16
Korsakov had given his men an hour to warm up and feed themselves, and now they were sprawled across the great room, their socks hanging from the fireplace screen, their overcoats spread out on the floor. Vika lay on her back on a horsehair sofa beneath the mounted ibex head, her ankles crossed, her fingers playing with the rabbit fur cap resting on her chest. Her dark red hair was cut short as a boy’s, so dirty it clumped together in spikes and whorls. She stared into the ibex’s glass eyes, fascinated by the murdered animal—wondering about the hunt, I imagined, about the hunter’s shot, if it was a clean kill or if the wounded beast ran for miles, not understanding that death had already burrowed into his muscle and bone, a tumbling slug that could not be outrun.
I was sitting on a window ledge watching her and trying to make sure she didn’t know I was watching her. She had stripped off her coveralls to let them dry. She wore a heavy wool woodcutter’s shirt that once belonged to a man twice her size and two pairs of long underwear. Unlike most redheads, she didn’t have a single freckle. She worried at her upper lip with the bottom row of her crooked little teeth. I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was no man’s idea of a pinup girl—underfed as she was, looking like she’d spent the last week sleeping in the forest—but I wanted to see her naked. I wanted to unbutton the woodcutter’s shirt, toss it aside, and lick her pale belly, strip off the long underwear and kiss her thin thighs.
This graphic daydream was a departure for me. Had Kolya’s pornographic playing cards riled my imagination? Usually my fantasies were chaste, anachronistic—I’d envision Vera Osipovna, fully clothed, giving me a cello recital in the loneliness of her bedroom, and afterward I would praise her playing, impressing her with my eloquence and mastery of the musicians’ vocabulary. The fantasy would end with some strong kissing, Vera’s out-flung leg knocking over the music stand, her face hot and flushed as I flashed a mysterious smile and left her standing, her collar askew, one button of her shirt undone.
My fantasies generally ended before getting to the sex because I was afraid of sex. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t even know enough to fake knowing how to do it. I understood the basic anatomy, but the geometry of the act confused me, and without a father or an older brother or any close friends with experience, there was no one around to ask.
But there was nothing chaste in my hunger for Vika. I wanted to jump on her, my pants around my ankles. She could show me where everything went and once we were sorted, her fingers with their dirty, bitten nails would rake my shoulders; her head would tilt back, exposing her long white throat and the tremor of pulse below her jaw; her heavy eyelids would open wide, pupils constricting in the blue of her eyes until they were the size of the dot above the
i.
All of the women of the house—Nina and Galina, Lara and Olesya—were prettier than Vika at first glance. Their hair was long and brushed; they had no dried mud on the backs of their hands; they even wore a bit of lipstick. They hurried in and out of the great room, carrying bowls of shelled walnuts and salted radishes. There was a new group of armed men to please—countrymen, yes, but still dangerous and unpredictable. One of them, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fire, grabbed Galina’s chubby wrist as she leaned down to refill his glass of vodka.
“You take a look outside yet? Is your boyfriend one of them lying on his face?”
His friend beside him laughed and the partisan, encouraged, yanked Galina into his lap. She was used to rough treatment; she didn’t cry out or spill a drop of the vodka.
“Did they bring you lots of tasty things to eat? They must have, eh, feel these cheeks!” He brushed a callused thumb across her soft pink cheek. “And what did you do for them? Anything they wanted, was that it? Danced naked while they sang the ‘Horst Wessel Song’? Sucked them off while they drank their schnapps?”
“Get off her,” said Vika. She was lying on her back just as she had been, still looking up at the ibex head while her feet in their thick wool socks swayed to the beat of an unheard song. Her voice was uninflected—if she was angry, it was impossible to tell. As soon as the words were in the air I wished I had said them instead. It would have been a brave gesture, possibly suicidal, but Galina had been kind to me and I should have defended her—not because of my noble nature, but because it might have impressed Vika. But in the moment when I might have acted I froze, another act of cowardice to dwell on through the years. Kolya would have intervened without hesitation, but Kolya was in the back bedroom with Korsakov, looking over the colonel’s letter of safe transit.
The partisan gripping Galina’s wrist hesitated before responding to Vika. I knew he was afraid. I’ve been afraid for so long I can spot the fear in other people before they know it’s there. But I also knew he would say something back, something cutting to prove to his comrades that he wasn’t afraid, even though they all knew he was.
“What’s the matter?” he finally asked. “You want her for yourself?”
It was a weak effort and none of his friends gave him a laugh. Vika didn’t bother responding. She never looked his way. The only sign that she had heard him at all was a slow smile that spread across her face, and it wasn’t clear if that was in response to his taunt or the ibex’s glass-eyed glare. After a few more seconds the partisan grunted, let go of Galina, and gave her a weak push.
“Go on, serve the others. You’ve been a slave so long that’s all you’re good for.”
If the partisan’s insults wounded her, Galina hid it well. She poured glasses of vodka for the other men in the room and all of them were polite, nodding their heads in thanks.
After a minute to consider the odds of severe embarrassment, I walked over to the horsehair sofa and sat on the end of it, close to Vika’s feet in their gray wool socks. The ibex’s chin beard dangled above my head. I glanced up at it and then over to Vika. She was staring right at me, waiting to hear whatever ludicrous thing I was planning to say.
“Was your father a hunter?” I asked. This was the question I had formulated while standing on the other side of the room. As soon as I said it I wondered why I had thought it was a good way to start a conversation. Some article I had read about snipers, something about Sidorenko shooting squirrels when he was a boy.
“What?”
“Your father . . . I thought maybe that’s how you learned to shoot.”
I couldn’t tell if it was boredom or disgust in her blue eyes. Up close, by the light of the oil lamps and the fireplace, I could see a spray of small red pimples across her forehead.
