We gathered around the pilot. He was a tall man, well built, and if we had seen him walking around Piter in street clothes, we would have known him at once for an infiltrator—he had the body of a man who ate meat every day.
Grisha knelt and unholstered the German’s sidearm. “Walther PPK. Told you.”
We rolled the German onto his back. His pale face was scuffed, the skin scraped on the asphalt, the abrasions as colorless as the intact skin. The dead don’t bruise. I couldn’t tell if he had died frightened or defiant or peaceful. There was no trace of life or personality in his face—he looked like a corpse who had been born a corpse.
Oleg stripped off the black leather gloves while Vera went for the scarf and goggles. I found a sheath strapped to the pilot’s ankle and pulled out a beautifully weighted knife with a silver finger guard and a fifteen-centimeter single-edge blade etched with words I could not read in the moonlight. I resheathed the blade and strapped it to my own ankle, feeling for the first time in months that my warrior destiny was at last coming true.
Oleg found the dead man’s wallet and grinned as he counted out the deutsche marks. Vera pocketed a chronometer, twice as big as a wristwatch, that the German had worn around the sleeve of his flight jacket. Grisha found a pair of folded binoculars in a leather case, two extra magazines for the Walther, and a slim hip flask. He unscrewed the cap, sniffed, and passed me the flask.
“Cognac?”
I took a sip and nodded. “Cognac.”
“When did you ever taste cognac?” asked Vera.
“I’ve had it before.”
“When?”
“Let me see,” said Oleg, and the bottle went around the circle, the four of us squatting on our haunches around the fallen pilot, sipping the liquor that might have been cognac or brandy or Armagnac. None of us knew the difference. Whatever it was, the stuff was warmth in the belly.
Vera stared at the German’s face. Her expression held no pity, no fear, only curiosity and contempt—the invader had come to drop his bombs on our city and instead had dropped himself. We hadn’t shot him down, but we felt triumphant anyway. No one else in the Kirov had come across an enemy’s corpse. We would be the talk of the apartment bloc in the morning.
“How do you think he died?” she asked. No bullet wounds blemished the body, no singed hair or leather, no sign of any violence at all. His skin was far too white for the living, but nothing had pierced it.
“He froze to death,” I told them. I said it with authority because I knew it was true and I had no way to prove it. The pilot had bailed out thousands of feet above nighttime Leningrad. The air at ground level was too cold for the clothes he was wearing—up in the clouds, outside of his warm cockpit, he never had a chance.
Grisha raised the flask in salute. “Here’s to the cold.”
The flask began to circle again. It never got to me. We should have heard the car’s engine from two blocks away, the city after curfew was quiet as the moon, but we were busy drinking our German liquor, making our toasts. Only when the GAZ turned onto Voinova Street, heavy tires rattling on the asphalt, headlights stabbing toward us, did we realize the danger. The punishment for violating curfew without a permit was summary execution. The punishment for abandoning a firefighting detail was summary execution. The punishment for looting was summary execution. The courts no longer operated; the police officers were on the front lines, the prisons half full and dwindling fast. Who had food for an enemy of the state? If you broke the law and you were caught, you were dead. There wasn’t time for any legal niceties.
So we ran. We knew the Kirov better than anyone. Once we got inside the courtyard gates and into the chilled darkness of the sprawling building, no one could find us if they had three months to search. We could hear the soldiers shouting at us to stop, but that didn’t matter; voices didn’t frighten us, only bullets made a difference and no one had pulled a trigger yet. Grisha made it to the gate first—he was the closest thing to an athlete among us—he leaped onto the iron bars and hoisted himself upward. Oleg was right behind him and I was behind Oleg. Our bodies were weak, muscles shrunken from lack of protein, but fear helped us scale the gate as quickly as we ever had.
Near the top of the gate I looked back and saw that Vera had slipped on a patch of ice. She stared up at me, her eyes round and fearful, on her hands and knees as the GAZ braked beside the body of the German pilot and four soldiers stepped out. They were twenty feet away, their rifles in their hands, but I still had time to pull myself over the gate and disappear into the Kirov.
