“Keep it. You’ll need it.”
I stared at Kolya, who shrugged. All of this was too strange to understand so there was no point straining the mind, trying to sort out where we stood. I got back on one knee and strapped the knife to my ankle again.
The colonel had moved to the French windows, where he watched yesterday’s snow blowing across the frozen Neva.
“Your father was the poet.”
“Yes,” I admitted, standing straight and staring at the back of the colonel’s head. No one outside my family had mentioned my father in four years. I mean this literally. Not a word.
“He could write. What happened was . . . unfortunate.”
What could I say to that? I stared at my boots and knew that Kolya was squinting at me, trying to figure out which unfortunate poet sired me.
“Neither of you has eaten today,” said the colonel, not asking a question. “Black tea and toast, how does that sound? Maybe we can find some fish soup somewhere. Borya!”
An aide stepped into the sunroom, a pencil tucked behind his ear.
“Get these boys some breakfast.”
Borya nodded and disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared.
Fish soup.
I hadn’t had fish soup since summer. The idea of it was wild and exotic, like a naked girl on a Pacific island.
“Come over here,” said the colonel. He opened one of the French doors and stepped into the cold. Kolya and I followed him along a gravel path that led through a frost-blasted garden, down to the banks of the river.
A girl in a fox fur coat skated on the Neva. In a normal winter you’d see hundreds of girls skating on a weekend afternoon, but this wasn’t a normal winter. The ice was solid and had been for weeks, but who had the strength for figure eights? Standing on the frozen mud at the river’s edge, Kolya and I stared at her the way you’d stare at a monkey riding a unicycle down the street. She was freakishly lovely, her dark hair parted in the middle and tied up in a loose bun, her wind-whipped cheeks flushed and full and healthy. It took me a few seconds to realize why she looked so strange, and then it was obvious—even at a distance you could tell that the girl was well fed. There was nothing pinched and desperate about her face. She had an athlete’s casual grace; her pirouettes were tight and fast; she never got winded. Her thighs must have been magnificent—long, pale, and strong—and I could feel my prick hardening for the first time in days.
“She’s getting married next Friday,” said the colonel. “A piece of meat she’s marrying, I say, but all right. He’s a Party man, he can afford her.”
“That’s your daughter?” asked Kolya.
The colonel grinned, his white teeth splitting his brawler’s face.
“You don’t think she looks like me? No, no, she got lucky there. She got her mother’s face and her father’s temper—this one will conquer the world.”
Only then did I realize that the colonel’s teeth were false, a bridge that seemed to encompass the entire upper row. And I knew, suddenly but surely, that the man had been tortured. They had brought him in during one purge or another, called him a Trotskyite or a White or a Fascist sympathizer, pried the teeth from his mouth, and beaten him till his eyes bled, till he pissed blood and shat blood, till the order came from whatever Moscow office: we have rehabilitated the man, let him alone now, he is one of us again.
I could picture it because I had pictured it often, whenever I wondered about my father’s last days. He had the misfortune of being a Jew and a poet and mildly famous, friends once with Mayakovsky and Mandelstam, bitter enemies with Obranovich and the others he considered tongues of the bureaucracy, the slingers of revolutionary verse who labeled my father an agitator and a parasite because he wrote about the Leningrad underworld, though—officially—there was no Leningrad underworld. More than this, he had the temerity to title his book
Piter,
the city’s nickname, the name every native used, but banned from all Soviet text because “Saint Petersburg” was a czar’s arrogance, named for the old tyrant’s patron saint.
One summer afternoon in 1937 they took my father from the offices of the literary magazine where he worked. They never gave him back. The call from the Moscow office never came for him; rehabilitation was not an option. An intelligence officer might hold future value for the state, but a decadent poet did not. He might have died in the Crosses or in Siberia or somewhere in between, we never learned. If he was buried, there is no marker; if he was burned, there is no urn.
For a long time I was angry with my father for writing such dangerous words; it seemed stupid that a book was more important than sticking around and slapping the back of my head when I picked my nose. But later I decided he hadn’t chosen to insult the Party, not consciously, not the way Mandelstam had (Mandelstam with his crazy bravery, writing that Stalin had fat fingers like slugs, a mustache like two cockroaches). My father didn’t know that
Piter
was dangerous until the official reviews were written. He thought he was writing a book five hundred people would read, and maybe he was right, but at least one of those five hundred denounced him and that was that.
