Hunger (6 page)

Alena, of course, was right that I could not have known that the blockade was coming. But I had always been right that France was a better place for a little girl whose parents had been jailed as internal enemies. And I could not understand why Alena seemed angrier with me now than she had when Albertine first departed.

On the fourth day of this treatment, I placed my hands around Alena's vanishing waist and kissed the side and back of her nape. My wife had never turned away my affections, and even now, when she hated me, she accepted my hands, my mouth, and the rest of me, sharing what remained of her body with me.

Of all the things I have to be ashamed of, this one comes to mind as often as any other.

•   •   •

Contrary to the imaginative indulgences of Herodotus, the Babylonians prized sexual fealty. Infidelities were punished harshly, but there was room for forgiveness. Though an adulterous wife caught in the act was usually bound to her lover and drowned in the Euphrates, her husband could grant her pardon. I have wondered how often that happened — and how often for love, how often for revenge.

If a wife went off with another man after her husband was taken prisoner, she was to be drowned, unless she did it for hunger. If she went with the other man because there was no food in her house — if she was lured by his pantry and not his bed — then no blame whatsoever was attributed to her. It has always been understood that people need to eat.

•   •   •

The herbarium was now mostly dark below its single row of high windows. The air by the ceiling, though, held dirty afternoon light. I was
alone, but the cracking sound brought me unease, brought fear of exposure.

Even though the rice was raw and stung my tender gums, its nutty flavor filled me with warmth and pleasure inside my skin of cold and discomfort.

This variety of rice grows in the humidity of southern Louisiana, and it was there that we — the great director, Lidia, Sergei, a whole little expedition of us — collected it in addition to several wild landraces. The trip was my last good time with Lidia.

Rice was Alena's specialization, but she had stayed in the pure air of Leningrad, waiting there to study the fruits of our collecting. In Louisiana, where the air is of another quality altogether — outside of time and living and breathing with heat and moisture — there is no pure, no impure. Most of our skin lay visible to the touch, and nothing seemed wrong. . . .

I stopped, having eaten more than I set out to, having wakened rather than dulled my
painful appetite. I longed to take home the small mound of pecan rice left in my palm, to boil it in water, to salt and sugar it and feed it in steaming spoonfuls to my Alena.

But I knew that she would close her lips to the food.

•   •   •

On my way from the institute to our flat, I watched a mother walk hand in hand with her newly mature daughter. Their proximity seemed to please them both, and yet I felt the mother's hand commanded the daughter closer than she would like to be.

They turned and disappeared from my view behind the rump of one of the stone lions that presides without interest over the Catherine Canal.

•   •   •

In 1776, south of Baghdad, peasants found the unfinished basalt figure of a lion amid the ruins
of what was once Babylon's northern palace. This lion stands hard, trampling the hapless man who lies beneath his paws. Unlike the seated lions that gaze so elegantly at the Catherine Canal, the Babylonian statue was made by someone whose gods were intimately, if cruelly, involved with human fate and the lots of individual men.

•   •   •

Alena stood across the room from me, and I saw her in relief. She spit softly onto a cloth and wiped, slowly, one by one, the cacti from the Botanical Gardens that she had agreed to care for. She kept them as warm as she could with our paltry fire and kept their pores open by rubbing them with her own saliva each day.

I watched and swallowed my own spit to diminish the hunger nausea that I could never move past.

Though Alena's hair was thinned and oddly parted from multiple nutrient deficiencies,
from the room's distance I could see only that it was as long as it had always been. And backlit by the window, it appeared luminous.

But the window told everything. At the start of the terrible winter, we had tacked layers of butcher paper over it to keep some of the cold outside, only to punch holes and tear the paper into kindling to keep our books from the fire.

So the light that revealed Alena's former prettiness came through ripped and broken like the paper.

•   •   •

The finest piece of fruit I have ever eaten was in Colima, in western Mexico. Twin volcanoes smoking in the distance, the perfect whitewash of a colonial square in the foreground.

