The Siege (11 page)

Empty woods, empty dachas, empty gardens which are already overwhelmed by weeds. This is the empty zone now, the dead zone from which everyone has fled. Here are the potatoes. She sets in her fork, presses down, lifts black earth and a nest of potatoes, as white as eggs. They are small this year, because they’ve had to fight the weeds for nourishment. Each potato clings to the mother plant by a fibrous tendril. She shakes the soil away, puts the potatoes into a hessian sack, and digs again. A tine spears a potato and splits it. As she pulls it off, she hears another shiver of leaves behind her. She plants her fork again and digs, forcing herself not to look round this time. One more row, then those onions, then she’ll go. The radishes have run to seed. She’ll dig up the parsley and put it in a pot. It’s worth having.

Leaves rub together with the hissing sound of late, dry summer. There’s no one. Even if she were to scream her breath away, there’d be no one. No smoke rising from the Sokolov farmhouse, no porky, bristling Vasya, no little Mitya. All the Sokolovs have gone. Wonder where Vasya is now. He’ll be all right, those Sokolovs always look after themselves. Remember Vasya bringing the nest up to the dacha, carrying it so carefully inside his cap, his head bent. Three baby thrushes inside. Vasya knew they were thrushes, he always knew everything like that.

‘Here, look what I brought you, Anna.’

You looked. They were bald and reddish-purple, squirming together.

‘I found it down by the stream.’

You peered into the nest, which smelled of mice. Vasya knew more about birds than anyone. He was always watching them. Once you saw him stamp on a frog, but that was only because he was with the other boys.

‘We’ll take them back now,’ said Vasya, ‘before she finds they’re gone.’

Everyone’s gone. She should never have come. Quickly, Anna sweeps together the last pile of potatoes and crams them into her bag, still covered in soil. No time for the parsley, and anyway she can’t carry any more. Both panniers are full, and her sacks, and the basket. She’d planned to fetch a few things from the dacha, but she doesn’t want to go inside. It’s locked up, and shuttered, as if it’s winter already. The house stares at her, surprised that she’s here, its windows blank. No, this is no longer the place she loves.

Anna fastens the buckles of her panniers slowly and carefully so that no one will see how her fingers want to fumble. Her skin crawls with animal terror. Imagine thinking earlier on that she might even go down and see if there are any radishes in the Sokolovs’ abandoned garden. She didn’t know what it would be like out here in the dead zone, where everything’s waiting, waiting.

A thread of sweat trickles down her back. She breathes out, long and slow, as Marina has shown her. That’s what you do for stage-fright, but it works for everything. She must not run.

She’s got to get back to Leningrad as fast as she can. Dear Leningrad, a hundred times dearer at this moment than it’s ever been, like the mother hive to a bee that’s out too late in the year. She’s seen those bees fly low, struggling, limping home through thick, cold air.

The leaves shake, as if they know something she doesn’t know. What will they see, before this is all over? Who will these trees bend their empty branches over next? The Germans are coming closer, closer. Soon they’ll be walking in our gardens. Wasps and birds have had the plums she might have picked for Kolya. There are dry white stones hanging by threads from the cherry tree, like tiny skulls.

But even now that she’s packed all her panniers and bags, there are still three rows of potatoes left. And those onions, and the little turnips too. Suddenly Anna’s terror hardens. Grimly, she sets her fork in the earth and begins to dig again. This time she doesn’t lift the potatoes carefully, cradling them between the tines in case they bruise. She throws each forkful aside, and attacks the next plant. It goes quickly like this. One row, another, then the third. Uprooted potato plants sprawl underfoot. And now the onions. She drags them from where they’re sitting plumply, half in and half out of the earth. She twists them to loosen the roots, and throws them on to the path. Good onions, packed with vitamins. Turnips next. They haven’t come to much, but they might provide a bit of nourishment. Get them out of the earth. All of it, all that food, out of the churned earth. No matter who invades, they’ll find nothing. The land won’t feed them.

Anna raises her boots high. She smashes them down on the white potatoes, the onions, and the turnips. Some of them try to hide by burying themselves back in the soft earth, but she’s on to them. Her heels grind and crush dirt into white flesh. Juices ooze, smearing the path. They are gone. They will feed nobody. She kicks soil over the food she has destroyed.

13

‘Your papers.’

