10
That night the soup tasted like June, like the dinners we remembered from before the siege. An admirer of Sonya’s, a pilot in the VVS, had given her an unspoiled potato. Kolya protested that he didn’t want to eat the gift of another lover, but his complaints were ignored, as he had hoped, and the Darling soup was thick with potato and onion and plenty of salt. Happily for us, the other surgeons were spending the night somewhere else. Sonya traded a wing and a cup of the broth to her neighbor for a bottle of drinkable vodka; the Germans lobbed only a few lazy shells at the city, as if to remind us they were still there but had better things to do on this particular evening; by midnight we were drunk, our bellies full, Kolya and Sonya fucking in the bedroom while I played speed chess with Timofei by the light of the stove.
Halfway through the second game I moved my knight; Timofei stared at the board, burped, and said, “Oh. You’re good.”
“You just figured it out? I mated you in sixteen moves last game.”
“Thought it was the drink. . . . I’m fucked, aren’t I?”
“You’re still alive. Won’t be long, though.”
He tipped over his king and burped again, pleased with his burping, pleased there was food in his stomach.
“Not much point in that. Ah, well. You can’t tell a chicken from a rooster, but you know chess.”
“I used to be better.” I right-sided his king and played his move for him, trying to see how long I could extend the endgame.
“You used to be better? When you were an embryo? What are you, fourteen?”
“Seventeen!”
“Are you shaving yet?”
“Yes.”
Timofei looked skeptical.
“I shaved my mustache. . . . It grows slower in the winter.”
Sonya gasped in the other room and began to laugh, forcing me to picture her, her head tilted back, her throat exposed, her nipples hard on her small breasts.
“I don’t know where they get the energy,” said Timofei, lying back on the layered blankets and stretching his arms. “Give me chicken soup every night and I’ll never need another woman as long as I live.”
He closed his eyes and soon he was asleep, another of the fast sleepers, leaving me alone to listen to the lovers.
Kolya woke me before dawn, handing me a cup of tea as he studied the abandoned chessboard. Timofei still slept on his back, his mouth open, his arms stretched above his head as if he were surrendering to the enemy.
“Who was playing black?”
“Me.”
“You had him in six.”
“I had him in five. Unless he made a mistake, and then I had him in three.”
Kolya frowned, looking at the pieces until he figured it out.
“You know how to play.”
“You still want to make that bet? What was it, nude pictures of French girls?”
He smiled, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“I should just give them to you as a favor. Show you where all the parts are. Come on, get your boots on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Mga.”
Kolya might have been a deserter, but he had enough natural authority in his voice that my boots were half laced before I thought to question his directive. He had already slipped on his greatcoat and leather gloves; he looped his scarf twice around his neck and checked his teeth in a small mirror hanging over the samovar.
“Mga’s fifty kilometers away.”
“Good day’s walk. We had a big dinner last night, we can make it.”
Slowly I awakened to the insanity of this proposition.
“That’s behind German lines. Why do we have to go to Mga?”
“It’s Monday, Lev. We need the eggs by Thursday and we’re not going to find any in Piter. Sonya’s uncle runs that poultry collective out there, right? I’m betting the Germans kept it going. They like their eggs, too.”
“That’s our plan? We’re going to walk fifty kilometers, right past the Germans, to a poultry collective that maybe didn’t get burned down, grab a dozen eggs, and come home?”
“Well, anything would sound ridiculous if you said it with that tone of voice.”
“Tone of . . . I’m asking you a question! That’s our plan? Sonya’s never even been there! How are we supposed to find it?”
“It’s in Mga! How hard can it be to find anything in Mga!”
“I don’t even know how to find fucking Mga!”
“Ah,” said Kolya, grinning now as he put on his Astrakhan fur hat. “That one’s easy. It’s on the Moscow line. We just follow the tracks.”
Timofei grunted in his dreams and rolled onto his side. I’d learned that doctors and soldiers could sleep through any non-life-threatening ruckus; my argument with Kolya might have been a softly sung lullaby, judging from the look of peaceful contentment on Timofei’s face. I looked at him and I hated him, hated him for getting to sleep on his bed of wool blankets, warm and comfortable and well fed, with no grandson of Cossacks to harass him, no NKVD colonel sending him out to the wilderness to find ingredients for a wedding cake.
