3
An hour after dawn two new guards opened the cell door, rousted us from bed, and clamped handcuffs on our wrists. They ignored my questions but seemed amused when Kolya asked for a cup of tea and an omelet. Jokes must have been rare in the Crosses, because it wasn’t such a good joke, but the guards grinned as they shoved us down the hallway. Somewhere someone was moaning, a low and endless moan, a ship’s horn heard from a great distance.
I didn’t know if we were heading for the gallows or an interrogation chamber. The night had passed without sleep; save for a swig from the German’s flask, there hadn’t been a sip to drink since the rooftop of the Kirov; a lump the size of an infant’s fist had swelled where my forehead had cracked the ceiling—it was a bad morning, really; among my worst—but I wanted to live. I wanted to live and I knew I could not face my execution with grace. I would kneel before the hangman or the firing squad and plead my youth, detail my many hours served on the rooftop waiting for the bombs, all the barricades I had helped to build, the ditches I had dug. All of us had done it, we were all serving the cause, but I was one of Piter’s true sons and I didn’t deserve to die. What harm had been done? We drank a dead German’s cognac—for this you want to end me? You want to tie rough hemp around my skinny neck and shut down my brain forever because I stole a knife? Don’t do this, comrade. I don’t think there is greatness in me, but there is something better than this.
The guards led us down a stone staircase, the steps beaten smooth by hundreds of thousands of boot heels. An old man with a heavy gray scarf wrapped twice around his throat sat on the far side of the iron bars that blocked the bottom of the staircase. He gave us a gummy grin and unlocked the gate. A moment later we walked through a heavy wooden door into the sunlight, emerging from the Crosses intact and alive.
Kolya, unimpressed by our apparent reprieve, scooped up a palmful of clean snow with his shackled hands and licked it. The boldness of the maneuver made me jealous, as did the thought of cold water on my tongue. But I didn’t want to do anything to anger the guards. Our escape from the Crosses seemed like an odd mistake and I expected to be shoved inside again if I did something wrong.
The guards escorted us to a waiting GAZ, its big engine grumbling, exhaust pipes spewing dirty vapor, two soldiers sitting in the front seat watching us with zero curiosity, their fur-lined hats pulled down low on their foreheads.
Kolya hopped into the backseat without waiting for an order.
“Gentlemen, to the opera!”
The guards, standards diminished by years of working the Crosses, gave Kolya another good laugh. The soldiers did not. One of them turned and inspected Kolya.
“You say another word and I’ll break your fucking arm. It were up to me, you’d already have a bullet in your head. Fucking deserter. You”—and this was addressed to me—“get in.”
Kolya’s mouth was already open and I knew violence was on the way; the soldier did not look like a bluffer and Kolya, clearly, was incapable of heeding a simple threat.
“I’m not a deserter,” he said. With his manacled hands he managed to push up the left sleeve of his greatcoat, the left sleeve of his army sweater, the left sleeves of the two shirts beneath it, and offered his forearm to the soldier in the front seat. “You want to break the arm, break it, but I’m not a deserter.”
For a long count nobody spoke—Kolya stared at the soldier, the soldier stared back, and the rest of us watched and waited, impressed by this match of wills and curious to see who would win. Finally, the soldier conceded defeat by turning away from Kolya and barking at me.
“Get in the car, you little cunt.”
The guards grinned. This was their morning’s entertainment. They had no torture scheduled, no teeth to wrench, no nails to pluck from a screaming man’s nail beds, so they got their fun watching me, the little cunt, scurry into the backseat next to Kolya.
The soldier drove very fast, caring not at all about the slicks of ice on the road. We sped along the banks of the frozen Neva. I had my collar upturned so I could hide my face from the wind that blasted in beneath the canvas roof. Kolya didn’t seem bothered by the cold. He stared at the spire of the Church of John the Baptist across the river and said nothing.
