David Benioff - City of Thieves

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.

“Calculated neglect. You need an education.”

We kept walking down Nevsky. It was one in the afternoon, but the winter sun was already drifting low in the western sky, our shadows elongating in front of us.

“So let’s start slow,” he said, “let’s start with basics. Is there a girl you like?”

“No one special.”

“Who said she needs to be special? You’re a virgin, you need warm thighs and a heartbeat, not Tamara Karsavina.”

“There’s a girl named Vera who lives in my building. But she likes someone else.”

“Fine. Step one, let’s not worry about someone else. Let’s worry about Vera. What’s special about her? Why do you like her?”

“I don’t know. She lives in my building.”

“That’s something. Anything else?”

“She plays the cello.”

“Beautiful instrument. What color eyes does she have?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t like the girl. You don’t know what color eyes she has, you don’t like her.”

“I do like her, but all she cares about is Grisha Antokolsky, so what’s the point?”

“Fine,” said Kolya, very patient with his dull charge, “you think you like her because she doesn’t like you. It’s very understandable, but I’m telling you, you don’t like her. Let’s forget about Vera.”

Forgetting about Vera didn’t seem hard to do. I had spent the last three years trying to imagine what she looked like naked, but only because she lived two floors below me and once, at the youth center swimming pool, I had seen her nipples when her swimsuit straps slipped off. If it weren’t for Vera’s panicked tumble by the Kirov’s gate, I wouldn’t have been wandering the streets of Piter with a lunatic deserter, looking for eggs. She never looked back when the soldiers grabbed me. She was probably grubbing with Grisha in one of the Kirov’s dark corridors while I was locked up in the Crosses.

“The colonel’s daughter was pretty. I like her.”

Kolya glanced at me, amused.

“Yes, the colonel’s daughter is pretty. I like your optimism. But that one’s not for you.”

“She’s not for you, either.”

“You might be wrong about that. If you saw the look she gave me.”

We walked past a group of young boys with stepladders and pails of whitewash who were busy painting over street signs and building numbers. Kolya stopped and stared at them.

“Hey!” he shouted at the closest boy, who wore so many layers of wool you would have thought he was fat, unless you saw the drawn skin of his face, his eyes shining and black above shadows as deep as an old man’s. Very few children this young were left in the city; most had been evacuated back in September. The ones who remained tended to be very poor, many of them war orphans with no family in the east.

“What the devil are you doing?” asked Kolya. He turned to me, stunned by this disrespect. “Little bastards are vandalizing the Prospekt. Hey! Boy!”

“Suck my cock and make a wish,” said the black-eyed boy, whiting out the number on the door of a watch repair shop.

Even Kolya seemed taken aback by this directive. He walked over to the boy, took him by the shoulders, and turned him around.

“You’re talking to a soldier of the Red Army, boy—”

“Kolya,” I started.

“You think this is the time for pranks? You and your little Gypsy friends want to run around—”

“You better take your hands off me,” said the boy.

“Now you’re threatening me? I’ve been shooting at Germans the last four months and now you want to threaten me?”

“Kolya,” I repeated, louder this time. “They’re on orders. If Fritz gets inside the city, he won’t know where he’s going.”

Kolya looked from the black-eyed boy to the whitewashed street signs and over to me.

“How do you know that?”

“Because I was doing it two days ago.”

Kolya released the boy, who glared up at him a moment longer before resuming his work.

“Well, it’s damn clever,” said Kolya, and we kept on toward Haymarket.

If you had something you wanted to buy, sell, or barter, you went to the Haymarket. Before the war the street stalls were considered the poor man’s Nevsky Prospekt. After the blockade began, when the fancy shops closed one by one, when the restaurants chained shut their doors and the butchers had no more meat in their lockers, the Haymarket thrived. Generals’ wives traded their amber necklaces for sacks of wheat flour. Party members haggled with peasants who had snuck in from the countryside, arguing over how many potatoes a set of antique silverware should purchase. If the negotiations lasted too long, the peasants would wave their hands dismissively and turn away from the city folk. “So eat your silverware,” they would say with a shrug. They almost always got their asking price.

We walked from stall to stall, eyeing the stacks of leather boots, some still bloody from the feet of the previous owners. Tokarev rifles and pistols were cheap, easily bought with a few rubles or two hundred grams of bread. Lugers and grenades were more expensive, but available if you asked the right person. One stall sold glasses of dirt for one hundred rubles each—Badayev Mud, they called it, taken from the ground under the bombed food warehouse and packed with melted sugar.

Kolya stopped at a stall where a gaunt, stooped man with an eyepatch and an unlit pipe in his mouth sold unlabeled bottles of clear liquor.

“What’s this?” asked Kolya.

“Vodka.”

“Vodka? Made from what?”

“Wood.”

“That’s not vodka, friend. That’s wood alcohol.”

“You want it or not?”

“This isn’t what we’re here for,” I told Kolya, who ignored me.

“Stuff makes a man blind,” he said to the stall keeper.

The one-eyed man shook his head, bored with the ignorance but willing to exert some minimal effort to make a sale.

“You pour it through linen,” he said. “Seven layers. After that, it’s safe.”

“Sounds like an elixir for the gods,” said Kolya. “You should call it Seven-Layer Sin. That’s a good name for a drink.”

“You want it?”

“I’ll take a bottle if you drink some with me.”

“It’s too early for me.”

Kolya shrugged. “I see you take a nip, I’ll buy the bottle. Otherwise, what can I tell you, the war’s made me a cynic.”

“Two hundred rubles a bottle.”

“One hundred. Let’s drink.”

“What are you doing?” I asked him, but he didn’t even glance at me.

The one-eyed man placed his cold pipe on the table, found a tea glass, and searched around his stall for a bit of cloth.

“Here,” said Kolya, handing over a white handkerchief. “It’s clean. Relatively.”

We watched the man fold the handkerchief three times and drape it over the mouth of the tea glass. He poured the liquor slowly. Even outdoors, with the wind gusting, the stuff smelled like poison, like a cleaning agent used on a factory floor. The one-eyed man set aside the handkerchief, which was now flecked with a soapy residue. He lifted the glass, sipped it, and set it back down on the table, his expression never changing.