7
Come in,” she said, “come in. You’re both frozen.”
You could see that Kolya’s friend had been beautiful before the siege: her dirty blond hair hung to the middle of her back; her lips were still full; and she had a crescent-shaped dimple that creased her left cheek every time she smiled. There was no corresponding dimple on the right cheek, which seemed odd, and I noticed that I kept waiting for her to smile so I could see the solitary dimple again.
Kolya had kissed both her cheeks when she opened the door and the blood had flooded her face, making her look healthy for a second.
“They said you were dead!”
“Not yet,” said Kolya. “This is my friend Lev. He won’t tell me his patronymic or his family name, but maybe he’ll tell you. I’ve got a feeling you’re his type. Lev, Sonya Ivanovna. One of my early conquests and still a dear friend.”
“Ha! Bit of a short-lived conquest, wasn’t it? Napoleon in Moscow?”
Kolya grinned at me. He still had an arm around Sonya, holding her close to him. She had swaddled herself in a man’s greatcoat and three or four sweaters, but even beneath all that bulk I could see there wasn’t much left of her.
“This one was a classic seduction. Met her in art history class. Explained to her all the perversions of the masters, from Michelangelo’s boys to Malevich’s feet—did you know about this? He used to sketch his housekeeper’s feet in the morning and jerk off to the drawings at night.”
“Such a lie. No one else in the world has heard this story,” she confided to me.
“She learned all about these lusty painters, got her juices flowing, couple of shots of vodka, that was it. I came, I saw, I conquered.”
She leaned closer to me, touching the sleeve of my overcoat, and told me with a stage whisper: “He came, anyway. I’ll give him that much.”
I wasn’t used to hearing women speak about sex. The boys I knew never shut up on the subject, though none of them seemed like great authorities, but the girls saved those talks for their own closed covens. I wondered if Grisha had laid Vera yet, before remembering that Grisha and Vera were both dead, buried beneath tombstones of broken concrete.
Sonya saw the miserable look on my face and assumed I was flustered by their brassy conversation. She gave me a warm smile, flashing that crescent dimple.
“Don’t worry, darling. None of us are nearly as bohemian as we think we are.” She turned to Kolya. “He’s a sweet one. Where’d you find him?”
“He lived in the Kirov. Over on Voinova.”
“The Kirov? That’s the one that went down last night? I’m so sorry, sweet boy.”
She gathered me in her arms. It was like being embraced by a scarecrow. I couldn’t feel any body beneath her clothing, just layer after layer of smoky wool. Still, it felt good to have a woman showing concern. Even if she was just being polite, it felt good.
“Come,” she said, taking my hand, leather glove on leather glove. “This is your home now. If you need to sleep here for a night, a week, this is where you sleep. Tomorrow you can help me carry some water up from the Neva.”
“We’ve got work to do tomorrow,” said Kolya, but she ignored him, ushering us into the sitting room. A band of six sat in a semicircle around a wood-burning stove. They looked like university students, the men still sporting elaborate sideburns and mustaches, the women wearing their hair cut short and Gypsy earrings. They shared several heavy blankets, sipped cups of tea, and watched us newcomers without saying a word of welcome. I understood their displeasure. Strangers were an irritation at best and fatal at worst—even if they meant no harm, they always wanted food.
Sonya introduced us all, naming everyone in the circle, but no one else spoke until Kolya made friends by unwrapping his library candy and passing it around. It was impossible to take much pleasure chewing the stuff, but it was something to eat, something to get the blood moving, and soon the conversation restarted.
Her friends, it turned out, were surgeons and nurses, not university students. They had just finished a twenty-four-hour shift, amputating arms and legs, plucking bullets from shattered bones, trying to patch together mutilated soldiers without the help of anesthetic or spare blood or electricity. They didn’t even have enough hot water to properly sterilize their scalpels.
“Lev here lived in the Kirov,” said Sonya, indicating me with a sympathetic tilt of her head. “That building on Voinova that was hit last night.”
There were murmured apologies, small nods to indicate condolence.
“Were you inside when the bomb hit?”
I shook my head. I glanced at Kolya, who was scrawling notes with a stub of pencil in his journal, not paying any attention to us. I glanced back at the doctors and nurses, who waited for a reply. These people were strangers. Why burden them with the truth?
