“Who told you that?”
A more mysterious man would have known how to deflect the question, how to sidestep like a boxer, bobbing and weaving, never getting tagged. I knew something she wanted to know. For the first time I had a slight advantage over her. The words
Novoye Koshkino
gave my NKVD credentials a touch of credence, offered me some leverage I could exploit.
“Lara,” I said, giving it all away with a word.
“Which one is Lara?”
I pointed her out. As Vika’s unblinking gaze shifted, I felt that I had somehow betrayed Lara. She had been generous—given us shelter from the cold, fed us warm food, ventured into the brutal winter night in her bare feet to help defend us from the suspicious partisans—and I had surrendered her name to this smirking blue-eyed killer. Vika slid her feet off the sofa, her toes in their wool socks grazing against my pants leg. She stood and walked over to Lara, who was crouched by the fire, adding another log to the blaze. With her boots off I saw how small Vika really was, but she moved with the kind of lazy grace you see in athletes when they’re relaxing away from the playing field.
This is modern warfare,
I thought,
where muscle means nothing and a slender girl can halve a German’s head at four hundred meters.
Lara seemed nervous when she saw the sniper smiling down at her. She rubbed the soot off her hands as she listened to Vika. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I saw Lara nod, and from the way she gestured with her hands I figured she was giving Vika directions.
Kolya walked into the room with Korsakov. Each had a glass of vodka in hand and they were laughing at some joke, best of chums now, the earlier hostility forgotten. I had expected nothing less—Kolya was a great salesman, especially when he was selling himself. He ambled over to the horsehair sofa and sat down with a sigh, slapping my knee and downing the last of his vodka.
“You get enough to eat?” he asked me. “We’re ready to move.”
“We’re leaving? I thought we’d sleep here tonight.”
The gunfight had riled my system, but now that some time had passed since the bullets were flying, I felt the fatigue seeping back into my bones. We had walked all day through the snow and I hadn’t slept since Sonya’s apartment.
“Come on, you’re smarter than that. What do you think is going to happen when those Fritzes out there don’t come back from their little party tonight? How long before they send a platoon to find out where their Oberleutnants disappeared to?”
Vika had gotten what she needed from Lara. Now she spoke in low tones to Korsakov, the two of them standing in the corner of the room—the broad-shouldered, stubble-jawed partisan commander and his little assassin, lit by the flickering fire.
The other partisans began to get ready, pulling on their dry socks and their felt boots, swallowing one more glass of vodka for the long march ahead of them. The girls of the house had disappeared to the back rooms where, I guessed, they would grab whatever they could carry and decide where to go next.
“We could take the German cars,” I said, inspired by the idea. “Drop off the girls in Piter . . .” Like most ideas I considered inspired, the brilliance of it faded before I reached the end of the second sentence.
“Drive a Kübel toward the Leningrad line,” said Kolya. “Hm, yes, that’s a thought. And when our own people blow us off the road and some Don Cossack country idiot pulls our smoking bodies from the wreckage, he’ll say, ‘Huh! These German boys look just like us!’ No, little lion, we’re not going back to Piter yet. We’ve got business in Novoye Koshkino.”
17
Twenty minutes later we were trudging through the snow again, the warmth of the farmhouse already slipping from memory. Flanked by mighty pines, we walked in single file with nine paces between each man, on Korsakov’s explicit orders. I didn’t understand the tactical significance of the formation, but trusted that these men were masters of the ambush and knew what they were doing. Kolya walked in front of me and with my head hanging low I was aware only of the hem of his greatcoat and his black leather boots. The rest of the bodies in our little caravan were phantoms, unseen and unheard except for the occasional crack of a stepped-on twig or the rasp of a canteen cap unscrewed for a sip of still-hot tea.
I had never really believed that truism that soldiers learned how to sleep while they marched, but as we continued east, lulled by the rhythm of our boots rising and falling in the snow, I lurched in and out of wakefulness. Even the cold could not keep me alert. Novoye Koshkino was only a few kilometers from the farmhouse by road, but we were far from any road, circling around German encampments that Kolya and I would have stumbled into if we were unescorted. Korsakov had said the march would take four hours; before the first one was over I felt that someone had poured thick syrup into a hole in my skull. Everything I did I did slowly. If I wanted to rub my nose, I was aware of the brain’s command and the hand’s grudging obedience, the long journey the hand took on the way to the face, the search for the nose (usually an easy target), and the hand’s grateful return to its cozy little cave in the depths of my father’s navy coat.
