The Siege

  But whatever’s sacrificed has got to be sacrificed. The ice road is all we’ve got. It must be believed in. They are already calling it ‘The Road of Life’. The bread queue mutters its creed, and blue lips pray for the temperature to drop, the ice to thicken further, the route to become faster, safer.

  ‘Now we’ve recaptured Tikhvin, the crossing won’t take so long. They won’t have to go all that way round.’

  ‘They’re working day and night to get the stuff to us. I heard there are thousands of tons of flour backed up at Novaya Ladoga.’

  ‘They’re opening up new tracks over the ice all the time. They’ve got fuel stations and first-aid posts all the way, every kilometre. That’ll speed things up.’

  But what they believe in remains invisible: there’s no food here. They have been queuing for two and half hours, and there’s still no sign of bread. There were problems with the ovens this morning, someone says. Anna huddles deeper into her coat, stamps her feet, and listens to the distant noise of shelling. She thinks of Lake Ladoga, beautiful in summer with its glistening iron-and-silver water, its cranberry marshes, birches, wild duck and reeds. The lake is deep, packed with fish and legends. But Andrei says that Ladoga is nothing to Lake Baikal. It’s no more than a puddle. He’ll take her to Baikal one day, when they go to Siberia together.

  ‘We have fish as big as whales,’ he says. ‘And the water of Lake Baikal is the purest in the world.’

  He explains why this is so, but she doesn’t bother to take it in. She imagines them both, in summer, on a wooden jetty which thrusts out far into the waters of Lake Baikal. They are not fishing or swimming. They are just sitting there, doing nothing, close together. Her head is on his shoulder, and his hand cups her cheek. The sun is on their backs and their breathing rises and falls in time to the distant cluck of water on the far-off grey stones of the shore. Andrei tells her that stones from the Baikal shores bring good luck, so she’s put a handful in her pocket. She reaches in and touches their round, smooth surfaces. The air smells of spice and pine, and the water breathes out its own virgin sweetness.

  ‘You see, I told you you’d love it here,’ says Andrei. Without looking at him she knows that his Siberian eyes have squeezed up into slits as he smiles at her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You’re right. I love it here.’ Across kilometres of water there are mountains, marching away into wilderness. No one goes there, says Andrei, apart from hunters.

  ‘I’ll take you up to the snow-line tomorrow.’

  But the sun on her back is warm.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Let’s not go anywhere. Let’s just stay here.’

  The woman ahead of Anna in the queue is wearing a heavy fox-fur coat, and a fox-fur hat. But in spite of her clothes she is trembling so much that the little fur tail on her hat bobs up and down and bounces on her shoulders as if it’s alive. Suddenly the woman turns and grasps Anna’s arm. Her face is the colour of old candle-grease, and her hands grip hard, digging into Anna.

  ‘Help me, I don’t feel well –’

  Anna staggers. Her body will not take the weight of this woman. ‘Sit down,’ she says. ‘Rest for a minute. The queue’s not moving.’

  But suspicion lights in the woman’s blurred, starved eyes. It could be a trick, to steal her place in the queue. One hand lets go of Anna, to scrabble inside her coat and check if the ration card is still there. Maybe Anna has used this moment of weakness to slide a hand in and take it. Without a ration card, you die. There’s no getting another, not now Pavlov’s tightened everything up. The woman gives a sob of relief as she finds the edge of her card and rubs her finger against it as if she’s touching a holy medal. But she still glares suspiciously at Anna.

  ‘Rest for a minute. I’ll keep your place,’ says Anna.

  The woman’s gloves, too, are made of fox-fur. The fur is reddish, soft, glistening. It looks so much more alive than the woman who’s wearing it. You can’t buy a fur coat of that quality in any shop Anna’s ever been into. The woman’s colourless lips open. ‘I want to live,’ she whispers, as if it’s the biggest secret of all. She leans all her weight on to Anna.