It was a mango, bought off the street, skewered on a stick barely strong enough to support its weight. The old man who sold it to me slashed it quickly, artfully, with a knife that seemed much too long for the job. He achieved
brief, crisscrossing incisions just shallow of the hardened flesh around the seed. His precise cuts formed perfectly bitable pieces, only a shade too large — and marvelously so — for the mouth.

“Just bite off a little more than you can chew,” I said to the great director.

But when he looked at me, his eyes did not register the joke. The old fruit vendor smiled, though I am sure he understood not one word of Russian. But he was a man who understood tone, inflection, subtlety, intent — the real meaning of a situation, all that happens between two people.

He sprayed the mangoes with salt and chili powder and lime juice to make us realize the perfect sweet flavor of the fruit itself.

And we did. Even the director moaned slightly, happily, deep in his voice box, his eyes narrowing and almost shining.

The mangoes in upper India were something altogether different. Smaller, greener,
more fibrous. Better for putting up than eating fresh, often too sour. But the one I ate after a long night of fighting, touching, fighting, touching, fighting Lidia was too sweet.

Again bought from the street, this one came from the hands of an old woman. Hands not so different from the hands of the elderly Mexican man who had shaken chili powder on the best piece of fruit I have ever eaten.

But her hands moved differently. Precise also, but unconcerned. Just a piece of fruit to be eaten by just a man.

And she served it differently. The mango was already halved and pitted. She cupped it in her hand and scored the flesh into dice, almost to the skin. She lifted her fist as though to strike a hard blow to my face. When I only stood there, staring, she grabbed my hand, formed it into a fist, and punched it for me into the skin of the mango half. The diced pieces spread from my fist like armor. Bite, bite, she said, pretending from a distance to bite
off a cube, her small blackened teeth snapping the air.

It was a clever way to open a mango, and the pieces were entirely manageable. But the taste spread unpleasantly in my mouth. Somehow both sour and much too sweet.

I spat out the yellow pulp, and the woman looked at me with supreme satisfaction.

It was her gaze and the taste in my mouth and that yellow color spat out on the street that brought back the sickness from Abyssinia. The malarial mango, I would always think of it.

So it was the other mango, the Mexican one, that I tried to conjure as I scraped with my small penknife at the hard dried core of a mango whose fruit was long gone. My efforts produced little, but I had better luck forcing the seed across the broken surface of a little device designed to grate nutmegs that I had picked up while traveling in Iberia.

Only when I had fully obscured the bottom of a small bowl with powdered mango pit did I
stop. I added warmed water, hoping to soften the shavings and make a paste. But the water and the seed remained distinct, refused to blend. So I settled for drinking the dirty water.

Like always, my regret was instant. I do not mean the guilt of theft and survival, which was constant, but simple regret for having awakened the horrible hunger that had finally gone numb.

I told myself that pain was the price of life; its absence was the step into death.

•   •   •

There are many ways to manipulate seed dormancy and germination, to shorten or lengthen the vegetative periods of cereals. Seeds can be stratified, brought out of dormancy with an imposed change of temperature. Scarification — the nicking and scratching of the hard-seed coatings of plants such as morning glory and okra — can end dormancy and begin germination so long as care is taken not to damage the embryo within the coating.

And even Lysenko's infernal vernalization has its uses. Soaking wheat in certain conditions until it is swollen can shorten, by a few days, the vegetative phase of some spring varieties, thereby slightly increasing yields if the second half of summer is dry. But it is time consuming and wastes seed. It causes some varieties to fail outright, and should summer's second half be moderately wet, yields will fall.

By the time the war started, Lysenko himself had quietly dropped vernalization, but not before he had made it an issue of class and turned Stalin against all of genetics. What the cost of this would be, I could only guess. But the ends of wars bring change, and this was what we had to rest our small hope upon.

•   •   •

“Stop by my office when you have a few minutes,” he had said. And so I found myself knocking on the door of the new director, a man who had no doubt earned his position through both ability and libel, hard work and
treacherous cunning, good luck and petty remarks.

