I’m shot!” he yelled back. He unbuttoned his coat and studied the hole in the seat of his pants. “Do you believe this? Those cunts shot me in the ass.”
“Walk toward us with your hands in the air!”
“You shot me in the ass, you fucking idiot! I can’t walk anywhere!”
I had my hand on Kolya’s arm, helping him stay upright; he couldn’t put any weight on his right leg.
“You should sit,” I told him.
“I can’t sit. How am I going to sit, I have a bullet in my ass! Do you believe this?”
“Can you kneel? I don’t think you should be on your feet.”
“You know how much shit I’m going to get from my battalion? Shot in the ass by fucking amateurs straight off the assembly line?”
I helped as he lowered himself to the ground. He winced when his right knee hit the snow, jarring his leg. The officers in the trench must have held an impromptu conference. A new voice called to us now, an older voice with more authority.
“Stay where you are! We’re coming to you!”
Kolya grunted. “Stay where you are, he tells us. Yes, I think I’ll do that, now that I’ve got one of your fucking rifle bullets in my ass.”
“Maybe it went straight through. That’s better, isn’t it, if it went straight through?”
“You want to pull down my pants and check?” he asked, giving me a pained grin.
“Should I do something? What do I do?”
“Pressure, they say. Don’t worry, I’ll do it.” He untied the drawstring of his down hat, took it off, and pressed it against the bullet hole. He had to close his eyes for a moment, inhaling deeply. When he opened them again, he seemed to remember something; with his free hand he reached under his sweater and pulled out the straw-stuffed box of eggs.
“Put it under your coat,” he ordered. “We don’t want them freezing. And don’t drop them, please.”
A few minutes later we saw a GAZ rolling toward us, an armored model with thick-nubbed snow tires and a heavy machine gun mounted in the back. The gunner kept the wide-mouthed muzzle aimed at our heads as the car braked beside us.
A sergeant and a lieutenant hopped out and walked over to us, their hands on the butts of their holstered pistols. The sergeant paused beside the discarded MP40 lying in the snow. He considered the submachine gun for a moment before looking at Kolya.
“Our snipers saw the German gun. They did the right thing.”
“Snipers, is that what you call them? Are they trained to shoot men in the ass?”
“Why do you have a German gun?”
“He’s bleeding, he needs help,” I told them. “Can’t you ask these questions later?”
The lieutenant glanced at me, his flat, bored face devoid of all emotion save mild hostility. His head was shaved and he wore no hat, as if he didn’t notice the cold wind gusting around us.
“You’re a civilian? You’re giving me orders? I could execute you right now for violating curfew and exiting the city limits without a permit.”
“Please. Comrade Officer. We stay out here much longer, he’ll bleed to death.”
Kolya dug into his pocket, pulled out the colonel’s letter, and offered it to the officers. The lieutenant read it, disdainful at first but stiffening when he saw whose signature was on the bottom of the page.
“You should have said something,” he muttered. He waved his hand for the driver and the gunner to come help.
“I should have—I was screaming the colonel’s name while you shot at us!”
“My men did the right thing. You were advancing with enemy hardware, we had no advance warning—”
“Kolya,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. He looked up at me, his mouth already open, ready to verbally fillet the lieutenant. For once in his life he understood that it was time to shut up. He smiled, rolling his eyes a little, but then he saw the troubled expression cross my face. He followed my gaze down to where the blood was seeping into the snow, his pants leg drenched. The stained snow looked like the cherry ices my father used to buy me at summer fairs.
“Don’t worry,” Kolya said, staring at the blood. “That’s not so much, don’t worry.”
The driver grabbed him under the armpits, the gunner held him under his knees, and they carried him to the backseat of the still-idling GAZ. I crouched in the space between the driver’s seat and the backseat while Kolya lay on his stomach, his greatcoat draped over him for warmth. We drove toward the trenches, Kolya closing his eyes each time the car jolted over a bump in the road. I had taken the blood-soaked cap from him and I pressed it against the bullet wound, trying to maintain enough pressure to slow the bleeding without hurting him.
He smiled, his eyes closed. “I’d rather Vika was the one with her hand on my ass.”
“Does it hurt very much?”
“Have you ever been shot in the ass?”
“No.”
“Well the answer is yes, it hurts. I’m just happy they didn’t hit the other side. Please, Lieutenant,” Kolya said loudly, “will you thank your snipers for not shooting my balls off?”
The lieutenant, sitting in the passenger seat, stared at the road ahead and did not answer, his bare scalp flecked with small white scars.
“The women of Leningrad thank them, too.”
“We’re taking you to the hospital at the Works,” said the lieutenant. “That’s where the best surgeons are.”
“Very good, I’m sure the NKVD will give you a medal. And when you’ve dropped me off, please take my little friend here to Kamenny Island. He has an important package for the colonel.”