“I was staying with friends.”
“A few of them got out,” said one of the surgeons, Timofei, a painterly-looking fellow wearing rimless glasses. “I heard someone talking about it at the hospital.”
“Really? How many?”
“Don’t know. Wasn’t listening too closely. Sorry, it’s just . . . buildings go down every night.”
The rumor of survivors lifted my spirits. The bomb shelter in the basement seemed sturdy—if people got there in time, they might have made it. Vera and the twins always rushed down to the shelter with their families when the sirens went off. Zavodilov the gangster, on the other hand—I don’t remember ever seeing him in the shelter. He slept through the sirens as he slept through the mornings, with a cold washcloth draped over his forehead and a naked girl by his side. Or at least that’s the way I imagined it. No, he wouldn’t have made it to the shelter, but then again, Zavodilov spent many nights away from the Kirov, taking care of his mysterious business or drinking in some other criminal’s apartment.
Sonya poured two more glasses of weak tea and handed one to me and one to Kolya. I took off my wool mittens for the first time since eating breakfast in the colonel’s office. The warm glass felt like a living thing between my palms, a small animal with a heartbeat and a soul. I let the steam rise to my face and didn’t realize for a moment that Sonya had asked me a question.
“Sorry?”
“I said, was your family in the building?”
“No, they got out of the city in September.”
“That’s good. So did mine. My little brothers went to Moscow.”
“And now the Germans are at the gates of Moscow, too,” said Pavel, a ferret-faced young man who stared at the iron stove and never made eye contact with anyone. “They’ll take it in a few weeks.”
“Let them take it,” said Timofei. “We’ll play a Rostopchin on them, burn everything down and retreat. Where will they find shelter? What will they eat? Let the winter take care of them.”
“Play a Rostopchin . . .
ech.
” Sonya made a face as if she smelled something nasty. “You make him sound like a hero.”
“He
was
a hero. You shouldn’t take your history from Tolstoy.”
“Yes, yes, good Count Rostopchin, friend to the people.”
“Don’t put politics into it. This is about warfare, not the class struggle.”
“Don’t put politics into it? Who has to put politics into it? You think politics doesn’t enter into warfare?”
Kolya silenced the bickering when he spoke up. He was looking into his cup of tea, holding it in both hands.
“The Germans won’t take Moscow.”
“According to which expert is this?” asked Pavel.
“According to me. Fritz was thirty kilometers from the city at the beginning of December. Now he’s one hundred kilometers away. The Wehrmacht has never retreated before. They don’t know how to do it. Everything they’ve trained for, everything they’ve studied in their books is attack. Attack, attack, attack. Now they’re going backward and they won’t stop till they’re lying on their backs in Berlin.”
No one said a word for a long count. The women in the group stared at Kolya, their eyes a little brighter in their gaunt faces. They were all a little in love with him.
“Forgive me for asking, comrade,” said Pavel, putting an ironic lilt into
comrade.
“But if you’re such an important figure in the army, privy to such critical conversations, why are you sitting here with us?”
“I can’t discuss my orders,” Kolya said, unruffled by the surgeon’s insulting tone. He took a sip of tea and let the warm water sit in his mouth for a moment. He noticed that Sonya was still watching him and he smiled at her. The group was silent. Nobody had moved, but the dynamic had shifted, with Kolya and Sonya onstage in the spotlight and the rest of us silent spectators, wondering if we’d see a bit of skin. The foreplay had already begun, even though they sat apart from each other, even though both were wrapped within layer after layer of wool. I wished that someday some girl would stare at me that way, but I knew it would never happen. This narrow-shouldered frame, these eyes as watchful and fearful as a rodent’s—I wasn’t the type to inspire lust. Worst of all was my nose, my hated nose, that beak of a thousand insults. It was bad enough to be a Jew in Russia, but to be a Jew with a nose from an anti-Semitic caricature, well, it inspired a good deal of self-loathing. Most of the time I was proud to be Jewish, but I didn’t want to look Jewish. I wanted to look Aryan, blond haired and blue eyed, broad in the chest and strong jawed. I wanted to look like Kolya.
Kolya winked at Sonya and finished off his cup of tea. He sighed, staring at the dregs in the bottom of his cup.
“Do you know I haven’t had a shit in nine days?”