The colonel had survived, though, and looking at him I wondered if he found it strange that he had been so close to the shark’s jaws and somehow fought his way back to shore, that he who had waited for another’s mercy could now decide for himself whether to grant it. He didn’t seem troubled at the moment; he watched his daughter skate, he clapped his busted-knuckled hands as she spun.
“So, the wedding is Friday. Even now, even in the middle of all of this—” said the colonel, gesturing with his hands to indicate Leningrad, the famine, the war, “—she wants a real wedding, a
proper
wedding. This is good, life must continue, we’re fighting barbarians but we must remain human,
Russian.
So we will have music, dancing . . . a cake.”
He looked at us each in turn as if there were something momentous about the word
cake
and he needed us both to understand.
“This is the tradition, says my wife, we need a cake. It is terrible luck, a wedding with no cake. Now, I’ve been fighting all my life against these peasant superstitions, the priests used them to keep people stupid and afraid, but my wife . . . she wants the cake. Fine, fine, make the cake. For months she’s been hoarding her sugar, her honey, flour, all the rest.”
I thought about this, the sacks of sugar, the jars of honey, the flour that must have been real flour, not moldy salvage from a torpedoed barge. Half the Kirov could probably survive two weeks on her batter alone.
“She has everything she needs, all except the eggs.” Again the portentous look. “Eggs,” said the colonel, “are hard to find.”
For several seconds we all stood silently, watching the colonel’s daughter twirl.
“The fleet might have some,” said Kolya.
“No. They don’t.”
“They have tinned beef. I traded a pack of playing cards for some tinned beef from one of the sailors—”
“They don’t have eggs.”
I don’t think I’m stupid, but it was taking me a very long time to understand what the colonel was asking, and a longer time to fire up my courage to ask him.
“You want us to find eggs?”
“A dozen,” he said. “She only needs ten, but I figure, one might break, a couple might be rotten.” He saw our confusion and he smiled his wonderful smile, gripping our shoulders hard enough to make me stand straighter. “My men say there are no eggs in Leningrad, but I believe there is everything in Leningrad, even now, and I just need the right fellows to find it. A pair of thieves.”
“We’re not thieves,” said Kolya, very righteous, staring into the colonel’s eyes. I wanted to punch him. By all rights we should have been dead and frozen, piled onto a sledge with the rest of the day’s corpses. We had our reprieve. Our lives had been returned in exchange for a simple task. A strange task, perhaps, but simple enough. And now he was going to ruin it—he was asking for his bullet, which was bad, but he was asking for my bullet, too, which was far worse.
“You’re not thieves? You abandoned your unit—no, no, shut up, don’t say anything. You abandoned your unit and the moment you did that you forfeited your rights as a soldier in the Red Army—your right to carry your rifle, to wear that coat, those boots. You’re a thief. And you, Big Nose, you looted a corpse. It was a German corpse so it doesn’t personally offend me, but looting is theft. Let’s not play games. You’re both thieves. Bad thieves, that’s true, incompetent thieves, absolutely, but you’re in luck. The good thieves haven’t been caught.”
He turned and walked back toward the house. Kolya and I lingered, watching the colonel’s daughter, her fox fur flashing in the sun. She must have seen us by now, but she never acknowledged us, never glanced our way. We were two of her father’s lackeys and therefore entirely boring. We watched her as long as we could, trying to etch the image into our brains for future masturbation, until the colonel barked at us and we hurried after him.
“You have your ration cards?” he asked, taking long strides, his respite finished, ready again for the long day’s work. “Hand them over.”
I kept mine pinned to the inside pocket of my coat. I unpinned it and saw Kolya pull his from his folded sock. The colonel took them from us.
“You bring me the eggs by sunrise Thursday, you get them back. You don’t, well, you’ve got all of January to eat snow, and there won’t be any cards waiting for you in February, either. That’s assuming one of my men doesn’t find you and kill you before then, and my men are very good at that.”
“They just can’t find eggs,” said Kolya.
The colonel smiled. “I like you, boy. You won’t live a long life, but I like you.”