I wish I could tell you that the thought of deserting Vera never entered my mind, that my friend was in danger and I went to her rescue without hesitation. Truly, though, at that moment I hated her. I hated her for being clumsy at the worst possible time, for staring up at me with her panicked brown eyes, electing me to be her savior even though Grisha was the only one she had ever kissed. I knew that I could not live with the memory of those eyes pleading for me, and she knew it, too, and I hated her even as I jumped down from the gate, lifted her to her feet, and hauled her to the iron bars. I was weak, but Vera couldn’t have weighed forty kilos. I boosted her onto the gate as the soldiers shouted and their boot heels slapped on the pavement and the bolts of their rifles snapped into place.
Vera went over the top and I scrambled up behind her, ignoring the soldiers. If I stopped, they would gather around me, tell me I was an enemy of the state, force me to kneel, and shoot me in the back of the head. I was an easy target now, but maybe they were drunk, maybe they were city boys like me who had never fired a shot before in their lives; maybe they would miss on purpose because they knew I was a patriot and a defender of the city and I had snuck out of the Kirov only because a German had fallen twenty thousand feet onto my street, and what seventeen-year-old Russian boy would not sneak outside to peek at a dead Fascist?
My chin was level with the top of the gate when I felt the gloved hands wrap around my ankles. Strong hands, the hands of army men who ate two meals every day. I saw Vera run inside the Kirov, never looking back. I tried to cling to the iron bars, but the soldiers dragged me down, tossed me to the sidewalk, and stood above me, the muzzles of their Tokarevs jabbing at my cheeks. None of the soldiers looked older than nineteen and none seemed reluctant to splatter the street with my brains.
“Looks ready to shit himself, this one.”
“You having a party here, son? Found yourself some schnapps?”
“He’s a good one for the colonel. He can ride with the Fritz.”
Two of them bent down, grabbed me under the armpits, yanked me to my feet, guided me to the still-idling GAZ, and shoved me into the backseat. The other two soldiers lifted the German by his hands and boots and swung him into the car beside me.
“Keep him warm,” one of them said, and they all laughed as if it were the funniest joke ever told. They squeezed into the car and slammed the doors.
I decided I was still alive because they wanted to execute me in public, as a warning to other looters. A few minutes before, I had felt far more powerful than the dead pilot. Now, as we sped down the dark street, swerving to avoid bomb craters and sprays of rubble, he seemed to be smirking at me, his white lips a scar splitting his frozen face. We were going the same way.
2
If you grew up in Piter, you grew up fearing the Crosses, that gloomy redbrick stain on the Neva, a brutish, brooding warehouse of the lost. Six thousand convicts lived there in peacetime. I doubt a thousand were left by January. Hundreds imprisoned for petty crimes were released into Red Army units, released into the meat grinder of the German Blitzkrieg. Hundreds more starved in their cells. Each day the guards dragged the skin-draped skeletons out of the Crosses and onto sledges where the dead were stacked eight high.
When I was small, it was the silence of the prison that frightened me most. You walked by expecting to hear the shouts of rough men or the clamor of a brawl, but no noise escaped the thick walls, as if the prisoners inside—most of them awaiting trial or a trip to the gulag or a bullet in the head—hacked out their own tongues to protest their fate. The place was an antifortress, designed to keep the enemies inside, and every boy in Leningrad had heard the phrase a hundred times: “You keep on with that and you’ll end up in the Crosses.”
I had seen my cell only for a second when the guards shoved me inside, their lamps shining on the rough stone walls, a cell two meters wide and four meters long, with bunk beds for four and all of them empty. I was relieved at that, I didn’t want to share the darkness with a stranger with tattooed knuckles, but after a time— minutes? hours?—the black silence began to feel tangible, something that could get into your lungs and drown you.
Darkness and solitude generally didn’t frighten me. Electricity was as rare as bacon in Piter those days, and my apartment in the Kirov was empty now that Mother and Taisya had fled. The long nights were dark and quiet, but there was always noise somewhere. Mortars fired from the Germans lines; an army truck motoring down the boulevard; the dying old woman upstairs moaning in her bed. Awful sounds, really, but
sounds
—something to let you know you were still in this world. That cell in the Crosses was the only truly silent place I’d ever entered. I could hear nothing at all; I could see nothing. They had locked me in death’s waiting room.