That night all of us slept in the sitting room except for Kolya and Sonya, who jointly stood on some unseen signal and disappeared into the bedroom. The rest of us shared the blankets. We lay close together for warmth, so even though the stove ran out of fuel sometime in the night, I wasn’t shivering too badly. The cold actually bothered me less than Sonya’s muffled little yelps. Her cries were impossibly happy, as if Kolya were fucking away all the misery of the last six months, fucking away the hunger and the cold and the bombs and the Germans. Sonya was lovely and kind, but her pleasure was awful to listen to—
I
wanted to be the one who could transport a pretty girl away from the siege with my cock. Instead I was lying on the floor of a stranger’s apartment next to a man I didn’t know, who twitched in his sleep and smelled like boiled cabbage.
I can’t imagine the sex lasted very long—who had the energy for it?—but it seemed to go on half the night, Sonya yelping, Kolya speaking in low tones that I couldn’t hear through the thin walls. He sounded very calm, as if he were reading to her from a newspaper article. I wondered what the hell he was telling her. What do you say to a girl you’re fucking? It seemed like an important thing to know. Maybe he was quoting that writer he was always raving about. Maybe he was telling her about fighting the cannibal and the cannibal’s wife, but that seemed unlikely. I lay in the darkness listening to them, as the wind shook the windows in their frames and the last embers popped in the stove. The loneliest sound in the world is other people making love.
8
The next morning we stood outside a building two blocks from the Narva Gate, staring up at a towering poster of Zhdanov. “This must be it,” said Kolya, stamping his feet to keep them warm—though it didn’t seem possible, it was colder than it had been the day before. Only a single fish skeleton of cloud interrupted the endless blue sky. We headed for the front door of the building. It was locked, of course. Kolya banged on it, but no one came. We stood there like idiots, slapping our gloved hands together, our chins buried beneath the folds of our scarves.
“So now what do we do?”
“Someone will go in or out, eventually. What’s wrong with you today? You seem a little grumpy.”
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” I said, but even I could hear the grumpiness in my tone. “Took us an hour to get here, we’re going to wait another hour to get inside, and there won’t be any old man with a coop full of chickens.”
“No, no, something is bothering you. You’re thinking about the Kirov?”
“Of course I’m thinking about the Kirov,” I snapped back, angry with him for asking because I had not been thinking about the Kirov.
“We had a lieutenant named Belak back in the fall. Army man to the bone, wore the uniform his whole life, fought against the Whites, all that. So one night he sees this kid Levin crying over a letter he just got. This was in a trench outside of Zelenogorsk, right before the Finns took it back. Levin couldn’t talk, he was bawling so hard. Someone was dead, killed by the Germans. I don’t remember if it was his mother, his father, maybe the whole family, I don’t know. Anyway, Belak took the letter, folded it very neatly, slipped it into Levin’s coat pocket, and said, ‘All right, get it out. But after this I don’t want to see you crying until Hitler’s hanging from a rope.’ ”
Kolya stared into the distance, contemplating the lieutenant’s words. He must have thought they were profound. To me they sounded manufactured, the kind of line my father always hated, fake dialogue invented by some Party-approved journalist for one of those buoyant “Heroes at the Front!” articles
Truth for Young Pioneers
always ran.
“So he stopped crying?”
“Well, he stopped right then. Just sniffled for a bit. But that night he was at it again. That’s not really the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“There’s no time for grieving. The Nazis want us dead. We can cry about it as much as we want, but that won’t help us fight them.”
“Who’s crying? I’m not crying.”
Kolya wasn’t listening to me. Something was caught between his two front teeth and he tried to pry it out with his fingernail.
“Belak stepped on a land mine a few days later. Nasty business, land mines. What they do to a man’s body. . . .”
His voice trailed off, contemplating his old officer’s mangled body, and I felt bad that I had insulted the lieutenant in my mind. Maybe his words were clichéd, but he was trying to help the young soldier, to distract him from the tragedy at home, and that mattered more than original phrasing.
Kolya banged on the building door again. He waited for a moment, sighed, stared at the solitary cloud drifting across the sky.
“I’d like to live in Argentina for a year or two. I’ve never seen the ocean. Have you?”
“No.”
“You are grumpy, my Israelite. Tell me why.”
“Go fuck a pig.”
