“There’s a man who says he has eggs.”
“Excellent!” Kolya turned to the boy. “Son, it has been a great pleasure.”
We walked back the way I’d come, passing the stalls now shutting for the night. Kolya handed me a wrapped library candy.
“Here you are, my friend. Tonight we feast.”
“The kid gave it to you?”
“Gave it to me? He sold it to me.”
“How much?”
“One hundred for two.”
“One hundred!” I glared up at Kolya as he unwrapped his bar and took a bite, grimacing at the flavor. “So we have three hundred left?”
“Correct. Impressive arithmetic.”
“That money is for the eggs.”
“Well, we can’t go egg hunting without a little something to keep us going.”
The bearded man waited for us at the edge of the Haymarket, arms still folded. He appraised Kolya as we came nearer, sizing him up the way a boxer takes the measure of his opponent.
“It’s just the two of you?”
“How many of us do you need?” asked Kolya in return, smiling at the giant. “I hear you sell eggs.”
“I sell everything. What do you have for me?”
“We have money,” I said, fairly sure we had already gone over this.
“How much?”
“Enough,” said Kolya. “We need a dozen eggs.”
The bearded man whistled. “You’re in luck. That’s all I have.”
“You see that?” said Kolya, gripping my shoulder. “This wasn’t so hard.”
“Follow me,” said the giant, crossing the street.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we followed.
“I keep everything inside. It isn’t safe out here. Soldiers come down every few days, steal everything they want, anyone says anything, they shoot him.”
“Well, the soldiers are out there defending the city,” said Kolya. “They can’t fight if they’re starving.”
The giant glanced at Kolya’s army coat, his regulation boots.
“Why aren’t you defending the city?”
“I’m on a mission for a certain colonel. Nothing you need to worry about.”
“This colonel sent you and the boy on a mission for some eggs, is that it?” The giant grinned down at us. His teeth gleamed like unmarked dice within his black beard. He didn’t believe Kolya, of course. Who would?
We walked alongside the frozen Fontanka Canal, the ice littered with abandoned corpses, some covered with shrouds weighted down with stones, others stripped for their warm clothes, their white faces staring up at the darkening sky. The wind was beginning to wake for the night and I watched a dead woman’s long blond hair blow across her face. She had taken pride in that hair once, washed it twice a week, brushed it out for twenty minutes before going to bed. Now it was trying to protect her, to shield her decay from the eyes of strangers.
The giant led us to a five-story brick building, all the windows boarded over with plywood. A massive poster, two stories high, portrayed a young mother carrying her dead child from a burning building. DEATH TO THE BABY KILLERS! read the text. After fishing in his coat pocket for his key, the giant unlocked the front door and held it open for us. I grabbed Kolya’s sleeve before he could enter.
“Why don’t you bring the eggs down here?” I asked the giant.
“I’m still alive because I know how to run my business. And I don’t do business on the street.”
I could feel my scrotum tightening, my timid balls creeping closer to my body. But I was born and raised in Piter, I wasn’t a fool, and I tried to keep my voice steady as I spoke.
“I don’t do business in strangers’ apartments.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Kolya, smiling broadly. “No need for all the suspicion. A dozen eggs. Name your price.”
“A thousand.”
“A thousand rubles? For a dozen eggs?” I laughed. “Are they Fabergé?”
The black-bearded giant, still holding the door open, glowered down at me. I stopped laughing.
“They’re selling glasses of dirt back there for a hundred rubles,” he told me. “Which is better, an egg or a glass of dirt?”
“Listen,” said Kolya, “you can stand here all day haggling with my little Jewish friend, or we can talk like honest men. We have three hundred. That’s all we have. Is it a deal?”
The giant continued to stare at me. He hadn’t liked me from the start; now that he knew I was a Jew I could tell he wanted to peel the skin from my face. He held out his massive palm to Kolya, beckoning for the cash.
“Ah, no, at this point I must side with my companion,” Kolya said, shaking his head. “First the eggs, then the money.”
“I’m not bringing them out here. Everyone’s starving and everyone’s got a gun.”
“You’re an awfully big man to be so afraid,” teased Kolya.
The giant eyed Kolya with something like curiosity, as if he couldn’t quite believe he was hearing the insult. Finally, he smiled, flashing those dice-white teeth.
“There’s a man facedown out there,” he said, gesturing with his chin to the Fontanka Canal. “Wasn’t hunger that got him, wasn’t the cold. His skull got smashed in with a brick. You want to ask me how I know?”
“I take your point,” said Kolya, quite agreeable. He peered into the darkness of the building’s vestibule. “Well, for what it’s worth, a brick is quicker.”
Kolya patted me on the back and stepped inside.
Everything I knew told me to run. This man was leading us into a trap. He had practically just confessed to being a murderer. Kolya had stupidly admitted exactly how much money we had on us. It wasn’t much, but three hundred rubles and two ration cards—which the giant must have assumed we still had—were easily enough to get killed over these days.
But what was the other choice? Head down to the Narva Gate and find some fabled old man and his chicken coop? We were risking our lives walking into the building, but if we didn’t find the eggs soon, we were dead anyway.
I followed Kolya. The front door closed behind us. It was gloomy inside, with no electricity for the bulbs and only the last of the daylight peeking in through gaps in the plywood covering the windows. I heard the giant moving behind me and I dropped to one knee, ready to unsheathe my knife. He passed by me and climbed the stairs, two at a time. Kolya and I glanced at each other. When Blackbeard was out of sight, I pulled out the German knife and slipped it into my coat pocket. Kolya raised his eyebrows, possibly impressed by the act, possibly mocking me. We headed up the stairs, taking them one by one but still panting by the time we reached the second floor.
