The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  But you understand, don’t you, Katya, that we had to go on digging the tank-trap?

  8

  It’s dark. The packed barn smells of women. Flesh, sweat, blood, dirty clothes, swollen feet. The heavy smell of work sweat, and the sharper, acrid stink of fear.

  The light of a hurricane lamp sends shadows stretching and sprawling. They’ll have a couple of hours sleep, maybe three, just enough to stop them falling over as they dig.

  Everyone’s hungry. A pail of cabbage soup with dried mushrooms is hot and tasty when it’s fresh in your belly, but the fullness doesn’t last long. And too much cabbage soup makes you shit. Shadow after shadow dodges out of the barn to crouch among trees, guts twisting. Only hope nothing splashes on these trousers, there’s no chance of washing them tonight.

  The bread supply didn’t arrive this evening. Four trucks shelled yesterday, someone said. The green and golden land of summer is changing. It smells of raw earth from hastily dug fortifications. It smells of sap where the pale-yellow inner flesh of birches quivers as the tree is chopped down. Trucks and tanks have gouged their way up to the Luga line, leaving the fields churned up behind them. They are ploughing next year’s food back into the earth before it has grown ripe. The German front line is close, but no one knows how close. There are rumours that the Luga line won’t hold. It’s bulging, like a dyke before it gives. Those motorized Panzer divisions can smash through anything.

  Not the whole length of the Luga line, for God’s sake: surely that can’t be. After all, we’ve got tanks and artillery too, and all these fortifications. There are tens of thousands of us, digging until we can’t stand up. And then there’s the Red Army, and the People’s Volunteers besides. What do you mean, the People’s Volunteers have only got one rifle between six of them? What kind of talk is that? My Piotr’s out there with his mates from the Sanitary Department. Don’t tell me they’d take all those men if they hadn’t got enough rifles for them.

  ‘Some people will believe anything,’ Evgenia hisses in Anna’s ear.

  Nothing seems to stop those Fascists. They’re not human, if you ask me. No matter how many get shot, there are always more of them, great grey waves of them racing inland, swallowing up our fortifications as if they were kids’ sandcastles. One minute they’re standing, the next they’ve crumbled away and then they disappear. You can’t even see where they were standing.

  They are shelling close tonight.

  ‘How close was that?’

  ‘If you count after the flash, like thunder, you can work it out.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid, of course it doesn’t work like thunder.’

  ‘Oh my God, that was close.’

  ‘Come on, girls,’ says Evgenia. ‘I want my sleep if you don’t. Here, this is what you do. Wrap your blanket round your head, tight, that’s the way. Fold it over your ears, just like your mother used to do – then you’ll soon drop off.’

  ‘Until they drop something on the barn.’

  Evgenia draws herself up. ‘What sort of talk is that?’

  Instinctively they are silent, glancing at one another. Who said it? Who’s the defeatist? Even here, thinks Anna, we’re still at it just the same.

  ‘If they drop a shell on the barn you’ll be fine,’ goes on Evgenia, ‘as long as you’ve got your blanket round your head. It’s just a question of having the correct attitude.’

  A tiny gasp. Can she really have meant to mock Party talk like that? Jokes are the worst thing, everyone knows. Nothing gets you disappeared faster than a joke overheard by the wrong person. Or even the right person, someone you trusted but who can’t stop herself weaselling off to the authorities like a kid in the playground trying to get in with the teachers. ‘Mi-iss, do you know what Evgenia said?’

  ‘All I do is put my blanket round my head, think about the high-up ones who are looking after us the way they always do, and I drop off right away,’ announces Evgenia. ‘Just like a baby. Nothing to worry about.’ A look of calm, virtuous stupidity spreads over the broad planes of Evgenia’s face. She thumps her fist into the pillow she’s constructed from straw and a liberated waiting-room curtain. Not the same one, of course, as Katya’s – but better not to think of that now.

  ‘Here, Anna, there’s room for two on this pillow. Bring your blanket over here. This is proper luxury, this is.’

