The Siege (20 page)

Kolya’s arms move stiffly. Anna turns him over, and lays her hand on his diaphragm.

‘Breathe in, Kolya. That’s right, slowly. And now out, all the way. Watch my hand go up and down.’

Kolya peers down his chest to watch her hand. When it moves, a fleeting smile crosses his old man’s face.

‘I’m good at breathing, aren’t I, Anna?’

After that, they put away the newspaper, to light next day’s fire.

Kolya will be looking out for her.

‘Where’s Anna?’ he’ll ask, and Marina will say, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be back soon. It’s a long way to the bakery.’

‘But I’m so hungry.’

She fights her way onward. A man passes her, pulling a sledge on which the starved contours of a human body poke through the sheet that covers it. One of the runners catches on a lump of ice, and the sledge sticks. The man jerks it free. She sees what lies there with terrible clarity, as if the man has stripped away the sheet. Forehead, nose, jaw, shallow breast, jutting ribs and pelvis. It’s a child’s body. The sledge runs lightly over the snow, bouncing a little.

Anna feels in her pocket, and touches the emergency quarter-slice of bread that rests there. She hasn’t felt dizzy today. Once again, she hasn’t had to eat the last quarter-slice of bread. Once again, she’ll be able to add it to Kolya’s ration.

21

It was too late for the little girl. Her veins collapsed, and before they could get a line in, she died. A camphor injection hadn’t done anything. As far as cause of death, you could take your pick. Dysentery, dehydration, shock… But she’d died of hunger. There are only two causes of death left: shelling and starvation.

The mother is still crouching by the iron cot, holding her daughter’s hand. She is silent. Andrei straightens himself slowly, easing his back, and puts a hand on the woman’s shoulder. But he doesn’t say anything either. What is there to say? What words of comfort for the loss of a child who need never have died at all? The little girl’s name was Nadia. Ten minutes ago he spoke her name into the bluish, shrunken face, although he already knew there was no calling her back.

‘Talk to her. She can still hear you,’ he said to the mother. For a while she sat there, bundled up, impassive. She looked sixty, but was probably thirty-five. Suddenly she seemed to realize what was happening. Her face quivered. She threw herself forward so that her mouth was almost touching the child’s, and words began to pour out of her. ‘Stay with me, don’t leave me, my treasure, my little soul. Look, I’ve brought you your little woolly cat, the one you love…’

But the child’s face remained rigid.

It’s over. Andrei sways with tiredness. Nine o’clock, and there’ll be a cup of barley soup for him in the canteen. Never mind that it’ll be water haunted by barley rather than the rich, hot, savoury soup his body craves. He has a half-slice of bread in his pocket, for Kolya. Anna’s face will unclench when she sees it. She’ll prod the bread with her quick fingers, as if it might not be real. And then she’ll frown and interrogate him about what he had to eat at the hospital. ‘Because you’ve got to have your ration, Andrei, when you’re on your feet all day long and then you’ve got to get home afterwards.’

Home.
That’s what they both call it now. Home isn’t the apartment, or even the room warmed by the
burzhuika.
It’s the mattress where they curl together at night, with Kolya breathing beside them. They don’t kiss. She doesn’t sigh, and press her body against his. They don’t ache for each other any more. They rest, wadded in their winter coats, like climbers bivouacked on an icy mountain. They lie cupped against each other, and still. His training tells him that this is because their starving bodies have shut down in order to survive. Their bodies know more than they do. If she weren’t there, would he ever be able to sleep?

When he lies like this, close to Anna, breathing her sour breath, he feels as if they are no longer separate at all. They are the same. When she sighs or moves, it’s as if this is happening inside his own flesh. When she swallows a crust of bread dipped in tea, he feels the warmth of it flushing his own skin.

They are high on the mountain, and ice tears at their flesh. He doesn’t know if they will live. Her face is sallow, her lips cracked at the corners. In the mornings her eyelids are stuck together with yellow crusts. He is the same. Slowly, slowly, they creak into life. They mustn’t keep on lying there. He’s heard too many stories of whole families sinking together into the stupor of death. She lights the
burzhuika,
and warms a pot of water which has frozen overnight. She dips a cotton rag in the water, and wipes his eyes until the crust is gone. He blinks. There she is. They look at one another without speaking. The day is in front of them, stretching out, a wasteland of hunger that they must shape. She nods at him. They are together. She is with him.

‘I’ll go and change your father’s dressings.’

‘Good. I’ll make tea.’

They can make tea out of anything. Often they make it out of plain water, with a touch of sugar or salt.

‘Kolya,’ she says then, ‘Ko-olya. Time to wake up.’

She won’t let Kolya sleep on too late into the morning. She insists that the days keep their shape. There’s not enough warm water to wash properly, but they can at least wipe themselves clean. She combs Kolya’s hair, massages his hands and feet to get his circulation going, and brushes his teeth very gently because Kolya’s gums bleed and his teeth are loose. By then the water is hot, and he can have his tea.