I turned back to Kolya, who was adjusting his hat to a properly heroic angle with the help of the mirror. I hated him even more, the cheerful swaggering brute, happy and fresh at six in the morning as if he’d just returned from a two-week holiday at the Black Sea. I imagined that he still stank of sex, though the truth was I couldn’t smell anything at all so early in the day, with the apartment so cold. My mighty nose was all show, a good target for bullies’ taunts but strangely bad at picking up scents.
“You think it’s so crazy,” he said, “but every one of those peasant swindlers selling potatoes for two hundred rubles in the Haymarket brought them in from outside the city. People make it past the lines every day. Why can’t we?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Off a quarter a bottle of vodka? I don’t think so.”
“There has to be somewhere closer than Mga.”
“So tell me.”
He was swaddled now for the weather, his jaw bristling with four days’ worth of blond beard. He waited for me to propose my alternative to his stupid plan, but as the seconds ticked past I realized I didn’t have one.
He smiled at me, a smile fine enough for a Red Fleet recruitment poster.
“The whole thing’s a fucking joke, I agree. But it’s a pretty good joke.”
“Yes, it’s a wonderful joke. And the funniest part is that we’re going to die out there and the colonel’s daughter won’t get her cake and nobody will ever know what we were doing in Mga.”
“Calm yourself, my morbid little Israelite. I won’t let the bad men get you—”
“You can eat shit.”
“—but we have to move now. If we want to make it there with any daylight left.”
I could have ignored him and gone back to sleep. The stove had gone cold in the night, the last of the wood chips burned through, but it was still warm enough under all the piled blankets. Sleeping made more sense than marching out to Mga—where the Germans waited in their thousands—in search of chickens. Anything made more sense than that. Still, no matter how much I protested the idea, I knew from the first that I would follow. He was right: there were no eggs in Leningrad. But that wasn’t the only reason for following. Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny. This wasn’t the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn’t. I was cursed with the pessimism of both the Russians and the Jews, two of the gloomiest tribes in the world. Still, if there wasn’t greatness in me, maybe I had the talent to recognize it in others, even in the most irritating others.
I stood, grabbed my coat off the floor, slipped it on, and followed Kolya to the front door, which he held open for me with grave courtesy.
“Wait,” he said, before I could cross the threshold. “We’re going on a journey. We should sit.”
“I didn’t know you were superstitious.”
“I like the traditions.”
There were no chairs so we sat on the floor beside the open door. The apartment was quiet. Timofei snored from his spot near the stove; the windows shuddered in their frames; the radio broadcast its endless metronome, signaling that Leningrad remained unconquered. Outside someone nailed posters to boarded windows with quick, efficient hammer strikes. Instead of picturing a man hanging posters, though, I imagined a coffin maker at work, fashioning a casket from planks of pinewood. The vision was intense and detailed: I could see the calluses on the coffin maker’s palms, the black hairs sprouting between his thick eyebrows, the sawdust on his sweaty forearms.
I took a deep breath and looked at Kolya. He was looking right back at me.
“Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.”
I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.
11
The Moscow line had been cut only four months before, but the rails were already beginning to rust. Most of the ties had been pried from the ground and split for firewood, though they were impregnated with creosote and dangerous to burn. Kolya walked atop of one rail, a gymnast on the balance beam, hands held out to the side. I trudged along behind him, in the center of the tracks, unwilling to play his game, partly because I was angry with him, partly because I knew I’d lose.
The rails ran east past redbrick apartment blocks and three-story department stores, past the Kotlyarov streetcar barns, past abandoned factories that had built things nobody could use or afford during wartime. A crew of young women wearing overalls below their winter coats, under the supervision of an army engineer, labored to convert a post office into a defensive position. The corner of the sturdy old building had been demolished to make way for a machine-gun nest.
“Great body on that one,” said Kolya, indicating a woman wearing a blue headscarf lugging sandbags from an idling truck.
“How can you tell?”
It was a ludicrous claim. The woman was at least fifty meters away; her jacket was heavily padded and she wore several layers beneath it.
“I can tell. She has a dancer’s posture.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t give me your
ah.
I know ballerinas. Believe me. I’ll bring you to the Mariinsky Theater some night, take you backstage. Let’s just say I have a reputation.”
“You never shut up about your reputation.”
“There is very little in this world that makes me happier than a ballerina’s thighs. Galina Ulanova—”
“Oh, stop.”
“What? She’s a national treasure. Her legs should be bronzed.”
“You never slept with Galina Ulanova.”
He gave me a small, secretive smile, a smile that said he knew many things but couldn’t share them all at once.
