The Conductor (32 page)
‘Yes, Mother,’ said Elias, spooning cabbage water into her mouth.
‘You must always put the meat in at the same time as the onions. That’s the trick, to spread the flavour through.’
When the sirens began, they no longer went to the cellar; she couldn’t make it, and he no longer cared. They simply stayed where they were, Mrs Eliasberg lying in her bed and Elias sitting next to her. Even walking a few blocks to queue for food or buy water seemed an insurmountable task.
On a day when the temperature fell to minus twenty-five and the air cracked with cold, he stumbled down the stairs and knocked on the Shaprans’ door.
‘Who is it?’ Olga’s voice was wary. In a city where you could be beaten and robbed for a small hunk of bread, it was better not to trust anyone.
The cold was so intense it sat in his mouth and stopped his tongue; he tried several times before he could make a sound. ‘It’s me, Karl Elias.’
Olga opened the door slightly, keeping her body behind it like a suspicious official who might close a barrier at any moment.
‘I’ve come to ask a favour.’ He spoke very slowly. He’d blacked out that morning, and there was a low ominous buzzing in his ears.
‘Of course you have. Why else would a person come knocking these days?’
Elias pulled his hat lower over his ears. ‘I was wondering if I might borrow some lard, or a little sunflower oil? I’ve given all we had to my mother, and I find I’m close to collapse. A tiny amount of protein would help me get to the bread queue.’
Olga stared at him expressionlessly.
‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ ventured Elias, ‘that you and Mr Shapran seem —’ His brain was working as poorly as his tongue; he didn’t know how to phrase it tactfully. ‘You look healthier than most people. I thought, therefore, that you might be in a position to lend me a very little oil, which I promise to pay back with my next ration card.’
Olga flushed, and she gripped the edge of the door. Her hand was thinner than before, but far from skin and bone. ‘What are you implying? Do you think we’re cheating the system? Using fake ration cards?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Perhaps you think we’re cannibals?’ Her eyes were full of dislike and distrust. ‘Cutting flesh off bodies from the roadsides and boiling it up for soup, or buying human meat-cakes from the black market?’
Elias, who hadn’t even heard of this practice, began to shake. ‘I’m s-s-sorry. I’ll leave.’
‘Yes, you’ll leave! You’ll leave me and my husband alone! Some way to thank us for our help, especially after Mr Shapran saved us all from the incendiary bomb.’ She slammed the door, and Elias half-fell against the wall.
‘Pssst!’ A small sound came from above. ‘Pssst!’
Dazed, he looked up. There was Valery Bobrovsky, staring at him through the stair railings. His hair stuck up like feathers and his boyish face was pinched, but his eyes gleamed in the old way. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he hissed. ‘They eat rats.’
‘Who eats rats?’
‘Mr Shapran and his missus. They trap them out in the back alley at night. Mice, too. I seen them.’
‘I’ve
seen them,’ corrected Elias automatically.
‘You, too?’ Valery nodded. ‘Then I guess you know why they’re surviving all right. Mrs Shapran makes soup from them. Guess she doesn’t want you to know they’re virgin-eaters, huh?’
‘Vermin-
eaters,’ said Elias, starting slowly back up the stairs.
‘And last week I saw Mr Shapran strangling that ginger tomcat that’s been hanging around,’ said Valery. ‘The mean old bastard!’ He extracted his head from the railings and got up, dusting off his knees. ‘I’d better go. I’m not supposed to be out these days without saying where I am. I hope your ma’s all right.’
Back in his apartment, Elias stumbled to the bedroom. The cold in there was so intense he recoiled: they’d used only the main room now
for many weeks. Under a stack of cartons, he found a small jar, still almost full. He rarely used hair oil, reserving it for concerts and other special occasions; the last time had been at Sollertinsky’s leaving party, and that seemed an eternity ago.
He moved slowly in the semi-darkness of the kitchen, boiling water and stirring in two spoonfuls of hair-oil. After adding a tiny pinch of salt, he sipped it. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.
‘Is that sausage soup?’ queried his mother. ‘Don’t hog it all for yourself.’
After she’d been fed a few spoonfuls, she nodded slowly. ‘Much better. See how the flavour’s improved by putting the meat in first?’
