‘I’m sorry, Anna Mikhailovna, I didn’t mean anything –’
She’s terrified I won’t give her the sugar now. No, it’s more than that. She really is sorry. I have got to stop being so suspicious of everyone.
‘I’ll go and get that sugar. And thanks again for letting us use your axe. I’ll bring you your share of the wood once we’ve finished chopping up the dressing-table.’
‘A dressing-table – how nice! I’ve always wanted one of those.’
‘It was my mother’s.’
At the thought of the dressing-table, Zina’s eyes fill for the first time with tears of weakness.
‘It doesn’t seem right, does it, all this?’
‘You go and lie down. When I come back with the sugar I’ll knock on the door twice so you know it’s me. Tuck him in beside you, and open the shawl so he gets the warmth of your body. They can’t maintain their body temperature as we can.’
She sounds like Fedya, thinks Zina. So sure of herself, and knowing things, and having the right words. But it’s different with Anna, because I can understand what she says. I don’t keep drifting off.
In the apartment the burzhuika is burning strongly, eating up Anna’s schoolbooks.
‘It’s getting hot!’ shouts Kolya as she comes into the room. Her father is on the sofa, swaddled in blankets. On the floor Marina has pushed together the big mattress and Kolya’s little mattress. She is busy heaping them with blankets, pillows and shawls. In the light of the candle-stub, huge shadows of Marina leap from wall to wall. It is five o’clock.
Anna goes to the kitchen with a spill of paper lit from the candle, lights another stub, and opens the store-cupboard. There’s the last bag of sugar. Without allowing herself to think about what she’s doing, she opens it carefully, and measures a hundred grammes into a cup.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Oh! – Marina. You nearly made me spill it. I’m just measuring some sugar.’
‘For whom?’ Marina raps out.
‘For the baby next door. Zina’s baby. He’s starving.’
Marina is silent while Anna refolds the top of the sugar bag. Then she says, with cold certainty, You can’t do that.’
‘I’ve got to. He’s malnourished, and he’s dehydrated. In this cold he could easily die.’
Marina draws herself up. ‘So what are you going to do about it, Anna? What about all those other babies? Are you going to trawl up and down the street knocking on doors until you’ve given away all our food to people who are going to die? And then you can come home and watch Kolya die.’
‘It’s only a hundred grammes.’
‘A hundred grammes is a hundred grammes. It’s not “only” anything.’
‘But Zina’s our neighbour. We can hear the baby crying. She’s only across the landing, and she hasn’t got a clue what to do. He’s going to go to sleep and not wake up at all if he doesn’t get some calories into his body soon.’
Marina lays her hand on Anna’s arm. Her voice changes, taking on a seductive, vibrant,’ cello-note that Anna has not heard before.
‘Anna,’ she says, ‘you are the ones who matter. You and Kolya. Don’t you understand that?’
‘Only us?’
‘You still don’t see, do you, what it’s going to be like? You still don’t understand. It’s going to go on like this, getting colder and colder, and with less and less food. No one’s going to come and help us. And I don’t intend to watch you all die.’
‘You might die first.’ A grin stretches her face. She can’t really be standing here with Marina, talking about their own deaths. She can’t really want to burst out laughing.
‘People don’t die just when they want to. I’m the type who’ll go on to the end. It’s pure selfishness, you’re quite right. I can’t face seeing you die one by one before me. So put the sugar back in the bag.’
Marina’s eyes glow in the light of the candle-stub. Anna can’t read them, but they draw her in. She wants, suddenly, more than anything, to yield and become what Marina wants. She wants to be carried on the warm wave of Marina’s voice. To let Marina decide. They are almost touching, in the tiny space of the kitchen. She wants to give in, and Marina knows it. It’s like sex. The other person always knows.
But the baby cries. In spite of his weakness, the cry is piercing. It is like Kolya’s cry. She would get up in the night to him, sick with tiredness, those first days after Vera died. She didn’t know the first thing about babies then.
‘No,’ says Anna, with stiff, clumsy lips. ‘I can’t do that. I’ve told Zina she can have a hundred grammes. But that’ll be the end of it. She’ll have to manage on her own after this. Everything else is for Kolya.’