‘The bakeries will be open already,’ she tells him. ‘They opened at six o’clock. They’ll be baking your bread now, Kolya.’ Then, because they’ve got a stub of candle, she does a little reading with him. He’s so quick, a real little Levin. A few months ago he’d have zipped through the pages. But now he doesn’t remember the words. She points to them. ‘What does that say, Kolya? Can you remember? And that one?’

That is
home,
where Anna is. ‘Yes,’ Andrei promises himself, ‘I’ll finish all this, and then I’ll go home.’

Andrei is swallowing the last of his soup when the surgeon he worked under last spring stops by his table.

‘I’ve been looking for you.’ Pavel Nikolayevich is a chunky man with spatulate fingers. He looks more like a tram-driver than anyone’s idea of a surgeon. But Andrei’s seen those fingers at work, and knows the skills built into each of them. Pavel Nikolayevich takes a small packet out of his coat. ‘Here. Something for you.’

‘Thank you.’ Andrei reaches out and takes the packet, which is squashy and heavy for its size. He doesn’t ask what it is. These days, you say your thanks and don’t ask questions.

The professor leans close. ‘Guinea-pig,’ he whispers. ‘Incredibly enough, Tamara was still keeping a few of the lab animals alive. Giving them hay and so on. So there you are. The South Americans regard guinea-pig as a great delicacy, I believe.’

‘I can’t thank you enough…’

‘Rubbish. If we don’t keep you young doctors going, who’ll look after us when we’re old men? Besides, you know, I have no dependants. These days that’s a blessing. Now, put that away before anyone sees it. They’ll all be wanting some.’

He pats Andrei’s shoulder and walks on.

‘What’s that, Andryusha?’

‘Meat.’

‘Meat! What meat? Where did you get it?’

‘Someone gave it to me.’

‘But what is it? Dog? Cat?’

‘No, better than that, wait a minute – ‘

He’s already unwrapped the packet once, in the hospital, and seen the little stiff, furred corpse.

‘Let me see it! Andrei!’

‘No, not yet – why don’t I cook it first?’

Her face blanches. She steps back from him. ‘What kind of meat is it?’ she whispers hoarsely. Her face is stiff with horror. At once he knows what she suspects.

‘No, Anna, no, I swear, it’s not that. It’s nothing bad. It’s a guinea-pig.’

‘A guinea-pig!’ She puts her hand over her mouth. ‘You’re sure, Andrei? Who gave it to you? You hear such things.’

He has heard them too. In the market, and in the bread queue. Even among the doctors. Andrei believes in what he’s seen, not in rumours. People whisper of corpses with missing limbs, and of children who disappear. They say there are cannibals trading in the Sennaya market now, hawking unidentifiable meat pâté. Quickly, he turns his mind away.

‘Of course it’s a guinea-pig. Look at it. Fur and all.’

‘Oh yes-’

‘But we’ll have to skin it.’

‘You can do that. You’re used to dissecting things. I’ll work out how to cook it. We haven’t lit the
burzhuika
yet, because there’s only one bookshelf left’

The room is icy. Kolya, swathed in blankets, is perched on Marina’s knee. She must have been reading him a story, but she has fallen into the sudden sleep that keeps overtaking all of them. Anna’s father, under his mound of blankets, is also sleeping.

Kolya’s sharp little face turns to Anna. ‘Marina’s been asleep for a long time, but I didn’t wake her up.’

‘Good boy. Guess what, Kolya, we’re going to have meat! Andrei’s brought it. You can help me get the stove ready.’

‘Meat,’ says the child, as if he doesn’t quite remember what it is.

‘Yes, and then I’m going to make soup from the bones, like we do. When Daddy and Marina smell soup, they’ll soon wake up.’

But Marina is already struggling out of sleep. ‘Soup? Let me make it. You and Andrei must rest. You both look exhausted.’

As she crosses to the kitchen she checks Mikhail, as she always does, and pulls the blankets closer around him. Anna won’t believe it, she says, but her father was awake for a quite a long time, earlier. While you were in the bread queue, Anna. He even talked, didn’t he, Kolya? Your father was talking to us, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ says Kolya, but uncertainly.

Anna massages Andrei’s legs while the meat cooks. They’ve decided to make a stew, so as not to lose any of the meat’s goodness. They can eat strips of meat today, then the soup tomorrow. The rare, savoury smell of cooking meat fills the apartment. The next moment, there’s a knock on the door.

‘Someone smells meat,’ says Marina.

‘I’ll go.’ And whoever it is, I’ll stop them at the door. They mustn’t come in. If word gets out that we’ve got meat… What if it’s Zina? I can’t give her any more – I promised Marina –

It is Zina, with the baby in her arms. She stands in the doorway and holds him out to Anna, as she did before.

