City of Thieves

by David Benioff

  I tried to think of a song to sing, a poem to recite, but all the words were stuck inside my head like salt in a caked shaker. I lay on one of the top bunks, hoping whatever heat existed within the Crosses would rise and find me. Morning promised nothing but a bullet in the brain and yet I longed for daylight to seep inside. When they dumped me in the cell, I thought I had seen a sliver of barred window near the ceiling, but now I couldn’t remember. I tried counting to a thousand to pass some time but always got lost around four hundred, hearing phantom rats that turned out to be my own fingers scratching the torn mattress.

  The night was never going to end. The Germans had shot down the fucking sun, they could do it, why not, their scientists were the best in the world, they could figure it out. They had learned how to stop time. I was blind and deaf. Only the cold and my thirst reminded me that I was alive. You get so lonely you start longing for the sentries, just to hear their footsteps, smell the vodka on their breath.

  So many great Russians endured long stretches in prison. That night I learned I would never be a great Russian. A few hours alone in a cell, suffering no torture other than the darkness and the silence and the absolute cold, a few hours of that and I was already half broken. The fierce souls who survived winter after winter in Siberia possessed something I did not, great faith in some splendid destiny, whether God’s kingdom or justice or the distant promise of revenge. Or maybe they were so beaten down they became nothing more than animals on their hind legs, working at their masters’ command, eating whatever slop he threw down for them, sleeping when ordered and dreaming of nothing but the end.

  At last there was noise, footsteps, several sets of heavy boots clomping in the corridor. A key turned in the lock. I sat up in bed and cracked my skull against the ceiling, hard enough that I bit through my lip.

  Two guards—one of them holding an oil lamp, the prettiest light I ever saw, better than any sunrise—escorted a new prisoner, a young, uniformed soldier who glanced around the cell like a man viewing an apartment he’s considering for rent. The soldier was tall and stood very straight; he towered over the guards, and though they had pistols in their holsters and the soldier was unarmed, he seemed ready to give orders. He held his Astrakhan fur hat in one hand and his leather gloves in the other.

  He looked at me just as the guards left, shutting the cell door and bolting it from the outside, taking their light with them. His face was the last thing I saw before the darkness resumed, so it stuck in my mind: the high Cossack cheekbones, the amused twist of the lips, the hay-blond hair, the eyes blue enough to please any Aryan bride.

  I sat on the bed and he stood on the stone floor and from the perfect silence I knew neither of us had shifted position—we were still staring at each other in the darkness.

  “Are you a Jew?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “A Jew. You look like a Jew.”

  “You look like a Nazi.”

  “I know. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch, too. I volunteered to be a spy, but nobody listened to me. So, you are a Jew?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Don’t be ashamed of it. I don’t have a problem with Jews. Emanuel Lasker is my second-favorite chess player. Just a rung under Capablanca. . . . Capablanca is Mozart, pure genius; you can’t love chess and not love Capablanca. But Lasker, nobody’s better in the endgame. You have any food?”

  “No.”

  “Put out your hand.”

  This seemed like some sort of trap, a game children played to snare morons. He would slap my palm or just let it hang there till I realized my stupidity. But no offer of food could be refused, even the least likely, so I stretched my hand into the darkness and waited. A moment later a sliver of something cold and greasy sat on my palm. I don’t know how he found my hand, but he did, without any fumbling.

  “Sausage,” he said. And then, after a pause, “Don’t worry. It’s not pork.”

  “I eat pork.” I sniffed at the sausage and then nibbled off a bit. It was as far from real meat as ration bread from real bread, but there was fat in it, and fat was life. I chewed on the sliver as slowly as I could, trying to make it last.

  “You chew loudly,” he told me, a reprimand from the dark. I heard the creak of bedsprings as he sat on one of the lower bunk beds. “And you’re supposed to say thank you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. What’s your name?”

  “Lev.”

  “Lev what?”

  “What do you care?”

