Hunger

ACCLAIM FOR

ELISE BLACKWELL'S

Hunger

“An exquisite little book. . . . A multicolored treat. . . . Blackwell craftily weaves history and botany through this utterly devourable narrative. . . .
Hunger
, like any great book, raises as many questions as it answers. . . . A compact embarrassment of riches.”

— Mark Rozzo,
Los Angeles Times

“All the more chilling for its poetic economy,
Hunger
captures a sweeping catastrophe through one man's tale of belated conscience. It is a haunting reminder that history has no mercy, that no matter how lofty our circumstances or our ideals, we may be tested terribly at any moment by the times in which we live.”

— Julia Glass, author of the
National Book Award–winning
Three Junes

“A story of desperation in its rawest form. . . . Insightful and gripping. . . .
Hunger
examines both the limitations and the possibilities of the human character when deprived of the ability to satisfy primal needs. . . . Blackwell's stark novel is fascinating for its study of how human behavior shifts when faced with the most extreme circumstances and when motivated by fear. Her characters strive to make sense of suffering, to find meaning in it, but are bereft.
Hunger
brings human behavior into sharp relief.”

— Carmela Ciuraru,
San Francisco Chronicle

“A lyrical, haunting story about the cost of survival.”

— Joanne Wilkinson,
Booklist

“A remarkable, fact-based story of heroism and self-sacrifice under the harshest of war's privations and of the desperate will to survive. . . . The prose of
Hunger
is terse, stripped to essentials, but it produces a lilting, nearly poetic quality. The detail is exacting and freshly presented. . . . A compelling exploration of the moral chasm that war can create.”

— Harold Parker,
BookPage

“An evocative account of a nameless man's efforts to survive while all around him are dying. . . . Blackwell is brave in her assertions even if her narrator isn't.”

— Mary McCay,
New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Ms. Blackwell writes in a lucid, serene style, which contrasts with her grim subject matter and increases its nightmarish quality. . . . As the narrator recalls these gruesome stories in small, slow-moving vignettes, they build like stanzas of a prose poem. Juxtaposed one against the other, they suggest a profoundly disturbing reality.”

— Diane Scharper,
Wall Street Journal

“An eccentric, courageous, and poetic study of human beings
in extremis
.”

— Julia Blackburn, author of
The Leper's Companions
and
Old Man Goya

“A riveting fictional account, based on real events. . . . This stark debut novel is a poignant look at a wrenching period of history.”

— Kristin Kloberdanz,
Chicago Tribune

“A quietly effective, poignant debut. . . . Blackwell offers gemlike observations and sensory detail. . . . The juxtaposition of the gnawing torment of starvation with the narrator's memory of the exotic foods he collected and ate on his travels around the world before the war furnishes the novel with many of its tensions and delights. . . . A well-crafted novel that works largely because of its small, evocative moments.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Blackwell's disciplined economy of prose enables her to write a complex story in concise, lean chapters. . . . The juxtaposition of passages exploding with the fertile images of Babylonia's famed Hanging Gardens against the sterility of a life where even tree bark is a luxury gives a heightened intensity and human face to a historical story.”

— Joan Hinkemeyer,
Denver Rocky Mountain News

“A sparse, exquisitely written story. . . . This tale of cowardice, bravery, and betrayal will linger long after the book is returned to the shelf.”

— Robert Francis,
Aptos Times

by

ELISE BLACKWELL

Copyright © 2003 by Elise Blackwell

Reading group guide copyright © 2004 by Elise Blackwell and Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
Time Warner Book Group
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at
www.twbookmark.com

Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company, April 2003 First Back Bay trade paperback edition, May 2004

The conversation with Elise Blackwell reprinted in the reading group guide at the back of this book first appeared at
IdentityTheory.com
. Copyright © 2003 Matthew Borondy. Reprinted with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blackwell, Elise.                                                            
       Hunger / by Elise Blackwell. — 1st ed.
         p. cm.                                           
       ISBN 0-316-73895-6 (hc) / 0-316-90719-7 (pb)
       1. Saint Petersburg (Russia) — History — Siege, 1941–1944 — Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Russia — Saint Petersburg — Fiction. 3. Rare plants — Fiction. 4. Scientists — Fiction. I. Title.                      

