Kolya inspected the level of the liquid in the cup, making sure the vendor had truly taken a sip. Satisfied, he picked up the glass and saluted us.
“For Mother Russia!” He downed the wood alcohol with a gulp, slammed the glass down on the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gagged. He grabbed my shoulder, trying to support himself, his eyes wide open and tearing.
“You murdered me,” he said, barely able to get the words out of his throat, pointing an accusing finger at the one-eyed man.
“I didn’t tell you to drink it fast,” he replied, unimpressed, putting the pipe back in his mouth. “One hundred rubles.”
“Lev . . . Lev, are you there?” Kolya’s face was turned toward mine, but his eyes were unfocused, looking straight through me.
“Very funny.”
Kolya grinned and stood straight. “Can’t trick a Jew, I should have known. Very good, pay the man.”
“What?”
“Go ahead,” he said, gesturing to the waiting vendor. “Give the man his money.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Don’t try to cheat me, boy!” roared Kolya, grabbing the collar of my greatcoat and shaking me till I felt my bones rattling. “I am a soldier of the Red Army and I won’t stand for any thievery!”
Abruptly he released me, shoving his hands into my coat pockets, pulling out scraps of paper, a bit of string and lint, nothing close to money. Kolya sighed and turned to the vendor.
“Apparently we have no money. I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel the transaction.”
“You think because you’re a soldier,” said the one-eyed man, opening his coat to show us the hilt of a Finnish dagger, “I won’t carve you up?”
“I’ve got a glass of poison in my belly already. So why don’t you try?”
Kolya smiled at the man and waited for a response. There was nothing behind Kolya’s blue eyes, neither fear nor anger nor excitement about the prospect of a fight—nothing. This, I came to learn, was his gift: danger made him calm. Around him people would deal with their terror in the usual ways: stoicism, hysteria, false joviality, or some combination of the three. But Kolya, I think, never completely believed in any of it. Everything about the war was ridiculous: the Germans’ barbarity, the Party’s propaganda, the crossfire of incendiary bullets that lit the nighttime sky. It all seemed to him like someone else’s story, an amazingly detailed story that he had stumbled into and now could not escape.
“Move on or I’ll cut your lips off,” said the one-eyed man, chewing the stem of his unlit pipe, hand on the hilt of his dagger. Kolya saluted and marched off to the next stall, relaxed and unworried as if the entire transaction had been clean and easy. I followed behind, heart thumping within my rib cage.
“Let’s just find the eggs,” I said. “Why do you have to go around provoking people?”
“I needed a sniff, I took a sniff, now I feel alive again.” He took a deep breath and exhaled through pursed lips, watching the condensation rise into the air. “We both should have died last night. Do you understand that? Do you understand how lucky we are? So enjoy it.”
I stopped at a stall where an old peasant woman wearing a headscarf sold patties of pale gray meat. Kolya and I stared at the meat. It looked fairly fresh, glistening with fat, but neither of us wanted to know what sort of animal it had been.
“Do you have any eggs?” I asked the old woman.
“Eggs?” she asked, leaning forward to hear. “Not since September.”
“We need a dozen,” said Kolya. “We can pay good money.”
“You can pay a million rubles,” she said, “there are no eggs. Not in Piter.”
“Where?”
She shrugged, the lines creasing her face so deep they seemed carved. “I have meat. You want meat, it’s three hundred for two patties. No eggs.”
We went from stall to stall, asking everyone if they had eggs, but no one in the Haymarket had seen any since September. A few people had theories on where they could be found: high-ranking army officers had them flown in from Moscow; farmers outside the city gave them to the Germans, along with butter and fresh milk, in exchange for their lives; an old man who lived near the Narva Gate kept chickens in a rooftop coop. This last rumor seemed obviously absurd, but the boy who told us insisted it was true.
“You kill a chicken, maybe it will last you a week. But you keep it alive, well, an egg a day, along with your rations, that will get you by till summer.”
“You have to feed a chicken,” said Kolya. “Who’s got food for a chicken?”
The boy, his black curly hair spilling out from beneath an old Imperial Navy cap, shook his head as if it were a silly question.
“Chickens eat anything. A spoonful of sawdust, that’s all they need.”
The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city’s books were disappearing like the pigeons.
“And you’ve seen these chickens?” asked Kolya.
“My brother has. The old man sleeps in the coop at night with a shotgun. Everyone in the building wants those chickens.”
Kolya glanced at me and I shook my head. We all heard ten different siege myths a day, stories of secret meat lockers stocked with chilled haunches of beef, of larders crammed with caviar tins and veal sausages. It was always someone’s brother or cousin who had seen the treasure. People believed in the stories because it matched their conviction that someone, somewhere, was feasting while the rest of the city starved. And they were right, of course—the colonel’s daughter might not be eating roasted goose for dinner, but she was eating dinner.
“The old man can’t stay in the coop all the time,” I told the boy. “He has to get his rations. He has to get water and use the toilet. Someone would have grabbed the chickens months ago.”
“He pisses off the roof. When it’s coming out the other side, I don’t know, maybe that’s what he feeds the chickens.”