  “It’s just manners,” he said. “For instance, if I introduce myself, I say, ‘Good evening, my name is Nikolai Alexandrovich Vlasov, my friends call me Kolya.’ ”

  “You just want to know if I have a Jewish name.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah.” He sighed happily, pleased to hear his instincts confirmed. “Thank you. Don’t know why you’re so afraid of telling people.”

  I didn’t answer. If he didn’t know why, there was no point explaining it.

  “So why are you here?” he asked.

  “They caught me looting a dead German on Voinova Street.”

  This alarmed him. “The Germans are already on Voinova? So it’s begun?”

  “Nothing’s begun. He was a bomber pilot. He ejected.”

  “The AA boys got him?”

  “The cold got him. Why are you here?”

  “Sheer idiocy. They think I’m a deserter.”

  “So why didn’t they shoot you?”

  “Why didn’t they shoot you?”

  “Don’t know,” I admitted. “They said I was a good one for the colonel.”

  “I’m not a deserter. I’m a student. I was defending my thesis.”

  “Really? Your thesis?” It sounded like the dumbest excuse in the history of desertion.

  “An interpretation of Ushakovo’s The Courtyard Hound, through the lens of contemporary sociological analysis.” He waited for me to say something, but I had nothing to say to that. “You know the book?”

  “No. Ushakovo?”

  “Miserable how bad the schools have gotten. They should have you memorizing passages.” He sounded like a crotchety old professor, though from my one look at him I would have guessed he was twenty. “ ‘In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs.’ First line. Some say it’s the greatest Russian novel. And you’ve never heard of it.”

  He sighed extravagantly. A moment later I heard a strange scratching sound, as if a rat were sharpening its claws on the mattress ticking.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “Hm?”

  “You don’t hear that noise?”

  “I’m writing in my journal.”

  I could see no farther with my eyes open than with them closed and this one was writing in his journal. Now I could tell the scratching was a pencil on paper. After a few minutes the journal slapped closed and I heard him stuff the book into his pocket.

  “I can write in the dark,” he said, punctuating the sentence with a light burp. “One of my talents.”

  “Notes on The Courtyard Hound?”

  “Exactly. How’s this for strange? Chapter six: Radchenko spends a month in the Crosses because his former best friend . . . Well, I don’t want to give it away. But I have to say, it seemed like fate when they brought me here. I’ve been every other place Radchenko visited—every restaurant and theater and graveyard, the ones that are still around, anyway—but I’ve never been inside here. A critic could argue that until you spend a night in the Crosses, you can’t understand Radchenko.”

  “Pretty lucky for you.”

  “Mm.”

  “So you think they’ll shoot us in the morning?”

  “I doubt it. They’re not preserving us for the night just to shoot us tomorrow.” He sounded quite jaunty about it, as if we were discussing a sporting event, as if the outcome wasn’t particularly momentous no matter which way it went.

>   “I haven’t had a shit in eight days,” he confided. “I’m not saying a good shit—it’s been months since I’ve had a good shit—I mean no shit at all for eight days.”

  We were quiet for a moment, considering these words.

  “How long do you think a man can last without shitting?”

  It was an interesting question and I was curious to know the answer myself, but I didn’t have one for him. I heard him lie down, heard him yawn happily, relaxed and content, his piss-stained straw mattress as comfortable as a feather bed. The silence lingered for a minute and I thought my cell mate had fallen asleep.

  “These walls must be four feet thick,” he said at last. “This is probably the safest place in Piter to spend a night.” And then he did fall asleep, shifting from speech into snores so quickly that at first I thought he was faking.

  I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. I was born an insomniac and that’s the way I’ll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way longing for unconsciousness, longing for a rubber mallet to crack me in the head, not so hard, not hard enough to do any damage, just a good whack to put me down for the night. But that night I didn’t have a chance. I stared into the blackness until the blackness blurred into gray, until the ceiling above me began to take form and the light from the east dribbled in through the narrow barred window that existed after all. Only then did I realize that I still had a German knife strapped to my calf.

