Great Historical Novels (83 page)

It was hard to tell how long he lay there, blocking out the chaos, waiting for death. As suddenly as it had begun, the raid was over. The plane engines faded to a drone, and the clatter of anti-aircraft fire stuttered into silence. Slowly, he turned his head and looked out through the bent spokes of the wheel.

It was a nightmare vision — though only the most fevered imagination could have created such terrible detail. Blocks of concrete and twisted steel strewn over the ground, canvas awnings shredded like the sails of wrecked boats. And lying amid the wreckage were dozens of mutilated bodies. Legs ripped off torsos, hands ripped off arms, some still clutching their bread rations in their bloodied fingers. The worst, though, were the severed heads, staring at the sky with open eyes.

He lay still in his small shelter which smelt of mud and mouldy cabbage. He didn’t want to crawl out and confront what was waiting beyond. He prayed to someone or something he’d never believed in.
Give me strength.
Help me. Give me strength
. Finally, with tears streaming down his face, he edged his way out from under the cart and stumbled to his feet.

It was easy enough to spot those who needed help; the bodies that were moving stood out from the dead. He began following the orders of a doctor, a moustached man whose right leg was drenched in blood. Along with the other shocked survivors, they ripped up coats to staunch blood, and lifted the wounded onto makeshift stretchers, covering the corpses with sacks, torn rugs and whatever else they could find. Elias worked as automatically as he could, forcing back nausea, pretending that these were not real people who had been cut down in seconds. No, this was not a mother who had been queuing for bread for her children; this had not been a boy running to snatch his baby brother out of the path of a vegetable cart.

‘You’ll be all right,’ he said repeatedly to those still breathing. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Suddenly his heart began hammering so hard he thought he’d choke. ‘Is it you?’ His voice was clogged with fear. ‘Nina Bronnikova?’

It was certainly Nina, though she was far thinner than she’d been when he last saw her. Her face was white, and her lips so pale they looked as if they’d been drained of blood. She was half-lying against a tram filled with sandbags that had barricaded the entrance to the marketplace; its metal frame had been torn in two.

‘Mr Eliasberg?’ She reached out for him, with hands that were covered in blood.

He knelt beside her. ‘How badly are you hurt?’

‘I don’t know. I tried to get up, but I can’t stand.’ Her left calf was a mess of ruined flesh, shrapnel and blood-soaked stockings.

His stomach heaved. Quickly, he looked back at her face. ‘You’re still conscious. It’s a miracle.’

‘A miracle that anyone has been left alive,’ she murmured.

‘We need to —’ began Elias.

But her eyes had closed, and her head fell with a thud against the side of the tram.

Frantically he felt her wrist for a pulse. Nothing. But on her neck he felt a faint fluttering. He cradled her head in both hands. Slowly, her eyes opened and she looked at him in a dazed way.

‘We have to get you to hospital. Do you think you can make it over to that van?’ Carefully, as if she were the most fragile of instruments, he placed her arm around his neck. ‘Hold on if you can.’

She was lighter than he imagined, but he staggered as he stood up; his legs were shamefully weak. A gangly teenager stood nearby, staring blankly at them, blood trickling out from under his cap. ‘Could you help me?’ gasped Elias. Wordlessly, the boy stepped forward, and together they carried Nina to the nearest van. Already it was crammed with the injured, but no one objected as they laid her in the last empty space at the back.

‘Nina?’ Elias stroked her forehead — but she had lost consciousness again, and he was forced to step away as the engine started.

The teenager went off without a word and Elias was left watching the ambulance weave away through the broken market. He remained there long after the vehicle had disappeared, standing in the shadow of the cracked fountain: without company, without conversation, and intensely aware of the lack of both. Almost angrily, he wiped the tears from his eyes. Being alone was what he was accustomed to, after all. There was no need to cry about it.

Relatives

Aunt Tanya was installed in Nikolai’s apartment for the indeterminate future, and she was as bossy and auntish as ever, though there was no longer anyone around to call her ‘Aunt’. Once or twice, the title slipped out of Nikolai’s mouth. His sister-in-law had always made him feel as if he were a member of the younger generation — as if he should be watching his language and hiding his cigarettes in his pocket. If he’d thought that the likelihood of being starved or bombed into oblivion might have encouraged Tanya to lower her standards, it quickly became clear he was wrong.

