I can smell my mama’s borscht.
“Get up, Vera.”
At first it is Sasha’s voice, deep and familiar, and then it is my own. Screaming.
“Get up, Vera.”
I am alone. There is no one here beside me, no lover’s breath that smells of honeyed cherries. There is just me, kneeling in the deep snow, slowly freezing to death.
I think of Leo’s giggle and Anya’s stern look and Sasha’s kiss.
And I climb slowly, agonizingly, to my feet.
It takes hours to get home, although it is not far. When I finally arrive and stumble into the relative warmth of the apartment, I fall again to my knees.
Anya is there. She wraps her arms around me and holds me.
I have no idea how long we sit there, holding each other. Probably until the cold in the apartment drives us back into bed.
That night, after a dinner of hot sauerkraut and a boiled potato—heaven—we sit around the little burzhuika.
“Tell us a story, Mama,” Anya says. “Don’t you want a story, Leo?”
I scoop Leo into my arms and stare down at his pale face, made beautiful by firelight. I want to tell him a story, a fairy tale that will give him good dreams, but my throat is tight and my lips are so cracked it hurts to speak, so I just hold my babies instead and the frosty silence lulls us to sleep.
You think that things cannot get worse, but they can. They do.
It is the coldest winter on record in Leningrad. Rations are cut and cut again. Page by page I burn my father’s beloved books for warmth. I sit in the freezing dark, holding my bony children as I tell them the stories. Anna Karenina. War and Peace. Onegin. I tell them how Sasha and I met so often that soon I know the words by heart.
It feels further and further away, though. Some days I cannot remember my own face, let alone my husband’s. I can’t recall the past, but I can see the future: it is in the stretched, tiny faces of my children, in the blue boils that have begun to blister Leo’s pale skin.
Scurvy.
Lucky for me, I work in the library. Books tell me that pine needles have vitamin C, so I break off branches and drag them home on my sled. The tea I make from them is bitter, but Leo complains no more.
I wish he would.
Dark. Cold.
I can hear my babies breathing in the bed beside me. Leo’s every breath is phlegmy. I feel his brow. He is not hot, thank God.
I know what has wakened me. The fire has gone out.
I want to do nothing about it.
The thought hits before I can guard against it. I could do nothing, just lie there, holding my children, and go to sleep forever.
There are worse ways to die.
Then I feel Anya’s tiny legs brush up against mine. In her sleep, she murmurs, “Papa,” and I remember my promise.
I take forever to get up. Everything hurts. There is a ringing in my ears and my balance is off. Halfway to the stove, I feel myself falling.
When I wake from my faint, I am disoriented. For a second, I hear my father at his desk, writing. His pen tip scratches words across the bumpy linen paper.
No.
I go to the bookcase. Only the last of the treasure is left: my father’s own poetry.
I cannot burn them.
Tomorrow, perhaps, but not today. Instead, I take the ax—it is so heavy—and crack off a piece of the side of the bookcase. It is thick, old wood, hard as iron, and it burns hot.
I stand by the bed, in front of the fire, and I can feel how I am swaying.
I know suddenly that if I lie down, I will die. Did my mother tell me this? My sister? I don’t know. I just remember knowing the truth of it.
“I won’t die in my bed,” I say to no one. So I go to the only other piece of furniture left in the room. My father’s writing desk. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I sit down.
Can I smell him, or am I hallucinating again? I don’t know. I pick up his pen and find that the ink in the well is frozen solid. The little metal inkwell is as cold as ice, but I carry it to the stove, where we both warm quickly. Making a cup of hot water to drink, I go back to the desk.
I light the lamp beside me. It is silly, I know. I should conserve this oil, but I can’t just sit here in the icy black. I have to do something to keep alive.
So I will write.
It is not too late. I’m not dead yet.
I am Vera Petrovna and I am a nobody. . . .
I write and write, on paper that I know I will soon have to burn, with a hand that trembles so violently my letters look like antelopes leaping across the sheet. Still, I write and the night fades.
Some hours later, a pale gray light bleeds through the newsprint, and I know I have made it.
I am just about to put the pen down when there is a knock at the door. I force my legs to work, my feet to move.
I open the door to a stranger. A man in a big black woolen coat and a military cap.
“Vera Petrovna Marchenko?”
I hear his voice and it is familiar, but I cannot focus on his face. My vision is giving me problems.
“It is me. Dima Newsky from down the hall.” He hands me a bottle of red wine, a bag of candy, and a sack of potatoes. “My mama is too ill to eat. She won’t make it through the day. She asked me to give this to you. For the babies, she said.”
“Dima,” I say, and still I don’t know who he is. I can’t remember his mother, either, my neighbor.
But I take the food. I do not even pretend not to want it. I might even kill him for it. Who knows? “Thank you,” I say, or think I do, or mean to.
“How is Aleksandr?”
“How are any of us? Do you want to come in? It is a little warmer—”
“No. I must get back to my mother. I am not here long. It’s back to the front tomorrow.”
When he is gone, I stare down at the food in awe. I am smiling when I waken Leo that morning and say, “We have candy. . . .”