  3

  An hour after dawn two new guards opened the cell door, rousted us from bed, and clamped handcuffs on our wrists. They ignored my questions but seemed amused when Kolya asked for a cup of tea and an omelet. Jokes must have been rare in the Crosses, because it wasn’t such a good joke, but the guards grinned as they shoved us down the hallway. Somewhere someone was moaning, a low and endless moan, a ship’s horn heard from a great distance.

  I didn’t know if we were heading for the gallows or an interrogation chamber. The night had passed without sleep; save for a swig from the German’s flask, there hadn’t been a sip to drink since the rooftop of the Kirov; a lump the size of an infant’s fist had swelled where my forehead had cracked the ceiling—it was a bad morning, really; among my worst—but I wanted to live. I wanted to live and I knew I could not face my execution with grace. I would kneel before the hangman or the firing squad and plead my youth, detail my many hours served on the rooftop waiting for the bombs, all the barricades I had helped to build, the ditches I had dug. All of us had done it, we were all serving the cause, but I was one of Piter’s true sons and I didn’t deserve to die. What harm had been done? We drank a dead German’s cognac—for this you want to end me? You want to tie rough hemp around my skinny neck and shut down my brain forever because I stole a knife? Don’t do this, comrade. I don’t think there is greatness in me, but there is something better than this.

  The guards led us down a stone staircase, the steps beaten smooth by hundreds of thousands of boot heels. An old man with a heavy gray scarf wrapped twice around his throat sat on the far side of the iron bars that blocked the bottom of the staircase. He gave us a gummy grin and unlocked the gate. A moment later we walked through a heavy wooden door into the sunlight, emerging from the Crosses intact and alive.

  Kolya, unimpressed by our apparent reprieve, scooped up a palmful of clean snow with his shackled hands and licked it. The boldness of the maneuver made me jealous, as did the thought of cold water on my tongue. But I didn’t want to do anything to anger the guards. Our escape from the Crosses seemed like an odd mistake and I expected to be shoved inside again if I did something wrong.

  The guards escorted us to a waiting GAZ, its big engine grumbling, exhaust pipes spewing dirty vapor, two soldiers sitting in the front seat watching us with zero curiosity, their fur-lined hats pulled down low on their foreheads.

  Kolya hopped into the backseat without waiting for an order.

  “Gentlemen, to the opera!”

  The guards, standards diminished by years of working the Crosses, gave Kolya another good laugh. The soldiers did not. One of them turned and inspected Kolya.

  “You say another word and I’ll break your fucking arm. It were up to me, you’d already have a bullet in your head. Fucking deserter. You”—and this was addressed to me—“get in.”

  Kolya’s mouth was already open and I knew violence was on the way; the soldier did not look like a bluffer and Kolya, clearly, was incapable of heeding a simple threat.

  “I’m not a deserter,” he said. With his manacled hands he managed to push up the left sleeve of his greatcoat, the left sleeve of his army sweater, the left sleeves of the two shirts beneath it, and offered his forearm to the soldier in the front seat. “You want to break the arm, break it, but I’m not a deserter.”

  For a long count nobody spoke—Kolya stared at the soldier, the soldier stared back, and the rest of us watched and waited, impressed by this match of wills and curious to see who would win. Finally, the soldier conceded defeat by turning away from Kolya and barking at me.

  “Get in the car, you little cunt.”

  The guards grinned. This was their morning’s entertainment. They had no torture scheduled, no teeth to wrench, no nails to pluck from a screaming man’s nail beds, so they got their fun watching me, the little cunt, scurry into the backseat next to Kolya.

  The soldier drove very fast, caring not at all about the slicks of ice on the road. We sped along the banks of the frozen Neva. I had my collar upturned so I could hide my face from the wind that blasted in beneath the canvas roof. Kolya didn’t seem bothered by the cold. He stared at the spire of the Church of John the Baptist across the river and said nothing.

