David Benioff - City of Thieves

I thought about the fallen Kirov, about Vera Osipovna and the Antokolsky twins, whether they had been crushed by tumbling masonry or had survived the building’s collapse, trapped beneath great slabs of reinforced concrete, only to die slowly, begging for help, as smoke and gas choked them in the rubble. Maybe they were dead because a German in the forest, sipping from a passed flask of schnapps and joking with his fellow officers, gave a young gunner the wrong coordinates, and the seventeen-centimeter shells meant for the Winter Palace fell on my ugly gray apartment building instead.

“How many come?”

Nina glanced at the other girls, but none of them returned her gaze. Galina picked at some unseen scab on the back of her hand. One of the burning logs tumbled off the andirons and Lara shoved it to the back of the fireplace with a poker. Olesya, the girl with the pigtails, hadn’t said a word since we entered the farmhouse. I never learned if she was shy, or born mute, or if the Einsatzgruppen had sliced her tongue from her mouth. She picked up our empty plates and teacups and carried them out of the room.

“It depends on the night,” Nina finally said. She spoke casually, as if we were discussing a game of cards. “Sometimes nobody comes. Sometimes two, or four. Sometimes more.”

“They drive?”

“Yes, yes, of course.”

“And they stay the night?”

“Sometimes. Not usually.”

“And they never come during the day?”

“Once or twice.”

“So, forgive me for asking, but what keeps you from walking away?”

“You think this is so easy to do?” asked Nina, annoyed by the question, by the implication.

“Not easy,” said Kolya. “But Lev and I, we left Piter at dawn and here we are.”

“These Germans you’re fighting, the ones who have taken half our country, you think they’re stupid? You think they would leave us here alone if we could just open the door and walk to Piter?”

“But why not? Why can’t you?”

I could see the affect of his questions on the girls, the anger in Nina’s eyes, the shame in Galina’s as she stared at her soft white hands. Knowing Kolya even for a few days, I believed he was genuinely curious, not trying to batter the girls with his interrogation— but still, I wished he would shut up.

“Tell them about Zoya,” Lara said.

Nina seemed annoyed by the advice. She shrugged and said nothing.

“They think we’re cowards,” Lara added.

“I don’t care what they think,” said Nina.

“Fine, I’ll tell them. There was another girl, Zoya.”

Galina stood, brushed off her nightshirt, and walked out of the great room. Lara ignored her.

“The Germans loved her. For every man who came here for me, six came for her.”

Lara’s blunt telling made all of us uncomfortable. Nina clearly wanted to follow the other girls out of the room, but she stayed where she was, her eyes darting around, looking at everything except Kolya and me.

“She was fourteen. Her mother and father were both in the Party. I don’t know what they did, but I guess it was something important. The Einsatzgruppen found them and shot them in the street. They hanged the bodies from a lamppost so everyone in the town could see what happened to Communists. They brought Zoya here the same time they brought us, the end of November. Before that there were other girls. After a few months they get bored of us, you see. But Zoya was the favorite. She was so little and she was so afraid of them. I think they liked that. They would tell her, ‘Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you, I won’t let them hurt you,’ things like that. But she’d seen her parents hanging from the lamppost. Any one of them who touched her, he could be the man who shot her mother and father, or ordered them shot.”

“We all have stories,” said Nina. “She panicked.”

“Yes, she panicked. She was fourteen; she panicked. It’s different for you; you have your sister. You’re not alone.”

“She had us.”

“No,” said Lara, “it’s different. Every night, after they left, she cried. For hours, I mean, until she fell asleep, and sometimes she didn’t sleep. The first week we tried to help her. We’d sit with her and hold her hand, tell her stories, anything to get her to stop crying. But it was impossible. Have you ever tried to comfort a baby with a fever? You try everything: you hold her in your arms, you rock her, you sing to her, you give her something cool to drink; doesn’t matter, nothing works. She never stopped crying. And after a week of this, we stopped feeling sorry for her. We got angry. What Nina says is true: all of us have stories. All of us lost family. None of us could sleep with Zoya crying. The second week she was here, we ignored her. If she was in one room, we went to another. She knew we were angry—she didn’t say anything, but she knew. And the crying stopped. All at once, as if she had decided that was enough. For three days she was very quiet, no more crying, just keeping to herself. And on the fourth morning she was gone. We didn’t even know until later, when the officers came. They waltzed in here drunk, singing her name. I think they used to make bets, and the winner got Zoya first. They would bring friends from other units to see her, they would take pictures of her. But she was gone and, of course, they didn’t believe us. We told them we had no idea but I would have called me a liar, too. I hope we would have lied, if we’d known. I hope we would have done that for her. I don’t know that we would have.”

“Of course we would have,” said Nina.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They went out looking for her, Abendroth and the others. He’s their, well, I don’t know the ranks. Major?” She looked at Nina, who shrugged. “The major, I think. He’s not the oldest, but he gives the orders. He must be good at what he does. And he always had her first, every time he came, didn’t matter if they brought a colonel from somewhere, he’d take her for himself. When he was done with her, he’d come sit by the fire and drink his plum schnapps. Always plum schnapps for him. His Russian is perfect. And his French— He lived in Paris for two years.”

“Hunting down the Resistance leaders,” said Nina. “One of the others told me. He was so good at it they made him the youngest major in the Einsatzgruppen.”

“He likes to play chess with me,” said Lara. “I can play a decent game. Abendroth spots me a queen, sometimes a queen and a pawn, and I never last more than twenty moves, even when he’s drunk, and he’s usually drunk. If I’m… if I’m busy, he sets up the board and plays both sides himself.”

“He’s the worst of them,” said Nina.

“Yes. I didn’t think so at first. But after Zoya, yes, he’s the worst of them. So they got their dogs and they followed her tracks and they went into the woods to find her. It only took them a few hours. She hadn’t gotten far. She was so weak…. She’d been little to begin with, and she’d barely eaten a thing since she’d been here. They brought her back. They’d torn all the clothes off her. She looked like a wild animal, filthy, dead leaves in her hair, bruised all over her body where they’d hit her. They’d tied her wrists together and her ankles. Abendroth made me get the saw from out by the woodpile. When Zoya ran, she took my coat and my boots, so they figured I was the one helping her. He told me to get the saw. I don’t know what I thought, but I wasn’t thinking that… maybe I thought they’d use it for the rope. Maybe they wouldn’t hurt her because they liked her so much.”

I heard a muffled cry and looked over to see Nina scratching her forehead, her palm covering her eyes, her lips pressed together as she willed herself silent.