12
Outside of Leningrad the trees still grew, crows muttered on birch branches, squirrels raced between the firs. The squirrels looked fat and innocent, easy targets for a man with a pistol. They were lucky to live in occupied Russia.
We marched through the woods, through open fields of cold sunshine, keeping the train tracks visible to our left. The snow was hard packed, scattered with pine needles, decent for walking. We were in German-controlled territory, but there was no indication of a German presence, no sign at all of war. I was strangely happy. Piter was my home, but Piter was a graveyard now, a city of ghosts and cannibals. Walking in the countryside I felt a physical change, as if I were breathing pure oxygen after months at the bottom of a coal mine. The tangles in my gut uncoiled, my ears unclogged, I had strength in my legs I hadn’t felt for months.
Kolya seemed affected in the same way. He squinted in the glare off the snow, pursing his lips to blow great gusts of vapor, as delighted by this trick as a five-year-old.
Spotting a green scrap of paper near the trunk of a grand old birch, he bent down to pick it up. It looked normal enough, a ten-ruble banknote, Lenin’s eyes glaring at us from beneath his broad bald head—except that ten-ruble notes were gray, not green.
“Counterfeit?” I asked.
Kolya nodded, pointing to the sky with one finger as he scrutinized the bill.
“Fritz drops them by the bushel. The more counterfeit notes floating around, the less the real ones are worth.”
“But it’s not even the right color.”
Kolya flipped the note around and read aloud the printed text on the other side.
“
The prices for food items and the necessities of daily life have increased enormously and the black market in the Soviet Union is florishing.
‘Flourishing’ is spelled wrong, by the way.
Party functionaries and Jews are working dark deals at home while you at the front have to sacrifice your life for these criminal.
‘These criminal,’ that’s nice. They occupy half the country and they can’t even find someone who speaks the language?
Soon you will see the reason, so keep this ten-ruble note. It will guarantee your safe return to a free Russian after the war.
”
Kolya grinned and glanced up at me. “You working some dark deals, Lev Abramovich?”
“I wish.”
“They think these things will turn us? Don’t they understand? We invented propaganda! All this is bad tactics; they’re irritating the people they’re trying to convert. Young man thinks he’s found a ten-ruble note, he’s happy, maybe he can buy an extra slice of sausage. But no, it’s not money, it’s a poorly spelled surrender coupon.”
He speared the note to a tree branch and set it on fire with his lighter.
“You’re burning your chance to come back to a free Russian after the war,” I told him.
Kolya smiled as he watched the note blacken and curl. “Come on. We have a long way to go.”
After another hour slogging through the snow, Kolya prodded me in the shoulder with his gloved fingers.
“Do Jews believe in the afterlife?”
The day before the question would have annoyed me, but right then it seemed funny, so perfectly Kolya, asked with genuine curiosity and apropos of nothing.
“It depends on the Jew. My father was an atheist.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother’s not Jewish.”
“Ah, you’re a half-breed. No shame in that. I’ve always thought I had Gypsy blood in me from somewhere up the stream.”
I looked up at him, his eyes as blue as a husky’s, a smattering of blond hair showing from beneath the black fur cap.
“You don’t have Gypsy blood.”
“What, the eyes? Plenty of blue-eyed Gypsies in the world, my friend. Anyway, the New Testament’s very clear about the whole thing. You follow Jesus, you go to heaven; you don’t, you’re off to hell. But the Old Testament . . . I don’t even remember if there is a hell in the Old Testament.”
“Sheol.”
“What?”
“The underworld is called Sheol. One of my father’s poems is called ‘The Bars of Sheol.’ ”
It was very odd to speak openly about my father and his work. The words themselves seemed unsafe, as if I were confessing a crime and the authorities might hear. Even here where the Litburo had no sway, I worried about getting caught, worried about spies lurking in the larches. If my mother were around, she would have silenced me with a look. Still, it was good to talk about him. It made me happy that poems are referred to in the present tense even when the poet is in the past tense.
“What happens in Sheol? They punish you for your sins?”
“I don’t think so. Everybody goes there, doesn’t matter if you were good or bad. It’s just dark and cold and nothing’s left of us but our shadows.”
