Abendroth still did not realize the game was over, but it was over. I glanced at Vika, stupidly proud of my imminent victory, and saw that her hand had slipped inside her coveralls. She would wait no longer for me to act, she was reaching for her knife; and Kolya had his hands on the edge of the table, ready to shove himself to his feet and attack when she did. My eyes met Vika’s and I knew with sudden clarity that if I sat still, her tattered body would soon be dripping out its last on the peeling linoleum floor.
While Abendroth considered the board and the rare mob of queens, I pretended to itch my calf, dipping my fingers slowly inside my boot. This was not a surge of courage, but the opposite—my fear of Vika’s death overpowered all my other fears. Abendroth squinted at his king and I saw his expression shift as he understood the truth about his position. I expected defeat to anger him. Instead a smile brightened his face and for a moment I could see what he must have looked like as a young boy.
“That was beautiful,” he said, raising his head to look at me. “Next time I won’t drink so much.”
Whatever he saw in my own expression troubled him. He peered around the table and saw my hand digging inside my boot. I fumbled with the hilt and finally yanked the knife free of its sheath. Before I could swing at him Abendroth lunged forward, knocking me out of my chair and onto the floor, pinning my knife hand down with his left hand and reaching for his holstered pistol with his right.
If I had managed to free my knife faster, if I had lucked into slashing his jugular, if this miracle had happened, Vika and Kolya and I would have died. The troopers would have raised their MP40s and blasted us from existence. Abendroth’s alertness—or my clumsiness, depending on how you look at it—saved us. As the troopers charged forward to help the Sturmbannführer, who needed no help, they neglected their other prisoners. Only for a moment, but that was enough.
Abendroth drew his automatic. Hearing the clamor at the far end of the room, he looked that way. Whatever he saw worried him more than this feeble, emaciated Jew writhing beneath him. He aimed at his target—Vika or Kolya, I could not see. I cried out and reached for the barrel of the gun with my left hand, slapping the muzzle just as he pulled the trigger. The pistol kicked and the report nearly deafened me. Abendroth snarled and tried to pull the gun away from my grasping fingers. Fighting him was as pointless as fighting a bear, but I clung to the barrel of that gun with all the strength left in me. Those seconds were a tumult of noise and violence, hollered German and flashing muzzles, the drumming of boot heels on linoleum.
Frustrated by my stubborn grip, Abendroth punched me hard in the side of the head with his left hand. I had been in a few scrapes and tussles growing up in the Kirov, but they were the brand of sloppy, bloodless fights you’d expect from boys who belong to chess clubs. No one had ever hit me in the face. The room went blurry, fireflies darting across my field of vision, as Abendroth ripped his automatic out of my hand and pointed it at my eyes.
I sat up and shoved the point of my knife deep into his chest, through the breast pocket of his jacket, below the cluster of medals, the blade sliding in all the way to the silver finger guard.
Abendroth shuddered and blinked, looking down at the black hilt. He still could have shot a bullet through my brain, but avenging his own murder did not seem important to him. He looked disappointed, his lips curling downward, and finally he looked confused, blinking steadily, his breath gone ragged. He wanted to stand, but his legs gave way and he toppled over sideways, falling off of the knife in my hand, his pistol dropping from his slack fingers. He opened his eyes wide—a sleepy man forcing himself awake—placed his palms on the linoleum, and tried to crawl away from the sordid tableau, ignoring the commotion around him. He did not get far.
I turned and saw Kolya struggling on the floor with one of the troopers, both men trying to gain control of the German’s submachine gun. By that point I considered Kolya a champion fighter, but no one had told the trooper and he seemed to have the upper hand. I don’t remember getting to my feet or running over to help, but before the trooper could level his MP40 and empty his magazine into Kolya’s chest, I was on the man’s back, plunging the knife in and pulling it out, again and again.
Vika finally pulled me off the dead man. Her coveralls were drenched with blood and before logic could assert itself, I assumed she had been shot in the gut. I don’t think I said anything coherent, but she shook her head, hushed me, and said, “I’m not hurt. Here, let me see your hand.”