“Ah! There it is!” He gave me a little shove, danced away, moving his hands like a boxer, pretending to spar with me.
I sat down on the doorstep. Even that small movement caused a swarm of sparks to fly across my vision. We had drunk more tea at Sonya’s when we woke up, but there was no food, and I was saving the rest of my library candy. I looked up at Kolya, who was now watching me with some concern.
“What were you saying last night?” I asked him. “When you were, you know, when you were with her.”
Kolya squinted, confused at the question.
“With whom? With Sonya? What did I say?”
“You were talking to her the whole time.”
“When we made love?”
The phrase itself was embarrassing. I nodded. Kolya frowned.
“I didn’t know I said anything.”
“You were talking the whole time!”
“The usual stuff, I suppose.” A sudden smile lit his face. He sat beside me on the lintel step. “But of course, if you’ve never visited a country, you probably don’t know the customs. You want to know what to say.”
“I was just asking a question.”
“Yes, but you’re curious. Why are you curious? Because you’re a little bit nervous. You want to do things properly when you get the chance. This is very smart of you. I’m serious! Quit your scowling. You take compliments worse than anyone I know. Now, listen: women don’t like silent lovers. They’re giving you something precious and they want to know you appreciate it. Give me a little nod to show you’re listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“Every woman has a dream lover and a nightmare lover. The nightmare lover, he just lies on top of her, crushing her with his belly, jabbing his little tool in and out till he’s finished. He’s got his eyes clenched shut, he doesn’t say a word; essentially he’s just jerking off in the poor girl’s pussy. Now the dream lover—”
We heard the
shush
of sled runners on hard-packed snow and turned to see two girls dragging a sled loaded down with buckets of ice from the river. They were heading straight toward us and I stood, brushing off my coat, relieved that Kolya’s lecture had been interrupted. Kolya stood beside me.
“Ladies! Do you need a hand carrying that ice?”
The girls exchanged a glance. They were both about my age, sisters or cousins, with the same broad faces and downy upper lips. They were Piter girls, untrusting of strangers, but at the same time, climbing the stairs to their apartment with four pails of ice . . .
“Who are you here to see?” asked one of them, with a librarian’s prim correctitude.
“We’d like to speak to a certain gentleman about his chickens,” said Kolya, choosing honesty for unknown reasons. I expected the girls to laugh at us, but they didn’t.
“He’ll shoot you if you go up there,” said the second girl. “He doesn’t let anyone get near those chickens.”
Kolya and I stared at each other. He licked his lips and turned back to the girls, flashing his most seductive smile.
“Why don’t you let us carry the pails. We’ll worry about the old man.”
By the fifth floor, sweating through all my layers of wool, my seagull legs trembling with the effort, I was starting to regret the decision. There must have been an easier way into the building. We took long breaks at each landing, where I panted and flexed my hands, pulling off my mittens to inspect the deep grooves the pail handles were sawing into my palms. Kolya quizzed the girls about their reading habits and their ability to recite the opening stanzas of
Eugene Onegin
. To me the girls seemed spiritless, cud chewers, with no mischief in their eyes and no spark in their speech, but nobody bored Kolya. He chatted with them as if they were the most delightful creatures ever to grace a ball, looking one in the eye and then the other, never allowing silence. By the fifth floor it was clear that both girls were taken with him, and I got the sense they were now trying to determine which of them held the upper hand.
A surge of envy rose in me again, that sense of injustice compounded with anger and self-loathing—why did they like him? The long-winded braggart! And why did I begrudge him their attention? I didn’t care about these girls, after all. Neither was remotely attractive to me. This man saved my life yesterday and today I cursed him because girls grew awkward in his presence, blood rushing to their faces, staring at the floor and playing with the buttons on their coats?
But Sonya I liked. Sonya with her crescent dimple and her warmth, welcoming me into her home, offering me a place to stay whenever I needed it, even though one more week without food would kill her—the shape of her skull was too easy to read beneath her near-translucent skin. Perhaps I liked her so much because I met her thirty minutes after seeing the tombstones of the Kirov. Maybe the sight of her kept me from dwelling too much on all my neighbors, trapped beneath the slabs of fallen concrete.
