Winter Garden (31 page)

The ground is too frozen for burial. I should have known this. I would have known it if my mind were working, but hunger has made me stupid and slow.

Sasha looks at me. The sadness in his eyes is unbearable. I want to give in then, just slump into the snow and stop caring.

“I can’t leave her here,” I say, unable to even count the bodies. Neither can I bring her home again. It is what too many neighbors have done, just set aside a place for the dead in their apartments, but I cannot do it.

Sasha nods and moves forward, dragging the sled around the snowy mounds and into the dark, quiet cemetery.

We hold hands. It is the only way we can know where the other is. We find an open space beneath a tree laced with snow and frost. I hope this tree will be the protector for her I was not.

Our voices echo through the falling snow as we tell each other this is the place. I will always know this tree, recognize it, and here I will find her again someday, or at least I will stand here and remember her. From now on, I will always remember her on the fourteenth of December, wherever I am. It is not much, but it is something.

I kneel in the snow; even with gloves on, my fingers are trembling with cold as I untie the ropes and release her frozen body.

“I am sorry, Mama,” I whisper, my teeth chattering. I touch her face in the darkness like a blind woman, trying to remember how she looks. “I’ll come back in the spring.”

“Come on,” Sasha says, pulling me to my feet. I know better than to kneel, even for this, in the snow. Already my knees are colder. Soon I will not be able to feel my legs.

We leave her there. Alone.

“It is all we can do,” Sasha says later as we trudge for home, our breathing ragged.

All I want to do is lie down. I am so hungry and so tired and so sad. I do not even care if I die.

“Yes,” I say. I don’t care. I just want to stop.

But Sasha is there, urging me forward, and when we get home, and our children climb into bed with us, I thank God my husband is there.

“Don’t you give up,” he whispers to me in bed that night. “I will find a way to get you out of here.”

I promise.

I agree not to give up, though I don’t know what it even means then.

And in the morning, he kisses my cheek, whispers that he loves me, and he leaves.

In late December, the city slowly freezes to death. It is dark almost all the time. Birds drop from the sky like stones. The crows die first; I remember that. It is impossibly cold. Twenty degrees below zero becomes normal. The streetcars stop in their tracks like children’s toys that have fallen out of favor. The water mains burst.

The sleds are everywhere now. Women drag them through the streets to carry things home—wood from burned-out buildings, buckets of water from the Neva River, anything they can burn or eat.

You’d be amazed what you can eat. There are rumors that the sausage sold in the markets is made from human flesh. I don’t go to the markets anymore. What is the point? I see beautiful fur coats and jewels selling for nothing and oil cakes made of warehouse sweepings and sawdust going for exorbitant prices.

We do as little as we can, my children and I. Our apartment is black all the time now—there is only the briefest spasm of daylight and very few candles are left to light the darkness. Our little burzhuika is everything now. Heat and light. Life. We have burned most of the furniture in our apartment, but some pieces are still left.

The three of us are wrapped tightly together all night, and in the morning we waken slowly. We lie beneath all the blankets we have, with our bed pushed close to the stove, and still we waken with frozen hair and frost on our cheeks. Leo has developed a cough that worries me. I try to get him to drink hot water, but he resists me. I cannot blame him. Even after it is boiled, the water tastes like the corpses that lie on the river’s frozen surface.

I get up in the cold and take however long I must to break off a chair leg or shatter a drawer, and feed the wood into the stove. There is a ringing in my ears and a kind of vertigo that often sends me sprawling at the merest step. I know my own body by its bones now. Still, I smile when I kiss my babies awake.

Anya groans at my touch and this is better than Leo, who just lies there.

I shake him hard, yell his name; when he opens his eyes I can’t help falling to my knees. “Silly boy,” I say, wiping my eyes. I can’t hear anything over the roaring in my ears and the hammering of my heart.

I would give anything to hear him say he is hungry.

I make us each a cup of hot water laced with yeast. It is no nutrition, but it will fill us up. Carefully, I take a piece of thick black bread—the last of this week’s rations—and I cut it in thirds. I want to give it all to them, but I know better. Without me, they are lost, so I must eat.

