Authors: Helen Dunmore
‘It’s for you. It’s honeycomb. A patient’s mother gave it to me.’
Anna takes the jar over to the candle. Sure enough, there it is, a dark comb of patterned cells that drip with honey. There’s quite a lot there. The small jar is at least half-full. She turns it round, so that the light catches it.
‘I wonder where she got it from.’
‘I didn’t ask.’
‘You have some of it, to keep your energy up.’
‘I get my meals at the hospital. I’m fine. Anna, I can’t believe you’ve got the
burzhuika.
It’s like heaven here. Is it all right if I sleep in this chair?’
‘Of course.’
She steps over the mattress, sits down at his feet, and rests her head against his knees. She feels his hand begin to stroke her hair. His hand is still trembling. After a few minutes it slackens, and weighs heavy. Marina and her father are within touch, but she feels as distant from them as if she were on another star. Those stars that hang over Leningrad, bitingly sharp, when the dust and smoke from the shelling clear. They look down and they see everything. A smell of antiseptic clings to Andrei. She knows how carefully he scrubs his hands and arms before he comes to see her, so he won’t smell of blood.
‘I’ll make you tea in a minute,’ she says.
‘Just let’s sit.’ His voice is blurring. The stove-warmed, people warmed air is working on him like a drug. His hand on her skin is growing warmer.
‘So nice,’ he says, as he falls into sleep.
Slowly, a fug thickens in the little room. The temperature must be at least eight degrees. Maybe even ten. She can’t put any more wood in the stove, or there’ll be none for tomorrow, but it’ll be a while before it cools. They’ll have warmth to get them through part of the night. Marina’s head has drooped, though she is still sitting upright. Perhaps she’s fallen asleep, too. How good it is to fall asleep, and not to feel hunger any more. You should never wake anyone once they’ve got away, deep into their dreams, where there’s food,
But Anna can’t sleep. Her stomach hurts, and the candle’s nearly burned down. She can think about her drawing. The figures are sharp on the surface of her mind. She can shut her eyes and see them. Who will ever finish drawing all this? The gaping mouths, the heavy coats hung on racks of bones, the shell-shattered streets, the purple faces of old women, the white snow falling, the uncleared snow in the streets, the children scrabbling in piles of rubbish while tongues of ice poke out of the gutters. A whole city is going to sleep. A forest of ice is growing around us.
No one can see us any more. Do they even know what’s happening here? Are they being allowed to know? Radio Leningrad tells the truth, or part of it, but that’s because it’s local. The people who speak on the radio are hungry too, you can tell. It shouldn’t make any difference whether they know in Moscow what we’re going through in Leningrad, but it does. They may not be able to do anything for us, but to be lost from people’s thoughts is like a second death.
When this drawing is finished, she’ll do another. She’ll draw until her paper gives out. It doesn’t matter if her hands are clumsy. She’ll draw Evgenia’s face with the freckles standing out on it, and her big wide mouth smiling. Zina holding out the baby as if she wanted to give it away. The baby’s shrivelled face. Andrei leaning against the inside of the door. The wound in her father’s shoulder that won’t heal. She shuts her eyes and tests herself. Yes, they are all there. She can see them in every detail.
Anna wraps a blanket around Andrei, on top of his coat, and tucks it in. He doesn’t stir. Those soot marks are still on his face, so she spits on her handkerchief and gently wipes them off. Then she blows out the guttering end of the candle.
20
What are days? You wake hours before it’s light, from hunger. Hunger has burrowed deep into your stomach and is eating away at you. You turn, moaning, trying to dislodge it. You taste the foulness of your breath.
The day begins like a day of fever. Strange dreams and voices march over your mind as you slip in and out of sleep. Someone laughs close to your ear. Suddenly, you catch the scent of coffee. Blue smoke drifts from a ventilation shaft. Inside, they are roasting coffee beans, then grinding them and packing the grains into stiff brown-paper bags which are sealed with white labels. They stack the bags plumply on shelves. It is morning, and it isn’t winter any more, but summer, with light streaming through the shop window. The fragrance of coffee wreathes around your head like smoke.
