The Siege (10 page)

Parents besiege Anna, wanting to know if it’s true that a train full of children was bombed somewhere near Mga two days ago.

‘We haven’t had any information. I swear I’m not keeping anything from you. I’ll tell you everything as soon as we know it.’

‘Think they’ll tell you anything? They’ll tell
her,
but she’s the sort that’s so uptight she won’t even let her own shit go down the pan.’

And sure enough, there’s Elizaveta Antonovna, face to face with a sweating, half-demented mother who has run all the way from the Lepny machine-tool factory at the end of a twelve-hour shift, on hearing the latest bombing rumours. Elizaveta Antonovna is wagging her lists at the mother. ‘You’re simply making things more difficult for everybody. I shall have to put in a report –’

‘Elizaveta Antonovna, allow me to inform you that you are urgently required by a Party official in Hall Three,’ breaks in Anna, shoving between them. Thank God, Elizaveta Antonovna spins round, a tiny spot of crimson on each cheek, and marches from the room.

‘Please, come and sit down; forgive us, she doesn’t know what she’s saying. In this little room here.’

‘I suppose you’re another of them who doesn’t know anything about anything,’ shouts the woman, but she allows Anna to lead her into the cleaner’s cupboard. In the stuffy darkness, her shoulders bow. She breaks into heavy sobs.

‘I only sent her away for the best, I didn’t want her to go.’

Anna does not attempt to comfort her. If only Elizaveta Antonovna keeps out of the way. If only they can have a few minutes’ peace in this cupboard that smells of damp mops.

‘I didn’t even say goodbye properly, in case it started her off crying.’

‘Listen, you stay here as long as you like. I’ve got to go and sort out the children. But I promise you, as soon as we hear anything –’

‘You won’t hear anything. The ones like you never do. It’s the ones like
her
that they tell everything to.’

Parents bring their children to the evacuation centre, change their minds, take them home again. And the system is completely overloaded now. There aren’t enough trains, and no matter how many children are processed, most never leave. Suddenly six busloads of children reappear, whom Anna had thought must be well on their way to the Urals by now. An exhausted mother explains, ‘The line was torn up by a bomb five kilometres ahead. They kept waiting and waiting to see if they could get us through, but then we ran out of food so they had to send us back.’

News comes of the bombed train. Not the train near Mga: that was just a rumour, although it’s true that the Germans are still trying to cut the railway line there. But a train
was
bombed, with nearly two hundred children on it, and forty adults. There are thirty-two survivors. Perhaps the children on that train were among those whom Anna squeezed on to the benches, and told to line up for transport. Children who were too hot in their winter hats with flaps that tied over their ears, and who started eating the sausage and apples in their knapsacks as soon as they were out of their mothers’ sight.

That night Anna lies awake, listening to Kolya’s breathing. Leningrad still bulges with children. For every evacuee sent away to the east, it seems that another arrives from the south and west, fleeing the German advance. And Kolya remains here. The room smells of his sleep. Has she made the right decision? If Marina Petrovna wasn’t here, she would have had to send him. Anna’s working sixteen hours a day, and with her father coming out of hospital as well, in a couple of days, it would have been impossible to keep Kolya. How strange to think that it was only by chance that Marina had come here at all. Yes, she’s beginning to think of her like that, dropping the patronymic even from her mind: Marina.

She would never have thought she could be grateful to Marina. But day by day, steadily, Marina has earned her right to a place in their lives. She queues, she makes meals, and she even manages to keep Kolya happy too, with stories, pretend games, and drawing, while the queues slowly move forward.

Marina is obsessed with food, even more so than Anna herself. She will walk halfway across the city on the chance of a bag of sugar for their store-cupboard. The sun is still shining, there is still food in the shops, and the rations aren’t too bad. Prices have shot sky-high, though, and if it weren’t for Marina, Anna would no longer be able to buy sugar or fats off the ration. Eighteen roubles for a bag of sugar, can you imagine? But Marina pays it. She has money.

‘You mustn’t spend so much, Marina. I’ll never be able to pay you back.’

‘We are not going to be able to eat money,’ is all Marina will reply.

She gets Kolya walking too. They set off, the pair of them, Kolya bouncing along, his black eyes glistening with excitement as Marina breaks off her story just at its most exciting point.

