Burying the Sun (3 page)

With its buried statues, its camouflage nets and gray paint, and its ruined parks, I no longer recognized my city. As I always did when I was discouraged, I took my worry to Yelena. Somehow she always found a way to cheer me. “How,” I asked her, “will Leningrad ever to be the same again?”

For an answer she wrote a poem.

I guess she meant eventually everything would be all right, only it looked to me as if it might take a while.

July 1941

Yelena's patriotic work took place on the roof of the Winter Palace, where she worked for three hours each night as an air-raid warden. Though German Messerschmitts sometimes flew over the city, they flew at very high altitudes. As yet there were no bombs, but they could come at any time, and the city had to be prepared. I hated the idea of Yelena risking her life every night, but she was proud of her assignment.

“You are digging air-raid shelters, Georgi, and I will warn everyone when to go into them. You will protect the people, and I will protect the buildings.”

“A building isn't worth a life. Promise me you will get down and into the safety of a shelter if the planes come.”

She wouldn't promise. “There are thousands and thousands of girls like me in Leningrad,” she said, “but there is only one Winter Palace. Come and see for yourself, Georgi.”

“There are hundreds of palaces,” I argued. And to myself I said, But there is no one like you. Still, I agreed to join her one night after my digging was over. I was eager to see the palace where long ago my mama had lived with the empress and the tsar and their children. She had told Marya and me stories of ballrooms with golden ceilings and a room whose walls were made of precious stone.

“Mama,” I said, “I'm going with Yelena tonight to the Winter Palace. Would you like to come with us?”

Mama smiled sadly. “I'd give a great deal to visit the Winter Palace I remember, but not today's Winter Palace.” In a hushed voice she said, “There was a
great deal of injustice when the tsar lived there, Georgi, but it was spoiled for me when the Bolsheviks took it over. They planned the arrests and murders of thousands of people there. I have no wish to see it again.” After a moment Mama relented, for her anger never lasted long, burning and then cooling just as quickly. “Of course you must go with Yelena. She's a brave girl, and whatever has happened in the palace, the building itself must not be blamed. It has always been one of the glories of St. Petersburg.”

The roof of the palace stretched for acres, so Yelena was only one of many air-raid wardens assigned to the roof. To reach Yelena's section, we went through door after door and climbed stairway after stairway. The part of the palace we traveled through was unoccupied. I gasped at what I saw: gilded walls, ceilings painted with cupids flying about in blue sky and pink clouds, marble columns, and floors so shiny you could see your reflection in them. Though the crystal chandeliers and all the valuable
furniture and paintings had been put away, I could still imagine them as Mama had described them.

The great empty rooms of the palace were so eerie, to break the tension I let go of Yelena's hand and, taking off my shoes, began to slide about over a polished floor. At first Yelena was shocked, but after a moment she slipped out of her shoes, and the two of us glided back and forth, trying to see who could slide the longest distance. When we heard one of the guards coming, we hurriedly got into our shoes and, laughing, raced up the stairway.

At each roof station there were pails of water and sand as well as a wicked-looking ax. I tried to imagine Yelena flailing about with the ax.

“I've tried it, Georgi. It's heavy, but if I had to, I know I could do it.”

Yelena's section looked northwest across the Neva to Vasilevsky Island. We settled comfortably against one of the chimneys. Though it was night, a pale sun gilded the Neva. In the sky there was nothing more
dangerous than a few pink clouds. The palace was only four stories high, yet we looked down on the green roofs of Leningrad, with their hundreds of chimneys, like so many mushrooms springing up from a forest floor. More than two hundred years ago Peter the Great had built a city where there had been nothing but marshes and sea. When it was finished, he ruled that no building could be taller than his palace.

“Up here on the roof we are like kings and queens,” Yelena said, “looking out over our kingdom.”

Across the Neva was the camouflaged spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and on Vasilevsky Island the university buildings.

Yelena said, “With the war it looks like we will never be students at the university, Georgi. Still, it's nice to think about, like keeping yourself from freezing in the cold by imagining what it would be like to walk into a warm room.”

“What would you study at the university?” I asked.

“Russian literature,” she said. “I want to read Pushkin and Lermontov and every Russian poem that has ever been written.”

I looked around nervously. I didn't want anyone to overhear Yelena if she was going to recite Lermontov, since she always recited his love poetry.

But she only asked, “Georgi, what will you study if the war ends?”

