The Bronze Horseman

by Paullina Simons

  Alexander took hold of Tatiana’s hand and said soothingly, patting his chest, “Come here.”

  She stood for a long time—her face pressed into Alexander’s chest, his arms around her—and cried.

  Anton’s leg was not getting better. Anton was not getting better.

  Tatiana brought him a piece of Alexander’s chocolate. Anton ate it, but listlessly.

  She sat by his bed. They didn’t speak for a while.

  “Tania,” he said, “remember summer before last?” His voice was weak.

  “No,” said Tatiana. She only remembered last summer.

  “In August when you came back from Luga, me, you, Volodya, Petka, and Pasha played soccer in Tauride Park? You wanted the ball so much, you kicked my shin to get it? I think it was the same leg.” A faint smile passed over Anton’s face.

  “I think you’re right,” Tatiana said quietly. “Shh, Anton.” She took his hand. “Your leg will heal, and maybe next summer we’ll go to Tauride Park and play soccer again.”

  “Yes,” he said, squeezing her hand and closing his eyes. “But not with your brother. Or my brothers.”

  “Just you and I, Anton,” whispered Tatiana.

  “Not even me, Tania,” he whispered back.

  They’re waiting for you, Tatiana wanted to say to him. They’re waiting to play soccer with you again.

  And with me.

  5

  Tatiana used to leave at six-thirty to get the rations—herself as punctual as a German—so that even with waiting in line and the ration store being all the way on Fontanka, she could be back by eight when the bombing formations flew overhead and the air-raid sirens sounded. But she had noticed that either the raids were starting earlier or she was getting out later, because three mornings in a row she got caught in the shell fire while still on Nekrasova returning home.

  Only because she had promised, sworn to Alexander that she would, Tatiana waited out the bombing in a shelter in someone else’s building, holding her precious bread to her chest and wearing the helmet he had left her and made her promise and swear to wear when she went out.

  The bread Tatiana was holding wasn’t delicious bread; it wasn’t white, and it wasn’t soft, and it didn’t have a golden crust, but still a smell emanated from it. For thirty minutes she sat while thirty pairs of eyes glared at her from all directions, and finally an old woman’s voice said, “Come on, girlie, share with us. Don’t just sit there holding the loot. Give us a bite.”

  “It’s for my family,” Tatiana said. “There are five of us, all women. They’re waiting for me to bring it to them. If I give it to you, they will have no food today.”

  “Not much, girlie,” the old woman persisted. “Just a bite.”

  The shelling stopped, and Tatiana was the first one out. After that she made sure she didn’t lag behind anymore.

  But despite her best efforts she could not seem to get to the ration store and back before the bombs came.

  To go at ten was impossible. Tatiana had to be at work; people depended on her there, too. She wondered if Marina would do better, or maybe Dasha. Maybe they could move faster than Tatiana. Mama was sewing uniforms by hand in the morning and at night. Tatiana couldn’t possibly send her mother, who practically never looked up from her sewing nowadays, trying to finish a few uniforms so she could get some extra oatmeal.

  Dasha said she couldn’t go because she had to do laundry in the morning. Marina also refused, which was just as well. She had nearly stopped going to university. Taking her ration card, she picked up her own bread and ate it immediately. At night when she came back to Fifth Soviet, she demanded more food from Tatiana. “Marinka, it’s just not fair,” Tatiana would say to her cousin. “We’re all hungry. I know this is hard, but you have to keep yourself in check—”

  “Oh, like you keep yourself in check?”

  “Yes,” Tatiana said, sensing that Marina was not talking about the bread.

  “You’re doing well,” Marina said. “Very well, Tania. Keep it up.”

  But Tatiana didn’t feel she was doing well.

  She felt that she was doing worse than ever before, and yet her family was lauding her efforts. Something was not right with the world in which her family thought Tatiana was making a success out of a big botch. It wasn’t that she felt herself to be slow that bothered her, but that she felt herself slowing down. All her efforts at haste, at deliberate speed, were met with an unknown resistance—resistance from her own body.