As siege-hardened as I believed I was before my arrest, the truth was that I had no more courage in January than I had in June—contrary to popular belief, the experience of terror does not make you braver. Perhaps, though, it is easier to hide your fear when you’re afraid all the time.
I tried to think of a song to sing, a poem to recite, but all the words were stuck inside my head like salt in a caked shaker. I lay on one of the top bunks, hoping whatever heat existed within the Crosses would rise and find me. Morning promised nothing but a bullet in the brain and yet I longed for daylight to seep inside. When they dumped me in the cell, I thought I had seen a sliver of barred window near the ceiling, but now I couldn’t remember. I tried counting to a thousand to pass some time but always got lost around four hundred, hearing phantom rats that turned out to be my own fingers scratching the torn mattress.
The night was never going to end. The Germans had shot down the fucking sun, they could do it, why not, their scientists were the best in the world, they could figure it out. They had learned how to stop time. I was blind and deaf. Only the cold and my thirst reminded me that I was alive. You get so lonely you start longing for the sentries, just to hear their footsteps, smell the vodka on their breath.
So many great Russians endured long stretches in prison. That night I learned I would never be a great Russian. A few hours alone in a cell, suffering no torture other than the darkness and the silence and the absolute cold, a few hours of that and I was already half broken. The fierce souls who survived winter after winter in Siberia possessed something I did not, great faith in some splendid destiny, whether God’s kingdom or justice or the distant promise of revenge. Or maybe they were so beaten down they became nothing more than animals on their hind legs, working at their masters’ command, eating whatever slop he threw down for them, sleeping when ordered and dreaming of nothing but the end.
At last there was noise, footsteps, several sets of heavy boots clomping in the corridor. A key turned in the lock. I sat up in bed and cracked my skull against the ceiling, hard enough that I bit through my lip.
Two guards—one of them holding an oil lamp, the prettiest light I ever saw, better than any sunrise—escorted a new prisoner, a young, uniformed soldier who glanced around the cell like a man viewing an apartment he’s considering for rent. The soldier was tall and stood very straight; he towered over the guards, and though they had pistols in their holsters and the soldier was unarmed, he seemed ready to give orders. He held his Astrakhan fur hat in one hand and his leather gloves in the other.
He looked at me just as the guards left, shutting the cell door and bolting it from the outside, taking their light with them. His face was the last thing I saw before the darkness resumed, so it stuck in my mind: the high Cossack cheekbones, the amused twist of the lips, the hay-blond hair, the eyes blue enough to please any Aryan bride.
I sat on the bed and he stood on the stone floor and from the perfect silence I knew neither of us had shifted position—we were still staring at each other in the darkness.
“Are you a Jew?” he asked.
“What?”
“A Jew. You look like a Jew.”
“You look like a Nazi.”
“I know
. Ich spreche ein bisschen Deutsch,
too. I volunteered to be a spy, but nobody listened to me. So, you are a Jew?”
“Why do you care?”
“Don’t be ashamed of it. I don’t have a problem with Jews. Emanuel Lasker is my second-favorite chess player. Just a rung under Capablanca. . . . Capablanca is Mozart, pure genius; you can’t love chess and not love Capablanca. But Lasker, nobody’s better in the endgame. You have any food?”
“No.”
“Put out your hand.”
This seemed like some sort of trap, a game children played to snare morons. He would slap my palm or just let it hang there till I realized my stupidity. But no offer of food could be refused, even the least likely, so I stretched my hand into the darkness and waited. A moment later a sliver of something cold and greasy sat on my palm. I don’t know how he found my hand, but he did, without any fumbling.
“Sausage,” he said. And then, after a pause, “Don’t worry. It’s not pork.”
“I eat pork.” I sniffed at the sausage and then nibbled off a bit. It was as far from real meat as ration bread from real bread, but there was fat in it, and fat was life. I chewed on the sliver as slowly as I could, trying to make it last.
