“We’ll tell her that Mama,” said Tatiana, “but soon we will have no wood.”
“Tania, she is freezing in the apartment. Do you see how slowly she is moving?”
Dasha nodded. “She used to go to the public canteen and spend all day there waiting for some soup, some porridge. Today I never saw her get up from the couch once, not even to eat dinner with us. Tania, can we get her into your hospital?”
“We can try,” said Tatiana from her wall. “But I don’t think there are any spare beds. The children have them all. And the wounded.”
“Let’s try tomorrow, all right?” said Mama. “At least in the hospital she’ll be warmer. They’re still heating the hospitals, right?”
“They’ve closed three wings of the hospital,” Tatiana replied, crawling out of bed. “They’re keeping just one open. And it’s full.”
She went to see her grandmother. The blankets had fallen off Babushka Maya, who lay on the sofa covered by just her coat. Tania picked up the blankets and covered Babushka thoroughly, up to her neck, tucking the blankets all around her. She knelt on the floor. “Babushka,” she whispered, “talk to me.”
Babushka groaned faintly. Tatiana put her hand on her grandmother’s head. “No strength left?” she asked.
“Not much . . .”
Tatiana managed a smile. “Babushka, I remember sitting by you when you painted; the smells of the paint were very strong, and you were always covered with it, and I used to sit so close to you that I would become covered by it, too. Do you remember?”
“I remember, sunshine. You were the sweetest child.” She smiled. Tatiana’s hand remained on her.
“You taught me how to draw a banana when I was four. I had never seen a banana and couldn’t draw one, remember?”
“You drew a very good banana,” Babushka said, “even though you had never seen one. Oh, Tanechka . . .” She broke off.
“What, Babushka?”
“Oh, to be young again . . .”
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Tatiana whispered, “but the young ones aren’t doing so well either.”
“Not them,” Babushka said, opening her eyes briefly. “You.”
The next morning Tatiana fetched the two buckets of water and then went to get the rations, and when she came back, Babushka was dead. She was lying on the couch, covered by Tatiana’s blankets and a coat, still and cold. Marina, crying, said, “I went in to wake her, and she wasn’t moving.”
Tatiana and her family stood over Babushka.
Sniffling, shrugging, turning toward the dining table, Marina said, “Come on, let’s eat.”
And Mama, nodding her head and turning herself, agreed. “Yes, let’s have the morning bread. I already made a little chicory to drink. Sarkova warmed up the kitchen stove for breakfast with her own wood. There was a little heat left for me.”
They sat down at the table, and Tatiana cut their ration into two halves—just over half a kilo for now, just over half a kilo for later. She divided the half-kilo into four pieces, and they ate, 125 grams each. “Marina,” Tatiana said firmly, “bring your bread home, you hear?”
“What about Babushka’s share?” said Marina. “Let’s divide it up and eat it now.” And they did. And then Marina and Dasha and Mama ate the chicory grinds from which they had just made a liquid that looked and smelled like coffee. Tatiana said no to the grinds.
She told her mother she would go to the local Soviet council to notify them of Babushka’s death so the burial crew could come and take her body. Mama placed her hand on Tatiana. “Wait,” she said. “If the council comes, they’ll know she is dead.”
“Yes?”
“And her rations? They’ll stop.”
Tatiana got up from the table. “Mama, we’ll still have the coupons until the end of the month. That’s ten more days of her bread.”
“Yes, but then what?”
Clearing the table, Tatiana said, “Mama, you know what? I’m not really thinking that far ahead.”
“Stop clearing, Tania,” said Dasha. “There is no water to wash anything with. Leave the dishes. All they had was bread on them. We’ll reuse them tonight.” Turning to her mother, Dasha said, “Besides, Mama, if not the council, then who? We can’t move her ourselves. We can’t leave her here. Can we?” She paused. “We can’t continue to eat dinner and sew with our grandmother on the couch.”
Mama stared at Babushka. “Better for her to be here than lying out in the street,” she said faintly.
