Authors: Helen Dunmore
‘I don’t see how you can be sure,’ says Anna, but even as she says it she knows that Evgenia is right. One look at Evgenia’s tough, strong-boned face, and death would back off to find an easier target. God knows there are plenty.
‘Mum says these are the latter days,’ says Evgenia.
‘What does she mean?’
‘She’s got a little book of prophecies. It says that in the latter days two giant serpents shall do battle until they devour the world with fire and thunder.’
‘I can’t think who those two serpents could be.’
‘Me neither, I keep telling her it’s a load of cobblers.’ But Evgenia’s sharp, ironic eyes are gleaming. ‘Still, it wouldn’t be a bad bargain if we got rid of two serpents for the price of one, would it?’
‘But they’d have already devoured the world.’
‘Yeah, there is that. But still…
“In the latter days, in the time of blood,”
Evgenia quotes. ‘That’s what her book says.’
They go to the door.
‘She’ll be there for hours,’ whispers Evgenia, glancing back at her mother.
‘It’s hard for you.’
‘I wish she’d just talk to me.’
‘A doctor I know says it’s hunger that’s making everyone so strange. It’s nothing personal.’
‘She’s not hungry. I make sure of that. But what’s the point of me doing all this, if she won’t eat?’
‘Evgenia –’
‘It’s all right. I’m just being stupid.’
They are in each other’s arms. They are rocking each other.
‘It’s all right, it’ll all be over soon, it’ll get better, have a good cry…’
For a long time they cling. Five minutes, maybe ten. The minutes belong only to them. Then Evgenia draws away, wiping her cheeks.
‘We’d better get going. I’ll see you on your way.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘I know. As long as you don’t –’
‘– waste –’
‘– bloody –’
‘Was it bloody she said, or fucking?’
‘Bloody.’
‘Sausage,’
they say, both together, their faces only centimetres apart.
In the latter days, in the time of blood
… But here, there’s no blood. Snow lies congealed on the roofs, and blood congeals in the bodies that loll in frozen parks. Not a drop spills, all through the long night. This is Peter’s city, built on the marshes of the Baltic. Labourers brought soil to build it on, carrying soil in the hems of their cloaks. They laid down their bones and the city walked over them. They sank down. When there were enough of them, Peter had his foundations.
Late in the morning a lilac-coloured dawn will come, with burning frost that glitters on branches, on spills of frozen water, on snow, cupolas and boarded-up statues. Nothing has ever been more beautiful than these broad avenues, the snow-coloured Neva, the parks and embankments. Only the people mar its perfection as they crawl out of their homes into the radiance of snow. Perhaps today is the day when they’ll fail to reach the bread queue. So they move on, flies caught between sheets of glass.
27
The December death-toll is mounting. The figures can’t be accurate, because not all the dead find their way to cemeteries or to common graves dynamited out of frozen earth. It’s impossible to count those who lie frozen in their homes, or covered in snow, on their way to a destination nobody remembers. Pavlov sees them, as everyone else sees them. A foot sticking out of a snowdrift here, a bundle face-down on the Neva ice. Those dead don’t go away. They aren’t buried, and they won’t decay. There will be a major public health crisis once spring comes, thinks Pavlov automatically, then he turns his mind away. That is not his problem.
Pavlov’s problem is the next day, and the one after. His job is to inch Leningrad towards life. His job is life, although he understands that there must be death, and sometimes there is so much of it that it seems to come off on his hands, like newsprint.
On available statistics the deaths for December look as if they’ll be four or five times November’s figures.
‘We’re coming up to forty thousand.’
‘Are you sure? Have those figures been checked and confirmed?’ raps out Pavlov. ‘I need an accurate picture.’
He’s got to know how many ration cards will not be re-registered at the beginning of next month. Now that everyone has to appear in person to re-register his or her card each month, the dead can’t distort the system with their ‘ghost’ rations. It makes fraud more difficult, although still not difficult enough.
Fraud, black market and theft are distorting his statistics. Pavlov rubs his eyes. The penalty for any misappropriation of food must be summary. That is no problem. That is already happening. Black-marketeers, thieves and ration-card forgers can expect no mercy. Those who manipulate the system from within are the worst, and must be punished most harshly and publicly, so that examples are made. The problem is that when so many are dying, the death penalty loses its edge.
