‘Good luck.’
The sky flares briefly into sunset as Anna trudges on. The snow burns blue and crimson, then the light dies. There are only a few wild-looking streaks of red left in the sky. And over there, that red that burns more fiercely, it must be a fire started by German shells. They are using phosphorus incendiaries. Because there is no water to put the fires out, they burn until they die of their own accord. The wind is rising, though it’s not fierce yet. It burns Anna’s face as she makes her way onward, back bent, dragging the heavy sledge. Only a few hundred metres now. Soon she’ll be home. They’ll have to help her carry the stove upstairs, piece by piece. She can’t do it on her own, she just can’t do all those journeys up and down the stairs on top of this. Maybe Marina will be able to manage the sections of stove-pipe, one at a time, if Anna carries the stove itself. But Marina’s so weak.
Anna stops. She looks up at the sky, and fine, icy snow patters into her face. Her legs shake. Is it just the snow falling, or is she losing her balance? She clenches the rope. She’s still standing. She won’t fall. She’ll make it to the corner, then to the first lamp-post, then the next.
An explosion tears through her. She doubles up, dropping the rope. She’s down in the snow, on all fours, like an animal. Slowly, realizing herself, she clambers up. It wasn’t close. It’s all right. Blood beats hard in her head as the shock spreads through her flesh. She bends down slowly and picks up the loop of rope. It’s all right, it wasn’t close. Just the usual shelling, pounding from the south-west.
‘Bastards,’ says Anna. ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards.’
Last month they shelled the department where her mother worked. But all the equipment Vera had fought for was saved, because it had already been moved into the cellars. Komarovsky told Anna about it when she met him one day, crossing the Anichkov bridge. He said things were difficult, but they were still able to carry on.
‘How’s every one?’
‘We’re managing. We have to improvise. There’s no chance of getting spare parts, and of course there’s a shortage of trained personnel. So many away sick. But we keep going. I often think of your mother?
She will get this sledge home. She will get the stove upstairs, and light it. She will make sure that Kolya does his breathing exercises. She will put food in his mouth, whatever it takes. Nothing is going to stop her.
‘Bastards!’ she shouts at the grey sky. ‘I don’t care what you do! You can all go and fuck yourselves, you fucking bastards. See if I care!’
19
Kolya kneels by the stove. Yellow light flickers on his face as he touches his lighted taper to a curl of newsprint. His breathing is heavy with responsibility.
‘Hold it there. Wait till it catches.’
Kolya holds the taper still. A blue skim of flame races over the paper, and deepens to yellow.
‘It’s lit! It’s lit! It’s on fire!’ He turns round to Anna, his face triumphant. ‘I lit it properly, didn’t I, Anna?’
Flame burrows deep into the coils of Leningradskaya Pravda with which Anna has packed the stove. Among these coils is the front page from one of the worst days of the September bombardment. Leningrad: To Be, Or Not To Be? it asks. Her father had stared at that headline for a long time when the paper came out. On that day he didn’t have the energy to read the article, but he folded the newspaper and kept it by his bed. From time to time he reached out and touched the headline.
‘Leningrad,’ he muttered. ‘And we’re asking if it will be, or not be.’
After a few days she had taken away the newspaper, and he hadn’t seemed to notice. She thought she would keep it, and she folded it inside her father’s copy of Oblomov. One day, when all this was over, she would show it to Kolya.
But now everything that can burn must be burned. Flame crackles at the handful of splintery wood from a chopped-up packing-case. Kolya kneels there, swallowing the warmth of the fire like food. He’s taken off his gloves, and spread his hands to the heat. How thin they are now, not like Kolya’s hands at all. They look older and more knowing than they should, now that the rosy flesh has disappeared. So does his face, with its sharp little nose and big eyes. Now he knows what grown-ups can’t do. You can ask for food, but they won’t give you any.
‘I’m hungry, Anna. My stomach hurts.’
‘Let me rub it for you.’
‘I don’t want you to rub me. I want some sausage.’
‘There isn’t any sausage, Kolya.’
