by JV Love
The windows were covered over with plywood and it was dark inside the apartment. The man's wife and aunt were busy packing things. He explained that they were being evacuated tomorrow. They were supposed to have left two days ago, but apparently the car that was to have taken them had broken down.
He was quite generous in donating children's clothes, and Petya learned why - both of their daughters had died the week before.
On the second floor, one of the doors opened as Petya walked up to it. The Lusinkii's lived there and Petya saw their eldest son, an officer in the navy, emerge. He looked comparatively healthy, as did most of his family. They certainly weren't flourishing, but neither had they lost anyone to starvation or disease either. Petya didn't know how they did it, but they were not alone. Death was busy knocking on nearly every door in Leningrad, but by no means all.
Petya asked them if they wanted to donate any clothing or coats. They said no, quickly closing the door.
No one responded to his knocks at the door across the hall, so he moved on to the next one where the Karpovskii's lived. The man's wife answered and Petya asked her if they had any coats they would like to donate. She invited him in and led him down a short hallway and through another door that opened into the kitchen. It was dark there and she lit a candle. The light glittered off the frost-covered walls.
She pointed to the floor by a boarded-up window. A corpse lay there. "You can have his coat," she said. "He doesn't need it anymore."
Petya didn't have to ask who it was. He knew it was Mr. Karpovsii. "When did he die?"
"Day before yesterday," she replied.
Dead bodies, even in apartments, did not stink or decompose because of the bitter cold.
"I can take care of the body for you, if you like," Petya said.
"How much?" the woman asked.
"A day's bread ration."
The woman contemplated for a few seconds. "No, I can't do it."
"You're just going to leave him here then?"
"Yes," she answered. "I can't give up an entire day's ration."
Petya saw the woman's teeth as she spoke. They were badly decayed. It was the same all over the city. There wasn't a single body part that didn't suffer from the effects of starvation.
"You're a neighbor," Petya said. "I'll do it for half the ration. How about that?"
She nodded, went into the other room, then returned a minute later with the bread. It didn't look like half the ration, but Petya wasn't going to argue with her.
He stuck the bread in his pocket, then went over to the body and took the coat off. "Here," he said, handing the coat to the woman. "Lay that out in the hallway for me. I'll come and get it later." Petya grabbed the body by the arms and pulled it off the table down to the floor. Then he dragged it out of the apartment to the hallway where he let it lay while he returned to the third floor to get one of their sleds and give Katya half of the bread he'd just received.
He was surprised when he didn't find her sitting in the chair in front of the door. Instead, he saw her in her bedroom walking from one side to the other. Her ankle had healed some, but she still walked with almost as big a limp as Petya did.
She seemed to be gathering things into a bag. Petya didn't bother asking her about it though. He knew she wouldn't answer him. He held out the bread to her, and she stopped doing whatever it was she was doing just long enough to take it.
Petya worried that no matter how much food she received now that it wouldn't help, that she was too far gone to be saved. There were tens of thousands of people like her - firmly in death's grasp, their bodies too depleted of nutrients to ever regain their health.
After Petya dragged the body of Mr. Karpovskii down the stairs to the outside, he loaded it onto the sled. But instead of taking it to the morgue or the cemetery, he made for a small shed in the courtyard across the street. All the apartment buildings there had been destroyed by the German's long-range artillery and the area was deserted now. The shed was the only structure still standing, and Petya unlocked the padlock he'd put on the door and started to drag the body inside.
There were disembodied arms and legs scattered about the floor, and Petya had to kick a head out of the way so he could get the new body in. The head rolled a foot or two under the workbench and came to a stop on its right ear. Petya quickly closed the door behind him and then tied a rope around the corpse.
This was his butcher shop, complete with a variety of knives and a small ceramic stove. Without this place, Petya figured he would have starved to death weeks ago. Labeling some of the meat 'Horse Sausage,' he'd recently started going to the Haymarket to try to sell it. The Haymarket, made famous by Dostoevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment, was the biggest marketplace in the city. Everything and anything was sold there: boots, coats, clothes, sleds, bread, and, of course, 'meat.' Most everyone knew what the meat was really made of but chose to feign ignorance, pretending it was actually whatever the seller said it was. Petya hadn't had much success at the Haymarket yet. There was stiff competition for those selling 'meat.'
He cleared away a pair of thin arms from his workbench, tossing them into the corner. The arms were sometimes too thin to do anything with, so he threw those away with the heads and other unuseable parts. Reaching under the workbench, he tried grabbing hold of the head he had kicked earlier. The old man - or maybe woman, Petya didn't remember and couldn't tell from looking at the head - didn't have much hair left. Starvation and lack of nutrition had seen to that while they were still alive. Petya grabbed what hair he could, lifting the head out from underneath the bench. But before he could toss it into the corner, the head dropped to the floor again, a handful of white hair clinging to Petya's still clenched fist. The head, with its sunken eyes and thin, nearly nonexistent lips, looked up at the ceiling. Its mouth was partially open, revealing several brown, severely decayed teeth and numerous gaps. Petya hated dealing with the heads, because they were the body parts most likely to speak to him. He bent over and closed his eyes as he grabbed the head with both hands. Then he carried it to the corner and set it down, leaning it against a severed foot so it would look toward the wall.
