My only complaint of this book was that it was too short - I could have read this book for another 200 pages. One of the best historical fiction narratives I’ve ever come across.
Notes
“Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.” He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. “And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life.”
Heroes and fast sleepers, then, can switch off their thoughts when necessary. Cowards and insomniacs, my people, are plagued by babble on the brain.
Kolya was a braggart, a know-it-all, a Jew-baiting Cossack, but his confidence was so pure and complete it no longer seemed like arrogance, just the mark of a man who had accepted his own heroic destiny.
Kolya seemed fearless, but everyone has fear in them somewhere; fear is part of our inheritance. Aren’t we descended from timid little shrews who cowered in the shadows while the great beasts stomped past? Cannibals and Nazis didn’t make Kolya nervous, but the threat of embarrassment did—the possibility that a stranger might laugh at the lines he’d written.
In certain ways I am deeply stupid. I don’t say this out of modesty. I believe that I’m more intelligent than the average human being, though perhaps intelligence should not be looked at as a single gauge, like a speedometer, but as a full array of tachometers, odometers, altimeters, and the rest.
The loneliest sound in the world is other people making love.
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.
The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening.
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.
“Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She’s beautiful; when you’re with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she’s been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.”
“The secret to winning a woman is calculated neglect.”
“Don’t worry, my friend. I won’t let you die.” I was seventeen and stupid and I believed him.
Perhaps, though, it is easier to hide your fear when you’re afraid all the time.
“There’s a difference between ignoring a woman and enticing her. You entice her with mystery. She wants you to come after her, but you keep circling. It’s the same with sex. Amateurs yank down their pants and shove it in there like they’re trying to spear a fish. But the man with talent knows it’s all about teasing, circling, coming close, and moving away.”
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.”
“That’s our plan? We’re going to walk fifty kilometers, right past the Germans, to a poultry collective that maybe didn’t get burned down, grab a dozen eggs, and come home?” “Well, anything would sound ridiculous if you said it with that tone of voice.”
They have decided nothing can kill them but God himself, and they don’t even believe in him.
“What’s the good news?” “Pardon?” “You said the bad news is we’re going the wrong way.” “There isn’t any good news. Just because there’s bad news doesn’t mean there’s good news, too.”
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.
The Einsatzgruppen were Nazi death squads, killers handpicked from the ranks of the regular army, the Waffen-SS, and the Gestapo, chosen for their brutal efficiency and their pure Aryan blood.
The Nazis had printed thousands of invitation cards to a grand victory party Hitler intended to throw at the Astoria Hotel after conquering what he had called, in a speech to his torch-bearing storm troopers, “the birthplace of Bolshevism, that city of thieves and maggots.”
Walking in the countryside I felt a physical change, as if I were breathing pure oxygen after months at the bottom of a coal mine. The tangles in my gut uncoiled, my ears unclogged, I had strength in my legs I hadn’t felt for months.
So many great Russians endured long stretches in prison. That night I learned I would never be a great Russian.
“Your mother and sister weren’t on the radio telling us all to be brave. Look, I don’t expect composers and poets to be heroes. I just don’t like hypocrites.”
Now, listen: women don’t like silent lovers. They’re giving you something precious and they want to know you appreciate it. Give me a little nod to show you’re listening.”
The arithmetic was brutal, but brutal arithmetic always worked in Russia’s favor.
Stepping inside the farmhouse felt like entering the belly of the whale, the warmest place I’d been in months.
This was not a surge of courage, but the opposite— my fear of Vika’s death overpowered all my other fears.
I’ve been afraid for so long I can spot the fear in other people before they know it’s there.
He was like a cheerful senile grandfather who sat at the dinner table with beet soup splattered on his collar, telling once more the story of his encounter with the emperor, though everyone in his family could recite it now from memory.