“Where do you get the eggs?” asked Kolya, calling out to the giant who was already a flight above us. The big man was untroubled by the climb. He and the colonel’s daughter were the two fit-test people I’d seen in Piter in months. I wondered again where he got his energy.
“There’s a peasant I know, he works on a farm near Mga.”
“I thought the Germans took Mga.”
“They did. The Germans like their eggs, too. They come every day and grab all they can find, but my friend hides a few. Can’t hide too many or they’ll figure it out.”
The giant stopped on the fourth floor and rapped on an apartment door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me,” he said. “With a couple of customers.”
We heard a deadbolt slide back and the door opened. A woman wearing a man’s fur hat and a bloodied butcher’s apron blinked at Kolya and me, wiping her nose with the back of her gloved hand.
“What I was wondering,” said Kolya, “is how you keep the eggs from freezing. Because frozen eggs won’t do us much good, I’m afraid.”
The woman stared at Kolya as if he were speaking Japanese.
“We keep them by the samovar,” said the giant. “Come on, let’s get it over with.”
He gestured for us to enter the apartment. The silent woman stepped to the side to let us pass and Kolya walked right in, not a care in the world, looking around with a smile as if he’d just been invited into a new girlfriend’s place. I waited by the door until the giant put his hand on my shoulder. He didn’t shove me, exactly, but with a hand that big the effect was the same.
Wick lamps lit the small apartment and our long shadows crept across the walls, across the frayed rugs on the floor, the brass samovar in the corner, and a white sheet hanging on the far side of the room—partitioning off a sleeping area, I assumed. When the giant closed the door, the sheet billowed like a woman’s dress in the wind. In the moment before it settled down I saw what lay behind it—not a bed, no furniture at all, just slabs of white meat hanging from hooks, suspended from a heating pipe by heavy chains, with plastic sheeting on the floor to collect the drippings. Maybe for half a second I thought it was pig, maybe my brain tried to convince my eyes that they weren’t looking at what they were looking at: a flayed thigh that could only be a woman’s thigh, a child’s rib cage, a severed arm with the hand’s ring finger missing.
The knife was in my hand before I realized I wanted it—something moved behind me and I wheeled and slashed, crying out, unable to form any words, throat constricted. The giant had pulled a foot-long section of steel pipe from his coat; he danced away from me, far quicker than a man that big should be, easily dodging the German steel.
The giant’s wife drew a cleaver from her apron pouch. She was quick, too, but Kolya turned out to be quickest of all, pivoting on his back foot and hitting the woman with a right cross to the jaw. She crumpled to the floor.
“Run,” said Kolya.
I ran. I thought the door would be locked, but it wasn’t; I thought the giant’s pipe would crush my skull, but it didn’t; and I was out in the hallway, hurtling down the staircase, jumping nearly the entire flight to the landing below. I heard a great shout of pure un-worded fury and the thud of the giant’s hobnailed boots on the floorboards as he charged across the room. I stopped there with my hand on the banister, unable to catch my breath, unwilling to run farther away, unable to climb the dark stairs back to the cannibals’ apartment. I heard the terrible sound of steel slamming into skull or plywood.
I was betraying Kolya, deserting him when he was weaponless and I had a good knife. I tried to will my feet to move, to carry me back to the battle, but I was shaking so hard I couldn’t keep my knife hand steady. More shouts, more thuds of pipe on what? Plaster flakes fell from the ceiling above me. I cowered on the stairs, certain that Kolya was gone, certain I could not run fast enough to escape the giant—his wife would carve me with a few expert chops of that heavy cleaver, and soon the parts of me would be hanging from steel chains as the last of my blood dripped onto the plastic sheeting.
The shouting continued, the walls shuddered, Kolya was not dead yet. I held the knife with both hands and put one foot on the step above me. I could sneak into the apartment while the cannibal was distracted, stick the knife in his back—but the blade seemed flimsy to me now, far too small for killing giants. It would prick him, draw a little blood, and he would turn, grab my face, and squeeze the eyeballs from my skull.
I took another step up and Kolya shot out of the apartment, his boots skidding on the floor as he nearly ran past the staircase. He made the turn, hurling himself down the flight, grabbing my collar, and tugging me along with him.
“Run, you little fool! Run!”
We ran, and whenever I faltered or nearly tripped on a slick step, Kolya’s hand was there to steady me. I heard the shouting above us, heard that monstrous heavy body thudding down the steps behind us, but I never looked back and I never ran faster. In the midst of all that terror, the shouts and the footfalls and the squeal of our heels on the wooden steps, there was something else, something strange. Kolya was laughing.
We made it out the front door of the building and into the dark street, the night sky already crisscrossed with roving searchlights. The sidewalks were empty; no one close by to help us. We ran into the middle of the street, sprinted three blocks, looking over our shoulders to see if the giant was still chasing us, never seeing him, never slowing down. Finally, we spotted an army car passing by and we ran into its path, arms raised, forcing the driver to hit the brakes, the tires skidding on the iced pavement.
“Get out of the road, you motherless shits!” shouted the driver.
“Comrade officers,” said Kolya, palms raised, speaking calmly and with his perpetual, freakish confidence, “there are cannibals in that building back there. We’ve just escaped them.”
“There are cannibals in every building,” said the driver. “Welcome to Leningrad. Now step aside.”
Another voice inside the car said, “Hold on a moment.” An officer stepped out. He looked more like a professor of mathematics than a military man, with his trim gray mustache and his frail neck. He studied Kolya’s uniform and then looked him in the eye.
“Why aren’t you with your regiment?” he asked.
Kolya pulled the colonel’s letter from his pocket and showed it to the officer. I could see the man’s expression change. He nodded at Kolya and gestured for us to get in the car.