We stepped inside the sunroom. The colonel sat down at his desk and stared at the black telephone. He raised his eyebrows, remembering something, opened the desk drawer, and pulled out a folded letter. He held it out for Kolya.
“That’s a curfew waiver for the two of you. Anyone gives you trouble, show them that, you’ll be on your way. And here, this, too. . . .”
He pulled four 100-ruble notes from his wallet and gave them to Kolya, who glanced at the letter and the rubles and slipped them into his pocket.
“That would have bought me a thousand eggs in June,” said the colonel.
“And it will again next June,” said Kolya. “Fritz won’t last the winter.”
“With soldiers like you,” said the colonel, “we’ll be paying for eggs with deutsche marks soon.”
Kolya opened his mouth to defend himself, but the colonel shook his head.
“You understand this is a gift? You bring me a dozen eggs by Thursday, I give you your lives back. You understand the rareness of this gift?”
“What day is today?”
“Today is Saturday. You deserted your unit on a Friday. When the sun rises tomorrow it is Sunday. Can you keep track from this point forward? Yes? Good.”
Borya returned with four slices of toast on a blue plate. The toast had been slathered with something oily, lard maybe, glistening and fatty and luscious. Another aide stepped into the sunroom behind him, carrying two cups of steaming tea. I waited for a third aide carrying bowls of fish soup, but he never came.
“Eat quick, boys,” said the colonel. “You’ve got a lot of walking to do.”
4
Big Nose. I like that. Who was your father, Big Nose?”
“You wouldn’t know him.”
“If he was a published poet, I know him.”
“Just leave it alone.”
“You’re a moody one, aren’t you?”
We were crossing the Kamennoostrovsky Bridge again, this time on foot. Kolya stopped at the midpoint, gloved hands on the balustrade, looking down the river toward the Dolgorukov mansion. The colonel’s daughter no longer skated her figures, but Kolya watched for a moment anyway, hoping for an encore.
“She smiled at me,” he said.
“She didn’t smile at you. What are you talking about? She didn’t even look at us.”
“Perhaps you’re jealous, my friend, but she definitely gave me a smile. I think I’ve seen her before, at the university. I have a reputation.”
“As a deserter?”
Kolya turned away from the balustrade and glared at me. “I’ll knock your teeth out if you call me a deserter again.”
“I’ll shove my knife in your eye if you try it.”
Kolya considered this and turned back to his river view.
“I’d get to you before you could pull the knife. I’m very quick when I need to be.”
I thought about pulling the knife now, just to prove him wrong, but he didn’t seem angry anymore and I wanted to keep moving.
We crossed the bridge, back to the mainland, and headed south on Pesochnaya, the river to our right, the rusted rails of the Finland line to the left. No trains had run since September, when the Germans encircled the city and cut the tracks of every line—Finland, Moscow, Vitebsk, Warsaw, Baltic—all severed and useless. The city’s only connection now with the rest of Russia was by air, and few planes could make it through the Luftwaffe patrols.
“We could run for it, of course. Tough without ration cards, though.” He considered the problem. “The NKVD boys don’t worry me much. In the army they say the police can’t find pussy in a whorehouse. But not having ration cards . . . tricky.”
“We have to find the eggs,” I told him. We were walking in the sunlight and breathing the air because of the colonel’s command; if the payment for this reprieve was a dozen eggs, we would find a dozen fucking eggs. There was no room for negotiation or maneuvering.
“Finding the eggs is the best outcome, I agree. Doesn’t mean I can’t consider my options. Maybe there are no eggs in the city. Then what? You still have family in Piter?”
“No.”
“Me neither. That’s one good thing. Only have to worry about our own skins.”
Signs were posted on the walls of fire-gutted warehouses: HAVE YOU SIGNED UP YET FOR THE PEOPLE’S VOLUNTEERS? There were no residential buildings in this area and the street was empty, no one else walking beneath the colorless sky. We could have been the last two survivors of the war, the last two defenders of the city, with only my stolen knife and Kolya’s purportedly quick fists to fight off the Fascists.
“The Haymarket’s our best chance,” said Kolya. “I was there a few months ago. They still had butter and cheese, a little caviar, maybe.”
“So how come the colonel’s men couldn’t find any eggs?”
“It’s the black market. Half that stuff is stolen. You’ve got people trading their ration cards, all sorts of lawbreaking. They’re not going to sell to anyone in a uniform. Especially not an NKVD uniform.”
