David Benioff - City of Thieves

Kolya winked at Sonya and finished off his cup of tea. He sighed, staring at the dregs in the bottom of his cup.

“Do you know I haven’t had a shit in nine days?”

That night all of us slept in the sitting room except for Kolya and Sonya, who jointly stood on some unseen signal and disappeared into the bedroom. The rest of us shared the blankets. We lay close together for warmth, so even though the stove ran out of fuel sometime in the night, I wasn’t shivering too badly. The cold actually bothered me less than Sonya’s muffled little yelps. Her cries were impossibly happy, as if Kolya were fucking away all the misery of the last six months, fucking away the hunger and the cold and the bombs and the Germans. Sonya was lovely and kind, but her pleasure was awful to listen to— I wanted to be the one who could transport a pretty girl away from the siege with my cock. Instead I was lying on the floor of a stranger’s apartment next to a man I didn’t know, who twitched in his sleep and smelled like boiled cabbage.

I can’t imagine the sex lasted very long—who had the energy for it?—but it seemed to go on half the night, Sonya yelping, Kolya speaking in low tones that I couldn’t hear through the thin walls. He sounded very calm, as if he were reading to her from a newspaper article. I wondered what the hell he was telling her. What do you say to a girl you’re fucking? It seemed like an important thing to know. Maybe he was quoting that writer he was always raving about. Maybe he was telling her about fighting the cannibal and the cannibal’s wife, but that seemed unlikely. I lay in the darkness listening to them, as the wind shook the windows in their frames and the last embers popped in the stove. The loneliest sound in the world is other people making love.

The next morning we stood outside a building two blocks from the Narva Gate, staring up at a towering poster of Zhdanov. “This must be it,” said Kolya, stamping his feet to keep them warm—though it didn’t seem possible, it was colder than it had been the day before. Only a single fish skeleton of cloud interrupted the endless blue sky. We headed for the front door of the building. It was locked, of course. Kolya banged on it, but no one came. We stood there like idiots, slapping our gloved hands together, our chins buried beneath the folds of our scarves.

“So now what do we do?”

“Someone will go in or out, eventually. What’s wrong with you today? You seem a little grumpy.”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” I said, but even I could hear the grumpiness in my tone. “Took us an hour to get here, we’re going to wait another hour to get inside, and there won’t be any old man with a coop full of chickens.”

“No, no, something is bothering you. You’re thinking about the Kirov?”

“Of course I’m thinking about the Kirov,” I snapped back, angry with him for asking because I had not been thinking about the Kirov.

“We had a lieutenant named Belak back in the fall. Army man to the bone, wore the uniform his whole life, fought against the Whites, all that. So one night he sees this kid Levin crying over a letter he just got. This was in a trench outside of Zelenogorsk, right before the Finns took it back. Levin couldn’t talk, he was bawling so hard. Someone was dead, killed by the Germans. I don’t remember if it was his mother, his father, maybe the whole family, I don’t know. Anyway, Belak took the letter, folded it very neatly, slipped it into Levin’s coat pocket, and said, ‘All right, get it out. But after this I don’t want to see you crying until Hitler’s hanging from a rope.’”

Kolya stared into the distance, contemplating the lieutenant’s words. He must have thought they were profound. To me they sounded manufactured, the kind of line my father always hated, fake dialogue invented by some Party-approved journalist for one of those buoyant “Heroes at the Front!” articles Truth for Young Pioneers always ran.

“So he stopped crying?”

“Well, he stopped right then. Just sniffled for a bit. But that night he was at it again. That’s not really the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“There’s no time for grieving. The Nazis want us dead. We can cry about it as much as we want, but that won’t help us fight them.”

“Who’s crying? I’m not crying.”

Kolya wasn’t listening to me. Something was caught between his two front teeth and he tried to pry it out with his fingernail.

“Belak stepped on a land mine a few days later. Nasty business, land mines. What they do to a man’s body….”

His voice trailed off, contemplating his old officer’s mangled body, and I felt bad that I had insulted the lieutenant in my mind. Maybe his words were clichéd, but he was trying to help the young soldier, to distract him from the tragedy at home, and that mattered more than original phrasing.

Kolya banged on the building door again. He waited for a moment, sighed, stared at the solitary cloud drifting across the sky.

“I’d like to live in Argentina for a year or two. I’ve never seen the ocean. Have you?”

“No.”

“You are grumpy, my Israelite. Tell me why.”

“Go fuck a pig.”

“Ah! There it is!” He gave me a little shove, danced away, moving his hands like a boxer, pretending to spar with me.

I sat down on the doorstep. Even that small movement caused a swarm of sparks to fly across my vision. We had drunk more tea at Sonya’s when we woke up, but there was no food, and I was saving the rest of my library candy. I looked up at Kolya, who was now watching me with some concern.

“What were you saying last night?” I asked him. “When you were, you know, when you were with her.”

Kolya squinted, confused at the question.

“With whom? With Sonya? What did I say?”

“You were talking to her the whole time.”

“When we made love?”

The phrase itself was embarrassing. I nodded. Kolya frowned.

“I didn’t know I said anything.”

“You were talking the whole time!”

“The usual stuff, I suppose.” A sudden smile lit his face. He sat beside me on the lintel step. “But of course, if you’ve never visited a country, you probably don’t know the customs. You want to know what to say.”

“I was just asking a question.”

“Yes, but you’re curious. Why are you curious? Because you’re a little bit nervous. You want to do things properly when you get the chance. This is very smart of you. I’m serious! Quit your scowling. You take compliments worse than anyone I know. Now, listen: women don’t like silent lovers. They’re giving you something precious and they want to know you appreciate it. Give me a little nod to show you’re listening.”

“I’m listening.”

“Every woman has a dream lover and a nightmare lover. The nightmare lover, he just lies on top of her, crushing her with his belly, jabbing his little tool in and out till he’s finished. He’s got his eyes clenched shut, he doesn’t say a word; essentially he’s just jerking off in the poor girl’s pussy. Now the dream lover—”

We heard the shush of sled runners on hard-packed snow and turned to see two girls dragging a sled loaded down with buckets of ice from the river. They were heading straight toward us and I stood, brushing off my coat, relieved that Kolya’s lecture had been interrupted. Kolya stood beside me.

“Ladies! Do you need a hand carrying that ice?”

The girls exchanged a glance. They were both about my age, sisters or cousins, with the same broad faces and downy upper lips. They were Piter girls, untrusting of strangers, but at the same time, climbing the stairs to their apartment with four pails of ice…