“I want to go back to Siberia,” I said. Quickly I added, “Not to Dudinka and the cold and the exile, but to the Siberia Marya and I saw in the summer, the birch trees and the great river and the reindeer and, most of all, the Samoyed people who were so good to us. The Communist Party has shut them and their reindeer up in farms. The Samoyeds must hate it. I want to study the native peoples of Russia—I want to become an expert and convince the Party to let the Samoyeds and their reindeer roam free. We still have the boots and parka they made for my father. I'll show them to you sometime.”

Across from Vasilevsky Island were Petrograd Island and the Lenfilm movie studio where all the famous movies were made.

“Maybe I'll write a great film,” Yelena said, “like
Ivan the Terrible
.”

“And I'll play Ivan.”

So we sat talking for three hours in the twilight of the white night. At midnight the next shift arrived, and we made our way back down the stairs and through the empty palace rooms with their ghosts of the dead tsar and empress and their poor dead son and daughters.

Because of staying up so late, I was half asleep the next morning when I reached the Hermitage. Marya was already there. Although some of the museum employees had left for the army and some had been sent off, like Viktor, to the Luga River to build fortifications against the Germans, Comrade Orbeli had managed to recruit new workers. One trainload of the museum's treasures had already left with hundreds of
crates. As I had loaded them onto the railroad cars I couldn't help but notice the antiaircraft guns mounted on the cars like giant nursemaids to watch over their charges.

Now the second shipment was nearly ready. There was little left in the museum, only the empty frames. While I was packing one of the last boxes, a soldier wandered into the gallery. Vera, one of the guards, hurried to stop him, calling,
“Ostanovka!”
“Halt!”

Embarrassed, the soldier stopped in his tracks.
“Prastitye,”
he mumbled. “I am from the country and have never been in Leningrad. When our company passed through the city, I wanted a look at the great museum. We learned about it in our school.
Prastitye
,” he said again, and turned to leave.

“That's all right, Vera,” I said. With the way the war was going, the soldier might never get to the museum again. “Since you've come this far,” I told him, “I'll give you a tour.”

The soldier looked around the gallery, disappointed and puzzled. “The frames are all empty.”

“Never mind, I packed every painting in this room, and I know them like the back of my hand. All Dutch, every one. There, for example.” Guessing what would be sure to interest him, I pointed to an empty gold frame. “That is a picture of a Dutch farm. You can see a man at his spring plowing. He has two big white horses. They look strong enough to pull the whole country to another place on the map, great muscly fellows.”

The soldier was staring hard at the empty frame, nodding his head. “Very few trees,” I went on, “only one or two starting to bud out. Holland is built on the sea, so you don't have a lot of trees. And in the background the steeple of a church. Over on the right-hand side is a windmill. The Dutch have to spend their lives pumping away the sea. The best thing of all is the sky. In all these paintings it's the finest thing. Holland is flat, so you get as much sky as you want, miles of it.
The painters make the most of it. This one is filled with rosy clouds spread like sour cream on a dish of borscht so that just a bit of the beet juice seeps through.”

He looked from the frame to me and back again, nodding eagerly. “Yes,” he said, “I see it all. We would have given much to have such horses on our collective farm.”

I took him from empty frame to empty frame, pointing out in one picture how cleverly the artist had placed the snow over the countryside and in another how everyone in the village, adults and children alike, was skating on the river, and how a fine big brown dog with a patch of white on his chest was on the ice.

When he left, the soldier took my hand in his and shook it vigorously. “Wonderful pictures,” he said. “I'll never forget them, and I'll tell the others on the farm when I get back from the front. Especially the big horses.”

That night there was borscht for dinner, and it
reminded me of the farmer-soldier who had come to the gallery. Marya laughed at my story, but I knew she hadn't really listened to me. I guessed she had something she wanted to say to us. I could always tell, because she bit at her lip and peeked out at you from under her dark lashes.

Mama knew it as well. When I finished my tale, Mama said, “Marya, something is on your mind.”

In one long breath the words tumbled out. “It is Comrade Orbeli. He has assigned me to travel with the train this time when the last shipment from the Hermitage leaves. Several of us are going, for there must be people at the other end who know how to preserve the treasures. It can't be too damp or too dry for them or they will be ruined. Only I hate to be away from Leningrad. I don't want to leave you, Mama, and if I go, Georgi is sure to do something foolish.”

With great indignation I threw my napkin at her, yet the truth was I was shaken by the idea that she
would leave us. I had never been separated from Marya; without her I might be in an orphanage or lie buried someplace in Siberia.

“How long will you be gone, dear?” Mama asked. Her face was pale, but her voice was strong. Better than anyone, she knew that you could not say no to an order.