      PS3602.L3257 H86 2003
      813'.6 —dc21                 

                                                                                           2002034130

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Q-FF

Book designed by Victoria Hartman

Printed in the United States of America

For David and Esme

We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names. . . . And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all
.

— Paul Valéry

You may have noticed the bush that it pushes to air
,
Comical-delicate, sometimes with second-rate flowers
Awkward and milky and beautiful only to hunger
.

— Richard Wilbur, from “Potato”

Hunger

The celebrated biologist Nikolai Vavilov collected hundreds of thousands of seed and plant specimens from around the world, housing them at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad. Vavilov became a victim of the antigenetics campaign waged by Trofim Lysenko, who gradually gained control of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. Vavilov died in prison in 1942 or 1943 of some combination of maltreatment and starvation. Many of his associates and staff were imprisoned, exiled, sent to work on collective farms, or dismissed. During the siege of Leningrad, those who remained protected Vavilov's
collections from rats, from human intruders, and from themselves. What follows is a fictional account of such a time and place. The characters are inventions and are in no way based on the courageous people who worked at what today is called the Vavilov Institute
.

It is not so uncommon for those near the end of their lives to run their mind's hand over the contours of those lives. Perhaps that is all that I do here as I reach across the populated spaces of time, geography, and language, reach from a comfortable New York apartment to a city once and again called Saint Petersburg.

•   •   •

The anniversary of our wedding day fell on the last of the early summer's white nights, and I could still believe that we would be fine. We
dined at a restaurant that had been better a few years earlier but was still very good. Our window overlooked the Neva. The Peter and Paul Fortress lifted from the center of the river. Its bastion tilted slightly over the water, seeming more precarious than fortified, pointing askew to a sky more bright than light, a sky the creamy white color of the anona tree's sweet custard apple.

Alena's voice floated lighter on the air than it had in a year, and we ate well, sucking the delicate saltiness from the leg casings of huge crabs, spooning caviar directly into our mouths and sliding it down our throats with a white-grape wine that was just too sweet but good nonetheless.

I kept the check from Alena. She believed that the loss of her salary and the approach of Hitlerite Germany's young soldiers meant that we should hold tight to our money. Like the smell of rain before drops hit the skin, the coming war told me to spend, to have whatever I
could now, before it could no longer be had. It would be later that I would learn to hoard crumbs like a miser.

I desired to go straight home and make love to the only woman I was allowing myself, the only one I really wanted. But Alena had heard on the radio the poet Vera Inber, whose account of the long days and nights ahead would secure her fame and favor, and wished to attend a reading she was giving.

We walked along Nevsky Prospect, which had widened with the crowds out to enjoy the last night of the year when the sun would go to the horizon but no lower. I held Alena close, by her arm, and then closer, my arm around her waist.

Every fabricated thing in Leningrad, from the antique ornaments atop monument gates to the nouveau wire poles, pointed upward, elegant, futile.

The small hall where the reading was held was full and very hot and smoky, something I
would savor often in memory but did not enjoy at the time.

I remember few of Vera Inber's words. But those of the reputationless poet who preceded her have remained long with me. Tall and sturdy, he had been a sailor before he seized a pen. He appeared hale on first glance, but the gray folded into his face and the depth and yellow of his eyes gave away some disease of the internal organs.

He read several poems, none of them particularly to my taste, in a strong voice that was decidedly more naval than poetic. The last is the one I remember. It was called “The Shipwreck Survivor.” I offer it now to begin my own story.

I never saw the poem on paper, so I do not know how the sailor-turned-poet broke his lines. But I recall each word as spoken:

“The ones who drown never change the facts, but those who survive the sea in their lungs must send their stories on words, words
like small leaky boats, across the distance, cold, and currents of that water.”

•   •   •

The volunteers of the
opolchenia
, including my Alena but not myself, scurried like rodents. Shelters appeared, and trenches. Young women pierced their skin wrapping barbed wire around obstacles built to prevent tanks from penetrating the city. We all waited for the attack and prepared to defend our city block by block, building by building, hand to hand.

But the tanks never rolled in. They stopped outside the city, and how much simpler it would have been had they kept coming.

•   •   •

In early September, the first Hitlerite shells descended — graceful and even hesitant from their high loft. Then Junkers rose and fell, rose and fell, leaving behind deposits of incendiaries like so much fatal silt.