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 so
mething else, closer to pity.
28
It is ten past midnight. Darkness, stillness, cold. A savage cold that is strong enough to halt the beat of blood, strong enough to turn the dead into logs of frost.
All four of them huddle together, sharing their body heat. They’re fully dressed down to hats with ear-flaps, gloves and scarfs. At the foot of the mattresses four pairs of boots stand ready. The ventilation window has been mended with layers of cardboard where a shell-burst shattered it two weeks ago. The other windows are crusted with frost, inside and outside. Outside, an ice-laden wind sifts the snow into whirling demons at empty street-corners.
But it’s dark, dark. Nothing of this can be seen. There’s only the savagery of cold, like an animal prowling the room, lashing every inch of exposed skin. Outside, the midnight temperature is eighteen degrees below zero. It has been dark since three o’clock, and it will be dark late into the morning. Long, long hours when there’s nothing to do but cling together and keep alive.
If she touched the burzhuika now, its freezing metal would stick to her palm. Tomorrow they’ll burn more books. Thank God there are books to burn.
He doesn’t see the burning of his books. Four people lie together in one room, but in the next he’s alone. He lies on his back, his nose jutting into the cold. His hands are folded on his breast, and they hold a book. His skin is glazed solid. The cold can rage around him as much as it likes, but it can’t do him any harm. He’s part of it now. It has cauterized his wounds. There’s no smell of sickness any more, and although death has come into the room it too remains frozen, dormant, like a winter visitor who will only come to life with the spring.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘No, are you?’
‘No.’
‘How’s the little one?’
‘Sleeping.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, sure. But his feet are cold.’
‘Give me your hand.’
In their cave of rugs and blankets, two hands meet. There is no warmth in the touch. Two hands, stiff, chill, claw-like, fold into one another. They are not male or female any more. But they are alive. One hand stretched out to another, touching. From the child there is a sudden, spasmodic explosion of coughing. His body shakes, his chest rattles, but he doesn’t wake. Andrei and Anna press closer, one on each side of Kolya’s body, warming it as much as they can.
‘Marina’s sleeping?’
‘Yes,’ says Anna. ‘She’s sleeping. It’s only sleep.’
Kolya shakes and coughs. Anna undoes her coat and pulls him inside. Slowly, with stiff fingers, she buttons her coat back over them both. He burrows into her, choking against the skin of her neck. She rubs his back and tucks his feet between her hollow thighs.
The four of them, musty in clothes that they don’t take off at night. Four pairs of boots stand by the mattresses, and when they crawl from their cave of blankets into the freezing room, all they have to do is step into them. But everything takes so long. It hurts to breathe. You get palpitations.
Marina is curled into a ball at Anna’s back, turned away from the others, her fist pressed into the hollow under her cheekbone. Imagine being asleep, and dreaming. Dreams of food. Dreams of fragrant, smoking-hot soup made with dried mushrooms. Tiny dumplings float on top of it, golden and puffy…
Kolya’s honey. The glass jar is almost empty. Only one spoonful left.
Things will get better. They’ve got to. The blockade will be lifted. Our forces will take back Mga and the Moscow railway will re-open. The circle of siege will break.
Only Kolya’s honey stretches between this time, now, and then, when things will be better. A thin, dark, sweet thread, smelling of heather and smoke. One spoonful. They’ll all watch, while Anna lifts the spoon to Kolya’s mouth.
‘There, slowly, don’t gobble it.’
In go the precious calories and vitamins. Is it their imagination, or is there a little more colour in Kolya’s wasted cheeks as he swallows? Anna reaches out, catches on her finger a drop which has fallen from the spoon on to the side of the glass jar, and puts her finger into the child’s mouth to suck. He sucks and keeps on sucking long after the sweetness has gone. On these threads they hang.
The honey jar is here, wedged against the mattress. If thieves broke in, they wouldn’t find it. Anna fingers it. The pain in her stomach sharpens. She snatches her hand back into the cave of blankets.
The cold, dead rooms of the apartment lean over her. Each frozen cell hangs suspended in the comb of the apartment building. Below, there are the icy, ringing staircases, the courtyard shrouded in snow, the unswept pavements, the shell-damaged buildings, the bomb-sites, the inner-city defences she helped to construct back in September, in another life. Beyond them, the iron ring of the invading army, pressing on Leningrad’s neck. There is Leningrad, paralysed like her own flesh and blood.
Kolya is sucking in his sleep. His lips move against her neck, rooting for food like the baby he was five years ago. Andrei is silent. He’s asleep again, like Marina. His hand has fallen away from hers.