N
ikolai knew he would eat the whole of his bread ration as soon as he left the bakery. It seemed impossible, today, to save it till he got home: to cut it into three thin slices and make them last for the next twenty-four hours. He shoved Tanya’s share deep inside his pocket and stepped into a doorway. There had been too many violent attacks recently; it wasn’t safe to eat where people could see you, nor to linger for long in public places.
He bit off a chunk of the bread, then crammed the whole crust into his mouth. It tasted mouldy; recently the city’s bread had been made out of grain dredged from the lake, salvaged from supply barges sunk by German bombers. But the sensation of having his mouth full was compensation enough for taste. Chewing hard, breathing through his nose, he shifted from foot to foot to keep warm. The wind was icy, the wall damp. He swallowed the last morsel. It had taken him two minutes to eat a whole day’s worth of food.
Turning up his collar, pulling down his hat, he plunged back into the driving sleet. The snow underfoot was so heavy that every step was an effort. Over the past weeks he’d felt himself shrinking by degrees, so that even his feet, layered in socks and bound with rags, slipped around inside his boots. When he curled up in bed, his knees grated against each other and his hipbones jutted painfully through two pairs of trousers so he could never lie comfortably.
Shostakovich had written to him, begging him to get out of Leningrad. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he wrote, with typical self-deprecation and naivety,
‘I’ll add my weight to an official appeal. You can stay here in Kuibyshev with us. Until then, I’m sending you some coffee.’ The letter had arrived minus the coffee. Nikolai kept the scribbled page in his shirt pocket; its rustling was strangely comforting. But never once had he considered leaving the city.
Around him people moved like sleepwalkers. Some towed sheet-wrapped corpses towards the already full cemeteries, rolling them off the sleds, leaving them at the gates without looking back. He passed a vacant lot where bodies were stacked in piles, half-covered in snow. Quite dispassionately, he looked at their frost-blackened faces, their stiff outstretched arms. He felt little emotion these days, only a dogged determination to make it through to spring, when he would begin searching for Sonya once more.
At Sennaya market, a handful of women were scanning public notices on the wall, hoping to exchange china, cutlery, jewellery — anything that had once been precious and was now worthless — for rice, oil and smoked lard. Most of the notices were weeks old, ripped and barely legible. Somewhere among them, he supposed, was Tanya’s offer: her father’s collection of lead soldiers in return for coffee substitute.
‘Keep them,’ he’d said, when she first suggested this sacrifice. ‘You might have sons some day.’ He doubted this — Tanya had always had the trenchant air of a spinster and seemed to consider all men idiots — but small miracles did sometimes occur.
‘It’s a significant collection of soldiers,’ she said slightly huffily. ‘Papa succeeded in attaining complete regiments, from the Napoleonic war onwards.’
‘Well, exchange them if you must,’ said Nikolai, although it was common knowledge that even grand pianos had been traded for nothing more than a few slices of black bread. What Tanya was doing, he knew, was more significant than offering up a family treasure for a pound of dried lentils. Ever since the day she’d been caught red-handed with the cello, she’d been different: nervous, apologetic. Often she tried to give Nikolai some of her rations — half a spoonful of sugar, a slice of bread — as if these would make up for the moment when she’d shouted that Sonya was lost forever. Now the cello, wrapped in newspapers and an old blanket, was hidden somewhere Tanya would never find it. Leningraders were chopping up furniture and burning books to keep themselves warm: Nikolai would go to his grave before telling anyone where the Storioni lay.
He walked on past the market. Ahead of him was an elderly woman hauling a sled on which was slumped a half-conscious old man. ‘The ice road will save us,’ she said over her shoulder. She slipped to her knees, got up, and laboured on. ‘We’ll all be saved by the ice road.’
Nikolai fixed his eyes on the sled-runner tracks, using them as a guide. He’d heard about the ice road from Tanya, who’d heard about it at the hospital. As soon as Lake Ladoga was frozen solid, convoys of trucks would be able to cross the ice more regularly, and bring food and fuel into the dying city. ‘And then,’ Tanya had said, as surely as if it were fact, ‘everything will improve dramatically. No one expected a siege, after all. The authorities were taken by surprise. But they’ll get things running smoothly again once the lake’s frozen.’