Marina has drawn back. It’s over. ‘Even if she comes knocking on the door with that baby?’
‘Even if she does.’
‘Good. Because you have a responsibility, you know.’
‘To what?’
Anna is sure she knows the answer. Marina will say that her responsibility is to Kolya, and to her father. But she doesn’t. Instead she looks closely at Anna and says, ‘To stay alive, of course.’
To what? thinks Anna later, when the sugar is gone, and the candle is burning down. But the burzhuika really does give out some heat, now that she’s been able to feed it with wood. Kolya’s looking better already. And tomorrow she’ll attack the other half of the dressing-table. She couldn’t do it all at once. The effort of chopping the wood made her heart beat so fast that she thought she would vomit. Marina made her sit down and take valerian drops.
She is drawing. Kolya is asleep, curled on his mattress close to the stove. Anna has a stick of willow charcoal, and she is drawing Marina as she sits by the sofa, reading to Anna’s father. A responsibility – but to what? thinks Anna again. What did Marina really mean? To stay alive is not enough, if everything else has gone. She’s right about that. I should have waited, and helped Tanya to climb the canal steps, but I couldn’t do it. I had to get home, and carry the stove upstairs.
Her father lies still, with his eyes closed, but Anna knows he is awake. Marina is reading a Shakespeare play, in English, which she speaks better than any of them. It is A Winter’s Tale. Anna can understand some of it, but she’s not really listening. She has cut out the too-seductive sound of Marina’s voice, so that she can draw. Her fingers are clumsy with cold, even though she’s wearing a pair of old woollen gloves. Their tips are cut off, because she can’t draw with gloved fingers. She draws with long, firm strokes. Tonight, the charcoal seems not just to sweep the paper, but to understand every grain of it.
How strange it is that she should be drawing Marina’s portrait now. Marina’s face is so much changed, or maybe it’s Anna’s perception which has changed. Marina does not look beautiful. Her glasses perch on her nose, and she wrinkles up her eyes to focus on the text in the poor light of the candle. Her eyes are watering. Anna knows she’s worried about her eyesight. From time to time she stops reading, and fixes Anna’s father with a long look, as ruthlessly protective as the stare of a hawk circling its nest, scouring the sky for danger to its young.
She loves him. Of course she does. It’s as simple as that. She has loved him in this way, and he has loved her in another. She is his dear and brilliant friend, of whom he has always been very slightly afraid. But she loves him. It’s been going on for years, nearly twenty years, way back before Kolya’s birth, back to when Marina tried to make herself into a dear friend of their mother’s, too. But Vera wouldn’t let her. Vera refused to be party to any of it. She would never collude. How strange it all is, how painful and lopsided.
But when you look at Marina, you can’t help believing that this is the only way she could ever have loved. There would always have to be something impossible at the core of it.
And I would never have known about it, if it hadn’t been for all this. She would have remained my father’s old friend, wonderful actress, beautiful too, you know, in her time. You should have see
n her, but of course these days…
I would never have folded blankets with her, hand to hand. I would have drawn her portrait at her dacha, and never known her at all.
It has got to be a double portrait. Her father, and Marina. Rapidly, Anna sketches the sofa, the outline of her father’s body blurred by its pile of covers, the sharp edges of nose and jaw, the sunken hollows of his eyes. She draws his protruding eyeballs, with the veined skin of his eyelids sealed down over them. She draws the angle of Marina’s neck as she fixes her gaze on him again. The poise of that head closes a circle which contains only Marina, and the man lying on the sofa. One hand holds the pages of her Shakespeare, the other rests on the pillow, close to his shrunken cheek.
Anna draws on. She shapes the pointed shadows that spring out on the wall behind Marina. She draws the patchwork blanket which is drawn up under her father’s chin. She knitted that blanket herself, coloured square by coloured square, before Kolya was born. It wrapped him on his first outing. Her fingers remember the warmth and scratchiness of the wools. It was spring, and cold. She held Kolya awkwardly, not yet used to him, as she walked in the park. The black buds were swollen, bursting with leaf. The baby screwed up his eyes against the strong spring light.