“I don't know, Mama. They won't tell us or perhaps they don't know. It could be months—or longer. It depends on the war.”

“Where are you to go?”

From habit Marya lowered her voice. “That's the worst part of it. It's a secret. No one has been told.”

“
I
know,” I said.

Marya stared at me. “Don't be so smart. Of course you don't know.
I
don't know.”

“But I
do
know. When we were loading the first train, I got to talking with the engineer—about how fast the train could go and so forth. He told me the train was going to Sverdlovsk. You'll be safe enough
from the Germans there.”

Marya's brown eyes were very round. She whispered, “Georgi, you shouldn't have said that.”

Mama began to sob. We both looked at her with alarm. Suddenly I realized what I had done, I and my bragging and my big mouth. The city far away in the Ural Mountains that was now called Sverdlovsk was once called Yekaterinburg, which meant the Empress Catherine's City. Like all names in Russia that had anything to do with tsars or empresses, the name had been changed, but to Mama Yekaterinburg stood for hell itself. It was in that city that the Bolsheviks had murdered the tsar and the empress and their son and four daughters, the four daughters who had been like sisters to Mama.

“No, Marya!” Mama said. “You can't go to that terrible place. It's cursed. I'll never see you again.”

Marya put her arms around Mama. “Mama, I have to go. Not only is it an order that I mustn't disobey, but those paintings are everything to me. They
are like my children. I must go with them.”

“Not there, not there,” Mama whispered.

“That was long ago,” Marya pleaded.

“In my heart it was only a minute ago,” Mama said, but she wiped the tears from her eyes. She sighed. “You are right, Marya. When all of this is over, whether we are still here or not, those treasures will be there to remind people what the war was all about. In Germany they are burning paintings. Here we are risking our lives to save them.”

The next day, with many kisses and promises to write, Marya left, her last words to me: “Take care of Mama, Georgi, and stay out of trouble.”

August 1941

The second week in August Viktor returned. Olga had knocked on our door on a warm Saturday evening. “Let me sit for a while with the two of you. It's too hot to sleep, and I worry about Viktor and about Yelena perched on top of the Winter Palace like a dove on a treetop. What if the Germans begin to bomb?”

Olga often knocked on our door. She could not stand to be alone. When there was no one in the apartment with her, we heard the radio going long into the night. I could only guess what voices inside her she was drowning out. I knew Mama was tired after a
long day at the hospital as well as the work of unloading wood, but she never turned Olga away.

“I'll put on the kettle,” she said. Mama believed that hot tea on a hot night would cool you off.

Suddenly Olga sprang from her chair. “What is that?”

Mother took the hissing kettle from the stove, and we all listened. I heard nothing, but Olga ran to the door and opened it. Someone was calling her name. We followed her to the stairway, and at the bottom of the stairs was Viktor.

“Olga, help me,” he cried. We all ran down the stairway, and with me on one side and Mama on his other side and Olga behind pushing, we half carried Viktor up the stairway and into our apartment, where he fell into one of the chairs.

If I had seen him on the street, I don't think I would have recognized him. He had lost half his weight. His cheeks were sunken, and he had a straggly white beard that didn't match his dark hair. He was
always a neat man, with his hair slicked back, and though he had only two shirts, the one he wore was always clean. Now his clothes were covered with dirt, and there were streaks of dirt across his face.

He looked and looked at Olga and Mama and me. “Ah, I did not think to ever see you again,” he cried. “The Germans have crossed the Luga River. Everything is lost. There were hundreds of thousands of us. We dug trenches until our arms could no longer lift a pick or a shovel, and then we crawled on the ground and dug with our hands. There was hardly any food, and no place to sleep but the fields. All the while, the Germans fired their artillery at us and dropped bombs on us from their planes. A woman who was working beside me was killed. One minute she was there and the next minute…” He put his hands over his eyes.

“In the end none of our work mattered. The German tanks rolled over our earthworks as if they were cotton wool. Half our solders didn't have guns, while the Germans were shooting with cannons. We
turned and ran, everyone ran. The roads were so crowded, you could hardly move. And not just the volunteers. The soldiers were running as well. The people on the farms were running, driving their farm animals ahead of them. It was like a thousand Noah's arks. And I'll tell you something else. There were Estonians who joined up with the Germans to fight us. Now we must wait for the Germans to put an end to us.”

Olga sobbed while Viktor talked, but Mama was busy. She put a glass of tea and a bowl of soup in front of Viktor, who began to throw the food down his throat.

Mama laid a hand on his arm. “Gently, gently, Viktor. You will make yourself sick.”