“You chew loudly,” he told me, a reprimand from the dark. I heard the creak of bedsprings as he sat on one of the lower bunk beds. “And you’re supposed to say thank you.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. What’s your name?”
“Lev.”
“Lev what?”
“What do you care?”
“It’s just manners,” he said. “For instance, if I introduce myself, I say, ‘Good evening, my name is Nikolai Alexandrovich Vlasov, my friends call me Kolya.’ ”
“You just want to know if I have a Jewish name.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.” He sighed happily, pleased to hear his instincts confirmed. “Thank you. Don’t know why you’re so afraid of telling people.”
I didn’t answer. If he didn’t know why, there was no point explaining it.
“So why are you here?” he asked.
“They caught me looting a dead German on Voinova Street.”
This alarmed him. “The Germans are already on Voinova? So it’s begun?”
“Nothing’s begun. He was a bomber pilot. He ejected.”
“The AA boys got him?”
“The cold got him. Why are you here?”
“Sheer idiocy. They think I’m a deserter.”
“So why didn’t they shoot you?”
“Why didn’t they shoot
you
?”
“Don’t know,” I admitted. “They said I was a good one for the colonel.”
“I’m not a deserter. I’m a student. I was defending my thesis.”
“Really? Your thesis?” It sounded like the dumbest excuse in the history of desertion.
“An interpretation of Ushakovo’s
The Courtyard Hound
, through the lens of contemporary sociological analysis.” He waited for me to say something, but I had nothing to say to that. “You know the book?”
“No. Ushakovo?”
“Miserable how bad the schools have gotten. They should have you memorizing passages.” He sounded like a crotchety old professor, though from my one look at him I would have guessed he was twenty.
“ ‘In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs.’
First line. Some say it’s the greatest Russian novel. And you’ve never heard of it.”
He sighed extravagantly. A moment later I heard a strange scratching sound, as if a rat were sharpening its claws on the mattress ticking.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Hm?”
“You don’t hear that noise?”
“I’m writing in my journal.”
I could see no farther with my eyes open than with them closed and this one was writing in his journal. Now I could tell the scratching was a pencil on paper. After a few minutes the journal slapped closed and I heard him stuff the book into his pocket.
“I can write in the dark,” he said, punctuating the sentence with a light burp. “One of my talents.”
“Notes on
The Courtyard Hound
?”
“Exactly. How’s this for strange? Chapter six: Radchenko spends a month in the Crosses because his former best friend . . . Well, I don’t want to give it away. But I have to say, it seemed like fate when they brought me here. I’ve been every other place Radchenko visited—every restaurant and theater and graveyard, the ones that are still around, anyway—but I’ve never been inside here. A critic could argue that until you spend a night in the Crosses, you can’t understand Radchenko.”
“Pretty lucky for you.”
“Mm.”
“So you think they’ll shoot us in the morning?”
“I doubt it. They’re not preserving us for the night just to shoot us tomorrow.” He sounded quite jaunty about it, as if we were discussing a sporting event, as if the outcome wasn’t particularly momentous no matter which way it went.
“I haven’t had a shit in eight days,” he confided. “I’m not saying a good shit—it’s been months since I’ve had a good shit—I mean no shit at all for eight days.”
We were quiet for a moment, considering these words.
“How long do you think a man can last without shitting?”
It was an interesting question and I was curious to know the answer myself, but I didn’t have one for him. I heard him lie down, heard him yawn happily, relaxed and content, his piss-stained straw mattress as comfortable as a feather bed. The silence lingered for a minute and I thought my cell mate had fallen asleep.
“These walls must be four feet thick,” he said at last. “This is probably the safest place in Piter to spend a night.” And then he did fall asleep, shifting from speech into snores so quickly that at first I thought he was faking.
I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. I was born an insomniac and that’s the way I’ll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way longing for unconsciousness, longing for a rubber mallet to crack me in the head, not so hard, not hard enough to do any damage, just a good whack to put me down for the night. But that night I didn’t have a chance. I stared into the blackness until the blackness blurred into gray, until the ceiling above me began to take form and the light from the east dribbled in through the narrow barred window that existed after all. Only then did I realize that I still had a German knife strapped to my calf.