“Sounds about right.” He scooped up a handful of clean snow and took a bite, let it melt in his mouth. “A few weeks ago I saw a soldier with no eyelids. He was a tank commander, his tank broke down somewhere in the worst of it, and by the time they found him, the other boys in the tank were dead from the cold and he had frostbite over half his body. Lost some toes and fingers, a bit of his nose, his eyelids. I saw him sleeping in the infirmary, thought he was dead, his eyes wide open. . . . I don’t know if you call them ‘open’ if there’s no way to shut them. How do you stay sane with no eyelids? You have to go the rest of your life without ever once closing your eyes? I’d rather be blind.”
I had not seen Kolya morose before; the sudden shift in his mood made me anxious. Both of us heard the howling at the same time; we turned and looked through the crooked avenues of birch trees.
“Is that a dog?”
He nodded. “Sounds like it.”
A few seconds later we heard the howl again. There was something terribly human in its loneliness. We needed to keep walking east, we needed to reach Mga by nightfall, but Kolya headed off toward the crying dog and I followed without arguing.
The snow was deeper here and soon we were wading through thigh-high drifts. The energy I had felt ten minutes before began to seep away. I was tired again, battling for each step forward. Kolya slowed his pace so that I could keep up. If he was impatient with me, he didn’t show it.
I had my head down so I could choose each footfall—a twisted ankle was certain death now—and I saw the tread marks before Kolya. I grabbed his sleeve to stop him. We were at the edge of a vast clearing in the woods. The glare of sunlight off the hectares of snow was bright enough that I had to shield my eyes with my hand. The snow had been corrugated by dozens of tank treads, as if an entire Panzer brigade had passed through. I didn’t know treads the way I knew airplane engines, couldn’t tell a German Sturmtiger’s from a Russian T-34’s, but I knew these weren’t our tanks. We would have already broken the blockade if we had this much armor in the woods.
Gray and brown heaps lay scattered across the snow. At first I thought they were discarded coats, but I saw a tail on one, an outstretched paw on another, and I realized they were dead dogs, at least a dozen of them. We heard another howl and finally we saw the howler, a black-and-white sheepdog dragging itself off the field, its front legs doing the work its hind legs could not. Behind the wounded animal was a blood-smeared trail more than a hundred meters long, a red brushstroke slapped across a white canvas.
“Come on,” said Kolya, stepping into the field before I could stop him. The tanks were gone, but they had been here recently; the tracks were still cleanly defined in the snow, unblurred by wind. The Germans were near, in force, but Kolya didn’t care. He was already in the middle of the clearing, marching toward the sheepdog, and as usual I hurried to catch up.
“Don’t get too close to any of them,” he told me. I didn’t know why he told me that. Was he worried about disease? Did he think a dying dog might bite me?
When we got closer to the sheepdog, I could see that a wood box was strapped to its back, held in place with a leather harness. A wood post extended straight up from the box. I glanced around the field and saw that all the other dogs wore the same contraptions.
The sheepdog did not look at us. He was intent on reaching the fringe of trees on the far side of the field, where he thought he could find safety, or comfort, or a quiet place to die. Blood dribbled from two bullet holes near his hip and another must have pierced his belly, for something wet and coiled was dragged along beneath him, innards never meant to see daylight. He panted, his long pink tongue dangling from the side of his mouth, his black lips curling back from his yellowing teeth.
“They’re mines,” said Kolya. “They teach them to find food underneath a tank’s armor, and then they starve them, and when the Panzers come they let them loose. Boom.”
Except none of the dogs had gone boom. The Germans clearly knew all about it; they’d warned their gunners and their gunners were good shots. Dead dogs littered the field, but there were no tank carcasses, no upended armored cars, no explosions at all. It was another ingenious Russian ploy that had failed completely, as all of the Russian ploys had failed, and I pictured the hungry dogs sprinting toward the Panzers, their paws kicking up fantails of snow, their eyes bright and happy as they raced for their first meal in weeks.
“Give me your knife,” said Kolya.
“Be careful.”
“Give it to me.”
