Winter Garden (27 page)

Vera is stunned by the generosity of the act. Honey is more valuable than gold on this Luga line. Food and medicine in one.

“Why are you doing this?” Vera says after she smears a small drop on Olga’s wounds.

The woman looks at her. “We are all we have left,” she says, scooting back into her place amid the hay bales.

“What is your name?” Vera says.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman says. “Watch your sister closely. I have seen eyes like hers before. She is not doing well.”

Vera nods bravely, though the words are like a cold wind. She has been telling herself that this change in Olga is ordinary sleep deprivation and hunger, but now she sees what the old woman sees: the speck of craziness in her sister’s wide eyes. Olga cannot stand these days and nights—the screaming, the endless work, the horror of watching a girl your own age blown apart. The suddenness of the danger; that’s the worst of it. Olga is unraveling. She talks to herself and hardly ever sleeps. She pulls out her hair in clumps.

“Come here, Olgushka,” Vera says, pulling her sister into her arms. They crawl back into their bed of hay, which is neither soft nor sweet-smelling.

“I see Papa,” Olga says, her voice dreamy-sounding. It is as if she has forgotten who they are and where they are and of whom they do not speak.

“Shush.”

“Tell me a story, Vera. About princesses and boys who bring you roses.”

Vera is weary to the bone, but she strokes her sister’s dirty, matted hair and uses the only thing she has—her voice—to soothe their spirits. “The Snow Kingdom is a magical, walled city, where night never falls and white doves nest on telephone lines. . . .”

Long after Olga has fallen asleep, Vera is still stringing her pretty words together, changing the world around them in the only way she can. When her own eyes grow too heavy to keep open any longer, she kisses her sister’s bloody palm, tasting the metallic blood mixed with the sweetness of the honey. She should have put some of the honey on her own blistered palm, but she didn’t think of it. “Sleep now.”

“Will we see Mama tomorrow?” Olga asks sleepily.

“Not tomorrow, no,” Vera says, tightening her hold. “But soon.”

The day is sunny and bright. If not for the Germans bombing everything in sight, and their tanks rolling forward, forward, the birds would be singing here, the pine trees would be green instead of black. As it is, the beauty of the place is long gone. The trench is a huge, gaping slash in the earth, a mortal muddy wound. Girls crawl all around it; soldiers run back and forth between here and the front line, not far away. If this line breaks, if the Germans get past it, Leningrad will fall. This they all believe, so they keep digging, no matter that their hands are bleeding and bombs are as ever-present as sunlight.

Vera is trying not to think about anything except the spoon in her hand. The pickax broke last week. For a while she was lucky enough to find a spade, but she didn’t hide it well and one morning when she woke up it was gone, so now she digs with a serving spoon.

All day long. Stab, push, twist, pull. Until her shoulder aches and her neck hurts and her blistered palms burn. No amount of salt water can help (the honey and the old woman are long gone). And now she is having her monthly bleeding as well. Her body is turning against her, it seems, and yet all she can worry about is Olga. Her sister digs without complaint, but she can’t sleep or eat, and when the bombs start falling, Olga just stands there with a hand tented across her face, staring up at the planes.

In the past few weeks, Vera has learned that anything can become ordinary—sleeping in the dirt, running for cover, digging holes, watching people die, stepping over bodies, smelling flesh burn. But she cannot accept the new Olga, who moves like the blind and laughs giddily when bombs explode around her.

The air-raid alarm rings out. Girls and women scurry out of the trench and into it. They are screaming to one another, pushing each other aside.

Olga is standing beside the trench, her dress torn and dirty. Her long strawberry-blond hair is filthy, frizzy, and held back from her blackened face by a once-blue kerchief. Overhead, German planes begin to fill the sky, their engines droning.

Vera yells for her sister as she scrambles over the broken earth, leading the way, pushing debris aside. “Come on—”

“It sounds like Mama’s sewing machine.”

Vera turns at that, looks back. Olga is still standing there, too far away, her hand tented over her eyes.

“Run!” Vera yells at the same time the bomb hits.

Olga is there and gone, flung like a rag doll to the side. She falls in a broken heap on the other side of the trench while debris rains down. . . .

Vera is screaming, crying; she crawls out of the trench and over the broken earth to where her sister lies beneath a pile of dirt and rubble. A brick is on Olga’s chest—where did it come from?

Blood gushes from the side of Olga’s mouth and slides through the soot and mud on her cheek. Her breathing is a phlegmy, bubbling cough. “Vera,” she says, shuddering. “I forgot to get down. . . .”