You wake yourself, snuffling around in the bedclothes. A load of blankets and coats weighs you down, but you’re still cold. Your feet are numb and your breath comes short. The cold settles in your back and makes your spine hurt. You must breathe gently. You must not be restless. Every movement destroys energy which you no longer possess.
In the next apartment a baby cries steadily from hunger. The crying goes on and on, threading its way into the innermost coils of your brain. If only he’d stop. Whatever it takes, make him stop.
There is no electricity. There is no running water. It is the twelfth of December. Leningrad is garlanded with ice, pinned down by heavy blankets of snow. Later, the low, slanting light of winter will glide along the blue banks of the Neva. There will be streaks of rose on the snow.
The bread ration is now 250 grammes per day for workers, and 125 grammes for everyone else. How much is that? A couple of slices of bread. One, if you cut thickly.
But you don’t cut thickly. You cut the bread into tiny cubes. You moisten each one with saliva. As long as it lasts, you have food in your mouth. But your stomach tears at you. It’s not fooled.
In bread queues people talk about the ice road over Lake Ladoga. A road made of ice, tracking over miles of unstable ice, the one route that now connects Leningrad to ‘the mainland’. Lake Ladoga, north-east of Leningrad, is the only way out. The young ice has already swallowed up dozens of trucks and men, but it’s freezing hard, and the ice is getting thicker. Soon they’ll be able to bring in supplies. Food will come. It’s early days yet, and of course they’re losing trucks and men. Ladoga’s ice is still treacherous, freezing solid enough to take a tank in one place, and then opening into a crevasse a couple of hundred metres farther on. The Germans know that it’s the only supply route left, and they started shelling it almost as soon as the first trucks rolled out on to the ice.
But whatever’s sacrificed has got to be sacrificed. The ice road is all we’ve got. It must be believed in. They are already calling it ‘The Road of Life’. The bread queue mutters its creed, and blue lips pray for the temperature to drop, the ice to thicken further, the route to become faster, safer.
‘Now we’ve recaptured Tikhvin, the crossing won’t take so long. They won’t have to go all that way round.’
‘They’re working day and night to get the stuff to us. I heard there are thousands of tons of flour backed up at Novaya Ladoga.’
‘They’re opening up new tracks over the ice all the time. They’ve got fuel stations and first-aid posts all the way, every kilometre. That’ll speed things up.’
But what they believe in remains invisible: there’s no food here. They have been queuing for two and half hours, and there’s still no sign of bread. There were problems with the ovens this morning, someone says. Anna huddles deeper into her coat, stamps her feet, and listens to the distant noise of shelling. She thinks of Lake Ladoga, beautiful in summer with its glistening iron-and-silver water, its cranberry marshes, birches, wild duck and reeds. The lake is deep, packed with fish and legends. But Andrei says that Ladoga is nothing to Lake Baikal. It’s no more than a puddle. He’ll take her to Baikal one day, when they go to Siberia together.
‘We have fish as big as whales,’ he says. ‘And the water of Lake Baikal is the purest in the world.’
He explains why this is so, but she doesn’t bother to take it in. She imagines them both, in summer, on a wooden jetty which thrusts out far into the waters of Lake Baikal. They are not fishing or swimming. They are just sitting there, doing nothing, close together. Her head is on his shoulder, and his hand cups her cheek. The sun is on their backs and their breathing rises and falls in time to the distant cluck of water on the far-off grey stones of the shore. Andrei tells her that stones from the Baikal shores bring good luck, so she’s put a handful in her pocket. She reaches in and touches their round, smooth surfaces. The air smells of spice and pine, and the water breathes out its own virgin sweetness.
‘You see, I told you you’d love it here,’ says Andrei. Without looking at him she knows that his Siberian eyes have squeezed up into slits as he smiles at her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You’re right. I love it here.’ Across kilometres of water there are mountains, marching away into wilderness. No one goes there, says Andrei, apart from hunters.