Tatiana stopped clearing the table and went to get a white sheet from the dresser. “Mama, no, we can’t leave her here. A body needs to be buried. Even in the Soviet Union,” she said sadly. “Dasha, help me, will you? We need to wrap her before they take her. We’ll wrap her in this.”
Taking the coat and the blankets off Babushka, Dasha said, “We’ll keep the blankets. We’ll need them.”
Tatiana looked around the room. She saw pockets of disarray: books off the shelves, clothes on the floor, plates on the table. Where was the thing she was looking for? Ah, there. She went to the window and picked up a small drawing. It was a charcoal sketch of a latticed apple pie that Babushka had drawn back in September. Tatiana picked it up and placed it gently on Babushka’s chest. “All right, let’s go,” she said.
After the girls wrapped Babushka in the sheet, Mama sewed up the top and the bottom, making a sack. Tatiana crossed herself, quickly wiped her tears, and went to the council.
Later that afternoon two men from the council came. Mama paid them with two shots of vodka each. “Can’t believe you still have vodka, comrade,” one of the men said. “You’re the first one so far this month.”
“Did you know vodka is the number-one trading item?” said the other man. “You can get yourself some nice bread if you’ve got any more.”
The Metanov women exchanged looks. Tatiana knew they had two bottles left. After Papa died, and with Dimitri away, no one drank the vodka except Alexander when he came, and he drank only a little.
“Where are you taking her?” Mama asked. “We’ll come with you.” They had all stayed home from work.
The council men said, “We’ve got a full truck waiting outside. There is no room for you on this truck. We’ll be taking her to the closest cemetery. That would be Starorusskaya. Go and see her there.”
“What about a grave?” Mama said. “A casket?”
“Casket?” The man opened his mouth and silently laughed. “Comrade, give me the rest of your vodka and I still won’t be able to get you a casket. Who is going to make them? And out of what?”
Tatiana nodded. She would take a casket and burn it for firewood herself before she used it to bury her grandmother. She shivered, buttoning up her coat.
“What about a grave?” asked Mama, her face ashen and her voice cracking.
“Comrade,” the council man exclaimed, “have you seen the snow, the frozen ground? Come outside with us, come and take a look, and while you’re at it, take a look at our truck.”
Tatiana stepped forward, putting her hand on the man’s arm. “Comrade,” she said quietly, “just get her downstairs for us. That’s the hardest thing. Get her downstairs and we’ll take care of her from there.”
She went to the attic, where once upon a time they used to hang their washing. There was no washing there now, but she did find what she was looking for—her childhood sled. It was a brightly painted blue sled with red runners. She carried it downstairs to the street, careful not to slip. Babushka’s body had already been taken down and left on the snowy pavement. “Come on, girls, on one-two-three,” Tatiana said to Marina and Dasha. Marina was too weak to help. Tatiana and Dasha lifted Babushka onto the sled and pulled her three blocks to Starorusskaya, with Mama and Marina following. Tatiana did reluctantly glimpse in the back of the open council truck. The bodies were piled three meters tall, one on top of another.
“These are all the people who died today?” she asked the driver.
“No,” he
said. “That’s just what we picked up this morning.” He bent toward her. “Yesterday we picked up fifteen hundred bodies off the streets. Sell your vodka, girl, sell it and buy yourself some bread.”
The entrance to the cemetery was barricaded with corpses, some in white sheets, some without.
Tatiana saw a mother with a young child who had been pulling their dead father to the cemetery when they themselves froze in the entrance, in the snow. Closing her eyes, Tatiana shook the image out of her head. She wanted to get home. “We can’t get through. We can’t clear the path. Let’s leave our Babushka,” Tatiana said. “What else can we do?” She and Dasha took Babushka’s body and laid it gently in the snow next to the cemetery gates. They stood over her for a few minutes.
Then they went home.
They sold their two bottles of vodka and received only two loaves of white bread for it on the black market. Now that Tikhvin had gone to the Germans, there was no bread even on the black market.
7
A week passed. Tatiana could not flush the toilet. She could not brush her teeth. She could not wash. Alexander would not be happy with that, she thought. They hadn’t heard from Alexander. Was he all right?