“You’re supposed to listen to me,” Vera says. She holds her sister to her chest, trying to keep her alive by loving her. “I am your big sister.”

“Always . . . bossing . . .”

Vera kisses her sister’s cheek, tries to wipe the blood away, but her hands are so dirty she is just making a mess. “I love you, Olga. Don’t leave me. Please . . .”

Olga smiles and coughs. Blood gushes from her nose and mixes with dirt. “Remember when we went—”

And she is gone.

Vera sits there a long time, kneeling in the dirt. Until the soldiers come and take Olga away.

Then she goes back to digging. It isn’t that she doesn’t care or doesn’t hurt.

But what else can she do?

In August, Vera is released from work on the line. She is one of thousands of dazed, solitary women walking in silent groups for home. The trains are still running, although most of them are full all the time, and only the luckiest find space enough to sit or stand. They are evacuating the children of Leningrad again—this time with their mothers—but Vera does not trust her government anymore and will not follow the evacuation order again. Only last week she heard of a train of children that was bombed near Mga. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. She does not care. It could be true, and that is enough for her.

She is tougher now, after two months spent digging in the black earth and running for shelter. Tough enough to make her way home through countryside she’s never seen. When she is lucky, a transport or a lorry picks her up and takes her as far as they are going, but luck is a thing she has never counted on, and most of the miles to Leningrad, she walks. When she meets soldiers on the road, she asks about Sasha, but she does not get answers. It is no surprise to her.

When she finally makes it to Leningrad, she finds a city as changed as she. Windows are blacked out and crisscrossed in tape. Trenches cut through parks, tearing through grass and flowers. Everywhere she looks are mounds of broken cement—dragon’s teeth, they are called—meant to bar the tanks. Huge iron beams crisscross the city boundaries like the ugly, misplaced bars of a prison. And soldiers move in marching columns through the streets. Already many of them look as broken as she feels; they’ve lost on one front and are moving to another, closer to the city. In their tired eyes, she sees the same fear that is now lodged inside of her: Leningrad is not the impervious city they’d imagined her to be. The Germans are getting closer. . . .

Finally, Vera stands on her own street and looks up at her apartment. Except for the blacked-out windows, it looks as it always did. The trees out front are in full summer bloom and the sky is as blue as a robin’s egg.

As she stands there, afraid to go forward, a feeling moves through her, as powerful as hunger or desire: she shivers with it.

It is wanting to turn and run, to hold on to this terrible truth a little longer, but she knows that running will not help, so she takes a deep breath and walks forward, one step at a time, until she is at her own front door.

It opens at her touch and suddenly she is in her home again, as small and cluttered as it is. Never has the broken-down furniture and peeling paint looked so beautiful.

And there is her mama, standing at the stove in a faded dress, with her gray hair all but hidden beneath a threadbare kerchief, stirring something. At Vera’s entrance, she turns slowly. Her bright smile is heartbreaking; worse is the way it fades away and is replaced by sorrow. Only one has come home.

“Mama!” Leo screams, coming at her like a windstorm, toys dropping from his hands. Anya is beside him in an instant and they throw themselves into Vera’s arms.

They smell so good, so pure. . . . Leo’s cheeks are as soft and sweet as ripe plums and Vera could eat him up. She holds them too long, too tightly, unaware that she has begun to shake and to cry.

“Don’t cry, Mama,” Anya says, wiping her cheek. “I still have the butterfly. I didn’t break it.”

Vera slowly releases them and stands up. She is shaking like a leaf and trying not to cry as she stares across the kitchen at her mother. In that look, Vera feels her childhood leave her at last.

“Where’s Aunt Olga?” Leo asks, looking past her.

Vera cannot answer. She just stands there. “Olga is gone,” Mama says with only a slight tremble in her voice. “She is a hero of the state, our Olga, and that is how we must think of her.”

“But . . .”

Mama takes Vera in her arms, holding her so hard that neither can breathe. There is only silence between them; in that silence, memories pass back and forth like dye in water, moving and fluid, and when they pull back and look at each other, Vera understands.

They will not speak of Olga again, not for a long time, not until the sharp pain rounds into something that can be handled.

“You need a bath,” Mama says after a time. “And those bandages on your hands need changing, so come along.”