  ‘Quick, the queue’s moving,’ says Anna. The woman lets go and lunges forward. The queue stirs, shifts, but does not move, while Anna steps back out of the reach of the woman’s preying hands, and folds her own arms across her chest. Her head hurts. She tries to recapture the jetty with its warm, sunlit wood, the feel of Andrei’s shoulder, and the muscled leap of a fish far out on the water. But they will not come.

  Someone behind her is whispering about the ice road now. ‘The rate we’re losing trucks, there won’t be any left soon.’

  ‘But some of them they’re getting through, all the same,’ replies another woman. ‘They know how bad things are here. They’re doing the best they can. Working night and day…’

  As long as people know about us, we are not alone. Not left in the dark like abandoned children, to freeze and starve.

  ‘They’re getting through,’ Anna repeats under her breath. They will come. We will live, and not die. She sees the ghostly whiteness of the frozen lake, swept by mist and snowstorms, and the wavering track the supply trucks have to follow. Perhaps there are flags stuck in the ice, to guide the trucks from station to station. The Finns believe an ice-woman lives there, far out on the ice, where the water is deepest. She calls through the storms to draw to herself a human lover. Male or female, she doesn’t care. What she wants is what she hasn’t got: warm flesh and a beating heart. Each lover can only warm her for a moment, before she freezes him.

  The trucks churn on over the ice. There are weak patches, and crevasses. There is wind that stings with driving snow. It hisses, carrying sound. Doroga zhizni… doroga zhi-ii-izniii… This is the Road of Life, the only chance you’ve got. Broken-down trucks litter the sides of the track. But although the blizzard is dangerous, it’s less dangerous than the German planes which it keeps on the ground.

  Sacks of flour, meat essence, butter, tinned fish, cereals, ammunition, baby-milk. Anna wills the trucks forward. They must come whatever happens, over hundreds of kilometres of emergency track built across the Ladoga marshlands, and over the ice on to the railway that will bring them to Leningrad. The Germans pincers can’t quite close on this last supply-route. They bomb it whenever the sky clears, but winter is on our side. The ice grows thicker. Engines groan as the trucks labour on. It is twenty degrees below zero out on the ice, and the wind blows hard, stripping heat from men and machines. The sacks of flour are tightly packed, but even so they judder as the trucks judder.

  These are not sacks of flour, but days of life. If a truck rolls into a crevasse, this number of people will die. If a truck gets through, this number will live. Kolya will grab his bread. Anna will give it to him bit by bit, to make sure that he chews it properly instead of swallowing it like a dog. He must chew, in order to extract every morsel of goodness from the bread. She will smear it with a few drops of the sunflower oil she bartered for her mother’s sheepskin coat. Kolya’s whole life is in his mouth.

  The bread queue surges. It’s arrived, the bread which is still called bread even when it’s mostly cellulose and warehouse sweepings. The smell of it drifts out as if from the lips of heaven. In front of Anna the woman in the fox-furs begins to cry and laugh, crossing herself over and over. She had believed there would be no bread today. That today the ration would simply cease to be. It would disappear, like the last little circle of water that a wild duck struggles to keep open in winter, by constantly swimming round and round in the same spot.

  Anna shuffles forward, feeling for the ration cards where they lie in the secret pocket she has sewn into the lining of her coat. She won’t take the cards out until the moment when she’s at the head of the queue. Ration cards are not like gold: they are so far above gold that you can’t even make the comparison. Before she even picks up her bread, she’ll hide the cards again. If there are thieves about, better lose one day’s ration than the cards.
You can survive a day without bread, just about, but you can’t survive without ration cards until the end of the month. She and Marina have discussed over and over again the risks of Anna collecting the rations for the whole family. What if she fainted, and was robbed of the cards? It would be safer if she and Marina went together. But someone must stay with her father, and Kolya. And although Anna doesn’t say it, she knows she is now the only one with the strength for the daily walk to the bakery, and for hours of queuing. Marina’s cough is bad.

