The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  Marina Petrovna did not leave. When Wednesday came, her friend’s children weren’t evacuated. They would have to wait for the next convoy, and until they left there would be no space for Marina in her friend’s apartment. Anna accepted it, not letting herself know how she felt about Marina’s continuing presence. She was determined to see it as something impersonal, one more consequence of the war. They did not quarrel. Marina Petrovna seemed to want to be friends, but that wasn’t possible yet. Kolya liked her. That was important. It freed Anna for fire-watching and queuing.

  And then the call came for more volunteers, not to fight this time, but to go and dig defences. It didn’t matter if you were fourteen or sixty, as long as you could hold a spade. A hundred thousand Leningraders were needed. No, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. Posters bloomed everywhere. To the trenches! To the fortifications! Defend the Motherland!’ Long lines of schoolchildren waited to register, chattering about tank-traps and fortifications instead of maths homework. New words flew about, words these kids had never even heard before, let alone used. Strategic defences. Signing up. Immediate danger of invasion. Crisis.

  Now they were off to learn what these words meant, with their bare hands and maybe a knapsack with a bit of food and a change of underwear in it, if they were lucky.

  And there was Anna, an outsider again. Neither a student, nor really a worker any more. The nursery had closed, then re-opened, then closed again after the latest evacuations. She’d scrubbed the toilets for the last time, and straightened the rows of tables. The silence was like a holiday. Elizaveta Antonovna had been drafted into a Vital position in the evacuation service’, where her solid Party skills would outweigh her ignorance of the needs of children. Lyuba had vanished. Anna wandered through the empty, sun-filled rooms, and then out to the children’s garden, where their sunflowers grew as they grew every year, vigorously and unequally. How disappointed little Vaska Piskov would be to see that his sunflower was completely dwarfed by the thrusting sunflower of Pavlik Orlovsky, who hadn’t bothered to water his plot at all, even after a stern lecture from Elizaveta Antonovna.

  Anna locked up, delivered the keys, then went off wandering again with Kolya. They took a tram down to the Baltic station, where crowds of students surged and jostled, waiting for trains that would take them where the action was.

  ‘Are we going on a train?’ asked Kolya, tugging at her hand. She held on tight to him, afraid of losing him in the rush of people.

  ‘No, we’re not going anywhere. Not yet, anyway.

  ‘I bet I could be a good fighter.’

  ‘They aren’t going to fight. They’re going to build defences.’

  ‘I would fight, if I was grown up. Why don’t you fight, Anna?’

  ‘Because I’ve got you. I can’t leave you on your own, can I?’

  ‘No, you can’t leave children on their own, because they might get lost and not be able to find theirselves.’

  But he said it glibly, by rote, as if it was something that could never possibly happen to him.

  And then suddenly it became possible. She could go. Marina Petrovna simply said, ‘It’s ridiculous, the two of us stuck here looking after one child. I can’t dig, with my back – I’ve never even been able to dig my own garden. But if you go, I’ll look after Kolya. He’ll be fine with me. We’ll get on with building our fort, won’t we, Kolya?’

  ‘Will we get it finished by the time she comes back?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  How heartless children could be, Anna thought. He was perfectly happy to let her go, now that Marina Petrovna was there to make papier-mache from wallpaper paste and newspaper, and draw plans for the fort which was going to be built to exactly the right scale for Kolya’s toy soldiers. They were going to paint it in camouflage colours.

  ‘But how will you manage? What about the shopping?’

  Because you’re not a person yet. You haven’t got the right papers. You don’t really live here. If you can’t get your own rations, you’ll be eating up ours.

  ‘I’m going to get all that sorted out,’ said Marina Petrovna briskly. ‘I’m here in Leningrad to release a worker for volunteer duty. I’ll get my papers. These aren’t normal times. And meanwhile I can do the shopping down at the Sennaya Market. I’ve got money.’

  Yes, it’s all worked out right for you, thought Anna. She could not separate out her feelings for Marina Petrovna, or decide which to trust. Was Marina generous, or self-interested? Was she manipulating Anna, or trying to help her? But you couldn’t listen to her voice and disbelieve her. That came from her training, perhaps. She was an actress. Doubts came later, worming into Anna’s imagination. This was the woman her mother hadn’t trusted. Vera had tapped Marina Petrovna’s letters on the table, and handed them back, unread, to Anna’s father.

  So there was Kolya waving goodbye, in the arms of a woman he had never seen a week before, entrusted to a woman whom Anna had wanted to draw, not to live with. Marina Petrovna had won. She’d made her place in their lives. She was there, opening and closing the doors of their apartment, saying to Kolya when they’d finished shopping, ‘Come on, it’s time to go home.’

  Evgenia’s arm weighs heavy. But if I move, I’ll wake her, and she needs her sleep. I’ll just curl sideways, like this, and wait until they come to get us up. It can’t be long now.