‘I’ll tell you the rest when we’ve walked as far as that building down there – look, the one with the brown doors.’ She points away into the distance and Kolya, instead of grizzling and dragging at her hand, as he might do with Anna, bounds forward with a squeak of pleasure.

Anna crushes the stir of jealousy she feels. But how quickly Kolya has transferred his attention. Not his love, no, she doesn’t believe that. But every morning he rushes to Marina as soon as Anna has finished helping him to dress. Their laughter spills out as he helps Marina to fold her blankets, push back the sofa and make the room ready for the day. There’s something magnetic about Marina. Anna has to remind herself that her mother didn’t feel it. Vera wasn’t attracted, she was repelled. And she must have had her reasons. What were they?

Marina bends over her shopping-bag, and pulls out a jar.

‘Two hundred grammes of lumpfish roe!’

‘Marina! What did it cost?’

‘I keep telling you, money’s not going to mean anything soon.’

Kolya and Marina crouch over their pot of wallpaper paste, dipping in strips of newspapers and layering them on to the wire bones of Kolya’s fort.

‘Am I doing it really well, Marina?’

‘Really well. Look how smooth you’ve made that wall.’

‘The walls have to be high, don’t they, so the enemies can’t climb over them.’

‘That’s right. One more layer should do it, Kolya, then we’ll leave it to dry. We can start the painting tomorrow.’

Marina sits back on her heels, and wipes paste and newsprint off her hands. What if I drew her like this? Anna thinks. In her mind the old pose Marina took at the dacha still hangs. That’s the portrait she’ll finish one day, when all this is over.

But perhaps it isn’t. Everything’s changed, so why shouldn’t her work change too? Perhaps it’s better to find a different way of working. Break up the portrait. Turn it into dozens of sketches, quick and fluid, charcoal on sugar paper. Instead of one definition, go for her now, frowning over the wads of dirt packed under her nails. Or now, twisting to warn Kolya not to try and lift the fort yet, let the papier-maché harden. Or now, noticing Anna’s stare and offering back the candour of a face which knows how to change itself into anything it wants.

Anna lies awake. The night is taut, tensed, watchful. All over Leningrad people are awake, as she is. She thinks herself through the walls, into apartment after apartment after apartment. All of them waiting, counting the hours. Up on the roofs, fire-watchers keep themselves awake, too, gripping the metal rims of their sand-buckets, waiting for the noise of aeroplane engines. No one knows what’s going to happen next. Even the Germans may not know. We think they know everything, but maybe they’re waiting, just like us, for orders that haven’t been written yet, and thoughts that haven’t even come into anyone’s head.

They’re waiting out in our woods, smelling the mushrooms that are ready for picking. But they won’t know where to find the best ones. They’ll trample them underfoot, and the bruised chanterelles will give off their scent of apricots.

And then there’s Andrei. He never came back, and she’d been so sure that he would that she hadn’t even warned herself not to trust him.

How horrible it is that you can be completely wrong about things like that. You can trust yourself, believe in your own instincts, and then they turn out to be wrong. The other person wasn’t even thinking about you. As soon as he got outside the apartment, he had forgotten her. He’d taken his message to her, and he hadn’t thought of her again. Finish. But how humiliating it is, to reach out towards someone who hasn’t reached out to you. Like running towards a face in the distance, your arms held out, calling, ‘How wonderful to see you! I didn’t know you were back!’ and then getting close and seeing that the face was a stranger’s, stiff with embarrassment.

But Andrei doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that she closed her eyes and danced with him in the dark. He doesn’t know that she asked him:
Do you want it, too?

She twists on her bed. Should Kolya be here at all? If the bombs come – if the bombers come over in wave after wave, as they did over London, and set the city blazing – if the German army advances – if they get here –

German aeroplanes are dropping leaflets, not bombs. Anna does not dare to pick them up. You don’t know who might be watching you. But she has listened to the whispers in the evacuation queues, and she knows what those leaflets say.

