Why in the world would she go to Tatarstan?
The only sensible destination was home. She didn’t want to get on this train, she didn’t want to chase after the wrong life. She should have lived a life that would have led her to the train with the dancers, not the one to Kama, Tatarstan. Not there. She didn’t belong there. And she didn’t belong here, either.
The officer’s wife waved and waved, called her again and again, but Stasia turned her back on her and pushed through the crowd in the station concourse, emerging into the cool air, the grey daylight; she ran blindly through the streets, simply following her feet, further and further away from this station with its overcrowded trains. She lugged her old suitcase along with her, like an abdicated king dragging his sceptre. As she reached a wide, alarmingly empty boulevard the sirens began to wail: even then she still felt nothing.
She turned into a side street and sat down in the empty entrance to a house. She took a cigarette out of the bag and lit it. She looked up at the sky. No bombers to be seen. Good. That was something, at least.
*
In another city, at this moment, another woman also sat down and looked up at the sky. This city, though, had been cut off from the world for months; survival there was akin to a miracle. The woman was gaunt, taller than Stasia, with olive skin; she was bony, like Stasia, but she looked older, sickly, and there were grey streaks in her jet-black hair. She was wearing a patched autumn coat and her hands were covered in earth. Her cheeks were sunken, her lips dry and cracked, and her fingers bare, not a single ring left on them. She had just been harvesting vegetables alongside other women in one of the public parks, and had sat down, exhausted, on the damp ground. This last winter she had lost more than eleven kilos, and had sold the most precious thing she owned: her piano, which was used not to make music, but for firewood. Almost all her records had gone, too, as she could no longer bear to hear music, since the blockade; music made her vulnerable, and she couldn’t allow that. Not any more.
She had survived the mass deaths. She had survived the famine. She had survived the reduction of the bread ration to two hundred grams. She had survived the sight of starved, frozen bodies on the streets. She had seen people eating their shoes, or dogs, or cats, starch paste, and crows. She had survived thousands of bombs that had been dropped on her since the city came under siege. But she would not survive music. Music, she believed, would cause her heart, still beating dully in her breast, to contract so unbearably that she would die on the spot.
Because she was unmarried and had no children, because she was neither disabled nor wounded, she was very low on the list for urgent evacuation. Along with the other seven hundred thousand people left in the city, she had braced herself for the coming winter. The last one had seared itself into the minds of the city’s populace with such cruelty that they were now going about preparing for the next coming horror as best they could, mechanically, without feeling. Because no one doubted that the horror would return, in all its shattering glory. She looked down at her cracked and reddened hands, covered in dirt. She was living in the present. In this moment. She asked herself, as she had so often before, whether she actually knew why she was trying so hard, so doggedly, so desperately to stay alive.
*
The thermometer read minus 34 degrees. The Generalissimus issued the order to begin the counter-offensive, led by Zhukov. On 6 November, he gave a ceremonial speech in the Moscow metro, praising the tenacity of the Soviet people and the Red Army’s powers of resistance. The following day, there was even a parade on Red Square to commemorate the October Revolution. The Russian army was marching — with or without winter clothing, with or without helmets. (After the war, General Eisenhower is said to have expressed his outrage to Marshall Zhukov over the way the wartime leadership in the Soviet Union had recklessly thrown away human lives. Zhukov is said merely to have smiled and replied, ‘It doesn’t matter; Russian women will bear more.’)
At the end of November, the Germans were just twenty kilometres from Moscow. On 2 December, a tank battalion penetrated a Moscow suburb; they could see the Kremlin through their binoculars. The symbolic power of this development generated downright euphoria among the German soldiers; the dangers of the Russian winter seemed to have been superseded by joy over the imminent capture of Moscow. In Moscow itself there was talk of a march Hitler had personally commissioned to be played during the capitulation of the city.