“When do you think they will repair the pipes?” Dasha asked one morning.
“You should hope not too soon,” said Tatiana. “Otherwise you’re going to have to start doing laundry again.”
Dasha came over to Tatiana and hugged her. “I love you. You’re still making jokes.”
“Not good ones,” said Tatiana, hugging her sister back.
Living with small buckets of water was hard. The freezing of the water pipes was worse. But the worst was the spilling of the water that people carried upstairs from the first floor. The water splashed out of the buckets onto the stairs and froze. It was five to twenty degrees below zero every day, and the stairs remained perpetually covered with ice. Every morning, to get the water, Tatiana had to hold the bucket with one hand and the railing with the other, sliding down on her bottom.
Carrying the full bucket upstairs was much harder. She would fall at least once and have to go back for more water. The more water was spilled on the stairs, the more easily she fell and the thicker the ice on the stairs became. The back stairs were even more treacherous. A woman from the fourth floor fell down a flight, broke her leg, and could not get up. She froze on the stairs, into the ice. No one could move her, before or after.
Tatiana, Marina, Dasha, and Mama sat on the couch and listened to the radio’s metronome pound its own relentless heartbeat over the airwaves, its frequencies open and occasionally interrupted by a steady stream of words, some sensible, like “Moscow is fighting the enemy for its very life,” some nonsensical, like “The bread ration is cut once again to 125 grams a day for dependents, 200 grams for workers.”
Other words sometimes followed: “losses,” “damage,” “Churchill.”
Stalin talked of opening a second front in Volkhov. But not until Churchill opened a second one of his own to distract the Germans in the North European countries. Churchill said he had neither the men nor the resources to open a second front, but said he was prepared to repay Stalin for the material losses he had suffered. To which Stalin tartly replied that he would be presenting that bill straight to the Führer himself.
Moscow was in death throes, every last breath expended in the struggle against Hitler. The city was bombed as Leningrad was bombed.
“Haven’t heard from Babushka Anna in a month,” said Dasha one late November evening. “Tania, have you heard from Dimitri?”
“Of course I haven’t,” said Tatiana. “I don’t think I’ll be hearing from him again, Dasha.” She paused. “We haven’t heard from Alexander for a while either.”
“I have,” said Dasha. “Three days ago. I just forgot to tell you. Want to read his letter?”
Dear Dasha and all the girls,
I hope this letter finds you well. Are you waiting for me to return? I am waiting to come back to you.
My commander sent me up to Kokkorevo—a fishing village with no fishermen left. It’s a bombed-out hole where the village used to be. We had practically no trucks on this side, certainly no fuel for the ones we do have. There were twenty of us standing around with a couple of horses. We were there to test the ice, to see if it could hold a truck with food and munitions, or at the very least a horse with a sledge filled with food.
We walked out onto the ice. It’s so cold you’d think the ice would have formed by now, but no. It was surprisingly thin in places. We lost a truck and two horses right away, and then we just stood on the banks of Lake Ladoga and looked at the ice spreading before us, and I said, forget this, give me the damn horse. I hopped on it and rode the mare for four hours—on ice—all the way to Kobona! Temperatures were a dozen degrees below zero. I said this ice will suffice.
As soon as I came back—with a sledge full of food, I was instantly put in charge of a transport regiment—another name for a thousand People’s Volunteers. No one would spare real soldiers for this.
Before the ice got thick enough for the trucks, the volunteers had to ride the horses with the sledges to Kobona to pick up flour and other supplies and ride the horses back. I tell you, your Babushka would have done better than some of those men. They had either never ridden horses or never been out in the cold, or both, because I can’t tell you how many accidents we had with men falling off their horses, falling through the ice, drowning. First day we lost a truck and a load of kerosene right off. We were trying to bring fuel into Leningrad. The fuel shortage is almost as bad as the food shortage. There is no petroleum to fire up the kilns to bake the bread.