Leningrad is already defeated. Our victory is inevitable, and resistance will only make things worse for you. Your armies are withdrawing to Moscow, abandoning you. The defeat of Leningrad is inevitable…

She turns over again, and buries her face in her pillow. The nights are growing cool, but each time she thinks of Andrei a wave of heat washes over her skin. She forces her mind back to Kolya. And the other children, those children in the lorries. Nyusha, Olenka and all the others. She can’t shake off the feeling of guilt, the uneasy, ominous sense that every action now has a consequence out of all proportion to the action itself. She read a child’s name off a list. The child went, or stayed in Leningrad. The train was bombed, or the bomb missed it. Leningrad will be bombed, or not bombed. But whether she feels guilt over the children who were sent away, or over those who stay, she can’t decide.

The nights are still warm. These are the last nights of summer, being wasted and thrown away. Anna twists in her bed. She will not think of him.

12

The city has not yet been bombed. It floats under the late summer sky, borne up by the light that seems as much to rise from the Baltic as to shine from above. Floating, lyrical, miraculous Petersburg, made out of nothing by a Tsar who wanted everything and didn’t care what it cost. Peter’s window on Europe, through which light shines. Here’s beauty built on bones, classical facades that cradled revolution, summers that lie in the cup of winter.

As August wears on towards September, its goldenness fools nobody. How many more days like this can there be, before the end of the northern summer that ‘mimics the southern winter’? Night steps out, lengthening its stride. The rim of cold slowly rises, and each morning the sun takes a little longer to warm the air. All day the heat of the sun feels shallower. Petals grow crisp, as sap runs back into the stems of trees and flowers. There’s a winy taste in the morning air, and in the parks, under the trees, there’s the first tang of decay. Rowing boats still knock against their moorings, but this is the Baltic, where in winter you will walk on water. Time to lift the boats, and store them for winter.

No bombs yet, though the city is braced for them, ‘
BRACED TO RESIST THE ONSLAUGHT OF GERMAN AGGRESSION WITH HEROIC FORTITUDE,’
announces
Leningradskaya Pravda.
But sky and earth remain in the same relations as ever, braced or naked.

The city is still undamaged by enemy action, but not untouched. Every park and open space is gashed with trenches for air defence. Train-loads of treasures from the Hermitage have been shipped out, and what can’t be moved has been packed into cellars. Statues which cannot be safely moved are wadded with sandbags. Barrage balloons hang in the air, fins all pointing in the same direction, like airships which are going nowhere. The swaddled statue of Peter the Great looks like a hand-grenade you might pick up and hurl towards the enemy. Everything makes you blink, and look twice.

That old woman, sitting on a bundle of bedding in a doorway, is not moving from one apartment to another. She’s on her way to the railway station to be evacuated, but she’s had to rest. Even though she’s left almost everything behind, she has to keep stopping if she’s going to manage to drag the essentials along with her. Food for the journey, blankets, her goosedown pillow without which she can’t sleep. If she leaves that behind, only God knows when she’ll get another, and she can’t bear to lose the comfort of it, or the way you can keep your whole body warm as long as you don’t get a draught between head and neck.

By the time she reaches the station, the train will be full. Patiently, she will drag her bundle home again, and wait, and set out for a second time the next morning. There she is, resting in exactly the same place, on her second journey. Is she real, or not real? She doesn’t move, just sits there on her bundle with her head bowed. Her face is sunk into its lines. She has retreated deep inside herself, trying to gather strength for the next move she must make.

Everywhere there are armed men, moving steadily through the city. They are being deployed from one section of the front to another, as it strains under the German advance. They are the raw guts of the army, exposed, pulled back, exposed again. These are men who have clawed their way back from Kingisepp or Novgorod, who’ve felt what the Leningraders have yet to feel. The old woman watches them as they pass her, but she doesn’t speak to them, and they are mostly too exhausted to notice her. Everything is organized confusion, a city torn out of one rhythm and struggling to find another.

Three men in sweat-stained, filthy uniforms sway with exhaustion on the kerb. They’ve stuck together all the way.

‘Listen, babushka, can you get us some water?’

The old woman raises her head and stares with milky eyes. ‘Water?’

‘Yes, water. You know, wet stuff, comes out of taps?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t live here.’

The man standing over her is enormous. She cringes as if he’s the enemy, not one of our boys at all.

‘Leave it, Pavlik. Let’s try down here.’