We each cut our third of a piece of bread into tiny pieces, which we eat as slowly as possible. I put half of mine in my pocket for later. I get up and put on all of my clothes.

My children lie in the bed, snuggled close. Even from across the room, I can see how skeletal they look. When last I bathed Leo, he was a collection of sharp bones and sunken skin.

I go to them, sit by them on the bed. I touch Leo’s cheeks, pull his knit cap down far enough to cover his ears.

“Don’t go, Mama,” he says.

“I have to.”

It is the conversation we have every morning, and honestly, there is very little fight left in them. “I will find us some candy, would you like that?”

“Candy,” he says dreamily, slumping back into his flattened pillow.

Anya looks up at me. Unlike her brother, she is not sick; she is just wasting, like me. “You shouldn’t tell him there will be candy,” she says.

“Oh, Anya,” I say, pulling her into my arms and holding her as tightly as I can. I kiss her cracked lips. Our breath is terrible, but neither of us even notices anymore.

“I don’t want to die, Mama,” she says.

“You won’t, moya dusha. We’ll make sure of it.”

My soul.

She is that. They both are. And because of that, I get up and get dressed and go to work.

Out in the freezing darkness of early morning, I drag my sled through the streets. In the library, I go down to the one reading room that is open. Oil lamps create pockets of light. Many of the librarians are too sick to move, so those of us who are able move books and answer research questions for the government and the army. We go in search of books, too, saving what we can from bombed buildings. When there is nothing left to do, I queue up for whatever rations I can get. Today I am lucky: there is a jar of sauerkraut and a ration of bread.

The walk home is terrible. My legs are so weak and I can’t breathe and I am dizzy. There are corpses everywhere. I no longer even go around them. I don’t have the energy.

Halfway home, I reach into my pocket and pull out my tiny piece of bread from the morning meal. I put it in my mouth, let it melt on my tongue.

I can feel myself swaying. That white roar of noise is back in my ears; in the past few weeks I have grown accustomed to the sound.

I see a bench up ahead.

Sit. Close your eyes for just a moment . . .

I am so tired. The gnawing in my belly is gone, replaced by exhaustion. It is a struggle just to breathe.

And then, amazingly, I see Sasha standing in the street in front of me. He looks exactly as he did on the day I met him, years ago, a lifetime; he isn’t even wearing a coat and his hair is long and golden.

“Sasha,” I say, hearing the crack in my voice. I want to run to him, but my legs won’t work. Instead I crumple to my knees in the thick snow.

I can feel him beside me, putting his arm around me. His breath is so warm and it smells of cherries.

Cherries. Like the ones Papa used to bring us . . .

And honey.

I close my eyes, hungry for the taste of him and his sweet breath.

I can smell my mama’s borscht.

“Get up, Vera.”

At first it is Sasha’s voice, deep and familiar, and then it is my own. Screaming.

“Get up, Vera.”

I am alone. There is no one here beside me, no lover’s breath that smells of honeyed cherries. There is just me, kneeling in the deep snow, slowly freezing to death.

I think of Leo’s giggle and Anya’s stern look and Sasha’s kiss.

And I climb slowly, agonizingly, to my feet.

It takes hours to get home, although it is not far. When I finally arrive and stumble into the relative warmth of the apartment, I fall again to my knees.

Anya is there. She wraps her arms around me and holds me.

I have no idea how long we sit there, holding each other. Probably until the cold in the apartment drives us back into bed.

That night, after a dinner of hot sauerkraut and a boiled potato—heaven—we sit around the little burzhuika.

“Tell us a story, Mama,” Anya says. “Don’t you want a story, Leo?”

I scoop Leo into my arms and stare down at his pale face, made beautiful by firelight. I want to tell him a story, a fairy tale that will give him good dreams, but my throat is tight and my lips are so cracked it hurts to speak, so I just hold my babies instead and the frosty silence lulls us to sleep.

You think that things cannot get worse, but they can. They do.

It is the coldest winter on record in Leningrad. Rations are cut and cut again. Page by page I burn my father’s beloved books for warmth. I sit in the freezing dark, holding my bony children as I tell them the stories. Anna Karenina. War and Peace. Onegin. I tell them how Sasha and I met so often that soon I know the words by heart.

