The days in Moscow slid into one another like shadows at dusk. Christian felt less a soldier than a ghost, drifting from one hidden corner of the city to the next. He no longer counted time by hours or days but by doorways opened, by voices lowered, by the scrape of boots against stone floors where no light entered.
Above ground, Moscow was a fortress bristling with defiance; banners snapping in the wind, propaganda booming from loudspeakers, the endless tramp of Red Army boots. But beneath, in the city's veins, there was only hunger, whispering, and the sickly odor of coal smoke that seemed to seep into his very skin.
He learned the underworld of Moscow not through maps but by smell and sound. A wet cellar where potatoes rotted in burlap sacks. A school basement turned into a meeting hall where chalk still clung to broken blackboards. A boiler room where rusted pipes hissed as though warning intruders away.
Each place had its keeper. A boy with frostbitten ears who carried coded notes sewn into the lining of his coat. A woman with yellowed fingers from smoking too much cheap tobacco, who brewed tea so weak it tasted like ashes. A gaunt priest who spoke in riddles about sacrifice and resurrection before slipping Christian a ration card marked with faint numbers.
No gathering lasted more than minutes. They came together like sparks, flared briefly and then vanished into darkness. Each departure took a different route, a different alley, a different stairwell. The city was alive with listening ears, and no one dared tempt fate by walking the same path twice.
Moscow spoke, but never aloud. It whispered. "The Germans reached Klin…"
"A commissar was shot by his own men…" "The NKVD took twenty from the Arbat…"
Voices bent close, eyes always darting, lips brushing against mufflers and collars. The words were fragments, blades disguised as gossip. Truth or trap, there was no way to know.
Christian became a man of nods and silences. He let sentences wash past him like smoke, never clinging, never answering. To speak was to risk. To listen was survival.
One night, in the back room of a shuttered bakery, the whispers turned into knives. They sat hunched over a crooked table, a single oil lamp spilling thin light across their faces. A man with hollow cheeks and eyes like glass leaned forward. His voice, quiet but sharp, cut through the murmurs.
"Who are you really? Where do you come from?" The room stilled. Every gaze turned on him. Christian felt the question like a gun barrel pressed to his temple. He had seconds no more. He let his shoulders sag, lowered his eyes, and answered not in Russian, but in Polish. His words trembled as though torn from an old wound.
"I am a Jew from Kraków," he said. "The Germans came… they took everything. My mother, my father, my sister, everyone I loved. Dogs, fire, soldiers shouting. I ran. I crawled through the sewers like an animal, choking on filth, until I could no longer stand. I crossed east, alone, starving, praying only to live one more day."
His voice cracked. His hands shook just enough for them to see. For a long moment, the man's eyes searched him, probing for cracks. Then, slowly, he leaned back.
"Then you are one of us," he said at last. The others murmured assent, some cursing the Germans, some nodding in grim solidarity. A woman crossed herself. Someone poured Christian a cup of tea so thin it tasted of boiled dust.
But across the table, a single pair of eyes still lingered on him; sharp, unconvinced. Christian felt the stare burrow into him even as the meeting broke up. Masks were accepted, but never trusted. That night, in a deserted courtyard, he burned the sketches of Kremlin guard rotations someone had slipped him. The paper curled into blackened ash. Too neat. Too ready. A trap disguised as a gift.
Everywhere he turned, masks shifted. A tram conductor whispered troop movements but never asked for fare. A professor knew the next safe house before Christian even asked. A woman wept too loudly, her tears falling like signals for ears hidden in stairwells.
Double agents. Informants. Survival as performance. Moscow was not a city of resistance but of theater, where every line spoken might be rehearsed for someone unseen.
Every step carried weight. He could not laugh, not even in jest; laughter was as suspicious as a knife. He could not linger in a window, for eyes from across the street might be watching. He could not cough too long in a line, lest someone mistake him for weak, or foreign, or out of place.
Silence was his shield, but also his prison. At night, lying on straw in cellars or corners of ruined apartments, he felt the silence pressing in like a second skin.
Through it all, one thing bound him to himself: the ring. Kristina's ring, cool against his chest, hidden beneath his shirt. At times, in the thickest silence, he touched it lightly, and it was as if her voice returned, faint but present. He remembered the way her eyes had filled when she gave it back. The way his hand had trembled as he returned it. Now it was his last anchor, proof that somewhere beyond this city of masks and whispers, love had once existed.
Moscow was a labyrinth not of streets but of fear. Doors opened and closed with eyes peering through slits. Footsteps followed but never arrived. The NKVD was everywhere, unseen but constant, their presence felt like the weight of a hand at the back of his neck. Every man could be a comrade, every woman a betrayer.
Even children might already be trained to report a stranger. The city was not merely a place to infiltrate; it was a cage meant to crush him.
On the eve of his mission, Christian sat in the cellar of a ruined apartment block. A single candle flickered inside a jar, its flame bending shadows across broken plaster. He had not heard his own voice in days, and when he finally whispered aloud, it startled him.
He closed his hand over the ring, pressed it to his lips, and let the silence swallow the words.
Above, Moscow thundered; tanks grinding over cobblestones, voices shouting orders in the night air. Below, in the earth, he prepared himself to move into the heart of the storm.
If tomorrow was the end, then tonight was all he had left to remember he was human.