  Suddenly Evgenia heaves herself around. Her breath, sour but not unpleasant, blows softly into Anna’s face. Her warm, acrid, redhead’s scent enfolds them both. Her arm isn’t just lying there now, it’s encircling, gripping, remembering some lost lover or child who appears as a phantom in Evgenia’s dreams. But there is nothing ghost-like about the warmth of Evgenia. Their bodies lie close, and alive. Katinka should be here too. She ought to be lying on the other side of Anna, moaning on about how she’s got straw stuck down her neck and she’s never gong to be able to sleep in this place, it’s even worse than going on a Pioneers’ camp. Katinka should be examining her white legs for scratches, and saying in a high, aggrieved voice, ‘It’s all right for you, Anna!’ because she knows that Anna is only a nursery assistant, not a student on her way to better things. And therefore Anna was naturally better able to cope with straw and scratches. Katinka’s parents were not Party members in good standing for nothing. They’d taught her well.

  Katinka, dimpling a smile at her reflection in the morning bucket of water, and then brushing out her fair hair, fifty strokes on one side, fifty on the other, like the well-brought-up girl she was. That hairbrush was about the only thing she’d thought of bringing with her.

  ‘My mother would kill me if I didn’t look after my hair. She acts as if it’s hers, she’s been taking care of it so long.’

  All that muddle of a person gone. And they’re moving us on today. What if they don’t even bury her? No, they won’t bury her. There isn’t time.

  The ground shakes. Women start up, clutching blankets.

  ‘Oh my God, what was that?’

  ‘Just the shelling, same as always,’ says Evgenia, sitting up calmly, shaking back her red hair. ‘Getting a bit close, though, isn’t it, girls? What about you, Anna? Did you have a nice sleep, duckie?’

  ‘Duckie!’ says Raisa Fyodorovna. ‘Why d’you have to talk like a village girl, when you’re a Leningrader like us?’

  ‘’Cos I am a village girl really, only I came to the city when I was eight, to make something of myself. What’s wrong with us village girls, anyway? At least we know how to dig, which is more than I can say for some.’ And she mimics Raisa’s ineffectual pawing at the earth.

  ‘Can’t you think of anything better than making fun of people who are doing their best?’ spits Raisa. ‘Listen to that shelling. They’re right on top of us.’

  ‘That’s our artillery, can’t you tell the difference? We’re answering back. Those bastards aren’t going to have everything their way.’

  Evgenia stands up, and twists her hair into a knot. ‘Come on then, my darlings, that’s eno
ugh tarting yourselves up – time to get on with the digging. The Germans aren’t going to wait while our Raisa cleans her fingernails.’

  9

  (Extract from the diary of Mikhail Ilyich Levin.)

  Triumphant return bearing two eggs. Got them from the farm we can see through the trees: just one old woman left, sitting by the unlit stove. She wouldn’t take my money, called me Sir, and talked about the war as if it was the weather.

  ‘I don’t know what’11 happen to the hens and pigs with all those armies running around, and no man in the house, but what can’t be cured must be endured.’

  Two sons in the army, husband dead, daughter-in-law gone three days ago with the grandchildren to walk to the railway station at S—.

  ‘If the trains are still running, they’ll go on to Peter,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t walk so far, not with my legs. So they left me to mind the shop.’

  She thrust her legs out to show me. They needed dressing, but there was no one left to do it, she said. Knots of blue vein wriggled down the inside of her calves. The skin was too white, dead white, with raw purple and red sores in it which were eating away at the healthy flesh. One of the sores was suppurating. Andrei would have known what to do.

  ‘I sit out in the yard like this, Sir, so I can get the sunlight. Sunlight’s better than liniment.’ She pointed to the wooden stool by the doorway. ‘I carry that outside, and I sit there, and the hours fly by.’

  She hobbled out to get the eggs for me. Very slowly she creaked down on to her knees, opened the hen-house door, and fumbled around inside. At last she brought out two small eggs covered with shit and straw and she came hobbling back, cradling them in the palms of her hands. She blew on the eggs, then rubbed off the bits of straw.

  ‘These are today’s eggs, these are, nice and warm. Put them in water, and they’ll sink like stones. You try it, Sir. That’ll show you how fresh they are.’

  She took me round to the pigsty and showed me the sow and four piglets. A solid, bristly sow with wicked eyes slanting up at us to see if we’d brought any swill, or if we were going to be daft enough to get within biting range.

  ‘She’s one you want to watch. She’s had my son pinned on his back before now, in that corner. If I hadn’t of held her off with the pitchfork she’d have had him. But there isn’t a sow like her for breeding. Twelve fine piglets she bore in her last litter. We gave four of them to the chairman of our kolkhoz at six weeks, then my daughter-in-law’s family had three. We ate one ourselves, and we’re rearing these four. The way the wind is blowing, the high-up ones are turning a blind eye to pigs these days, thank God for it. Well, you understand it all, Sir, because you’re an educated man.

  ‘We used to have a cow, but she died. My daughter-in-law reckons that if we rear these four pigs, we can trade them for a cow in the kolkhoz market. But now they’ve put a tax on our orchard, so I don’t know how we’re to pay that except out of the pig money.’

