David Benioff - City of Thieves

Kolya’s apparent immunity to exhaustion aggravated and amazed me. I could keep moving only by sighting a distant tree and promising myself that I would not quit before I reached it—and when we got to that tree, I would find another and swear this was the last one. But Kolya seemed capable of traipsing through the woods, orating with a stage whisper, for hours at a time.

I waited a moment to make sure he was finished before I nodded. “That’s nice.”

“Isn’t it?” he said quickly, pleased to hear it. The way he responded made me study his moonlit face.

“You’ve got most of the book memorized?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. Passages here and there.”

The snow was deeper as we crossed a ridge, making each step more of a chore, and I huffed and wheezed like an old man with one lung as I staggered toward the next tree.

“Can I ask you something?”

“You just did,” he said, with his annoyingly pleased smile.

“What do you write when you write in your journal?”

“Depends on the day. Sometimes just notes on what I’ve seen. Sometimes I hear someone say something, a line or two, and I like the way it sounds.”

I nodded and experimented by keeping one eye closed for ten seconds, then the other, alternating in a bid to give them some rest and spare them from the wind.

“Why do you ask?”

“I think you’re writing The Courtyard Hound .”

“You think… you mean a critique of The Courtyard Hound ? Well, I am. I told you that. Someday I’ll give lectures on the book. Maybe seven men in Russia know more about Ushakovo than I do.”

“I don’t think there is an Ushakovo.” I pushed up my cap so I could get a better look at him. “You keep telling me it’s this classic and I’ve never heard of it. And you were very happy when I told you I liked that bit, you were proud of it. If I quoted Pushkin for you, and you said the writing was good, it wouldn’t make me proud, would it? They’re not my lines.”

Kolya’s expression never changed. His face admitted nothing, denied nothing. “But you did like it?”

“It’s not bad. You just came up with that?”

“Over the last few hours. You know what inspired me? That poem of your father’s. ‘An Old Poet, Once Famous, Seen at a Café.’”

“That was another clue. You robbed him blind.”

He laughed, blowing a great gust of vapor into the frigid air.

“This is literature. We don’t call it robbery; we call it homage. What about the first line of the book? You like that, too?”

“I don’t remember the first line of the book.”

“In the slaughterhouse where we first kissed, the air still stank from the blood of the lambs.”

“A little melodramatic, isn’t it?”

“What’s wrong with drama? All these contemporary writers are such timid little fish—”

“ Melo drama, I said.”

“—but if the subject demands intensity, it should get intensity.”

“So this whole time… Why didn’t you just tell me you were writing a novel?”

Kolya stared at the moon, sinking now toward the fringe of pine tops. Soon it would be down and we’d be walking in true darkness, tripping over roots and slipping on patches of black ice.

“The truth is, that first night I met you? In the Crosses? I thought they were going to shoot us in the morning. So what did it matter what I told you? I said whatever popped into my head.”

“You told me they weren’t going to shoot us!”

“Well, you seemed a little frightened. But come on, think about it: a deserter and a looter? What were our chances?”

The next tree I had chosen as a way station seemed impossibly far away, a silhouetted pine that loomed above its brothers, a silent sentinel older than all the rest. While I panted, Kolya sipped tea from his canteen, a naturalist out for an evening hike. Army rations greatly exceeded civilian rations—that was my rationale for his superior energy, ignoring the fact that we had eaten the same meals for the last several days.

“You said you left your unit so you could defend your thesis on Ushakovo’s The Courtyard Hound ,” I said, pausing between each sentence to regain my breath. “And now you’re admitting there is no Ushakovo and there is no Courtyard Hound . ”

“But there will be. If I live long enough.”

“Why did you leave your unit?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You two about to fuck in the bushes?”

Kolya and I wheeled around. Vika had crept up behind us without a sound, close enough that I could have reached out and touched her cheek. She glared into our faces with contempt, obviously disgusted to be in the company of such miserable soldiers.

“You were told to march single file with a nine-stride gap.” Her voice was very low for such a small girl, hoarse, as if she had been sick the week before and her larynx hadn’t recovered yet. She was a practiced whisperer, able to enunciate each quiet word so that we could understand everything yet anyone standing five meters away would not hear a thing.

“You’re strolling along like a couple of faggots, chatting about books. You realize we’ve got German camps within two kilometers of where we stand? You want to end up in a ditch with all the Communists and Jews, that’s your business, but I plan on seeing Berlin next year.”

“He’s a Jew,” said Kolya, jabbing at me with his thumb, ignoring the angry look I directed his way.

“Are you? Well, you’re the first dumb Jew I ever met. Either turn around and go back to Piter or else shut your mouths and follow our rules. There’s a reason we haven’t lost a man in two months. Now go on, move.”

With a hand on each of our backs she shoved us forward and we resumed our places in the single file, nine strides between us, shamed into silence.

I thought about the nonexistent author Ushakovo and his nonexistent masterpiece, The Courtyard Hound . For some reason I wasn’t angry at Kolya. It was a strange lie but a harmless one, and the farther I walked the more I understood his motivation. Kolya seemed fearless, but everyone has fear in them somewhere; fear is part of our inheritance. Aren’t we descended from timid little shrews who cowered in the shadows while the great beasts stomped past? Cannibals and Nazis didn’t make Kolya nervous, but the threat of embarrassment did—the possibility that a stranger might laugh at the lines he’d written.

My father had many friends, most of them writers, and they chose our apartment as their clubhouse because of my mother’s cooking and my father’s unwillingness to throw anyone out. My mother complained that she was running the Hotel Literati. The place stank of cigarette smoke and the butts were everywhere, in the potted plants and half-drunk glasses of tea. One night an experimental playwright stuck dozens of the butts into gobs of melted candle wax on the kitchen table, representing Roman and Carthaginian forces, so he could demonstrate Hannibal’s double envelopment maneuver at the battle of Cannae. My mother griped about the noise, the broken glasses, the rugs stained with cheap Ukrainian wine, but I knew she liked hosting the crowds of poets and novelists, loved it when they devoured her stews and raved about her cakes. When she was young, she was a pretty woman, and if she wasn’t a flirt herself she liked it when good-looking men flirted with her. She would sit beside my father on the sofa and listen to the debates and rants and decrials, saying nothing but hearing everything, saving it all for the debriefing she would have with my father when the last drunk finally staggered out the door. She was not a writer herself, but she was a very good reader, passionate and eclectic in her tastes, and my father had great faith in her judgments. When one of the great men came to the apartment, a Mandelstam or Chukovksy, she didn’t treat them with any special favors, but I could tell she watched them more carefully, evaluating how they behaved with my father. In her mind the literary community was ranked as precisely as the army; the ranks might not have titles and insignia, but they were ranks all the same, and she wanted to know where my father stood.