“The Germans will march into Leningrad and kill us all,” Olga wailed.

“No,” Mama said. “They will think there is no need for that. They will surround us, hoping to starve us, and only then will they march into the city. That
way they won't have to sacrifice their soldiers.”

“But they will bomb us.” Olga began to cry again.

“It's all over,” Viktor said. His soup bowl was empty, and some color was coming back to his face.

I couldn't stand such talk. “Why is everyone giving up?” I demanded. “We have bomb shelters now, and we are going to learn how to fight the Germans hand-to-hand if we have to.”

“Georgi is right,” Mama said. “This is our city. Why should we let the Germans take it from us? You will see. When the time comes, we'll know how to fight.”

The next day the headline in the newspaper read, the enemy is at the gates. When I went to the food store for Mama to get flour, I found long lines of angry people. Word had gotten out that the German army had crossed the Luga. Everyone was thinking the same thing: The Germans will starve us.

At once the government passed out ration cards. We were allowed a little over a pound of bread a day,
and if you got to the store in time, there was sugar and fat and millet to make porridge. We even had bread left over for Mama to slice and dry into her rusks. Our rusk bag was bursting at the seams, but still Mama dried the bread.

Large numbers of women and children were sent out of the city, but so many refugees flooded into Leningrad from the south to escape the Germans, the population of the city stayed at three million. Rumors flew. There was a story that German planes dropped leaflets on the outskirts of the city, telling the women to put on white dresses so that the bombers could see them and not drop bombs near them. Some women were foolish enough to do it, and instead of sparing the women, the German bombers used the white spots as targets.

Leningrad was divided into sections, several blocks to a section. Each one of the city's 150 sections was to be protected by an army of volunteers. Everyone was welcome. At last I was to be in an army,
but such an army: women, children, and old men. Each section had its own store of ammunition. Heavy guns were put onto trucks. The trucks would be driven about to be used where they were needed. We collected bottles and were taught how to make bombs and throw them against tanks. We also practiced using rifles so that we could shoot down Germans parachuting into the city. There were not enough rifles for each of us to have one to practice with, just one rifle that was passed around within our section. I had never fired a gun before, and when my turn came to try the rifle, I nearly fell over from its recoil.

To stop the German tanks from advancing into Leningrad, cement blocks were scattered throughout the city, making it look like a giant had spilled sugar cubes. Wooden posts were pounded into any open space—parks, squares, and even the cemeteries—to keep Germans from parachuting into the city. Everyone who could lift a shovel or a pick was put to work. Thousands of miles of ditches were plowed to
stop the German tanks. The ditches hadn't stopped the Germans at the Luga River, but that didn't seem to matter.

One day a burly soldier marched into our section and called for volunteers to demonstrate how to kill a German soldier if one happened to walk down one of Leningrad's streets. Dmitry and I volunteered at once. The soldier started his lesson with me.

“Go ahead and try to hit me,” the soldier ordered.

I swung at his chin, and before my fist could connect, I was propelled into the air and landed on the sidewalk.

Dmitry cheered. The soldier gave him a stony look and the same order. In a minute he was beside me on the ground while the others applauded.

All morning we were instructed on how to dispose of German soldiers, and all afternoon Dmitry and I practiced on each other until we were black and blue. After that we were careful in patrolling our section, eager to come upon the enemy so that we could put
our new skills into practice, but we saw no German soldiers.

At the end of August Dmitry's reporter brother, Vladimir, returned from the front with more bad news, so bad it could not be kept out of the newspaper. The headline read:
VIRONA
lost. The
Virona
had been one of the navy's largest ships. Vladimir had been covering the war with the Russian navy in the Gulf of Finland. The ships were anchored near the city of Tallinn on the coast of Estonia, another country that Russia had conquered. I begged Dmitry to let me come and hear Vladimir's story for myself.

The Trushins' apartment was a pleasure to visit. Mrs. Trushin always seemed to be covered with flour. No sooner did you poke your head inside their place than Mrs. Trushin would open the oven door and take out some
piroshki
or
makivneki
oozing raisins, which was probably why all the Trushins were a little on the chubby side. The minute I walked through the door of the apartment, I could smell fresh baking. There were
no raisins to be had now, nor meat for
piroshki
, but still there was a wonderful fragrance.

“Georgi, come and have some egg bread,” Mrs. Trushin said. “I baked it for poor Vladimir. What he has been through! Let me pour you some tea, and here are the sugar cubes. It's a miracle I could still find some.”