So much flour, so much sugar, so much fat. High-protein airlifts are coming in, but quantities are pitiful. Fifty or sixty tons of high-calorie food a day, against a target of two hundred tons. Sometimes the planes are grounded, and nothing arrives. But whatever the military airlift brings, it won’t fill those millions of mouths.
The ice road over Lake Ladoga is what’s going to save the city, if anything will. But progress on that front is still slow. So many trucks have gone through the ice, or broken down, and those that are left take nearly three times the projected journey time. Blizzards often make it close to impossible for trucks to navigate from one station on the ice to the next, and when the sky’s clear, the German bombers come. It’s a heroic struggle, of course it is. Everything’s heroic. You can take that for granted, but it’s not the point. Pavlov’s pen rests on his paper. He looks up, calculating. His eyes are reddened with smoke and lack of sleep, but he’s a strong man, and he knows how far he can drive himself.
The Kirov works have just had to stop production, although the workers are still there, heroically defending the factory, sleeping in shifts, staying at their posts even when they can’t stand up. But producing nothing.
We don’t need any more heroes, we need tanks. We need antiaircraft batteries, and engineers with spare parts. Even when supplies have got safely over the ice, there’s the nightmare of the single-track line from Lake Ladoga to Leningrad. Railway staff are starving like everyone else. They can’t keep the line clear, and it needs constant repair after regular bombing raids. There’s not enough fuel for the engines, there’s a shortage of skilled manpower, and they can’t even get together enough up-to-strength gangs to clear the lines and points.
‘Here are the latest figures.’
More figures on thin paper in front of him. Hungrily, his mind seizes on the statistics. That’s Pavlov’s gift: figures don’t overwhelm him, they sharpen him. At once the new figures slot into their place in the latest of the plans he’s had to make on the wing fifty times this winter. He knows they call him the Food Tsar behind his back, but he takes it as a compliment. Besides, he doesn’t underestimate his enemy. Pavlov knows his Nekrasov.
The greatest Tsar of all is hunger
– Nekrasov got it right about that. But it’s no good cowering before hunger. No, you’ve got to keep your head and attack, before it’s too late. Get that Irinovsky line going, no matter what it takes. Get the ice road up to full production, the way it should be. Never mind if those bastards bomb the railway night and day. Get the gangs on to the line and repair it every time. If those in charge can’t organize, shoot them.
Of course there’ll be losses. So do it now, before the deaths rise any more. Corpses can’t clear railway lines, or man the stations on the ice. He knows that military command is with him on this. He’s talked to Zhdanov.
Those on the lowest ration-level can’t live for long, unless they have private stores of hoarded food. It’s unlikely that they’ll have such stores, after almost three months of mounting hunger, any more than they’ll have fat left on their bodies. The fat is all burned off. The cupboards are stripped. These people now receive two slices of adulterated bread each day. Because their body-fat has gone, their muscle is being consumed by the engine of their bodies. They drop dead from hypothermia, heart failure, exhaustion, and all those diseases that have a thousand names but come to the same thing: starvation.
‘Deaths reported from dystrophy and other starvation-related diseases…’ drones a voice behind him.
‘Kindly don’t waste my time giving me that information again,’ snaps Pavlov. ‘I am familiar with the pathology. I want precise figures for the amount of flour in storage at the West Ladoga warehouses. It is essential that all possible efforts are made to increase the volume of supplies brought in over the ice road.’
Like body-fat, the number of those into whose mouths he must put food is melting.
‘Thirty thousand deaths, you say? Forty? Forty-five?’
The numbers are written in columns. In other columns, the tonnage of flour, fat, sugar, meat is noted just as meticulously. When he cut the ration at the end of November, a raw stenographer blurted out, ‘But people will die!’ and then went white, realizing what she had said. There was no one else in the room. If there had been, he would have had to take action.
‘Do you think I have no human feeling?’ asked Pavlov quickly.
‘No – of course not – I didn’t intend –’
‘I take responsibility, do you understand that?’