“I’m being cruel,” he admitted. “Talking to you about things of this nature . . . it’s sadistic. Like talking about Velázquez with a blind man. Let’s change the subject.”
“You don’t want to talk about ballerinas you didn’t sleep with for the next thirty-nine kilometers?”
“Three boys go to a farm to steal chickens,” he began in his joke-telling voice. He used a different accent for jokes, though I couldn’t tell what kind of accent it was supposed to be or why he thought it made things funnier.
“The farmer hears them and rushes over to the farmhouse. So the boys jump into three potato sacks and hide.”
“Is this going to be a long joke?”
“The farmer kicks the first sack and the boy inside says, ‘Meow!’ pretending to be a cat.”
“Oh, he was pretending to be a cat?”
“I just said that,” said Kolya, looking back at me to see if I was starting trouble.
“I know he’s pretending to be a cat. Once he says, ‘Meow,’ it’s obvious he’s pretending to be a cat.”
“You’re surly again because I slept with Sonya? Are you in love with her? Didn’t you have a nice time with what’s his name? The surgeon? You looked so cute curled up together by the stove.”
“And what’s that accent you’re doing? Is it supposed to be Ukrainian?”
“What accent?”
“Every time you tell a joke you use some stupid accent!”
“Listen, Lev, my little lion, I’m sorry. I know it’s not easy for you, lying there all night, your meat in your hand, listening to her happiness—”
“Just tell your dumb joke.”
“—but I promise you, before you hit eighteen—when’s your birthday?”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I’m going to find you a girl. Calculated neglect! Don’t forget.”
All this time he continued to walk atop the steel rail, one foot in front of the other, never losing his balance, never looking down, going faster than I could walk in the usual way.
“Where was I? Ah, the farmer, he kicks the first sack, ‘Meow,’ and so on. He kicks the second sack, and the boy inside says, ‘Woof!’ Pretending to be—”
Kolya pointed at me to finish the sentence.
“A cow.”
“A dog. When he kicks the third sack, the boy inside says, ‘Potatoes!’ ”
We walked in silence.
“Well,” said Kolya at last, “other people think it’s funny.”
On the outskirts of the city, the apartment blocks were no longer stacked one on top of the other. The concrete and brick was now broken by stretches of frozen marsh and snow-covered lots where future buildings were meant to rise before the war ended all construction. The farther we walked from the city center, the fewer civilians we saw. Army trucks with chains on their tires rattled past, the weary soldiers in the flatbeds staring at us with no interest as they motored toward the front.
“Do you know why it’s called Mga?” Kolya asked.
“Somebody’s initials?”
“Maria Gregorevna Apraksin. One of the characters in
The Courtyard Hound
is based on her. Heiress to a long line of field marshals, peculators, and royal toilet lickers. She’s convinced her husband is trying to murder her so he can marry her sister.”
“Is he?”
“Not at first, no. She’s completely paranoid. But she never shuts up about it and then he does start to fall in love with the sister. And he realizes life really would be better without his wife around. So he goes to Radchenko for advice, but he doesn’t know that Radchenko’s been fucking the little sister for years.”
“What else did he write?”
“Hm?”
“Ushakovo,” I said. “What other books did he write?”
“
The Courtyard Hound
, that’s it. It’s a famous story. The book came out, it was a failure. There was only one review and the critic absolutely blasted it. Called it vulgar and despicable. Nobody read it. Ushakovo worked on that book for eleven years. Eleven years, can you imagine that? And it disappears like it was dropped into the ocean. But he starts all over again, a new novel; his friends who see pieces of it say it’s his masterpiece. Except Ushakovo’s getting more and more religious, spending time with this church elder who convinces him that fiction is Satan’s work. And one night Ushakovo becomes convinced that he’s going to hell; he’s in a complete panic; he tosses the manuscript in the fire. Poof, gone.”
This sounded strangely familiar.
“But that’s exactly what happened to Gogol.”
“Well, no, not exactly. Very different in the particulars. But an interesting parallel, I agree.”
The rails veered away from the road, past stands of birch saplings too slender for firewood. Five white bodies lay facedown in the white snow. A family of winter dead, the dead father still clutching his dead wife’s hand, their dead children sprawled a short distance away. Two battered leather suitcases lay open beside the corpses, emptied of everything but a few cracked picture frames.
The family’s clothes and boots had been stripped away. Their buttocks had been hacked off, the softest meat, easiest for making patties and sausages. I couldn’t tell if the family had been murdered by gunfire, or knives, or an exploding shell, by German artillerymen or Russian cannibals. I didn’t want to know. They had been dead a long time, at least a week, and their bodies had started to become part of the landscape.
