15
Lara brought us to a small bedroom in the back of the house, where I imagined the valets slept in the time of the emperors. She carried a brass candelabrum with two lit candles, which she rested on the little writing desk. The pine-paneled walls were unadorned, the bunk bed had no sheets on the mattresses, and I almost tripped on the warped floorboards, but the room was warm enough. The narrow windows offered a view of a moonlit toolshed and a wheelbarrow lying on its side in the snow.
I sat on the lower mattress and ran my finger over a name carved in the wall. ARKADIY. I wondered how long ago Arkadiy stayed in this room, and where he was now, an old man shivering somewhere in the cold night or just bones in the churchyard. He had been good with the knife, his ARKADIY was a delicate filigree in the dark wood, slants and curlicues, a strong slash underlining the name.
Lara and Kolya came up with a code—banging pots with serving spoons—that would allow her to signal to us how many Germans showed up for their late-night entertainment. When she left, Kolya pulled out his pistol and began taking it apart, neatly arranging the various parts on the writing desk, checking them for damage and wiping them off with the sleeve of his shirt before reassembling the weapon.
“Have you ever shot anybody?” I asked.
“Not that I know about.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I shot my rifle a hundred times, maybe a bullet hit someone, I don’t know.” He slapped the magazine back into the butt of the automatic. “When I shoot Abendroth, I’ll know it.”
“Maybe we should just leave now.”
“You’re the one who wanted to come in here.”
“We needed to rest. We needed food. I feel a lot better now.”
He turned and looked at me. I was sitting on the bed with my hands under my legs, my overcoat spread out behind me.
“There could be eight of them coming,” I said. “We’ve got one gun.”
“And one knife.”
“I can’t stop thinking about Zoya.”
“Good,” he said. “Keep thinking about her when you stick the knife in his gut.”
He threw his overcoat onto the top mattress and clambered up there, sitting cross-legged with his pistol beside him. He pulled his journal from the pocket of his overcoat. His stub of pencil had shrunk to the size of a thumbnail, but he jotted down notes with his usual speed.
“I don’t think I can do it,” I said, after a long silence. “I don’t think I can stick a knife in anyone.”
“Then I’ll have to shoot them all. What’s it been now, eleven days since I had a shit? What do you think the record is?”
“Probably a lot longer than that.”
“I wonder what it’s going to look like when it finally comes out.”
“Kolya . . . why don’t we just go now? Take the girls and go back to the city. We’d make it. They’ve got plenty of food we could bring. We’ve got our blood flowing again. Bring some extra blankets—”
“Listen to me. I know you’re afraid. You’re right to be afraid. Only an idiot would be calm sitting in a house knowing the Einsatzgruppen are coming. But this is what you’ve been waiting for. This is the night. They’re trying to burn down our city; they’re trying to starve us to death. But we’re like two of Piter’s bricks. You can’t burn a brick. You can’t starve a brick.”
I watched the candles gutter in the candelabrum, watched the shadows dance across the ceiling.
“Where’d you hear that?” I finally asked him.
“Which part, the bricks? My lieutenant. Why? You’re not inspired?”
“It was going along all right until then.”
“I like the bricks. ‘You can’t burn a brick. You can’t starve a brick.’ It’s nice. It has nice rhythm.”
“This is the same lieutenant who stepped on a land mine?”
“Yes. Poor man. Well, forget about the bricks. I promise you, little lion, we’re not dying out here. We’re going to kill a few Nazis and we’re going to find those eggs. I have a little Gypsy blood in me; I can read the future.”
“You don’t have any Gypsy blood.”
“And I’ll insist the colonel invites us to his daughter’s wedding.”
“Ha. You love her.”
“I do. I believe I am truly in love with that girl. She is quite possibly an idiot bitch, but I love her. I want to marry her and she never has to say a word. She doesn’t have to cook for me; she doesn’t have to carry my babies. Just skate naked on the Neva, that’s all I want. Do a little spin above my open mouth.”
For a few seconds he helped me forget the fear, but it never left for long. I could not remember when I was not afraid, but that night it came on stronger than ever before. So many possibilities terrified me. There was the possibility of shame, of cowering again on the fringe of the action while Kolya fought the Germans—except this time, I knew he would die. There was the possibility of pain, suffering through the kind of torture Zoya suffered through, the saw teeth biting through my skin, muscles, and bone. And there was the excellent possibility of death. I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the most absurd beauty.
I heard the bedsprings creaking and looked up to see Kolya leaning over the side of the top mattress, his upside-down face peering at me, his blond hair hanging in filthy clumps. He looked like he was worried about me, and all at once I felt like crying. The only one left who knew how frightened I was, the only one who knew I was still alive and that I might die tonight, was a boastful deserter I’d met three nights before, a stranger, a child of Cossacks, my last friend.
“This will cheer you up,” he said, dropping a deck of cards in my lap.
They seemed like ordinary playing cards until I flipped them over. Each presented a different photographed woman, some naked, some wearing garter belts and lace corsets, their heavy breasts tumbling from their cupped hands, their lips slightly parted for the camera.
“I thought I had to beat you at chess to get these.”
“Easy with that, easy. Don’t crease the corners. Those came all the way from Marseille.”
He watched me shuffle through the nudes, smiling when he saw me give certain models closer looks.
“What about the girls here, eh? Four beauties. We’re going to be heroes after tonight, you realize this, yes? They’ll be falling all over us. So which one do you want?”
“We’re going to be dead after tonight.”
“Truly, my friend, truly you have to stop speaking like this.”
“I guess I like the little one with the chubby arms.”