‘I’ll take you up to the snow-line tomorrow.’
But the sun on her back is warm.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Let’s not go anywhere. Let’s just stay here.’
The woman ahead of Anna in the queue is wearing a heavy fox-fur coat, and a fox-fur hat. But in spite of her clothes she is trembling so much that the little fur tail on her hat bobs up and down and bounces on her shoulders as if it’s alive. Suddenly the woman turns and grasps Anna’s arm. Her face is the colour of old candle-grease, and her hands grip hard, digging into Anna.
‘Help me, I don’t feel well –’
Anna staggers. Her body will not take the weight of this woman. ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘Rest for a minute. The queue’s not moving.’
But suspicion lights in the woman’s blurred, starved eyes. It could be a trick, to steal her place in the queue. One hand lets go of Anna, to scrabble inside her coat and check if the ration card is still there. Maybe Anna has used this moment of weakness to slide a hand in and take it. Without a ration card, you die. There’s no getting another, not now Pavlov’s tightened everything up. The woman gives a sob of relief as she finds the edge of her card and rubs her finger against it as if she’s touching a holy medal. But she still glares suspiciously at Anna.
‘Rest for a minute. I’ll keep your place,’ says Anna.
The woman’s gloves, too, are made of fox-fur. The fur is reddish, soft, glistening. It looks so much more alive than the woman who’s wearing it. You can’t buy a fur coat of that quality in any shop Anna’s ever been into. The woman’s colourless lips open. ‘I want to live,’ she whispers, as if it’s the biggest secret of all. She leans all her weight on to Anna.
‘Quick, the queue’s moving,’ says Anna. The woman lets go and lunges forward. The queue stirs, shifts, but does not move, while Anna steps back out of the reach of the woman’s preying hands, and folds her own arms across her chest. Her head hurts. She tries to recapture the jetty with its warm, sunlit wood, the feel of Andrei’s shoulder, and the muscled leap of a fish far out on the water. But they will not come.
Someone behind her is whispering about the ice road now. ‘The rate we’re losing trucks, there won’t be any left soon.’
‘But some of them they’re getting through, all the same,’ replies another woman. ‘They know how bad things are here. They’re doing the best they can. Working night and day…’
As long as people know about us, we are not alone. Not left in the dark like abandoned children, to freeze and starve.
‘They’re getting through,’ Anna repeats under her breath. They will come. We will live, and not die. She sees the ghostly whiteness of the frozen lake, swept by mist and snowstorms, and the wavering track the supply trucks have to follow. Perhaps there are flags stuck in the ice, to guide the trucks from station to station. The Finns believe an ice-woman lives there, far out on the ice, where the water is deepest. She calls through the storms to draw to herself a human lover. Male or female, she doesn’t care. What she wants is what she hasn’t got: warm flesh and a beating heart. Each lover can only warm her for a moment, before she freezes him.
The trucks churn on over the ice. There are weak patches, and crevasses. There is wind that stings with driving snow. It hisses, carrying sound.
Doroga zhizni
…
doroga zhi-ii-izniii
… This is the Road of Life, the only chance you’ve got. Broken-down trucks litter the sides of the track. But although the blizzard is dangerous, it’s less dangerous than the German planes which it keeps on the ground.
Sacks of flour, meat essence, butter, tinned fish, cereals, ammunition, baby-milk. Anna wills the trucks forward. They must come whatever happens, over hundreds of kilometres of emergency track built across the Ladoga marshlands, and over the ice on to the railway that will bring them to Leningrad. The Germans pincers can’t quite close on this last supply-route. They bomb it whenever the sky clears, but winter is on our side. The ice grows thicker. Engines groan as the trucks labour on. It is twenty degrees below zero out on the ice, and the wind blows hard, stripping heat from men and machines. The sacks of flour are tightly packed, but even so they judder as the trucks judder.