As the NKVD was able to confirm that Japan was not planning an attack on the Soviet Union, various divisions were pulled out of the north and sent towards the capital. The infantry marched on Moscow in skis and snowshoes. On the night of 5 December, Soviet parachutists landed near Yukhnov; railway lines and important roads were secured and occupied. At the same time, the counteroffensive was launched in the west.
The Wehrmacht had no longer reckoned with such a fierce counter-attack. Its reaction was belated and uncoordinated. There was no time: the army group only received the order to take evasive action on the evening of 6 December.
On 7 December, the Sovinformburo announced another sensation, this time on the other side of the world: the Japanese had attacked the Pearl Harbor naval base near Honolulu. As a result, the United States declared war on Japan, thereby officially becoming part of the universal apocalypse. And Hitler, for fear of losing Japan as an ally, declared war on America.
It wasn’t until mid-January that Hitler ordered the retreat from Moscow, but by then the German troops had already suffered massive losses, not just from Russian bullets and grenades, but above all as a consequence of the freezing temperatures that winter. During the retreat, the German soldiers had to leave almost all their munitions behind, as they had neither horses nor the machines and fuel at their disposal to transport them back in an orderly manner. Frozen and dejected, the soldiers left the city, singing quietly to themselves:
Before the gates of Moscow stood a battalion,
The proud remains of Wehrmacht 34th Division.
The Kremlin was just in sight
But they were forced to leave the fight
Just like Napoleon.
The Soviet power does not punish, it improves.
POSTER SLOGAN
Kitty walked up the little hill to Christine’s house. She went into the neglected garden and lay down on the damp earth. She screwed up her eyes, counting the glow-worms above her as they turned into stars. Christine had just got back from the hospital, where she had taken a full-time job as a nurse, and where, in recent weeks, German prisoners-of-war had kept arriving, as well as the numerous Soviet casualties. She stopped by the glass door and watched her niece, who was stretching her limbs and staring into space with a glazed expression. Christine picked up a little stool and went and sat next to Kitty.
‘What’s Andro planning? You have to tell me. I can see you’re not happy about it, that you’re suffering. Tell me.’
‘It’s nothing; you’re exaggerating, Christine. It’s really nothing. I just miss him so terribly, and I’m worried about Deda too …’
‘Don’t lie to me.’
‘Really, I don’t know anything.’
‘It’s important that you tell me what you know. We might get into trouble, Kitty. Big trouble. You must talk to me. Where is he? And why can’t I find him through the commissariat?’
‘I don’t know where he is. I wish I did!’ Not a scrap of truth escaped from under Kitty’s thick eyelashes. Christine fixed her one good eye on her niece. How many times Kitty had feigned ignorance … What was she trying to protect Andro from? What was she afraid of? The obvious suspicion was that Andro had joined a partisan movement. But as long as it remained no more than a suspicion, Christine could protect neither Kitty nor herself. Perhaps he had already been killed in action, and Kitty was scared of this finality. But something told Christine this wasn’t the case.
Suddenly she thought of her nephew, Kostya, abou
t whom she had forbidden herself to think these past few months. She saw his well-manicured fingernails, his dark eyes, his upright gait, heard his gallant way of speaking. She would so like to hold him in her arms, gently kiss his cheeks, as she had always done when he was small and they all lived in one house. She would ruffle his hair, slip him a sweet, and everything would be as before; Ramas would walk through the door, would call out for her …
Christine began to take out the hairpins that kept her face-covering in place. No one but Stasia was allowed to see her divided face.
How little we know, she thought. We, the left behind, the silenced, how we fear what awaits us in the end. How we hate to be the ones left behind, and yet how little we can do about it. She touched Kitty’s shoulder. Kitty was still lying motionless, her face turned away.
‘Turn round. Look at me.’
‘Please, Christine …’
‘Look at me!’
Slowly, listlessly, Kitty obeyed, sat up, and involuntarily put her hand over her mouth to stop herself crying out. Her wide eyes betrayed her horror. Her head wobbled like a nevalyashka doll’s.