I pulled the German dagger from its sheath and handed it to him. The sheepdog kept trying to drag his gutted self toward the woods, but he was losing strength in his front legs. He finally quit when he saw Kolya approaching, as if he had decided that this was far enough. He lay in the blood-wet snow, staring up at Kolya with weary brown eyes. The wood post stuck straight up from the box on his back like the mast of a sailboat. It seemed a flimsy thing, no thicker than a drumstick.
“You’re my good boy,” said Kolya, kneeling beside the sheepdog, holding the back of the dog’s head steady with his left hand. “You’re my good boy.”
Kolya cut the dog’s throat with one quick motion. The dog shuddered, the blood pouring from him, steaming in the cold air. Kolya lowered the dog’s head gently to the ground, where he continued to twitch for a few seconds, pawing at nothing, like a dreaming puppy, and then he was dead.
We were silent for a moment, giving our respect to the fallen dog. Kolya wiped both sides of the bloody blade on the snow, dried it on the sleeve of his overcoat, and handed it back to me.
“We just lost forty minutes. Walk fast.”
13
We marched at double time through the birch forest, the railroad tracks to our left, the sun tumbling fast from the sky. Kolya hadn’t spoken since the field of dead dogs. I could tell he was worried about the time; he had miscalculated our speed, how fast we could walk across snow-covered terrain, and our detour had ruined any chances of making Mga by nightfall. The cold was a greater danger than the Germans now and the temperature was already dropping fast. Without shelter we would die.
We hadn’t seen a human being since saying farewell to the Tartar sergeant and we kept our distance from the abandoned railway stations at Koloniya Yanino and Dubrovka. Even from two hundred meters away we could see the toppled statue of Lenin outside the Dubrovka station, the black graffiti spray painted on the concrete wall: STALIN IST TOT! RUSSLAND IST TOT! SIE SIND TOT!
At three in the afternoon the sun dipped below the western hills and the brooding gray clouds above us flared orange. I heard the whine of airplane engines and looked up to see four Messerschmitts racing toward Leningrad, so high above us they seemed harmless as fruit flies. I wondered what buildings they would flatten, or if they would be shot down by our boys on the ground, or our pilots in the air. It seemed wonderfully abstract to me, somebody else’s war. Wherever they dropped their bombs, it wouldn’t be on me. When I realized that thought was my own, I felt a surge of guilt. What a selfish shit I had become.
We were walking past Berezovka, a name I’d first heard in September when the Red Army and the Wehrmacht clashed outside the village. According to the newspapers, our boys fought with great valor and tactical brilliance, outfoxing the German commanders and frustrating Hitler himself, who followed each development from his war room in Berlin. But everyone in Leningrad knew how to read a newspaper article. The Russian forces were always “calm and determined,” the Germans were always “stunned by the fury of our resistance”—these phrases were mandatory. The key information came near the bottom of each article, tucked away inside a closing paragraph. If our men “withdrew to reserve our fighting strength,” we had lost the battle; if the troops “gladly sacrificed themselves to repel the enemy invaders,” we had been massacred.
Berezovka was a massacre. According to the papers, the village was famous for its church, built on the direct order of Peter himself, and a bridge where Pushkin challenged a rival to a duel. These landmarks were gone. Berezovka was gone. A few fire-blackened walls still stood above the snow; if not for that, there would be no sign that the village had ever existed.
“They’re fools,” said Kolya, as we skirted around the hamlet’s torched remnants. I looked up at him, not sure whom he meant.
“The Germans. They think they’re so efficient, the greatest war machine ever built. But you look at history, you read the books, and the best conquerors always gave their enemies a way out. You could fight Genghis Khan and get your heads lopped off or you could submit and pay him taxes. That’s an easy choice. With the Germans, you can fight them and get killed or you can surrender and get killed. They could have turned half this country against the other half, but they don’t have subtlety; they don’t understand the Russian mind; they just burn everything.”
What Kolya said was true enough, as far as it went, but it seemed to me that the Nazis had no interest in a subtle invasion. They didn’t want to change anyone’s mind, at least no one among the inferior races. The Russians were a mongrel people, spawned by hordes of Vikings and Huns, raped by generations of Avars and Khazars, Kipchaks and Pechenegs, Mongols and Swedes, infested by Gypsies and Jews and far-roaming Turks. We were the children of a thousand lost battles and defeat was heavy in us. We no longer deserved to exist. The Germans believed in the lesson of Darwin’s mockingbirds—life must adapt or die. They had adapted to brute reality; we mixed-race drunks on the Russian steppes had not. We were doomed, and the Germans were only playing their mandated role in human evolution.