Kolya nodded, impressed by the old man’s clever means of keeping the birds alive, though I was convinced the kid was making this up as his lips moved.
“When was the last time you had a shit?” Kolya asked me, abruptly.
“I don’t know. A week ago?”
“It’s been nine days for me. I’ve been counting. Nine days! When it finally happens, I’ll have a big party and invite the best-looking girls from the university.”
“Invite the colonel’s daughter.”
“I will, absolutely. My shit party will be much better than this wedding she’s planning.”
“The new ration bread hurts coming out,” said the curly-haired boy. “My father says it’s all the cellulose they’re putting in.”
“Where do we find the old man with the chickens?”
“I don’t know the address. If you walk toward Stachek Prospekt from the Narva Gate, you’ll pass his building. There’s a big poster of Zhdanov on the wall.”
“There’s a poster of Zhdanov on half the buildings in Piter,” I said, getting a little irritated. “We’re going to walk another three kilometers to find a bunch of chickens that don’t exist?”
“The boy’s not lying,” said Kolya, patting the kid on his shoulder. “If he is, we’ll come back here and break his fingers. He knows we’re NKVD.”
“You’re not NKVD,” said the boy.
Kolya pulled the colonel’s letter from his coat pocket and slapped the boy’s cheek with it.
“This is a letter from an NKVD colonel authorizing us to find eggs. What do you think about that?”
“You got another one from Stalin, authorizing you to wipe your ass?”
“He’ll have to authorize me to shit first.”
I didn’t stay long enough to learn how the conversation ended. If Kolya wanted to tramp all over the city looking for the fabled ch
ickens, that was his business, but nightfall was coming and I wanted to go home. I hadn’t slept in thirty-some hours. I turned and walked toward the Kirov, trying to remember how much bread I had stashed under the loose tile in the kitchen. Maybe Vera had something for me. She owed me after the way she ran, never looking back even though I’d rescued her. It occurred to me that Vera and the others must have thought I was dead. I wondered how she had reacted, whether she had cried, hiding her face in Grisha’s chest as he comforted her, or maybe pushing him away, angry, because Grisha had fled, abandoned her, while I stayed behind and saved her from certain execution. And Grisha would say, “I know, I know, I’m a coward, forgive me,” and she would forgive him, because Vera forgave Grisha everything, and he would wipe away her tears, and tell her they would never forget me, my sacrifice. But of course they would—within a year they wouldn’t be able to picture my face anymore.
“You there. You the one looking for eggs?”
Obsessed with my pitiful fantasy, it took me a moment to realize the question was meant for me. I turned and saw a bearded giant staring back at me, arms folded across his chest, rocking back and forth on his boot heels. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen, far taller than Kolya and broader in the chest. His bare hands looked big enough to crack my skull like a walnut shell. His beard was thick and black and shined as if oiled. I wondered how much food a man that big needed to eat every day, how he could possibly keep the meat on his titanic frame.
“You have eggs?” I asked, blinking up at him.
“What do you have for me?”
“Money. We have money. Wait, let me get my friend.”
I ran back through the Haymarket. For the first time since I’d met him, I was happy to see Kolya’s blond head. He was still joking with the curly-haired boy, probably describing his dream of a glorious shit.
“Hello, there he is!” he shouted when he saw me. “I thought you’d run off without me.”
“There’s a man who says he has eggs.”
“Excellent!” Kolya turned to the boy. “Son, it has been a great pleasure.”
We walked back the way I’d come, passing the stalls now shutting for the night. Kolya handed me a wrapped library candy.
“Here you are, my friend. Tonight we feast.”
“The kid gave it to you?”
“Gave it to me? He sold it to me.”
“How much?”
“One hundred for two.”
“One hundred!” I glared up at Kolya as he unwrapped his bar and took a bite, grimacing at the flavor. “So we have three hundred left?”
“Correct. Impressive arithmetic.”
“That money is for the eggs.”
“Well, we can’t go egg hunting without a little something to keep us going.”
The bearded man waited for us at the edge of the Haymarket, arms still folded. He appraised Kolya as we came nearer, sizing him up the way a boxer takes the measure of his opponent.
“It’s just the two of you?”
“How many of us do you need?” asked Kolya in return, smiling at the giant. “I hear you sell eggs.”
“I sell everything. What do you have for me?”
“We have money,” I said, fairly sure we had already gone over this.
“How much?”
“Enough,” said Kolya. “We need a dozen eggs.”
The bearded man whistled. “You’re in luck. That’s all I have.”
“You see that?” said Kolya, gripping my shoulder. “This wasn’t so hard.”
“Follow me,” said the giant, crossing the street.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we followed.
“I keep everything inside. It isn’t safe out here. Soldiers come down every few days, steal everything they want, anyone says anything, they shoot him.”
“Well, the soldiers are out there defending the city,” said Kolya. “They can’t fight if they’re starving.”
The giant glanced at Kolya’s army coat, his regulation boots.
“Why aren’t you defending the city?”
“I’m on a mission for a certain colonel. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“This colonel sent you and the boy on a mission for some eggs, is that it?” The giant grinned down at us. His teeth gleamed like unmarked dice within his black beard. He didn’t believe Kolya, of course. Who would?
