The Siege (4 page)

5

The green and gold evening passes like a hundred others. It seems nothing special at the time. Anna’s tired after the bike ride back, with a long detour to avoid the dogs at the Tutaev farm. She’s washed away dust and sweat, put on her favourite green cotton dress, and made a casserole of potatoes and anchovies. Kolya and her father are late back from fishing, but it doesn’t matter. The casserole will be a little crisper on top, that’s all.

‘Anna!’ she hears Kolya shouting through the garden. ‘Anna, we got two! Two real beauties.’

The fish are brown trout. She could wrap them in wet muslin and they’d last until tomorrow, but she decides that for once they’re going to have a real feast. Casserole first, then the trout fried in butter. Her father has already cleaned the fish and they lie on the kitchen table with the patient, helpful look a trout takes on after its death.

If only she’d known at the time how important every detail of that evening was going to become. Kolya boasting that the trout he’d caught had been this one, the fatter of the two. Her father, sunburnt and relaxed after his day at the lake. The taste of the trout.

Anna peels back the salty, delicate crust of scales. Each of them dips forkfuls of trout flesh into the foaming butter Anna has swirled around the pan. And her father says as he does every summer: ‘There’s nothing like fresh-caught fish. By the time it gets to market half the flavour’s gone.’ Sharp, smoky taste of anchovies, potatoes rich and savoury with anchovy oil. A handful of early lettuce. Kolya’s red lips greasy with butter as he reaches for another chunk of bread to wipe round his plate.

No, she doesn’t really notice any of it. After Kolya’s gone to bed, she and her father drink tea on the verandah. He smokes while they talk, and a warm breeze shivers the birch leaves. Plumes of flower toss on the lilac, and now its scent is strong. They sit up until long after midnight, because neither of them wants to break the spell of the summer night. The only unusual thing is that when at last her father rises to go to bed, he doesn’t shuffle off with a mumbled goodnight, his shoulders bowed by the thought of the night to come. He stands beside his daughter for a moment, with his hand on her hair.

‘What a night, eh?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

‘Your mother’s roses will be flowering soon.’

‘Kolya helped me to weed them.’

‘That’s right. That’s how it should be.’

He strokes her hair again. ‘That’s how it should be,’ he repeats.

‘Well… Goodnight, Anna.’

‘Goodnight.’

Anna sleeps. In her dream, her father is reading her a bedtime story. He has the book open on his knee but he isn’t really reading, because he knows the story by heart. It’s a very frightening story but Anna doesn’t want him to stop. Her father says that it is about a war that happened a long time ago, when the French invaded Russia.

‘How long ago?’

‘Oh, more than a hundred years, Anna. You’ll learn about it in history one day:

Once, long ago, General Hunger met General Winter. General Winter, as you would expect, was sheathed in snow. His fingers were daggers of ice, and where his boots struck the earth they left blackened footprints in the grass. When he bent to smell a rose, his breath scorched it. But he loved roses, and rippling fields of wheat, and naked, suntanned children. He loved them all, because he had power over them all.

General Winter stood in his greatcoat of snow, and greeted General Hunger, as all great generals greet one another, once enough of their people have died and they can open their talks
.

General Hunger, on the other hand, was not what you would expect. His cheeks were rosy, his hair sprang from his head, and his eyes were moist and bright. He was in his element. The two generals sat down on their chairs, planted their tall polished boots in front of them and leaned towards one another. They began to boast of what they could do to their enemies.

This is what I can do,’ said General Hunger. 7 make their skin flake and crack at the corners of their mouths. I make sores break out on their lips. They screw up their eyes and try to focus, but they never see me. They don’t realize that it’s I who have changed their eyesight.

‘I whittle most of them down to skeletons, but with some I play a trick and fill their bodies with liquid that keeps them pinned to their beds. What I like best is a big, strong, well-muscled lad of eighteen, who burns up food like a stove. You should come back and see him after I’ve been keeping him company for a few weeks. He melts faster than a candle, in my hands. His muscles waste away. All those big strong bones stand out. I can turn him into an old man, I can make his eyes weak and watering, I can loosen his teeth in his gums until a crust of bread will pull them out. No one eats himself up quicker than a fit young man.