  It wasn’t moving as fast as it used to, and the inarguable proof of that lay with the German bombers, who at precisely eight o’clock flew their planes over the center of the city and for two hours sounded the mortar clarion call, the high-explosive bugle, to disrupt the rush hour of the morning.

  Sunrise came at eight also. Tatiana walked to the store and back in near-dark.

  One morning Tatiana was walking on Nekrasova and without much thought passed a man walking in the same direction. He was tall, older, thin, wearing a hat.

  Only when she passed him did it occur to Tatiana that she hadn’t passed anyone in a long time. People walked at their own pace, but it was never an overtaking pace. Either I’m walking faster, she thought, or he is even slower than me.

  She slowed down, then stopped. As she turned around, she saw him drift down like a parachute by the side of the building and keel over to his side. Tatiana walked back to him, to help him sit up. He was still.

  Nonetheless, she tried to straighten him up. She lifted his hat. His unblinking eyes stared at Tatiana. They remained open, as they were just minutes ago when he had been walking on the street. Now he was dead.

  Horrified, Tatiana let go of the man and his hat and hurried on without turning around. On the way back with her rations, she decided to take Ulitsa Zhukovskogo instead so as not to walk by the corpse. The air raid had started, but she ignored it and walked on. If they wanted to take my bread in the shelter, there would be nothing I could do to stop them, Tatiana thought, pulling Alexander’s helmet down over her head.

  That morning she told her family she had seen a dead man on the street. They barely acknowledged it. “Oh?” said Marina. “Well, I saw a dead horse in the middle of the street, cut open, and a crowd of people helping themselves to the horse’s flesh. And that’s not the worst part. I walked up behind someone and asked if there was anything left for me.”

  The man’s face, his walk, his silly hat stayed in Tatiana’s mind as she closed her eyes at night. It wasn’t his death that tormented her, because, unfortunately, Tatiana had seen death before—in Luga, in the abject absence of Pasha, as she watched her father burn. But it was this man’s walking gait that Tatiana saw when she closed her eyes, because when he died, he had been walking, and though he was walking slower than Tatiana, he was not walking slower by much.

  6

  “How many cans of ham do we have left?” Mama asked.

  “One,” Tatiana replied.

  “That can’t be.”

  “Mama, we’ve been eating it every night.”

  “But it can’t be,” said Mama. “We had ten just a few days ago.”

  “About nine days ago.”

  The next day Mama asked, “Have we got any flour left?”

  “Yes, we have about another kilo. I’ve been making pancakes with it every evening.”

  “Is that what those are? Pancakes?” Dasha said. “Tastes like flour and water to me.”

  “It is flour and water.” Tatiana paused. “Alexander calls them sea biscuits.”

  “Can you make bread out of it?” demanded Mama. “Instead of silly pancakes?”

  “Mama, bread? Out of what? We have no milk. We have no yeast. We have no butter. And we certainly have no more eggs.”

  “Just mix it with a little water. We must have some soy milk?”

  “We have three tablespoons.”

  “Use it. Put some sugar in it.”

  “All right, Mama.” For dinner Tatiana made unleavened bread with sug
ar and the remaining milk. They had the last can of ham. It was October 31.

  “What’s in this bread?” Tatiana asked, breaking off a piece of the black crust and looking inside. “What is this?” It was the start of November. Babushka was on the couch. Mama and Marina had already gone out for the day. Tatiana was procrastinating, trying to make her portion last. She didn’t want to go to the hospital.

  Dasha leaned over from her chair and shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? How does it taste?”

  “Actually, revolting.”

  “Eat it. What, maybe you’d like some white bread instead?”

  Tatiana picked at a little piece of something in the bread, poked it with her fingers, then put it on her tongue. “Dash, oh my God, you know what it is?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “It’s sawdust.”

  Dasha paused in her own chewing, but only for a second. “Sawdust?”

  “Yes, and this here?” Tatiana pointed to a brown fleck between her fingers. “That’s cardboard. We’re eating paper. Three hundred grams a day, and they’re giving us paper.”

  Finishing every last crumb of her piece and looking hungrily at the one Tatiana was kneading between her fingers, Dasha said, “We’re lucky to have that. Can I open the can of tomatoes?”

