City of Thieves by David Benioff

sirens went off. Zavodilov the gangster, on the other hand—I don’t remember ever seeing him in the shelter. He slept through the sirens as he slept through the mornings, with a cold washcloth draped over his forehead and a naked girl by his side. Or at least that’s the way I imagined it. No, he wouldn’t have made it to the shelter, but then again, Zavodilov spent many nights away from the Kirov, taking care of his mysterious business or drinking in some other criminal’s apartment.
    Sonya poured two more glasses of weak tea and handed one to me and one to Kolya. I took off my wool mittens for the first time since eating breakfast in the colonel’s office. The warm glass felt like a living thing between my palms, a small animal with a heartbeat and a soul. I let the steam rise to my face and didn’t realize for a moment that Sonya had asked me a question.
    “Sorry?”
    “I said, was your family in the building?”
    “No, they got out of the city in September.”
    “That’s good. So did mine. My little brothers went to Moscow.”
    “And now the Germans are at the gates of Moscow, too,” said Pavel, a ferret-faced young man who stared at the iron stove and never made eye contact with anyone. “They’ll take it in a few weeks.”
    “Let them take it,” said Timofei. “We’ll play a Rostopchin on them, burn everything down and retreat. Where will they find shelter? What will they eat? Let the winter take care of them.”
    “Play a Rostopchin . . . ech. ” Sonya made a face as if she smelled something nasty. “You make him sound like a hero.”
    “He was a hero. You shouldn’t take your history from Tolstoy.”
    “Yes, yes, good Count Rostopchin, friend to the people.”
    “Don’t put politics into it. This is about warfare, not the class struggle.”
    “Don’t put politics into it? Who has to put politics into it? You think politics doesn’t enter into warfare?”
    Kolya silenced the bickering when he spoke up. He was looking into his cup of tea, holding it in both hands.
    “The Germans won’t take Moscow.”
    “According to which expert is this?” asked Pavel.
    “According to me. Fritz was thirty kilometers from the city at the beginning of December. Now he’s one hundred kilometers away. The Wehrmacht has never retreated before. They don’t know how to do it. Everything they’ve trained for, everything they’ve studied in their books is attack. Attack, attack, attack. Now they’re going backward and they won’t stop till they’re lying on their backs in Berlin.”
    No one said a word for a long count. The women in the group stared at Kolya, their eyes a little brighter in their gaunt faces. They were all a little in love with him.
    “Forgive me for asking, comrade,” said Pavel, putting an ironic lilt into comrade. “But if you’re such an important figure in the army, privy to such critical conversations, why are you sitting here with us?”
    “I can’t discuss my orders,” Kolya said, unruffled by the surgeon’s insulting tone. He took a sip of tea and let the warm water sit in his mouth for a moment. He noticed that Sonya was still watching him and he smiled at her. The group was silent. Nobody had moved, but the dynamic had shifted, with Kolya and Sonya onstage in the spotlight and the rest of us silent spectators, wondering if we’d see a bit of skin. The foreplay had already begun, even though they sat apart from each other, even though both were wrapped within layer after layer of wool. I wished that someday some girl would stare at me that way, but I knew it would never happen. This narrow-shouldered frame, these eyes as watchful and fearful as a rodent’s—I wasn’t the type to inspire lust. Worst of all was my nose, my hated nose, that beak of a thousand insults. It was bad enough to be a Jew in Russia, but to be a Jew with a nose from an anti-Semitic caricature, well, it inspired a good deal of self-loathing. Most of the time I was proud to be Jewish, but I