I didn’t understand the request. I raised my right hand, still clutching the bloody knife, but she gently pushed it down, took my other wrist, and held my left hand between her palms. For the first time I realized that I was missing half of my index finger. Vika knelt beside one of the dead troopers—the boy with the moles, who stared blindly at the ceiling, his throat split open—and cut a strip of wool from his pants. She came back to me and tied it around my finger, a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding.
Kolya had grabbed the MP40s. He tossed one to Vika, kept the other for himself, and snatched the egg crate off the table. We could hear German voices calling out from elsewhere in the building, confused officers wondering if the gunshot they heard in their sleep was dreamed or real. Kolya slid open one of the four-paned windows and crawled onto the ledge.
“Hurry,” he said, beckoning for us to follow him. He jumped and I rushed to follow him. The drop from the second floor wasn’t very far and the snow below the window was a meter deep. I lost my balance on landing and tumbling face-first into the snow. Kolya hauled me to my feet and brushed the snow from my face. We heard a burst of gunfire from the conference room. A moment later Vika leaped from the window, smoke rising from the muzzle of her submachine gun.
We ran from the burned-out police station. Unlit streetlamps curled above us like question marks. The shouting from the old Party headquarters intensified and I expected bullets to start ripping through the air, but none ever came. The guards stationed at the front door must have run inside when they heard the gunfire; by the time they realized their mistake we were lost in the darkness.
Soon we reached the edge of the small town. We turned off the road and ran through the frozen farm fields, past the silhouettes of abandoned tractors. Back in Krasnogvardeysk we could hear car engines revving and chain-wrapped tires trundling over the snow. In the murky distance ahead we could see the black edge of the great forest waiting to receive us, to cloak us from the eyes of our enemies.
I have never been much of a patriot. My father would not have allowed such a thing while he lived, and his death insured that his wish was carried out. Piter commanded far more affection and loyalty from me than the nation as a whole. But that night, running across the unplowed fields of winter wheat, with the Fascist invaders behind us and the dark Russian woods before us, I felt a surge of pure love for my country.
We ran for the forest, crashing through the stalks of wheat, beneath the rising moon and the stars spinning farther and farther away, alone beneath the godless sky.
24
An hour later we still looked over our shoulders, listening for tracked vehicles, but the deeper into the woods we went, the more likely our escape began to seem. We sucked on icicles snapped off pine branches, but the night was so cold we couldn’t bear to keep ice in our mouths for very long. The stump of my finger began to throb in time with my pulse.
Kolya had unbuttoned his army coat and shoved the straw-stuffed box under his sweater to keep the eggs from freezing. Over the last few kilometers he had slapped my shoulder repeatedly, grinning wildly beneath his stolen down cap with the silly drawstring tied beneath his chin.
“You really showed me something back there,” he told me four separate times.
Now I was a killer of men and the German knife stuffed in my boot was an actual weapon, not just a boy’s memento. Perhaps it would reflect better on me to tell you I felt a certain sadness, a solidarity with the dead men despite the necessity of the violence. The mole-strewn face of the dead boy stayed with me for a long time, until finally I forgot what he actually looked like and could remember only the memory. The Sturmbannführer crawling toward nowhere is an image still vivid in my mind. I could mouth all sorts of pieties to convince you that I’m a sensitive man, and I believe that I am a sensitive man. Even so, that night I felt nothing but exhilaration about my actions. I had
acted
, against all expectation, against my own history of cowardice. In the end, killing Abendroth had nothing to do with avenging Zoya or eliminating a vital Einsatz officer. I had kept Kolya and Vika alive. I had kept myself alive. Our warm breath rising above our heads, our grunts as our boots sunk deep in the snow, every sensation we experienced on our long march—experience itself—all of it was because finally, my back against the wall, I had shown a bit of courage. The proudest moment of my life came when we paused to catch our wind and Vika, checking my finger to make sure the bleeding had stopped, whispered in my ear, “Thank you.”
At one point Vika and Kolya argued about which direction to walk. Vika ended the discussion with an impatient shake of her head, marching off without checking to see if we would follow. After the Mga debacle I had no faith in Kolya’s ability to navigate; I followed her. Kolya held his ground for all of eight seconds before hurrying after us.
