“Calculated neglect. You need an education.”
We kept walking down Nevsky. It was one in the afternoon, but the winter sun was already drifting low in the western sky, our shadows elongating in front of us.
“So let’s start slow,” he said, “let’s start with basics. Is there a girl you like?”
“No one special.”
“Who said she needs to be special? You’re a virgin, you need warm thighs and a heartbeat, not Tamara Karsavina.”
“There’s a girl named Vera who lives in my building. But she likes someone else.”
“Fine. Step one, let’s not worry about someone else. Let’s worry about Vera. What’s special about her? Why do you like her?”
“I don’t know. She lives in my building.”
“That’s something. Anything else?”
“She plays the cello.”
“Beautiful instrument. What color eyes does she have?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t like the girl. You don’t know what color eyes she has, you don’t like her.”
“I do like her, but all she cares about is Grisha Antokolsky, so what’s the point?”
“Fine,” said Kolya, very patient with his dull charge, “you think you like her because she doesn’t like you. It’s very understandable, but I’m telling you, you don’t like her. Let’s forget about Vera.”
Forgetting about Vera didn’t seem hard to do. I had spent the last three years trying to imagine what she looked like naked, but only because she lived two floors below me and once, at the youth center swimming pool, I had seen her nipples when her swimsuit straps slipped off. If it weren’t for Vera’s panicked tumble by the Kirov’s gate, I wouldn’t have been wandering the streets of Piter with a lunatic deserter, looking for eggs. She never looked back when the soldiers grabbed me. She was probably grubbing with Grisha in one of the Kirov’s dark corridors while I was locked up in the Crosses.
“The colonel’s daughter was pretty. I like her.”
Kolya glanced at me, amused.
“Yes, the colonel’s daughter is pretty. I like your optimism. But that one’s not for you.”
“She’s not for you, either.”
“You might be wrong about that. If you saw the look she gave me.”
We walked past a group of young boys with stepladders and pails of whitewash who were busy painting over street signs and building numbers. Kolya stopped and stared at them.
“Hey!” he shouted at the closest boy, who wore so many layers of wool you would have thought he was fat, unless you saw the drawn skin of his face, his eyes shining and black above shadows as deep as an old man’s. Very few children this young were left in the city; most had been evacuated back in September. The ones who remained tended to be very poor, many of them war orphans with no family in the east.
“What the devil are you doing?” asked Kolya. He turned to me, stunned by this disrespect. “Little bastards are vandalizing the Prospekt. Hey! Boy!”
“Suck my cock and make a wish,” said the black-eyed boy, whiting out the number on the door of a watch repair shop.
Even Kolya seemed taken aback by this directive. He walked over to the boy, took him by the shoulders, and turned him around.
“You’re talking to a soldier of the Red Army, boy—”
“Kolya,” I started.
“You think this is the time for pranks? You and your little Gypsy friends want to run around—”
“You better take your hands off me,” said the boy.
“Now you’re threatening me? I’ve been shooting at Germans the last four months and now you want to threaten me?”
“Kolya,” I repeated, louder this time. “They’re on orders. If Fritz gets inside the city, he won’t know where he’s going.”
Kolya looked from the black-eyed boy to the whitewashed street signs and over to me.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I was doing it two days ago.”
Kolya released the boy, who glared up at him a moment longer before resuming his work.
“Well, it’s damn clever,” said Kolya, and we kept on toward Haymarket.
5
If you had something you wanted to buy, sell, or barter, you went to the Haymarket. Before the war the street stalls were considered the poor man’s Nevsky Prospekt. After the blockade began, when the fancy shops closed one by one, when the restaurants chained shut their doors and the butchers had no more meat in their lockers, the Haymarket thrived. Generals’ wives traded their amber necklaces for sacks of wheat flour. Party members haggled with peasants who had snuck in from the countryside, arguing over how many potatoes a set of antique silverware should purchase. If the negotiations lasted too long, the peasants would wave their hands dismissively and turn away from the city folk. “So eat your silverware,” they would say with a shrug. They almost always got their asking price.
We walked from stall to stall, eyeing the stacks of leather boots, some still bloody from the feet of the previous owners. Tokarev rifles and pistols were cheap, easily bought with a few rubles or two hundred grams of bread. Lugers and grenades were more expensive, but available if you asked the right person. One stall sold glasses of dirt for one hundred rubles each—Badayev Mud, they called it, taken from the ground under the bombed food warehouse and packed with melted sugar.
Kolya stopped at a stall where a gaunt, stooped man with an eyepatch and an unlit pipe in his mouth sold unlabeled bottles of clear liquor.
“What’s this?” asked Kolya.
“Vodka.”
“Vodka? Made from what?”
“Wood.”
“That’s not vodka, friend. That’s wood alcohol.”
“You want it or not?”
“This isn’t what we’re here for,” I told Kolya, who ignored me.
“Stuff makes a man blind,” he said to the stall keeper.