The lieutenant sat in sullen silence, angry that he had to take orders from a private but unwilling to risk making a powerful enemy. We stopped at a sandbagged barricade and lost nearly two minutes as soldiers lowered a wooden platform across the trench so we could cross. The driver barked at them to hurry, but even so the soldiers drifted about, weary and nonchalant, arguing about the proper way to position the bridge. Finally, we made it to the other side. The driver stepped on the gas and we sped past machine-gun emplacements festooned with sandbags.
“How far to the hospital?” I asked the driver.
“Ten minutes. Eight, if we’re lucky.”
“Try to be lucky,” said Kolya. His eyes were clenched shut now, his face pressed against the seat, his blond hair hanging over his forehead. In the last minute he had gotten very pale and could not stop shivering. I rested my free hand on the back of his neck and his skin was cool to the touch.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “I’ve seen friends bleeding worse than this and they were back a week later, all stitched up.”
“I’m not worried.”
“There’s so much blood in a human body. What is it, five liters?”
“I don’t know.”
“It looks like so much, but I bet I haven’t even lost a liter. Maybe one.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t talk.”
“Why not? What’s wrong with talking? Listen, you go to the wedding. Dance with the colonel’s daughter, and then come to the hospital and tell me about it. I want details. What she’s wearing, what she smells like, all that. I’ve been jerking off to her for five days straight, you know that? Well, once to Vika. My apologies. But what she did in the sheep barn, tightening the belt around her chest? You saw that. Can you blame me?”
“When did you have time to do that?”
“On the endless fucking march to here. You learn how to jerk it on the move when you’re in the army. Hand in the pocket, it’s no big trick.”
“You jerked off to Vika while we were walking last night?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you. You were sleepwalking half the night, I was bored, I had to do something. Now you’re angry. Don’t be angry with me.”
“Of course I’m not angry.”
The driver hit the brakes hard and Kolya would have tumbled off the backseat if I hadn’t been holding him. I sat up and peered through the windshield. We had reached the edge of the sprawling Kirov Works, a city in itself, where tens of thousands labored night and day. Artillery shells and Luftwaffe bombs had flattened some of the brick-walled machine shops; empty windows throughout the complex had been covered with plastic tarps; ice-filled craters pockmarked the yards. But even now, with thousands of workers evacuated and thousands more dead or waiting to die on the front lines, even now the chimneys still smoked, the alleyways bustled with women pushing carts filled with coal, the air was loud with the clamor of whirring lathes and rolling mills and hydraulic presses shaping steel.
A line of newly completed T-34 tanks had trundled out of an assembly shop as big as an airplane hangar. Eight of the tanks, their steel unpainted, rumbled slowly over the dirty snow, blocking off the road.
“Why did we stop?” Kolya asked. His voice sounded much weaker than it had a minute before and it made me afraid to hear him like that.
“Some tanks are going by.”
“T-thirty-fours?”
“Yes.”
“Good tanks.”
Finally, the tanks passed and we shot forward. The driver had a heavy foot on the accelerator, a sure hand on the wheel, and he knew the Works well—cutting through back alleys behind turbine shops; blasting down unpaved paths alongside the workers’ housing, tin-roofed sheds with squat little stovepipes—but even with an expert it took time to get to the far side of the rambling factory town.
“There,” said the lieutenant at last, pointing to a brick warehouse that had been converted into the local hospital. He turned in his seat and looked at Kolya. When he couldn’t see Kolya’s face, he looked at me, questioning. I shrugged to say,
I don’t know.
“Devils!” shouted the driver, slapping the steering wheel and hitting the brakes again. A small locomotive chugged across the tracks that bisected the Works, tugging boxcars loaded with scrap metal for the foundry.
“Lev?”
“Yes?”
“Are we close?”
“I think we’re very close.”
Kolya’s lips had gone blue, his breathing rapid and shallow.
“Is there any water?” he asked.
“Does anyone have water?” My voice broke as I asked the question. I sounded like a frightened child.
The gunner passed forward a canteen. I unscrewed the cap, shifted Kolya’s head sideways, and tried to pour water in his mouth, but it ended up spilling onto the seat. He managed to lift his head a little and I got some down his throat, but he choked and spat it up. When I tried to give him more, he refused with a slight shake of the head and I handed the canteen back to the gunner.
Realizing Kolya’s head must be cold, I tore off my hat and put it on him, ashamed that I hadn’t thought to do that before. Even though he shivered, his face was damp with sweat, his skin pale and mottled with coin-size scarlet patches.
I could see the doors of the hospital, less than a hundred meters away, through the gaps between the rolling boxcars. Our driver sat hunched forward in his seat, his arms draped around the wheel, nodding his head impatiently as he waited. The lieutenant kept glancing back at Kolya, more and more worried.
