Metronome, The (6 page)

“Are you OK?”

The older woman in the window seat is touching my arm.

“Yes, why?”

“Your hand. And you were making a sound, like it is hard for you to breathe.”

I look at my right hand and realize that I was biting it, teeth marks clearly visible on the skin.

“She is not suffering anymore.” That’s what he said when my mother died and I hated him for it.

“I am sorry,” I say to the woman. “I did not mean to bother you.”

“This looks like an old notebook,” she replies. The woman is about seventy, intelligent face crisscrossed with lines of years.

“My father’s. From the war.”

“Where was he?”

“In Leningrad. He was seventeen.”

She starts crying. “I was in Kiev; they evacuated us to Siberia in July 1941, that’s how we survived. I heard the stories on what it was like in Leningrad. I am so sorry.”

4 November, 1941

Our neighbor Nastya moved in with us. Her sister Serafima died two days before. Nastya and her mother were taking Serafima to a cemetery when they got caught in German bombardment. Nastya survived, but she is the only one left from their family.

It’s very cold. The three of us sleep in the same bed, in our clothes and covered by all the blankets we have. My mother is in the middle for propriety, although I am not sure how much this matters. All we care about, all we can think about, is food. Our little stash is down to only a few frozen potatoes. We are now scraping the wallpaper paste and boiling any leather we can find.

Makar and I are still doing our patrols. We shuffle on swollen feet. In this cold, it’s important to keep moving. You stop, you die. Some of the
militziamen
have died, and we can’t cover their territory. Makar says the city is slipping into anarchy.

It hits me: If this Nastya is, as I suspect, my mother, then I just read how my maternal grandmother died. I just knew that she was killed in the war.

16 November, 1941

There are four of us now. Three days ago, my mother went to check on Leontsev’s and found Andrei barely alive, his mother’s body frozen on the bed. She’d been beaten to death with a can of ham. Whoever did this must have had plenty of food, as he left the bloody mangled can lying next to the body. Andrei told us that men were coming to see his mother. The last one was in a military uniform; Andrei saw his face through a little opening in the curtain that covered Andrei’s bed.

There is no water or heating in our building any longer. Nastya is responsible for the water. Every day she goes to the river and brings two buckets back on Andrei’s sled. She has to climb down to the ice, fill the buckets, then climb back onto the embankment, one bucket at a time. Every day I wonder if she’ll make it. Then we have to boil the water. We brought in the
burzhuika
stove from the Leontsevs’ apartment. I think between heating and boiling water we only have enough books and furniture to burn for a month.

Anna Akhmatova was on the radio, reading her new poetry:

Birds of death are high in the sky.

Who will come to help Leningrad?

Be quiet – he is breathing,

He is still alive, he hears everything.

Hears how his people lament in their sleep,

How out of his depth screams “Bread!”

Reach out to heaven.

But the steel has no pity

And death is looking from every window
.

The rations have been cut again, to only 125 grams per day for dependents. I used to suffer from hunger, but now the pain stopped. You have to prolong the process of eating the little that you have, fool your body, cut the bread into small pieces, let the bread melt in your mouth for as long as possible. Two months ago, we were human. Now, we are starving animals. I don’t understand, for years we sacrificed in order to be ready for the war. We’ve been singing how we’ll swiftly defeat any invader! How come we are surrounded and starving?

Some pages were torn here. They had been torn carefully, slowly, but you can see that at least two pages are missing.

5 December, 1941

It’s only the three of us: Nastya, Andrei and I. We have no food supplies left, it’s just the bread rations. Andrei is in bed most of the time; we force him to get up and walk around once a day. Nastya’s breathing is shallow, it takes all her strength to bring in a bucket of water. We manage with one bucket a day. There is enough fuel left for perhaps two weeks. We are skeletons, covered by yellow skin with red spots. Our unwashed bodies smell, our breaths sour. Because we wear hats all the time, our hair is dirty and matted. It is freezing cold, the thermometer outside the window is stuck on -40 degrees. My feet are so swollen, it’s difficult to squeeze them into the boots. Nastya massages them at night, I am embarrassed that she handles my grimy stinky feet.

Makar and I continue our patrols. Have to walk carefully, for ice is hiding treacherously under the snow. You fall, break your ankle, you are done for. My beautiful city is now a majestic graveyard. The wind howls through the canyons of stone, piercing us to our bones. Today I saw a man sit on a bench, then slowly roll over and fall. He became one of many frozen corpses, lining the streets like statues. Bare blue legs protrude from snow drifts. Life and death coexist right in front of our eyes; there is only a thin line between the two. People show little emotion. All they talk about is food. It’s mostly a city of women, as men and children die faster.

Winter days are short. I leave in the dark, come back in the dark, crawl onto the mattress where Nastya and Andrei are bundled up. Sometimes I write in this diary, but we are down to the last candle and we have no fuel for the wick lamp.
Burzhuika
gives out heat, but no light for reading. We try to sleep as much as possible, to save our energy. We still hand crank the radio, listen to occasional music, reading of poetry. Olga Berggoltz read her new work today:

My dear neighbor,

Let’s sit down and talk,

Just the two of us.

Let’s talk about peace,

The peace we want so badly.

