The Siege (14 page)

Marina says they’re not selling any food off the rations now. The restaurants are closed. She sits on my bed and tells me how many potatoes we’ve got left, how many onions, how many grammes of lard. She counts them over aloud, then counts them again. We both enjoy it. If she stops, I ask her more questions. ‘How many potatoes did you say exactly, Marina?’

Kolya loves peeping into the store-cupboard and seeing how many jars there are. He doesn’t try to touch anything. He stares solemnly for a while, and then he says, ‘We’ve got lots of food, haven’t we, Marina?’ She answers, ‘Yes, we’re very fortunate,’ and he nods, satisfied, and goes back to his game.

There’s been further bombing of food stocks, but no one knows exactly where. Now we know that they don’t just want to defeat us. They want to destroy us. Nothing in Leningrad matters to them at all. Not a stone, or a child. Carthage must be destroyed.

But there’s freedom in knowing it. We can’t make deals with them any more. So much for our pact. We have no choice left. We have to resist.

So I get out of bed and lie on the sofa for two hours. Doesn’t sound much like resistance, does it? Wouldn’t it terrify the Germans to know that Mikhail Ilyich Levin is staying alive, and repeating poetry to himself.

Onegin, do you remember that hour

Picked by fate for our meeting

In the alley, in the garden…?

I can recite page after page. I close my eyes, and it’s as if I had the book in front of me. I go through the section where Tatyana is lost in her dream. The plains, the fir trees, the ghostly light and the creak of her footsteps through the snow: all these come to me so powerfully that it’s as if I’d never really read about them or thought about them before. I almost say aloud that I’m sorry I didn’t understand until now. My eyes fill with tears, and I don’t know why. But I know that it’s by these things, and nothing else, that we survive. Poetry doesn’t exist to make life beautiful. Poetry is life itself.

Tatyana will go on walking, the snow will fall, and Onegin will go on failing to love her until it is much too late. Suddenly he’ll recognize her for what she really is, and she’ll explain to him why nothing more can happen between them. Everything that seems arbitrary has been laid down since time began. Soon the brown, earth-coloured landscape will be covered by snow.

Always, every winter, there’s a certain moment when you think that this time it will go on for ever. The spring has forgotten us. Frost sinks deeper and deeper into the soil, driving out every sign of life. The sap will never rise again. And in a way you don’t even want it to rise. Spring is painful, and messy, and the earth smells foul when the crust of ice finally melts and breaks.

‘Onegin, do you remember…
‘

And the ice starts breaking.

‘That’s very good, Kolya. Just look at the way you’ve drawn that tank turret.’

‘But I can’t do the guns properly, Dad. Do you know how to draw guns?’

‘Give me your paper. Gently now. I’ll have a try.’

16

Impossible arithmetic. No matter how often you do the sums, they can’t work out. Evacuation started much too late, and too many people were evacuated into the path of the German advance. They poured back into the city, just ahead of the Germans. For every evacuee who left Leningrad for the Urals, three or four came in from the south and west, driven by the German advance. The city is packed. There are close to three million civilians, and then there’s the military, nearly half a million of them. Divide Leningrad’s food by all those mouths, and see how quickly it vanishes, once the supply-lines are cut.

Here’s a market stall, loaded with cabbages, buckwheat, lard, rye flour, wheat flour, sugar, honey, potatoes. The potatoes are solid, with firm, yellow flesh. The lard is of the finest quality, and the honey is on the comb, with its wax intact. Those fat, sweet cabbages with their crisp hearts are heaped up like chrysanthemums, green and bluish-purple, with first touch of frost prickling on their outer leaves. It’s a dream-stall, which could never really exist in a world of queues and shortages. But even if it did, how many could it feed? Imagine that a hundred people crowd around it, grabbing the food and stuffing it into their bags. Suddenly there are a thousand, and now the crowd swells out of the square to pack the surrounding streets. There are ten thousand, fifty, a hundred thousand. The imagination halts. It cannot grasp a million flailing hands. Besides, the dream-stall has long since been stripped and overturned. There’s nothing left.

But the hands are still there. They’re held out, and they’ve got to be filled. For city people, it’s hard to grasp that the supply chain has broken. It’s kept them going all their lives, even though the system sometimes dissolves into chaos, and prices go up and down like an undertaker’s hat. Leningraders don’t talk about shopping, they talk about ‘getting hold of things’. It’s an art-form you learn at your mother’s side, queueing. But there’s never just
not been anything.
We’re not peasants in the Ukraine.

Suddenly and sharply, it’s obvious that cities only exist because everyone agrees to let them exist. It’s crazy, when you think of it, for millions of mouths to pack themselves into a couple of hundred square kilometres, without a pig or a potato patch between them. It only works in the way that fiction works, by making people collaborate. All its life, the city has had the power to demand. It asks for milk, and before dawn milk arrives. Field after field furs over with rye and barley, pigs die choking on their own blood, apples swell and fishermen drown. In the black-deep reaches of Lake Baikal the sturgeon turn their snouts and swim into nets. The city doesn’t ask for details, as long as the food keeps coming in.

