Burying the Sun (6 page)

There was one bit of good news. Many German tanks had been called away from Leningrad to the outskirts of Moscow, where a battle was going on. For the moment the danger of invading Leningrad was over. General Zhukov was needed in Moscow and left our city to darkness and hunger, but he left it free of Germans.

The new enemy was hunger. It raged about the city like a savage wolf. It was all any of us could think about. We awakened hungry, went to bed hungry. There was no hour of the day when you did not long
for food. Yelena and I argued. “Better to eat every crumb of your ration all at once,” I insisted, “and be a little satisfied at least once a day.”

“No, no,” Yelena said. “Better to dole the bread out a little at a time—then there will be something to look forward to.”

We tried to outdo each other with imagined meals.

“First,” I said, “a fish soup, with big lumps of codfish and potatoes.”

“No, Georgi, chicken soup with carrots and leeks and tender little dumplings.”

“Boiled beef with pickles.”

“Pork paprikash with sour cream.”

We always agreed on the dessert—ice cream made with plenty of thick cream and fresh strawberries. After our game we would settle down to our single slice of bread that tasted of sawdust, or there would be a thin soup made from a bit of cabbage and a bone with no meat.

“They had better give me a little more,” Olga said,
“or I won't be able to lift my violin.”

It was true. Olga, who had been plump, was now thin and drawn. Even the music we heard through the walls of the apartment was weak and, for the first time, sad.

Yelena's dresses hung on her as if she were wearing the hand-me-downs of a much larger sister. Most frightening of all was Viktor. His face had been carved away by hunger. His eyes were sunken and there were craters where his cheeks had been. Mama ate at the hospital canteen, but she couldn't have eaten much, for she brought home bits of bread and lumps of potato concealed in her purse. I would not eat her hoardings but passed them on to Olga and Yelena.

Yelena was still working in the library. “Hundreds of thousands of our rarest books have been sent away for safekeeping. “The people are coming to us with such sad questions. They want to know how to make jelly from glue and how to make a soup from a leather belt.”

“Doesn't anyone come in to read?”

“Yes, more than ever. There's no heat, but they come wrapped in their coats and look for a table where a bit of warm sunshine comes in through the window. They read books about faraway places where the sun shines and food hangs from trees, but we have to be careful about lending books or there would be none left. People take them home and burn them as fuel for their stoves.” She looked truly horrified.

Cold was added to hunger. When you went to bed at night, you wore as many clothes as you did in the daytime—and, though Mama protested, sometimes the same clothes.

During the hour of electricity in the evening, Yelena and I sat together listening to the radio, but we no longer heard Anna Akhmatova. For her survival Akhmatova, like Shostakovich, had been urged to leave Leningrad. A plane carried her away, and a spark went from the city. Still, we listened to the symphony orchestra with Olga on her violin. The poets
who had stayed in the city read their latest works on the blockade. If there was no news, no readings, and no music on the radio, a metronome was set in motion so that all would know that Leningrad was still there. It was surprising how you would just sit and listen to its sound. Yelena wrote a poem about the metronome.

At the end of October the electricity stopped altogether: no more light, no more heat, and no more radio. To hear the radio you had to go to the loudspeakers on St. Isaac's Square. In spite of the cold, many people went, some to hear the latest news, or the music, or the sound of the metronome. Many went, as
Yelena and I often did, just for the comfort of being with others.

Though there was no heat, still everyone was praying for cold weather. Barges had been bringing food into Leningrad across Lake Ladoga, but the barges were large and cumbersome and they took nearly a day to make the trip across the lake. The Germans picked them off one by one. What the Germans did not get, the autumn storms pitched into the lake. When the lake froze, trucks would roll across the ice, trucks loaded with food. That hope kept us alive.

November 1941

November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, had always been a big holiday in the Soviet Union. Stores were closed and there were parades and dancing. This year there was no celebration. Here and there a tattered red flag was put out, but most of the stores were already closed, and no one had the strength for parades or dancing.

