David Benioff - City of Thieves

I heard the bedsprings creaking and looked up to see Kolya leaning over the side of the top mattress, his upside-down face peering at me, his blond hair hanging in filthy clumps. He looked like he was worried about me, and all at once I felt like crying. The only one left who knew how frightened I was, the only one who knew I was still alive and that I might die tonight, was a boastful deserter I’d met three nights before, a stranger, a child of Cossacks, my last friend.

“This will cheer you up,” he said, dropping a deck of cards in my lap.

They seemed like ordinary playing cards until I flipped them over. Each presented a different photographed woman, some naked, some wearing garter belts and lace corsets, their heavy breasts tumbling from their cupped hands, their lips slightly parted for the camera.

“I thought I had to beat you at chess to get these.”

“Easy with that, easy. Don’t crease the corners. Those came all the way from Marseille.”

He watched me shuffle through the nudes, smiling when he saw me give certain models closer looks.

“What about the girls here, eh? Four beauties. We’re going to be heroes after tonight, you realize this, yes? They’ll be falling all over us. So which one do you want?”

“We’re going to be dead after tonight.”

“Truly, my friend, truly you have to stop speaking like this.”

“I guess I like the little one with the chubby arms.”

“Galina? All right. She looks like a veal calf, but all right, I understand.”

He was quiet for a moment while I studied a picture of a shirt-less woman wearing jodhpurs, cracking a bullwhip.

“Listen, Lev, after this is over tonight, promise me you’ll talk to your little calf. Don’t run away like the shy boy you are. I’m very serious about this. She likes you. I saw her looking at you.”

I knew for a fact that Galina had not been looking at me. She had been looking at Kolya, as they all had, as he knew very well.

“What happened to calculated neglect? You said that according to The Courtyard Hound , the secret to winning a woman—”

“There’s a difference between ignoring a woman and enticing her. You entice her with mystery. She wants you to come after her, but you keep circling. It’s the same with sex. Amateurs yank down their pants and shove it in there like they’re trying to spear a fish. But the man with talent knows it’s all about teasing, circling, coming close, and moving away.”

“This one’s nice,” I said, holding up a card featuring a woman posed as a bullfighter, holding a red cape and wearing nothing but a montera.

“That’s my favorite one. When I was your age, I must have filled twenty socks staring at her.”

“ Truth for Young Pioneers says that masturbation defeats the revolutionary spirit.”

“Without a doubt. But as Proudhon said—”

I never found out what Proudhon said. The double clang of a copper spoon against a copper pot interrupted Kolya. We both sat up in our beds.

“They came early,” he whispered.

“Only two of them.”

“They picked the wrong night to travel light.” The moment those words were in the air the spoon struck the pot again—once, twice, three times, four.

“Six,” I whispered.

Kolya swung his legs over the side of the mattress and quietly lowered himself to the floor, pistol in his hand. He blew out the candles and squinted out the window, but we were on the wrong side of the house and there was nothing to see. We heard car doors slamming shut.

“This is what we do,” he told me, his voice low and calm. “We wait. Let them relax, warm up, have a few drinks. They’ll take their clothes off, with any luck they won’t be near their guns. Remember, they’re not here to fight. They’re here to have a good time, enjoy the girls. You hear? We have the advantage.”

I nodded. Despite what he said, the arithmetic seemed very bad to me. Six Germans and two of us. Would the girls try to help us? They hadn’t lifted a hand for Zoya, but what could they have done for Zoya? Six Germans and eight bullets in the Tokarev. I hoped Kolya was a good shot. Fear coursed through me, electric, forcing my muscles to twitch and my mouth to go dry. I felt more awake than I ever had before, as if this moment, in the farmhouse outside of Berezovka, was the first true moment of my life and everything that came before was a fitful sleep. My senses seemed amplified, extraordinary, responding to the crisis by giving me all the information I needed. I could hear the crunch of jackboots on packed snow. I could smell pine needles burning in the fireplace, that old trick to perfume the house.

The rifle shot startled us. We stood quietly in the darkness, trying to understand what was happening. After a few seconds, several more rifles echoed the first. We heard the Germans shouting to each other, panicked, their voices overlapping.

Kolya ran for the door. I wanted to tell him to wait, that we had a plan and the plan called for waiting, but I didn’t want to be alone in there while the rifles fired outside and the Germans screamed their ugly words.

We ran to the great room and threw ourselves onto the floor when a bullet smashed through one of the mullioned windows. All four girls were already lying belly-down on the floor, their arms up by their faces to protect themselves from flying glass.

I had been living in a war for half a year, but I had never been this close to a gunfight and I had no idea who was fighting. I could hear the chuffing cough of machine guns fired just outside the house. The rifle cracks seemed to come from farther away, the edge of the woods, possibly. Bullets hammered the stone walls of the farmhouse.

Kolya crawled up to Lara and jostled her.

“Who’s shooting at them?”

“I don’t know.”

Outside we heard a car engine igniting. Doors slammed and the car accelerated, tires spinning in the snow. The rifles fired even faster now, one on top of the other, bullets ripping through sheet metal, a very different sound from bullet on stone.

Kolya rose to a crouch and crept to the front door, keeping his head below the window line. I followed. We kneeled with our backs against the door. Kolya checked his pistol one last time. I pulled the German knife from my ankle sheath. I knew I looked silly holding it, the way a young boy looks holding his father’s shaving razor. Kolya grinned at me as though he was about to start laughing. This is all very strange, I thought. I am in the middle of a battle and I am aware of my own thoughts, I am worried about how stupid I look with a knife in my hand while everyone else came to fight with rifles and machine guns. I am aware that I am aware. Even now, with bullets buzzing through the air like angry hornets, I cannot escape the chatter of my brain.

Kolya put his hand on the doorknob and turned it slowly.

“Wait,” I said. We stayed very still for a few seconds. “It’s quiet.”

The gunfire had ended abruptly. The car engine still hummed, but I couldn’t hear the wheels turning. The German voices had gone silent as suddenly as the bullets. Kolya glanced at me and slowly pulled the door open, just enough to peer through. The moon was high and bright, lighting the brutal landscape: Einsatzkommandos in white anoraks sprawled facedown in the snow and a Kübelwagen rolling slowly down the unshoveled driveway, windows shot out, engine block smoking. The dead man in the passenger seat sagged halfway out of the side window, his fingers still wrapped around his machine pistol. A second Kübel, parked at a jaunty angle beside the farmhouse, had never moved. Two Germans lay halfway between it and the house, their skulls pouring dark junk onto the snow. I had just enough time to register the precision of the shots, the superb accuracy of the sniper, when a bullet flew through the gap between Kolya’s head and mine, twanging in the air like a plucked string.