Burying the Sun (7 page)

“It is so strange at the library,” she said. “Hundreds of people come and sit in the reading room all wrapped up in coats and mittens. They sit by our little oil lamps and read by the hour; they read as if tomorrow all the books will be gone.” She sighed. “And it may happen. A German shell could easily destroy the library.”

Sometimes, if she had the evening shift, Yelena spent the night at the library to avoid coming home after curfew. There were cots in one of the reading rooms for the library staff. On those nights I was shut up in my apartment with nothing to do. It was on one of those nights that I heard a scurrying noise in the cupboard. When I peeked in, a mouse darted away. Most of the Leningrad mice had long since expired of hunger. I thought, Here is a clever mouse who has not given up. I began to leave a crumb or two on the kitchen shelf. The mouse, too desperate for food to be afraid of me, would make a dash for the crumbs and then disappear. After a week the mouse was tame enough to sit and eat in front of me, but to tell the truth, I was so hungry I began to begrudge him even the crumbs. Still, I kept feeding him because when she saw him, the mouse made Yelena smile.

In the evenings I heard Yelena make her way slowly up the stairway, as if in her weakness each step were a
mountain. I tried to share my food with her, but apart from a little jam or a bit of Marya's chocolate—for Yelena loved sweets—she would not take it.

“Viktor is eating at the canteen at the firehouse,” she said, “so Mother and I get his bread ration.” The factory where Viktor had worked had been transferred long since to Moscow from Leningrad. Now he was a volunteer fireman, working night and day to put out the fires from the constant bombing.

I was desperate to find something to do besides scrape bark, and I tried to get a job as a fireman myself, but as usual I was too young. I had nearly given up hope that I would find a proper job when I heard about the lake from Dmitry, who had heard about it from his brother.

“Vladimir is just back from Lake Ladoga. He's writing a story about it. The lake is starting to freeze. Soon the trucks will be running. He says they'll go across the lake day and night, bringing food into the city. He says it's freezing just in time, because the city
is running out of flour. Soon there won't be any bread.”

I began to think about the trucks on Lake Ladoga. I thought about them all the time. I saw them starting out from Leningrad, empty, driving along on the ice, and then returning loaded with flour and sugar and butter and real tea. I saw myself bringing the food to Yelena, to all the hungry people in the hospital and the people dying on the street. “Listen,” I said to Dmitry, “they'll need people to unload the trucks. Why shouldn't we do it? I worked at loading and unloading the trucks from the Hermitage.”

Dmitry shook his head. “I don't think the trucks have even started.”

“We could go and see.”

“The streetcars and buses aren't running. It must be a twenty-mile walk to the lake. We'd be icicles before we got there, and then they might not give us jobs.”

I could tell he wasn't interested. What he said was
true. Still I resolved to go myself.

That evening when I told Yelena, she was against it. “Georgi, there will be men there to do the work. You'll freeze unloading the trucks in the cold and dark.”

“Just because they won't let me in the army, I don't mean to spend the rest of the war stripping bark from the trees. We're all weak from hunger, and Viktor looks sicker every day. All over the city people are dying. It's important to send the trucks for the food. Unloading them will be real work.”

Finally Yelena saw that I meant to go. “As for freezing,” I said, “come and let me show you something.”

I opened a chest and took out a box. Inside the box were the parka and boots the Samoyeds had made for Papa in Siberia. My parka and Marya's, now much too small for us, had long ago been sold. Mama wanted to keep Papa's things as a reminder of him, but I was sure she would approve.

“They look new,” Yelena said. “Someone will be
sure to steal them from you.”

I knew she was right and took them outside and rubbed them with dirt.

“Georgi, I wish you wouldn't take the risk.”

I was almost ready to back down when later that night, while I was still sleeping, there was a loud knocking on my door. Olga burst into the room.

“Come quickly, it's Viktor.”

Viktor was lying on his bed, his breathing so weak I could not be sure he was alive. There was hardly any flesh on his face, and his hands were like a skeleton's.

“He took sick at the firehouse and the men brought him home. They said he was starving.” Olga was shaking with sobs.

In a whisper Yelena said, “Mama asked if he wasn't eating at the firehouse canteen, and the men said there wasn't any canteen.” Two great tears slid down Yelena's cheeks. “Georgi, Viktor was just making that up so that we got his bread ration.”

Olga was trying to get some hot tea between
Viktor's lips, but it only dribbled out. He took a long breath, like someone about to plunge into deep water, and he was dead.

The next hours were terrible. We wrapped Viktor in a sheet and tied it around him. As soon as it was light, I found someone with a wagon and gave him the last chocolate bar to carry Viktor to the cemetery, where there would be no burial in the frozen ground. But it was the only place I knew.