In our home the holiday had never been celebrated. Mama thought it should be a day of mourning. “It was the day they made the whole country a prison,” she said, “and made us all prisoners.”

On this November 7 Mama was quiet when she came home from the hospital. “The hunger is hard on the older people,” she said. “They are so weakened, the least little cold or flu and they slip away. We have no heat in the hospital, and there is nothing to do but to pile heavy blankets on the patients, and with their thin bodies they almost smother. And Georgi, one of the doctors in the research laboratory said today that all the guinea pigs were gone.”

She looked at me. We both knew where they had gone—into someone's pot. There were no cats or dogs on the streets. There was no food to give to them, and if you could find a scrap for your beloved pet to keep him alive, you did not dare to let him out onto the streets, where he would look like a banquet to some starving person.

Our apartment was always cold. There was little water for the luxury of washing. If you washed your hands, you saved the water for the next person. I felt dirty all the time. One morning I saw a woman
kneeling on the ice around a well, doing her washing in freezing water.

The toilets didn't flush, and if you didn't empty the chamber pots at once, the pots froze and then you were in a pickle. And where to empty the pots? Thousands of pots were emptied on the streets, so walking was disgusting.

Every morning I had to get up and take a pail to the well at the end of the street to get our water for the day. I waited in line to get to the well, which was no more than a hole in the ice with water bubbling up. The pail seemed heavier each morning, the walk back to the apartment longer. If water was spilled on the steps, you nearly broke your neck on the ice that formed. One morning I saw an elderly woman just ahead of me with her own pail. It seemed to be too much for her, and she set it down on the sidewalk and stood there for a moment. She was so thin, there was almost no body inside the tattered clothes. I started to go up to her, thinking to carry the pail at least a little
distance for her. Right there before my eyes she slipped to the ground.

People were passing by, stepping around her. “Help me,” I said, for I was so weak that even her small weight was too much for me to lift. No one stopped. As I bent down over her, trying to move her away from the stream of people, I saw that she was dead. I had never seen a dead person, yet I knew. I was so frightened that some strength flowed into me, and I was able to pull her to the side of the walk.

When I looked up, someone had taken her pail and was hurrying off with it. Like the others, I went to the well and stood in line to fill my pail. I walked back to the apartment, but all the time I was thinking of the woman. I had never touched a dead person. I knew from Mama's work at the hospital that thousands were dying of starvation, but those deaths were only sad stories. Now I had touched death, and I was afraid that somehow it would cling to me and I would bring it back with me and give it to someone else. When I
got home I said nothing, but I washed my hands over and over until Mama complained.

“Georgi, no one knows better than you how hard it is to get a bit of soap or a drop of water. Surely your hands are clean now.”

I couldn't bring myself to tell even Mama the sad story.

In the dark mornings the ugliness and cheerlessness of the city was even more depressing. On my way to work I had to stumble along dark, filthy streets. Our brigade had finished its work in the sewers and had now joined a brigade stripping bark from all the pine and fir trees in the city parks. The bark was collected and ground up, to be added to the flour and all the other odds and ends that went into the making of our bread.

It was hard work, because the knives that were given to us were dull and we had no strength in our hands to tear at the bark. It was sad work; each time I wrenched a bit of the bark from a tree, I winced, for
I knew it meant a great old tree would die, but Dmitry said, “Better the trees than us.” One afternoon I found a cocoon on one of the tree branches. I was about to toss it away when something stopped my hand. I broke off the twig to which it was fastened and put it carefully in my pocket. That evening I gave it to Yelena.

She was delighted. Her thin face broke into a smile. “Oh, Georgi, a perfect gift. I didn't think I could get through the winter, but now I have something to look forward to.”

How I envied that little chrysalis, all wrapped up warmly in its cocoon with no need for food and no duty but to sleep and wait to become a butterfly. How I wished I could wrap myself up and fall asleep until the war ended. Each day it was easier and easier to lie in bed. It was such an effort to get up. I hated the thought of pushing off the blankets and coats that made a warm nest. I hated the thought of stumbling up and down the icy stairway for a pail of cold water.
I hated the thought of standing out in the cold and snow hacking away at the helpless trees.