‘Why?’
Her face is tight when she looks at him. Is she angry? Is she cross with him? He grizzles, to wear her down.
‘I’m hungry, Anna. I’m so hungry. My stomach hurts.’
She pulls him on to her knee. She rocks him, too tight and too hard. She doesn’t go into the kitchen and open the cupboard and get food for him.
He doesn’t ask any more. His hair is dry and dull under the fur cap which she keeps pulling forward to make sure his ears are covered. His hair needs cutting. Wisps of it stick out from under his cap. He crouches there like a cave-boy, worshipping flame.
‘We’ve got loads of stuff we can burn, haven’t we, Anna?’
‘Yes, loads of stuff.’
The crackle and hiss of flame is life in the cold room. You will live, it says. You will live, and not die. Once the burzhuika gets going, its fuel will be their mother’s oak dressing-table. It’s a solid, well-made piece which will give hours of heat.
Anna swallows the sudden memory of Vera at her dressing-table, twisting up her heavy dark-brown hair and pinning it at the nape of her neck. The hair was newly washed and slippery. Her mother made an impatient sound, dipped her fingers in a jug of water, then damped her hair. Anna leaned forward, and smelled her mother. She smelled her mother’s warm skin, and the rosemary rinse she used on her hair to make it shine. Vera’s face stared at itself in the mirror, but Anna knew she was thinking about something quite different.
‘Mama, you look prettier when you don’t bunch up your hair like that.’
‘It wouldn’t be practical, Anna.’
Vera was already thinking of her work. There, she glowed with life. There she had her team, her responsibilities, her patients. There was always some problem to be solved, or new technique to be explored. At work, Anna saw, her mother laughed. There were jokes which flickered over Anna’s head, and she basked in them without understanding them. Vera’s colleagues knew everything about Anna, and they had brought in cakes because she was coming. Vera explained the work of the radiology department to Anna, drawing diagrams and showing Anna the machines.
‘This is why you have to work hard at your maths, so that when you’re grown up you can get a job you love.’
Love was a rare word in her mother’s mouth. She praised Anna for what she did, rather than for what she was. Suddenly she placed her hand on Anna’s hair.
‘I want you to have this. I want you to have work that makes you happy. It’s especially important for you, because you’re going to be a woman. You’ll need something that is your own. I want you to keep studying hard, until you fulfil your potential.’
And here I am, thinks Anna, contemplating the well-made joints of the dressing-table. And your dressing-table’s about to fulfil its potential by keeping us warm for a couple of days. She feels a perverse, angry desire for her mother to see this. Maybe I haven’t fulfilled my potential, Mammy, but watch how I’ll keep us alive.
She wanted me to have something that was mine and didn’t depend on anyone else. She turned round on her stool, away from her mirrored image. She put her hands on either side of my face, and pushed my hair back, and looked into my eyes. She was half-smiling.
‘Work is what keeps you going, Anna.’
If only Anna had thought to bring the axe from the dacha. They have a tiny chopper in the apartment, but it won’t cut anything much thicker than the packing-case. They are borrowing a saw from the Sergeyevs across the landing, but this means that Anna has had to offer them a share in the woo
d. Zina didn’t want to take it at first. ‘No, go on, we’re not using the saw today anyway.’ The Sergeyevs have no burzhuika, but they have rigged up a lethal little brick fireplace close to their ventilation window.
‘There’s no fire risk,’ Zina assured Anna. ‘You see, there’s a layer of stones under the brick, and my Fedya’s put a sheet of steel underneath that.’
But Fedya’s hardly ever at home now. He works, sleeps and eats at the Kirov works.
‘My Fedya’s a wonderful worker. Practically a Stakhanovite,’ Zina said to Anna once, not long after her marriage.
Fedya won’t speak to Anna if he meets her on the stairway, or in the queue for the bathroom. He’s a big, solid, handsome man, fair-haired and strongly muscled. A real Leningrad boy, who grew up in the courtyard with his mates. His mother hung out of the window to yell him in for supper, like all the other mothers. Echoes, screams, whistles, shouts, smells of cabbage and soup.
