The Siege (30 page)
Authors: Helen Dunmore
Her thin, pale arms hung down from the too-large sleeves of the dress. She made a gesture with her arms, as if offering up what she was to him. ‘I know I look terrible.’
‘No. You don’t look terrible.’
‘It’s no good saying that, Andrei. I’ve got a mirror.’
‘I look just the same.’
‘Do you think we’re ever going to be ourselves again? Look at my hair. Every time I comb it, more falls out.’
‘It’ll grow. All you need is protein – and minerals –’
‘I know that.’
He touched her upper arms, where a fine down of hair caught the light falling through the window. Another sign of malnutrition. And his own hands looked enormous, with lumps of bony knuckle sticking out, and great raw wristbones. Who would want to be touched with such hands? But Anna closed her eyes, and sighed, and leaned towards him. And although his hands shamed him he felt them tightening on her. All winter they had slept cupped into one another and felt nothing. He pulled her closer. She put her lips on his, dry and searching. They kissed. After a while he said, ‘You taste different.’
‘I know. My breath doesn’t stink any more.’
It was true. The graveyard smell of starvation had left them. Her lips were dry, but not cracked. It must have been the nettle soup she’d been making, and the increase in the rations. The inside of her mouth was moist. They tasted each other again, exploring, her thin body pressing against his through the folds of her green dress and the folds of the shirt that hung on him. Their bones were sharp, but they pressed closer. She moved a little, fitting him to herself.
‘Yes, you taste right,’ she said. ‘You taste of yourself again.’
Anna has collected a fat bunch of dandelion leaves. Ahead of them, Kolya runs to a heap of rubble where a wall has collapsed under shelling. Nettles are sprouting, and dandelions, and tufts of new grass. Kolya darts here and there, picking leaves.
‘There are loads here, Anna! Millions!’ He waves a bunch of leaves at her, then kneels to grub up more. Anna looks down at the dandelion leaves in her hand. Sun glistens on them. They are so fresh that they look as if they are still unfolding. Anna eats another leaf. The taste is sharp and peppery: the taste of life, and not of death.
Marina and Mikhail lay side by side for a while. Now, although they lie in the same grave, they share it with thousands of other Leningraders. Perhaps, by accident, they were flung together, and they touch, as Marina would have wished. More likely, they are quite separate.
Already, new grass is furring the mound of the mass grave where they lie, just as frost furred their bodies in the room where Anna and Andrei laid them side by side, touching, on Mikhail’s bed. Anna could not bring herself to lay Marina on the floor. She looked at them, side by side, their noses pointing at the ceiling, and then she shut the door. She didn’t believe that they were together.
Their grave will be much visited. Fifteen years later, work will begin on a memorial to the victims of the Leningrad Blockade. Generations of Leningraders will come here, to Piskarevsky Cemetery. They’ll stand for a while, stare at the eternal flame, read the poem engraved on the memorial stone, and lay flowers. In the earth, slowly, imperceptibly, separately, the flesh of Marina and Mikhail will part from its bones, and dissolve into the flesh of all those other Leningraders who died of hunger in silent, frigid rooms. The mummified babies who barely had time to emerge into the light before they were snuffed out; the students who walked arm in arm through the Summer Gardens, eating Eskimo ice-cream; the professors; the refugee peasants who fled to Leningrad pushing their possessions in handcarts, hoping to save their lives; the orchestra members who kept on practising in fingerless gloves as the temperature in their rehearsal rooms sunk beyond zero; writers, lathe-turners, museum curators, engineers, street-cleaners, schoolchildren. There are so many of them, such an unearthly number that the mind also dissolves at the thought of it. The memorial stone will swear that they will never be forgotten, and this may be true.
Is that enough for them, those ones under the grass? They’re Leningraders, after all. They know the score. Leningraders will always be aware that stones can be lifted, statues can be felled, names changed, engraved words erased overnight. Invaders can come again. There’s no use relying too much on a memory that’s only set in stone.
In another part of the city, a red-haired woman with strong, bared, freckled arms is digging. Rows of young cabbages are being planted out where the park’s turf has been removed. Every square metre of open land in the city must be prepared for food production, against a second winter of siege. The beets are already in, and the potatoes. The woman bends forward, thrusts her spade deep into the earth, loosens it with a practised jerk of her foot, and brings up the heavy spadeful. It’s city earth, used to growing grass and flowers, but it has the same smell as earth in spring everywhere. It is sour, fermenting, full of promise. It crumbles easily after the deep frosts of the winter. Evgenia moves sideways, and drives her spade in again.
A couple of men in uniform stop to watch her. The sun is behind her, and it turns her red hair into a blazing halo. She’s taken off her headscarf, and rolled her sleeves up above her elbows. Evgenia has always liked the feeling of sun on her bare skin.