Almost six months of war,

Of bombs falling from the dark sky,

Shuddering earth, collapsing buildings,

Tiny rationed slice of bread

That weighs as little as a feather.

To live under siege,

To listen to deadly whistle of bombs,

How much strength do we need,

How much hatred and love
.

But mostly it’s a “click, click, click” sound of the metronome, heartbeat of the starving, frozen city. We are not living, we are surviving one day at a time.

What happened to his mother, my grandmother? There were four of them and now only three. It must be in the missing pages. Flight attendants are distributing food. It’s a long day, and I take a break to eat, then go back to the diary.

9 December, 1941

In addition to the water, Nastya takes responsibility for getting our bread rations. It’s a dangerous assignment; people will look to steal your coupons and your bread. Every morning, she goes to the bakery. As she leaves, Nastya carefully locks the door and tells Andrei to not open for anyone.

I convinced Makar to alter our patrol route to pass the bakery. Sometimes we see Nastya in the bread line, and she smiles at us. “Pretty girl,” says Makar.

Yesterday I had a day off. We took Andrei to the Puppet Theater. They only perform during the day now, when the Germans eat their lunch and stop shelling us for a while. There were more adults than children in the frozen theater. For the first time since we took him, I saw Andrei laugh.

I broke the crank handle of our radio. We have to get a new one but we have nothing to trade for it.

Another torn page here.

17 December, 1941

Today, our apartment building took a hit from an artillery shell. The apartment of our third floor neighbor is now laid bare: sofa,
burzhuika
, half of the bookcase, pictures on the wall. The people that lived there are dead. Our apartment has been spared, except all the windows have been shattered, and we have nothing to close the gaping holes with.

The building is not safe, but it’s dark, and we have nowhere else to go. We spent the night in our place. The wind is shrieking and the whole building is complaining. Andrei is crying, “We are going to die…” Nastya cradles him, says, “If we do, we’ll die together.” We are all on the death row, we just don’t know the exact time. My soul has been exhausted. I’ve never prayed, I’ve been told that religion is the opium for the masses, but I am praying tonight: “God, please get us through this night. Let us see the light of day.”

18 December, 1941

Ivan Mershov arranges for us to move to an empty apartment on Malaya Sadovaya. The previous occupants have all died. He gives me the rest of the day off.

We move the
burzhuika
, the radio, and a few of our possessions using Andrei’s sled. The good news is that the new apartment has furniture that we can burn, as all of ours is gone. The other good news is that we find two boxes of candles. I light one up. Our shadows sneak along the walls. And the best news is that the apartment has a radio. I crank it up and we sit around the little wooden box, listening to the news of our victories near Moscow. It is strange to be in someone else’s home. But home is not a physical place any longer; it’s where the three of us, the
burzhuika
, and the radio are. Like this candle, it’s a flicker of life in the sea of death.

So that’s how we ended up in our apartment on Malaya Sadovaya. They had to move after their place was hit in bombardment. Sixty plus years ago, and now I am talking to Evgeny Zorkin about selling the place.

20 December, 1941

I killed a man today. It was at the end of our patrol. We heard a woman screaming and ran to the sound. She rushed out of a dark alley, collided with Makar; they both fell. A man charged after her, big, well-fed, carrying an axe. Seeing us, he turned around and ran back into the alley. Without thinking, I pulled the rifle of my shoulder and shot at him. He staggered, dropped his axe, but continued moving. I ran after him and shot him again, this time for good. The woman explained that she took a shortcut trying to get home before dark and the man jumped out of a door, tried to grab her, missed and then went after her. Another cannibal…the city is now full of them.

I felt sick when I got home, my teeth were chattering. I told Nastya what happened; she held me and cried. “He was no longer human,” she said. “Hunger took his mind.”

Was it really like this? Did people turn into cannibals? I was walking these streets just a couple of days ago; it’s hard to imagine someone coming at you with an axe to kill and eat you.

24 December, 1941

For the last three days, Makar and I were on a new kind of patrol: going through apartments. We would go into freezing caves that were rooms, check who is alive. In many places, the whole families were dead in their beds. Sometimes, we would find places where parents died but children were still alive. We would take them to a hospital, for evacuation out of the city over the frozen Ladoga Lake.

One of the days, we check buildings along the frozen Fontanka River. There are signs of artillery bombardment everywhere. The Horse Tamers statues are gone from the bridge, Makar says they’ve been buried in the nearby Anichkov Palace. The ice of the river is covered with people. When I look closer, I realize that these are corpses, left there by the relatives that had not strength to get them all the way to a cemetery. Most are wrapped in shrouds, but some have been stripped from warm clothing.

In our new apartment with its supply of candles, I started reading Andrei one of my favorite books,
The Count of Monte Cristo
. He listens, transfixed, as poor innocent Edmund Dantes is condemned to life imprisonment. Andrei asks how big the food portions were in the 
Château d'If
prison; I reply they are similar to our rations.

The book takes our minds off hunger. Our little extra supply from the cinema has run out. We live on the mattress by the
burzhuika
stove, swathed in blankets. Getting up in the morning is so hard. Sometimes I just want to stay on that mattress, not move, slip into nothingness. I force myself to get up for Nastya and Andrei. The three of us, bound by an invisible bond.