Anna sees him in singlet and trousers on the bathroom landing, with his towel slung over his shoulder. He pushes his way into the bathroom first, because he’s got to get going, down to the Kirov works. He’s got a real man’s job. But he’s decent too, the kind who would do anything for you if he was on your side.
Fedya’s a Party member, the real thing. When he sees any member of the Levin family, his face closes over. He doesn’t trust them, doesn’t like them being in the building, and certainly doesn’t want them on his landing. The Levins are trouble.
‘We were living here when you were just a kid!’ she wants to tell him. But he swings his way down the stairs, whistling, proprietorial, and she says nothing. There’s nothing to be said to this young man in his prime, a respected worker with a wife and child, who has done everything right and has very little sense of humour. What can you say to him that will change his mind, when he believes so absolutely in what he is and what he does? By definition, his thoughts become truths. He knows that if there are enemies of the people still waiting to be unmasked, then they will behave exactly like Anna’s family, coming in and out at odd times, reading books in the bathroom, smiling when there is no reason to smile, and possessing two whole rooms and a kitchen.
Fedya certainly believes that enemies of the people exist. He reads his paper thoroughly, and scans the staring little photographs of engineers and university lecturers who have been unmasked as spies, Trotskyites and saboteurs. They thought they’d fooled him, did they? Well, look at them now, and a good thing too! Yes, when she passes Fedya on the stairs, Anna can see in his face the thought of their two-room apartment, and her own unworthiness to live in it when a whole raft of decent workers could be put in there. And how he’d love that, she thinks.
But there’s a shamefully weak part of her that still wants Fedya to like her, even though she knows that he never will. What a fool she is. She remembers the time when she was standing aside in the hallway, waiting while he helped old Masha downstairs with her kerosene. When he saw Anna, he shot her an unfriendly look, as if to say: What are you hanging about for? Why did that look burn her? She’d wanted to spread out her arms, barring the stairs, and not let him go by until she’d told him: ‘I work too, you know! I’m a nursery assistant and I’ve got more bums and noses to wipe than you’ve seen in your entire life. And I’m bringing up a child as well…’
But it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. He knows her origins. She’s the daughter of a member of the intelligentsia, and a dodgy one at that. No amount of toilet-scrubbing will get rid of that stain.
In spite of Fedya’s fireplace, the Sergeyevs’ room is as cold as a tomb. Theirs is a single room, but the biggest on the landing, and it faces north.
‘Why don’t you come in to us, you and the baby?’ Anna suggests. ‘Once we’ve got the burzhuika going, it’ll be a lot warmer than in here.’
But Zina shrinks back. ‘Oh no, thank you, we’re fine as we are. With our little fire, it gets quite warm.’
She wouldn’t dare come into their apartment. What would her Fedya say? He’s always telling her that she’s politically naïve. She can’t help it, he knows, because of her lack of education, so he’s undertaken to keep her on the right tracks. The trouble is that the tracks seem to keep swerving all over the place, and then doubling back on themselves. Zina’s given up trying to work out where these tracks are going. Although she looks and listens and nods in all the right places, really she has switched off.
But Fedya has dinned into her that the Levins are not safe neighbours. It’s one thing to meet on the stairway, but she mustn’t take it any further.
‘You see, Zina, with people like that, you get drawn in. They seem friendly enough, but that shows how artful they are. And of course you’re judged by who you associate with, that’s only natural.’
She knows that Fedya would go mad if he knew she’d been into the Levins’ apartment. Quite apart from questions of right or wrong or political education, you can’t be sure who might be watching you. Even now, when you’d think people would have enough to do with trying to find the next meal, there might be someone with enough energy to denounce you. There’s one in every apartment building.
The baby writhes in her arms. Its head wobbles on scrawny folds of neck as it lets out a mew and butts feebly against Zina’s clothes.
‘He’s hungry… ‘ she says to Anna.
‘Are you still feeding him yourself?’
‘Yes, but I don’t know if he’s getting enough. Can you remember what your Kolya weighed at three months?’