I didn’t say any of that, though. All I said was, “They gave the French a way out.”
“All the Frenchmen with balls died on the way home from Moscow in 1812. You think I’m joking? Listen, one hundred and thirty years ago they had the best army in the world. Now they’re the whores of Europe, just waiting to be fucked by whomever comes along with a hard cock. Am I wrong? So what happened to them? Borodino, Leipzig, Waterloo. Think about it. Courage got blasted out of their gene pool. Their little genius Napoleon castrated the whole country.”
“We’re losing the light.”
He glanced up at the sky and nodded. “If it comes to it, we can build a dugout and make it through till morning.”
He walked faster, accelerating our already-quick pace, and I knew that I couldn’t keep up for much longer. Last night’s soup was a delicious memory; the sergeant’s gift of ration bread had been devoured before noon. Each footstep was an effort now, as if my boots had been lined with lead.
It was already so cold I could feel it in my teeth; the cheap fillings plugging my cavities shrunk when the temperature dipped low. But I couldn’t feel my fingertips even though I wore thick wool mittens and had shoved my hands into the pockets of my overcoat. Nor could I feel the tip of my nose. What a good joke that would be—I spent most of my adolescence wishing for a smaller nose; a few more hours in the woods and I wouldn’t have a nose.
“We’re going to build a dugout? With what? You brought a shovel?”
“You still have hands, don’t you? And the knife.”
“We need to get inside somewhere.”
Kolya made a great show of looking around the darkening woods, as if a doorway might be hidden in one of the tall pines.
“There is no inside,” he said. “You’re a soldier now, I’ve drafted you, and soldiers sleep wherever they close their eyes.”
“That’s very beautiful. But we need to get inside.”
He placed his gloved hand on my chest and for a second I thought he was angry with me, insulted by my unwillingness to brave the winter night outdoors. But he wasn’t admonishing me; he was making me stand still. He gestured with his chin to an access road that ran parallel to the train tracks. It was a few hundred meters away, and the shadows were growing deeper, but there was still enough light to see a Russian soldier standing with his back to us, his rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Partisan?” I whispered.
“No, he’s regular Army.”
“Maybe we’ve taken Berezovka back. A counterattack?”
“Maybe,” whispered Kolya. We crept closer to the sentry, treading carefully. We didn’t know any passwords and no one with a rifle would wait to see if we were truly Russian.
“Comrade!” shouted Kolya when we were fifty meters away, his hands raised above his head. I raised mine, too. “Don’t shoot! We’re here on special orders!”
The sentry did not turn. Many soldiers had lost their hearing in the last few months; exploding shells had ruptured thousands of eardrums. Kolya and I exchanged a glance and walked closer. The soldier stood knee-deep in the snow. He was far too still. No living man could pose like a statue in cold this severe. I turned a full circle, scanning the woods, convinced this was a trap. Nothing moved but the birch branches in the wind.
We walked up to the soldier. He must have been a brute in his day, with his bulging brow and his wrists thick as ax handles. But he’d been dead for days, his paper-white skin wrapped too tightly around his skull, ready to split. A neat little bullet hole, crusted with frozen blood, punched through his cheek just below his left eye. A wood sign hung from his neck on a wire loop, the phrase
PROLETARIER ALLER LÄNDER, VEREINIGT EUCH!
spelled out with a black marker. I didn’t speak German, but I knew the phrase, as did every boy and girl in Russia who had suffered through endless lectures on dialectical materialism: Workers of all lands unite!
I pulled the sign off the dead soldier’s neck, careful not to let the ice-cold wire brush against his face, and tossed it away. Kolya unfastened the strap of the rifle and inspected the weapon: a Mosin-Nagant with a crooked bolt. He tried it a few times, shook his head, and let it drop to the ground. The soldier wore a hip holster with a Tokarev pistol; a leather lanyard ran through a loophole in the hilt of the gun, securing it to the holster. The dead man was an officer, a pistol waver—the Tokarev wasn’t meant for Germans, it was for Russians who refused to advance.