‘That’s right — look at me. I survived even this. I’m not afraid of anything any more. We can get through this together,’ said Christine, trying to stretch her lips into a smile.
Kitty’s hand was still clamped over her mouth.
‘Where is Andro?’
‘Please.’
‘Tell me where he is. Perhaps it’s still not too late. Stasia doesn’t know he’s disappeared. She thinks he’s in Crimea.’
‘I’m sure he is! That’s where he was posted.’
‘But he wasn’t planning on staying there, was he? Is it the partisans, the anarchists, the liberals — which bunch of lunatics has he joined?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Tell me!’
‘I can’t do this any more …’
Kitty started to sob. She wept uncontrollably. She wept and wept and would not be comforted. Christine watched her without a word; she sat on the stool and waited until the spasm had passed.
‘What can’t you do any more?’ she asked.
Suddenly, Kitty sat up and lifted her clothes to reveal the sharply protruding dome of her belly. Christine rose from her stool. For a brief moment Kitty thought she saw anger and disgust in Christine’s eyes, thought she had been betrayed, and waited for the words that would confirm this suspicion, but Christine just gave an expressionless nod and went back inside. Kitty followed her a moment later. When they reached the kitchen, Christine said, ‘I have ingredients for precisely one portion. I kept them in case the worst should happen. Or perhaps the best. I think this is both. So I’m going to prepare it for you now. I took Papa’s notebook after the funeral — Stasia didn’t want to give me the recipe! And the ridiculous reasons she gave me! It’s dangerous, it brings bad luck, there was a reason why Papa guarded the recipe with his life — I mean, really!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Sit down.’
And so Christine made Kitty her first hot chocolate, little suspecting that the misfortune her father had feared was inherent in his creation, the misfortune Stasia came to believe in when she returned to Thekla’s abandoned villa on the Fontanka with two tickets and such high hopes, would not pass Kitty by, either.
*
That same evening, Stasia had a waking dream. Thekla visited her and took her by the hand, leading her through the empty rooms of her St Petersburg villa, where there was no furniture apart from mirrors that had been taken off the walls. Stasia followed her, but whenever she thought Thekla was close enough for her to catch the sleeve of her robe, she slipped away and called to her from another room. At last Thekla stopped, in front of one of the big mirrors that now stood propped against the wall, and carefully removed the dustsheet. Stasia saw herself in the mirror, Thekla’s benevolent face beside her; she gazed at their reflections, but when she turned round to look at Thekla directly, Thekla was no longer there.
Stasia stayed in Moscow. There was still no way to leave the city. She stuck it out, waiting for a sign of life from her husband, her son, her sister. But, at Kitty’s request, her sister kept the most important news a secret from her: that in the midst of all that dying a new life had been created, and a new addition to the human race was on its way.
*
Every morning, at 05:14 precisely, Konstantin Jashi awoke with a start and a loud cry that made the other three sailors who shared his berth flinch. They would look at him, smile reassuringly, persuade him that everything was fine, make clear to him that he wasn’t in mortal danger, that they were all still alive — luckily, or unfortunately? Kostya couldn’t tell from their expressions.
He had been in action on Lake Ladoga since September and thus, without knowing it, perilously close to his beloved. In Leningrad, which had been divided into six sectors, Ida, alongside many other women and men, was erecting metre-high barricades. She helped patrol the streets, and was put to work building obstacles to stop the German tanks. She had to keep busy; she was clinging to the last remaining scraps of her sanity.
