David Benioff - City of Thieves

“Darling’s not for the pot,” said Kolya. “We need her for the eggs.”

“The eggs?” Timofei looked at us, at Darling, back to us. He seemed to think we were joking.

“Everyone’s quitting on Darling,” Kolya continued, “but I think she’s got it in her. Do you know anything about chickens? You think she can lay a dozen by Thursday?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

The surgeon seemed more and more irritated. Kolya glared back at him, insulted by the man’s tone.

“Don’t you speak Russian? We’re waiting for the eggs!”

For a moment I thought the conversation would turn violent, which would have been a bad thing for the Red Army; we needed our surgeons and Kolya would have splattered the man with a single punch. But Timofei finally laughed, shaking his head, waiting for us to laugh with him.

“Laugh all you want,” I told him. “You’re not touching the chicken.”

“It’s not a chicken, you idiot. It’s a rooster.”

Kolya hesitated, not sure if this was a joke the surgeon was playing or a trick to get us to throw Darling into the soup. I leaned forward in my chair and peered at the bird. I don’t know why I thought peering would help. What was I looking for, little balls?

“You’re saying she won’t lay eggs?” asked Kolya, watching Timofei carefully.

The surgeon spoke slowly, as if he were conferring with morons.

“It’s a he. And the odds aren’t good.”

That night the soup tasted like June, like the dinners we remembered from before the siege. An admirer of Sonya’s, a pilot in the VVS, had given her an unspoiled potato. Kolya protested that he didn’t want to eat the gift of another lover, but his complaints were ignored, as he had hoped, and the Darling soup was thick with potato and onion and plenty of salt. Happily for us, the other surgeons were spending the night somewhere else. Sonya traded a wing and a cup of the broth to her neighbor for a bottle of drinkable vodka; the Germans lobbed only a few lazy shells at the city, as if to remind us they were still there but had better things to do on this particular evening; by midnight we were drunk, our bellies full, Kolya and Sonya fucking in the bedroom while I played speed chess with Timofei by the light of the stove.

Halfway through the second game I moved my knight; Timofei stared at the board, burped, and said, “Oh. You’re good.”

“You just figured it out? I mated you in sixteen moves last game.”

“Thought it was the drink…. I’m fucked, aren’t I?”

“You’re still alive. Won’t be long, though.”

He tipped over his king and burped again, pleased with his burping, pleased there was food in his stomach.

“Not much point in that. Ah, well. You can’t tell a chicken from a rooster, but you know chess.”

“I used to be better.” I right-sided his king and played his move for him, trying to see how long I could extend the endgame.

“You used to be better? When you were an embryo? What are you, fourteen?”

“Seventeen!”

“Are you shaving yet?”

“Yes.”

Timofei looked skeptical.

“I shaved my mustache…. It grows slower in the winter.”

Sonya gasped in the other room and began to laugh, forcing me to picture her, her head tilted back, her throat exposed, her nipples hard on her small breasts.

“I don’t know where they get the energy,” said Timofei, lying back on the layered blankets and stretching his arms. “Give me chicken soup every night and I’ll never need another woman as long as I live.”

He closed his eyes and soon he was asleep, another of the fast sleepers, leaving me alone to listen to the lovers.

Kolya woke me before dawn, handing me a cup of tea as he studied the abandoned chessboard. Timofei still slept on his back, his mouth open, his arms stretched above his head as if he were surrendering to the enemy.

“Who was playing black?”

“Me.”

“You had him in six.”

“I had him in five. Unless he made a mistake, and then I had him in three.”

Kolya frowned, looking at the pieces until he figured it out.

“You know how to play.”

“You still want to make that bet? What was it, nude pictures of French girls?”

He smiled, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“I should just give them to you as a favor. Show you where all the parts are. Come on, get your boots on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Mga.”

Kolya might have been a deserter, but he had enough natural authority in his voice that my boots were half laced before I thought to question his directive. He had already slipped on his greatcoat and leather gloves; he looped his scarf twice around his neck and checked his teeth in a small mirror hanging over the samovar.

“Mga’s fifty kilometers away.”

“Good day’s walk. We had a big dinner last night, we can make it.”

Slowly I awakened to the insanity of this proposition.

“That’s behind German lines. Why do we have to go to Mga?”

“It’s Monday, Lev. We need the eggs by Thursday and we’re not going to find any in Piter. Sonya’s uncle runs that poultry collective out there, right? I’m betting the Germans kept it going. They like their eggs, too.”

“That’s our plan? We’re going to walk fifty kilometers, right past the Germans, to a poultry collective that maybe didn’t get burned down, grab a dozen eggs, and come home?”

“Well, anything would sound ridiculous if you said it with that tone of voice.”

“Tone of… I’m asking you a question! That’s our plan? Sonya’s never even been there! How are we supposed to find it?”

“It’s in Mga! How hard can it be to find anything in Mga!”

“I don’t even know how to find fucking Mga!”

“Ah,” said Kolya, grinning now as he put on his Astrakhan fur hat. “That one’s easy. It’s on the Moscow line. We just follow the tracks.”

Timofei grunted in his dreams and rolled onto his side. I’d learned that doctors and soldiers could sleep through any non-life-threatening ruckus; my argument with Kolya might have been a softly sung lullaby, judging from the look of peaceful contentment on Timofei’s face. I looked at him and I hated him, hated him for getting to sleep on his bed of wool blankets, warm and comfortable and well fed, with no grandson of Cossacks to harass him, no NKVD colonel sending him out to the wilderness to find ingredients for a wedding cake.

I turned back to Kolya, who was adjusting his hat to a properly heroic angle with the help of the mirror. I hated him even more, the cheerful swaggering brute, happy and fresh at six in the morning as if he’d just returned from a two-week holiday at the Black Sea. I imagined that he still stank of sex, though the truth was I couldn’t smell anything at all so early in the day, with the apartment so cold. My mighty nose was all show, a good target for bullies’ taunts but strangely bad at picking up scents.

“You think it’s so crazy,” he said, “but every one of those peasant swindlers selling potatoes for two hundred rubles in the Haymarket brought them in from outside the city. People make it past the lines every day. Why can’t we?”

“Are you drunk?”

“Off a quarter a bottle of vodka? I don’t think so.”

“There has to be somewhere closer than Mga.”

“So tell me.”

He was swaddled now for the weather, his jaw bristling with four days’ worth of blond beard. He waited for me to propose my alternative to his stupid plan, but as the seconds ticked past I realized I didn’t have one.

He smiled at me, a smile fine enough for a Red Fleet recruitment poster.

“The whole thing’s a fucking joke, I agree. But it’s a pretty good joke.”