Anna proffers them. She doesn’t speak, or smile. The militia know that smiles mean weakness. The militia-man plants his forefinger on her signature, and frowns.

‘Your papers appear to be in order,’ he says at last, as if this is only the beginning of her need to prove herself. He’s about her age, twenty-three or twenty-four. A real Leningrad boy, with his muddy blond skin, grey eyes and sharp cheekbones. But jumpy. They’re not just stopping people for the sake of it. The whole city’s gun-ready.

‘What have you got in all these bags?’

‘Produce.’

‘Open up the bags.’

She unties the sacks, and opens the panniers. He lifts up potatoes and onions, searching. But not roughly. Like her, he knows that you mustn’t bruise potatoes.

‘Stuff you’ve grown yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘Off to market with it, are you?’

‘No. It’s all for personal use.’

‘Per-son-al use,’ he drawls, looking over the sacks, the panniers, the carrier-basket.

‘Yes.’ She cracks, and offers him a complicit smile. ‘But you wouldn’t believe the weight of all these potatoes. I’ll never get this lot home. I could do with lightening the load a bit.’

He just keeps on staring at her. Maybe she needs to make it clearer.

‘They’re too heavy. I’ve got too much in the sacks.’

‘Potatoes, is it?’

They are talking in low voices now, scarcely moving their lips.

‘And onions. Onions keep well.’

It is dusk. Thick, grainy dusk settles around them, concealing them. Anna unhooks a pannier from her bike, and passes it to the young militia-man.

‘Perhaps you need to examine this.’

He looks at her, a long look, then moves off sharply with the pannier. She waits. Only peasants are permitted to sell their produce at the kolkhoz market. She’s carrying too much. If he charged her with bringing in stuff to pass it on at a profit, the charge would stick. Plenty of people do it. They go out to the villages to buy ‘private plot’ produce, and then add on a hundred per cent and sell it in city markets. Maybe there are people out there now, scouring empty plots from which everyone’s fled, making a profit before the Germans take the last villages around Leningrad. There are lots of dead zones, in a war. If you’re quick, you can make money out of them.

She could be here for hours. It’s dusk, and she said she’d be home by dark. She waits by the side of her bike, her face smooth. You mustn’t look anxious. But you mustn’t look too sure of yourself, either, or as if you’re taking anything for granted. The thing to aim for is a submissive, citizenly look. Meek, but not so meek that anyone will be tempted to stamp on you. These checkpoints at the city limits are to stop spies and saboteurs getting in. People say there are dozens of German agents in Leningrad, who have slipped through the suburbs into the heart of the city. They’re Russian-speakers. They spread propaganda and report back on the Leningrad defences and the state of morale. They help the German gunners to correct their sights on to key targets.

The sentry comes out, swinging Anna’s bag.

‘Everything’s in order,’ he grunts. She takes it. He’s on her side, he’s going to let her through. The bag is as empty as air. She fastens it back on to the bike frame.

‘But don’t try it on again.’

Anna still says nothing. She nods at the militia-man, avoiding his eyes.

‘Not bad, your onions,’ he says suddenly. ‘My gran used to grow onions like that.’

‘So did mine. That’s how I learned.’

‘Yeah, beautiful onions, she was famous for them. All right then, on your way.’

She swings herself on to the bike and pedals slowly down the street.

It is nearly dark by the time Anna gets close to home. So dark that she almost passes Andrei, only a hundred metres from her home. She sees a young man on the opposite side of the road, head down, striding away. She sees him as a stranger, then as himself.

‘Andrei Mikhailovich! Is that you?’ she calls out, braking the bike.

He looks up at her call. ‘Anna.’

He says it as if her name is the end of a journey. His face opens in a smile. ‘I thought I’d missed you. I’ve just been to your apartment, but Marina Petrovna told me you were out.’

‘Yes.’ She is smiling, too.

‘I’ve got a few hours off. Listen, shall we go and have a drink somewhere? Maybe a dance, like we said?’

‘I’ll have to take the potatoes home first.’ She must, but she wants to stall him, too. After all that getting used to disappointment, it’s too easy that he’s suddenly here.

‘What?’

‘All this stuff.’ She points to the panniers. ‘I’ve been to the dacha.’

‘You’ve been out of Leningrad?’ ‘Yes, I told you, to the dacha.’

