David Benioff - City of Thieves

Both of us tumbled backward and Kolya kicked the door shut with his boot. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled toward the shattered window beside the front door.

“We’re Russians! Hey! Hey! We’re Russians!”

For a few seconds there was silence, before a distant voice responded: “You look like a fucking Fritz to me!”

Kolya laughed, punching me in the shoulder in his happiness.

“My name is Nikolai Alexandrovich Vlasov!” he shouted toward the window. “From Engels Prospekt!”

“There’s an original name! Any Nazi with a few years of Russian could come up with that!”

“Engels Prospekt!” shouted another voice. “There’s an Engels Prospekt in every fucking town in the country!”

Still laughing, Kolya grabbed hold of my coat and shook me, for no other reason than his blood was spiked with adrenaline, he was alive and happy and he needed to shake something. He crawled closer to the broken window, skirting the shards of broken glass lying on the floor.

“Your mother’s cunt has a peculiar tubular shape!” he yelled. “Nonetheless I tolerate its effluvium and enthusiastically lick its inner folds whenever she demands!”

A very long silence followed this sentence, but Kolya did not seem concerned. He was chuckling at his own joke, winking at me like an old veteran of the Turkish war exchanging insults with his buddies at the bathhouse.

“How about that?” he added at the top of his lungs. “You think anyone with a few years of Russian could come up with that?”

“Which one of our mothers are you describing?” The voice sounded closer now.

“Not the one who shoots so well. One of you is a genius with the rifle.”

“You have a gun on you?” asked the voice outside.

“A Tokarev pistol.”

“And your little friend?”

“Just a knife.”

“Both of you step outside. Keep your hands up high or my friend will shoot your tiny balls off.”

Lara and Nina had crawled into the front hallway during this conversation, their nightshirts sequined with bits of glass from the blown-out windows.

“Did they kill them?” whispered Nina.

“All six,” I told her. I thought the girls would be pleased, but when they heard the news they exchanged worried looks. Their life of the past few months was over now. They would have to run without knowing where their next meal would come from or where they would sleep. Millions of Russians could say the same, but things were worse for the girls. If the Germans caught them again, they would suffer a harsher punishment than Zoya had.

As Kolya reached for the doorknob, Lara put her hand on his leg, making him wait for a moment.

“Don’t,” she said. “They won’t trust you.”

“Why wouldn’t they trust me? I’m a soldier of the Red Army.”

“Yes, and they’re not. There isn’t a Red Army unit within thirty kilometers of here. They’ll think you’re a deserter.”

He smiled and covered her hand with his own.

“Do I look like a deserter to you? Don’t worry. I have papers.”

Papers did not impress Lara. As Kolya reached again for the doorknob, she crawled closer to the broken window.

“Thank you for rescuing us, comrades!” she shouted. “These two in here are our friends! Please don’t shoot them!”

“You think I would have missed his fat blond head if I wanted to hit it? Tell the joker to come outside.”

Kolya opened the door and stepped outside, his hands held high in the air. He squinted across the snow, but the fighters were still out of sight.

“Tell the little one to come out here, too.”

Lara and Nina looked frightened for me, but Lara nodded, telling me with an encouraging nod that it would be all right. I felt a brief surge of anger for the girl: why couldn’t she step outside? Why did they have to be here at all? If the farmhouse had been empty, Kolya and I could have slept through the night and left in the morning, rested and dry. The thought passed through my head, immediately followed by guilt for its absurdity.

Nina squeezed my hand and smiled at me. She was easily the finest-looking girl who had ever smiled at me. I imagined describing the scene for Oleg Antokolsky: Nina’s little white hand gripping mine, her pale eyelashes fluttering as she stared at me, worried for my safety. Even as the moment passed I was narrating it for my friend, forgetting for the moment that Oleg would probably never hear the story, that the odds were strong he lay buried beneath the rubble on Voinova Street.

I tried to smile back at Nina, failed, and walked out the door with my hands in the air. Since the war began I had read hundreds of accounts of the country’s heroes in action. All of them refused to acknowledge they were heroes. They were honest citizens of the Motherland, protecting her from the Fascist rapists. When asked in interviews why they had rushed the pillbox, or clambered onto a tank to drop a grenade down the hatch, all responded that they hadn’t even thought about it, they were just doing what any other good Russian would have done.

Heroes and fast sleepers, then, can switch off their thoughts when necessary. Cowards and insomniacs, my people, are plagued by babble on the brain. When I stepped out of the door, I thought, I am standing in the front yard of a farmhouse outside Berezovka and partisans are pointing their rifles at my head.

Judging from the broad smile on Kolya’s face, he thought nothing at all. We stood side by side while our unseen interrogators looked us over. Our overcoats were back in the farmhouse and we shivered in the night air, the cold reaching down to our bones.

“Prove you’re one of us.” The voice seemed to come from beside one of the snow-covered hay bales, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I could see a man kneeling in the shadows, a rifle raised to his shoulder. “Shoot each of the Germans in the head.”

“That’s not much of a test,” said Kolya. “They’re already dead.”

The man’s ability to make a bad situation worse no longer surprised me. Perhaps a hero is someone who doesn’t register his own vulnerability. Is it courage, then, if you’re too daft to know you’re mortal?

“We’re still alive,” said the partisan in the shadows, “because we shoot them even when we think they’re dead.”

Kolya nodded. He walked over to the idling Kübel, which had finally rolled to a stop, its tires buried in a meter of snow.

“We’re watching you,” advised the partisan. “A bullet in every head.”

Kolya shot the dead driver and the dead passenger, the muzzle flashing in the night like a photographer’s camera. He turned and walked through the snow, stopping to shoot the Germans lying in their awkward poses.

At the sixth man, as he stooped to press the pistol to the fallen Einsatzkommando’s skull, he heard something. He got down on his knees and listened for a moment before standing up and calling out.

“This one’s still alive.”

“That’s why you’re going to shoot him.”

“Maybe he has something useful to tell us.”

“Does he look like he’s able to talk?”

Kolya turned the German onto his back. The man moaned softly. Pink foam bubbled from his mouth.

“No,” said Kolya.

“That’s because we shot his lungs out. Now do him a favor and end him.”

Kolya stood, aimed his pistol, and shot the dying man in the forehead.

“Holster your gun.”

Kolya did as he was told and the partisans emerged from their hiding places, stepping out from behind the hay bales, climbing over the low stone walls separating the farm fields, trudging through the snow at the edge of the woods. A dozen men in long coats, their rifles in their hands, their breath rising above their heads as they closed in on the farmhouse.