David Benioff - City of Thieves

Most of them looked like farmers, fur-lined hats pulled down to their eyebrows, faces broad and flat and unfriendly. There was no common uniform. Some wore Red Army leather boots, others walked in gray felt; some wore tan overcoats, others gray. One man was dressed in what looked like a Finnish ski troop’s winter whites. Walking in front was the man I took to be their leader, a week’s worth of beard darkening his jaw, an old hunting rifle strapped to his shoulder. Later that night we learned his name was Korsakov. If he had a first name and a patronymic, we never heard them. Korsakov probably wasn’t his real name, anyway—the partisans were notoriously paranoid about their identities, with good reason. The Einsatzkommandos responded to local resistance by publicly executing the families of known resisters.

Korsakov and two of his comrades approached us while the other partisans searched the dead Germans, taking their machine pistols and ammunition, their letters and flasks and wristwatches. The man in the ski outfit knelt beside one of the bodies and tried to tug a gold wedding band from the corpse’s ring finger. When it wouldn’t come off, the partisan stuck the finger in his mouth. He saw me staring at him and winked, pulling the wet finger from his lips and sliding the ring free.

“Don’t worry about them,” said Korsakov, when he saw what I was watching. “Worry about me. Why are you two here?”

“They’re here to organize the partisans,” said Nina. She and Lara had stepped out of the farmhouse in their bare feet, their arms wrapped around themselves, the wind blowing their hair.

“Is that right? Do we seem unorganized?”

“They’re friends. They were going to kill the Germans if you didn’t show up.”

“Were they? How kind.” He turned away from her and called out to the partisans searching the dead men in the car. “What do we have?”

“Small fish,” a bearded partisan shouted back, holding up the insignia he’d torn from the officer’s collars. “Leutnants and Oberleutnants.”

Korsakov shrugged and shifted his gaze back to Nina, appraising her pale calves and the shape of her hips below her nightshirt.

“Get back inside,” he told her. “Put some clothes on. The Germans are dead; you can quit being a whore.”

“Don’t you call me that.”

“I’ll call you whatever I want. Get back inside.”

Lara took Nina’s hand and dragged her back to the farmhouse. Kolya watched them go and turned to the partisan leader.

“You’re unkind, comrade.”

“I’m not your comrade. And if it weren’t for me, they’d have German cocks halfway up them right now.”

“All the same—”

“Shut your mouth. You’re wearing an Army uniform, but you’re not with the Army. You’re a deserter?”

“We’re here on orders. I have papers in my coat, inside the house.”

“Every collaborator I ever met had papers.”

“I have a letter from Colonel Grechko of the NKVD, authorizing us to come here.”

Korsakov grinned and turned to his men.

“And Colonel Grechko, he has authority out here? I love these policemen in the city, giving us orders.”

One of the men standing beside him, a rangy fellow with close-set eyes, laughed loudly, showing us his bad teeth. The other man did not laugh. He wore winter camouflage coveralls patterned with brown and white swirls, a trompe l’oeil of dead leaves. His eyes peeked out below the fringe of his rabbit fur cap. He was small, smaller than me, and young, with no trace of stubble on his pink cheeks. His features were very fine, the bones of his face precisely defined, his lips full, twisted into a smirk now as he stared back at me.

“You see something strange?” he asked, and I realized it wasn’t a man speaking at all.

“You’re a girl,” Kolya blurted out, staring at her. I felt stupid for both of us.

“Don’t look so shocked,” said Korsakov. “She’s our best shot. Those Fritzes over there with half their heads? That’s because of her.”

Kolya whistled, glancing from her to the dead Germans to the fringe of woods at the edge of the farm fields.

“From over there? What is that, four hundred meters? On moving targets?”

The girl shrugged. “You don’t have to lead them so much when they’re running through snow.”

“Vika’s after Lyudmila Pavlichenko’s record,” said the man with the under bite. “She wants to be the number-one woman sniper.”

“How many is Mila up to now?” asked Kolya.

“ Red Star says two hundred,” Vika replied with a little roll of her eyes. “The Army gives her a confirmed kill every time she blows her nose.”

“That’s a German rifle, isn’t it?”

“K ninety-eight,” she said, slapping the barrel with her palm. “Best rifle in the world.”

Kolya nudged me with his elbow and whispered under his breath. “I’ve got a little bit of a hard-on.”

“What’s that?” asked Korsakov.

“I said my cock’s going to fall off if we stand out here much longer—pardon my language.” He gave Vika an old-fashioned bow before turning back to Korsakov. “You want to see my papers, let’s go inside and see the papers. You want to shoot your countrymen here in the snow, all right, shoot us. But enough of this standing in the cold.”

The partisan clearly preferred the idea of shooting Kolya to looking at his papers, but killing an Army man was no small matter, especially with so many witnesses. He didn’t want to give in too quickly, either, and lose face in front of his men. So the two of them stood there glaring at each other for another ten seconds while I bit my lip to keep my teeth from chattering.

Vika broke the stalemate. “These two are falling in love,” she said. “Look at them! They can’t decide if they want to fight each other or roll naked in the snow.”

The other partisans laughed and Vika walked toward the farmhouse, ignoring Korsakov’s glare.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Those girls in there look like they’ve been eating pork chops all winter.”

The men followed her, carrying their loot, eager to get out of the cold and into the house. I watched Vika stomping her boots in front of the door, ridding her soles of snow, and I wondered what her body looked like beneath those winter camouflage coveralls, beneath the layers of wool and felt.

“Is she yours?” Kolya asked Korsakov, after Vika had stepped inside the farmhouse.

“Are you joking? That one’s more boy than girl.”

“Good,” said Kolya, punching me in the arm. “Because I think my friend here has a crush.”

Korsakov glanced at me and began to laugh. I always hated when people laughed at me, but this time I welcomed his amusement. I knew he wasn’t going to kill us.

“Best of luck to you, boy. Just remember, she can shoot your eyes out from half a kilometer.”

Korsakov had given his men an hour to warm up and feed themselves, and now they were sprawled across the great room, their socks hanging from the fireplace screen, their overcoats spread out on the floor. Vika lay on her back on a horsehair sofa beneath the mounted ibex head, her ankles crossed, her fingers playing with the rabbit fur cap resting on her chest. Her dark red hair was cut short as a boy’s, so dirty it clumped together in spikes and whorls. She stared into the ibex’s glass eyes, fascinated by the murdered animal—wondering about the hunt, I imagined, about the hunter’s shot, if it was a clean kill or if the wounded beast ran for miles, not understanding that death had already burrowed into his muscle and bone, a tumbling slug that could not be outrun.

I was sitting on a window ledge watching her and trying to make sure she didn’t know I was watching her. She had stripped off her coveralls to let them dry. She wore a heavy wool woodcutter’s shirt that once belonged to a man twice her size and two pairs of long underwear. Unlike most redheads, she didn’t have a single freckle. She worried at her upper lip with the bottom row of her crooked little teeth. I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was no man’s idea of a pinup girl—underfed as she was, looking like she’d spent the last week sleeping in the forest—but I wanted to see her naked. I wanted to unbutton the woodcutter’s shirt, toss it aside, and lick her pale belly, strip off the long underwear and kiss her thin thighs.