sonya’s building, drinking bad Ukrainian wine with her and a dozen other friends, toasting the names of Govorov and Meretskov, the generals who had broken through the German lines. By that time I had been in the army for over a year. My superiors had sized me up, decided I didn’t have the look of an infantryman, and assigned me to duty at Red Star, the army’s newspaper. My job that first year was to assist a team of experienced journalists traveling around the front, gathering anecdotes and quotations from soldiers in the various units we visited. I carried a rifle but never used it. My missing half finger bothered me only when I typed. Eventually I earned a promotion and began sending my own reports to the Red Star offices, where an editor I never met converted my submissions into sturdy, patriotic prose. My father would have hated all of it.
The night the siege ended, up on Sonya’s roof, after we had drunk too much wine and shouted till our throats hurt, I kissed her on the mouth. It was more than friendly and less than erotic. When we stepped apart, smiling to cover our embarrassment, I know we both thought of Kolya. I imagine he would have been delighted to see me kissing a pretty girl, he would have coached me on my technique and insisted on a firmer touch—but still, we thought of him and we never kissed that way again.
A few days after I had returned to Piter with the colonel’s eggs, I learned that the Kirov did not collapse until hours after the bombs struck. Most of the residents had survived, including Vera Osipovna and the Antokolsky twins. I ran into each of them eventually, but the winter had changed us all and there was little to say. I had hoped Vera would feel mildly guilty for running away without looking back after I had saved her at the courtyard gates, but she didn’t mention it and I didn’t bring it up. She had already earned a seat in the city’s depleted orchestra and she kept it for the next thirty years. The twins both fought with distinction in General Chuikov’s Eighth Guards, making it all the way to Berlin. There is a famous photograph of one of them signing his name on the Reichstag wall, but I could not tell you if it was Oleg or Grisha. Of all the fifth-floor Kirov kids, I suppose I am the least accomplished.
In the summer of 1945 I lived in a large apartment near the Moscow Station with two other young journalists. The evacuees had returned to Piter by then, including my mother and sister, but the city remained far less crowded than it had been before the war. People said water from the Neva still tasted like corpses. Boys ran home from school again, swinging their book bags. The restaurants and shops of Nevsky Prospekt had reopened, even though almost no one had money to spend. On state holidays we all strolled up and down the street, staring through new plate glass windows at the marzipan treats and wristwatches and leather gloves. Those of us who had lived through the siege stayed by habit on the south sidewalk, though no shells had landed for nearly two years.
One cool August night, the north wind blowing down from Finland with the scent of pine needles, I sat alone at the kitchen table of my apartment, reading a Jack London story. My roommates had gone to see a new play at the Pushkin; I’d been invited, but there was no contemporary Russian playwright I liked as much as Jack London. When I finished the story, I decided to read it again from the beginning, this time trying to figure out how he had written it. Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing. . . .
I did not look up from the page at the first knock on the door. The boy who lived a few apartments over entertained himself most evenings running up and down the hallway, banging on each door. Everyone I knew would let himself in, anyway—the lock was broken and we had few visitors. The third knock broke London’s spell. A little annoyed, I dropped the book on the kitchen table and went to scold the boy.
A young woman stood in the hallway, a suitcase at her feet, a cardboard carton in her hands. She wore a yellow cotton dress with a white flower print. The silver dragonfly on her necklace hung in the hollow of her collarbone and her thick red hair cascaded past her sunburned shoulders. She will tell you that she hadn’t chosen that dress with any care, or the necklace, that she hadn’t washed her hair or scrubbed her face, put a little red on her lips. Don’t believe it. No one looks that good by accident.
She grinned at me, that infuriating curl of the lips that seemed more smirk than smile, her blue eyes watching mine to see if I recognized her. If I were a little better at playing the game, I might have pretended not to, I might have said, “Hello, are you looking for someone?”
“You’re not as skinny as before,” she said. “But you’re still too skinny.”
“You have hair,” I replied, and immediately wished I could take it back. For three and a half years I had dreamed of her—literally, she had marched in her oversize coveralls through half the dreams I remembered—and all I could think to say when she finally arrived was, “You have hair”?
“I brought you a gift,” she said. “Look what they’ve invented now.”
She flipped open the lid of the cardboard carton. Inside twelve eggs nestled in their snug compartments. White eggs, brown eggs, and one that was speckled like an old man’s hand. She closed the lid and opened it again, pleased with its functional simplicity.
“Much better than packing them in straw,” she added.
“We could make an omelet,” I suggested.
“We?” She smiled, handing me the carton, picking up her suitcase, waiting for me to open the door wide and let her inside. “One thing you should know about me, Lyova. I don’t cook.”
Acknowledgments
Harrison Salisbury’s masterpiece, The 900 Days, remains the best English-language book on the siege of Leningrad. It was my constant companion while writing City of Thieves and I recommend it to anyone wishing to learn more about Piter and its inhabitants during the Great Patriotic War. I am equally indebted to Curzio Malaparte’s work of strange genius, Kaputt, which provides an entirely different perspective on the conflict. His descriptions of German antipartisan tactics, along with much else, proved essential in composing this narrative. I’d like to thank both of these late gentlemen for their books. If I got the details right, they deserve much of the credit.
David Benioff, City of Thieves
(Series: # )
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