David Benioff: City of Thieves

“I can write in the dark,” he said, punctuating the sentence with a light burp. “One of my talents.”

“Notes on The Courtyard Hound ?”

“Exactly. How’s this for strange? Chapter six: Radchenko spends a month in the Crosses because his former best friend… Well, I don’t want to give it away. But I have to say, it seemed like fate when they brought me here. I’ve been every other place Radchenko visited—every restaurant and theater and graveyard, the ones that are still around, anyway—but I’ve never been inside here. A critic could argue that until you spend a night in the Crosses, you can’t understand Radchenko.”

“Pretty lucky for you.”

“Mm.”

“So you think they’ll shoot us in the morning?”

“I doubt it. They’re not preserving us for the night just to shoot us tomorrow.” He sounded quite jaunty about it, as if we were discussing a sporting event, as if the outcome wasn’t particularly momentous no matter which way it went.

“I haven’t had a shit in eight days,” he confided. “I’m not saying a good shit—it’s been months since I’ve had a good shit—I mean no shit at all for eight days.”

We were quiet for a moment, considering these words.

“How long do you think a man can last without shitting?”

It was an interesting question and I was curious to know the answer myself, but I didn’t have one for him. I heard him lie down, heard him yawn happily, relaxed and content, his piss-stained straw mattress as comfortable as a feather bed. The silence lingered for a minute and I thought my cell mate had fallen asleep.

“These walls must be four feet thick,” he said at last. “This is probably the safest place in Piter to spend a night.” And then he did fall asleep, shifting from speech into snores so quickly that at first I thought he was faking.

I’ve always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. I was born an insomniac and that’s the way I’ll die, wasting thousands of hours along the way longing for unconsciousness, longing for a rubber mallet to crack me in the head, not so hard, not hard enough to do any damage, just a good whack to put me down for the night. But that night I didn’t have a chance. I stared into the blackness until the blackness blurred into gray, until the ceiling above me began to take form and the light from the east dribbled in through the narrow barred window that existed after all. Only then did I realize that I still had a German knife strapped to my calf.

An hour after dawn two new guards opened the cell door, rousted us from bed, and clamped handcuffs on our wrists. They ignored my questions but seemed amused when Kolya asked for a cup of tea and an omelet. Jokes must have been rare in the Crosses, because it wasn’t such a good joke, but the guards grinned as they shoved us down the hallway. Somewhere someone was moaning, a low and endless moan, a ship’s horn heard from a great distance.

I didn’t know if we were heading for the gallows or an interrogation chamber. The night had passed without sleep; save for a swig from the German’s flask, there hadn’t been a sip to drink since the rooftop of the Kirov; a lump the size of an infant’s fist had swelled where my forehead had cracked the ceiling—it was a bad morning, really; among my worst—but I wanted to live. I wanted to live and I knew I could not face my execution with grace. I would kneel before the hangman or the firing squad and plead my youth, detail my many hours served on the rooftop waiting for the bombs, all the barricades I had helped to build, the ditches I had dug. All of us had done it, we were all serving the cause, but I was one of Piter’s true sons and I didn’t deserve to die. What harm had been done? We drank a dead German’s cognac—for this you want to end me? You want to tie rough hemp around my skinny neck and shut down my brain forever because I stole a knife? Don’t do this, comrade. I don’t think there is greatness in me, but there is something better than this.

The guards led us down a stone staircase, the steps beaten smooth by hundreds of thousands of boot heels. An old man with a heavy gray scarf wrapped twice around his throat sat on the far side of the iron bars that blocked the bottom of the staircase. He gave us a gummy grin and unlocked the gate. A moment later we walked through a heavy wooden door into the sunlight, emerging from the Crosses intact and alive.

Kolya, unimpressed by our apparent reprieve, scooped up a palmful of clean snow with his shackled hands and licked it. The boldness of the maneuver made me jealous, as did the thought of cold water on my tongue. But I didn’t want to do anything to anger the guards. Our escape from the Crosses seemed like an odd mistake and I expected to be shoved inside again if I did something wrong.

The guards escorted us to a waiting GAZ, its big engine grumbling, exhaust pipes spewing dirty vapor, two soldiers sitting in the front seat watching us with zero curiosity, their fur-lined hats pulled down low on their foreheads.

Kolya hopped into the backseat without waiting for an order.

“Gentlemen, to the opera!”

The guards, standards diminished by years of working the Crosses, gave Kolya another good laugh. The soldiers did not. One of them turned and inspected Kolya.

“You say another word and I’ll break your fucking arm. It were up to me, you’d already have a bullet in your head. Fucking deserter. You”—and this was addressed to me—“get in.”

Kolya’s mouth was already open and I knew violence was on the way; the soldier did not look like a bluffer and Kolya, clearly, was incapable of heeding a simple threat.

“I’m not a deserter,” he said. With his manacled hands he managed to push up the left sleeve of his greatcoat, the left sleeve of his army sweater, the left sleeves of the two shirts beneath it, and offered his forearm to the soldier in the front seat. “You want to break the arm, break it, but I’m not a deserter.”

For a long count nobody spoke—Kolya stared at the soldier, the soldier stared back, and the rest of us watched and waited, impressed by this match of wills and curious to see who would win. Finally, the soldier conceded defeat by turning away from Kolya and barking at me.

“Get in the car, you little cunt.”

The guards grinned. This was their morning’s entertainment. They had no torture scheduled, no teeth to wrench, no nails to pluck from a screaming man’s nail beds, so they got their fun watching me, the little cunt, scurry into the backseat next to Kolya.

The soldier drove very fast, caring not at all about the slicks of ice on the road. We sped along the banks of the frozen Neva. I had my collar upturned so I could hide my face from the wind that blasted in beneath the canvas roof. Kolya didn’t seem bothered by the cold. He stared at the spire of the Church of John the Baptist across the river and said nothing.

We turned onto the Kamennoostrovsky Bridge, the old steel of its arches rimed with frost, the lampposts bearded with icicles. Onto Kamenny Island, slowing only a bit to circle around a bomb crater that had shattered the center of the road, pulling into a long driveway lined with the stumps of lime trees, and parking in front of a magnificent wooden mansion with a white-columned portico. Kolya studied the house.

“The Dolgorukovs lived here,” he said, as we stepped out of the car. “I suppose none of you have heard of the Dolgorukovs.”

“A bunch of aristocrats who got their necks snapped,” said one of the soldiers, gesturing with the barrel of his rifle for us to walk toward the front door.