Kolya drew the automatic, untied the lanyard, checked the pistol’s butt, and saw that the magazine had been taken. The ammo loops in the officer’s belt were empty, too. Kolya unbuttoned the man’s coat and found what he was looking for, a burlap pouch with a steel-buckled leather strap.
“Sometimes we put them under our coats at night,” he said, opening the pouch and grabbing three pistol magazines. “The buckle’s too shiny, reflects the moonlight.”
He slammed one of the magazines home and tried the action. Satisfied the pistol was sound, he stuffed it and the extra ammunition into his overcoat pocket.
We tried to pull the dead man out of the snow, but he was frozen into the ground, as rooted as a tree. Dusk was leeching all the colors from the forest; the night was almost on us; there was no more time to spare for corpses.
We hurried east, walking close to the tracks now, hoping that any Germans moving through the frozen woods would be in vehicles and easy to hear from a distance. The crows had quit cawing and the wind had stopped blowing. The only sounds were our boots sinking through the snow and the distant, arrhythmic drumbeat of mortar shells falling around Piter. I tried to hide my face behind the wool of my scarf and the collar of my overcoat, tried to use the warmth of my breath to heat my cheeks. Kolya stamped his gloved hands together and pulled his black fur cap down so low it almost covered his eyes.
A few kilometers east of Berezovka we walked along the perimeter of a large farm, the undulating fields of snow demarcated with low stone walls. Hay bales big as igloos sat abandoned in the fields, the harvest interrupted, the farmers fled to the east or dead. An old stone farmhouse stood at the far edge of the farm, protected from the northern wind by a copse of larch trees fifty meters high. Firelight shone through the mullioned windows, warm and buttery, spilling onto the snow in front of the house. Black smoke plumed from the chimney, barely visible as a curling smudge against the dark blue sky. It looked like the most inviting house ever built, the country residence of the emperor’s favorite general, heated and well stocked for Christmas with everyone’s favorite smoked meats and pastries.
I looked up at Kolya as we trudged through the snow. He shook his head but never took his eyes off the farmhouse, and I could see the longing in his expression.
“It’s a bad idea,” he said.
“It’s a better idea than freezing to death on the way to Mga.”
“Who do you think is in there? A country gentleman, sitting by the fire, petting his dog? You think we’re in a fucking Turgenev story? Every house in town was burned down, this one’s still standing. What happened, they got lucky? It’s Germans in there, the officers, probably. We’re going to storm the house with a pistol and a knife?”
“If we keep walking, we’re dead. If we go to the house and the Germans are there, we’re dead. But if it’s not Germans—”
“So let’s say they’re Russians,” he said. “That means the Germans let them stay there, which means they’re working with the Germans, which means they’re the enemy.”
“So we can appropriate food from the enemy, can’t we? And a bed?”
“Listen, Lev, I know you’re tired. I know you’re cold. But trust me, trust a soldier, this won’t work.”
“I’m not going any farther. I’d rather take a chance on the farmhouse.”
“There might be a place in the next town—”
“How do you know there
is
a next town? The last one is ashes. How much farther to Mga, another fifteen kilometers? Maybe you can make it. I can’t.”
Kolya sighed, rubbing his face with the back of his leather glove, trying to get some circulation going.
“I concede that we’re not going to make it to Mga. That’s no longer an issue. I’ve known for hours.”
“You didn’t want to tell me about it? How far away are we?”
“Far. The bad news is, I don’t think we’re going the right way.”
“What do you mean?”
Kolya was still looking at the farmhouse and I had to shove him to get his attention. “What do you mean we’re not going the right way?”
“We should have crossed the Neva hours ago. And I don’t think Berezovka is on the Mga line.”
“You don’t think . . . Why didn’t you say something?”
“I didn’t want you to panic.”
It was too dark to see the expression on his stupid Cossack face.
“You told me Mga is on the Moscow line.”
“It is.”
“You told me all we have to do is follow the Moscow tracks and they’ll take us to Mga.”
“Yes, all true.”
“So where the fuck are we?”
“Berezovka.”
I took a deep breath. I longed for powerful fists so I could pulp his skull.