She’d arrived in a state of indignation and shock, her ginger hair frothing from under her hat. The apartment block in which she lived with her cousin, her cousin’s husband and her cousin’s father-in-law (their home, for so many years!) had had an entire wall blown off by a powerful Luftwaffe bomb.

‘The front wall, too,’ she stressed, as if this were far worse than any other wall. And perhaps it was, for even in normal times the street had been a busy thoroughfare, and now it was used as a regular army route, so the Katsubas’ living quarters were on display to whole battalions. ‘The Germans have hung out our lives like dirty laundry. Anyone might see that the dishes hadn’t been washed, and that Grigori —’ She lowered her voice. ‘That Grigori had been eating out of the tin again.’

Nikolai’s eyes widened. It was hard to believe that, only a month ago, Tanya had been sleeping in straw and washing in streams in front of other defence-line women.

‘Yes, there was the tin with a spoon sticking out of it,’ she said, interpreting his surprise as shock, ‘for all the world to see. Anna’s spent seventeen years training him out of the habit. “There are such things as plates,” she says — but as soon as we’re off at the bread queues, out comes the spoon and in digs Grigori. One might as well try to teach a pig to count oranges.’

Nikolai shuffled towards the door, hoping to escape the rest of the story. But non-verbal cues became invisible to Tanya on extraordinary occasions — and what was more extraordinary than arriving home to find your apartment minus a wall and your furniture spilling into the street?

‘Grigori’s favourite armchair was hanging on by a whisker. We nearly lost it. As for Grigori’s father, where do you think he was?’

Nikolai couldn’t imagine, but knew he wouldn’t be permitted to leave the room before he was told.

‘He was —’ Tanya lowered her voice dramatically — ‘on the
lavatory
!’

Nikolai suppressed a smile. ‘Poor old fellow.’ He knew Grigori’s father slightly, having played chess with him a few times while the rest of the family squabbled over card games. ‘Is he all right?’

‘All right?’ Tanya pursed her mouth. ‘I suppose so, if you consider it “all right” to be gawked at by an entire neighbourhood with your pants around your ankles and pieces of plaster hanging off your derrière.’

‘Had he not been on the toilet,’ mused Nikolai, ‘he might have fallen into the street along with the dining table. Humiliation’s a small price to pay for a life saved.’

‘I suppose we should thank God for small mercies.’ Now that Tanya was permitted to speak the Lord’s name, due to the Party’s new-found belief that prayer might help a desperate situation, devoutness spilled from her like water from a fountain.

‘I’m sure it seems a large mercy for Grigori’s father.’ It was also merciful, thought Nikolai, that he didn’t have all three Katsubas sleeping on his floor or playing high-volume poker at his table. But it eased his mind a little that Tanya had been handed to him like some kind of universal reckoning. Having her there made things both better and worse. She treated grief like an infectious disease, sweeping it out of corners and wiping it off surfaces — something he remembered from nine years ago. Then, too, he’d felt both gratitude and irritation. But when she put away most of Sonya’s possessions, stacking the dusty books in cartons and cramming the dolls into a cupboard, it was too much.

‘Sonya left them like that for a reason,’ he said furiously, ‘and I’ve been careful not to disturb them. She
will
return.’

‘Of course she’ll return!’ Tanya flushed. ‘And when she does, she’ll need something to keep her occupied. Such as putting her room in order.’ She eyed the pencils lined up on Sonya’s desk, precisely graded in colour and length. ‘I see she inherited her mother’s obsessive habits. When she comes back, we’ll see what we can do about that.’

The relief of hearing Sonya talked about in the future tense made Nikolai forget his anger. He followed Tanya into the other room and watched her preparing to clean, rolling up her sleeves to reveal still sturdy forearms. Having been transferred out of the voluntary defence unit, she was working at the temporary hospital in the Astoria Hotel.
What a formidable sight she’d be in a nurse’s cap
, thought Nikolai. Quite enough to make you run in the opposite direction, whether or not you were wounded.

Nonetheless, he admired her. He knew he’d faint if forced to enter the hospital wards, to witness the horrors wreaked by artillery barrages and shells. ‘You’re an admirable person,’ he said. ‘You make my occupation, scraping horsehair over four metal strings, seem somewhat irrelevant.’

Tanya shrugged. ‘Your job is important as well. Keeping up morale and whatnot.’