‘Don’t you know how close they are? There’s going to be another major advance any day. What if you’d got caught up in it?’ ‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘And you could have got stopped on the way back in.’

‘I knew what I was doing.’

They stare through the gloom into each other’s faces.

‘Sorry,’ says Andrei.

‘No one tells me what to do.’

‘I can see that.’

‘You think I didn’t work out the risk? Who is going to look after Kolya, if I don’t? Look how much food I got.’

But her skin crawls with goose-flesh, remembering the silence of the dacha, and the rustling leaves.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look all right.’ He falls into step beside her as she wheels her bike to the courtyard entrance. It would be now that he comes, when she’s tired and sweaty, dressed in a cut-down pair of her father’s old trousers, and the boots which are two sizes too big, even though she’s lined them with felt so they are quite comfortable. He must think that her entire wardrobe consists of cast-offs.

‘My feet aren’t really this big,’ she finds herself saying. ‘You know how it is, I couldn’t get the right-sized boots last winter.’

‘You should see mine. But luckily, as it’s dark, neither of us need worry.’

At the bottom of the staircase she turns to him. ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting here with the bags, while I take the bike up. It’s not safe to leave them here.’

‘I’ll carry your bike up for you.’

He shoulders the bike. She slings a pannier on each arm, and holds the basket.

‘I’ll have to come back downstairs again for the sacks.’

‘You wait here while I take the bike up. I’ll come back down and help you with the rest of the stuff.’

Then he does a strange thing. He puts the bike down again, and takes a handkerchief out of his pocket.

‘If you’ll allow me, there’s something on your cheek. Mud, I think.’

He rubs at the mark with his handkerchief, but it won’t come off.

‘If you spit on the handkerchief –’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘No.’

‘There.’ He wipes firmly. ‘It’s all gone.’

There they are. His spit on her cheek, like a seal.

‘I wanted to come before,’ he says.

‘I know.’

‘I couldn’t. It’s been crazy –’

‘I know.’

*

Thank God, there is no one in the communal bathroom. Anna strips to the waist and finds the cloth that’s kept in the bend of the waste-pipe. She wipes clean the greyish basin with its clot of hair in the plug-hole, and then fills it with cold water. She’s forgotten the soap. Never mind, there isn’t time. Water will have to do. Anna sluices her face, her arms, her neck. There’s a knock at the door.

‘Anna, it’s me. I’ve brought you some soap.’ In her hand, Marina holds a bar of fine-grained, expensive toilet soap. The soap Anna’s seen and coveted, but never touched. ‘It’s jasmine.’

‘Where did you get that from?’ blurts Anna, then too late hears that it sounds like an accusation. She sees what she imagines Marina sees: herself, naked, dripping and graceless. ‘Thank you. Is Andrei all right?’ Is he bored, wanting to leave, being pestered by Kolya – or is he looking at you, Marina, not caring how old you are, caught by your beauty all the same. By your slender arms and legs, your clear, level, grey-eyed gaze. It won’t matter that you’re old, when you turn your eyes on him.

‘He’s fine. He’s talking to your father. But I don’t know where to put the potatoes. If they go down in the cellar, they’ll be stolen, but it’s too warm for them in the apartment. They’ll sprout.’

‘I’ll think of something.’ Anna is conscious of her breasts, wet and slippery, tight from cold water. She is not fine-bodied like Marina. There is too much of her. Her breasts swing heavily, their dark-brown nipples stiffening. She turns back to the basin and lathers up the jasmine soap, but Marina still won’t go.

‘Let me help you. I’ll do your hair.’

‘Thank you,’ Anna repeats, staring into the mirror to avoid Marina’s gaze. She doesn’t want her hair done, she wants to be left alone to put on the lace bra that’s shabby, though a perfect fit, the matching knickers, the satin petticoat that belonged to her mother, and her own favourite green dress.

‘I like your dress.’

‘I made it. I’m good with my hands,’ says Anna, brushing her hair savagely.

‘Here, let me help you. We all do our own hairstyles and make-up in the theatre, you know.’

‘I thought someone else did it.’ Surely Marina would have had a dresser? She’s always imagined Marina in her dressing-room, surrounded by flowers and sallow women in black who shake out costumes over their arms and dip their elbows into Marina’s bath to test its temperature. And, of course, those mirrors with a frame of bulbs. Only people who can afford to look at themselves in the strongest possible light would dare to sit in front of those mirrors.