Day by day, news mixes with rumours. The Finns are coming east, taking advantage of the German advance to grab back the territory they lost during the Winter War. They’ve been waiting for this, those bastards. It’s a pincer movement, Finns from the north, Germans from the south and west. Just what they’ve always wanted.

No, the Germans are planning to sweep round from the south, going east then coming back on us. They’re going to encircle us.

That’s impossible. That simply can’t happen. Look at a map. They would have to take: look – Mga, Volkhov. Those towns are actually on the Vologda railway. Do you think we’re going to lose the Vologda line, for God’s sake?

It can’t happen. Because if it did we’d be –

Not even a city any more. An island. An island of Russia in a sea of Germans. Not to mention those bastard Finns.

Put that map away, can’t you?

Late August. The moon swells like a barrage balloon, with the yellowness of harvest. This is the weather to be out in the fields and the little dacha gardens, bringing in next winter’s food. That’s what this moon is for. Harvest moon.

The fields were white with harvest

and the moon was full

I cut the field by morning

then I f— with you.

Who’d have thought people would ever be afraid of the moon? They’re calling it a bomber’s moon now, as if that’s what it’s for. But it’s always been a harvest moon. On a night like this you can work in the fields as if it’s daylight, without stopping, a whole row of you getting on as fast as if you had a tractor. Black shadows should be stooping in a silver sheet of barley, or among sharp-cut potato leaves, not running for their lives. You can learn to pick fruit by touch. When you touch fruit at night, it holds the day’s heat. Leaves are cold, but apples are warm. Whoever heard of not bringing home the harvest?

All those rows of vegetables Anna’s planted at the dacha. Out there, without her, they’re getting fat. She can’t bear the thought of them any longer.

‘Listen, Marina, I’m going to try it.’

‘It can’t be worth the risk.’

‘It would be. Think of everything I could bring back. I’ll take the panniers, and my basket, and I can balance a couple of sacks over the handlebars.’

‘But, Anna, the militia are stopping everyone as they come into the city now. What if they think you’re a spy?’

‘As long as I’ve got my papers with me, I’ll be all right. They’ll let me back in.’

‘If they don’t shoot you first.’

‘I’m going to go tomorrow. It’ll be fine.’

‘What about work?’

‘If I volunteer for tonight, I could come off shift at noon. I’ll come back here, get the bike, allow three hours to get there, then three hours to come back at the other end. I’ll be home before dark.’

‘Listen. If you’re really going to go –’

Marina kneels down and feels under the leather couch where she sleeps. ‘There. You’d better take that. I had it sharpened.’

It’s a Finnish hunting knife, a
puukkuu.

‘Where did you get it?’

‘Take it, you don’t know who might be around.’

‘There won’t be anyone, they’ve all left. It’s a dead zone now.’

All the same, Anna takes the knife. It is heavy and well-balanced in her hand. She imagines it slicing a ripe onion, spitting out juice as it slides through layers of lilac and white onion-flesh.

‘Who did it belong to?’

‘No one. I bought it.’

‘Don’t tell my father that I’ve gone.’

‘Of course not.’

‘We can tell him afterwards, when we’ve got something to show for it. I’ll get him some radishes, if there are any left.’

‘What are you going to tell me afterwards?’ asks Kolya, looking up from the flag he is painting for the fort.

‘No, not you, Anna was talking about someone at work.’

Kolya went into his father’s room the day he came back from hospital. What Kolya saw on the bed was an upthrust jaw with grey bristle pushing through it. A thread of spit ran from the corner of an open mouth.

‘Hush, he’s asleep.’

Asleep. Is that what asleep looks like? A snorting breath rattled out of the mouth. Kolya backed towards the door.

‘He’ll wake up soon.’

Two feet pointed upwards under the sheet. His father never sleeps like that. The thing in the bed didn’t look like his father at all. If they hadn’t told him it was his father, he would never have guessed.

And in fact he doesn’t really believe them. He says ‘Daddy’ because that is what they want him to say. His own father is away, fighting in the war. In Kolya’s mind, his father has changed into a Red Guard, storming a fort.

‘He’s very tired,’ they say. ‘He has to rest. Don’t stamp round like that, Kolya, it hurts your father’s head.’

They go in and out, tending to the silent grey thing on the bed.