In January, I strap poor Leo to the sled. He is so weak, he doesn’t even struggle; his tiny body is bluish black and covered in boils. Anya is too cold to get out of bed. I tell her to stay in bed and wait for us.
It takes three hours to walk to the hospital, and when I get there . . .
People have died in line, waiting to see a doctor. There are bodies everywhere. The smell.
I lean down to Leo, who is somehow both bony and swollen. His tiny face looks like a starving cat. “I am here, my lion,” I say because I can think of nothing else.
A nurse sees us.
Even though we are two among hundreds, she comes over, looks down at Leo. When she looks up at me, I see the pity in her eyes.
“Here,” she says, giving me a piece of paper. “This will get him some millet soup and butter. There’s aspirin at the dispensary.”
“Thank you,” I say.
We look at each other again, both knowing it is not enough. “He is Leo.”
“My son was Yuri.”
I nod in understanding. Sometimes a name is all you have left.
When I get home from the hospital, I cook everything I can find. I strip the wallpaper from the walls and boil it. The paste is made of flour and water, and it thickens into a kind of soup. Carpenter’s glue will do the same thing. These are the recipes I teach my daughter. God help us.
I boil a leather belt of Sasha’s and make a jelly from it. The taste is sickening, but I get Leo to eat a little of it. . . .
In the middle of January, a friend of Sasha’s arrives at our apartment. I can see that he is shocked by what he sees. He gives me a box from Sasha.
As soon as he is gone, we crowd around to look at it. Even Leo is smiling.
Inside are evacuation papers. We are to leave on the twentieth.
Beneath the papers is a coil of fresh sausage and a bag of nuts.
In utter darkness, I pack up the whole of my life, not that there is much left. Honestly, I do not know what I have taken and what I left behind. Most of our possessions have either frozen or been burned, but I remember to take my writings and my father’s, and my last book of poetry by Anna Akhmatova. I take all the food we have—the sausage, half a bag of onions, four pieces of bread, some oil cakes, a quarter of a jar of sunflower oil, and the last of the sauerkraut.
I have to carry Leo. With his swollen feet and boil-covered arms, he can barely move, and I don’t have it in me to waken him when he sleeps.
The three of us leave in the darkness of midmorning. Little Anya carries our only suitcase, filled with food. All our clothes we are wearing.
It is bitter cold outside and snowing hard. I hold her hand on the long walk to the train station, and once there, we are both exhausted.
In the train, we cram together. We are three of many, but no one talks. The air smells musty, of body odor and bad breath and death. It is a smell we all recognize.
I pull my babies close around me. I give Leo and Anya some wine to drink, but Leo is not happy with that. I cannot take out my food, not in this crowded train car. I could be killed for the oil cakes, let alone the sausage.
I dig deep in my coat pocket, which I have filled with dirt from the ground outside the burned Badayev food warehouses.
Leo eats the dirty, sugary particles greedily and cries for more. I do the only thing I can think of: I cut my finger and put it in his mouth. Like a newborn baby, he sucks on my finger, drinking my warm blood. It hurts, but not as much as hearing the congestion in his lungs or feeling the heat in his forehead.
In a quiet voice, I tell them stories of their father and me, of a fairy-tale love that seems so far away. Somewhere along that clackety trip, when I am so afraid and Leo is coughing terribly and Anya keeps asking when we will see Papa, I begin to call my husband a prince and Comrade Stalin the Black Knight and the Neva River takes on magical powers.
The train trip seems to last for a long time. My insides ache from being rattled around for so many hours. My fairy tale is the only thing that keeps us all sane. Without it, I think I might begin crying or screaming and never stop.
Finally, we reach the edge of Lake Ladoga. There is ice as far as I can see; there is almost no difference between my view through a clean window and one through the fog of my own breath.
We are at the start of the ice road.
Twenty-five
The army has been working for months to make a road across frozen Lake Ladoga. The road is here now, and everyone is calling it the road of life. Soon, they say, transports of food will rumble across the ice toward Leningrad. Up until now, those same trucks kept falling through into the freezing black water below. And, of course, the Germans bomb it constantly.
I check my children’s clothes. Everything is in place, just as it was when we left Leningrad. Leo and Anya are wrapped in newsprint and then in all the clothes they own. We wrap scarves around our heads and necks; I try to cover everything, even Leo’s small red nose.
Outside, it hurts when I take a breath. My lungs ache. Beside me, Leo starts to cough.
A full moon rises in the black sky, turning the snow blue. We stand around, all of us, matted together like cattle. Many people are coughing; somewhere a child is crying. It occurs to me to wish that it were Leo. His quiet scares me.
“What do we do, Mama?” Anya says.
“We find a truck. Here, take my hand.”
My eyes water and sting as I start forward. Leo is in my arms, and as thin as he is, he weighs me down so that I can hardly move. Every step takes concentration, willpower. I have to lean into the howling wind. The only real thing in this icy blue-and-black world is my daughter’s hand in mine. Somewhere far away, I hear an engine idling and then roaring. It is a convoy, I hope.