The one-eyed man shook his head, bored with the ignorance but willing to exert some minimal effort to make a sale.
“You pour it through linen,” he said. “Seven layers. After that, it’s safe.”
“Sounds like an elixir for the gods,” said Kolya. “You should call it Seven-Layer Sin. That’s a good name for a drink.”
“You want it?”
“I’ll take a bottle if you drink some with me.”
“It’s too early for me.”
Kolya shrugged. “I see you take a nip, I’ll buy the bottle. Otherwise, what can I tell you, the war’s made me a cynic.”
“Two hundred rubles a bottle.”
“One hundred. Let’s drink.”
“What are you doing?” I asked him, but he didn’t even glance at me.
The one-eyed man placed his cold pipe on the table, found a tea glass, and searched around his stall for a bit of cloth.
“Here,” said Kolya, handing over a white handkerchief. “It’s clean. Relatively.”
We watched the man fold the handkerchief three times and drape it over the mouth of the tea glass. He poured the liquor slowly. Even outdoors, with the wind gusting, the stuff smelled like poison, like a cleaning agent used on a factory floor. The one-eyed man set aside the handkerchief, which was now flecked with a soapy residue. He lifted the glass, sipped it, and set it back down on the table, his expression never changing.
Kolya inspected the level of the liquid in the cup, making sure the vendor had truly taken a sip. Satisfied, he picked up the glass and saluted us.
“For Mother Russia!” He downed the wood alcohol with a gulp, slammed the glass down on the table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and gagged. He grabbed my shoulder, trying to support himself, his eyes wide open and tearing.
“You murdered me,” he said, barely able to get the words out of his throat, pointing an accusing finger at the one-eyed man.
“I didn’t tell you to drink it fast,” he replied, unimpressed, putting the pipe back in his mouth. “One hundred rubles.”
“Lev . . . Lev, are you there?” Kolya’s face was turned toward mine, but his eyes were unfocused, looking straight through me.
“Very funny.”
Kolya grinned and stood straight. “Can’t trick a Jew, I should have known. Very good, pay the man.”
“What?”
“Go ahead,” he said, gesturing to the waiting vendor. “Give the man his money.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“Don’t try to cheat me, boy!” roared Kolya, grabbing the collar of my greatcoat and shaking me till I felt my bones rattling. “I am a soldier of the Red Army and I won’t stand for any thievery!”
Abruptly he released me, shoving his hands into my coat pockets, pulling out scraps of paper, a bit of string and lint, nothing close to money. Kolya sighed and turned to the vendor.
“Apparently we have no money. I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel the transaction.”
“You think because you’re a soldier,” said the one-eyed man, opening his coat to show us the hilt of a Finnish dagger, “I won’t carve you up?”
“I’ve got a glass of poison in my belly already. So why don’t you try?”
Kolya smiled at the man and waited for a response. There was nothing behind Kolya’s blue eyes, neither fear nor anger nor excitement about the prospect of a fight—nothing. This, I came to learn, was his gift: danger made him calm. Around him people would deal with their terror in the usual ways: stoicism, hysteria, false joviality, or some combination of the three. But Kolya, I think, never completely believed in any of it. Everything about the war was ridiculous: the Germans’ barbarity, the Party’s propaganda, the crossfire of incendiary bullets that lit the nighttime sky. It all seemed to him like someone else’s story, an amazingly detailed story that he had stumbled into and now could not escape.
“Move on or I’ll cut your lips off,” said the one-eyed man, chewing the stem of his unlit pipe, hand on the hilt of his dagger. Kolya saluted and marched off to the next stall, relaxed and unworried as if the entire transaction had been clean and easy. I followed behind, heart thumping within my rib cage.
“Let’s just find the eggs,” I said. “Why do you have to go around provoking people?”
“I needed a sniff, I took a sniff, now I feel alive again.” He took a deep breath and exhaled through pursed lips, watching the condensation rise into the air. “We both should have died last night. Do you understand that? Do you understand how lucky we are? So enjoy it.”
I stopped at a stall where an old peasant woman wearing a headscarf sold patties of pale gray meat. Kolya and I stared at the meat. It looked fairly fresh, glistening with fat, but neither of us wanted to know what sort of animal it had been.
“Do you have any eggs?” I asked the old woman.
“Eggs?” she asked, leaning forward to hear. “Not since September.”
“We need a dozen,” said Kolya. “We can pay good money.”
“You can pay a million rubles,” she said, “there are no eggs. Not in Piter.”
“Where?”
She shrugged, the lines creasing her face so deep they seemed carved. “I have meat. You want meat, it’s three hundred for two patties. No eggs.”
We went from stall to stall, asking everyone if they had eggs, but no one in the Haymarket had seen any since September. A few people had theories on where they could be found: high-ranking army officers had them flown in from Moscow; farmers outside the city gave them to the Germans, along with butter and fresh milk, in exchange for their lives; an old man who lived near the Narva Gate kept chickens in a rooftop coop. This last rumor seemed obviously absurd, but the boy who told us insisted it was true.