‘I think he’s ill. Do you think it’s a cold, or maybe an ear infection?’

The baby has been dead for at least three days, Anna judges, as she takes him into her own arms. The icy cold of Zina’s room has preserved him, but he is dry and blue and his half-open eyes show slits of white.

‘Zina…’

‘He’s cold. I wondered if we could come in. You said it was warm by your stove.’

‘Zina, where’s your Fedya? Has he seen the baby?’

‘He hasn’t been home since last week. You know he’s on the Defence Committee at work. My Fedya never stops – he’s practically a Stakhanovite.’

‘Zina, you know, don’t you, that the baby –’

Zina reaches up, and puts her hand over Anna’s mouth. ‘Don’t say anything, Anna. It brings bad luck.’ She takes back her baby and rocks him gently. ‘He’s so beautiful, isn’t he? And we haven’t even got a photograph of him. My mother’s never seen him, you know. So I came to ask you, Anna Mikhailovna. You know that drawing you did, the one you showed me, of your little Kolya when he was a baby? I wondered if you would draw my baby, so I can send the picture to my mother.’

The smell of meat floats into the tiny hallway.

‘Wait here a moment, Zina.’ Anna goes back into the apartment, snatches up paper and pencil, whispers in Marina’s ear, and returns to Zina, who still stands in exactly the same position, her face peacefully bent over the baby.

‘We’ll do the drawing in your apartment. It’s quieter there.’

In their coats, boots and hats, the two women sit opposite one another. Zina cradles her baby. From time to time she bends and whispers to him.

For the first time in her life, Anna doesn’t attempt to draw what she sees. She draws the baby as she remembers him in his early weeks, before the siege began. A breast-fed baby, already rounding out nicely, with a few feathers of damp, dark hair. One plump hand clutches the edge of his shawl. His eyes are open, and they find his mother’s gaze. She draws quickly, because Zina is beginning to tremble.

‘There you are. I can do a copy later on, if you like, so you’ve got one to keep and one to send to your mother.’

Zina stares at the drawing.

‘It’s just like him. That’s exactly the way he looks at me. And his hands, look. That’s just the way they hold the shawl.’

Anna does not look at the baby’s purple claw, curled over the edge of the blanket in which Zina has wrapped him.

‘My mum’s going to be so thrilled when she sees this.’

Zina shifts the baby into her right arm, takes the drawing and puts it carefully away under the bed.

‘My Fedya’ll frame it. He can do anything like that.’ Then she returns and faces Anna.

‘I know he isn’t –’ she swallows, ‘looking his best just now.’

‘No, because he’s –’

‘I know. Don’t think I don’t know. It’s just I don’t want to talk about it. And when my Fedya comes home he’ll do everything that should be done.’

‘Of course he will.’

Anna, Andrei and Kolya eat the tender, savoury meat, while Marina spoons broth into Mikhail’s mouth.

‘This is funny meat,’ says Kolya. ‘I’ve never tasted it before.’

‘It’s a special kind of meat they’ve brought in over the ice road.’

‘Can we have it again?’

‘Tomorrow, you’ll have meat soup with your bread. I don’t want my last bit, Kolya. You have it.’

Later, after the others have gone to sleep, there are just the two of them again. They lie face to face, whispering, feeling each other’s dry lips move. His breath smells of meat, and she knows her own must, too.

‘We stink,’ she says. Now the pipes are frozen there’s no running water in the apartment. For some reason a tap in the courtyard is still working, although water is so heavy that they carry only the bare minimum upstairs. But they’re lucky, not like Tanya. Every day she sees more people on their way down to the Neva, stumbling with their buckets, clambering down to the ice. God knows what’s in that water now.

Anna dreams of a steam-bath, her naked flesh red with heat, her sweat trickling down breasts and thighs and prickling at the roots of her hair. Women wade through clouds of steam, their heads small above mountains of breast, belly, buttock and thigh. They sit on wooden benches and snort with content. Every particle of dirt is steamed out of their pores.

Anna’s skin itches. It’s days now since she has taken off her clothes. She disgusts herself.

‘I’m so dirty,’ she says.

‘I love you more and more.’

‘Don’t go to sleep yet. I’m afraid.’

‘What are you afraid of?’

‘My father’s going to die soon. Marina says he wakes up, but I don’t think he does. Only in her mind. I feel as if we’re somewhere else, not here on earth at all.’

Andrei shifts his swollen legs. ‘That’s because it’s night. But tomorrow I’ll see if I can get a spoonful of cod-liver oil for Kolya. Masha at the dispensary said they might have some. A few drops a day will make all the difference. And you’ll go for the bread ration, and we’ll come home and eat. We’ll get through another day. We’ll still be on earth. As long as you’re alive, I’ll stay alive.’