Somewhere along the way I told her the true story of why Kolya and I had snuck out of Piter, crossed enemy lines, and eventually stumbled onto the farmhouse beneath the larches. I kept my voice low so Kolya would not hear, though I couldn’t imagine whom I was betraying. I told her about the colonel’s daughter, skating on the Neva; the cannibals and their grisly wares hanging from the ceiling chains; the dying boy Vadim and his rooster, Darling; the antitank dog bleeding in the snow; and the dead Russian soldier rooted in the ice. When I finished the story, Vika shook her head but said nothing, and I worried that I had told her too much.
Watching her march through the woods, silent and tireless, the submachine gun strapped to her shoulder, I remembered what Kolya had told me the previous morning. The war had changed everyone, but still, it was difficult to believe she had been an astronomy student seven months earlier.
“May I ask you something?”
She kept walking, not bothering to answer. She didn’t have time for inane questions like “May I ask you something?”
“Kolya says you’re NKVD.”
“Are you asking?”
“I guess so.”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said, but the moment I spoke the words I realized I did know. “I think he’s right.”
She peered through the darkness, looking for some kind of landmark to clarify which way we were going.
“Does it bother you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because of my father.” I realized she didn’t know what happened to my father, so I added, quietly, “They took him.”
For nearly a minute we walked in silence, climbing a slowly sloping hill. I began to pant, the weakness returning to my legs as we moved farther from the victory at Krasnogvardeysk.
“Your father was a writer, yes? Then the odds are very good other writers turned him in. The police were just doing their jobs.”
“Yes. And the Einsatz, as well. Of course, they chose their jobs.”
“If it changes anything, they took my father, too.”
“Really? Was he a writer?”
“No. He was NKVD.”
Cresting the long hill took us nearly an hour and stole all the spring from my legs, but when we finally got to the top of the treeless rise, I saw why Vika had chosen to come this way. The half-moon shone across the outstretched hectares of forest and farmland, all of it shimmering beneath a layer of frost and snow.
“Look,” she said, pointing north. “Do you see it?”
Far beyond the valley below us, past the hills that blocked the horizon in the shadowy distance, a slender pillar of light rose to the sky, bright enough to spotlight the cloud far above. The powerful beam began to move, a brilliant saber carving the night, and I realized I was looking at an antiaircraft searchlight.
“That’s Piter,” she told us. “You get lost on your way home, that’s your North Star.”
I turned to look at her. “You’re not coming with us?”
“There’s a band of partisans outside of Chudovo. I know the commander. I’ll try to connect with them.”
“I’m sure the colonel can give us an extra ration card if you come with us. I’ll tell him you helped us and he’ll—”
She smiled and spat on the ground. “Fuck the ration card. Piter’s not my city. I’m needed out here.”
“Don’t get killed,” said Kolya. “I think the boy is in love.”
“Stay off the roads on your way back. And be careful getting into the city. We’ve got mines everywhere.”
Kolya extended his gloved hand. Vika rolled her eyes at the formality but shook it. “I hope we meet again,” he told her. “In Berlin.”
She smiled and turned to me. I knew I would never see her again. When she saw the look on my face, something human entered those wolfish blue eyes. She touched my cheek with her gloved hand.
“Don’t look so sad. You saved my life tonight.”
I shrugged. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would say something mawkish and stupid, or worse, that I would start to cry. Five years had passed since I had cried, but I had never lived through a night like this one, and I was convinced that the sniper from Archangel was the only girl I would ever love.
Her gloved hand still rested on my cheek. “Tell me your last name.”
“Beniov.”
“I’ll track you down, Lyova Beniov. All I need is the name.” She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. Her mouth was cold, her lips rough from the winter wind, and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will always return to that kiss.
A moment later she walked away from us, head down, rabbit fur cap brimmed low, chin tucked into her scarf, her little body in the oversize coveralls dwarfed by the ancient pines around her. I knew she would not look back at me, but I watched her anyway until she was gone.
“Come,” said Kolya, wrapping his arm around my shoulders. “We have a wedding to attend.”