  Anna prepares for her daily walk to the bakery as carefully as a marathon runner. She eats the quarter-slice of bread she has saved from her ration, and tucks another quarter-slice into her pocket to eat if she begins to feel dizzy. She drinks a glass of hot water with a pinch of salt. She warms her jacket, coat, gloves and scarf at the burzhuika before putting them on. She heats foot-cloths, wraps them around her feet, and then puts on her father’s felt boots. She does everything slowly, according to a set pattern. Whenever her heart beats too fast, she stops, and rests.

  She always takes her father’s cherry-wood walking-stick to the bread queue. If she slipped on the uncleared ice and snow, she might never be able to get up again. And besides, the solidity of the stick in her hand is good. If someone tried to rob her, she would hit them with it. She’s seen people grappling in the snow, fighting in slow-motion over a crust of bread.

  She swathes her face with her shawl until only her eyes show. Each time, before Anna leaves, Marina makes the sign of the cross over her. The gesture means nothing to Anna, and a few weeks earlier it would have irritated her, but now she lets Marina do it. It’s another part of the ritual of setting out.

  ‘Be careful!’ they all say.

  ‘Be careful, Anna!’ pipes Kolya, staring at her from the mattress where Marina has laid out the fort and the toy soldiers. Sometimes he strokes his toys, but he hasn’t the energy to play with them any more.

  The bread is in her hands. A second later she has stuffed it into the cloth bag around her waist. Both bread and ration cards are invisible as she makes her way back through the frozen streets. The light is already fading. The grip of frost hardens, and the tip of her walking-stick skids on ice. Anna rights herself, breathing hard. Sweat springs out all over her body as the bread ration knocks against her, under her coat. She must not allow herself to fall. They’re waiting for her, counting the minutes until she comes back. The burzhuika will be cold by now, but they’ll be huddling together under the blankets to share their warmth. Marina might be singing to Kolya. She knows a lot of songs, and although her singing is more like a sort of rhythmic talking, it always calms him down. Funny that Marina can’t sing. But she can soothe Kolya when he has one of those fits of hopeless, hungry crying that make Anna feel like jumping out of the window.

  Or maybe Kolya’s doing his breathing exercises. When they get Leningradskaya Pravda they read every word, stripping it for meaning. Sometimes there are four sheets, sometimes only two. When everyone has read it, they spread the newspaper on the mattress and Kolya does the breathing exercises that are supposed to help his asthma.

  ‘Swim with your arms, Kolya. Make the paper crackle.’

  Kolya’s arms move stiffly. Anna turns him over, and lays her hand on his diaphragm.

  ‘Breathe in, Kolya. That’s right, slowly. And now out, all the way. Watch my hand go up and down.’

  Kolya peers down his chest to watch her hand. When it moves, a fleeting smile crosses his old man’s face.

  ‘I’m good at breathing, aren’t I, Anna?’

  After that, they put away the newspaper, to light next day’s fire.

  Kolya will be looking out for her.

  ‘Where’s Anna?’ he’ll ask, and Marina will say, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be back soon. It’s a long way to the bakery.’

  ‘But I’m so hungry.’

  She fights her way onward. A man passes her, pulling a sledge on which the starved contours of a human body poke through the sheet that covers it. One of the runners catches on a lump of ice, and the sledge sticks. The man jerks it free. She sees what lies there with terrible clarity, as if the man has stripped away the sheet. Forehead, nose, jaw, shallow breast, jutting ribs and pelvis. It’s a child’s body. The sledge runs lightly over the snow, bouncing a little.

  Anna feels in her pocket, and touches the emergency quarter-slice of bread that rests there. She hasn’t felt dizzy today. Once again, she hasn’t had to eat the last quarter-slice of bread. Once again, she’ll be able to add it to Kolya’s ration.

  21

  It was too late for the little girl. Her veins collapsed, and before they could get a line in, she died. A camphor injection hadn’t done anything. As far as cause of death, you could take your pick. Dysentery, dehydration, shock… But she’d died of hunger. There are only two causes of death left: shelling and starvation.