  “No. We have only two left. Besides, Mama and Marina are not here. You know if we open it, we’ll eat it all.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “We can’t. We’ll open it tonight for dinner.”

  “What kind of dinner is that going to be? Tomatoes?”

  “If you didn’t eat all your cardboard in the morning, you’d have some left for dinner.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I know,” said Tatiana, putting the rest of the bread in her mouth and chewing it with her eyes closed. “Listen,” she said when she had swallowed hard, “I’ve got some crackers left. Want to have some? Just three each?”

  “Yes.” The girls glanced at Babushka, who was sleeping.

  They ate seven each. Only small remainders were left of what used to be whole pieces of toasted bread. Broken remainders with crumbs on the bottom.

  “Tania, are you still getting your monthlies?”

  “What?”

  “Are you?” There was anxiety in Dasha’s voice and anxiety in Tatiana’s as she answered. “No. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m not either.”

  “Oh.”

  Dasha was quiet. The sisters breathed shallowly.

  “Are you worried, Dasha?” Tatiana said at last, with great reluctance.

  Dasha shook her head. “I’m not worried about that. Alexander and I—” She glanced at Tatiana. “Never mind. I’m worried I’m not getting it. That it just ceased to be.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Tatiana, relieved and sad for her sister at the same time. “It’ll come back when we start to eat again.”

  Dasha raised her eyes at Tatiana.

  Tatiana looked away.

  “Tania,” Dasha whispered, “aren’t you feeling it? Like your whole body is just shutting down?” She started to cry. “Shutting down, Tania!”

  Tatiana hugged her sister. “Dearest,” she said. “my heart’s still beating. I’m not shutting down, Dasha. And you’re not either.”

  The girls were silent in the cold room. Hugging Tatiana back, Dasha said, “I want that senseless hunger back. Remember last month when we were always starving?”

  “I remember.”

  “You don’t feel that anymore, do you?”

  “No,” admitted Tatiana faintly.

  “I want it back.”

  “You’ll get it back. When we start eating, it will all come back.”

  That night Tatiana came home with a pot of clear liquid they served in the hospital cafeteria. There was one potato floating in it.

  “It’s chicken soup,” Tatiana said to her family. “With some ham hock.”

  “Where is the chicken? Where is the ham hock?” Mama asked as she looked into the small pot.

  “I was lucky to get this.”

  “Yes, Tanechka, you were. Come, pour for us,” Mama said.

  It tasted like hot water with a potato. It had no salt, and it had no oil. Tatiana divided it into five portions because Alexander was still away.

  “I hope Alexander comes back soon so we can have some of his food. He’s so lucky to have such a good ration,” said Dasha.

  I hope Alexander comes back soon, too, thought Tatiana. I need to lay my eyes on him.

  “Look at us,” said Mama. “We’ve waited for this dinner since our one o’clock lunch. But someone has to help with the bombs, the fires, the glass, the wounded. We’re not helping. All we want to do is eat.”

  “That’s exactly what the Germans want,” said Tatiana. “They want us to abandon our city, and we are ready to do it to have a potato.”

  “I can’t go out there,” said Mama. “I’ve got five uniforms to sew by hand.” She glared at Babushka, who sat quietly, chewed her bread, and said nothing.

  “We won’t go out there,” said Tatiana. “We will sit and work and sew. But we are not abandoning our Leningrad. No one is leaving here.”

  No one else spoke.

  When the air raid began, they all descended to the shelter, even Tatiana, who tripped over a woman who had died sitting up against the wall and whom no one had bothered to move. Tatiana sank down and waited out the darkness.

  7

  Dasha wrote to Alexander each day; every single day she wrote him a short letter. How lucky she is, Tatiana thought. To be able to write to him, to have him receive her thoughts, how lucky.

  They also wrote to their widowed Babushka in Molotov.

  Letters back from her were rare.

  The mail was terrible.

  Then it stopped coming at all.

  When the mail stopped coming to the building, Tatiana started going to the post office on Old Nevsky, where an old gray man with no teeth sat and gave her the mail only after asking her if she had any food for him. She would bring him a remainder of a small cracker. Finally she got a letter from Alexander to Dasha.