It seemed like a reasonable argument. Kolya whistled some tuneless song of his own invention and we walked south toward the Haymarket. Things were looking up. Execution was not imminent. I had more food in my stomach than I’d had for weeks, and the strong black tea provided an extra spark. My legs felt strong enough to propel me wherever I needed to go. Someone, somewhere, had a dozen eggs, and we’d find them eventually. In the meantime I enjoyed a vivid fantasy of the colonel’s daughter skating naked on the Neva, her pale ass shining in the sun.
Kolya slapped my back and gave me a lewd grin, as if he had stared right through my glass skull.
“Remarkable girl, wasn’t she? You’d like to take a shot at that?”
I said nothing, but Kolya seemed long practiced at carrying on one-sided conversations.
“The secret to winning a woman is calculated neglect.”
“What?”
“Ushakovo. It’s a line from
The Courtyard Hound
. Oh wait, you never read
The Courtyard Hound
.” Kolya sighed, weary of my great ignorance. “Your father was a member of the literati and he left you illiterate. A little sad.”
“Why don’t you shut up about my father?”
“Radchenko, the protagonist, is a great lover. People come from all over Moscow to get his advice on wooing. He never leaves his bed, he just lies there, drinking tea—”
“Like Oblomov.”
“Nothing like Oblomov! Why does everyone always say, ‘Like Oblomov’?”
“Because it sounds exactly like Oblomov.”
Kolya stopped walking and looked down at me. He was taller by a head and twice as broad in the shoulders, and he loomed over me now, threatening with his eyes.
“Every university fool knows Goncharov wasn’t half the writer Ushakovo was. Oblomov is nothing. Oblomov is a morality lesson for the bourgeoisie, a little trifle you make your kids read so they don’t grow up lazy. Now, Radchenko—Radchenko is one of the great heroes of the language. Him and Raskolnikov and Bezukhov and, I don’t know, Chichikov, maybe.”
“You’re spitting on me.”
“Well, you deserve to be spat on.”
I continued walking south and Kolya, irritated as he was, soon fell into stride. Fate had shoved us together, that seemed beyond argument. Until Thursday, we were married.
Across the snow-dusted ice of the Neva the golden angel still sat atop the gilded spire of the Peter and Paul Cathedral even though people said the Wehrmacht had promised an Iron Cross to the artilleryman who knocked it down. Kolya gestured toward the Petrograd Side with his chin.
“I was stationed at the fortress when the zoo was bombed.”
“I heard there were baboons running around the city, and a Siberian tiger—”
“That’s a fairy tale,” he said. “None of them got out.”
“Maybe a few did. How do you know?”
“None of them got out. If you want to tell yourself something sweet to help you sleep, go ahead, but it’s a lie.” He spat on the ground. “Fritz burned the whole place to the ground. Betty the elephant . . . I loved that elephant. I’d go look at her all the time when I was a kid. The way she washed, sucking up water in her trunk and showering herself . . . She was graceful. You wouldn’t think so, she was so damned big, but she was.”
“She died?”
“What did I just tell you? They all died. Took Betty hours, though. The way she moaned . . . I was on guard duty and all I wanted to do was run over and shoot her in the heart. Just end it. You never want to hear an elephant dying.”
It was a long walk to the Haymarket, six kilometers maybe, over the Liteiny Bridge, past the Summer Gardens where the elms and the oaks had been hacked down with hatchets, past the Church on Spilled Blood, with its glazed tile facade and soaring onion domes, built on the spot where Hryniewiecki splattered himself and the emperor. The farther south we walked, the more crowded the streets; everyone bundled in three layers, leaning into the wind as they walked, their faces pinched and wasted and pallid from lack of iron. On Nevsky Prospekt all the shops had been closed for months. We saw two women in their sixties walking very close together, their shoulders touching, eyes on the sidewalk looking for the patch of ice that could kill them. A man with a glorious walrus mustache carried a white bucket filled with black nails. A boy, no more than twelve, tugged a sled with a length of rope. A small body wrapped in blankets lay on the sled, a bloodless bare foot dragging along the hard-packed snow. Dragon’s teeth studded the street, reinforced concrete blocks arrayed in rows to hinder the movement of enemy tanks. A printed sign on the wall read WARNING! THIS SIDE OF THE STREET IS THE MOST DANGEROUS DURING THE BOMBING.