  The mother is still crouching by the iron cot, holding her daughter’s hand. She is silent. Andrei straightens himself slowly, easing his back, and puts a hand on the woman’s shoulder. But he doesn’t say anything either. What is there to say? What words of comfort for the loss of a child who need never have died at all? The little girl’s name was Nadia. Ten minutes ago he spoke her name into the bluish, shrunken face, although he already knew there was no calling her back.

  ‘Talk to her. She can still hear you,’ he said to the mother. For a while she sat there, bundled up, impassive. She looked sixty, but was probably thirty-five. Suddenly she seemed to realize what was happening. Her face quivered. She threw herself forward so that her mouth was almost touching the child’s, and words began to pour out of her. ‘Stay with me, don’t leave me, my treasure, my little soul. Look, I’ve brought you your little woolly cat, the one you love…’

  But the child’s face remained rigid.

  It’s over. Andrei sways with tiredness. Nine o’clock, and there’ll be a cup of barley soup for him in the canteen. Never mind that it’ll be water haunted by barley rather than the rich, hot, savoury soup his body craves. He has a half-slice of bread in his pocket, for Kolya. Anna’s face will unclench when she sees it. She’ll prod the bread with her quick fingers, as if it might not be real. And then she’ll frown and interrogate him about what he had to eat at the hospital. ‘Because you’ve got to have your ration, Andrei, when you’re on your feet all day long and then you’ve got to get home afterwards.’

  Home. That’s what they both call it now. Home isn’t the apartment, or even the room warmed by the burzhuika. It’s the mattress where they curl together at night, with Kolya breathing beside them. They don’t kiss. She doesn’t sigh, and press her body against his. They don’t ache for each other any more. They rest, wadded in their winter coats, like climbers bivouacked on an icy mountain. They lie cupped against each other, and still. His training tells him that this is because their starving bodies have shut down in order to survive. Their bodies know more than they do. If she weren’t there, would he ever be able to sleep?

  When he lies like this, close to Anna, breathing her sour breath, he feels as if they are no longer separate at all. They are the same. When she sighs or moves, it’s as if this is happening inside his own flesh. When she swallows a crust of bread dipped in tea, he feels the warmth of it flushing his own skin.

  They are high on the mountain, and ice tears at their flesh. He doesn’t know if they will live. Her face is sallow, her lips cracked at the corners. In the mornings her eyelids are stuck together with yellow crusts. He is the same. Slowly, slowly, they creak into life. They mustn’t keep on lying there. He’s heard too many stories of whole families sinking together into the stupor of death. She lights the burzhuika, and warms a pot of water which has frozen overnight. She dips a cotton rag in the water, and wipes his eyes until the crust is gone. He blinks. There she is. They look at one another without speaking. The day is in front of them, stretching out, a wasteland of hunger that they must shape. She nods at him. They are together. She is with him.

  ‘I’ll go
and change your father’s dressings.’

  ‘Good. I’ll make tea.’

  They can make tea out of anything. Often they make it out of plain water, with a touch of sugar or salt.

  ‘Kolya,’ she says then, ‘Ko-olya. Time to wake up.’

  She won’t let Kolya sleep on too late into the morning. She insists that the days keep their shape. There’s not enough warm water to wash properly, but they can at least wipe themselves clean. She combs Kolya’s hair, massages his hands and feet to get his circulation going, and brushes his teeth very gently because Kolya’s gums bleed and his teeth are loose. By then the water is hot, and he can have his tea.

  ‘The bakeries will be open already,’ she tells him. ‘They opened at six o’clock. They’ll be baking your bread now, Kolya.’ Then, because they’ve got a stub of candle, she does a little reading with him. He’s so quick, a real little Levin. A few months ago he’d have zipped through the pages. But now he doesn’t remember the words. She points to them. ‘What does that say, Kolya? Can you remember? And that one?’

  That is home, where Anna is. ‘Yes,’ Andrei promises himself, ‘I’ll finish all this, and then I’ll go home.’

  Andrei is swallowing the last of his soup when the surgeon he worked under last spring stops by his table.