The Siege (21 page)

‘You promise?’

‘Yes, I promise.’

‘But my father will die.’

‘Yes. Yes, I think he will.’

Frost and snow gather, thickening centimetre by centimetre on windows, roofs, parks, railways, and the bodies of the dead. Slowly, the city sinks down, like a great ship sinking in an ice-field. Its lights have gone out. Its water no longer flows. Production in factories has all but stopped. The ship is poised, ready to dive into the blackness of death. Only its people keep on stubbornly living, as if they don’t know that it’s all over for them.

The next morning, Anna finds a small onion which must have rolled off the store-cupboard shelf and hidden itself among the bristles of her broom. She grabs Andrei’s arm with a cry of joy. Sobbing, she says to him, ‘You were right, you knew all the time. We’re going to be all right, I know it. This is a sign, that’s what it is. A sign.’

He looks at her dry, swollen lips, her sharp cheekbones and sunken eyes. He looks at the little onion which she is holding out in triumph.

‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘It’s a sign.’

She slices the onion finely, and adds it to the meat broth which she has saved for Kolya, with a pinch of salt and a cup of water.

‘The vitamins will do him so much good.’

She lights the stove with kindling from the last bookshelf. Soon the soup is simmering. Marina, Andrei and Anna gather round to watch Kolya swallow his meat soup with onion. Anna spoons it into his mouth. ‘There you are. It’s good, isn’t it? Now you’ll grow up to be a big boy.’

After eating, the child goes back into a fuddled drowse. Sometimes he whimpers. Anna notes that Marina has not even suggested keeping back any of the broth for her father.

‘I was listening to the radio,’ says Marina. ‘There was a nutritional expert on last night. She said there’s nourishment in wallpaper paste.’

‘But we haven’t got any.’

‘We have. Kolya’s fort. We used wallpaper paste to make the papier-maché. If I strip off the painted layer, we could cook the rest of it. There’s bound to be some calories in it.’

‘But what will Kolya say? He got so upset when I said we might have to use it for fuel for the
burzhuika?

‘Yes, but if it’s for food, that’s different.’

While Kolya sleeps, Marina works for hours, peeling off the thinnest possible layer of painted papier-maché from the fort, and putting the rest to soak in water.

‘The paper will float to the top, and the goodness of the paste will remain in the water. We can make it into a kind of soup for him.’

‘Don’t tell him.’

‘No. We’ll say we’ve put the fort away for safety, until the blockade is lifted.’

‘Yes, let’s say that.’

22

Again, it’s the dead of night, but this time she’s alone. The others are in the room, of course. Kolya, on the mattress next to her, pressed against her. Marina, on the other side of Kolya, sleeping. They lie like this, the adults sandwiching the child, so that their body-heat will keep him warm. But Andrei’s not here, and without Andrei she feels cold and fearful. She’s restless, thinking of him at work. He’s sleeping at the hospital tonight. She made him promise. Outside it’s minus twenty, and she’s afraid that on a night like this he could collapse on the way home and freeze to death.

There is typhus in one of the nearby children’s homes, he says, where orphans are crammed together. What if Andrei gets typhus? In his starved state, he’d have no resistance. What if he simply didn’t come home from the hospital one night? Would anyone there think to inform her if he was taken ill? Of course not. They don’t even know that she exists, let alone that Andrei’s living here –

A voice stirs beside her. It’s Marina.

‘Let’s talk. It’ll pass the time.’

‘What?’

‘You’re awake, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I’m awake. What time is it?’

‘Half past eleven.’

‘Only half past eleven.’

‘You’ve been asleep.’

‘Have I?’

‘Yes. You were asleep when I got up.’

‘Marina, you’ve lit the
burzhuika!’

‘I had to make tea for your father.’

‘What did you use?’

‘The encyclopaedia.’

‘Oh.’

‘I thought it was the one he’d miss least.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And there are twelve volumes.’

They speak quietly, although they lie on the same mattress, because Kolya is between them. But he is deeply asleep, with the flaps of his fur cap muffling his ears. And then the cold space on Anna’s other side, where Andrei should be.

‘So many hours, before it gets light,’ says Anna.

‘Your father’s been awake too. He only went back to sleep about half an hour ago. We’ve been talking for a long time.’

‘It’s strange, how he only talks when no one but you can hear him,’ says Anna. Her heart beats fast as she waits for Marina’s answer.

‘You think he doesn’t talk to me? You think I’m lying?’

‘No, not that-’

‘You think I invent it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Why should I do that?’

‘Because you want him to talk to you.’

‘There are a lot of things you don’t know, Anna.’ Her voice is sharp in the darkness.

‘I know,’ says Anna. ‘People have been telling me that all my life. I never had time to finish my education.’

‘Shall we talk properly, then?’ asks Marina, her voice changing. ‘Shall we stop all this? I could tell you a story.’

It’s still only half past eleven. Six and a half hours before the bakeries open. The night hangs like lead.