Those first days back in Leningrad seem like a dream to Vera. During the day, she works alongside other library employees, packing up the most valuable books for transport. She, who is so low on the roster, finds herself actually holding a first edition of Anna Karenina. The pages have an unexpected weight, and she closes her eyes for just a moment. In the darkness she sees Anna, dressed in jewels and furs, running across the snow to Count Vronsky.

Someone says her name so sharply she almost drops the treasured volume. Starting, she flushes and lowers her gaze to the floor, mumbling, “Sorry,” and goes back to work. By the end of the week, they have packed up more than 350,000 masterpieces and sent them out of harm’s way. They’ve filled the attic with sandbags and moved other important works to the basement. Room after room is cleared out and boarded up and shut down, until only the smallest of the rooms is left open for readers.

By the end of her shift, Vera’s shoulders ache from all the lifting and dragging of boxes, but she is far from finished for the day. Instead of going home, she trudges through the busy, camouflaged streets and gets into the first queue she finds.

She doesn’t know what they are selling at this market and she doesn’t care. Since the start of bread rationing and the limitations placed on the withdrawal of banking accounts, you take what you can get. Like most of her friends and neighbors, Vera has very little money. Her rations allow her four hundred grams of bread a day and six hundred grams of butter a month. On this, they can live. But she thinks often of a decision she made years ago: if she worked now in the bread factory, her family would be better fed. She would be an essential worker, with higher rations.

She stands in line for hours. At just past ten o’clock in the evening, she comes to the front. The only thing left for sale are jars of pickles, and she buys three—the amount she can afford and carry.

In the apartment, she finds her mother and grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, passing a cigarette back and forth between them.

Saying nothing—they all say little these days—she goes past them to the children’s beds. Leaning down, she kisses both tender cheeks. Exhausted and hungry, she goes back into the kitchen. Mama has put out a plate of cold kasha for her.

“The last transport left today,” Baba says when Vera sits down.

Vera looks at her grandmother. “I thought they were still evacuating the city.”

Mama shakes her head. “We could not decide and now it is decided for us.”

“The Germans have taken Mga.”

Vera knows what this means, and if she did not, the look of despair in her mother’s eyes would have been enough to inform her. “So . . .”

“Leningrad is an island now,” Mama says, taking a drag off the cigarette and handing it back to Baba. “Cut off from the mainland on all sides.”

Cut off from supplies.

“What do we do?” Vera asks.

“Do?” Baba says.

“Winter is coming,” Mama says in the silence. “We need food and a burzhuika. I will take the children and go to the marketplace tomorrow.”

“What will you trade?”

“My wedding ring,” Mama says.

“So it has begun,” Baba says, stubbing out the cigarette.

Vera sees the way they look at each other, the knowing sadness that passes between mother and daughter, and although it scares her, it comforts her, too. They have been through this before, her mama and her babushka. War is nothing new to Peter’s city. They will survive as they have survived before, by being careful and smart.

The city becomes one long line. Everything is disappearing, especially politeness. Rations are consistently being cut, and often there is no food to be had, even with a ration card. Vera, like everyone else, is tired and hungry and afraid. She wakes at four in the morning to stand in line for bread, and after work, she walks miles to the outskirts of town, bartering with peasants for food—a liter of vodka for a bag of withered potatoes; an outgrown pair of valenki for a pound of lard—and digging up whatever forgotten vegetables she can find.

It is not safe and she knows it, but there is nothing to be done. This search for food is all there is. No one goes to the library anymore, but Vera must keep working there to keep her worker’s rations. Now she is on her way home from the country. She moves quickly, keeping to the shadows, with her precious bag of potatoes hidden inside her dress like an unborn baby.

She is less than a mile from the apartment when the air raid alarm goes off, blaring through the nearly empty city streets. When it stops, she can hear the planes buzzing, growing closer.

She hears a loud whistling and starts to run for one of the trenches in the park to her left. Before she is even across the street, something explodes. Dirt and debris rain down from the sky. One building after another is destroyed.

And then . . . silence.

Vera gets up slowly, her legs unsteady.

The potatoes are okay.

She crawls out of the trench. Dusting herself off, she runs for home. The city is burning and smoking around her. People are screaming and crying.

She turns the corner and sees her apartment building. It is intact.

But the building next door is demolished. Only half of it remains; the other side is a pile of smoking, pulverized rubble. As she draws near, she sees a living room in perfect shape—green flowered wallpaper still in place, a table still set for dinner, a painting on the wall. But no people. As she stands there, the chandelier above the table shudders and falls, crashing across the dishes on the table.