‘I turn old men into children whimpering for food, and I turn five-year-olds into old men. It’s all the same to me if they’re young or old, ugly or beautiful, and I make them all the same. I’ve seen a lovely young woman of twenty-five shrink back from the sight of herself in a mirror after she’s been living with me for a month or two.

‘If I can’t finish them off on my own, I groom them for my friends. A little cold that wouldn’t keep them in bed for half a day soon proves fatal when it visits them after I’ve been staying.

‘I strip them of their thoughts. I take away their feelings. I get into their blood. I am closer to them than they are to themselves. They can think of no one else.

‘My dear cousin, you have got to admit defeat.’

‘Very good,’ said General Winter, scratching his ear with a nail of ice. ‘But now hear what I can do. I hide the earth so they cannot see a single shoot of green. I drive the sap down into the trees’ roots. I search out everyone who has no shelter. I fill roads with snow, I cut off retreats, I block all movement. I ensure that nothing can grow and nothing can thrive.

‘If they leave a hand or a foot uncovered, I seize it. I scorch their skin to red and purple, and then I blacken it. I make their flesh rot like the flesh of turnips when frost gets into a clamp. I harry them with wind and I blind them with blizzards. I freeze the seas so they cannot travel, I blow through the holes in their windows. I make them slow, and miserable, and afraid. I cut off their water supplies, and take away their light. I make them wade waist-deep in snow to find a handful of fuel. When they are ill and off-guard, I creep into their beds and rock them to everlasting sleep. I send gales and ice-storms. I drown them in mud. My greatest power lies in the fact that each year they forget how strong I am. In summer, when they lie under trees bathed in sunlight, they cannot believe in me. They make their plans, and they leave me out. But I have already made mine, and mine are always the same.

‘So, Cousin, what is hunger without winter? Without me, they would be able to eat the green shoots, and catch fish from the streams. Without me, the sun would keep them warm.’

General Hunger frowned, and folded his arms. His face was dark with thought.

‘There is something neither of us have mentioned,’ he said. He glanced around, but no one was listening. The two generals drew closer, so that their heads were almost touching.

‘Without the help they give us, we could do nothing,’ whispered one general to another.

‘Yes, it’s true, without them…
’

The two generals thought of the armies gathered to do their work for them. General Hunger broke into a smile, and slapped his thighs with meaty palms.

‘Let’s join forces!’ he said. ‘What one of us misses, the other can take care of. Together, we will be invincible.’

And the two generals stopped arguing. The talks were over. From that time on, they have always worked together.

‘ Who wrote that story, Daddy?’

‘I wrote it down, Anna. But I didn’t make it up. It’s a true story.’

Inside Anna’s dreaming flesh the child stares at her father. Anna twitches as if a mosquito has bitten her, and turns over in her sleep.

The next morning, Sunday morning, the weather stays fine. Little Mitya Sokolov comes over to play with Kolya, while Anna finishes her mending. Two shirts of her father’s, her red blouse, and that pair of last year’s shorts which will do Kolya for another summer if she patches the seat. She can hear the children’s voices from among the trees, where they’re building a camp. Her needle flashes in and out with quick, impatient stitches. Her father’s poking about with a bit of guttering which has come loose. She’ll go and give him a hand in a minute, because she’s pretty sure he hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. But it’s good to hear him whistling like that. She’ll just finish Kolya’s shorts, and then she’ll have a hunt for the twine. That’ll fix the guttering for the time being, at least, and stop it clattering at night when the wind blows. But where did she put the twine after she’d finished using it in the garden?

This is when she hears Mitya’s mother yelling. ‘Mitya! Mitya! Mitya! Where are you? Come here this minute!’

Stupid woman. What’s she bawling like that for? She knows perfectly well Mitya’s up here, playing with Kolya.

‘Mii-tya!’ The voice rises to a panicky shriek. Anna bundles up her sewing and runs to the verandah steps. Something’s wrong. An accident –

‘Darya Alexandrovna?’