Leningrad mobilizes countryside, villages and towns for hundreds of kilometres around. Thousands of peasants who will never see the city spend their whole lives working to provide its food. Its web of trade relationships curls into millions of lives.

Within the city, the process of transformation never stops. Raw wood-pulp is transformed into books, raw small-town boys are transformed into doctors and engineers. Would-be actors and filmmakers and dancers, bursting with chaotic talent, are shaped into finished artists. Leningrad can take anything, swallow it, and make it new.

In packed trams and buses, members of the Writers’ Union are jammed up next to steel-workers from the Kirov works, who transform rivers of molten metal into KV tanks as the writers struggle to strike out words at white-heat and pour them into new stories and poems. Leningraders deal in finished products. They are high up in the chain that leads from raw earth to luxury goods. Most of them will never eat caviar, but they know that caviar grows in jars in GORT stores, not within a fish. They understand that milk doesn’t come from cows, but from shops.

Years of food shortages, rations and queuing have had the odd, contrary effect of making them less likely to panic when times get tough. They’re so used to bread queues and scoured, empty shelves in shops. They believe in their bones that if you walk far enough, have the right contacts, join every queue and wait for as many hours as it takes, in the end you’ll go home with something in your shopping-bag. It could be a few frostbitten turnips, a precious, fragrant hundred grammes of coffee, a few gnarled apples from a kolkhoz stall, or a piece of sausage. Sometimes it won’t be much more than a couple of onions and fifty grammes of lard to make onion soup. But tonight, at least, you’ll eat.

And tomorrow is another day. The wheels will turn, the web will stretch, there’ll be an unexpected delivery of pickled cucumbers, or cranberries from the Ladoga marshes, all drawn to the magnet of the Leningrad markets. With any luck you’ll be there, bag at the ready, first in the queue. This is how it has always worked. Like a body that cannot stop believing in an amputated, ghostly limb, so the city continues to believe in its supply chains long after they have been severed.

All those millions of mouths. Lips open, teeth bite and grind, salivary glands flood mouths with rich saliva to moisten the food and begin its digestion. Rhythmic waves of peristalsis send the food into the centre of the body. Energy begins to flow. Starches convert to sugar, and the body floods with warmth, energy and hope. Lips shine with grease, the skin temperature rises slightly, and a faint pearling of sweat appears on the forehead. Life is good.

The mouths of Leningrad continue to open and swallow. The gummy, toothless mouths of babies fasten on to their mothers’ nipples. Old, toothless mouths mamble black bread dipped in tea. Ravenous seventeen-year-old boys, still growing, cram their mouths with anything they can find.

The question which arithmetic can’t answer has got to be addressed by someone. There is this much food, and it is not being replaced. If no further supplies come into the city, how long will it last? How many times can these three and a half million mouths open, and still be filled?

Dimitri Pavlov, newly arrived from Moscow, is the man who must attack the question, even if he cannot answer it. The brutal truth of the situation belongs to him, and he knows it to the core. Before long, the rest of Leningrad will know it too, not with their brains but in their bellies. The entire city is a stone island now, and has got to depend upon its own resources. But you can’t eat stone, or the magical prospect of the Neva at dawn. Nor can you derive calories from apartment buildings, armaments factories, icons or munition works. The history of Leningrad, Petrograd, St Petersburg may stretch back to the moment Peter put his iron mark on the marshes of the Neva, but you can’t eat history.

Pavlov has the power to do anything, though nobody, as he observes, can fold a piece of paper more than seven times. ‘Really? Can’t you? But of course you can, if it’s a big enough sheet.’

Silently, Pavlov hands over a large sheet of high-quality, thin paper, and watches his colleague fold it. Once, twice, three times. This is easy. But at the eighth fold the man looks up, pained, although still smiling.

‘Do you know, you’re quite right. I would never have believed it.’

‘Even if that paper were as big as Lake Ladoga, it still wouldn’t fold. We cannot change the laws of nature.’

Pavlov writes more lists, calculates figures, and works out his plans. There is silence, except for the scratching of his pen, the crackle of papers as he checks statistics, and the sound of typing from the next room. In the outer office the phone rings constantly, but Pavlov pays it no attention. The calls will be from managers of local food-storage units, slaughterhouses and depots, ringing in with the latest statistics which he has requested. He wants to know exactly what Leningrad holds. No rough calculations. He doesn’t want any fantasies about how many cabbages may still lie unharvested in suburban gardens. Above all, he doesn’t want optimism. He wants the detail. No rounding up of figures. No hoping against hope that somehow supplies may ‘get through’ when it is impossible for them to get through. For that is what the besieging army intends. Pavlov has grasped that from the beginning. They have dug in, and they’ll hold on, relying on hunger and winter to open the gates of Leningrad to them. The Panzer divisions may have been transferred away from the Leningrad front, but a ring of steel holds Leningrad tight.

