David Benioff - City of Thieves

Kolya inspected the level of the liquid in the cup, making sure the vendor had truly taken a sip. Satisfied, he picked up the glass and saluted us.

“For Mother Russia!” He downed the wood alcohol with a gulp, slammed the glass down on the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gagged. He grabbed my shoulder, trying to support himself, his eyes wide open and tearing.

“You murdered me,” he said, barely able to get the words out of his throat, pointing an accusing finger at the one-eyed man.

“I didn’t tell you to drink it fast,” he replied, unimpressed, putting the pipe back in his mouth. “One hundred rubles.”

“Lev… Lev, are you there?” Kolya’s face was turned toward mine, but his eyes were unfocused, looking straight through me.

“Very funny.”

Kolya grinned and stood straight. “Can’t trick a Jew, I should have known. Very good, pay the man.”

“What?”

“Go ahead,” he said, gesturing to the waiting vendor. “Give the man his money.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“Don’t try to cheat me, boy!” roared Kolya, grabbing the collar of my greatcoat and shaking me till I felt my bones rattling. “I am a soldier of the Red Army and I won’t stand for any thievery!”

Abruptly he released me, shoving his hands into my coat pockets, pulling out scraps of paper, a bit of string and lint, nothing close to money. Kolya sighed and turned to the vendor.

“Apparently we have no money. I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel the transaction.”

“You think because you’re a soldier,” said the one-eyed man, opening his coat to show us the hilt of a Finnish dagger, “I won’t carve you up?”

“I’ve got a glass of poison in my belly already. So why don’t you try?”

Kolya smiled at the man and waited for a response. There was nothing behind Kolya’s blue eyes, neither fear nor anger nor excitement about the prospect of a fight—nothing. This, I came to learn, was his gift: danger made him calm. Around him people would deal with their terror in the usual ways: stoicism, hysteria, false joviality, or some combination of the three. But Kolya, I think, never completely believed in any of it. Everything about the war was ridiculous: the Germans’ barbarity, the Party’s propaganda, the crossfire of incendiary bullets that lit the nighttime sky. It all seemed to him like someone else’s story, an amazingly detailed story that he had stumbled into and now could not escape.

“Move on or I’ll cut your lips off,” said the one-eyed man, chewing the stem of his unlit pipe, hand on the hilt of his dagger. Kolya saluted and marched off to the next stall, relaxed and unworried as if the entire transaction had been clean and easy. I followed behind, heart thumping within my rib cage.

“Let’s just find the eggs,” I said. “Why do you have to go around provoking people?”

“I needed a sniff, I took a sniff, now I feel alive again.” He took a deep breath and exhaled through pursed lips, watching the condensation rise into the air. “We both should have died last night. Do you understand that? Do you understand how lucky we are? So enjoy it.”

I stopped at a stall where an old peasant woman wearing a headscarf sold patties of pale gray meat. Kolya and I stared at the meat. It looked fairly fresh, glistening with fat, but neither of us wanted to know what sort of animal it had been.

“Do you have any eggs?” I asked the old woman.

“Eggs?” she asked, leaning forward to hear. “Not since September.”

“We need a dozen,” said Kolya. “We can pay good money.”

“You can pay a million rubles,” she said, “there are no eggs. Not in Piter.”

“Where?”

She shrugged, the lines creasing her face so deep they seemed carved. “I have meat. You want meat, it’s three hundred for two patties. No eggs.”

We went from stall to stall, asking everyone if they had eggs, but no one in the Haymarket had seen any since September. A few people had theories on where they could be found: high-ranking army officers had them flown in from Moscow; farmers outside the city gave them to the Germans, along with butter and fresh milk, in exchange for their lives; an old man who lived near the Narva Gate kept chickens in a rooftop coop. This last rumor seemed obviously absurd, but the boy who told us insisted it was true.

“You kill a chicken, maybe it will last you a week. But you keep it alive, well, an egg a day, along with your rations, that will get you by till summer.”

“You have to feed a chicken,” said Kolya. “Who’s got food for a chicken?”

The boy, his black curly hair spilling out from beneath an old Imperial Navy cap, shook his head as if it were a silly question.

“Chickens eat anything. A spoonful of sawdust, that’s all they need.”

The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city’s books were disappearing like the pigeons.

“And you’ve seen these chickens?” asked Kolya.

“My brother has. The old man sleeps in the coop at night with a shotgun. Everyone in the building wants those chickens.”

Kolya glanced at me and I shook my head. We all heard ten different siege myths a day, stories of secret meat lockers stocked with chilled haunches of beef, of larders crammed with caviar tins and veal sausages. It was always someone’s brother or cousin who had seen the treasure. People believed in the stories because it matched their conviction that someone, somewhere, was feasting while the rest of the city starved. And they were right, of course—the colonel’s daughter might not be eating roasted goose for dinner, but she was eating dinner.

“The old man can’t stay in the coop all the time,” I told the boy. “He has to get his rations. He has to get water and use the toilet. Someone would have grabbed the chickens months ago.”

“He pisses off the roof. When it’s coming out the other side, I don’t know, maybe that’s what he feeds the chickens.”

Kolya nodded, impressed by the old man’s clever means of keeping the birds alive, though I was convinced the kid was making this up as his lips moved.

“When was the last time you had a shit?” Kolya asked me, abruptly.

“I don’t know. A week ago?”

“It’s been nine days for me. I’ve been counting. Nine days! When it finally happens, I’ll have a big party and invite the best-looking girls from the university.”

“Invite the colonel’s daughter.”

“I will, absolutely. My shit party will be much better than this wedding she’s planning.”

“The new ration bread hurts coming out,” said the curly-haired boy. “My father says it’s all the cellulose they’re putting in.”

“Where do we find the old man with the chickens?”

“I don’t know the address. If you walk toward Stachek Prospekt from the Narva Gate, you’ll pass his building. There’s a big poster of Zhdanov on the wall.”

“There’s a poster of Zhdanov on half the buildings in Piter,” I said, getting a little irritated. “We’re going to walk another three kilometers to find a bunch of chickens that don’t exist?”

“The boy’s not lying,” said Kolya, patting the kid on his shoulder. “If he is, we’ll come back here and break his fingers. He knows we’re NKVD.”

“You’re not NKVD,” said the boy.

Kolya pulled the colonel’s letter from his coat pocket and slapped the boy’s cheek with it.

“This is a letter from an NKVD colonel authorizing us to find eggs. What do you think about that?”