“No. He wasn’t a hunter.”
“I guess a lot of snipers started out as hunters. . . . Anyway, I read something about it.”
She wasn’t looking at me anymore, she was back to studying the ibex. I was less interesting than a stuffed animal. The other partisans watched me, elbowing each other and grinning, leaning close to whisper and laugh quietly.
“Where’d you get that German rifle?” I asked her, a little desperate, a gambler who keeps on betting even as his hands get worse and worse.
“Off a German.”
“I have a German knife.” I pulled up my pants leg, unsheathed the knife, and turned it in my hand, letting the fine steel catch the light. The knife got her attention. She held out her hand and I passed it to her. She tested the edge of the blade against her forearm.
“Sharp enough to shave with,” I said. “Not that you need to . . . I mean . . .”
“Where’d you find it?”
“On a German.”
She smiled and I was very proud of the line, as if I’d said something massively clever, responding to her taciturnity with my own.
“And where’d you find the German?”
“Dead paratrooper in Leningrad.” I hoped that was vague enough to leave open the possibility that I had killed the paratrooper.
“They’re dropping into Leningrad? It’s started?”
“Just a commando raid, I guess. Only a few got through. Didn’t go so well for the Fritzes.” I thought that sounded right, offhand, as if I were the sort of killer who spoke casually of the enemies I’d dispatched.
“You killed him yourself?”
I opened my mouth, fully prepared to lie, but the way she looked at me, her lips curled into that smirk that both angered me with its condescension and made me want to kiss her . . .
“The cold killed him. I just saw him falling.”
She nodded and handed back the knife, stretching her arms behind her head and giving a tremendous yawn, not bothering to cover her mouth. Her teeth were like children’s teeth, very small and not quite matching. She looked content, as if she’d just eaten a nine-course meal served with the best wines, though all I’d seen her nibble on was a black radish.
“The cold is Mother Russia’s oldest weapon,” I added, some line I’d heard a general spout on the radio. Immediately I wished I could retract it. Maybe it was true, but it had been a propaganda cliché for months now. Even mouthing the phrase
Mother Russia
made me feel like one of those stupid smiling Young Pioneers, marching in the parks in their white shirts and red ties, singing “The Little Joyful Drummer.”
“I have a knife, too,” she said, slipping a birch-handled dagger out of a sheath tucked into her belt and offering it to me hilt first.
I turned the slender blade in my hand. There was a pattern of fine lines on the steel, like ripples in disturbed water.
“It seems a little flimsy.”
“It’s not.” She leaned forward to run the tip of her index finger along the textured blade. “That’s Damascus steel.”
She was close enough now that I could study the curling ridges of her ear or the creases that interrupted the smooth span of her forehead when she raised her eyebrows. A few stray pine needles were lodged in the thickets of her hair and I resisted the impulse to pluck them out.
“It’s called a puukko,” she told me. “All the Finnish boys get them when they come of age.”
She took the knife back from me and tilted it so she could admire the play of firelight on metal.
“The best sniper in the world is a Finn. Simo Häyhä. The White Death. Five hundred and five confirmed kills in the Winter War.”
“So you took that off some Finn you shot?”
“Bought it for eighty rubles in Terijoki.” She slipped the dagger back into the sheath on her belt and surveyed the room, looking for something more interesting to occupy her attention.
“Maybe you can be the Red Death,” I said, trying to keep talking because I knew if I stopped, I would never regain the courage to start again. “That was some fine sniping out there. I guess the Einsatzkommandos aren’t used to people shooting back at them.”
Vika regarded me with her cold blue eyes. There was something not entirely human about her gaze, something predatory, lupine. She made a circle of her lips before shaking her head.
“Why do you think those were Einsatzkommandos?”
“The girls told us that’s who comes here.”
“What are you, fifteen? You’re not a soldier—”
“Seventeen.”
“—but you’re traveling with a soldier who’s not with his unit.”
“Well, as he was saying, we have special orders from Colonel Grechko.”
“Special orders to do what? Organize the partisans? Do I look so very stupid to you?”
“No.”
“You came here to visit the girls? Is that it? One of these is your girlfriend?”
I was strangely proud that she thought one of the lovely girls in the house might be my girlfriend, even though I could hear the insulting tone in her phrasing,
“one of these.”
She was curious about me, that was a start. And she was right to be curious. Why should a Piter boy be all the way out here, twenty kilometers behind enemy lines, resting in a comfort house maintained for officers of the invaders?
I remembered what Kolya had told me about enticing a woman with mystery.
“We have our orders, I’m sure you have yours, let’s keep it at that.”
Vika stared at me in silence for a few seconds. She might have been enticed, but it was hard to tell.
“Those Germans out there with their brains in the snow? That’s regular Army. You’d think a man—sorry, a
boy
—working with the NKVD would know the difference.”
“I didn’t get a chance to inspect their insignia because you people were pointing your rifles at us.”
“We’re looking for Einsatz, though. That’s big game. We’ve been hunting this corpse-fucker Abendroth the last six weeks. Thought he might be here tonight.”
I had never heard the curse “corpse-fucker” before. The phrase sounded brutally vulgar coming from her lips. I smiled for some reason, a smile that must have seemed odd and unprovoked. In my mind I pictured her with her pants off; the image was sharp and detailed, far more convincing than my imagined nudes usually were. Maybe Kolya’s pornographic playing cards really had helped.
“Abendroth’s in a house in Novoye Koshkino,” I told her. “By the lake.”
The information seemed to entice her more than anything else I had said. My inappropriate smile matched with my knowledge of the Nazi’s whereabouts made me momentarily intriguing.