Sitting in a surprisingly comfortable chair, I watched the man and the driving snow through the window behind him. The man was my age and just barely remarkable. He would have been unremarkable, but he was just a bit slighter of frame and more handsome than what might be considered average.

“The delightful wife of Ivanovich speaks highly of you. She feels you to be a most useful colleague.”

Be careful, I told myself. In those times, one day's patron was the next day's doom. “It pleases me to hear these words, certainly, though I am not particularly well acquainted with Ivanovich's wife.”

“But what I really wanted to tell you, why I asked you to stop in, is what Pryanishnikov has been up to since he managed to get himself evacuated from Leningrad.”

“Ah, that's right, I had forgotten that he had been evacuated.” I said this in a way so as to
seem disinterested, or better, interested only in passing and upon being reminded.

“And of course you know that our disgraced former director was a student of his back in the old days.”

“I knew that, yes, at least at one time. But I have not thought of such connections in many years.” I met the new director's gaze, but tried not to hold it beyond a moment, letting my eyes refocus on the ever-stronger snow.

“It seems that Pryanishnikov has gone and nominated his star pupil for a Stalin prize.”

Against every voluntary physical power, I laughed loud and hard.

“You find that funny.”

I could not stop laughing. Finally, I managed to say, “Funny is exactly what I find it. Would you not say that it is funny that a man in prison is nominated for a Stalin prize?” My boldness so surprised me that I thought it possible that I had been insane for some time and was only now noticing it.

The director began to laugh with me — a
shrill, ringing laugh like a mynah bird. Despite its peculiar tone, it seemed genuine enough. But the director stopped so abruptly that I realized it must have been false. “It is indeed funny,” he said.

He stared at me for a time. His eyes were pale blue, but speckled with dark spots of green and black. His gaze was softer than I might have expected, almost kindly. Then he looked down and began to read through some stapled papers on his desk.

I watched the snow, still hard, small, and driving in at an angle. “Was there something else you wished to speak to me about?” I asked.

He looked up, as though startled to see me still sitting across from him. “I merely wanted to know what you thought about the disgraced former director, whom I know you worked closely with, being nominated for a Stalin prize. And now I know: you think it is funny.” He returned to his papers.

As I was leaving, he looked up one more time and said, “Oh, and how is your fine wife?”

“Well enough, thank you,” I said. “We are getting by as well as anyone — no worse, no better.”

•   •   •

Among the evacuees of 1942 were the great director's wife and son, who were settled in Saratov. They were told that the great director was imprisoned in Moscow, when he actually slept, malnourished, only a few kilometers from them. Did they feel his proximity or are such things not possible, I wondered later, when I heard.

His death sentence commuted but his death imminent, he was moved from Saratov prison to Magadan, where his cell was chilled by the cold but unseen Sea of Okhotsk. The precise details would never emerge, but he certainly died of mistreatment and malnourishment, perhaps more of one than the other, probably in late January of 1943.

When he arrived in my dreams or in my waking mind as if in dreams, he appeared
emaciated, pocked by the hunger edemas of lengthy albumin starvation. He appeared as my Alena had one year earlier.

•   •   •

My Alena survived the winter of hunger. In early March, I stood in Sennaya Square. It had been underwater in 1924, when people had waded neck deep, carts floated, and horses were forced to swim.

The square had been under food in 1934, when the new economic policy claimed credit for the bumper crops of cabbage, greens, and root vegetables. Carriage wheels and horseshoes locomoted dry over the flagstones of Nevsky-Voznesensky Prospect.

Submerging the square now were coffins — less scarce despite the wood that was still scavenged for warmth and the bodies that still succumbed to months of wasting, even after being fed bread and broth and potatoes. Even after more than one million left the city, evacuated
against the currents of oil and electrical charge that now surged into Leningrad through pipeline and cable across Lake Ladoga, our road of life. Even now, after food was almost not scarce and newspapers prepared to print and small signs pronounced the imminent reopening of theater, cinema, and production house.