Using a set of pulleys he'd attached to the ceiling, Petya hoisted his new corpse up onto the workbench. Then he left the shed, making sure the padlock was secured, and returned to his apartment building.
He knocked on the doors on the first floor to see if anyone else had anything to donate, but no one answered. Next, he stuffed all the coats and clothing he'd collected into the big brown bag and tied it to the sled to take to the collection center. The Germans had started shelling with their long-range artillery again, so Petya listened to the explosions and the high-pitched whistling of the shells for a while to see where they were coming from. The Germans were systematic in their bombing and you could tell what area of the city they were targeting and whether your trip would be safe.
All along his journey, Petya saw the old-timers - thin and seemingly on the verge of death - at their posts waiting for an air raid alarm. There hadn't been any bombing runs by German planes since mid-December (rumor was it was so cold that it froze the fuel in the planes), but that didn't mean the guards didn't still have to sit in the freezing cold at their posts by gates, doorways, in halls, or stairwells.
Petya passed by the block with the abandoned building where he'd found Kolya. He didn't bother stopping. For a week after Kolya disappeared, Petya had checked the building every day for him. He never showed up, and Petya had given up on ever finding the boy.
The Germans stopped their shelling when Petya was about halfway to the collection center, and all was eerily quiet. He hated the silence. It wasn't only that that was when the voices usually spoke to him, but it also just wasn't right that such a large city could be that quiet.
At one point, he thought he heard the sound of dogs barking, but knew that couldn't be true. There were no dogs left in the city. There hadn't been for a long time. Besides the Leningraders themselves, there were hardly any anim
als at all left in the city. No cats. No birds. No squirrels. The only animal one rarely saw were rats. But most of them had either starved, been eaten, or departed for the trenches at the front where the food supply was better.
Just as Petya feared, a voice began speaking to him. It was the voice of God and it was telling Petya how pleased he was that so many of his children were being returned to him in heaven as a result of the war.
"But there is one who has not come home yet," the voice said. "One that I miss very deeply."
Petya knew who the voice was talking about. It wasn't the first time God had expressed his longing to be reunited with Katya.
"I am tired of waiting," the voice said now to Petya. "I want her returned to me."
Petya didn't have to ask "When?" out loud. All he had to do now was think the question and the voice would answer.
"Today," it said.
Petya wanted to argue. He wanted to fight, or at least plead, instead of just giving in. But what did it matter what he wanted? In the end, the voice would win. It always did.
* * *
The warmth of the inside of the truck's cab, along with the methodical rocking and steady hum of the engine, had lulled Felix to sleep. He had strange dreams of being entombed in a coffin so big that he could stand up and walk around - either that or the coffin was regular size and he was really small. He didn't know which, but the dream left him feeling uncomfortable to the point of sickness and he wished he could have made it into the city yesterday, instead of today, January 8th.
The trip across the lake to Leningrad had been slow going from the start. The traffic was heavy and they often spent more time at a dead halt than they did moving.
Felix was startled awake by a tremendous noise and thought for sure they were under attack. When he opened his eyes though, he immediately saw the source of the noise. Five huge snowplows were approaching from the opposite direction, creating another road.
"Good," the driver said in his thick Georgian accent. "We need another road. The Nazis have pretty much ruined this one."
"They certainly seem determined to put an end to this supply route into the city," Felix said.
"Yes, but we're more determined to keep it open," the driver said. "They can keep on destroying our roads, we'll just keep building more. They'll never win."
"How are you so confident?"
"Because we'll never give up. That's why," the driver said. "They're not going to win unless they kill every last one of us." He paused to swerve the truck around a piece of wreckage sticking out from the side of the road. "This is our home. It's where we're meant to be."
The man's comments didn't surprise Felix. He'd noticed a slow but steady shift in people's attitudes and actions since those first few months of the war. You rarely met anyone these days who was ambivalent about the war. Everyone had bonded together in a common cause - the defeat of the Nazis by any means. It was no longer a conflict of opposing ideologies, it had become a patriotic war.
Felix wanted to continue the conversation, but his body had other ideas. It was a rare thing to be seated in a warm place and have nothing to do, and he fell quickly back asleep.
When he next awoke, he saw trees outside his window. "We're off the lake?"
"Yeah," the driver said, "we finished with that a while ago."
"How much further?"
"Not much," the driver said and pointed ahead of them.
Felix looked where the driver was pointing and was surprised to see Leningrad's skyline coming into view. He knew he must have been sleeping quite a while because once you crossed the lake, it was still a long distance before you reached the city.
He reached into his pack for a cigarette, but then remembered he only had three left and decided not to have one right now. He'd had another full pack when he started the journey, but the driver made it clear to him that the ride wasn't for free. He'd wanted money, but Felix had already given what little money he had to Misha for an earlier bribe. Thankfully, the driver had accepted Felix's pack of cigarettes as payment.