  Luxury. The smell of Evgenia’s thick red hair, the tickle of her plait as she switches it over her shoulder. Evgenia’s big, solid body hunches in purposeful sleep. Evgenia won’t lie awake counting shell flashes. That’s not going to stop a German tank, is it? The thing is to get what rest you can, and then be ready to crack on again in the morning.

  Yes, she really is asleep. A tiny snore, a snuffle, and then Evgenia flings out her arm across Anna. It lies there, heavy and warm. Why does it feel so good, like the answer to a question? Night and terror dissolve. Anna relaxes, lapped against Evgenia’s soft, warm flesh. The white, freckled arm that drives the spade into the ground faster than anyone.

  Evgenia has that effect on everyone. Somehow, with Evgenia in your work-team, things don’t seem quite so bad. You believe that the Germans will be stopped, as long as everyone does her bit, gets as much sleep as she can and doesn’t swill down the cabbage soup so fast that she ends up with bellyache. You have to chew that little bit of bread which you’ve kept over from yesterday’s ration, then have a swallow of your soup, then another bit of bread. Nice and easy, that’s the way, no gobbling. Give your digestion a chance. And as for the Germans, there’s no sense wasting time making them bigger in your mind than they really are. They’re only human, in the end, Panzer divisions or whatever. They’ve got to eat and sleep and shit and keep themselves warm, and once all that starts getting tough it won’t matter how many tanks they’ve got.

  Anna lies still, thinking in Evgenia’s voice. She smiles in the darkness. It’ll be light in less than an hour, and they’ll start work again, and she won’t have had any sleep. Normally she’d worry about that, but not now. She can sleep walking along, if it comes to it. You don’t walk straight, but there’s usually someone there to shove you into line. She hasn’t yet worked out a way of sleeping and digging at the same time, but perhaps that’ll come, if she gets into the rhythm.

  If only Kolya’s getting on all right with Marina Petrovna. How strangely things turn out. Who would have thought, a month ago, that Marina Petrovna would be the one to send Anna off to the war? There she stood in the door of their apartment, perfectly at home, hoisting up Kolya on to her hip so that he could wave goodbye to Anna as she disappeared down the stairwell.

  The knock came late at night, just when the blue gloom of a Petersburg summer midnight gives way to morning. Anna stumbled to the door, face sticky with sleep, afraid.

  Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s me. Marina Petrovna.’

  Even in the middle of her fear, Anna had to smile. Did everyone in the whole world say ‘It’s me’ before they said their name? She slid back the bolt, and grated the key round once, twice. Marina stood there, a bundle in her arms.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Quick.’

  If only no one’s seen her. What if they recognize her. Oh God, what’s she come here for? What’s she after now?

  ‘Your father… ‘ said Marina.

  ‘No, he’s not here. He’s gone off with the People’s Volunteers.’

  They stared at each other. This wasn’t the woman Anna had gone to draw, safely out of the way in her dacha. Here she was, wanting something from Anna.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marina. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘You can’t go now, in the middle of the night. You’ll get picked up. Or they’ll trace you back to us and we’ll all get picked up.’ Anna knew how hard her voice was, but she didn’t care. How could she cope with yet another person who wouldn’t be practical, who refused to come to terms with the way things were? She’d got enough of that with her father. Why couldn’t they have a bit of sense? Why did
they think she could have sense for all of them? ‘Come on in here,’ she said. ‘Let me take that.’

  The bundle was terribly heavy.

  ‘Be careful, there are glass jars in there. But I shouldn’t have come. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known. I thought your father would be here.’

  In the electric light, Marina’s face was drained. The grey in her hair showed thickly.

  ‘He’s gone. Everyone’s gone to fight. I think he’s somewhere near Kingisepp, but I’m not sure. You know they called for volunteer reinforcements?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And so he went. He’s in the People’s Volunteers.’ Anna kept her voice flat, hiding the fear she felt. Her father was the last man who should have gone.

  ‘Of course, he would go… ‘ said Marina, as if to herself, as if drawing on layers of knowledge Anna hadn’t known she had. ‘That’s just like him. Have you heard anything from him?’

  ‘No. But I didn’t expect to, with things the way they are.’

  Marina Petrovna looked like a ghost. She stared around the apartment, as if challenging its reality.