I didn't want Yelena to come. I knew what the horror looked like, but she insisted on accompanying the wagon. In a whisper she said to me, “Mama is too upset, and one of us must be there.”

As we left, Yelena sighed, “If only we had flowers for Viktor, but the ground is covered with snow.”

“Wait,” Olga said. She choked back her tears and rummaged through a drawer, drawing out her flowered scarf and laying it over the body. We stood awkwardly by Viktor. I said a prayer. Olga took up her violin and played a bit from the Rachmaninoff violin
concerto that Viktor loved and that we had often heard through the thin walls of the apartment.

The man and I carried Viktor down the stairway and laid him in the wagon. In a snowstorm Yelena and I followed the wagon to the cemetery, where the bodies were piled outside the gates, one upon the other, some not even decently wrapped. I helped the man to lay Viktor with the others. Yelena made the sign of the cross, and we turned away. Neither of us said a word. On the way back we took off our gloves and held hands, not caring about the cold, each wanting only to feel the hand of the other.

When we returned, there was no comforting Olga, for she was sure she had killed Viktor.

“He gave us his food,” Olga said.

“But not only his food, Mama,” Yelena told her. “He gave us his love as well. With such love we will never be hungry again.”

The next day I left for Lake Ladoga.

November 1941

I set off before light so that I would reach the lake before darkness set in. The trip through the city was one sad sight after another. Weakened by their hunger, people seemed to move in slow motion, a hopeless look on their faces. I wanted to shout at them that I was going to Lake Ladoga and that trucks laden with food would soon be moving across the ice. Just outside the city I hitched a ride part of the way with a truck carrying supplies from a Leningrad factory to the army.

“You must have a long way to go,” I said.

The truck driver laughed bitterly. “I wish I did. I can't tell you where I am going, but believe me, it's not far.”

So the front was close.

When I finally got to the lake's edge, it was late afternoon and already dark. There were no trucks to unload and no trucks to be seen, only a crowd of men and soldiers standing looking across a field of ice that was the lake.

“Where are the trucks?” I asked a soldier.

He laughed bitterly. “Trucks? There are no trucks. We don't know yet if the ice is safe. We have to plow a road thirty miles long across the ice. We can't do that until we are sure we have at least eight inches of ice, or the trucks will fall into the lake. They may try to get across on sleighs tomorrow. If you came for food, you might as well go home—the sleighs will never make it.”

I had no intention of going home. I found a little shack crowded with soldiers and volunteers who had come to drive the trucks. I joined them and made believe
I was one of the official volunteers. A little bread was passed around and weak tea. One of the soldiers had a bottle of vodka, and that was passed around as well. Someone started a fire, and someone else was ripping boards from the floor of the shack to keep the flames going. There was a lot of excitement at the idea of testing the ice, and men were wagering rubles as to how soon the first truck would fall through the ice. At last, with the sound of snoring and the smell of unwashed bodies huddled together to keep warm, everyone fell asleep but me. I was too excited to close my eyes.

As soon as someone stirred in the morning, I sprang up and hurried to the lake. A party was getting ready to set out on the sleighs, but they were short some men. There were loud complaints that the volunteers were sleeping off their vodka. Before I thought of what I was doing, I stepped forward. A man called Sasha motioned to me to join him on his sleigh. He was in his thirties, short and stocky like a tree trunk and with a loud voice and a loud laugh. He said,
“Young friend, come up here and keep me company. You are a cheerful soul, not like these long-faced types who grumble about this and that. You won't complain if these sad, bony horses fall over halfway there.”

Pleased to be chosen, I climbed up eagerly onto his sleigh. “They say there will be oats and hay in Kobona,” I told him.

“That's what I like to hear. Good news. Always look on the sunny side.” He leaned forward and began to talk to the horses.

“Let me tell you, fellows, what you two horses are doing is a great thing. Today you are heroes of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself will pin a medal on your harnesses. Never mind the cold and ice, just say to yourselves you are out on a run for pleasure, galloping across the lake for a lark. That's the way. Keep going, and on the other side you will have all the oats and hay you can eat.”

We set out slowly, the men in the lead sleigh stopping to measure the ice, which was only six inches. It
might support us, but not a truck. When we reached the open lake, the wind blew so hard, we had to clutch each other to keep from being blown away. The leader in the first sleigh would call out, “Thin ice,” and the call would be passed back. We would then have to go to the left or the right to find stronger ice.

I thanked the Samoyeds a million times for their gift. I was hungry and weak, but their parka and boots kept me warm. I thought of my Samoyed friend, the shaman, and how he would walk ahead of his people, pointing out the safest and quickest route. I wished he were guiding us across the lake.