Still, Mama found a way to lure me out of bed. “A rusk this morning, Georgi, and a half teaspoonful of jelly to sweeten your hot water. And tonight when I come home, we'll have Viktor and Olga and Yelena over to share a rusk or two. We'll act out another scene from Chekhov's
Cherry Orchard
.”

All at once the day did not seem so terrible. I threw off the blankets and struggled into my coat. I had slept in my hat and gloves. As I struggled down the icy stairway and out into the cold street with the water pail, the darkness seemed punishment for summer's long days of daylight. It stayed dark now until ten o'clock in the morning, and darkness fell again by afternoon. On the streets no one looked at anyone else, afraid to see a reflection of their own miserable condition. Everyone went silently about their sad business. I saw a woman pulling her sickly husband along behind her on a sled. Another woman was carrying a small girl
who must have been five or six but looked no larger than a doll. I trained myself to look straight ahead.

Rations had been cut for the third time, even for the soldiers, and everyone was so weak, work was almost impossible. Yet we had to work.

Mama came home with stories from the hospital of people brought in because of what they ate. “They are eating soap for the fat it contains and even motor oil.”

One day Yelena said, “Mama told me, ‘I have a special treat for you. I fried your bread in a bit of fat.'

“I asked, ‘Mama, where did you get fat? And why is the bread all red?' Georgi, my mama used all that was left of her last stick of lipstick for the grease!”

Yelena had lost a third of her weight. With her thin arms and sharp collarbones she looked like a fledgling bird. We all seemed shadows of ourselves, as if someone had painted our portraits and now was painting out parts of them.

One day there was an argument between Olga and
Yelena. Yelena had called us to share a treat with them. She had come home from the library with a bag of dried beans. They had been soaking and now were bubbling on the stove. To Mama and me they were as beautiful as pearls, but Olga was slamming the pots and pans about, and Viktor had an angry look on his face.

“Yelena inherited a first edition of Pushkin's poetry from a great-great uncle,” Viktor said. “Nothing could be more precious to her. This morning, without saying a word to us, she took it to the library.”

“There is a book dealer who comes into the library,” Olga said. “He cheated Yelena out of her most prized possession.”

Tears were running down Yelena's face. “It was not like that at all,” she said. “The dealer and I have become friends, and I told him about my Pushkin. He has been after me for days to sell it to him. When he promised all these beans, I couldn't resist. I was as
eager to sell as he was to buy.”

“We should have starved first,” Olga said, but seeing Yelena's thin body and hungry pinched expression, I could not agree. When it came my turn, I said beans didn't agree with me. I was glad she had sold the book, but I couldn't eat the beans. With a sinking heart, I noticed that after Olga spoke sharply to her, Yelena could hardly get a bean down her own throat.

The next morning Dmitry and I watched a man pulling a sled with something tied to it that looked like a mummy.

“It's a body all wrapped up in a sheet and tied up like a package,” Dmitry said. “My father said that if you walk by the Piskorevsky Cemetery, you can see hundreds and hundreds of such bodies, all stacked up like cords of wood because the ground is frozen and there is no place to bury them.”

“Mama says just the same,” I said. “There's no place to put the people who die in the hospital. They just leave them in the hospital courtyard.”

The pine bark was said to contain vitamins that would help to keep people from starving. With such terrible tales to consider, that day we worked harder than ever at tearing off the bark.

We were at our lowest when I came home from work to find a package from Marya. It was battered and dented and the wrappings were loose; still, it was a miracle that it had arrived. These days the postmen were wanted elsewhere, and the mail was often not delivered. Mama opened the package and, with trembling hands, took out one unimaginable thing after another and placed them on the kitchen table. There were three chocolate bars, a large hunk of cheese, packets of dried soup, and a handful of crumbs that must have been cookies.