Anna tiptoes into her father’s room. She takes away the glass of water beside his bed, empties it, and runs fresh water. He’s sleeping so much. Marina has got hold of a bedpan and a bed-bottle, because he can’t get out of bed. But he’s supposed to get out of bed, and walk around to keep his blood circulating. They hoisted him into a sitting position this morning, one at each side, then Anna pushed and they swivelled him sideways. Marina eased his legs off the edge of the bed. He seemed dazed, not really aware of what they were doing. His long, pale feet hung down to the floor.

‘Can you stand up?’

‘No, I – I’m sorry. I can’t stand up.’

‘Just sit for a minute. It’ll do you good.’

He was wearing his vest and long underpants. The vest wouldn’t fit over his bandaged shoulder, so Anna had cut out the sleeve. Tomorrow, they’d have to dress the wound. Take off the dressings, clean the wound with boiled water – and make sure you’ve boiled the swabs beforehand, so as not to introduce infection – then dry carefully, leave to air, sprinkle with boracic powder, replace with fresh dressings. But it had been impossible to buy fresh dressings. Every inch of bandage in the city was gone. Marina had managed to buy a packet of lint, then they’d cut up a sheet for bandages.

‘As long as it’s clean,’ they told each other.

He must drink. Water flushes out a wound. He must be roused to drink, even if he’s asleep. If he doesn’t pass urine, that’s a sign of dehydration. Water, not tea: tea is too stimulating.

Anna replaces the glass. He’s sunk in sleep. It’s so tempting to leave him where he is, out of pain, and beyond causing pain. But she gently taps his cheek.

‘Father. Wake up. You have to drink.’

It takes so long. His mouth works, as if he is chewing. Under his eyelids, his eyes move, but the lids stay sealed shut.

‘Wake up.’

Suddenly his eyelids spring open. To her amazement, he smiles and says in a voice that is so near to normal that it sounds like a shout in the still room, ‘Anna. What are you doing?’

‘Trying to wake you up. Here, have some water. Your lips are cracked.’

‘Anna, make me some tea.’

‘You’re not really supposed to have tea. It’s too stimulating.’

He turns his head wearily from side to side. ‘What’s that you say?’

To her horror, she realizes that he hasn’t understood the word ‘stimulating’. Her father, who collects words as other people collect rare coins.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get you some. A little glass of tea can’t do any harm.’

When she returns with the tea, he seems to be dozing, but as soon as she clinks the spoon against the glass, he opens his eyes again.

‘Did you put in two lumps of sugar?’ But he makes no move to raise himself or take the glass, even though his right arm is perfectly good.

‘I’m going to put another pillow behind you, then you’ll be able to drink it.’

He struggles into a sitting position.

‘Here you are.’

Tremblingly, he takes the handle of the glass, purses his lips, sips the tea.

‘Good tea.’

‘Try a little more.’

Sip after sip, the tea goes down. His hand shakes with exhaustion, and she takes away the empty glass. He lies back on the pillows, smiling with his eyes closed.

‘That was good.’

‘We’ll try lime-flower tea next time. You know how much you like it’

‘Yes, I do like it.’

‘I’ll just take this out, then I’ve got some porridge for you.’

‘I’m not really hungry, Anna,
moya dusha.
Just tired.’

Did he really say it? Never in his life has he called her that before.
My soul.
He smiles.

‘Onegin’s uncle.’

‘What?’

‘Me. I’m like him. Are you wondering when the devil will come for me?’

In a flash, like a miracle, the passage comes to her, and she knows what he means. She’s able to answer just as he’s always longed for her to be able to answer, finishing off his quotation.

‘No. I’ll just carry on gloomily spooning out the medicine.’

His smile broadens. ‘At least you haven’t forgotten your Pushkin.’

‘No, at least I haven’t forgotten that,’ she answers. He reaches for her hand and grasps it, but the grasp is weak. His mind has wandered off already. How can she be angry with him?

She thinks of it out at the dacha, as she digs up potatoes. Leaves rustle at her back. She turns, scans the crowding trees, puts her hand on the knife which lies on the earth beside her. No one there. But there could be. No one knows how close they are. Her bike is propped against one of her mother’s rose-bushes, at hand. A few late roses struggle through a mat of bindweed. The forest is closing in, swamping the garden she’s made.