“You kill a chicken, maybe it will last you a week. But you keep it alive, well, an egg a day, along with your rations, that will get you by till summer.”
“You have to feed a chicken,” said Kolya. “Who’s got food for a chicken?”
The boy, his black curly hair spilling out from beneath an old Imperial Navy cap, shook his head as if it were a silly question.
“Chickens eat anything. A spoonful of sawdust, that’s all they need.”
The boy sold what people called library candy, made from tearing the covers off of books, peeling off the binding glue, boiling it down, and reforming it into bars you could wrap in paper. The stuff tasted like wax, but there was protein in the glue, protein kept you alive, and the city’s books were disappearing like the pigeons.
“And you’ve seen these chickens?” asked Kolya.
“My brother has. The old man sleeps in the coop at night with a shotgun. Everyone in the building wants those chickens.”
Kolya glanced at me and I shook my head. We all heard ten different siege myths a day, stories of secret meat lockers stocked with chilled haunches of beef, of larders crammed with caviar tins and veal sausages. It was always someone’s brother or cousin who had seen the treasure. People believed in the stories because it matched their conviction that someone, somewhere, was feasting while the rest of the city starved. And they were right, of course—the colonel’s daughter might not be eating roasted goose for dinner, but she was eating dinner.
“The old man can’t stay in the coop all the time,” I told the boy. “He has to get his rations. He has to get water and use the toilet. Someone would have grabbed the chickens months ago.”
“He pisses off the roof. When it’s coming out the other side, I don’t know, maybe that’s what he feeds the chickens.”
Kolya nodded, impressed by the old man’s clever means of keeping the birds alive, though I was convinced the kid was making this up as his lips moved.
“When was the last time you had a shit?” Kolya asked me, abruptly.
“I don’t know. A week ago?”
“It’s been nine days for me. I’ve been counting. Nine days! When it finally happens, I’ll have a big party and invite the best-looking girls from the university.”
“Invite the colonel’s daughter.”
“I will, absolutely. My shit party will be much better than this wedding she’s planning.”
“The new ration bread hurts coming out,” said the curly-haired boy. “My father says it’s all the cellulose they’re putting in.”
“Where do we find the old man with the chickens?”
“I don’t know the address. If you walk toward Stachek Prospekt from the Narva Gate, you’ll pass his building. There’s a big poster of Zhdanov on the wall.”
“There’s a poster of Zhdanov on half the buildings in Piter,” I said, getting a little irritated. “We’re going to walk another three kilometers to find a bunch of chickens that don’t exist?”
“The boy’s not lying,” said Kolya, patting the kid on his shoulder. “If he is, we’ll come back here and break his fingers. He knows we’re NKVD.”
“You’re not NKVD,” said the boy.
Kolya pulled the colonel’s letter from his coat pocket and slapped the boy’s cheek with it.
“This is a letter from an NKVD colonel authorizing us to find eggs. What do you think about that?”
“You got another one from Stalin, authorizing you to wipe your ass?”
“He’ll have to authorize me to shit first.”
I didn’t stay long enough to learn how the conversation ended. If Kolya wanted to tramp all over the city looking for the fabled chickens, that was his business, but nightfall was coming and I wanted to go home. I hadn’t slept in thirty-some hours. I turned and walked toward the Kirov, trying to remember how much bread I had stashed under the loose tile in the kitchen. Maybe Vera had something for me. She owed me after the way she ran, never looking back even though I’d rescued her. It occurred to me that Vera and the others must have thought I was dead. I wondered how she had reacted, whether she had cried, hiding her face in Grisha’s chest as he comforted her, or maybe pushing him away, angry, because Grisha had fled, abandoned her, while I stayed behind and saved her from certain execution. And Grisha would say, “I know, I know, I’m a coward, forgive me,” and she would forgive him, because Vera forgave Grisha everything, and he would wipe away her tears, and tell her they would never forget me, my sacrifice. But of course they would—within a year they wouldn’t be able to picture my face anymore.
“You there. You the one looking for eggs?”
Obsessed with my pitiful fantasy, it took me a moment to realize the question was meant for me. I turned and saw a bearded giant staring back at me, arms folded across his chest, rocking back and forth on his boot heels. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen, far taller than Kolya and broader in the chest. His bare hands looked big enough to crack my skull like a walnut shell. His beard was thick and black and shined as if oiled. I wondered how much food a man that big needed to eat every day, how he could possibly keep the meat on his titanic frame.
“You have eggs?” I asked, blinking up at him.
“What do you have for me?”
“Money. We have money. Wait, let me get my friend.”
I ran back through the Haymarket. For the first time since I’d met him, I was happy to see Kolya’s blond head. He was still joking with the curly-haired boy, probably describing his dream of a glorious shit.
“Hello, there he is!” he shouted when he saw me. “I thought you’d run off without me.”