These are not sacks of flour, but days of life. If a truck rolls into a crevasse, this number of people will die. If a truck gets through, this number will live. Kolya will grab his bread. Anna will give it to him bit by bit, to make sure that he chews it properly instead of swallowing it like a dog. He must chew, in order to extract every morsel of goodness from the bread. She will smear it with a few drops of the sunflower oil she bartered for her mother’s sheepskin coat. Kolya’s whole life is in his mouth.
The bread queue surges. It’s arrived, the bread which is still called bread even when it’s mostly cellulose and warehouse sweepings. The smell of it drifts out as if from the lips of heaven. In front of Anna the woman in the fox-furs begins to cry and laugh, crossing herself over and over. She had believed there would be no bread today. That today the ration would simply cease to be. It would disappear, like the last little circle of water that a wild duck struggles to keep open in winter, by constantly swimming round and round in the same spot.
Anna shuffles forward, feeling for the ration cards where they lie in the secret pocket she has sewn into the lining of her coat. She won’t take the cards out until the moment when she’s at the head of the queue. Ration cards are not like gold: they are so far above gold that you can’t even make the comparison. Before she even picks up her bread, she’ll hide the cards again. If there are thieves about, better lose one day’s ration than the cards. You can survive a day without bread, just about, but you can’t survive without ration cards until the end of the month. She and Marina have discussed over and over again the risks of Anna collecting the rations for the whole family. What if she fainted, and was robbed of the cards? It would be safer if she and Marina went together. But someone must stay with her father, and Kolya. And although Anna doesn’t say it, she knows she is now the only one with the strength for the daily walk to the bakery, and for hours of queuing. Marina’s cough is bad.
Anna prepares for her daily walk to the bakery as carefully as a marathon runner. She eats the quarter-slice of bread she has saved from her ration, and tucks another quarter-slice into her pocket to eat if she begins to feel dizzy. She drinks a glass of hot water with a pinch of salt. She warms her jacket, coat, gloves and scarf at the
burzhuika
before putting them on. She heats foot-cloths, wraps them around her feet, and then puts on her father’s felt boots. She does everything slowly, according to a set pattern. Whenever her heart beats too fast, she stops, and rests.
She always takes her father’s cherry-wood walking-stick to the bread queue. If she slipped on the uncleared ice and snow, she might never be able to get up again. And besides, the solidity of the stick in her hand is good. If someone tried to rob her, she would hit them with it. She’s seen people grappling in the snow, fighting in slow-motion over a crust of bread.
She swathes her face with her shawl until only her eyes show. Each time, before Anna leaves, Marina makes the sign of the cross over her. The gesture means nothing to Anna, and a few weeks earlier it would have irritated her, but now she lets Marina do it. It’s another part of the ritual of setting out.
‘Be careful!’ they all say.
‘Be careful, Anna!’ pipes Kolya, staring at her from the mattress where Marina has laid out the fort and the toy soldiers. Sometimes he strokes his toys, but he hasn’t the energy to play with them any more.
The bread is in her hands. A second later she has stuffed it into the cloth bag around her waist. Both bread and ration cards are invisible as she makes her way back through the frozen streets. The light is already fading. The grip of frost hardens, and the tip of her walking-stick skids on ice. Anna rights herself, breathing hard. Sweat springs out all over her body as the bread ration knocks against her, under her coat. She must not allow herself to fall. They’re waiting for her, counting the minutes until she comes back. The
burzhuika
will be cold by now, but they’ll be huddling together under the blankets to share their warmth. Marina might be singing to Kolya. She knows a lot of songs, and although her singing is more like a sort of rhythmic talking, it always calms him down. Funny that Marina can’t sing. But she can soothe Kolya when he has one of those fits of hopeless, hungry crying that make Anna feel like jumping out of the window.
Or maybe Kolya’s doing his breathing exercises. When they get
Leningradskaya Pravda
they read every word, stripping it for meaning. Sometimes there are four sheets, sometimes only two. When everyone has read it, they spread the newspaper on the mattress and Kolya does the breathing exercises that are supposed to help his asthma.
‘Swim with your arms, Kolya. Make the paper crackle.’