But the woman is so out of breath she can’t speak. She must have run all the way from the farm. She’s fat, like all the Sokolovs, and she smells powerfully of sweat. There are beads of it on her broad forehead. Her breasts heave under her overall.

‘Mitya’s fine, Darya Alexandrovna. He’s only playing with Kolya – look, they’re just over there. I thought you knew he was up here with us –’

‘Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you heard the radio?’

‘No-’

‘It’s war. They’ve attacked, the devils, just when we weren’t expecting them.’

Looking terrified, Darya Alexandrovna wipes her hand across her mouth, as if to spirit away the words that have just left her lips.

‘War, don’t you understand?’

‘The Germans?’

‘Of course it’s the Germans! You don’t think we’d be attacking ourselves, do you? They’re dropping bombs on us already, the bastards.’

Anna stares up at the clear blue sky.

‘They’ve bombed Kiev,’ gasps Darya Alexandrovna, words tumbling out of her mouth like betrayed secrets. ‘Holy Kiev, would you believe it? And other cities, they say. It was Molotov himself who told us.’

‘Molotov? Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure. Wasn’t it I who heard it? Bombs and shells, dropping on everywhere.’

But the perfect sky is empty. War doesn’t belong here, in the country. War. Everything will change.

‘The children –’

The children’s voices are piercing. ‘No, Mitya! That’s
my
piece of wood. You’ve had your turn.’

A tussle, a wail of rage. ‘It’s not fair…’

‘I’d better sort them out.’

But Darya Alexandrovna detains her, pressing a hand on her arm.

‘At least they’re the age they are, my Mitya and your Kolya. They’re too young to get dragged into it. But my nephew – you know, our Vasya – he’s your age, twenty-three. God alone knows where they’ll be sending him off to.’

The image of Vasya rises in Anna’s mind. Plump buttocks straining the cloth of his too-tight trousers, stiff bristles of blond hair and little, cunning grey eyes. A Sokolov all right. He’ll look after himself.

‘I’m sure Vasya will be fine, Darya Alexandrovna.’

‘It’s always the same,’ mutters Darya. ‘The high-up ones start things, but it’s us who have to finish them off.’ And she glares at Anna as if suspecting her, too, of being a ‘high-up one’ who will expect Darya, Vasya and the whole tribe of the Sokolovs to put right her mistakes. Then she goes pale, obviously realizing that a different construction could be put on her words. She’s dropped her guard in the panic of the moment.

‘No offence, mind – when I say “high-up ones” I don’t mean anything by it. You know that, Anna Mikhailovna.’

‘I know. It’s the shock. You don’t know what to think.’

‘They’ll be swallowed up, those Fascists, that’s what they’ll be. They won’t get away with it. Our lads’11 soon beat them off, under Comrade Stalin’s leadership.’

‘Of course,’ says Anna mechanically. She knows this is not the way Darya Alexandrovna really thinks, or talks. It’s just the usual stuff everyone has to spout the whole time. Like the way old people in the village thank God every second sentence, if they haven’t been taught how backward it is. Luckily, the words form themselves into clichés so naturally that you don’t even have to think about it. Out here in the country, those words sound even more grotesque than they do in the city.

Darya Alexandrovna’s right when she says we weren’t expecting the Germans. But why weren’t we? Why didn’t those ‘high-up ones’ know anything? They know whose stories should be published and whose not. They even know people’s thoughts. They know that Olya’s got to lose her job, and hang around the bread queues like a ghost. But they don’t know that the German army’s about to drop bombs on us.

And here comes her father, hesitating when he sees Darya Alexandrovna. He doesn’t like her, and she doesn’t like him. Writers are useless articles, in her opinion. Her father holds a broken bit of guttering in his hand.

‘Anna Mikhailovna,’ says Darya is a hurried undertone, ‘I don’t reckon I’m going to be able to oblige you with that honey after all.’

‘But–’

‘It’s the bees. I ought to of told you before, our bees’ve not been doing as well as they should. It’s those late frosts. We had to light fires in the plum orchard to drive the frost away. I thought we’d have honey to sell this year as usual, but the way things are, we’re going to need it all for the family.’