David Benioff - City of Thieves

“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.