  My dear Dasha, and everyone else,

  The saving grace of war is that most women don’t have to see it, only the nurses who tend to us, and they are immune to our pain.

  Across from Shlisselburg we’re trying to supply the island fortress Oreshek with munitions. A small group of soldiers has been holding that island since September, despite intense German shelling from the banks of Lake Ladoga just 200 meters away. You remember Oreshek? Lenin’s brother Alexander was hanged there in 1887 for his part in the plot to assassinate Alexander III.

  Now that war has started, the sailors and soldiers guarding the entrance to the Neva are lauded as heroes of the New Russia—the Russia after Hitler. We are all told that after we win, everything will be completely different in the Soviet Union. It will be a much better life, we are promised, but for that life we have to be prepared to die. Lay down your life, we are told, so your children can live.

  All right, we say. The fighting doesn’t end, even at night. Neither does the rain. We have been wet all day and all night for seven days. We can’t dry out. Three of my men have died of pneumonia. It almost seems cosmically unfair to die from pneumonia, when Hitler is so intent on killing us himself. I’m glad I’m not in Moscow right now. Have you heard much about what’s going on there? I think that’s what’s saving us. Saving you. Hitler diverted a large part of his Army Group Nord, including most of his planes and tanks, away from Leningrad for his attack on Moscow. If Moscow falls, we’re done for, but right now it’s our only reprieve.

  I’m fine myself. I don’t like being wet much. They still feed us officers. Each day I have meat I think of you.

  Be well. Tell Tatiana to walk close to the sides of the buildings. Except when the bombs are falling; then tell her to stop walking and wait in a doorway. Tell her to wear the helmet I left.

  Girls, under no circumstances give away your
bread. Stay clear of the roof.

  And use the soap I left you. Remember that you always feel slightly better about things when you’re clean. My father told me that. I will add it’s impossible to keep yourself clean on the winter front. But on the plus side, it’s so cold here that the lice that spread typhus can’t live.

  Believe me when I tell you I think of you every minute of every day.

  Until I see you again, I remain distantly

  Yours,

  Alexander

  Tatiana wore the helmet. She used the soap. She waited in the doorways. But for some reason all she could think about with a peculiar and prolonged aching, as she didn’t take off her felt boots, her felt hat, and her quilted coat, which Mama had made in the days when there was a sewing machine, was Alexander being wet all day and night in his uniform on the icy Ladoga.

  PETER’S DARKENED CITY

  THERE was no longer any denying that what was happening to Leningrad was nothing like what they could have ever imagined.

  Marina’s mother died.

  Mariska died.

  Anton died.

  The shelling continued. The bombing continued. There were fewer incendiaries falling, and Tatiana knew this because there were fewer fires, and she knew this because as she walked to Fontanka, there were fewer places for her to stand and warm her hands.

  As she was making her way to the store one November morning, Tatiana noticed two dead people lying in the street. On the way back two hours later there were seven. They weren’t injured, and they weren’t wounded. They were just dead. She made the sign of the cross as she walked past them, stopped and thought, what did I just do? Did I make the sign of the cross on dead people? But I live in Communist Russia. Why would I do that? She made the sign of the hammer and sickle as she slowly walked on.

  There was no place for God in the Soviet Union. In fact, God clearly went against the principles by which they all lived their lives: faith in work, in living together, in protecting the state against nonconformist individuals, in Comrade Stalin. In school, in newspapers, on the radio, Tatiana heard that God was the great oppressor, the loathsome tyrant who had kept the Russian worker from realizing his full potential for centuries. Now, in post-Bolshevik Russia, God was just another roadblock in the way of the new Soviet man. The Communist man could not have an allegiance to God because that would mean his first allegiance was to something other than the state. And nothing could come before the state. Not only would the state provide for the Soviet people, but it also would feed them and it would give them jobs and protect them from the enemy. Tatiana had heard that in kindergarten, and through nine years of school and in the Young Pioneer classes she attended when she was nine. She became a Pioneer because she had no choice, but when it was time for her to join the Young Komsomols in her last year of school, she refused. Not because of God necessarily, but just because. Somewhere deep inside, Tatiana had always thought she would not make a very good Communist. She liked Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories too much.