David Benioff - City of Thieves

We stood on the sidewalk, beneath a powerless streetlamp cob-webbed with hoarfrost, the great guns firing to the south, the moon veiled by muslin clouds, listening until the final note. When it ended, something seemed wrong: the performance was too good to go unacknowledged, the performer too skilled to accept no applause. For a long moment we were silent, staring up at the dark windows. Finally, when it seemed respectful to move again, we resumed our march.

“It’s lucky no one’s chopped up his piano for firewood,” said Kolya.

“Whoever that is, nobody’s chopping up his piano. Might have been Shostakovich himself. He probably lives around here.”

Kolya glared at me and spat on the sidewalk.

“They evacuated Shostakovich three months ago.”

“That’s not true. He’s on all the posters, wearing that fire warden’s helmet.”

“Yes, the great hero, except he’s in Kuybishev, whistling those Mahler tunes he plagiarized.”

“Shostakovich did not plagiarize Mahler.”

“I thought you’d take Mahler’s side,” said Kolya, glancing down at me with that amused twist of his lips that meant, I now knew, he was about to say something irritating. “Don’t you prefer the Jew over the Gentile?”

“They’re not on different sides. Mahler wrote great music. Shostakovich writes great music—”

“Great? Ha. The man is a hack and a thief.”

“You’re an idiot. You don’t know anything about music.”

“I know that Shostakovich was on the radio in September talking about our great patriotic duty to fight Fascism, and three weeks later he’s in Kuybishev, eating porridge.”

“It’s not his fault. They don’t want him dead so they made him go. Think how bad it would be for morale—”

“Oh, of course, think of the tragedy,” said Kolya, adopting the professorial tone he used for high sarcasm. “We can’t let the great ones die. If I were in charge, I’d push the other way. Put the famous on the front lines. Shostakovich takes a bullet to the head? Think of the outrage across the nation! Across the world! RENOWNED COMPOSER MURDERED BY NAZIS. Anna Akhmatova, she was on the radio, too. You remember? Telling all the women of Leningrad to be brave, to learn how to fire a rifle. Now where is she? Shooting at Germans? Hm, no, I believe not. At the Works, grinding shell casings? No, she’s in fucking Tashkent, pumping out more of that narcissistic verse that made her famous.”

“My mother and sister left, too. Doesn’t make them traitors.”

“Your mother and sister weren’t on the radio telling us all to be brave. Look, I don’t expect composers and poets to be heroes. I just don’t like hypocrites.”

He rubbed his nose with the back of his gloved hand and glanced back to the south, at the artillery bursts lighting the sky.

“Where is this goddamned building of yours, anyway?”

We had just turned the corner onto Voinova and I raised my hand to point out the Kirov. I was pointing at nothing, but for a long time I didn’t even think to lower my hand. Where the Kirov had stood there was now rubble, a steep hill of broken concrete slabs, a scree of masonry and twisted steel rods and sprays of glass dust glittering in the moonlight.

If I had been alone, I would have stared at those ruins for hours without comprehension. The Kirov was my life. Vera and Oleg and Grisha. Lyuba Nikolaevna, the spinster on the fourth floor who read palms and mended dresses for all the women in the building, who saw me reading an H. G. Wells novel in the stairwell one summer night and the next day gave me a box filled with the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Dickens. Anton Danilovich, the janitor, who lived in the basement and shouted at us whenever we threw stones in the courtyard or spat off the rooftop or built lewd snowmen and snowwomen with carrots for cocks and pencil erasers for nipples. Zavodilov, rumored to be a gangster, missing two fingers on his left hand and always whistling at the girls, even if they were homely, maybe whistling louder at the homely girls to keep their spirits up—Zavodilov who had parties that lasted till dawn, playing the latest jazz records, Varlamov and his Hot Seven or Eddie Rozner; men and women with half-buttoned shirts laughing and dancing out into the hallway, infuriating all the old folks, thrilling the kids who decided if we had to grow up, at least we could grow up to be like Zavodilov.

It was an ugly old building that always stank of disinfectant, but it was my home and I never thought it would fall. I waded into the tumble of debris, bending down to toss aside hunks of concrete. Kolya grabbed my arm.

“Lev… come with me. I know another place we can spend the night.”

I pulled out of his grip and continued shoveling with my hands. He grabbed me again and this time he held my arm tight, so I couldn’t pull away.

“There’s no one alive down there.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Look,” he said quietly, pointing at a number of small red stakes that had been shoved into the rubble in various spots. “They’ve already been here digging. The building must have gone down last night.”

“I was here last night.”

“You were in the Crosses last night. Come. Come with me.”

“People survive. I’ve read about it. People survive for days sometimes.”

Kolya surveyed the wreckage. The wind whipped up miniature storms of concrete dust.

“If anyone’s alive in there, you won’t be able to pull them out with your bare hands. And if you stay here all night trying, you won’t make it to morning. Come on. I have friends nearby. We need to get inside.”

I shook my head. How could I abandon my home?

“Lev… I don’t need you to think right now. I just need you to follow me. Understand? Follow me.”

He tugged me down from the hill of rubble and I was too weak to resist, too tired for grief or anger or defiance. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to eat. We walked away from the Kirov’s remnants and I could not hear my footsteps. I had become a phantom. There was no one left in the city who knew my full name. I felt no great misery for myself, just a kind of dull curiosity that I still seemed to be alive, my exhalations still visible in the moonlight, this son of Cossacks still marching beside me, looking at me from time to time to make sure I kept moving, checking the night sky for bombers.

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.”