The Siege (26 page)

28

It is ten past midnight. Darkness, stillness, cold. A savage cold that is strong enough to halt the beat of blood, strong enough to turn the dead into logs of frost.

All four of them huddle together, sharing their body heat. They’re fully dressed down to hats with ear-flaps, gloves and scarfs. At the foot of the mattresses four pairs of boots stand ready. The ventilation window has been mended with layers of cardboard where a shell-burst shattered it two weeks ago. The other windows are crusted with frost, inside and outside. Outside, an ice-laden wind sifts the snow into whirling demons at empty street-corners.

But it’s dark, dark. Nothing of this can be seen. There’s only the savagery of cold, like an animal prowling the room, lashing every inch of exposed skin. Outside, the midnight temperature is eighteen degrees below zero. It has been dark since three o’clock, and it will be dark late into the morning. Long, long hours when there’s nothing to do but cling together and keep alive.

If she touched the
burzhuika
now, its freezing metal would stick to her palm. Tomorrow they’ll burn more books. Thank God there are books to burn.

He doesn’t see the burning of his books. Four people lie together in one room, but in the next he’s alone. He lies on his back, his nose jutting into the cold. His hands are folded on his breast, and they hold a book. His skin is glazed solid. The cold can rage around him as much as it likes, but it can’t do him any harm. He’s part of it now. It has cauterized his wounds. There’s no smell of sickness any more, and although death has come into the room it too remains frozen, dormant, like a winter visitor who will only come to life with the spring.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘No, are you?’

‘No.’

‘How’s the little one?’

‘Sleeping.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes, sure. But his feet are cold.’

‘Give me your hand.’

In their cave of rugs and blankets, two hands meet. There is no warmth in the touch. Two hands, stiff, chill, claw-like, fold into one another. They are not male or female any more. But they are alive. One hand stretched out to another, touching. From the child there is a sudden, spasmodic explosion of coughing. His body shakes, his chest rattles, but he doesn’t wake. Andrei and Anna press closer, one on each side of Kolya’s body, warming it as much as they can.

‘Marina’s sleeping?’

‘Yes,’ says Anna. ‘She’s sleeping. It’s only sleep.’

Kolya shakes and coughs. Anna undoes her coat and pulls him inside. Slowly, with stiff fingers, she buttons her coat back over them both. He burrows into her, choking against the skin of her neck. She rubs his back and tucks his feet between her hollow thighs.

The four of them, musty in clothes that they don’t take off at night. Four pairs of boots stand by the mattresses, and when they crawl from their cave of blankets into the freezing room, all they have to do is step into them. But everything takes so long. It hurts to breathe. You get palpitations.

Marina is curled into a ball at Anna’s back, turned away from the others, her fist pressed into the hollow under her cheekbone. Imagine being asleep, and dreaming. Dreams of food. Dreams of fragrant, smoking-hot soup made with dried mushrooms. Tiny dumplings float on top of it, golden and puffy…

Kolya’s honey. The glass jar is almost empty. Only one spoonful left.

Things will get better. They’ve got to. The blockade will be lifted. Our forces will take back Mga and the Moscow railway will re-open. The circle of siege will break.

Only Kolya’s honey stretches between this time, now, and then, when things will be better. A thin, dark, sweet thread, smelling of heather and smoke. One spoonful. They’ll all watch, while Anna lifts the spoon to Kolya’s mouth.

‘There, slowly, don’t gobble it.’

In go the precious calories and vitamins. Is it their imagination, or is there a little more colour in Kolya’s wasted cheeks as he swallows? Anna reaches out, catches on her finger a drop which has fallen from the spoon on to the side of the glass jar, and puts her finger into the child’s mouth to suck. He sucks and keeps on sucking long after the sweetness has gone. On these threads they hang.

The honey jar is here, wedged against the mattress. If thieves broke in, they wouldn’t find it. Anna fingers it. The pain in her stomach sharpens. She snatches her hand back into the cave of blankets.

The cold, dead rooms of the apartment lean over her. Each frozen cell hangs suspended in the comb of the apartment building. Below, there are the icy, ringing staircases, the courtyard shrouded in snow, the unswept pavements, the shell-damaged buildings, the bomb-sites, the inner-city defences she helped to construct back in September, in another life. Beyond them, the iron ring of the invading army, pressing on Leningrad’s neck. There is Leningrad, paralysed like her own flesh and blood.