This was something of a breakthrough; ever since her younger sister had not only become a musician but had married one, Tanya had been at a loss to understand the
why
— the usefulness — of such a profession. ‘Of course,’ she added with more conviction, ‘you’re also fire-watching.’

Privately, Nikolai found working with the Radio Orchestra far more of an ordeal than battling with fires. When he stumbled from the Radio Hall at the end of each day, his ears rang from Alexander’s curses and Elias’s rebukes, clashing in contrapuntal disharmony with Tchaikovsky’s sublime chords. More than ever he ached for the days before the siege, those ordinary days when he could leave the Conservatoire feeling calm and satisfied, and look forward to seeing Sonya. Now, instead of going home, he would hurry away to replace Tanya in the bread queue, so that she, in turn, could go to her official work, fuelled only by tea and some solidified sugar meted out from the Badayev warehouse disaster.

He dreaded the hair-raising stories she told when she returned to the apartment, sometimes only a minute or two before the ten o’clock curfew. Maimed children with limbs ripped off by shells. Pregnant women on stretchers, their stomachs blown away to reveal dead foetuses. Bleeding
men arriving in pairs, using each other as crutches. Tanya described these things matter-of-factly, as she chomped through her small ration of dry bread. There were few things that put her off her food or brought tears to her eyes, whereas Nikolai, listening to her, found his eyes watering compulsively. Usually he lay back in his chair and draped a menthol-drenched handkerchief over his face, citing blocked sinuses from inhaling cinder dust as an excuse.

The day after the bombing of the Gostiny shopping district, Tanya was more than usually keen to talk. ‘Hundreds were caught unawares, you know. The warning came too late.’

Her face looked blurry viewed through the handkerchief. Could he, just this once, ask her to keep her gory stories to herself?

‘You wouldn’t believe the human damage.’ Tanya slurped her tea. ‘One man was brought in with no nose, no eyes, no mouth: just gaping cavities in his face.’

Nikolai inhaled sharply, filling his own nose and mouth with fabric. He sat up, coughing. ‘Our conductor was there, apparently. But he wouldn’t speak of it at rehearsal today. He looked terrible, as if he were still in shock.’ Rearranging the handkerchief over his face, lying back again, he concentrated on tuning out most of Tanya’s voice.

Then, from a great distance, he heard a few words. ‘Dancer. Beautiful. Ruined.’

‘What?’ He sat up too fast. For a dizzying second he saw three or four Tanyas. ‘What did you say?’

‘A dancer was brought in from Gostiny. Shrapnel all through her leg. I talked to her this evening — she was with the Kirov before the war began, you know.’ Tanya’s voice rang with importance: Nikolai wasn’t the only one to brush shoulders with the cultural elite!

‘What did she look like? Black hair, black eyes? A pointed chin?’
Please
, he thought desperately,
please say no.

‘That’s right. Now, what was her name? The same as the wife of your hoity-toity composer friend, the man with the specs.’

‘Nina.’ Nikolai groaned. ‘Nina Bronnikova. I know her. Was she badly wounded?’

‘Well, she won’t die,’ said Tanya. ‘But it’s safe to say she won’t be doing much dancing.’

‘Ever?’ He remembered Nina’s strong shoulders and slim hips, her kindness to Sonya, her composed serenity at Sollertinsky’s party.

‘She’s still young.’ Tanya sounded determinedly positive. ‘There are
plenty of other things she can do — get married, start a family. Even if she ends up with a limp, at least she’s got a pretty face. She should be able to get a husband.’

‘What a blessing.’ Nikolai’s voice was sharp.

‘Isn’t it,’ agreed Tanya, who’d never been good at detecting sarcasm.

He went to stand by the covered window, feeling suffocated. He longed to pull down the black sheets, rip off the strips of tape and lean out into the cool September night. Ever since Sonya had gone, his lungs had seemed incapable of taking a deep breath. And now — now Nina was hurt, too.

‘Terrible mess they’ve made of the Astoria.’ Tanya clicked her tongue. ‘Soldiers traipsing mud all over the stair carpet, vagrants sleeping in the main entrance, everything scratched and broken. Nothing like a top hotel any more. I don’t know what …’

But Nikolai had stopped listening. His claustrophobia was growing. Trapped in his blacked-out apartment, trapped in the city — and worst of all, trapped in his own mind. Shamefully, alarmingly, he began to long for a violent release.