Nevsky before the war was the heart of the city, built to rival the grand promenades of London and Paris, sidewalk kiosks hawking cherry blossoms and chocolates, the aproned old men behind the counter in Eliseyev’s slicing smoked sturgeon and sable, the clock tower of city hall rising above all the clamor, letting everyone know how late they were for whatever came next. Black Packards would whip past, horns blaring, carrying Party members from one meeting to another. Even if you had no money to buy anything and nowhere important to go, Nevsky was always a good place to walk. In June the sun didn’t set till midnight and nobody wanted to waste the light. You could watch the prettiest girls in Piter staring through the bright windows of the fancy shops, their eyes appraising the newest dresses for sale, studying the cut so they could make the dress at home if they managed to snatch enough material from work. Even if you never said anything to these girls, even if you always watched from a distance—
“You’re a virgin, aren’t you,” said Kolya, interrupting my thoughts with such eerie timing it startled me.
“Me?” I asked, stupidly. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that you’ve never had sex.” Sometimes you know there’s no point in lying; the game is over before it’s begun.
“What do you care?”
“Listen, Lev, what if we try to be friends? What do you think about that? We’re going to be together until we find these eggs, we might as well get along, right? Now, you seem like an interesting boy, a bit ornery, a bit moody in the Jewish way, but I like you. And if you weren’t so fucking resistant all the time, I could probably teach you something.”
“About girls?”
“About girls, yes. About literature. About chess.”
“What are you, nineteen? How come you always talk like you’re such an expert at everything?”
“I’m twenty. And I’m not an expert at everything. Just girls, literature, and chess.”
“That’s all.”
“Mm. And dancing. I’m an excellent dancer.”
“What do you want to bet on a game of chess?”
Kolya glanced at me and smiled. He exhaled, his breath rising in vapor above his head.
“I’ll take that German knife of yours.”
“And what do I get?”
“You won’t get anything. You’re not going to win.”
“But let’s say I do.”
“I’ve got maybe another hundred grams of that sausage—”
“Hundred grams of sausage for a German pilot’s knife? I don’t think so.”
“I have some pictures. . . .”
“What kind of pictures.”
“Pictures of girls. French girls. You’d learn things you need to learn.”
Pictures of French girls seemed like a prize worth playing for. I wasn’t worried about losing the knife. There were plenty of people in Piter who could beat me at chess, but I knew all their names. My father had been city champion when he was still in university; he used to take me with him on Thursdays and Sundays to the Spartak Chess Club at the Palace of the Pioneers. When I was six, the club coach declared me a talent. For several years I was one of the top-ranked young players, winning little ribbons and medals at tournaments throughout Leningrad Oblast. This made my father proud, though he was too much of a bohemian to admit to caring about competitions and he never let me display my prizes in our apartment.
When I was fourteen, I quit the club. I had learned that I was a good player but would never be a great one. Friends of mine at Spartak, whom I had beaten consistently when we were younger, had left me far behind, advancing to a plane I could not access no matter how many games I played, how many books I read, how many endgame problems I worked on in bed at night. I was like a well-trained pianist who knows which notes to hit but can’t make the music his own. A brilliant player understands the game in a way he can never quite articulate; he analyzes the board and knows how to improve his position before his brain can devise an explanation for the move. I didn’t have the instincts. Quitting the club disappointed my father, but I wasn’t sad about it. Chess became far more fun once I no longer had to worry about my citywide ranking.
Kolya stopped at the Kvissisana Café and stared through a plate glass window covered with taped crosses. The restaurant inside was empty, all the tables removed, nothing but a linoleum floor and a chalkboard on the wall still marked with August’s specials.
“I took a girl here once. Best lamb cutlets in the city.”
“And then you took her home and made love to her?” I said, deeply sarcastic but immediately fearing that he had done exactly that.
“No,” said Kolya, checking his reflection in the window and brushing some stray blond hair back under his black fur cap. “We made love before dinner. After dinner we had a drink at the Europa. She was mad for me, but I liked a friend of hers better.”
“So why didn’t you take the friend to dinner?”
Kolya smiled, a superior’s kind smile for his simple subordinate.