The Trushins drank their tea in the old-fashioned way, holding a cube of sugar in their mouths to sweeten the tea as it went down.

I joined Dmitry, Vladimir, and Mr. Trushin, who worked in the warehouses of the freight docks. The warehouses were where food was stored. Whether Mr. Trushin was able to fill his pockets I never knew, but there were always plenty of ingredients for Mrs. Trushin's baking.

Mr. Trushin said, “Vladimir is telling us the sad story of the Russian navy. I'd like to know who was stupid enough to send our navy away from the safety of the Kronstadt naval base.” Kronstadt was on an
island about thirty miles east of Leningrad.

“The deed is done, Papa,” Vladimir said. “What good does it do to talk about who is to blame? If you had seen what I saw, none of that would matter to you.” Vladimir was unshaven, his hair long, his clothes a mixture of army and navy castoffs.

“Vladimir was on the
Virona
,” Dmitry said proudly.

“We never had a chance,” Vladimir said. “The Germans guns were only a few miles away, and their shells came one after another. Overhead, German Junkers were dropping bombs on us. There must have been nearly two hundred boats there, all of them sitting ducks. Before they sailed away, the ships were supposed to take on board all the Russians from Estonia who were trying to leave the country to escape the Germans. On the
Virona
we had the Russian navy families who had been stationed there.

“It wasn't just the the shelling and the bombing,” Vladimir went on. “A terrible storm blew up, and once we were under way, we had to make our path
through the German mines.”

I knew all about mines. “They're magnetic, aren't they? They're drawn to the metal in the ships.”

“Everybody knows that,” Dmitry said.

“Those mines made us inch along. Still, we sat down to dinner as if we were in Mama's kitchen. Afterward I went up on deck to watch the shelling and the bombs. It was like a great fireworks display, the German shells and bombs and our own antiaircraft guns on the ship booming away at the planes. All at once the ship exploded under me. In one second I was in the air, and then I was in the cold bathtub. People were swimming all around me, calling out for help. I kicked off my shoes and treaded water until I spotted a plank from the ship. I hung on for dear life.”

Mrs. Trushin was wiping tears from her eyes with one hand and making the sign of the cross with the other. She urged more egg bread and tea on Vladimir. “You must eat, my darling, to get your strength back.”

“A cutter picked me and several others up, but many were drowned. Of the twenty-nine Russian transports that set sail, twenty-three were lost.”

“The fleet should never have been cooped up there in reach of the Germans,” Mr. Trushin said. “What were the commanders thinking?”

“In this country,” Vladimir said with a shrug, “if you think for yourself, they shoot you.”

“Vladimir!” Mrs. Trushin said. “How can you say such a thing?”

“I say it to you because I can say it to no one else.”

“But what does it mean?” I wanted to know.

“It means,” Vladimir said, “that the Germans are drawing the noose more tightly around Leningrad.”

I had to hurry through the streets to reach home, for a ten-o'clock curfew was now in effect. There had been almost no bombing in Leningrad. Still, listening to Vladimir, I worried more than ever about Yelena sitting up on the roof of the palace. I needn't have worried, for when I got home, I found Yelena and
Olga looking out for me.

“Wonderful news!” Olga greeted me from the top of the stairway. “They have put antiaircraft guns on the roof of the palace, and the soldiers are on guard there. Yelena was sent home.”

“Georgi, come inside our apartment and listen,” Yelena said. “Anna Akhmatova is going to be on the radio. Your mother is already in our kitchen.”

Viktor had recovered and was now on air-raid duty, so we were only four sitting around the table. Akhmatova was Leningrad's most famous poet. One by one she had seen poets silenced. Her dearest friend, the great poet Osip Mandelstam, had been arrested right before her eyes. He had died in a prison camp. Akhmatova's husband had been executed by the Bolsheviks. After that, her poetry was banned in the Soviet Union. Now here she was, reading her poems on the radio.

I knew all about Akhmatova because she was Yelena's hero. I had complained that poets were useless
in a war, but Yelena had told me that it was as important to feed the spirit of the city as it was the city's hunger. “Akhmatova's words do that,” Yelena said. Yelena and some poet friends of hers at the library were printing poems and placing them around the city for people to read.

In her strong voice Akhmatova greeted the citizens of the city. Leningrad had always been a part of her life, she said. “Leningrad gave my poetry its spirit.” Leningrad, she promised, would never be conquered by the Germans.

Yelena and Olga were crying; even Mama had tears in her eyes. For once I was glad I wasn't in the army. I was in Leningrad, and Leningrad was sure to be as dangerous a place as any battlefield.