It feels further and further away, though. Some days I cannot remember my own face, let alone my husband’s. I can’t recall the past, but I can see the future: it is in the stretched, tiny faces of my children, in the blue boils that have begun to blister Leo’s pale skin.

Scurvy.

Lucky for me, I work in the library. Books tell me that pine needles have vitamin C, so I break off branches and drag them home on my sled. The tea I make from them is bitter, but Leo complains no more.

I wish he would.

Dark. Cold.

I can hear my babies breathing in the bed beside me. Leo’s every breath is phlegmy. I feel his brow. He is not hot, thank God.

I know what has wakened me. The fire has gone out.

I want to do nothing about it.

The thought hits before I can guard against it. I could do nothing, just lie there, holding my children, and go to sleep forever.

There are worse ways to die.

Then I feel Anya’s tiny legs brush up against mine. In her sleep, she murmurs, “Papa,” and I remember my promise.

I take forever to get up. Everything hurts. There is a ringing in my ears and my balance is off. Halfway to the stove, I feel myself falling.

When I wake from my faint, I am disoriented. For a second, I hear my father at his desk, writing. His pen tip scratches words across the bumpy linen paper.

No.

I go to the bookcase. Only the last of the treasure is left: my father’s own poetry.

I cannot burn them.

Tomorrow, perhaps, but not today. Instead, I take the ax—it is so heavy—and crack off a piece of the side of the bookcase. It is thick, old wood, hard as iron, and it burns hot.

I stand by the bed, in front of the fire, and I can feel how I am swaying.

I know suddenly that if I lie down, I will die. Did my mother tell me this? My sister? I don’t know. I just remember knowing the truth of it.

“I won’t die in my bed,” I say to no one. So I go to the only other piece of furniture left in the room. My father’s writing desk. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I sit down.

Can I smell him, or am I hallucinating again? I don’t know. I pick up his pen and find that the ink in the well is frozen solid. The little metal inkwell is as cold as ice, but I carry it to the stove, where we both warm quickly. Making a cup of hot water to drink, I go back to the desk.

I light the lamp beside me. It is silly, I know. I should conserve this oil, but I can’t just sit here in the icy black. I have to do something to keep alive.

So I will write.

It is not too late. I’m not dead yet.

I am Vera Petrovna and I am a nobody. . . .

I write and write, on paper that I know I will soon have to burn, with a hand that trembles so violently my letters look like antelopes leaping across the sheet. Still, I write and the night fades.

Some hours later, a pale gray light bleeds through the newsprint, and I know I have made it.

I am just about to put the pen down when there is a knock at the door. I force my legs to work, my feet to move.

I open the door to a stranger. A man in a big black woolen coat and a military cap.

“Vera Petrovna Marchenko?”

I hear his voice and it is familiar, but I cannot focus on his face. My vision is giving me problems.

“It is me. Dima Newsky from down the hall.” He hands me a bottle of red wine, a bag of candy, and a sack of potatoes. “My mama is too ill to eat. She won’t make it through the day. She asked me to give this to you. For the babies, she said.”

“Dima,” I say, and still I don’t know who he is. I can’t remember his mother, either, my neighbor.

But I take the food. I do not even pretend not to want it. I might even kill him for it. Who knows? “Thank you,” I say, or think I do, or mean to.

“How is Aleksandr?”

“How are any of us? Do you want to come in? It is a little warmer—”

“No. I must get back to my mother. I am not here long. It’s back to the front tomorrow.”

When he is gone, I stare down at the food in awe. I am smiling when I waken Leo that morning and say, “We have candy. . . .”

In January, I strap poor Leo to the sled. He is so weak, he doesn’t even struggle; his tiny body is bluish black and covered in boils. Anya is too cold to get out of bed. I tell her to stay in bed and wait for us.

It takes three hours to walk to the hospital, and when I get there . . .

People have died in line, waiting to see a doctor. There are bodies everywhere. The smell.

I lean down to Leo, who is somehow both bony and swollen. His tiny face looks like a starving cat. “I am here, my lion,” I say because I can think of nothing else.