The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  The adults hold back until the water has boiled and Anna has made tea.

  ‘You’re a real Stakhanovite, Anna, making all this tea out of nothing.’

  ‘Yes, I should send a sample to our great leader. Life has become better, life has become more cheerful. And here’s the proof of it. Here, Kolya, your tea. And which jam do you want this time, raspberry or cloudberry?’

  Kolya frowns, savouring choice. ‘Raspberry. But, Anna, I don’t really remember what raspberries taste like. They don’t look like I thought.’

  ‘Here you are. Open your mouth for a spoonful and then I’ll put some on your saucer.’

  ‘Not too much,’ says Andrei. ‘He’s not used to it. Take it slowly.’

  ‘There now, good boy, you’ve had two spoonfuls. Slow down a bit. Smell it first. Isn’t it wonderful?’

  Kolya lifts the saucer to his nose and snuffs the fragrance of raspberries trapped in sugar. ‘I’m going to eat all round the edges, then I’ll eat the middle, then I’ll lick the saucer until you can’t see anything.’

  Andrei poises his spoon over Anna’s saucer. ‘Which will you have?’

  ‘Cloudberry.’

  ‘Me too.’

  You could get drunk on such sweetness. The jam syrup slides over tongue, palate, throat. You feel suddenly warm, as the sugar hits you, and the touch of acidity that the best cloudberry jam always keeps. And then a sip of scalding tea. You feel your cheeks flushing. Surely, for a moment, you look like yourself again, as you scrape up the last quarter-spoonful. You are young again, with smooth, full flesh. You wipe the saucer clean with your finger, and suck it.

  ‘Cloudberries remind me of home,’ says Andrei. ‘And blackberries, too. When blackberries are ripe in hot sun, they already smell like jam.’

  ‘But you don’t have hot sun in Siberia.’

  ‘Of course we have. No one has a summer like ours. The sun comes down to the earth, to where we are – it’s not like your high-up Petersburg sun. And it really burns. We roll around in it, just as we roll in the snow in winter-time. You don’t know anything about it, Anna, until you’ve been there, but I’ll show you. Just wait.

  ‘We’ll take bread and goat’s cheese, and a berry-pail. Even in winter you can find berries under the snow, if you know where to look. The snow lies deep on them. There’s an ice-crust, and when you break through it, there’s fine soft snow, like powder. You have to dig down, but lightly, with your fingers, so that you don’t crush the berries. When the snow’s cleared away, the bushes spring up, and the berries are there, coated in ice. The ice preserves them. You can walk all day out there, and feel better than you did when you set out.’

  ‘Yes, goat’s cheese… Do you think we could have another spoonful, Marina, or should we save it?’

  Marina seems not to hear the question. She’s turning her saucer round in her hand, but not eating it.

  ‘Marina, aren’t you going to eat yours? You must eat.’

  ‘Not now. I’ll drink my tea. But you eat. Take another spoonful. Kolya, have a little bit of mine, and see if you remember what cloudberries taste like. You know what this reminds me of?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Easter.’

  ‘Easter! Why?’

  ‘You’re too young, all of you, to remember. We’d fast for six weeks, even in the theatre we’d fast, when I was twenty or twenty-one. And then suddenly you’d know that things were changing. It was exactly the feeling that you get when the wind changes direction, and begins to blow from the south-west. And then Holy Week came. Holy Thursday was the day I loved most, when we’d boil onion skins and dip our eggs in the water to colour them. There was such an atmosphere. It grew day by day, mounting up until you knew things couldn’t possibly go on like this. Down by the river you could already hear water running strongly, under the ice. And the surface of the ice had that grainy look it doesn’t have at any other time, except just before it melts.

  ‘We’d go to confession, all of us, even those who weren’t really believers. Even if you didn’t really believe, you’d feel sure that something had happened. It was like winter lifting from your soul. You would notice everything: little children running about with red cheeks, fresh as bread, and the way ice stayed thick and dirty in the lee of walls, where the sun didn’t come.

