City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

flakes cover him, too. He veered north, the snow whipping at his face, with Vronsky’s haunting music and memories of Sofia swirling around him.

His skull still in a blizzard all of its own.

26

Tuesday October 30

His eyes grainy, encrusted with sleep, blinked open in the grey morning light. He felt as though he’d slept for a thousand years. His ribs ached but someone seemed to have dressed and padded them, so he managed to turn himself in the bed. There she was, a soft, warm body next to his. He kissed the nape of her neck.

‘Sofia,’ he whispered. ‘Sofia.’

The woman sat up in her bed, the white sheet slipping down and revealing a figure trussed up in a blanket over a thick dressing gown, all over layers of undergarments.

‘No, I’m not your precious Sofia,’ said Tatiana Vasiliyeva, his upstairs neighbour with the guitar and the beguiling voice.

Rossel’s eyes widened. Under the sheets he patted himself down, absurdly concerned for his modesty. But he, too, was trussed in a dressing gown and on top of that swaddled in blankets.

‘You have been mumbling her name half the night. I like you, comrade policeman, because from our short acquaintance so far, I have formed the view that you’re relatively honest. And so, with you, right from the start a girl gets to know where she is in the pecking order.’

Rossel sat up.

‘How did I . . .?’

Everything hurt. It was the sharpness of the pain in his ribs that took his breath away, but he had been beaten so thoroughly that as he subsided back into the mattress, every other part of his anatomy began registering its own agony.

She got out of bed and took off the blanket, her dressing gown and most of the undergarments. Then picked up her clothes from a small green armchair and began to dress. Even though it was so cold in the room that her breath froze in the air, she dressed unhurriedly, holding his gaze as she spoke.

‘I found you last night, lying in the street in front of the apartment block. A stray dog was licking at your heels. Everyone in the building knows you have been in The Crosses so I figured at least five or six of our friends and neighbours had stepped over you before I came. Another hour, I think, and it would have been too late. If you had leprosy or bubonic plague, they might have taken you in, propped you up in front of the fire and nursed you back to health, but a trip to prison can be just as contagious and is something they fear more.’

‘Not you, though?’

She did up the last button on her plain white shirt.

‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘I’ll brew some tea.’

Rossel tried to lever himself back into a sitting position and half succeeded. He glanced around him at the ruffled sheets and his uniform, discarded on the floor.

He looked at her. It was hardly possible, given the state he was in, but . . .

She shook her head.

‘No such luck, for you, comrade. You were shivering and barely conscious. I got in beside you to warm you through. You were in the war?’

He nodded.

‘So you know it’s the only thing that works. Besides, as a rule, I like to do the deed with people who can at least get my name right.’

*

She fried him some eggs, all she had, and served them on a chipped blue plate with two slices of black bread. He wolfed them down.

Although she had the luxury of a secluded room, she was forced to share the kitchen on his floor. Back on familiar territory, Rossel felt his appetite return. Vassya – she preferred to be called Vassya, a play on her surname – got up and went over to the window. She rested half her backside on the sill and blew hard on her tea. Rossel leant back, at last finding himself a little at ease with her. Enjoying watching her be herself. An errant pink curler – she had set them in her hair – sprang free and rolled away under the table.

‘Talking of names,’ Vassya said, ‘your parents must have been dedicated Bolsheviks to name their son after the revolution.’

‘It was my father’s choice,’ he replied. ‘I was born a few weeks after the storming of the Winter Palace. Babies were being given all manner of revolutionary names, in my case literally. It could have been worse. Vladlen, or Barrikad, or Spartak. Elektrofikatsiya or Oktyabrina for the girls. I’ve met a few of those.’

‘That is impressive devotion to the Communist cause on your father’s part.’

‘It cooled.’

After a while, Vassya began to talk.

She had been a pilot in the war. ‘We cut our engines as we approached our targets,’ she said. ‘Biplanes, the slowest thing in the air, slower than big Mongolian geese, so we cut the engines to fly in as quiet as we could. But you can’t stop the wind whistling around those heavy wings and the bracing wires. The Krauts said it sounded like witches zooming around the night sky. Except that we were dropping bombs instead of casting spells.’

Rossel had heard the story of the Nachthexen, the Night Witches, many times before – it was a staple of wartime propaganda – but he let her talk on as he sipped his tea.

The women of the Night Bomber Regiment had flown hundreds of sorties each, bombing arsenals, supply lines, depots, enemy airfields. ‘The Nazi planes were too quick for their own good. If they saw us, we just had to bank hard and they would fly right past. But the flak and the ground fire – we weren’t too slow for that. Get caught in the searchlights and they would turn you into mincemeat if you didn’t know what you were doing.’

She looked sad.

‘What were you doing before the war?’ he asked.

‘A student. Engineering. I was only in my second year when I flew a plane for the first time.’

‘Difficult to go from engineering studies to