The more tired I got the more doubtful the whole scenario seemed. How could this be real? We were a band of enchanted mice, marching beneath the chalked moon on the blackboard sky. A sorcerer lived in Novoye Koshkino, a man who knew the ancient words that could transform us back into the men we once were. But there would be perils on the way, giant black cats scrambling over the ice, lunging for us as we scurried for cover, our long tails twitching with fear.
My boot sank deep into a mound of soft snow and I nearly turned my ankle. Kolya stopped and looked back when he heard me stagger, but I managed to right myself, give him a quick nod, and keep walking without any help.
The girls who lived in the farmhouse had left at the same time we did. They did not have any overcoats or winter boots; the Germans had taken those items away after Zoya made her run. Without proper clothing the girls resorted to layering, throwing on every shirt they had, every sweater and pair of leggings, until they teetered beneath the weight, wobbling through the great room like drunk, obese peasants. Galina had brought up the idea of taking the Nazis’ overcoats, but she was quickly shushed—their chances were bad enough, if they were captured, but getting captured while wearing a dead officer’s coat was the end.
Kolya and I had kissed their cheeks at the doorway. They had decided not to go to Leningrad; a few of them had family there, but the uncles and cousins might have died already or fled to the east. More important, there was no food in Leningrad for the residents and certainly no food for four girls from the villages with no ration cards. Leningrad didn’t make sense, so they were heading south. They had brought whatever provisions were left after the partisans took what they wanted. Korsakov let them keep two of the Germans’ Lugers for protection. Their odds were not good, but they seemed in high spirits as they walked out the farmhouse door. They had been prisoners there for months, had suffered their own tortures night after night, and now they were free. I kissed all eight cheeks, waved good-bye, and never saw them again or heard anything about them.
Something jolted my shoulder, my eyes popped open, and I realized I’d been walking in a semiconscious trance. Kolya marched beside me now, his gloved hand gripping me through my coat.
“You still with us?” he asked quietly, watching me with real concern.
“I’m here.”
“I’ll walk with you. Keep you awake.”
“Korsakov told us to—”
“I don’t take orders from that motherless pig. You saw how he treated the girls.”
“You’re the one who was getting so chummy with him.”
“We need him right now. And his little friend . . . I saw you staring at her back there by the fireplace. You’d like to take a shot at the sniper, eh? Eh? Ha!”
I shook my head, too tired even to groan at his miserable joke.
“Have you ever been with a redhead? Oh wait, what am I saying, you’ve never been with anyone. The good news is they’re demons between the sheets. Two of the three best fucks of my life were redheads. Two of four, anyway. But the other side of the coin, they hate men. A lot of anger there, my friend. Beware.”
“All redheads hate men?”
“Makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Any redhead you meet out here, chances are she’s descended from some Viking who ran around hacking people’s arms off before raping her ancestral grandmother. She’s got the blood of the pillagers in her.”
“That’s a good theory. You should tell her about it.”
On every stride I tried to step into the boot prints of the partisan who walked eighteen strides ahead of us. Stepping into crushed snow took less energy than stepping into fresh powder, but the man in front had long legs, and I was having a hard time matching him.
“And just so I’m clear,” I began, panting a little and ducking beneath an out-flung branch laden with pine needles, “we’re marching to Novoye Koshkino to find the house where the Einsatzgruppe is headquartered because they might have some eggs there?”
“That’s what we’re doing for the colonel. But for us, and for Russia, we’re marching to Novoye Koshkino to kill the Einsatz because they need to be killed.”
I lowered my head so that most of my face was shielded from the wind by the upturned collar of my father’s greatcoat. What was the point of further discussion? Kolya considered himself a bit of a bohemian, a free thinker, but in his own way he was as much a true believer as any Young Pioneer. The worst part about it was that I didn’t think he was wrong. The Einsatzkommandos needed to be destroyed before they destroyed us. I just didn’t want to be the one responsible for destroying them. Was I supposed to sneak into their lair with only a knife for protection? Five days ago an account of this expedition would have seemed like the great adventure I’d been waiting for since the war began. But now, in the middle of it, I wished I’d left in September with my mother and sister.
“Do you remember the end of book one of
The Courtyard Hound
? When Radchenko sees his old professor stumbling down the street, muttering at the pigeons?”
“Worst scene in the history of literature.”
“Oh, forgive me, you’ve never read the book.”
There was something oddly comforting in Kolya’s consistency, his willingness to make the same jokes—if you could call them jokes—over and over again. He was like a cheerful senile grandfather who sat at the dinner table with beet soup splattered on his collar, telling once more the story of his encounter with the emperor, though everyone in his family could recite it now from memory.