The men watch Evgenia. Her clumsy jacket and trousers hide her body, but they can tell she’s just the kind of woman they fancy. They can picture the strong socket of her waist, bent at work, her hips, her breasts. They admire the strength of her white arms. Not too skinny, either: she’s managed to keep a bit of flesh on her.
‘She looks as if she could carry on like that for ever,’ says one of them.
‘Yes, she’s a real worker, that one.’
Evgenia’s spade slices cleanly into the earth. Up comes another spadeful, with the moisture of spring still on it, making it glisten like chocolate. Now the sun and rain will sweeten it. The young cabbages will spread their roots and drive deep, fattening themselves on the endless sunshine of white nights. These cabbages will have to work hard. They must pump themselves full of life in the brief, dazzling Northern summer, before the frost comes round again and turns their stalks to blackened slime.
A patch of sweat spreads between Evgenia’s shoulder-blades, and she wipes her face, streaking it with fresh earth. She glances behind her, but the men have moved on. She had the feeling that someone was watching her, and she doesn’t like that. Four more rows, and then she’ll rest. Or perhaps she’ll carry on a little longer. After all, you don’t get many days like this.
Three people stroll along the embankment, close to Lieutenant Schmidt’s bridge. The late sun strikes towards them, bouncing off the water so that they squint and shield their eyes. The man and woman walk close, touching at shoulder, hip and thigh. They are enlaced, lazy, only just keeping an eye on the little one scooting along the kerb ahead of them. Is the child a girl or a boy? The three of them are far off, and it’s hard to tell. Suddenly they move into a bar of light reflecting up from the water. Broken, shivering pieces of light run up and down their bodies. They look as if they are dancing.
They are mother, father and child out for a walk on this beautiful May afternoon, as Leningrad settles like a swan on the calmest of waters.
But, of course, they are not.
‘HeT, Becь я He yMpy…’
‘No, I shall not wholly die…’
Alexander Pushkin
Select Bibliography
I am indebted to the authors of the following books:
The Road to Stalingrad
by John Erickson, Cassell & Co., 1975
Russia’s War by
Richard Overy, Penguin, 1998
The Siege of Leningrad
by Harrison E. Salisbury, Secker & Warburg, 1969
The Russian Century
by Bryan Moynahan, Chatto and Windus, 1994
Leningrad v. Period Velikoy Otchestvennoy Voinny 1941–1945
, Leningrad Historical Museum
Notes of a Blockade Survivor
by Lydia Ginzburg
Everyday Stalinism
by Sheila Fitzpatrick, OUP, 1999
Stalinism, New Directions
, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Routledge, 2000
Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia 1934–1941
by Robert W. Thurston, Yale University Press,1998
Stalingrad
by Antony Beevor, Viking, 1999
Reinterpreting Russia
by Hosking & Service, Arnold, 1999
Echoes of a Native Land
by Serge Schemann, Abacus, 1998
Soviet Women
by Francine du Plessix Grey, Doubleday, 1990
A Week Like Any Other
by Natalya Baranskaya
The Making of Modern Russia
by Lionel Kochan and John Keep, Penguin, 1990
Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind
by Evgenia Ginzburg, Collins Harvill, 1989
Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned
by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Harvill Press, 1999
A People’s Tragedy
by Orlando Figes, Pimlico, 1997
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer, Secker & Warburg, 1960
*
The poems, in various editions and translations, of Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Nikolai Gumilev, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Blok.
The Cambridge Companion to Modern Russian Culture
, ed. Nicholas Rzhensky, CUP, 1998
Art Under Stalin
by Matthew Cullerne Bown, Phaidon Press, 1991
Modern Poetry in Translation No
. 15, ed. Luca Guerneri, 1999
Pushkin’s Button
by Serena Vitale, Fourth Estate, 1999
Introduction by Lydia Pasternak Slater to
The Poems of Boris Pasternak
, Unwin Paperbacks, 1984
Pushkin, Selected Verse
by John Fennell, Bristol Classical Press, 1991
Mandelstam Variations
by David Morley, Littlewood, 1991
The translations from Pushkin (passages taken from
The Bronze Horseman, Eugene Onegin, To the Slanderers of Russia
and
Exegi Monu-mentum
) are my own.
Some characters in this novel, for historical reasons, take an unfriendly view of their Finnish neighbours. I do not share this view. It was through living in Finland that I first came to love the brief, astonishingly beautiful Baltic summers, and sombre Baltic winters. This book owes a debt to the Finnish landscape and people, along with its heavier debt to the landscape, the history and the people of their great neighbour, Russia.
1
A nickname for stalin.