‘All right,’ says Anna.

‘You know the people in my story. You’ll have your own version. But let me tell you mine, and then you can tell me yours.’

Anna draws up her knees and pulls Kolya more deeply into the bony cradle of her body, under the layers of blankets. She tucks his hands into her armpits, where they’ll be warm. He sleeps on.

‘You realize that your father and I have known each other for a long time?’

‘Of course.’

‘I was thirty-two when I first met him. He was a couple of years older, with a wife and a four-year-old daughter. Your father was very interested in Tairov’s work – you’ll have heard of Tairov. He was in Moscow, directing at the Kamerny theatre, which he’d founded just before the war. Misha had been reading Tairov’s book,
Notes of a Director.
It wasn’t long after he’d staged
Phèdre.
I remember that the first time we met, we argued about that production. We’d both been to Moscow to see it. Your father was still hoping to write for the stage then.’

‘But he never did.’

‘No. So, we argued. He told me straight away that he was married, and about you. He used to tell me how clever you were, because you could already read when you were only four. But from what I could see he wasn’t at home very much. Those were such different times, and although it’s only twenty years ago it’s passed away so completely you can’t guess what it was like unless you remember it.’

‘There’s nothing so very different,’ says Anna, ‘about men who get married and have babies and then find that they don’t want to be at home very much.’

‘It was a new world,’ says Marina. ‘That’s what we believed. Everything had changed so fast, and it was still changing. The theatre was right in the heart of it. It was 1922. For the first time ever we had a mass audience, we had soldiers and factory workers coming in with free tickets they’d been given. Theatre was going to be for everyone. They came to everything, they listened to everything, they talked about everything. They ate and drank as if they were in their own homes and they didn’t dress up. They just poured in, in their boots and overcoats. They wanted theatre, because they’d never had it before. Everybody wanted it. Everybody wanted us. Ensembles sprang up, actors flung ideas at the audience, there were experiments going on everywhere. Some of them worked and some of them didn’t. The whole of theatre turned into a giant stage where you were always in danger of being pushed back into the wings if artistic politics left you behind. The spotlight might suddenly shine on you, or it would go off and you’d be alone.

‘And yet there was so much freedom. We didn’t live in a fog, stumbling with one arm in front of our faces to ward off what was coming next. We knew the future was rushing towards us and we raced to embrace it. I sleep a lot now, but in those years I hardly went to bed. I’d go to sleep at two in the morning, and at seven I’d snap out of bed wide awake and run to rehearsals. And everyone else would be up too. Imagine actors getting up before ten. And yet they didn’t look worn out and grey. Everyone looked beautiful, even those who were ugly.

‘You’ve no idea, Anna, because you’ve grown up with what came after. The time of hope didn’t last long. Everything solidified so quickly, after only a few years. They closed down one of Bulgakov’s plays, and banned
The Crimson Island.
It wasn’t allowed a single performance. By that time people were measuring what they said, and thinking about where to align themselves. There was such fear. It’s one thing for a poet to speak out. He can always write poems. But an actor or a director has got to have a theatre. He has got to be part of something, or else he’s nothing. People saw that they’d be out in the wilderness if they made the wrong choices.’

People,
thinks Anna. Always
people.
I want to know about you, not about
people.

‘I thought you were going to talk about what happened between you and my father.’

‘Yes. But this isn’t background. It’s all part of it.’

Those rounded, authoritative syllables. You have to believe her. But don’t forget that Marina has been trained to make people believe what she says.

Kolya sighs, and shudders. A bad dream, nothing more. Anna pushes her hand under his coat and rubs his back, over the knobs of his spine, across his ribs, up to the wings of his shoulder-blades.

‘There, sleep now. Sleep.’

‘In the second year, I became pregnant,’ says Marina. ‘By that time I knew your mother. We’d been introduced, we liked one another. I used to come to the house. We were becoming real friends, kitchen friends.’

‘And what?’

‘I had an abortion, as everyone did. It was perfectly normal. I didn’t tell your father until afterwards.’

There is silence for a while.

‘What did he say?’

‘He was angry.’

‘So, he wanted another house, and another baby not to go home to. Was that it?’

‘No. He said it was our baby, part of our life. He said I should have told him before I had the abortion.’

‘But he wouldn’t have done anything.’

‘Of course not. He loved your mother. I knew that by then. But he was still angry with me.’

‘It’s true, he can stay angry for a long time.’

‘He asked me if the foetus was male or female.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I didn’t know.’

‘Did you?’

‘It was male. I was four months pregnant.’

‘You left it late.’

‘Through stupidity. Thinking I might tell him, and then pulling back from it, and then thinking again that I might tell him.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘No. It’s finished. It’s a long time ago. But that was the end of things between us. After that we were friends.’

‘That wasn’t what you wanted.’

‘No. But I could tell that it was an effort for him to touch me. So I preferred not to be touched.’