We walked alongside the frozen Fontanka Canal, the ice littered with abandoned corpses, some covered with shrouds weighted down with stones, others stripped for their warm clothes, their white faces staring up at the darkening sky. The wind was beginning to wake for the night and I watched a dead woman’s long blond hair blow across her face. She had taken pride in that hair once, washed it twice a week, brushed it out for twenty minutes before going to bed. Now it was trying to protect her, to shield her decay from the eyes of strangers.
The giant led us to a five-story brick building, all the windows boarded over with plywood. A massive poster, two stories high, portrayed a young mother carrying her dead child from a burning building. DEATH TO THE BABY KILLERS! read the text. After fishing in his coat pocket for his key, the giant unlocked the front door and held it open for us. I grabbed Kolya’s sleeve before he could enter.
“Why don’t you bring the eggs down here?” I asked the giant.
“I’m still alive because I know how to run my business. And I don’t do business on the street.”
I could feel my scrotum tightening, my timid balls creeping closer to my body. But I was born and raised in Piter, I wasn’t a fool, and I tried to keep my voice steady as I spoke.
“I don’t do business in strangers’ apartments.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Kolya, smiling broadly. “No need for all the suspicion. A dozen eggs. Name your price.”
“A thousand.”
“A thousand rubles? For a dozen eggs?” I laughed. “Are they Fabergé?”
The black-bearded giant, still holding the door open, glowered down at me. I stopped laughing.
“They’re selling glasses of dirt back there for a hundred rubles,” he told me. “Which is better, an egg or a glass of dirt?”
“Listen,” said Kolya, “you can stand here all day haggling with my little Jewish friend, or we can talk like honest men. We have three hundred. That’s all we have. Is it a deal?”
The giant continued to stare at me. He hadn’t liked me from the start; now that he knew I was a Jew I could tell he wanted to peel the skin from my face. He held out his massive palm to Kolya, beckoning for the cash.
“Ah, no, at this point I must side with my companion,” Kolya said, shaking his head. “First the eggs, then the money.”
“I’m not bringing them out here. Everyone’s starving and everyone’s got a gun.”
“You’re an awfully big man to be so afraid,” teased Kolya.
The giant eyed Kolya with something like curiosity, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was hearing the insult. Finally, he smiled, flashing those dice-white teeth.
“There’s a man facedown out there,” he said, gesturing with his chin to the Fontanka Canal. “Wasn’t hunger that got him, wasn’t the cold. His skull got smashed in with a brick. You want to ask me how I know?”
“I take your point,” said Kolya, quite agreeable. He peered into the darkness of the building’s vestibule. “Well, for what it’s worth, a brick is quicker.”
Kolya patted me on the back and stepped inside.
Everything I knew told me to run. This man was leading us into a trap. He had practically just confessed to being a murderer. Kolya had stupidly admitted exactly how much money we had on us. It wasn’t much, but three hundred rubles and two ration cards— which the giant must have assumed we still had—were easily enough to get killed over these days.
But what was the other choice? Head down to the Narva Gate and find some fabled old man and his chicken coop? We were risking our lives walking into the building, but if we didn’t find the eggs soon, we were dead anywa
y.
I followed Kolya. The front door closed behind us. It was gloomy inside, with no electricity for the bulbs and only the last of the daylight peeking in through gaps in the plywood covering the windows. I heard the giant moving behind me and I dropped to one knee, ready to unsheathe my knife. He passed by me and climbed the stairs, two at a time. Kolya and I glanced at each other. When Blackbeard was out of sight, I pulled out the German knife and slipped it into my coat pocket. Kolya raised his eyebrows, possibly impressed by the act, possibly mocking me. We headed up the stairs, taking them one by one but still panting by the time we reached the second floor.
“Where do you get the eggs?” asked Kolya, calling out to the giant who was already a flight above us. The big man was untroubled by the climb. He and the colonel’s daughter were the two fit-test people I’d seen in Piter in months. I wondered again where he got his energy.
“There’s a peasant I know, he works on a farm near Mga.”
“I thought the Germans took Mga.”
“They did. The Germans like their eggs, too. They come every day and grab all they can find, but my friend hides a few. Can’t hide too many or they’ll figure it out.”
The giant stopped on the fourth floor and rapped on an apartment door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me,” he said. “With a couple of customers.”
We heard a deadbolt slide back and the door opened. A woman wearing a man’s fur hat and a bloodied butcher’s apron blinked at Kolya and me, wiping her nose with the back of her gloved hand.
“What I was wondering,” said Kolya, “is how you keep the eggs from freezing. Because frozen eggs won’t do us much good, I’m afraid.”
The woman stared at Kolya as if he were speaking Japanese.
“We keep them by the samovar,” said the giant. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”
He gestured for us to enter the apartment. The silent woman stepped to the side to let us pass and Kolya walked right in, not a care in the world, looking around with a smile as if he’d just been invited into a new girlfriend’s place. I waited by the door until the giant put his hand on my shoulder. He didn’t shove me, exactly, but with a hand that big the effect was the same.