Kolya is sucking in his sleep. His lips move against her neck, rooting for food like the baby he was five years ago. Andrei is silent. He’s asleep again, like Marina. His hand has fallen away from hers.

These are the most difficult hours, the hours after midnight, when day is still unimaginably far off. Anna drowses, jerks suddenly out of sleep, then drowses again. Her stomach hurts. She draws up her knees, cradling Kolya. Her toes are itching, but she can’t reach them.

It sounds as if death is walking about in the next room. Its footsteps are clear, and close.

Tomorrow, the fight for food, for warmth, for one more day’s survival. Tomorrow, once again, they won’t take her father’s body to the cemetery. If Kolya’s little sledge hadn’t been stolen, they might have managed it. Her father will have to stay here, and it’s been six days now. Or is it seven? Time’s slipping, like the mat of blankets. She begins to count back. It was on the Thursday – no, the day before –

Tomorrow the honey will be gone. Don’t think of it now. Kolya’s heart ticks against her breastbone. Do children’s hearts normally beat as fast as this? He whimpers, but doesn’t cough. That’s right, sleep, sleep. They can’t blockade your sleep.

The night passes.

Then it’s night again.

Nine days now since her father’s death – or is it ten? It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The sun comes out, and its light pushes through crisscrossed paper into the room where Anna’s father lies. The room grows radiant. Shadows of frost leaf and frost petal settle on the mound of Mikhail’s body. His beard sparkles, but he sleeps on in frigid silence, as he has slept for ten days now. Or is it nine? Now the sunlight vanishes as the sky grows yellow with coming snow.

The bakeries opened late again. Today it was because a shortage of water delayed the baking of bread. When Anna got back with the rations, Andrei was already home from the hospital, after a night shift. He ought to sleep there all the time, like the other doctors, but he still insists on coming home whenever he can. He got a lift on a truck this time, he tells her. It’s crazy to use up his energy like that, but she’s given up arguing about it. She only argued from duty: she wants him here.

Andrei is asleep, with Kolya in his arms, when Anna comes in. She stoops to check Kolya’s breathing. His face is peaceful, locked in sleep. His cough’s getting better now. This is his best and deepest sleep, the midday sleep after the midday meal of bread soup. He’ll have had a couple of spoonfuls of buckwheat porridge today, as well. They’ve got into a system of eating half their rations as late in the evening as they can, and the other half at noon. That way, it doesn’t matter how late Anna gets backs with the bread. They’ve at least got something to eat at noon. And if, one day, the bakery doesn’t open at all, or something happened to Anna, they could keep going until the following day. They would never have to say to Kolya:
There’s nothing to eat today
.

Seventeen hours to endure, between seven in the evening and noon the next day. This morning Anna rinsed the empty honey jar with hot water for Kolya. The rest of them had hot water flavoured with nettle tea that Anna dries after use, and then re-uses. She puts a pinch of salt in the tea. Salt stops you feeling dizzy.

If only her father hadn’t died so close to the end of the month. They were only able to claim his ration for a few days after he died, then it was re-registration time. Everyone must re-register in person. If someone dies at the beginning of the month, just after registration, you do well. As much as thirty days of extra rations. As it was, Anna dried a half-slice of the extra bread from her father’s ration over the
burzhuika
each day, and put it away. The seven half-slices are hidden in a vase with a heavy plate over it. She checks them every morning to make sure mice haven’t got at them, although there don’t seem to be mice around any more. Cats, crows, dogs and pigeons have all been eaten. People are eating rats, and rats are eating people, in apartments where the dead lie on the floor in puddles of ice.

Perhaps someone in their apartment building has trapped and eaten the mice. Or more likely, the mice know that there’s no living for them here, not even a crumb. They’ve broken the blockade and gone to the German lines.

She lifts the plate. There is the dried bread, untouched. If the ration’s cut again, or Kolya gets another illness, at least she’s got something in reserve. Or if he cries too much. Now that he’s getting over his illness, he cries more.

‘Anna,’ he said one day, ‘when are you going to make my soup?’

‘What soup, Kolyenka?’