These are the most difficult hours, the hours after midnight, when day is still unimaginably far off. Anna drowses, jerks suddenly out of sleep, then drowses again. Her stomach hurts. She draws up her knees, cradling Kolya. Her toes are itching, but she can’t reach them.
It sounds as if death is walking about in the next room. Its footsteps are clear, and close.
Tomorrow, the fight for food, for warmth, for one more day’s survival. Tomorrow, once again, they won’t take her father’s body to the cemetery. If Kolya’s little sledge hadn’t been stolen, they might have managed it. Her father will have to stay here, and it’s been six days now. Or is it seven? Time’s slipping, like the mat of blankets. She begins to count back. It was on the Thursday – no, the day before –
Tomorrow the honey will be gone. Don’t think of it now. Kolya’s heart ticks against her breastbone. Do children’s hearts normally beat as fast as this? He whimpers, but doesn’t cough. That’s right, sleep, sleep. They can’t blockade your sleep.
The night passes.
Then it’s night again.
Nine days now since her father’s death – or is it ten? It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The sun comes out, and its light pushes through crisscrossed paper into the room where Anna’s father lies. The room grows radiant. Shadows of frost leaf and frost petal settle on the mound of Mikhail’s body. His beard sparkles, but he sleeps on in frigid silence, as he has slept for ten days now. Or is it nine? Now the sunlight vanishes as the sky grows yellow with coming snow.
The bakeries opened late again. Today it was because a shortage of water delayed the baking of bread. When Anna got back with the rations, Andrei was already home from the hospital, after a night shift. He ought to sleep there all the time, like the other doctors, but he still insists on coming home whenever he can. He got a lift on a truck this time, he tells her. It’s crazy to use up his energy like that, but she’s given up arguing about it. She only argued from duty: she wants him here.
Andrei is asleep, with Kolya in his arms, when Anna comes in. She stoops to check Kolya’s breathing. His face is peaceful, locked in sleep. His cough’s getting better now. This is his best and deepest sleep, the midday sleep after the midday meal of bread soup. He’ll have had a couple of spoonfuls of buckwheat porridge today, as well. They’ve got into a system of eating half their rations as late in the evening as they can, and the other half at noon. That way, it doesn’t matter how late Anna gets backs with the bread. They’ve at least got something to eat at noon. And if, one day, the bakery doesn’t open at all, or something happened to Anna, they could keep going until the following day. They would never have to say to Kolya: There’s nothing to eat today.
Seventeen hours to endure, between seven in the evening and noon the next day. This morning Anna rinsed the empty honey jar with hot water for Kolya. The rest of them had hot water flavoured with nettle tea that Anna dries after
use, and then re-uses. She puts a pinch of salt in the tea. Salt stops you feeling dizzy.
If only her father hadn’t died so close to the end of the month. They were only able to claim his ration for a few days after he died, then it was re-registration time. Everyone must re-register in person. If someone dies at the beginning of the month, just after registration, you do well. As much as thirty days of extra rations. As it was, Anna dried a half-slice of the extra bread from her father’s ration over the burzhuika each day, and put it away. The seven half-slices are hidden in a vase with a heavy plate over it. She checks them every morning to make sure mice haven’t got at them, although there don’t seem to be mice around any more. Cats, crows, dogs and pigeons have all been eaten. People are eating rats, and rats are eating people, in apartments where the dead lie on the floor in puddles of ice.
Perhaps someone in their apartment building has trapped and eaten the mice. Or more likely, the mice know that there’s no living for them here, not even a crumb. They’ve broken the blockade and gone to the German lines.
She lifts the plate. There is the dried bread, untouched. If the ration’s cut again, or Kolya gets another illness, at least she’s got something in reserve. Or if he cries too much. Now that he’s getting over his illness, he cries more.
‘Anna,’ he said one day, ‘when are you going to make my soup?’
‘What soup, Kolyenka?’
‘You always make me soup when I’ve been ill, to build me up again.’ He looked at her reproachfully, like an old man. He remembered the chicken soup she used to make after anyone had been ill, flavoured with parsley and a handful of dried chanterelles. It was golden, flecked with green, with the faintest pearling of chicken-fat on its surface. If she had the flour she would make wheat dumplings as well, feather-light and floating. Kolya used to love it when he was allowed to lower the dumplings one by one on their slotted spoon, and watch them sink to the bottom of the pan before they swelled and rose to the surface. The dumplings absorbed any excess fat so that the soup’s texture was perfect.