David Benioff - City of Thieves

The trapper’s cabin looked like it had been hammered together from old planks and rusted nails by a man with little skill for carpentry and no patience for the job. The door hung crooked on its hinges. There were no windows, just a pipe jutting out of the rooftop to vent smoke, and no floor but hard-packed dirt. Inside the smell of human shit was almost too much to stand. The walls were gouged as if by claws, and I wondered if the ghosts of all the skinned martens and foxes still haunted the place, eager to flay their guests alive when the candles burned out.

As cold as it was outside, inside offered only respite from the wind and no added warmth. Korsakov elected one unlucky man to take the first guard shift. The partisan in the Finnish ski patrol uniform removed his pack and set up a little “bourgeois stove,” filling it with scraps of wood that they had left in the cabin earlier. When the stove was lit, all of us crowded as close together as we could, thirteen men and a woman—or twelve men, a woman, and a boy, if we were being honest about it. I wondered, for the hundredth time that night, what she would look like with the filthy coveralls stripped off, her pale dirty skin stretched taut over the blue tracery of her veins. Did she have breasts or was she flat chested as a boy? Her hips were as narrow as mine, I was fairly sure of that, but even with her cropped hair and mud-stained neck there was something undeniably feminine about that proud jutting lower lip. Did the other men in the group lust for her, too, or did they all see her as Korsakov saw her, as a sexless sniper with an uncanny eye? Were they idiots or was I?

The shit stench made my eyes water, but soon smoke from the stove camouflaged the worst of the smell, and the fire and our body heat made the cabin comfortable enough. At that point I could have slept anywhere, and with my father’s navy coat laid flat beneath me and my folded scarf as a pillow, for once I slipped into unconsciousness within seconds of resting my head.

A moment later Kolya nudged me.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Hey, are you awake?”

I kept my eyes clenched shut, hoping he would leave me alone.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked. His mouth was next to my ear, allowing him to whisper directly into my skull without bothering any of the others. I wanted to punch him to make him shut up, but I did not want him to punch me back.

“No,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

“I’m sorry I lied to you. Even if I thought we were dead, it doesn’t matter. It was wrong of me.”

“Thank you,” I told him, and shifted onto my side, hoping he would get the hint.

“You like the title, though? The Courtyard Hound? Do you know what it means?”

“Please… please let me sleep.”

“I’m sorry. Sleep, of course.”

Thirty seconds passed in silence, but I could not relax because I knew he was fully awake, staring at the ceiling, waiting to ask me another question.

“You want to know the truth, don’t you? About why I left my battalion.”

“You can tell me tomorrow.”

“I hadn’t been with a girl in four months. My balls were ringing like a couple of church bells. You think I’m joking? I’m not like you. I don’t have your discipline. I fucked my first girl three days after the first time I came. Twelve years old, didn’t have a hair on my sack, but I stuck it in Klava Stepanovich down in the boiler room, boing boing boing. ”

Boing boing boing?

“I get this hunger, I’m telling you. I go a week without it and I can’t concentrate, my brain doesn’t work, I’m walking around the trenches with a hard-on out to here.”

Kolya’s hot breath was on my ear and I tried to turn farther away, but we were all squeezed together on the earth floor like cigarettes in a pack.

“We had a party planned for New Year’s Eve, the whole battalion. There was vodka; there was going to be some singing; I heard a rumor someone found a few pigs stashed away in a barn somewhere and we were going to roast them. All-night affair, right? So I figured, this is good, let them celebrate with their vodka and their pigs, I’ve got other business. We were less than an hour from Piter, by car. I had a friend delivering messages to headquarters. He was going to be in the city for three, four hours. Perfect. So I ride with him, he drops me off at a friend’s building—”

“Sonya?”

“No, a girl named Yulia. Not the most beautiful girl in the world, not even pretty, really. But listen, Lev, this girl made me hard when she filed her nails. Her pussy was magic. It really was. She lived on the sixth floor and the whole way up I’m getting myself ready. Already decided the position—just toss her over the back of the sofa, ass in the air, go in deep. I don’t know if you’ve got much going on downstairs, by the way, but if you don’t, that’s a good position for you. Gets you all the way in. Anyway, I finally get to her apartment, I’m starting to unbuckle my belt, I bang on the door, an old woman opens up. Barely bigger than a midget this woman, looks about two hundred years old. I tell her I’m a friend of Yulia’s and she says, ‘God forgive me, Yulia’s been dead a month now.’ God forgive me! Fuck! So I say my sorrys to this crone, give her a piece of bread because she’s barely able to stand up, and run downstairs. Time’s running out. There’s another girl who lives close by, one of the ballerinas I told you about. A little bit of an ice queen, but the best legs in Piter. I have to climb over a gate to get into her building, nearly get an iron spike up my asshole, but I make it, get to her apartment door, bang on it, ‘It’s me, Nikolai Alexandrovich, let me in!’ Door opens, her fat rat-eyed husband’s staring me down. Vile turd’s never home, except this time. Party man, of course, usually down at the offices figuring out new regulations for the Army, but tonight he decides to stay home and torture his wife for New Year’s. ‘Who are you? What is this?’ he says to me, indignant, as if I’ve somehow insulted him by banging on his door and demanding his wife’s wet twat on a plate. I wanted to knock him on his dimpled ass, but that would have been the end of me, so I give him a salute, the civilian cunt, tell him I knocked on the wrong door, and disappear. Now I’m fucked. The only other girl I know on that side of town is Roza, but she’s a professional and I’ve got no money on me. But I’m a good customer, maybe she trusts me, maybe she’ll take whatever food I’ve got left in exchange, right? It’s a couple of kilometers away. I’m sprinting now, sweating, first sweat since October. There’s not much time left before my friend’s driving back. I make it there, out of breath, up four flights to Roza’s apartment; door’s unlocked, I let myself in, and there’s three soldiers waiting in her kitchen, passing around a bottle of vodka. I can hear her groaning away in the other room and these drunk morons are singing peasant songs and slapping each other on the back. ‘Don’t worry,’ says the one who’s last in line, ‘I’ll be quick.’

“I offered them money to cut the line, except I didn’t have any money and they weren’t such morons they were going to take a note from me. I told them I had to get back to battalion and one of them said, ‘It’s New Year’s Eve! They’re all drunk! Long as you get back by morning you’ll be fine.’ That sounded right to me, and they kept passing the bottle around, so I drank with them and pretty soon I was singing their fucking peasant songs louder than all of them. And an hour later I finally got to lie down with Roza. She’s a sweet girl—I don’t care what anyone says about whores—she let me in for the rest of the bread I had in my pocket, and it wasn’t a lot. But she said her pussy was hurting so she sucked me off instead. Fifteen minutes later I’m ready again, she grins and says, ‘Oh, I love you young ones,’ and lets me go inside her, very slow, very gentle. And then again, half an hour later. I must have sprayed a liter of come inside her, north and south.”