She finds her family in the basement, huddled alongside their neighbors. When the All-Clear sounds, they go back upstairs and put the children in bed.

It is only the beginning. The next day Vera goes with her mother and the children to the market, where they search for a burzhuika. Without such a stove, her mother says, they will have problems come winter.

They find one deep in the back of the market, in a stall run by the kind of people Vera normally would never see. Swarthy, drunken men and women wearing jewels they surely hadn’t owned a week ago.

Vera holds her children close, trying not to make a face as the man’s vodka breath washes over her.

“This is the last one,” he says, leering at her, swaying.

Mama takes off her wedding ring. The gold shines dully in the morning light. “I have this gold ring,” she says.

“What good is gold?” He sneers.

“The war won’t last forever,” Mama says. “And there’s more.” She opens her coat and pulls out a large jar full of white sugar.

The man stares at it; sugar is like gold dust now. Baba or Mama must have stolen it from the warehouse where they work.

The man’s ham-sized fist snakes out; his fingers coil around the jar and pull it back.

Mama hardly seems to care that her ring is gone, that a man like that has possession of it.

Together, the four of them drag the stove and pipe back to their apartment, pull it up the stairs in clanging bursts. When it is up and in place, its vent going out the window, Mama clasps her hands. “That’s that,” she says, coughing.

The stove is a small, ugly thing, cast iron with a pair of drawers that jut out brokenly. A long metal pipe goes from the stove, up the side of the wall, and out through a newly cut hole. She finds it hard to believe that it is worth a woman’s wedding ring.

“That was a lot of sugar,” Vera says quietly as Mama walks past her.

“Yes,” Mama says, pausing. “Baba brought it to us.”

“She could get in trouble,” Vera whispers, moving closer. “The Badayev warehouses are watched. Almost all of the city’s food stores are there. And both of you are employees. If one of you gets in trouble—”

“Yes,” Mama says, looking at her hard. “She is still there now, working late. She will be the last one to leave.”

“But—”

“You do not yet know,” Mama says, coughing again. It is a hacking, bubbly sound that unaccountably makes Vera think of muddy rivers and hot weather.

“Are you okay, Mama?”

“I am fine. It is just the dust in the air from the bombings.”

Before Vera can answer or even think of what to say, the air-raid alarm sounds.

“Children!” she screams. “Come quickly.” Vera grabs the coats from the wall and bundles her children up.

“I don’t want to go to the basement,” Leo whines. “It stinks down there.”

“Mrs. Newsky is the one who stinks,” Anya says, and her frown turns to a smile.

Leo giggles. “She smells like cabbage.”

“Hush,” Vera says, wondering how long this childhood will last for her babies. She buttons Leo’s coat and takes his hand.

Out in the hallway, the neighbors are already lining up for the stairs. On all of their faces is the same look: a combination of fear and resignation. No one really believes that being in the basement will save them from a bomb falling on their building, but at a time like this, there is no other salvation, so they go.

Vera kisses each of her children, hugs them fiercely in turn, and then hands them over to Mama.

While her family and neighbors go down to save themselves, Vera goes up. Breathing hard, she runs up the dirty, dark staircase and emerges onto the flat, litter-strewn roof. A long pair of iron tongs and several buckets full of sand are in place along the short wall. From here, she can see across Leningrad to the south. In the distance are the planes. Not one or two as before, but dozens. At first they are tiny black dots, dodging between giant barrage balloons that hang above the city, but soon she can see their shiny propellers and the details on their tails.

Bombs fall like raindrops; in their wake, puffs of smoke and flashes of fire.

A plane is overhead. . . .

Vera looks up, sees its glistening silver belly open up. Incendiary bombs drop out. She watches in horror as one lands not more than fifteen feet from where she is standing. She runs for it, hearing its hiss. Her foot catches on a piece of wood and she falls to the ground so hard she tastes blood. Scrambling back up, she reaches for the gloves in her pocket and puts them on, shaking, trying to hurry; then she grabs up the iron tongs and tries to use them to pick up the bomb. It is an intricate task. She takes too long and fire catches on the wooden beam beneath the bomb. Smoke rises up. She positions the tongs on the bomb—the heat on her face is terrifying; she’s sweating so she can hardly see. Still, she clamps the handles and lifts the long bomb, and throws it off the side of the building. It lands with a thud on the grass below, where it can do no real damage. Dropping the tongs, she runs back to the small fire started by the bomb and stomps the flames out with the soles of her shoes, then pours sand on it.