Even when those images slipped through my mind, they lacked barbs, passing cleanly through, and I would find myself thinking again about the colonel’s daughter, or the colonel himself, or the giant chasing us down the steps with his steel pipe, or the woman at the Haymarket selling glasses of Badayev dirt. If I thought about the Kirov at all, it was the building itself that I remembered, my childhood playground, with its long corridors so well designed for footraces, its stairwells with the lead glass windows so layered with dust you could draw your self-portrait with your fingertip, the courtyard where all the kids gathered after the first big snowfall of every year for the annual snowball fight, floors one through three against floors four through six.
My friends and neighbors—Vera and Oleg and Grisha and Lyuba Nikolaevna and Zavodilov—seemed unreal already, as if their deaths had erased their lives. Perhaps I had always known they would disappear one day, and so I had kept them at a distance, laughed at their jokes and listened to their plans but never really trusted their existence. I had learned how to protect myself. When the police took my father, I had been a dumb boy, unable to understand how a man—that willful, brilliant man—could cease to exist at the snap of an unseen bureaucrat’s fingers, as if he were nothing but cigarette smoke exhaled by a bored sentry in a watchtower in Siberia, a sentry who wondered if his girlfriend back home was cheating on him, who stared over the wintry woods, unaware of the great blue maw of sky above him that waited to swallow the curling smoke and the sentry and everything growing on the ground below.
Kolya was saying good-bye to the girls, dropping his pails inside their apartment door and motioning for me to do the same.
“Be careful up there,” said one of the girls, the bolder one, I suppose. “He’s eighty years old, but he’ll shoot you in a second.”
“I’ve been on the lines fighting Fritz,” said Kolya, reassuring her with a smile and a wink. “I think I can handle a cranky grandfather.”
“If you want something to eat on your way down, we’re making soup,” said the second girl. The bold one shot her a look and I wondered, with little real curiosity, if she was peeved at the offer of free food or at the flirtatious gesture.
Kolya and I climbed the final flight of stairs to the roof door.
“Here’s the plan,” he told me. “Let me do the talking. I’m good with old people.”
I pushed open the door and the wind came at us, blowing bits of ice and dust into our faces, the grit of the city. We lowered our heads and pressed forward, two Bedouins in a sandstorm. Ahead of us was a mirage, what could only be a mirage—a shed nailed together with wood planks and roofing felt, the gaps stuffed with scraps of wool and old newspapers. I was a city boy to the bone; I had never been to a farm or even seen a cow; but I knew this was a chicken coop. Kolya looked at me. Our eyes were watering from the wind, but we were both grinning like madmen.
There was a crooked door on one end of the coop with an unfastened hook-and-eye latch on the outside. Kolya knocked softly on the door. No one answered.
“Hello? Don’t shoot us! Ha, ha! Ah, we just wanted to visit with you. . . . Hello? All right, I’m going to open the door. If that’s a bad idea, if you’re thinking of shooting, just say something now.”
Kolya stepped to one side of the door frame, motioned for me to do the same, and prodded open the door with the toe of his boot. We waited for a shouted curse or a shotgun blast, but neither came. When it seemed safe, we peeked into the coop. It was dark inside, lit by a single wick lamp hanging from a hook on the wall. The floor was covered with old straw that stank of bird shit. One wall was lined with empty nesting boxes, each big enough for a single chicken. A boy sat at the far end of the coop, his back against the wall, his knees drawn to his chest. He wore a woman’s rabbit fur coat. He looked ridiculous but warm.
A dead man sat in the straw beneath the nesting boxes, back against the wall, limbs stiff and splayed like an abandoned marionette. He had a long white beard, the beard of a nineteenth-century anarchist, and skin like melted candle wax. An antique shotgun still lay across his lap. From the looks of him he’d been dead for days.
Kolya and I stared at this grim tableau. We had entered into someone else’s private misery and we felt the guilt of interlopers. I did, at least. Shame didn’t afflict Kolya the way it did me. He walked inside the coop, knelt beside the boy, and gripped his knee.
“Are you all right, little soldier? You need some water?”
The boy didn’t look at him. His blue eyes seemed enormous in his starved face. I broke off a square of the library candy, stepped into the coop, and held out my hand. The boy’s eyes shifted slowly in my direction. He seemed to register my presence and the food in my hand before he looked away again. He was very far gone.
“Is this your grandfather?” asked Kolya. “We should bring him out to the street. Not good for you to be sitting here alone with him.”