“One of the most beautiful passages in literature, you know. His professor had been a famous writer back in his day, but now he’s completely forgotten. Radchenko feels ashamed for the old man. He watches him through his bedroom window—Radchenko never leaves his apartment; remember, he hasn’t left in seven years—he watches the professor walk out of sight, kicking at the pigeons and cursing them.” Kolya cleared his throat and switched to his declamatory tone.
“Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She’s beautiful; when you’re with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she’s been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.”
Kolya’s apparent immunity to exhaustion aggravated and amazed me. I could keep moving only by sighting a distant tree and promising myself that I would not quit before I reached it—and when we got to that tree, I would find another and swear this was the last one. But Kolya seemed capable of traipsing through the woods, orating with a stage whisper, for hours at a time.
I waited a moment to make sure he was finished before I nodded. “That’s nice.”
“Isn’t it?” he said quickly, pleased to hear it. The way he responded made me study his moonlit face.
“You’ve got most of the book memorized?”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. Passages here and there.”
The snow was deeper as we crossed a ridge, making each step more of a chore, and I huffed and wheezed like an old man with one lung as I staggered toward the next tree.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You just did,” he said, with his annoyingly pleased smile.
“What do you write when you write in your journal?”
“Depends on the day. Sometimes just notes on what I’ve seen. Sometimes I hear someone say something, a line or two, and I like the way it sounds.”
I nodded and experimented by keeping one eye closed for ten seconds, then the other, alternating in a bid to give them some rest and spare them from the wind.
“Why do you ask?”
“I think you’re writing
The Courtyard Hound
.”
“You think . . . you mean a critique of
The Courtyard Hound
? Well, I am. I told you that. Someday I’ll give lectures on the book. Maybe seven men in Russia know more about Ushakovo than I do.”
“I don’t think there is an Ushakovo.” I pushed up my cap so I could get a better look at him. “You keep telling me it’s this classic and I’ve never heard of it. And you were very happy when I told you I liked that bit, you were proud of it. If I quoted Pushkin for you, and you said the writing was good, it wouldn’t make me proud, would it? They’re not my lines.”
Kolya’s expression never changed. His face admitted nothing, denied nothing. “But you did like it?”
“It’s not bad. You just came up with that?”
“Over the last few hours. You know what inspired me? That poem of your father’s. ‘An Old Poet, Once Famous, Seen at a Café.’ ”
“That was another clue. You robbed him blind.”
He laughed, blowing a great gust of vapor into the frigid air.
“This is literature. We don’t call it robbery; we call it homage. What about the first line of the book? You like that, too?”
“I don’t remember the first line of the book.”
“In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs.”
“A little melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“What’s wrong with drama? All these contemporary writers are such timid little fish—”
“
Melo
drama, I said.”
“—but if the subject demands intensity, it should get intensity.”
“So this whole time . . . Why didn’t you just tell me you were writing a novel?”
Kolya stared at the moon, sinking now toward the fringe of pine tops. Soon it would be down and we’d be walking in true darkness, tripping over roots and slipping on patches of black ice.
“The truth is, that first night I met you? In the Crosses? I thought they were going to shoot us in the morning. So what did it matter what I told you? I said whatever popped into my head.”
“You told me they weren’t going to shoot us!”
“Well, you seemed a little frightened. But come on, think about it: a deserter and a looter? What were our chances?”
The next tree I had chosen as a way station seemed impossibly far away, a silhouetted pine that loomed above its brothers, a silent sentinel older than all the rest. While I panted, Kolya sipped tea from his canteen, a naturalist out for an evening hike. Army rations greatly exceeded civilian rations—that was my rationale for his superior energy, ignoring the fact that we had eaten the same meals for the last several days.
“You said you left your unit so you could defend your thesis on Ushakovo’s
The Courtyard Hound
,” I said, pausing between each sentence to regain my breath. “And now you’re admitting there is no Ushakovo and there is no
Courtyard Hound
. ”
“But there will be. If I live long enough.”
“Why did you leave your unit?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You two about to fuck in the bushes?”
Kolya and I wheeled around. Vika had crept up behind us without a sound, close enough that I could have reached out and touched her cheek. She glared into our faces with contempt, obviously disgusted to be in the company of such miserable soldiers.
“You were told to march single file with a nine-stride gap.” Her voice was very low for such a small girl, hoarse, as if she had been sick the week before and her larynx hadn’t recovered yet. She was a practiced whisperer, able to enunciate each quiet word so that we could understand everything yet anyone standing five meters away would not hear a thing.