  ‘I had a pair of black suede boots with little heels, and I remember picking my way to the theatre and watching the little square tips of the boots and thinking how perfect they were, and how much I liked the noise of my heels tapping on the pavement. Suddenly we were all eager to help one another, even those of us who were rivals for parts. Of course it didn’t last. And when Sunday came everyone would greet you, and you’d greet everyone: Christ is risen! And they’d answer: He is risen indeed! In our house, when I was growing up, they always served cloudberry jam with the pashka on Easter Day.’

  ‘Marina, eat it, please.’

  ‘I’ll eat it later. I’m so tired, I’ve got to sleep now.’

  ‘Just a little. Here, smell it.’

  Anna holds the spoon to Marina’s mouth. Marina’s mouth wrinkles, opens a little, then closes. With all her heart Anna wants Marina to swallow, and to eat her share. But with something else, which doesn’t feel like her heart at all, she reasons, ‘If Marina doesn’t eat, there will be more for Kolya. And it’s not as if I haven’t tried to make her.’

  ‘Don’t, Anna. I want to lie down. I’m really not hungry.’ They help her into bed, and cover her with the stove-warmed blanket. Her eyes close at once, and she sinks away from them into sleep.

  ‘Now, Kolya, let’s get you settled on the sofa…’

  Kolya curls up in his nest, with the chessboard and paper pieces.

  ‘And then the bad horse comes up and tries to swallow all the people, but they don’t let him, they run away and their friends help them…’

  ‘It’s a bad sign,’ says Andrei quietly.

  ‘What? But he’s looking so much better. More energy –’

  ‘Not Kolya. Marina. Not that she didn’t eat, but that she’s not hungry. It’s a recognized stage in the physiology of starvation.’

  And in spite of himself, and for all his warm sympathy towards Marina, Andrei can’t help a faint gleam of satisfaction crossing his face at his accurate, professional diagnosis. He’d understood her condition, right down to the torrent of memory she’d let loose. That was all part of it, too. He knows what is happening and he has the right words to describe it. That was what his professor said, two days ago: ‘You’ve already experienced what very few doctors ever experience. If you live, you’ll become a good doctor.’ And he had glowed with it. Yes, in the frozen corridor, where corpses lay like wood, he had been elated.

  But it’s Marina he’s talking about. She’s always scared him a bit, but she’s part of this ‘home’ where in weeks they’ve grown into one another more closely than a family of forty years. It’s the place where Anna bends over Kolya with her lips moving as he eats, where Marina and Anna pass a sliver of scented soap between them. It’s a place of books, drawings, ancient rugs that are loved all the more because they are worn out, and of meticulous sharing-out of soup and cereal into equal portions which are then sabotaged by both women’s determination to give Kolya that featherweight on the scales which may add up to his life.

  It’s where Anna sets out for her hours of queuing in savage cold, where she jots down for him items of news she’s heard on Radio Leningrad, because otherwise she’ll have forgotten them by the time he gets home. She worries about not being able to remember things, but he tells her that it’s only a temporary symptom. Her diet is lacking in important minerals and vitamins, he tells her solemnly, and they both laugh, but he knows that she’s relieved. And then she presents him with an insulating lining for his boots, which she’s made out of the felt underside of her father’s desk blotter.

  He should not have spoken of Marina like that, as if he were on a ward-round and she were any anonymous patient. Quickly, to blot out his w
ords, he says, ‘We mustn’t let her sleep too long. We must rouse her in not more than an hour’s time, and feed her. And we must keep checking her temperature.’

  ‘She’s exhausted, that’s all,’ says Anna. ‘I don’t know how long she was sitting in that room.’

  ‘No.’ He frowns, lost in his own thoughts. ‘We shouldn’t have let her go on talking like that. She’s too weak.’

  ‘She wanted to.’

  ‘Yes, people get like that. The past is clearer to them than the present. They have to speak about it. And then they stop talking, and you know they aren’t remembering any more. They’ve gone back there.’