‘Yes-’
She doesn’t understand, and she can’t understand. To be the one who writes the order is not pleasant, even when you know it’s the only thing to be done. He’s writing history, but at the same time history is writing him. He hasn’t got the choice that girl thinks he has. And back in Moscow, the Boss is watching him.
But things will change. They have got to. Pavlov can sense a change which can’t yet be seen or heard or felt. It’s like a certain rawness in the air after months of dry frost. Hundreds of kilometres to the south there’s a warm wind stirring, although the frozen river doesn’t know this yet. These are not things you can know or understand, but you sense them, and your blood stirs with them. No, it’s true, these really are the greatest pleasures of all, those pleasures you don’t really understand.
Pavlov has leaned forward. His hands grip the desk. He is not in grey, winter-haunted Leningrad now, but in a village eighty miles south-west of Moscow, standing on a shallow cliff above a river where the ice is breaking. Thick sheets of ice bump and grind against one another. Some are forced underwater by the pressure of the current racing over them. The air’s full of the noise of water, rushing and urgent, and all at once he realizes how long and silent the winter has been. A bird flies low over the surface of the river, skims it, and then rises over the wooded opposite bank. There’s a smell of mud, and raw, churning water, and surely the light over those folded hills is clearer now? It picks out their curves like a promise.
So many tons at West Ladoga, so many tons stored in Leningrad, so many on their way to Leningrad across the ice road. It’s the third week in December, the coldest and darkest week of all, when the pulse of life sinks lowest. It’s not dramatic to die of hunger. No one has the strength to run into the streets, bleeding and cursing. This is an invisible disaster, like the death of a hive in winter. But when it’s spring and the hive’s opened, it will all become clear. Like cells, the apartment houses of Leningrad will be packed with bodies, shrivelled and blackened with frost.
Pavlov pulls another piece of paper towards him. On it he sketches a graph plotting the rise in the death rate against the cuts he has made in rations. He arrives at mid-December, pauses, then continues, extrapolating into the January that has not yet arrived. Assume no rise in the ration. Assume that the death rate follows the December pattern. No further cuts, but no rise. Dependants remain on 125 grammes of bread per day. On through January, into February. The angle of his graph points at the sky, carrying the lives of more than half the population of Leningrad with it. It goes on up. They die faster.
He looks again at his up-to-date lists of reserve food supplies. His reserves are pitiful. All they guarantee is a few more days’ bare survival. If he increases the ration by as much as twenty grammes, the risk is appalling. But leave it like this, and the citizens of Leningrad will die anyway. There’s only one thing that gives him any room for manoeuvre, and that’s the potential of the ice road. Not what it’s done for Leningrad so far, certainly: but what it might do. He lifts the telephone, pulling graph and statistics in front of him, and makes a call to Zhdanov and the Leningrad Military Command.
Hours later, Pavlov picks up his graph of the projected Leningrad death rate and scrutinizes it again. Then he strikes a match, holds a corner of the paper to it, and lets it burn. He doesn’t need it, because the figures are printed on his mind. And besides, it’s a document that doesn’t need to be seen by anyone, especially by that stenographer with the white face who said, ‘But people will die!’ Blackness scrolls up the side of the paper. Only when the flame is about to touch his fingers does he blow it out, and crush the burnt paper to ash.
On the twenty-fifth of December, the daily bread-ration will be increased by a hundred grammes for workers, and seventy-five grammes for dependants.
*
But the stenographer was perfectly right. In another part of Leningrad, on Vasilievsky Island, three days later, a child opens her notebook. It’s a small notebook, made to fit in a pocket, like an address book. The letters of the alphabet run down the right-hand side. In the clear handwriting of a well-taught eleven-year-old she writes her first entry.
Zhena
. She goes back and underlines the word,
Zhena. She died on 28th Dec. at 12.30 in the morning, 1941.
In future entries, she will not underline the names. She will record the deaths of her family one by one, until they are all there. At the end she’ll write:
The Savichevi are dead. They are all dead. Only Tanya is still here.
Pavlov, too, is perfectly correct. He’s writing history, while history writes him. He rubs his eyes. His colleague watches from across the room. Pavlov frightens him, but it’s not fear he feels at this moment, but something else, closer to pity.