‘When my mother died, did you ever think –’

‘No. I never thought of it. I knew it would not happen.’

She says it coldly and clearly, as if she’s giving a statement to the authorities.

‘So there you are,’ says Marina. ‘That’s my story.’

They lie silent, in the dark. Her father breathes snoringly. Kolya twitches, then goes still. The room smells of the books Marina has burned.

‘How many volumes did you burn, Marina?’

‘Two. It’s good paper, and the boards are almost as thick as wood.’

‘We’ll burn two more in the morning.’

Anna thinks of the bright hot flame that will spurt from those books. She’ll hold her hands so close that her bones show through the flesh. The flames will lap at her palms. Who could have ever imagined such ecstasy, while the radiators still worked? Her whole life will be in her hands, and Kolya will sit between her knees, his face lit, his candle-pale skin flushed to rose.

‘Of course, that wasn’t the truth,’ says Marina.

‘What?’

‘Do you want the real story?’

‘Yes.’

‘We recognized each other right from the first moment. We hadn’t any choice, that’s what I thought. He’s dying now, and perhaps I’ll die, too. Nobody will ever know what happened. There was no child, and now there’s not even any story left. Everything will be rubbed out. That’s what they do to enemies of the people, isn’t it, Anna? They are erased from the records. So I’ll tell you, even if you don’t want to hear. Even if you think I’m your enemy.

‘I was already well-known. I was used to things being as I wanted them to be. The roles I wanted, the tables I wanted in restaurants, summers in the Crimea. I was used to respect. Nothing had ever caught me and held me and made me do things I didn’t want to do, and go to places I didn’t want to go.

‘But your father did all that. He captured me like a fish and then he tried to throw me back into the water, but it was too late. I’d spent too much time up in the air and I was damaged. I wasn’t as beautiful any more, either to him or to myself. I couldn’t repair myself. I couldn’t even swim away. I sank to the bottom of the water and I hid there, in the mud. I believed that the mud was where I belonged.

‘I wanted the child, but I knew that your father wouldn’t be prepared to become its father. He would stay with Vera, and with you. My child would depend on me for everything. Once or twice I imagined telling him, in the heart of the night, after hours of sex, when you seem to be out of your body. I know, he’s your father. I shouldn’t be telling you this. I would imagine us talking soul to soul. Of course it never happened. I didn’t have the courage.

‘The doctor I went to was not a pleasant individual. He knew who I was. He kept telling me about how much he loved the theatre, and which roles I should take in the future. Plenty of excellent, fatherly advice, but his eyes weren’t fatherly. We were in his consulting-rooms. He owned me, for a while. He was full of understanding for what he called my “predicament”. What he wanted was for us to conspire together, and maybe for me to weep tears on his shoulder. But I wouldn’t. I had to open my legs for him but I would not open my mouth. He actually said to me that he would be interested to come to my next performance, to find out if my experience had affected my art.

‘Your father, of course, knew nothing about any of this. When I told him that I’d had the abortion, later on, he wrote a series of poems. They were very good poems.

‘Vera read them. There was never any quarrel, nothing was said. She simply withdrew. She could be in the same room, and it would seem as if she wasn’t there. You know how she always read all the drafts of your father’s work? At that time she used to write her thoughts on small sheets of yellow paper – often very good, clear, technical comments – and then she’d clip the yellow sheets to his manuscripts. She never wrote on the manuscripts themselves. Your father showed me what she’d attached to the manuscript of the poems he wrote after we’d separated. It was just a short note. “In my opinion these poems, excellent as they are, strike a false note.” That was all she ever said.

‘I spent a long time down in the mud, thinking about it all. I thought a lot about your mother, too. I wanted her friendship even more now that I’d done this to her, but I couldn’t get it. She didn’t try to stop me seeing him, nothing like that. She didn’t need to.

‘I had to understand that I’d been mistaken from the beginning. We hadn’t recognized each other. I’d recognized him, but he’d thought I was someone else. And I saw what a relief it was to him, when he believed I wasn’t in love with him any more. He really loved me, then. He was so grateful to me for having got over him that he built me up into something remarkable.

‘I remember the tone of the doctor’s voice exactly. “It was a boy,” he said. He wanted me to know that. Not, not so fatherly at all.

‘And all those letters your father sent to me. The most wonderful letters, years and years of them. I’ve kept them all. Is Kolya still asleep?’

‘Fast asleep.’

‘That’s it. Now it’s time for you to tell me your story.’

‘There isn’t one to tell.’

‘Of course there is.’

‘No,’ says Anna, ‘because it’s still happening. It hasn’t turned into a story yet.’

Marina laughs. ‘How like your mother you are.’

‘I hope I am.’

She’s solid, like Vera. She doesn’t know what she wants yet, but when she does know there won’t be any hesitation. Why did I tell her all that? Because she’s going to survive. You can see it, it’s written in her face.
Though thousands shall perish around thee, it shall not come near thee.
God knows why that is.