David Benioff - City of Thieves

The giant and his wife were gone. They’d left everything behind, the wick lamps still lit, the tea still hot in the samovar, but they had fled into the night. The officer shook his head, glancing around the apartment. Gaping holes yawned from the walls like open mouths where the steel pipe had struck.

“We’ll put their names on the list, cancel their ration cards, all that, but it will be dumb luck if they get caught. There isn’t much of a police force right now.”

“Where’s he going to hide?” asked Kolya. “He’s the biggest fucker in Piter.”

“Then you better hope you see him first,” said one of the soldiers, running his finger along the ragged edge of a hole punched in the wall.

You really laid her out,” I told Kolya as we trudged north past the clock tower of the Vitebsk Station, grandest of all Leningrad’s train stations, even now, when no train had run in almost four months and the stained glass windows were boarded over.

“It was a solid shot, wasn’t it? Never hit a woman before, but it seemed like the right move.”

That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn’t let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn’t admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.

The curfew alarm hadn’t sounded yet, but there wasn’t much time left. We had decided to spend the night in the Kirov, where I knew I had enough scrap wood for a decent fire, and a full pot of river water for tea. It wasn’t such a long walk, but now that my panic was gone I felt like an old man, the muscles of my legs aching from the running. Breakfast with the colonel had been beautiful at the time, but it also served to stretch out my stomach, and the hunger had returned. Now it was mixed with nausea, because I couldn’t get the image of the child’s rib cage out of my head. When I nibbled on the frozen library candy, I thought it tasted like dried skin, and I had to force myself to swallow the stuff.

Kolya limped along beside me, his legs as shot as mine, but in the moonlight he looked as worry free as ever, unburdened by any unpleasant thoughts. Maybe his mind was more peaceful because he had reacted bravely, with strength and decisiveness, while I cowered on the dark staircase, waiting to be saved.

“Look, I feel that I… I want to say I’m sorry. I ran away and I’m sorry. You saved my life.”

“I told you to run.”

“Yes, but… I should have come back. I had the knife.”

“You had the knife, sure.” Kolya laughed. “Lot of good it would have done you. You should have seen yourself, swinging at him. David and Goliath, ha. He was getting ready to eat you raw.”

“I left you alone in there. I thought they were going to kill you.”

“Well, they thought so, too. But I told you I had quick fists.” He fired a few jabs into the air, grunting like a boxer: huuunnh! huuunnh!

“I’m not a coward. I know I looked like one back there, but I’m not.”

“Listen to me, Lev,” he said, draping his arm around my shoulders, forcing me to match his long strides. “You didn’t want to go up to that apartment. I was the country fool who insisted on it. So you don’t owe me an apology. And I don’t think you’re a coward. Anyone with a spoonful of sanity would have run.”

“You didn’t.”

“Quod erat demonstrandum,” he said, pleased with his simple Latin.

I felt a little better about everything. Kolya had told me to run. The giant could have poked a hole in my skull as easily as a child sticks his thumb through a cherry pie. Maybe I hadn’t acted heroically, but I hadn’t betrayed the nation, either.

“It really was a terrific punch.”

“I don’t think she’ll be chewing on any children for a while.”

Kolya grinned at the phrasing, but the grin didn’t last for long. His words brought our minds back to that pale meat, the plastic sheeting wet with drippings. We were living in a city where witches roamed the streets, Baba Yaga and her sisters, snatching up children and hacking them to pieces.

A siren sounded, that long, lonely wail, and soon all the sirens in the city were echoing its cry.

“Here comes Fritz,” said Kolya, and we increased our pace, forcing our tired bodies to move faster. We could hear the shells landing to the south, a distant beat of timpani, as the Germans began their nightly attack on the great Kirov Works, where half of Russia’s tanks and airplane engines and heavy guns were built. Most of the men working there were out on the front lines now, but women had taken over on the lathes and presses and the Works never lost a step, coal always burning in the furnaces, smoke always rising from the redbrick smokestacks, the factories never shutting down, even when bombs fell through the roof, even when dead girls had to be carried from the assembly lines, cold hands still clutching their tools.

We hustled past the fine old buildings of Vitebsky Prospekt, with their white stone facades, ram-horned satyr heads grinning down at us from the pediments, carved in the days of the emperors. Each of these buildings would have a bomb shelter in its basement; citizens would be huddled down there, dozens of them clustered around a single flickering lamp, waiting for the all clear. The shells were landing close enough now that we could hear them whine in the air. The wind was louder, shrieking through the broken windows of abandoned apartments, as if God and the Germans were conspiring to blow down our city.

“On the front lines, you get good at judging where the shells will land,” said Kolya, his hands jammed into the pockets of his greatcoat, as he walked into the wind that had been behind us a moment before. “You listen to them and you know: that one’s falling a hundred meters to the left; that one’s going in the river.”

“I can tell a Junkers from a Heinkel the second I hear it.”

“I should hope so. A Junkers sounds like a lion and a Heinkel is a mosquito.”

“Well, a Heinkel from a Dornier, then. I captained the firefighting crew on the—”

Kolya held up his hand for me to shut up. He stopped walking and I stopped beside him.

“You hear that?”

I listened. I couldn’t hear anything beyond the winter wind that seemed to come from every direction at once, gathering its strength over the Gulf of Finland and howling down all the side streets. I thought Kolya heard a shell coming our way and I looked skyward, as if I could spot our death winging toward us, as if I could dodge it if I had. The wind finally calmed, gasping more quietly now, a child at the end of his tantrum. Shells exploded to the south, several kilometers away from the sound of it, but close enough to make the pavement shudder beneath us. But Kolya wasn’t listening to the wind or the mortars. Someone inside the old building was playing the piano. I couldn’t see any lights through the windows, no candles or lamps burning. The other residents must have gone down to the basement shelter (unless they were too weak from hunger or too old to care), leaving behind this stray genius to play in the darkness, impudent and precise, showing off with thundering double fortissimos immediately followed by fragile little pianissimos, as if he were having an argument with himself, the bullying husband and the meek wife all at once.

Music was an important part of my childhood, on the radio and in the concert halls. My parents were fanatic in their passion; we were a family with no talent for playing but great pride in our listening. I could identify any of Chopin’s twenty-seven etudes after hearing a few bars; I knew all of Mahler, from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen to the unfinished Tenth. But the music we heard that night I had never heard before and have never heard since. The notes were muffled by window glass and distance and the unending wind, but the power came through. It was music for wartime.