She draws on. The stove sighs as a lump of wood collapses into ash. Soon its warmth will be gone. Quickly, quickly, before her fingers stiffen, she draws her father’s jawbone.
Only Anna hears two taps at the outer door. She gets up, putting her drawing aside. It can’t be Andrei, because he’s already said he won’t be able to come tonight. Perhaps it’s Zina. Something wrong with the baby again.
But it’s Andrei, pale, with soot marks on his face.
‘What’s happened?’
‘That crazy idiot Borya made a fire in our apartment, and then he fell asleep and it went through to the floorboards. They managed to put it out, but the smoke’s wrecked everything. Both mattresses caught fire.’
‘Oh my God. Is Borya all right?’
‘He’s inhaled smoke, so he’s not feeling too good. But he’ll survive. The Antonovs will take him in.’
‘He didn’t lose his ration card?’
‘No.’
Without a ration card, you die for certain. It’s as simple as that. With one, you may die too, but the land of not-dying remains open to you. Andrei stares down at her with his Siberian eyes. Even when he’s as kicked-in as he is now, he still seems to bring with him the taste of a different, more open-handed air. She rests her mouth on his cold cheek, which smells of smoke. Her lips open. She tastes him.
‘You can stay here. Of course you can. But it’s too far for you to walk all the way to the hospital from here. Surely they’d give you a bed there?’
He seizes her and holds her. He is trembling all over. He’s stalled with exhaustion, and then the shock of the fire and finding everything gone.
‘All the way I was thinking what I would do if you weren’t here.’
‘Where else should I be?’
‘I know. But anything can happen these days. I suppose I could find a cot somewhere at the hospital, but it’s so full. We’ve got patients on the floor, in the corridors, jammed up next to dead bodies.’
‘You can stay here. We’ll work everything else out later. Come on in. My father and Kolya are sleeping, but Marina’s awake. You wouldn’t believe how warm it is now we’ve got the burzhuika?
She takes him in, and moves her drawing off the arm of her chair. Andrei sits down, closing his eyes.
‘He’s staying here,’ says Anna to Marina. ‘He hasn’t anywhere else. His room’s been burnt out.’
Marina nods silently. Then, in the voice that still comes clear from her shrunken mouth, she continues to read from the play:
‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;
Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come:
I’ll fill your grave up: stir; nay, come away;
Bequeath to death your numbness …’
‘Feel in my pocket,’ says Andrei.
‘Your coat pocket?’
‘Yes.’
His coat is cold. She reaches into the pocket, and brings out a jar.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s for you. It’s honeycomb. A patient’s mother gave it to me.’
Anna takes the jar over to the candle. Sure enough, there it is, a dark comb of patterned cells that drip with honey. There’s quite a lot there. The small jar is at least half-full. She turns it round, so that the light catches it.
‘I wonder where she got it from.’
‘I didn’t ask.’
‘You have some of it, to keep your energy up.’
‘I get my meals at the hospital. I’m fine. Anna, I can’t believe you’ve got the burzhuika. It’s like heaven here. Is it all right if I sleep in this chair?’
‘Of course.’
She steps over the mattress, sits down at his feet, and rests her head against his knees. She feels his hand begin to stroke her hair. His hand is still trembling. After a few minutes it slackens, and weighs heavy. Marina and her father are within touch, but she feels as distant from them as if she were on another star. Those stars that hang over Leningrad, bitingly sharp, when the dust and smoke from the shelling clear. They look down and they see everything. A smell of antiseptic clings to Andrei. She knows how carefully he scrubs his hands and arms before he comes to see her, so he won’t smell of blood.
‘I’ll make you tea in a minute,’ she says.
‘Just let’s sit.’ His voice is blurring. The stove-warmed, people warmed air is working on him like a drug. His hand on her skin is growing warmer.
‘So nice,’ he says, as he falls into sleep.
