23) Kolya says as he drops off into a seemingly untroubled sleep. "They're not preserving us for the night just to shoot us tomorrow," (p. Lev is petrified, but Kolya is everything that Lev is not boisterous and bombastic, handsome and charming, and annoyingly optimistic.
His cellmate, Kolya, is a soldier who's just been arrested for desertion and together the two await the dawn and almost certain execution. Lev alone is caught, arrested, and thrown into Leningrad's infamous prison, the Crosses. Lev and his friends-tempted by the prospect of chocolate or other contraband-break curfew to loot the body. But his youth might still have passed uneventfully had a dead Nazi paratrooper not fallen onto his street one night. "I was seventeen, flooded with a belief in my own heroic destiny," (p. Although too young to join the army, Lev refused to flee with his mother and sister, and proudly serves as commander of his apartment building's volunteer fire brigade. David asks to hear the true story, so Lev reaches into the distant past to share the horrors, privations, and adventures that the famously besieged city offered one young boy on the brink of manhood.Ī Jew and the son of a poet who was "disappeared" by the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), Lev was nonetheless an ardent patriot who believed in the justness of the Soviet cause and enough of a naïf to still believe in the romance of war. Mild-mannered Lev Beniov is reputed-by unspoken family lore-to have killed two Nazis in a knife fight that cost him a single fingertip.
Unable to muster any enthusiasm for his easy and undeniably pleasant American youth, he hops on a Florida-bound plane to interview his Russian grandfather about life in Leningrad during World War II. At the age of thirty-four, David, an Los Angeles–based screenwriter specializing in mutant superhero films, is asked to write an autobiographical piece for a trade magazine.
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