Svetlana looks up, finally, as the sun rises and she turns into one of the side streets. A familiar route to the out-of-the-way, the hidden. Wide spaces between old manor houses, narrow streets. She follows the Fontanka embankment for a bit, and then turns again, into Grafskiy Pereulok. Women in thick aprons and boots, clapping their hands in the cold and stomping their feet, speaking in quick hushed half-whispers, “Come here, come here, handsome, potatoes fresh from the fields of out the city, buy a potato for your girl.”
Only then Svetlana notices the man who is walking next to her, even though the smell of him is so deep in her nostrils it makes her sneeze. His face is just as out of place as his smell—full and red-cheeked, bright-eyed, healthy. So handsome, so untouched— like a wax sculpture under museum glass. Lips so red.
“How much for potatoes?” she asks the woman.
“What have you got?” The woman draws away a thick covering of canvas off the top of a wooden crate, exposing a few small tubers, malaised and bruised with frost. They would be so sickly sweet in a pot, cooked over their metal stove. More floorboards will have to be peeled off that night—the boys can help with that. And maybe then she could go to the roof with other girls from the neighborhood, to watch out for incendiary bombs. Their building has been lucky so far, but they always have buckets of sand with them to extinguish the foul things should one fall. She stares at the potatoes and lets her thoughts roll leisurely, to distract her from the handsome man standing so close to her, as if he knows her—but how could one know something so alien?
Satisfied with the sight of the potatoes, Svetlana shows the woman her treasure—the cameo brooch left to her mother by grandma Anna.
She nods, and scoops the measly tubers into a newspaper cone; it takes Svetlana all her willpower not to gnaw on them as soon as the newspaper rustles in her mittens.
“Do you mind if I walk with you?” the handsome man says, somewhat belatedly.
She hesitates for a moment—of course, it would be safer with him, unless he decided to hit her and take her potatoes away. She shifts her weight so that the pistol in the shearling pocket rests against her jutting hip. “I don’t mind,” she finally says. “You can walk where you please.”
And back they go, as the dusk slowly lifts and the snow sparkles weakly, as if touched by malaise. They pass two dead bodies, lying by the curb—faces up, eyes closed—and Svetlana wonders if they died like this, side by side, slowly keeling backward, or if someone put them there, pushed them aside to let the traffic through. They pass a small girl carrying half a loaf of bread, clearly visible in its messy newspaper nest— rations for an entire family, looks like, and Svetlana worries that someone would take the bread away from the girl, little as she is and unaware that carrying such treasures openly is dangerous. She stops and waits for the girl to catch up to her, and the man waits too.
The little girl eyes them with suspicion.
“Let me walk you home,” Svetlana says. “Do you live far?”
The girl motions east, to the rising sun. “Ulitsa Marata,” she says. “Not far.”
Svetlana turns to face the man. “Are you coming with us?”
He nods, wordlessly, one corner of his mouth curling shyly but happily.
She wonders if her asking somehow negated her aloof demeanor, rendered it a pretense. Still, she has to take the girl home, even though the two boys wait for the potatoes, all the way back by Neva’s embankment.
She follows the girl in silence, and the man follows her—a hierarchy of silent guardians, each watching over the smaller and the weaker one.
“You smell funny,” the girl says, spinning around and pinning the man with her stare.
“Can’t be helped,” he says, smiling shyly still. “You can’t help it if your teeth are crooked, can you?”
The girl frowns, clamps her lips shut, and stays quiet until they arrive to a three-storied brick building. “It’s just me and grandma now,” she says. “Would you like to come in?”
“Some other time,” Svetlana says. “I have to take care of my brothers, but maybe I’ll bring them by one day, so you can play together.”
“Tomorrow?” Light grey eyes up, expectant. Impatient, but how could one not be? It would be foolish to plan ahead for more than a day.
“Tomorrow,” Svetlana says.
“I’m Valya,” the girl calls out of the cavernous mouth of the entry way, disappearing from view.
“Svetlana,” Svetlana calls back.
“Ilya,” the man next to her echoes.