Slowly, a fug thickens in the little room. The temperature must be at least eight degrees. Maybe even ten. She can’t put any more wood in the stove, or there’ll be none for tomorrow, but it’ll be a while before it cools. They’ll have warmth to get them through part of the night. Marina’s head has drooped, though she is still sitting upright. Perhaps she’s fallen asleep, too. How good it is to fall asleep, and not to feel hunger any more. You should never wake anyone once they’ve got away, deep into their dreams, where there’s food,
But Anna can’t sleep. Her stomach hurts, and the candle’s nearly burned down. She can think about her drawing. The figures are sharp on the surface of her mind. She can shut her eyes and see them. Who will ever finish drawing all this? The gaping mouths, the heavy coats hung on racks of bones, the shell-shattered streets, the purple faces of old women, the white snow falling, the uncleared snow in the streets, the children scrabbling in piles of rubbish while tongues of ice poke out of the gutters. A whole city is going to sleep. A forest of ice is growing around us.
No one can see us any more. Do they even know what’s happening here? Are they being allowed to know? Radio Leningrad tells the truth, or part of it, but that’s because it’s local. The people who speak on the radio are hungry too, you can tell. It shouldn’t make any difference whether they know in Moscow what we’re going through in Leningrad, but it does. They may not be able to do anything for us, but to be lost from people’s thoughts is like a second death.
When this drawing is finished, she’ll do another. She’ll draw until her paper gives out. It doesn’t matter if her hands are clumsy. She’ll draw Evgenia’s face with the freckles standing out on it, and her big wide mouth smiling. Zina holding out the baby as if she wanted to give it away. The baby’s shrivelled face. Andrei leaning against the inside of the door. The wound in her father’s shoulder that won’t heal. She shuts her eyes and tests herself. Yes, they are all there. She can see them in every detail.
Anna wraps a blanket around Andrei, on top of his coat, and tucks it in. He doesn’t stir. Those soot marks are still on his face, so she spits on her handkerchief and gently wipes them off. Then she blows out the guttering end of the candle.
20
What are days? You wake hours before it’s light, from hunger. Hunger
has burrowed deep into your stomach and is eating away at you. You turn, moaning, trying to dislodge it. You taste the foulness of your breath.
The day begins like a day of fever. Strange dreams and voices march over your mind as you slip in and out of sleep. Someone laughs close to your ear. Suddenly, you catch the scent of coffee. Blue smoke drifts from a ventilation shaft. Inside, they are roasting coffee beans, then grinding them and packing the grains into stiff brown-paper bags which are sealed with white labels. They stack the bags plumply on shelves. It is morning, and it isn’t winter any more, but summer, with light streaming through the shop window. The fragrance of coffee wreathes around your head like smoke.
You wake yourself, snuffling around in the bedclothes. A load of blankets and coats weighs you down, but you’re still cold. Your feet are numb and your breath comes short. The cold settles in your back and makes your spine hurt. You must breathe gently. You must not be restless. Every movement destroys energy which you no longer possess.
In the next apartment a baby cries steadily from hunger. The crying goes on and on, threading its way into the innermost coils of your brain. If only he’d stop. Whatever it takes, make him stop.
There is no electricity. There is no running water. It is the twelfth of December. Leningrad is garlanded with ice, pinned down by heavy blankets of snow. Later, the low, slanting light of winter will glide along the blue banks of the Neva. There will be streaks of rose on the snow.
The bread ration is now 250 grammes per day for workers, and 125 grammes for everyone else. How much is that? A couple of slices of bread. One, if you cut thickly.
But you don’t cut thickly. You cut the bread into tiny cubes. You moisten each one with saliva. As long as it lasts, you have food in your mouth. But your stomach tears at you. It’s not fooled.
In bread queues people talk about the ice road over Lake Ladoga. A road made of ice, tracking over miles of unstable ice, the one route that now connects Leningrad to ‘the mainland’. Lake Ladoga, north-east of Leningrad, is the only way out. The young ice has already swallowed up dozens of trucks and men, but it’s freezing hard, and the ice is getting thicker. Soon they’ll be able to bring in supplies. Food will come. It’s early days yet, and of course they’re losing trucks and men. Ladoga’s ice is still treacherous, freezing solid enough to take a tank in one place, and then opening into a crevasse a couple of hundred metres farther on. The Germans know that it’s the only supply route left, and they started shelling it almost as soon as the first trucks rolled out on to the ice.