Hearing our shouts of joy, Olga, Viktor, and Yelena came running into the apartment.

“Are you all right?” Olga asked.

“Never better,” Mama said.

They saw the glorious treats set out on the table
like so many priceless jewels. No one touched a thing. Starved as we were, we did not fall upon them and stuff them into our mouths. We just stared at them as if we were travelers who had come upon some rare sight that we ought to memorize, knowing we would never see it again.

After a few minutes Mama reached for a chocolate bar. She carefully broke off a square and divided it into five pieces, being sure that all the pieces were equal. She solemnly passed them out. I saw that our friends wanted to refuse them, but it was impossible; anyhow, we would never have allowed that. Slowly the bit of chocolate melted in our mouths. No one chewed. No one swallowed. We just sat there with that bit of chocolate on our tongues, all of us with smiles on our faces, happier than we had been for days. Then Mama carefully put it all away, first handing Olga some cheese and a packet of soup.

Olga shook her head. “No, no, that's impossible. We could not take it.”

Mama got very angry. “If it had come your way, wouldn't you have shared it with us? What about the beans? Do you think we can sit here in the kitchen gorging ourselves while our dearest friends are next door starving?” Olga and Mama were both crying. They kissed, and Olga took the food. Yelena and I wet our fingers and had a battle to see who could get up the most cookie crumbs.

After the good news came bad news. The next day when I got home, I could tell Mama had been waiting for me. “Georgi, sit down. I must tell you what I have decided. There are not enough doctors and nurses at the front with the soldiers. The soldiers are giving their lives for us with no one to help and comfort them when they are injured. They are drafting nurses from the hospital. I am not sure I could say no if I wanted to. I hate to leave you, but everything must be done to help our soldiers. If they don't defeat the Germans, we will all die. I remember in the last war how much comfort the nurses were to the soldiers at the Catherine
Palace. And Georgi, when I am gone, the food that we have will go further. I wouldn't leave if I didn't feel you could manage on your own. I am so proud of you, Georgi. I don't know what I would have done without you, and Georgi, I count on you to take care of Yelena and Olga.”

I didn't want Mama to go. I had told myself that I was a man and doing a man's work, but at her words I didn't feel like it; instead, I felt like a child again. I was always struggling to get Mama to realize I was grown up. Now she had, and I wasn't so happy about it.

Mama was watching me. “Georgi, I wouldn't push you out of the nest unless I was sure you could fly.”

The volunteers from the hospital were leaving the next day, so Mama had little time for preparations. Olga came with a warm scarf and Yelena contributed gloves. At first Mama would not take them, but Olga said, “The hospital tents at the front will not be
heated. What good will you be to the soldiers if you are sick with cold and your fingers numb?”

The morning she left, Mama put her arms around me. “It breaks my heart, Georgi, that you should have to grow up in such times.”

“Mama, it was the same with you and Papa.” When they were only a little older than me, Mama and Papa had faced starvation and imprisonment.

“All the more reason I didn't want it for you, Georgi, but I know you are strong. Only promise not to do anything foolish.”

The apartment was empty with Marya and Mama away. Having an older sister is like having an extra mother. Now both of my mothers were gone. As sad as I was to see Mama go, still, I tried to cheer myself up by telling myself I could do as I pleased. But when there is war, you do not do as you please. I still had to tumble out of bed while it was dark and fetch a pail of water, and I still had to hurry to one of the parks where we were scraping bark.

It was dark when I returned home. Dinner was simple. I cut off a bit of bread and sliced a little of the pickled cabbage. With no money, there was no place to go; besides, you could not go out into the cold streets, for it would take you hours to warm up once you returned to your unheated home. Olga spent long hours at the radio station, playing music with the symphony. Yelena and I sat close together for warmth and read books aloud to each other. I did most of the reading, for Yelena's voice was weak. She had been thin to begin with, and when the rations were cut, the small amount of food she got and what little I could spare were hardly enough to keep her going.