We said, let’s forget the trucks for a few days, let’s just use the horses. Little by little, the horses from Kobona made the thirty-kilometer journey to Kokkorevo. One day we brought in over twenty tons of food. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something. I’m in Kobona now, loading food onto the sledges, having a hard time looking at flour and knowing you are in your apartment without any. The front-line troop rations have been reduced to half a kilo of bread a day. I heard the dependent ration fell to 125g. We’ll try to get it back up.
I don’t need to tell you that the Germans are not happy about our little ice road. They bomb it mercilessly, day and night. Less at night. During our first week we lost over three dozen trucks and much food with them. Finally it became clear that I couldn’t be driving the trucks anymore; it was just not putting me to the best use. Now I’m on the Kokkorevo side, as an artillery gunner against the German planes. I’m behind a Zenith antiaircraft weapon. It shoots either machine-gun fire or bombs. It gives me a great feeling of satisfaction to know that I blew up a plane that was going to sink a truck that was bringing food to you.
The ice is thick now except for a few weak patches, and we have some good trucks. They can go as fast as forty kilometers an hour across the lake. The other soldiers and I are calling the ice road the Road of Life. Has quite a ring to it, don’t you think?
Still, without Tikhvin, we’re unable to bring much into Leningrad. We must recapture Tikhvin. What do you think, Dasha, should I volunteer my services for that? Charge the Germans on my starving gray mare, with my brand-new Shpagin machine gun in my arms? I’m just kidding, I think. The Shpagin is a superb gun, though.
I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to Leningrad again, but when I do, I’m bringing food with me, so hang on and keep going.
Courage, all.
Yours,
Alexander
Walk, walk, don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana told herself. Pull that scarf over your face, pull it over your eyes if you have to, just don’t look up, don’t see Leningrad, don’t see your courtyard where the bodies pile up, don’t see the streets where the bodies are laid out on the snow, lift your foot and step over them. Walk around the corpse. Don’t look—you don’t want to see. That morning Tatiana saw a man freshly dead, lying in the street missing most of his torso. Not from a bomb. His flanks h
ad been cut out with a knife. Feeling for Alexander’s pistol in her coat pocket, Tatiana mutely moved through the snowdrifts, her gaze on the ground in front of her.
She had to brandish Alexander’s pistol twice, out in the street by herself, in the dark of the early morning.
Thank God for Alexander.
At the end of November an explosive wave blew out the glass in the room where they ate. They covered the hole with Babushka’s blankets. They had nothing else. The room temperature dropped by thirty degrees, from just above freezing to much below.
Tatiana and Dasha carried the bourzhuika into their room, placing it in front of Mama’s couch, so when Mama sewed the uniforms she would be warm. Continuing to encourage private initiative, the factory paid her twenty rubles for every extra uniform she sewed above her norm. It took Mama the whole of November to sew five uniforms. Then she gave Tatiana a hundred rubles and told her to go and find something in the stores.
Tatiana returned with a glass of black dirt. It was the dirt into which the sugar had melted when the Germans bombed the Badayev warehouses in September. As cheerfully as she could, Tatiana said, “Once the dirt settles to the bottom, our tea will be sweet.”
Step over, don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana, just stand in line and keep your place; if you lose your place they won’t have any bread for you, and then you’ll have to scavenge the city for another store. Stay, don’t move, someone will come and clear this up. A bomb had fallen into the street, into the line Tatiana was in, right on Fontanka, fell and blew apart half a dozen women. What to do? Take care of the living? Of her family? Or move the dead? Don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana.
Don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana, keep them peeled to the snow, and look at nothing but your falling-apart boots. Mama once could have made you another pair. But Mama can’t even hand-sew one extra uniform nowadays, with or without Dasha’s help, with or without your help, when in October she was sewing ten a day by machine.
Alexander! I want to keep my promise to you. I want to stay alive—but I just don’t see how even I with my small needs and stunted metabolism can make it on 200 grams a day, of which 25 percent is edible cellulose—sawdust and pine bark. Bread doused with cottonseed cake, previously thought to be poisonous to humans—not anymore. Bread that is not bread but hardtack—flour and water. Sea biscuit, you called it? Bread that is as dark and heavy as a cobblestone. I cannot make it on 200 grams a day of that bread.