We turned onto the Kamennoostrovsky Bridge, the old steel of its arches rimed with frost, the lampposts bearded with icicles. Onto Kamenny Island, slowing only a bit to circle around a bomb crater that had shattered the center of the road, pulling into a long driveway lined with the stumps of lime trees, and parking in front of a magnificent wooden mansion with a white-columned portico. Kolya studied the house.
“The Dolgorukovs lived here,” he said, as we stepped out of the car. “I suppose none of you have heard of the Dolgorukovs.”
“A bunch of aristocrats who got their necks snapped,” said one of the soldiers, gesturing with the barrel of his rifle for us to walk toward the front door.
“Some of them,” admitted Kolya. “And some of them slept with emperors.”
In the daylight Kolya looked like he could have stepped out of one of the propaganda posters pasted on walls throughout the city; the angles of his face were heroic—the strong chin, the straight nose, the blond hair that fell across his forehead. He was a fine-looking deserter.
The soldiers escorted us onto the porch, where sandbags had been piled four feet high to form a machine-gun nest. Two soldiers sat near their gun, passing a cigarette between them. Kolya sniffed the air and stared longingly at the hand-rolled butt.
“Real tobacco,” he said, before our armed guides pushed open the front door and herded us inside.
I had never been inside a mansion before, had only read about them in the novels: the dances on the parquet floors, the servants ladling soup from silver tureens, the stern patriarch in his book-lined study warning his weeping daughter to stay away from the lowborn boy. But while the old Dolgorukov home still looked magnificent on the outside, the revolution had come to the interior. The marble floor was tracked with a thousand muddy boot prints, unwashed for months. The smoke-stained wallpaper curled away from the baseboards. None of the original furniture had survived, none of the oil paintings and Chinese vases that must have lined the walls and rested on teak shelves.
Dozens of uniformed officers hurried from one room to the next, hustled up a curving double staircase missing its balustrade and all the balusters, probably torn down for firewood weeks ago. The uniforms were not Red Army. Kolya noticed me staring.
“NKVD. Maybe they think we’re spies.”
I didn’t need Kolya to tell me the men were NKVD. Since I was little I had known what their uniforms looked like, with their peaked blue-and-maroon caps and their holstered Tokarevs. I had learned to dread the sight of their Packards idling outside the gates of the Kirov, the Black Ravens, waiting to carry some unlucky citizen away from his home. The NKVD arrested at least fifteen men from the building while I lived there. Sometimes those taken returned after a few weeks, their heads shaved and their faces pale and lifeless, avoiding my eyes in the stairwell as they limped up to their apartments. The broken men who came home must have known how rare and lucky they were, but they took no apparent joy in their survival. They knew what happened to my father and they could not meet my eyes.
The soldiers kept prodding us forward till we entered a sunroom at the very rear of the house, the tall French windows offering a fine vantage of the Neva and the grim, stolid apartment buildings of the Vyborg section on the far side of the river. An older man sat alone at a simple wood desk set down in the middle of the sunroom. He had a telephone receiver nestled between his face and his shoulder so he could scribble with a pen on a pad of paper as he listened.
He glanced at us as we waited at the entryway. He looked like an ex-boxer with his thick neck and crooked, flattened nose. The shadows below his hooded eyes were deep, as were the furrows that crossed his forehead. His gray hair was shaved very close to the scalp. He might have been fifty years old, but he looked like he could rise from his chair and beat us all down without mussing his uniform. Three metal stars shone on the collar tabs of his jacket. I didn’t know precisely what three stars signified, but they were three stars more than anyone else in the mansion.
He tossed his pad of paper on the desk and I could see that he hadn’t been taking notes, as I’d thought, but simply drawing
X
’s, over and over again, till the entire sheet of paper was covered with them. For some reason this frightened me more than his uniform or his brawler’s face. A man who drew pictures of tits or dogs seemed like a man I could understand. But a man who drew nothing but
X
’s?