  ‘So here I am,’ she breathed, ‘after all this time… ‘ And she picked up a photograph.

  ‘It’s very like her.

  ‘I know.’

  Anna wanted to pick up the photograph and hold it to her, the glass against her body so that Marina Petrovna couldn’t see her mother’s image. What did this woman want? Memory curled inside Anna like smoke, making shapes she didn’t want to recognize. Her mother had not wanted to be this woman’s friend. And why was that, when Vera believed so passionately in everything women could do for one another? All the women who worked with her loved her. She understood that they had to spend their lunchtimes in queues, because that was what she had to do herself. She knew that after work they would have to take a tram and then a bus to the nursery, then another bus home, and then immediately start to prepare the supper out of the heavy bag they’d been lugging around half the day. But had Marina Petrovna ever lugged a lunchtime shopping-bag, or peeled potatoes with her coat still on so as to save time, because the children were whining with hunger?

  In the photograph, Anna’s mother glanced up and smiled, unaware of them both. She was still picnicking in the forest near Tolmachevo, still sitting on a rug spread out in a birch grove where shade dappled her face. Under her summer dress Anna saw the swelling roundness that would become Kolya. It was hot that day. Vera’s ankles were swollen, and her face puffy. In her hand she held a hard-boiled egg which she had just finished peeling. In a minute she would stretch out her arm and offer it to someone who was just outside the frame of the picture. There’s a screw of salt in the basket…

  But Marina Petrovna doesn’t know anything about all that. She can pick up the photograph and stare at it as much as she likes, but she’ll never know my mother. And I shan’t tell her anything. What is she here for? What does she want from us?

  ‘Thank God,’ said Marina Petrovna, ‘that Vera knows nothing of all this.’

  ‘No.’ Anna stared at her smiling mother, lost in summer peace. You died, and you left me to deal with it all. When I show Kolya your picture and say, ‘That’s Mama,’ he doesn’t even want to look at it. He just says ‘I know,’ in a bored voice, and rushes off to play. But I know that you didn’t mean to die. You had no patience with the idea.

  ‘Anna, I’ve got something to ask you,’ says Marina Petrovna. ‘A great favour. But you must say no, if it’s impossible. I shan’t be offended.’

  Marina’s eyes shone as if she had just blinked away tears. She was still much too beautiful, even now with the lines driving deep into her skin as she smiled, and her hair showing coarse and grey under the electric light. She was an actress, wasn’t she? That’s why she could throw out so much emotion that she took up the entire room. Imagine living with that force. You’d feel crowded. It would crowd you out. Everything you felt would be less important than anything she felt. Perhaps that was why she went on battering Vera with offers of friendship, when the friendship was gone.

  ‘You want to stay here,’ said Anna.

  ‘Yes. Only for a day or two. I’ve had to leave the dacha. A friend has offered me a room, but I’ll have to wait until her children are evacuated. It should be on Wednesday. And with the Germans breaking through, I wanted to be sure to get into the city as soon as possible, before I was cut off.’

  The matter-of-fact way she said it unnerved Anna.

  ‘They’ll never get as far as your dacha. They can’t get that close to Leningrad.’

  Marina smiled in much the way Anna smiled when Kolya made one of his wild, childishly confident assertions. Fine, if you don’t want to join the grown-ups, I shan’t spoil things for you.

  ‘My old nurse has gone up to Mga. She’s got family there. But this is where I belong. This is where I should be, here in Leningrad. So if you could let me stay, just for a couple of nights – I can sleep anywhere. And I shan’t go out, so there won’t be any risk to you. And look –’ she dived into her bundle. ‘Food. I brought everything I could. Here, have these jars of honey.’

  Two jars of dark honey. Two sealed jars of lard. A greasy packet of smoked trout. Dried mushrooms, dried cherries –

  ‘This is pork fat. And the bilberry jam is last year’s. It’s full of vitamins.’

  Marina Petrovna laid the jars and packets out on Anna’s table. Her face sparkled with triumph.

  ‘I brought as much as I could carry.’