“Lev? You like the title?”
“What title?”
“
The Courtyard Hound
.”
“It’s a good title.”
“I could just call it
Radchenko.
”
“
The Courtyard Hound
is better.”
“I think so, too.”
He opened his eyes, those pale blue Cossack eyes, and smiled at me. We both knew he was going to die. He trembled, lying on the backseat beneath his greatcoat, his teeth very white against his blue lips. I have always believed that smile was a gift for me. Kolya had no faith in the divine or the afterlife; he didn’t think he was going to a better place, or any place at all. No angels waited to collect him. He smiled because he knew how terrified I was of dying. This is what I believe. He knew I was terrified and he wanted to make it a little easier for me.
“Can you believe it? Shot in the ass by my own people.”
I wanted to say something, to make some stupid joke to distract him. I should have said something, I wish that I had, even though I still can’t think of the right words. If I told him that I loved him, would he have winked and said, “No wonder your hand’s on my ass?”
Even Kolya couldn’t hold the smile for long. He closed his eyes again. When he spoke, his mouth was very dry, his lips sticking together as he tried to form the words.
“It’s not the way I pictured it,” he told me.
26
Officers in uniform and stern-faced civilians hurried in and out of the mansion on Kamenny Island, shoving through the front door beneath the white-columned portico. Behind the old house the Neva lay coiled, frozen and dusted with snow, a white snake slithering through the broken city.
The bald lieutenant escorted me to one of the machine-gun emplacements in front of the mansion, where a band of soldiers sat behind stacked sandbags, sipping weak tea from tin cups. The sergeant in charge read the colonel’s letter, glanced at me, and said, “You have something for him?”
I nodded and he beckoned for me to follow him. The lieutenant turned and walked away, never looking back, eager to escape what had turned into an unfortunate morning for him.
We finally found Grechko downstairs in the mansion’s wine cellar. All the grand old bottles of wine had been drunk long ago, but the walls were still honeycombed with terra-cotta racks. The colonel stood beside one of his subordinate officers, who checked items off a list. Young soldiers opened wood crates with crowbars. They dipped their arms into the shredded paper protecting the contents, pulling out tins and jars and burlap sacks and calling out the contents.
“Two kilos of smoked ham.”
“Five hundred grams of black caviar.”
“Kilo of jellied beef.”
“Garlic and onions . . . no weight listed.”
“Kilo of white sugar.”
“Kilo salted herring.”
“Boiled tongue, no weight listed.”
For a minute I stood and watched as the pile of foodstuffs grew, all the ingredients for a legendary feast. Carrots and potatoes, plucked chickens and jars of sour cream, wheat flour, honey, strawberry jam, jugs of fermented cherry juice, canned borovik mushrooms, blocks of butter wrapped in wax paper, a two-hundred-gram bar of Swiss chocolate.
The sergeant escorting me whispered a word to the officer standing beside Grechko. The colonel heard him and turned my way. For a few seconds he frowned, unable to place me, the deep furrows splitting his forehead.
“Ah,” he said, his strange, beautiful smile emerging. “The looter! Where’s your friend, the deserter?”
I don’t know how my face reacted to this question, but the colonel saw and understood.
“Too bad,” he said. “I liked that boy.”
He waited for me to do something and for a long count I couldn’t remember why I was there. When it came back to me, I unbuttoned my coat, pulled the slatted, straw-stuffed box out from under my sweater, and handed it over.
“A dozen eggs,” I told him.
“Wonderful, wonderful.” He gave the box to his underling without looking at it and gestured to the delicacies heaped on the stone floor. “Airlifted some provisions in last night. Just in time. You know how many owed favors I had to spend on this wedding?”
The subordinate officer handed the egg box to one of the young soldiers and made a mark in his book. “Another dozen eggs.”
I watched the soldier walk away with the box.
“You already have eggs?”
The subordinate checked his book. “That’s four dozen now.”
“The more the better,” said the colonel. “Now we can make fish pies. Here, give the boy a Grade One ration card. Ah, give him two; he might as well have his friend’s.”
The subordinate raised his eyebrows, impressed with this generosity. He pulled two ration cards from a leather wallet and signed them. He took an inkpad from his pocket and stamped the cards before handing them to me.
“You’ll be a popular boy,” he said.
I stared at the cards in my hand. Each one entitled me to an officer’s rations. I looked around the cellar. Kolya would have known which vineyards the Dolgorukovs preferred, the white they chose for sturgeon, the red best paired with venison. Or if he didn’t know, he would have made it up. I watched soldiers walk upstairs carrying sacks of rice and long strings of fat sausage.
When I turned toward the colonel, he stared right back at me. Again he understood my expression.
“Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.” He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. “And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life.”