  We turned onto the Kamennoostrovsky Bridge, the old steel of its arches rimed with frost, the lampposts bearded with icicles. Onto Kamenny Island, slowing only a bit to circle around a bomb crater that had shattered the center of the road, pulling into a long driveway lined with the stumps of lime trees, and parking in front of a magnificent wooden mansion with a white-columned portico. Kolya studied the house.

  “The Dolgorukovs lived here,” he said, as we stepped out of the car. “I suppose none of you have heard of the Dolgorukovs.”

  “A bunch of aristocrats who got their necks snapped,” said one of the soldiers, gesturing with the barrel of his rifle for us to walk toward the front door.

  “Some of them,” admitted Kolya. “And some of them slept with emperors.”

  In the daylight Kolya looked like he could have stepped out of one of the propaganda posters pasted on walls throughout the city; the angles of his face were heroic—the strong chin, the straight nose, the blond hair that fell across his forehead. He was a fine-looking deserter.

  The soldiers escorted us onto the porch, where sandbags had been piled four feet high to form a machine-gun nest. Two soldiers sat near their gun, passing a cigarette between them. Kolya sniffed the air and stared longingly at the hand-rolled butt.

  “Real tobacco,” he said, before our armed guides pushed open the front door and herded us inside.

  I had never been inside a mansion before, had only read about them in the novels: the dances on the parquet floors, the servants ladling soup from silver tureens, the stern patriarch in his book-lined study warning his weeping daughter to stay away from the lowborn boy. But while the old Dolgorukov home still looked magnificent on the outside, the revolution had come to the interior. The marble floor was tracked with a thousand muddy boot prints, unwashed for months. The smoke-stained wallpaper curled away from the baseboards. None of the original furniture had survived, none of the oil paintings and Chinese vases that must have lined the walls and rested on teak shelves.

  Dozens of uniformed officers hurried from one room to the next, hustled up a curving double staircase missing its balustrade and all the balusters, probably torn down for firewood weeks ago. The uniforms were not
Red Army. Kolya noticed me staring.

  “NKVD. Maybe they think we’re spies.”

  I didn’t need Kolya to tell me the men were NKVD. Since I was little I had known what their uniforms looked like, with their peaked blue-and-maroon caps and their holstered Tokarevs. I had learned to dread the sight of their Packards idling outside the gates of the Kirov, the Black Ravens, waiting to carry some unlucky citizen away from his home. The NKVD arrested at least fifteen men from the building while I lived there. Sometimes those taken returned after a few weeks, their heads shaved and their faces pale and lifeless, avoiding my eyes in the stairwell as they limped up to their apartments. The broken men who came home must have known how rare and lucky they were, but they took no apparent joy in their survival. They knew what happened to my father and they could not meet my eyes.

  The soldiers kept prodding us forward till we entered a sunroom at the very rear of the house, the tall French windows offering a fine vantage of the Neva and the grim, stolid apartment buildings of the Vyborg section on the far side of the river. An older man sat alone at a simple wood desk set down in the middle of the sunroom. He had a telephone receiver nestled between his face and his shoulder so he could scribble with a pen on a pad of paper as he listened.

  He glanced at us as we waited at the entryway. He looked like an ex-boxer with his thick neck and crooked, flattened nose. The shadows below his hooded eyes were deep, as were the furrows that crossed his forehead. His gray hair was shaved very close to the scalp. He might have been fifty years old, but he looked like he could rise from his chair and beat us all down without mussing his uniform. Three metal stars shone on the collar tabs of his jacket. I didn’t know precisely what three stars signified, but they were three stars more than anyone else in the mansion.

  He tossed his pad of paper on the desk and I could see that he hadn’t been taking notes, as I’d thought, but simply drawing X’s, over and over again, till the entire sheet of paper was covered with them. For some reason this frightened me more than his uniform or his brawler’s face. A man who drew pictures of tits or dogs seemed like a man I could understand. But a man who drew nothing but X’s?