Nikolai was less certain. True, flatcars laden with grain had been sighted rolling through the deserted stations. But he’d also heard that German pilots were dropping parachute flares over the lake to light up the Russian convoys and then bomb them. And Ladoga’s icy surface remained treacherous, with cracks opening up under the weight of the three-ton trucks. Blizzards drove vehicles off course, so the drivers got lost and froze to death.
Rations might be slowly increased
, he thought.
But not soon enough to save us
. The city was ruined, wreathed in black smoke, and people were shuffling in hundreds towards their death.
Nearing Troisky Bridge, he passed the old couple without a second glance, heard the woman gasping and the man coughing deep in his lungs. With a shock, he realised how much he’d changed; how, through these hellish months of deepest winter, he’d been driven by a new fierceness. Something to do with grief, but an entirely different grief from that which had felled him nine years earlier. Sonya might be missing, but until she was pronounced dead he would fight. For the first time in his life — and, ironically, through loving someone else — he’d learnt to put himself first.
Already the small amount of energy from the bread had dissipated. Up ahead the bridge rose into the swirling mist, as insurmountable as the steepest mountain. He refused to let himself think of Tanya’s rations lying in his inner coat pocket. It was not his, it was not food, he was not starving.
Reach the post on the top of the bridge
, he told himself,
and then find another marker to aim for
.
As he drew closer, he saw that what he’d believed to be a lamp-post was the dark figure of a man. And when he was closer still, he saw the
man fall against the railings and slide to the ground.
He trudged on at a snail’s pace; his legs would move no faster, nor would his brain allow him to try. But when at last he reached the crest of the bridge, he stopped and looked down.
‘Are you all right?’ It was difficult to speak; his lips were as stiff as boards.
The man’s face was covered in blisters, and his eyes rolled. He opened his mouth, revealing bleeding gums and crimson-stained teeth. ‘I’m dying,’ he rasped. ‘Please — help — me.’
Nikolai looked at him for a long moment. Finally, with an effort, he bent and dragged the man to his feet. His body was lighter than Sonya’s had been, and his mottled wrists as thin as the neck of a violin.
‘Stand.’ This was all he could say. ‘Stand.’
But once more the man collapsed against the bridge, slithering onto the muddy ground. His face had the same lime-green tinge as the snow-laden sky.
The breath of the frozen water rose up through the bridge, seeping through the soles of Nikolai’s boots. Dangerously, murderously cold, it spread into his legs, filling them with a fierce iron-ache. ‘I’m sorry.’ He bent towards the man. ‘I can do nothing.’
‘Don’t leave me.’ The man gripped his ankle with a raw bleeding hand. ‘Please don’t leave me.’
For a second longer Nikolai stood still. Then he stepped back, wrenching his boot out of the man’s feeble grip. ‘I must go.’
He trudged away without looking back. The icy wind made his eyes stream so that he could hardly see to walk.
H
e hadn’t remembered there were so many stairs, nor that they were so steep. He counted the number of steps he had to tackle to reach the first landing. Already, he’d climbed six from the street to the front door, and another four to the sliding glass window, and his knees were shaking.
Ignoring the custodian’s stony stare, he leaned on the ledge. ‘I am Karl Illyich Eliasberg,’ he announced. ‘Of the Radio Orchestra.’
Remembering who he once was gave him a temporary strength; he started up the stairs again like a child learning to climb. Right foot, then left foot; feet together, start again. At last, chest heaving, he reached the brass-handled double doors. Beside them was the same paint-stripped, straight-backed chair that had always been there. It had never looked so inviting.
He sat there for thirty minutes, then forty, then fifty. His tailbone pressed painfully against the wood. Shifting his weight, he cursed the Party’s habit of always making their minions wait.
After an hour, or an eternity, the secretary appeared. ‘This way.’ Unsmilingly, he ushered Elias into the ante-chamber. Here, at least, the chairs were a little more comfortable and the furnishings less depressing. The building itself was a bomb-damaged wreck, its facade crumbling and its front steps cracked. But the entrance hall — clean, cheerless, entirely lacking in character — looked just as it had before the war. And in the ante-room there was still carpet on the floor, curtains at the tall windows and paintings on the walls.