Every so often a young woman comes in from the outer office with a long, flimsy strip of paper covered in typewritten columns, and lays it down at his side. Pavlov drinks in these statistics at a glance, and adds them to his calculations.

‘It’s the same with our reserves,’ he announces suddenly, to the colleague who keeps glancing at the folded sheet of paper as if perhaps he might have done it another way, and succeeded with the eighth fold.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Our reserves. Here. According to these figures, at present we have twenty-five thousand pigs in the Leningrad area. Some on the hoof, some already slaughtered. Sounds a lot, doesn’t it?’

‘I should say so.’

‘But we are consuming meat at the rate of two hundred and fifty tons a day. Tell me, how long will we be able to continue to fold that particular piece of paper?’

‘Forgive me, I don’t know exactly how much a pig actually weighs –’

‘Then find out. These are the things we must all know. Facts. We have got to know the facts, not what we think will happen or hope will happen. For a start, we must put out of our minds any expectation of further supplies reaching us in the foreseeable future.’

‘But, excuse me, surely it’s still possible to bring in supplies by water, over Lake Ladoga.’

‘Not enough. The supply chain is too weak, and we haven’t got the infrastructure. There are not enough landing-stages or barges, and the railway line is hopelessly inadequate. We’ll exploit that route as far as we can, but our boats are sitting ducks for German bombers. For the time being, I have decided to discount from my calculations any supplies which may reach us via the Ladoga route. We must be realistic. Facts are our business, not pious hopes. We have three and a half million people to feed for an indefinite period, and at the present rates of consumption we won’t do it. The ration must be cut again.’

Both men would say, if you asked them, that they are working in concentrated silence. They have long since ceased to hear the sirens, the screech of fighter planes struggling to defend the city, and the explosions which are so loud that they seem not to be heard but to thud deep into the stomach, like blows. They do not try to put what is happening into words. If they did, they would probably reach for cliches. ‘Leningrad is fighting for its life.’ ‘The people of Leningrad will defend their city to the last drop of blood.’ ‘The Fascist invaders will be repulsed by the determination of the Soviet people.’ Pavlov would reach for the cliches, simply because to do so saves time.

Pavlov is a man in his prime. He reaches out for a paper without looking at the woman who brings it, and she plants it eagerly in his hand. From time to time he blinks, and runs his fingers through thick, vigorous hair which is gritty with dust. Hair, skin and mouths are full of dust these days, from the bombardment. When these old buildings are shelled, they send clouds of blackened, ancient dust into the air, which drift and settle everywhere. Pavlov’s skin has a faintly kippered smell, from the smoke which hangs low over Leningrad. He coughs, and seizes another strip of figures.

‘Excuse me,’ ventures the colleague at last, ‘how long do you calculate that the blockade will continue?’

‘How should I know?’ snaps Pavlov. ‘The duration of the blockade is not within my area of competence. Not only do I not know the answer, but the answer doesn’t even interest me. I have not been sent here to speculate. Facts are what I need.’

He sits back, and knuckles his eyes with his fists. His eyes are raw with sleeplessness, and they itch all the time. It’s the dust. Sometimes lines of figures dance as he studies them. Already he is afraid that mistakes have been made. If the decision to implement tougher cuts in the rations had been taken two weeks ago, thousands of tons of supplies would still be held in reserve. It’s no good making cuts on an ad-hoc basis, in response to each new crisis. There must be a properly thought-through and managed policy to deal with improper, unmanageable realities.

‘We must continue to fold our piece of paper,’ he says, without opening his eyes. ‘Even when it becomes impossible.’

He begins another list, heading it with the words ‘Other resources’:

Warehouses, depots, freight trucks, etc. to be swept and sweepings sifted for grain Soil at Badayev warehouses to be processed for reclamation of sugars Edible cellulose content in bread to be increased

FOR URGENT ACTION:

Slaughterhouse by products

Edible barks, fungi, berries, peat

Harvesting of vegetable plots from dead zone

Brewers’ malt

Domestic pets

Laboratory and zoo animals – guinea pigs, rabbits, etc.

Edible wild plants, especially anti-scorbutics, e.g. nettles, pine needles

Wallpaper paste

Leather articles…

Pavlov hands this new list to his colleague. ‘Please add your thoughts.’

‘Leather articles?’

‘Some nourishment can be obtained from leather. Of course we have to set against that nourishment the energy which is required to boil the leather until a stock can be extracted. Apparently a type of beef jelly can be made from top-quality leather. This is the type of information which people will require, as time goes on. So please add your thoughts. It’s possible that I have missed something.’