“Galina? All right. She looks like a veal calf, but all right, I understand.”
He was quiet for a moment while I studied a picture of a shirt-less woman wearing jodhpurs, cracking a bullwhip.
“Listen, Lev, after this is over tonight, promise me you’ll talk to your little calf. Don’t run away like the shy boy you are. I’m very serious about this. She likes you. I saw her looking at you.”
I knew for a fact that Galina had not been looking at me. She had been looking at Kolya, as they all had, as he knew very well.
“What happened to calculated neglect? You said that according to
The Courtyard Hound
, the secret to winning a woman—”
“There’s a difference between ignoring a woman and enticing her. You entice her with mystery. She wants you to come after her, but you keep circling. It’s the same with sex. Amateurs yank down their pants and shove it in there like they’re trying to spear a fish. But the man with talent knows it’s all about teasing, circling, coming close, and moving away.”
“This one’s nice,” I said, holding up a card featuring a woman posed as a bullfighter, holding a red cape and wearing nothing but a montera.
“That’s my favorite one. When I was your age, I must have filled twenty socks staring at her.”
“
Truth for Young Pioneers
says that masturbation defeats the revolutionary spirit.”
“Without a doubt. But as Proudhon said—”
I never found out what Proudhon said. The double clang of a copper spoon against a copper pot interrupted Kolya. We both sat up in our beds.
“They came early,” he whispered.
“Only two of them.”
“They picked the wrong night to travel light.” The moment those words were in the air the spoon struck the pot again—once, twice, three times, four.
“Six,” I whispered.
Kolya swung his legs over the side of the mattress and quietly lowered himself to the floor, pistol in his hand. He blew out the candles and squinted out the window, but we were on the wrong side of the house and there was nothing to see. We heard car doors slamming shut.
“This is what we do,” he told me, his voice low and calm. “We wait. Let them relax, warm up, have a few drinks. They’ll take their clothes off, with any luck they won’t be near their guns. Remember, they’re not here to fight. They’re here to have a good time, enjoy the girls. You hear? We have the advantage.”
I nodded. Despite what he said, the arithmetic seemed very bad to me. Six Germans and two of us. Would the girls try to help us? They hadn’t lifted a hand for Zoya, but what could they have done for Zoya? Six Germans and eight bullets in the Tokarev. I hoped Kolya was a good shot. Fear coursed through me, electric, forcing my muscles to twitch and my mouth to go dry. I felt more awake than I ever had before, as if this moment, in the farmhouse outside of Berezovka, was the first true moment of my life and everything that came before was a fitful sleep. My senses seemed amplified, extraordinary, responding to the crisis by giving me all the information I needed. I could hear the crunch of jackboots on packed snow. I could smell pine needles burning in the fireplace, that old trick to perfume the house.
The rifle shot startled us. We stood quietly in the darkness, trying to understand what was happening. After a few seconds, several more rifles echoed the first. We heard the Germans shouting to each other, panicked, their voices overlapping.
Kolya ran for the door. I wanted to tell him to wait, that we had a plan and the plan called for waiting, but I didn’t want to be alone in there while the rifles fired outside and the Germans screamed their ugly words.
We ran to the great room and threw ourselves onto the floor when a bullet smashed through one of the mullioned windows. All four girls were already lying belly-down on the floor, their arms up by their faces to protect themselves from flying glass.
I had been living in a war for half a year, but I had never been this close to a gunfight and I had no idea who was fighting. I could hear the chuffing cough of machine guns fired just outside the house. The rifle cracks seemed to come from farther away, the edge of the woods, possibly. Bullets hammered the stone walls of the farmhouse.
Kolya crawled up to Lara and jostled her.
“Who’s shooting at them?”
“I don’t know.”
Outside we heard a car engine igniting. Doors slammed and the car accelerated, tires spinning in the snow. The rifles fired even faster now, one on top of the other, bullets ripping through sheet metal, a very different sound from bullet on stone.
Kolya rose to a crouch and crept to the front door, keeping his head below the window line. I followed. We kneeled with our backs against the door. Kolya checked his pistol one last time. I pulled the German knife from my ankle sheath. I knew I looked silly holding it, the way a young boy looks holding his father’s shaving razor. Kolya grinned at me as though he was about to start laughing. This is all very strange, I thought. I am in the middle of a battle and I am aware of my own thoughts, I am worried about how stupid I look with a knife in my hand while everyone else came to fight with rifles and machine guns. I am aware that I am aware. Even now, with bullets buzzing through the air like angry hornets, I cannot escape the chatter of my brain.
Kolya put his hand on the doorknob and turned it slowly.
“Wait,” I said. We stayed very still for a few seconds. “It’s quiet.”
The gunfire had ended abruptly. The car engine still hummed, but I couldn’t hear the wheels turning. The German voices had gone silent as suddenly as the bullets. Kolya glanced at me and slowly pulled the door open, just enough to peer through. The moon was high and bright, lighting the brutal landscape: Einsatzkommandos in white anoraks sprawled facedown in the snow and a Kübelwagen rolling slowly down the unshoveled driveway, windows shot out, engine block smoking. The dead man in the passenger seat sagged halfway out of the side window, his fingers still wrapped around his machine pistol. A second Kübel, parked at a jaunty angle beside the farmhouse, had never moved. Two Germans lay halfway between it and the house, their skulls pouring dark junk onto the snow. I had just enough time to register the precision of the shots, the superb accuracy of the sniper, when a bullet flew through the gap between Kolya’s head and mine, twanging in the air like a plucked string.