Each knew nothing of what the other was doing, had no idea that there were only thirty-two kilometres between them. Kostya didn’t know that in the first year of the blockade the woman he could not forget, whose scent, like the memory of some terrible deed, refused to leave him, had already, along with all the inhabitants of her beloved city, survived bombardments of up to eighteen hours, 70,000 bombs, hunger, sickness, and cold. And Ida didn’t know that as a sailor in the marines, tasked with securing the ‘Road of Life’, Kostya had helped get more than 44,000 tons of food and more than 60,000 tons of kerosene into Leningrad by tug and motorboat. That he had evacuated more than 50,000 people, and that he, too, had survived eighteen-hour bombardments, hunger, sickness, and cold. Kostya didn’t know, either, that Ida thought just as often as he did about their wordless intimacy, so ridiculously impossible and yet, in retrospect, so fundamentally essential. And Ida didn’t know that the marines and the soldiers of the 54th Army had voluntarily reduced their rations in favour of the besieged population, to mitigate the hell of that savage winter. Ida didn’t know that she was eating a piece of Kostya’s bread.
The winter was merciless. The lake was frozen. The transport of supplies was laborious and subject to long interruptions. People drew water from the Neva. Fires broke out all over the city; furniture and apartments burned. Both Ida and Kostya heard the same warnings on the radio. Both drank a glass of schnapps on the last day of 1941. They were separated by thirty-two kilometres of the Road of Life — or Death, depending. Neither knew what awaited them.
Kostya’s unit was on the southern shore of the lake, the Schlüsselburg side. He himself never got as far as the city. He hardly wrote any letters any more. The previous year he had still received imploring letters from his mother, postcards from his sister covered in cherry lips, and encouraging telegrams from his father. But he had not had any such news for some time now, and he no longer bothered to make contact with his homeland, either. The war had robbed him of speech and of the capacity to feel. All the dead pursued him, and he had already seen far too many die. He renounced his memories.
There was only one memory he could not shake off: the memory of the woman with the ringed fingers on Vasilievsky Island. He was haunted by her scent, stronger than the stench of death. Her memory clung to him, to his hair, to his skin; it was unmistakable, indestructible, and threatening: it weakened him, made him vulnerable.
In the spring, Hitler himself gave the order to Army Group South to advance on Stalingrad. Stalingrad was Hitler’s top priority in the summer of 1942, because of its geographical, strategic, and above all symbolic significance. The great Volga river ran through Stalingrad — one of the most important supply lines for the Soviets’ war materials. As for symbolic significance: it was in 1918, in this city that now bore
his name, that the Generalissimus had been appointed commissioner for the mass shooting of saboteurs and partisans. This was where his ascendancy had begun.
O God, now I have but a single request of Thee:
destroy me, shatter me utterly,
cast me into hell, do not stop me before my course is run,
but deprive me of all hope and swiftly destroy me forever and ever.
DANIIL KHARMS
In August 1942, the Wehrmacht occupied Krasnodar and crossed the Kuban. Not long afterwards, the Georgian Military Road fell into German hands. The Nazi flag fluttered at the top of Mount Elbrus.
Kitty’s child was due in September — by which time people were dying in their thousands in Leningrad while her brother worked tirelessly to try and prevent it; a few months before her lover would be transferred to the Georgian Legion, to the French front. But in August, when the eighteen-year-old Kitty had to give up her voluntary work at the hospital on account of her girth, three Red Army soldiers came one warm, late summer’s afternoon to collect her from the villa in the Old Town.
She offered no resistance and got in the car. Perhaps she hoped it was a secret sign from Andro — the news she had been waiting for for so long. A glimmer of hope. A little piece of future.
After a two-hour drive, they stopped in a village south of Tbilisi — I’m afraid I don’t know the precise location — got out, and entered an abandoned school building. Kitty’s companions had been silent throughout the journey; her enquiries about their destination had gone unanswered. They entered a bare room with an outsized, badly painted portrait of the Generalissimus on the wall. Two empty school benches, a broken chair, a carafe of water.
Kitty was left alone in this room for almost an hour, tired, her legs swollen. She kept peering round the door; she called out that she didn’t want to be left here so long, someone should come and talk to her, but no one answered. Finally, a woman in a Red Army uniform entered the room, followed by a man in civilian clothes. They sat down opposite her and offered her a glass of water. The woman gave her a friendly smile; the man tried to avoid Kitty’s eyes.
The Eighth Life Page 26