“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“In the midst of all that terror, the screams, the heavy footsteps there was something else, something strange. Kolya was laughing.”
Every now and then it happens that you mention a book and the eyes of everyone who has read it light up. It is not the effect of the “essential classic” (to be read with the confidence that the quotes suggest), nor of the latest editorial case (“The book of the year” and we are in January); it is as if an intimate memory were activated, a private event of inestimable value and tenderness, and a complicity was created similar to that of two lovers who remember their first knowing look, that epiphany between two from which the rest of the world was excluded.
This is what we seemed to glimpse in the eyes of those to whom we told that we had just finished “City of Thieves” by David Benioff (or Beniov). One of those books in which you laugh and cry, sometimes together, you want to reread that poignant detail or that stormy description, in which you stop stunned by the innocence of the feelings and the atrocity of their absence, children at war, a devastating oxymoron.
Leningrad, 1941. German siege. Two beardless boys, one accused of desertion and the other profiteering, are spared by an inscrutable NKDV colonel in exchange for an out-of-place, out-of-mind, out-of-time mission: to recover 12 eggs for his daughter’s wedding cake. (“She had simply drawn so many “x”s until she covered the entire sheet.
Who knows why, this scared me more than the uniform or the puncher’s face. I could have understood a man who draws boobs or dogs, but one who only ever draws x’s?”). Thus begins an absurd pilgrimage, punctuated by surreal encounters, cold nights and literary bouts, the stages of a friendship as unexpected as it is profound. Kolja and Lev, two dots in the snow: one shrewd, brilliant and generous, the other insecure, awkward, thoughtful. Forced to be together, destined to love each other. “The days have become one disaster after another” – and, truly, it is not easy to explain the sorcery that draws us to these disasters, the light-hearted way Benioff has of telling us what it is like to understand who you are or who you are becoming amidst the hunger, the cold, the rubble, the people who disappear. It’s hard to imagine smiling and getting scared and loving like that in less than 300 pages. Getting to the ending and reopening the book all over again, risking reading it all again. Some people call it Literature: it could be a moment’s distraction, trying to add something, and we would immediately betray the delicate mastery with which these strange adventures were reported to us.
“They want to raze our city to the ground, they want to starve us. But we are like two bricks of Piter. You can’t burn a brick. You can’t starve a brick.”
“And where did you hear this?”
“My lieutenant. Why?”
“Is this the same lieutenant who then stepped on a mine?”
“Yeah, poor guy. Forget about bricks.”
It’s all like this, a mutual building, a testing oneself in comparison with the other, a wandering with a precise purpose (finding the eggs) but totally senseless (finding the eggs) which makes almost every event in the story precisely senseless . Yet every senselessness capitulates in the face of the brightness of a character like Kolja, in the face of his crazy contempt for fear, his inappropriate comments, his passion for literary creation, his unscratchable, genuine vitality. It’s as if we feel lucky to have met him, if the years tend to dull the emotions a little, the sight of this little man and his shining in Lev’s world, so fearful, so overwhelmed by thoughts, also revitalizes our gaze, they make us want to say, “I just read a great book.”
Written by Delis
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David Benioff, La città dei ladri, Neri Pozza, Vicenza, 2011
Original edition: City of Thieves, Viking Books, New York, 2008