He was watching us, Kolya and me, and I knew that he was judging us, condemning us for our crimes and sentencing us to death, all while listening to a voice traveling across wires.
“Good,” he said at last, “I want it done by noon. No exceptions.”
He hung up the phone and smiled at us, and the smile was as incongruous on his face as the man and his plain wood desk were in the gorgeous sunroom of the old noble house. The colonel (for I assumed now that this was the colonel the soldiers had spoken of the night before) had a beautiful smile, his teeth surprisingly white, his brutal face shifting instantly from menace to welcome.
“The deserter and the looter! Come, come closer, we don’t need the cuffs. I don’t think these boys will cause any trouble.” He gestured to the soldiers, who reluctantly pulled out their keys and removed our manacles.
“I’m not a deserter,” said Kolya.
“No? Go,” he ordered the soldiers, not bothering to look at them. The soldiers obeyed, leaving us alone with the colonel. He stood and walked toward us, the pistol on his waist holster slapping against his hip. Kolya stood very straight, at attention for the officer’s inspection, and I, not knowing what to do, followed his lead. The colonel kept coming until his battered face nearly touched Kolya’s.
“You’re not a deserter and yet your unit reported you missing and you were picked up forty kilometers from where you were supposed to be.”
“Well, there’s a simple explanation—”
“And you,” he continued, turning to me. “A German paratrooper falls on your block and you don’t notify the authorities. You decide to enrich yourself at the city’s expense. Is there a simple explanation for that, too?”
I needed water. My mouth was so dry it felt scaly, like the skin of a lizard, and I had begun to see bright little sparks of light swimming in the peripheries of my vision.
“Well?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re sorry?” He looked at me a moment longer and laughed. “Ah, well, you’re sorry, all right then, that’s fine. As long as you’re sorry, that’s the important thing. Listen, boy, do you know how many people I’ve executed? I don’t mean on my orders, I mean done it myself, with this Tokarev—” Here he slapped the holstered pistol. “Do you want to guess? No? Good, because I don’t know. I’ve lost count. And I’m the kind of man who likes to know. I keep track of things. I know exactly how many women I’ve fucked, and it’s quite a few, believe me. You’re a handsome boy,” he said to Kolya, “but trust me, you won’t catch up with me, even if you live to a hundred, and that seems doubtful.”
I glanced at Kolya, expecting him to say something stupid and get us both killed, but Kolya, for once, had nothing to say.
“Sorry is what you say to the schoolmaster when you break a piece of chalk,” the colonel continued. “Sorry doesn’t work for looters and deserters.”
“We thought he might have a little food on him.”
The colonel stared at me for a long moment.
“Did he?”
“Just some cognac. Or brandy . . . schnapps, maybe.”
“We shoot a dozen people every day for forging ration cards. You know what they tell us, before we put bullets in their brains? They were hungry. Of course they were hungry! Everyone is hungry. That won’t stop us from shooting thieves.”
“I wasn’t stealing from Russians—”
“You stole state property. Did you take anything from the body?”
I hesitated as long as I dared.
“A knife.”
“Ah. The honest thief.”
I knelt, unstrapped the sheath from my ankle, and handed it to the colonel. He stared at the German leather.
“You had this on you all night? No one searched you?” He exhaled with a soft curse, weary of the incompetence. “No wonder we’re losing the war.” He pulled out the blade and studied the inscription. “BLOOD AND HONOR. Ha. May God fuck those whoresons in the ass. You know how to use it?”
“What?”
“The knife. Slashing,” he said, slashing the air with the steel blade, “is better than stabbing. Harder to block. Go for the throat, and if that’s not working, go for the eyes or the belly. Thigh’s good, too, big veins in the thighs.” All this instruction was accompanied by vigorous demonstration. “And never stop,” he said, dancing closer, the steel flashing, “never let up; keep the knife moving, keep him on the defensive.”
He sheathed the blade and tossed it to me.