‘You always make me soup when I’ve been ill, to build me up again.’ He looked at her reproachfully, like an old man. He remembered the chicken soup she used to make after anyone had been ill, flavoured with parsley and a handful of dried chanterelles. It was golden, flecked with green, with the faintest pearling of chicken-fat on its surface. If she had the flour she would make wheat dumplings as well, feather-light and floating. Kolya used to love it when he was allowed to lower the dumplings one by one on their slotted spoon, and watch them sink to the bottom of the pan before they swelled and rose to the surface. The dumplings absorbed any excess fat so that the soup’s texture was perfect.

Kolya was still talking.
‘
You know
,
Anna, your chicken soup. I like that soup.’

Anna swallowed the gush of saliva in her mouth.

I’ll make you some soup.’

She made him bread-soup, crumbling a half-slice in water and heating it over the stove with a pinch of salt. He drank it greedily, like a convict, clutching the cup to him.

Yes, Kolya’s getting better, but he’s so weak they don’t let him out of the one room they can keep above freezing. The pipes in the bathroom are frozen anyway, so he doesn’t need to go in there. The toilet’s frozen too. They use an old chamber-pot which Anna empties into a snowdrift in the yard. Sometimes she hasn’t got the strength to carry it downstairs, and then she puts the pot out on the landing, its sullen stew of urine and faeces covered by a tin plate. It’s so cold that soon the chamber-pot freezes, too, and the next time she goes down to the yard she has to hack out the frozen sludge before she can throw it away. Everything takes so long. Every day she is slower. Her hands are stiff, joints swollen, fingers raw. She cut the web of skin between thumb and finger on her left hand, when she was chopping wood, and it won’t heal. She’s never been clumsy like that before.

Evgenia’s wood is all gone, but Andrei got another sackful when the wooden fence around the hospital was torn down, and there are still books to burn. Her father’s Shakespeare is on the shelf above his bed.

Anna draws the quilt up around the back of Andrei’s head. But where’s Marina? The
burzhuika
is almost out. Anna opens the stove, where the fire is down to red ash. Kneeling, she teases it with scraps of paper and splinters of wood until flames lick up out of the ash. She makes a little wigwam of kindling, and then adds two larger chunks of fencing. Even in here, with the stove going, the windows are blank with frost. Yesterday the temperature outside fell to twenty degrees below zero. The radio says that newspaper pads should be used to wrap children’s chests. Newspaper, because of its insulating properties, provides excellent protection. If you have no newspaper, you can take a book apart and stitch layers of pages into a child’s vest. You might think it was better to burn the book as fuel, but in the fight against cold you need long-term weapons as well as short-term ones. A paediatrician gave details of how she had stitched together layers of Tolstoy into a vest for her six-year-old son.

The door to the kitchen is closed.

‘Marina?’ But no one answers. Perhaps she’s gone down for water. But what if she can’t carry it back up, the way she couldn’t last time? What if Anna’s got to haul the water upstairs and support Marina as well? It’s bad enough to make the ascent alone with a bucket of water. She has to grope her way upwards because the lights don’t work, stopping every few steps, terrified of slipping on a patch of ice left where someone else spilled their water. Tears of anger and weakness spring to Anna’s eyes.

‘Marina?’

‘I’m here,’ answers Marina, from behind the closed door of Anna’s father’s room. Anna hasn’t been in there since he was laid to rest. She pushes the door, and it opens easily, sending out a coil of freezing air. Quickly, she steps inside and shuts the door behind her so Kolya won’t be chilled.

There’s a light fur of frost on her father’s face. He lies on his back, with a book between his hands. It’s a battered volume of Pushkin, folded there by Marina before Mikhail’s body stiffened. Marina, wrapped in coat and shawl, sits beside the bed. The shawl is wound around her face, so that only her eyes show as she turns to the door. But her hands are bare and they are wrapped around Mikhail’s.

‘But Marina, your hands – you’ll get frostbite. You mustn’t stay in here.’

She lifts Marina’s hands. They are stiff, marbled blue and red.

Anna rubs them between her own, as Evgenia did. Marina’s hands feel dead between hers.

‘It’s all right,’ says Marina. ‘I’ve only just taken off my gloves. I wanted to touch him.’