  Anna’s mouth prickled. Here it was, everything she’d searched for in the empty shops. She could smell the musk of the cherries. Already, in her mind, she was storing the food and portioning it out. But she said what she had to say.

  ‘Marina Petrovna, we can’t take this –’

  ‘Don’t you know that food is the only thing that matters in a war? The only thing. You must put all this away, Anna. You’re going to need it. You’re too young to remember what it was like last time. Such terrible sufferings… but you were only a baby then.’

  ‘I can’t let you give us so much,’ said Anna, but she knew she would, and she thought that Marina Petrovna knew it too. And perhaps Marina Petrovna wasn’t going to be so bad after all. At least she wasn’t so completely lost in how things used to be that she never bothered to find out how they were now.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Marina Petrovna. ‘There’s still some food left in the bundle. I shan’t go to my friend’s house empty-handed. But I’m not making any conditions, Anna. Whether I stay here or not, this food is for you and Kolya, for your mother’s sake.’

  If only she hadn’t tacked on that last bit, about my mother. But then she is an actress. That’s why her sentences always end properly. It’s important not to forget that. And then Marina Petrovna smiled, a sudden, naked, timid smile, unlike any expression Anna had seen on her face before.

  ‘Of course you can stay here,’ Anna said, before she knew that she was going to say it.

  They made up a bed on the slippery leather sofa, and then sat at the table by the window and drank tea as dawn washed between the crisscross strips of sticky paper.

  ‘Thank God you don’t live in a communal apartment any more,’ remarked Marina Petrovna. ‘Do you remember it, Anna? All those little Slatkin children crawling around under the table, pinching people’s ankles while your mother and Lydia Maximovna talked about childcare theory. And there was that poet – what was his name, the one who was no good and kept plonking himself down at the end of the table to copy out his poems, just when the supper was ready. He had a perfect instinct for it. And then someone would have to go and unblock the lavatory on the landing for the hundredth time, because the little Slatkins kept throwing things down it. What an impossible life, for a woman like your mother.’

  She keeps coming back to my mother, like someone feeling a hole in a tooth with her tongue.

  ‘We liked it,’ said Anna. ‘At least, I think we did.’ She remembered the packed, moist warmth in the
kitchen, the taste of sugar lumps which had been dipped into the grown-ups’ tea, the unexpected people huddling there for hours over their tea-glasses. There’d been a constant, noisy flow of talk that washed back and forth above the children’s heads. Beneath it, under the table, Anna and the Slatkin children had done exactly as they liked. Anna remembered the forest of adult legs, the different shoes, the way a woman’s foot would suddenly slide out of its sheath of leather and her toes would wriggle.

  And then everything had changed. People had stopped being idealistic about communal living. It became something you only did if you couldn’t climb any higher. If you had influence, or money, you measured it in square metres of privacy. The Slatkins had separated, and the children were sent off to their granny’s in the country. Otherwise, Lydia would never have been able to finish her novel.

  ‘I haven’t thought about them for years,’ said Anna. ‘The Slatkins, I mean. I wonder if they’re still in Leningrad.’

  ‘Lydia Maximovna’s doing very nicely, writing screenplays for Lenfilm. She’ll have been evacuated, with the rest of the company. But of course she hasn’t come near your father for years. She’s much too canny for that.’

  ‘What about the children?’

  ‘You wouldn’t guess that she’d ever had any children. She’s remade herself, Anna – she’s an object lesson to us. What a pity that we can’t all do the same.’

  Anna looked sharply at Marina Petrovna, then allowed her a small smile of recognition.

  Anna packed all the food carefully away at the back of her store-cupboard. They would touch none of it yet, not even the dried cherries that Kolya loved. Something came to her, a fleeting thought as stray as a fragment of a dream, but alive with terror. She saw Kolya’s mouth wide open, his pink mouth with the milk teeth that Anna brushed so carefully. Suddenly Kolya’s white teeth were brown, and rotting. Kolya opened his mouth for food, but there was no food. Without allowing herself to think about what she was doing, Anna fetched the empty glass jars she collected through out the winter for next year’s preserving. She built a parapet of empty jars in front of the food Marina Petrovna had given her. A fortification.