‘You need to know how to do everything yourself. There are all those years before you qualify for a dresser – and all the years afterwards, too. There aren’t any guarantees in the theatre. A few good years might be all you get. Look, this colour will suit you. Do you like it?’

‘I don’t wear lipstick.’

‘I know. But with your skin, you can take quite a dark red. As long as it’s a red which hasn’t got any blue in it.’

‘I don’t like the feel of it on my lips.’

‘Try it. You’ll be surprised at the difference.’

Marina paints Anna’s mouth, blots it, paints again. But the lipstick is shaped to Marina’s mouth, not Anna’s.

‘I’d like to try taking your hair right off your face, and putting it up.’

Marina brushes Anna’s hair upward. ‘Like this. It needs more lift. I haven’t got any setting lotion, but you should be all right without it. Your hair’s nice and thick and it’s got plenty of body.’

It is strange to have another woman’s fingers in her hair. Anna wants to twist and shake them off. It is like being owned. Men don’t make her feel like this.

‘Did I pull your hair?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

‘There, have a look in the mirror.’

Anna looks without looking. Sometimes she can’t bear her own reflection, and this is one of those times.

‘Thank you, Marina, I couldn’t have done it like that.’

And now go, go. Leave me alone so I can gather myself together.

‘Tell him I shan’t be a moment.’

Marina understands. Is she disappointed, or not? What does she want from this sudden intimacy she’s created: two women in a bathroom, hairstyles, make-up, fingers in each other’s hair? What does she think the next scene is going to be? No, thinks Anna, don’t come any closer. I am not a girl who’s looking for a mother. If you sent me a letter, I would send it back unopened.

I have Kolya. I’ve become what I wanted.

She shuts the door firmly behind Marina, and returns to the mirror. There’s her face, rather pale, her red lips, her pulled-back hair. It occurs to her that by washing, she has washed away Andrei’s spit. When he rubbed her cheek, he cupped her jaw in his hand to steady it. His touch was warm. She reaches into her hair, finds Marina’s hairpins, and pulls them out. Then she takes a piece of newspaper from the spike by the toilet, and wipes the colour from her lips. She leans closer to the mirror, and smiles.

‘It fell down,’ she mouths to Marina as she goes back into the apartment, shrugging her shoulders. But Andrei isn’t looking at Marina, or anyone else. He’s asleep.

‘He went to sleep just when I was showing him my fort,’ says Kolya. ‘Can you wake him up again, Anna?’

She looks down at Andrei. His head has slipped to one side. She must put a cushion there, or he’ll have a stiff neck when he wakes. How pale he is.

‘It’s the heat in the apartment,’ says Marina.

‘Yes.’

‘They’ve only been sleeping three hours a night.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

‘Yes. He was explaining why he couldn’t come before.’

‘He didn’t need to explain. I knew there’d be a good reason why he didn’t come.’

Kolya fits his toy soldiers carefully into the entrance of the fort.

‘There, they’re on guard now. Aren’t you going to wake him up?’

‘Not just yet. But if you’re a good boy and play quietly, you can stay up a bit longer.’

Go away, Marina. Go to my father, as you always do when I come home. Andrei will sleep better, if you aren’t watching him.

*

Later, Andrei and Anna walk together in the blackout.

‘We’re talking as if they’re bound to attack.’

‘What else can happen now? It’s inevitable.’

‘How many more nights like this will there be?’ says Anna, almost to herself. ‘Don’t you feel it? It’s like a weight pressing down on us.’

‘It’s the blackout.’

‘I was never afraid of the dark when I was little.’

‘I can’t stand it. It’s like living inside a box.’

‘That’s because you’re Siberian.’

‘Of course. Everything’s because I’m Siberian.’

‘Do you wish you were there?’

‘No.’

He turns, clasps her. He rubs his face into her hair, scrubbing away the images that pack around his mind like shadows, leaving only a small lit-up core that belongs to him. The shadows stretch and sway. He makes himself look at them, because if he looks they don’t grow larger. They are the wounded, brought back to Leningrad in trucks and carts.

All those bodies he’s seen opened. The smell of gangrene in stomach wounds. The glistening, blue-purple slide of intestines. He has seen a man try to pack his own intestines back into his body. He’s seen a frill of bubbles around the eyes of a man with facial burns, who had also had a leg amputated above the knee.