  She knew how it all works. You have to have so much for the kolkhoz chairman, to make sure everything goes smoothly and you don’t get into trouble. So much for the tax on orchards. And give thanks to God that they’ve decided to turn a blind eye to pigs, since the ‘model charter’ of 1935. She rattled the whole lot off as if these were the laws of nature. And I felt ashamed, even though none of it was my doing. Words like these don’t belong in the mouths of old women who can’t help crossing themselves when they say the words ‘thank God’, even though it’s been drummed into them that God has no place in our great struggle against backwardness.

  Model charters, edicts, labour-days, allotted tasks, ‘liquidate the kulaks as a class’. I didn’t make up those words. So why did I feel guilty? Perhaps because I’m an educated man. One of those who ought to have given her bread, but instead all she’s had is words, dropping on her like millstones. We were going to make everything different, and better. To hear Vera talking about healthcare in the community was like watching the sun come up.

  Well, we certainly made things different.

  The old woman bent over the pen and scratched the sow’s back.

  ‘She’s as good as gold with me. It’s the men she doesn’t like. You can’t blame her. She’s sharp enough to know that she had twelve and now there’s only four left. She remembers that it was my son took her piglets away.’

  I could have stayed there for hours. I didn’t want to leave the old woman. Not because there was anything I could do for her, but because inside that little yard you couldn’t believe in anything but the cluck of hens, the midday heat, and the wicked grin of that sow as she bided her time. There were bluebottles all over the midden, and horseflies. Everything was rotting down nicely, the way it should. She was so sure it would all go on, just as it had always done, season after season. Even if the high-up ones went completely crazy, they couldn’t stop apples growing on apple trees. The pigs would grow, the hens would lay, and once the midden was ripe her son would appear to spread the muck on the potatoes.

  ‘This is our “private plot”, you see, Sir. They let us grow our vegetables here, and keep our hens. There you are, Sir, that’s the way. Wrap the eggs round in your kerchief and you’ll get them home safe.’

  I fetched the stool for her and she sat down in the yard, and hitched up her skirts to the knee so that the sun could warm her raw, swollen legs. Vera would have known what to put on those sores.

  ‘I must be on my way,’ I said. I pressed money for the eggs into her hand, and she got out a ragged handkerchief, tied the coins into a knot in the corner, and stuffed them deep into her pocket.

  ‘Will you be walking this way again?’ she asked me, as if I were a gentleman on a rambling holiday.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you’ll always find eggs here. I can’t eat them myself, never have been able to. I’d give them to you for nothing if it wasn’t for my daughter-in-law. They’re her hens, you see, and she’ll know at once if I don’t get the right price for them. The way she can add the figures together, you wouldn’t believe it. She keeps herself sharpened up like a knife.’

  Her face creased, chewing over the thought of her daughter-in-law. I left her sitting in the yard. By the time I’d got to the gate I’m sure she’d already forgotten about me.

  Andrei and I have just eaten our eggs. Little fires are burning, everything’s calm and settled and almost like home. That’s the main thing I remember from the last war. You had to make a home out of wherever you were, no matter what the place was like.

  We lit cigarettes, and Andrei started telling me about camping out in the taiga in summer. He won’t hear a word said against Siberia. We’re all ignorant and prejudiced, he says. It’s the most beautiful place in the world. The air is free and bright, not like our muddy Leningrad air. The water is the purest on earth. When you drink it, out in the taiga, ice-cold, you feel it flowing through your body like new life. And the people there are quite different from city people.

  ‘No wonder, since they’re all ex-cons and politicos,’ Ilya commented. ‘Siberia’s not exactly somewhere you’d go to by choice.’

  ‘So you’re criticizing the wives of the Decembrists now, are you?’ Andrei said. ‘Why d’you think they chose to follow their husbands? Typical Leningrad narrow-mindedness. There is life beyond the Neva, you know.’

  ‘So why’re you here then, if it’s so great in Irkutsk? And let’s leave the wives of the Decembrists out of it. They didn’t have such a bad time, if you ask me.’

  ‘Are you saying they weren’t martyrs?’ broke in a Komsomol boy called Petya.

  So here we are in the middle of nowhere, in the path of the German advance, equipped with entrenching tools instead of the machine-guns and rifles we need, but still arguing about the martyr status of the Decembrists’ wives. Nothing, to me, more effectively sums up both our strength and our weakness.

  ‘I’m saying nothing,’ said Ilya, leaning forward so his face was a couple of inches from Petya’s. ‘Nothing, right? You got th
at?’

  And suddenly there was something so impressive about him that Petya simply said, ‘I know. Don’t get me wrong.’

  Petya’s a nice boy. Idealistic, but not the informer type. Meanwhile, Andrei had pulled out the textbook on thoracic surgery he carries everywhere, and started on Chapter Three for the dozenth time. But every time Andrei begins to study, something happens and we have to –

  Diary ends. Written in pencil on blank side of folded diary sheets:

  Diary sheets found by medical student Andrei A— in the breast-pocket of Mikhail L—, a member of the People’s Volunteers wounded in the German offensive of 7—8th August, and taken by the said Andrei A—for safe-keeping and return to his family.