Burying the Sun (11 page)

“We managed it!” she said, flinging herself down onto a chair. “We got through the whole symphony.”

True to her word, the next night Olga had seats for Mama, Yelena, Marya, Andrei, and me. A friend from the Hermitage offered to care for Fyodor. We hurried through the little park with its statue of the poet Pushkin and into Symphony Hall. We were among the
privileged, for though we were early, the hall was filling up and long lines were still forming at the ticket office. We were all wearing our best clothes, which were little more than rags. I had on my one good shirt, so thin you could read a book through it. Yelena wore the dress I remembered from our picnic at the Summer Garden.

She laughed when I complemented her. “Georgi, there is more mending than material! I only hope it lasts through the concert. Certainly I can't move an inch.”

The hall was impressive with its red velvet and its tiers of boxes that had once held the aristocrats of St. Petersburg. I caught Mama looking up at what had been the royal box, where she had sat with the tsar and the empress and their children.

Suddenly something startling happened. There was a brightness all about us. Electric lights had lit up the stage. It had been months since anyone had seen an electric light. All around me people gasped with
surprise and pleasure. One by one the musicians walked onto the stage. You could see they were making a great effort to walk briskly and carry themselves well, but every few seconds one or the other would have to slow a bit or shift the weight of an instrument from one hand to another. The musicians were thin and shabby, but on their faces was an expression of great pride, as if they were kings and queens. There were cheers and applause. After they were seated, the conductor, Eliasberg, walked onto the stage amid great applause and bowed to the audience. He raised his baton. The hall was silent. The music began.

Though for weeks I had heard Olga's violin through the walls of our apartment, and though Mama always had on the broadcasts of the philharmonic orchestra, still I knew little about music. I liked popular tunes better, but the Shostakovich symphony pounded you over the head with its power. First came something that sounded like an
evil army marching in the distance and then pounding drums, coming closer and closer. Next there was sad, waiting music followed by music that grew louder and more exciting. The excitement died down, and Olga, her face shining, played a violin solo. Yelena squeezed my arm so hard I nearly yelped. The music grew stronger and stronger and ended in a great victorious crash. We all felt it was the Russians defeating the German army.

When the music ended and Eliasberg put down his baton, and the members of the orchestra put down their instruments, there was complete silence in the hall. We were all in a trance, bewitched, we couldn't move. Someone in the audience stood up and began to clap, someone else followed. Soon everyone was standing, and the hall was shaking with the sound of applause. The audience could not get enough. They kept calling Eliasberg back. A little girl ran up onto the stage with a bouquet of flowers as big as she was—they must have been all the flowers blooming in
Leningrad. We clapped one another on the shoulders, and wiping away our tears, we finally made our way out into the park.

The sound of a shell falling somewhere in the city startled me. “It was amazing,” I said. “There was no sound of artillery during the symphony.”

Andrei smiled his knowing smile. “That was no accident. All the shelling you heard last night, that was our soldiers giving the Germans everything we had. We wanted to knock them back on their heels so that we would not have to put up with their bombs tonight.”

Later we heard that the German army had listened to the symphony on their radios. So much power must have had them shaking in their boots.

Early in September we dug up the first turnips. They were still small, but the days were growing shorter and we were already having frosts. The beans were used up and the tomato vines were turning brown. Blooms on the morning glories were scarce
and frazzled. On September sixth Mama harvested the last of the vegetables, a fat squash that she cooked to celebrate my sixteenth birthday.

The next day I joined the Russian army.

blini:
a pancake filled with fruit or cheese

 

burzhuika:
small stove

 

gastronom:
grocery store

 

Gostiny Dvor: combination marketplace and flea market

 

krendeli:
little heart-shaped cookies

 

makivneki:
sweet rolls with poppy seeds

 

nichevo:
never mind

 

ostanovka:
halt

 

piroshki:
meat pies

 

prastitye:
pardon me

 

S Rozhdestvom Khristovom:
Merry Christmas

 

unimaniye:
attention

 

voina:
war

Ginzburg, Lidiya.
Blockade Diary
. Trans. by Alan Myers. London: Harvill Press, 1995.

Likhachev, Dmitry S.
Reflections on the Russian Soul: A Memoir
. New York: Central European University Press, 2000.

Lincoln, W. Bruce.
Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia.
Boulder, Colo.: Basic Books, 2001.

Salisbury, Harrison E.
The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad
. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Cover art © 2004 by Peter Malone