It was late afternoon when we came to open water. Some of the men cursed, sure that after all our efforts we would have to turn back. One of the men climbed out of his sleigh and walked to one side until we heard him call from a distance that he was on solid ice again. We followed him and kept going. Once we stopped for a short time, and Sasha shared a bit of bread with me.

At times the wind blowing across the lake was so
strong, the sleigh was blown off its course. We came to a wide crack in the ice. Sasha cursed in a string of words I had never heard before. Along with the other sleighs, we headed south and then east again to avoid the crack. Hours later we reached the island of Zelenets, where we were ordered to rest the horses, whose warm bodies were sending up ghosts of white steam into the freezing air. We were given great hunks of bread and real tea with sugar cubes to drink with it. But there were no oats or hay for our poor horses. Sasha looked at me. Together we looked at our starving, shivering horses. We fed the horses half our bread and smiled at each other as the horses slobbered up the sugar cubes we held out to them.

We were back on the ice again. It was midnight before we reached Kobona, on the other side of the lake. A crowd had waited up for us, and we heard their cheers as we pulled the sleighs onto land. There was food there, real bread with butter and real tea. I put half the buttered bread in my pocket for Yelena
and even wrapped the used tea leaves in my handkerchief to save.

There was no time to rest. The sleighs were loaded with cereal, cottonseed cakes, and sugar, but again there was no food for the horses. How were the poor beasts to pull loaded sleighs back the thirty miles across the ice? Yet the food on the sleighs would save many lives. I remembered how the Samoyeds told of the reindeer digging with their hooves to get at the moss that lay under the snow's covering. I told this to Sasha, who clapped me roughly on the back and said, “You see, I knew from the first you would bring me luck.” Together we swept away snow and pulled up the dried grass, which the horses eagerly munched. When the others saw what we were about, they did the same.

The loaded sleighs began their return trip across the ice, and the next morning we brought the first load of food into Leningrad.

We unloaded the sleighs onto trucks and climbed
onto the trucks ourselves. Once the trucks reached the warehouses, we unloaded them again. We all had been dreaming of taking a bit of food for our efforts, but that dream soon ended. As we were unloading, we heard a shot and saw one of the drivers fall to the ground. A soldier put his gun back into his holster. “There are plenty of bullets,” he said, “for the next man who tries to steal food.”

Near the end of November the ice was thick enough for the trucks. Sasha was chosen to be a driver. I begged to go along to help with the loading and unloading. “If your truck breaks down, I know all about engines,” I said.

Sasha agreed. “You are only a boy, but you are strong and good-natured and you don't argue with me. If you know something about trucks, so much the better.”

I expected the trucks to be empty crossing the lake, but half of the city wanted to escape. The authorities agreed. The more people left the city, the more
food there would be for those who remained, but there was only so much room in the trucks. Unless they had the proper papers, people were turned away, so the place from which the trucks set off was crowded with pushing, hysterical people offering money and jewelry and gold to get on one of them. If a passenger was taken on without the proper papers, the truck driver was severely punished.

“They shoot us,” Sasha said.

The refugees were punished as well, for the trip in the bed of a truck across the lake with the cold and the wind was a fearful ordeal. Some did not make it.

On our return the trucks took their loads of food to the warehouses in the freight yards; from there it was distributed across the city. Once a week I would get a day off, and after unloading the truck, I would make my way across the city to our apartment. In Kobona I could sometimes get a little extra butter or cereal, so Olga looked more cheerful and Yelena began to have a little color to her face.

Yelena had worked out a scheme with the library that pleased her. “I worried about all the people not strong enough to come to the library. How terrible I should feel if I didn't have a book close by. Even on the coldest day and no matter how hungry I am, a favorite book will give me a minute or two of peace. They are allowing me to take books to the hospitals, and oh, Georgi, if you could see the faces of some of the patients when I put a book in their hands—it is nearly as good as bread.”

At the end of November the weather turned warm. People breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they would be saved from freezing to death, but on the lake it was a disaster. The ice began to thaw. One day on the way back we came to a soft spot. Sasha did not pause but gunned the engine, and we roared across, almost flying over the ice. When I looked behind me, I saw the truck that had tried to follow us sink into the water and disappear. I covered my eyes with my hands and groaned.

“
Nichevo
, never mind,” Sasha said, as he said to everything.

“We have to go back,” I shouted. I was shaking at our narrow escape and horrified at what I had seen.

Sasha said, “We would fall through ourselves. Besides, the food we are carrying will save a thousand lives.”

I knew he was right, but it was terrible to me that people were dying in the city from hunger and dying on the lake to end the hunger.