Kolya and I continued east along the Vologda line. He didn’t tell any more jokes that morning.
A little before noon we reached the edge of the Leningrad defenses: thickets of barbed wire, trenches three meters deep, dragon’s teeth, machine-gun nests, antiaircraft batteries, and KV-1 tanks covered with white camouflage netting. The soldiers we had seen earlier had ignored us, but now we were too far east to be civilians, and too strange of a pair to be Army. As we walked along the tracks a band of young privates, hauling the tarpaulin off a 6x6 truck, turned to stare at us.
Their sergeant walked toward us, not pointing his carbine at us, precisely, but not pointing it away, either. He had the posture of a lifelong Army man and the high cheekbones and narrow eyes of a Tartar.
“You two have papers?”
“We do,” said Kolya, reaching inside his jacket. “We have excellent papers.”
He handed over the colonel’s letter and nodded toward the truck.
“That the new-model Katyusha?”
The tarpaulin had been flung to the ground, revealing racks of parallel rails jutting skyward, waiting to be loaded with rockets. According to what we heard on the radio, the Germans feared the Katyusha more than any other Soviet weapon—they called it Stalin’s organ, after the rockets’ low and mournful howls.
The sergeant glanced at the rocket launcher and back to Kolya. “Never mind about that. Which Army are you with?”
“The Fifty-fourth.”
“The Fifty-fourth? You’re supposed to be in Kirishi.”
“Yes,” said Kolya, giving the sergeant an enigmatic smile and nodding at the letter in the man’s hand. “But orders are orders.”
The sergeant unfolded the letter and read. Kolya and I watched the privates position the finned-tail rockets on the Katyusha’s rails.
“Give them hell tonight!” shouted Kolya. The soldiers on the truck glanced at us and said nothing. They looked like they hadn’t slept in days; it took all their concentration to load the rockets without dropping them, there was no energy to waste on madmen.
Unwilling to be ignored, Kolya began to sing. He was a baritone with a strong, confident voice.
“On the bank Katyusha starts singing, of a proud gray eagle of the steppe, of the one Katyusha loves deeply, of the one whose letters she’s kept.”
The sergeant finished the letter and refolded it. The colonel’s message had clearly impressed him; he looked at Kolya now with genuine respect, nodding his head in time with the old song.
“That’s the stuff. I heard Ruslanova herself sing it during the Winter War. Gave her a hand when she was coming offstage, think she had one glass too many. You know what she said to me? ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ she said. ‘You look like a man who knows how to use his hands.’ What do you think of that? Always the hell-raiser, Ruslanova. But it’s a beautiful song.”
He slapped Kolya on the chest with the letter, giving it back, smiling at both of us.
“Sorry I had to stop you boys. You know how it is. . . . They say there’s three hundred saboteurs inside Leningrad and more coming every day. But now I know what you’re up to, working for the colonel. . . .”
He gave Kolya a wink.
“I know all about it, organizing the partisans, that’s the stuff. You let us regulars take ’em from the front, you boys plug ’em from the back, we’ll be leaving hot turds in the Reichstag come summer.”
Kolya had read the colonel’s letter aloud the day we got it and it didn’t mention partisans—it said only that we should not be detained or harassed as we were operating under the discretion of the colonel himself—but the newspapers were full of stories about simple country folk who had been trained to fight as deadly guerrillas by NKVD specialists.
“You keep ’em dancing with the organ here,” said Kolya—I didn’t know if he was mimicking the sergeant’s speech intentionally or not—“and we’ll make sure they can’t get any more strudel from the Vaterland.”
“There you go, there you go! Cut off the supply lines, let ’em starve in the woods, it’ll be 1812 all over again.”
“But no Elba for Hitler.”
“No, no, not for him, no Elba for Hitler!”
I wasn’t entirely sure the sergeant knew what Elba was, but he was adamant that Hitler wouldn’t get it.
“We’ll give him a bayonet in the balls, but no Elba!”
“We should keep moving,” said Kolya. “We have to make Mga by nightfall.”
The sergeant whistled. “That’s a long way. Stay to the woods, you hear? Fritz owns the roads, but a Russian doesn’t need a road to walk on, does he? Ha! You have enough bread? No? We can spare some. Ivan!”
The sergeant shouted at a scruffy young private standing beside the truck.
“Find some bread for these boys. They’re going behind lines.”