They passed a small collection of ice huts where he saw two nurses with the customary red crosses on their arms. They were pulling a wounded man into one of the huts. A little ways after that, they passed a snow-covered truck tipped over on its side. A squirrel ran along the top of it.
The closer they got to the city, the more Felix could see how viciously Leningrad's once beautiful skyline had been ravaged by the German Luftwaffe and long-range artillery. He tried to prepare himself mentally for the devastation he knew he was about to experience.
They passed by two figures trudging away from the city, heading in the direction of the lake. One of them was wearing a man's fur coat that was much too big for them, and Felix wondered if the man had lost that much weight or if maybe the coat didn't belong to him. He was pulling a small brown sled with some bundles strapped to it. The fur wasn't as dark as most similar coats and it had an interesting pattern of stripes to it. It looked vaguely familiar to Felix and he thought for a second he might know the man, but he couldn't see his face because it was wrapped in a dark scarf.
The other person appeared to be an old woman. She was stooped, wore a wool shawl, and had rags wrapped around her boots. Felix had seen the rags or carpets wrapped around the feet before. It was an attempt to prevent frostbite.
"Where are they going?" Felix asked.
"To the lake," the driver said. "I see them all the time. They're evacuating on their own. They try to hitch a ride with us when we're headed back across."
"Do you pick them up?"
"Sure, if they can give me something - some cigarettes or bread, you know."
"And those who don't have anything to give?"
"Aww, come on. Everyone's got a least a little something. If they don't want to give us anything, then they can walk."
"Walk where? All the way across the lake?"
"That's their problem. We're not even supposed to pick them up in the first place."
Felix watched the two fade into the distance. It would be dark soon, and he wondered where they would sleep that night. He wondered too about the desperateness they must have experienced to take on such a journey - a journey where the odds of dying were far greater than the odds of living. He'd seen the lifeless bodies alongside the road multiply the closer they got to Leningrad. He'd assumed they were victims of bombings or shellings, but now he knew the truth.
When the outskirts of Leningrad spread out before them, the driver stopped the truck. "This is where you get off," he said. "They don't let us carry passengers into the city."
Felix buttoned up his coat and pulled his scarf tight around his neck. He thanked the driver for the ride and hopped out of the truck.
"One word of advice," the driver said. "Keep your wits about you if anyone approaches. Especially stay away from the river."
"What do you mean?" Felix said. "I already told you I don't have any money."
"It's not your money these people are after," he said.
"Then what?"
The driver bared his teeth and pretended to bite his own arm, then drove away. Felix wasn't sure what that meant and didn't spend any time trying to figure it out. He looked across the horizon at the faint sun and calculated there was about one hour of daylight left, which meant it was now about three p.m.. He got a piece of bread out, took a big bite of it, and set off for Katya's neighborhood. It was going to be a long walk, he knew. Several hours at least.
The section of the city he started out in wasn't familiar to him. Piles of rubble lay in the street and for some strange reason he kept smelling turpentine. Blackened, burnt-out buildings and dead trees jutted out from the ground. They balanced precariously, looking as though they might fall over after the next big gust of winter wind. Snow drifts reached to the windows of the second floor of some buildings. Streetcars and automobiles were frozen in place and partially, or in some cases completely, covered over with snow. Everything was quiet and he imagined that his own footst
eps crunching the hard snow beneath him could be heard a mile away. It was like he was walking through the ruins of an ancient city.
He didn't encounter a single other person for the first forty minutes, and as he witnessed one frozen, lifeless block after another, he started to wonder who or what could possibly survive here. Then he saw them - dark figures trudging in the alleys and around the snow drifts. He came across three of them as he rounded the next corner. They wore black masks over their faces, with peepholes cut out for their eyes. Felix instinctively reached for his gun but realized they weren't out to rob him. They wore the masks to protect themselves against the cold of the arctic night.
An artillery shell exploded nearby, shaking the earth beneath him. Felix was about to dive to the ground when he noticed that nobody else seemed to even notice it. They just kept on walking as if nothing had happened. It was then that he realized how numb they were to the death and chaos around them.
He came across some soldiers on pass from the front to visit their families, and asked them for directions. Right after Felix left them, he saw a man and a woman wearing militia uniforms come up to them. "Your papers, please," the woman said.
Felix quickened his pace and hoped they wouldn't notice. He had no pass, no orders to be in the city. If he was caught, he could be sent to the firing squad for desertion.
He heard the woman yell in his direction, "Comrade, where are you bound?" Felix pretended that he didn't hear and kept walking. When he came to the next alley, he turned into it and, safely out of their sight, began running. He climbed over a couple snowdrifts and emerged on the other side, then resumed his walking. He wanted to blend in and knew he would attract a lot of attention if anyone saw him running. It was clear to him that anyone living here wasn't capable of doing that.
A five-ton truck rumbled down the road and Felix wondered if it might be carrying more people being evacuated. It slowed as it approached a corpse in the street, then slid to a halt a few yards beyond it. Three men got out of the truck and pulled the tarp from the back, revealing dozens of dead bodies stacked one on top of the other.