3.
Things one needs to extinguish incendiary bombs: buckets of sand, blankets, mittens, several giggling girls. They drag the heavy buckets with effort, heaving them with all the might of their thin shoulders, the shoulder blades and the collarbones straining like twigs under the weight of encasing ice. Their legs wobble in the boot shafts too big for them, like pestles in mortars. And still they laugh and gossip, and stare at the sky.
It’s blackout, and from the roof one can see nothing but blackness. I imagine it sometimes, through Svetlana’s eyes, straining in this absolute void. Human eyes are made to see, and panic sets in when they can’t, and still they strain, trying to reach through the infinite distance of blackness into some pinprick of light. It is so dark here, like under ground. I imagine it would be like this, there.
Ilya shows up, unbidden and silent, and the girls titter more and then silence, after they notice how he follows Svetlana, how he’s always helping her with her bucket even though she tells him not to. How both of them avoid accidentally touching their hands together.
He shows up every night they keep watch on the roof ever since. Svetlana doesn’t know how he knows—he just appears and sits by her when they rest, or helps with the buckets. They have enough sand up there to extinguish a hellfire, Svetlana thinks, if there was such a thing—but she’s a materialist, and knows that there isn’t.
He also comes by in the mornings when she goes out to wait in a breadline or to work at the factory, or to take the boys to visit Valya, the girl they walked home on the day of their first meeting. He never goes in with them though, but waits outside, through the cold, through the wind.
Valya’s grandmother, Olga Petrovna, is old enough to die soon even without the hunger. She often cries that she’s not strong enough to refuse her portion entirely, even though she only eats half and gives the rest to her granddaughter, and to Svetlana’s brothers when they happen along. Sometimes she gives Svetlana jewelry to take to the black market. “Get some bread. Don’t bring it here though,” she says, “or we’ll eat it all up. Take it to the hospital across the river. They need it.”
Svetlana does as she is told, and Ilya follows, asking for nothing but mute solidarity. He refuses food when offered, but doesn’t seem to suffer as much as Olga Petrovna does.
Olga Petrovna has stories and theories. She tells Svetlana that there’s food in the city, only Zhdanov and other party officials keep it to themselves; she says that there’s grain in Vavilov’s Institute, the Genofond scientists keep all kinds of wheat and rice and every grain known to man. She also doesn’t think cannibals are really cannibals. “You’re young,” she tells Svetlana. “You don’t even know who upyri are.”
“I know,” Svetlana whispers, eyes downcast. The very word, Upyr, makes her skin crawl, materialism notwithstanding. There was never a Russian child not scared half to death by the stories of those dead who rose from their graves and ate the living.
“You just remember,” Olga Petrovna says, “if they ever come for you, all you have to do is to call them for what they are. ‘Upyr,’ you must say, and he’ll turn into a man—for a little bit, at least.”
Svetlana smiles, imagining herself confronting a gang of cannibals with words. “Men are still men. They’re still dangerous.”
“But if they’re human, they won’t try to eat you.” Svetlana shrugs, not convinced. With hunger like that, why wouldn’t they try to eat anything alive and made of meat?
4.
In her mind, Svetlana never recognized her relationship with Ilya as courtship. It was only when Yasha and Vanya, re-energized by playing at Valya’s quiet, cavernous apartment, as barren of floorboards as any other, and by her grandmother’s stories and slivers of bread she fed them throughout (children ate from her hands, opening their mouths wide and stretching their thin necks, like baby birds) started teasing. “Bride and groom,” they started in a whisper and then, growing bolder, in a singsong, when Ilya and Svetlana walked side by side behind them, heading home to mother. “Bride and groom.”
Svetlana blushed and looked at her boots, the slicks of ice, the river swelling up leaden and white up ahead, and at the boy’s shaven heads, blue under their hats—anywhere but Ilya’s steady gaze and his hale earth smell.
Ilya murmured under his breath, as embarrassed as she felt. She couldn’t quite make out the words, but thought that he said “Heart” or “My heart,” and her stomach felt warm and tight.