‘About eight kilos, I think.’
‘He only weighs four and a half. And he was such a big baby when he was born, do you remember?’
‘Yes, he was. Let me have a look.’
Gently, Anna draws back the shawl. The baby’s hands are crossed on his chest. They are purplish and spider-thin, like the hands of a newborn. She touches the baby’s cheek. He’s suffering from dehydration, as well as malnutrition.
‘Is he drinking water?’
‘No.’
‘You could boil a little on your fire, and let it cool. Have you got any sugar?’
‘No.’
Anna touches the baby’s cheek again.
‘Or honey? Anything sweet?’
‘We haven’t got anything.’
But to put sugar into this baby’s mouth is to take it out of Kolya’s. The baby mews again, its old, small face screwing up. Its mouth works against the palm of Anna’s hand, rooting for food. She’ll give Kolya an extra share of her own bread ration to make up.
‘Zina, I can let you have a hundred grammes of sugar. Have you got a baby’s bottle?’
Zina nods. ‘I got one when he was born, but I’ve never used it’
Zina doesn’t seem surprised or grateful at Anna’s offer of the sugar. She doesn’t in fact seem to understand what it means.
‘Boil up the water, and quarter-fill the bottle. While the water’s still hot, add a teaspoon of the sugar so it dissolves. Then give him that every hour, even if you have to rouse him. If he doesn’t suck at first, put the water on your finger until he gets the taste of it, and then he’ll suck.’
‘But he’s sleeping so well. He’s sleeping right through the night now.’
‘That’s because he’s so weak. He shouldn’t be sleeping like that. You have to rouse him. Flick the soles of his feet with your fingers if he won’t wake: like this. Once he’s got a bit of energy he’ll start to suck more strongly. The stronger he sucks, the more milk you’ll make. And you must rest all you can. Wrap yourself up in everything you’ve got, and drink plenty of water. You’ll make more milk if you conserve your energy.’
Zina is only nineteen. Four years younger than Anna, and not even a Leningrader. She’s got no family here, and now she’s landed up in the middle of all this, and with the baby too. Zina’s a Kiev girl, and she hasn’t seen her mother since the baby was born. Her dark eyes fix intently on Anna’s face.
‘Anna Mikhailovna, tell me,’ she whispers, ‘when are t
hey going to lift the blockade?’
‘I don’t know.’
But Zina’s eyes continue to search her face.
‘Doesn’t your father know anything? He’s a writer, isn’t he?’
‘We don’t know anything. How could we?’
Zina asks no more, though Anna can tell she wants to. Maybe she really believes that there is a layer of people left in Leningrad which is in control of what is happening, and knows what’s coming. Maybe it’s less frightening, if you believe that. Whether her father comes into that category because he’s a writer, or because Fedya’s told her he might be a German sympathizer, Anna can’t guess. But she’s still angry, even though there is no point in being angry with Zina.
‘My father was wounded defending the Motherland. He can’t even get out of bed,’ she says. ‘How do you think he can possibly know anything?’
How strange to hear herself talking of the Motherland, using words that belong on posters, not in real life. And yet she means it. Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade. Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy. It’s not like trying to read mirror-writing any more. Everything gets clearer day by day, as siege and winter eat into their lives. The coils of Soviet life are losing their strength. There’s only the present left, and it has burned away both past and future. There’s only the dark, besieged, freezing city, and the Germans outside, dug into their winter positions, waiting, stamping their feet.
But they will never come in. Her friend in the Party was right. We will destroy everything, we will blow up our own city and let it burn as we let Moscow burn before Napoleon. We’ve mined bridges, steelworks, palaces and power stations. If we have to, we’ll press the buttons that detonate those fuses. Once Anna saw an apartment building dynamited, because it was in the way of a new road. In the second of detonation it hung in the air, silent, holding shape like a mirage of itself. Then the noise of the blast rolled over it and flattened it.
We will do that. We will eat horses and pigeons and dogs, we will burn our books and our furniture, we will consume ourselves rather than be consumed.