  ‘… and the horse stamps his feet so hard that all the people are frightened and they hide in their houses, right back here where the horse can’t get at them…’

  ‘Anna. Would you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’ she asks, to gain time, because she thinks she’s already understood the question.

  ‘If I were dead, and there was nothing you could do for me any more, would you still go and sit with me?’

  ‘We’re not like them, Andrei.’

  ‘I know we’re not.’

  ‘We’ve had different lives. And they were born in such different times. They try to belong to the present, but they can’t.’

  ‘They loved one another.’

  ‘She loved him. I’m not so sure about my father. Perhaps he loved the fact that she loved him.’

  ‘But she kept on.’

  ‘Yes. And she won’t stop. She’ll go on until she dies, too.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘You sound so cold, Anna.’

  ‘I’m not cold. It’s only that I don’t believe in sacrificing yourself, when the sacrifice doesn’t benefit anyone.’

  ‘It’s what she wants.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t sit beside me?’

  ‘Andrei, you’re asking me something that doesn’t make any sense. I’m not Marina. I’ve got Kolya to think of.’

  ‘I know you have. It’s not that I don’t understand that, it’s just –’

  ‘I know. You wish that I hadn’t got him. You want us to start together from nothing, together, with nothing to think about but each other. I don’t blame you. Elisaveta Antonovna, at the nursery, always used to get angry about the way I was with Kolya. “Really, Anna Mikhailovna, anyone would think that child was your own son. Don’t you realize what a bad impression you’re making?” She didn’t think any upstanding Soviet citizen would look twice at me. My class origins for a start, and then a child in tow… Well, maybe she was right.’

  ‘How can you say that? You know that isn’t what I mean. I’m talking about you, not about other people.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kolya’s voice has faded to a murmur. He’s tired, too, after the burst of energy that the jam has given him. He lies back on the sofa cushions, his face wiped clean of mood, his eyes unfocused, staring at the paper strips that crisscross the window. His lips move.

  ‘Kolya, what are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m talking to my little horse. I’m telling him to be brave, because the big horse has hurt his head. He kicked him.’

  ‘That wasn’t nice.’

  ‘No. You shouldn’t kick people. Anna, is Marina dead?’

  ‘No, of course not. What made you think that?’

  ‘Only she looks dead.’

  ‘She’s sleeping. She’s very tired.’

  ‘Like Daddy.’

  ‘He’s dead, Kolya.’

  ‘I know. But he was tired as well.’

  ‘You remember, you said goodbye to him.’

  ‘Of course I remember. I’m not a baby. Anna, do a lot of people always die?’

  ‘No, not like this. I told you. It’s because of the war. Usually, people don’t die until they get old.’

  ‘Oh, I forgot you told me that.’

  ‘I’ll play a game of chess with you, Kolya,’ says Andrei, ‘and then I’ve got to go.’

  ‘To the hospital?’

  ‘Yes, to the hospital.’

  ‘Andrei?’

  What?’

  ‘Are we – you know – like Daddy and Marina?’

  ‘You mean, are we going to die?’

  Kolya presses his lips together, and nods.

  ‘No,’ says Andrei. We’re not going to die. Not you and me and Anna. We’re going to live.’

  Kolya’s lips purse in an exaggeratedly nonchalant, soundless whistle. ‘It’s only that I wasn’t sure, so I wanted to know,’ he explains.

  Andrei sets out the paper chess pieces, going over their positions with Kolya. ‘Now you show me, Kolya, where your king goes, and where your queen goes.’

  They play for ten minutes or so, in the guttering candlelight. Anna watches without speaking. Soon, she will have to move, but not just yet. She has found a leather manicure case which belonged to her father. He must have forgotten about it, because it was in the pocket of his dressing-gown. It is pigskin, she thinks. She has emptied out scissors, clippers and emery board, and removed the metal fastenings. Now she must fetch water, and put the manicure case on the stove to make broth from it. It will take a long time before the pigskin softens, but it will be worthwhile. There’ll be nourishment in it. They’ll drink the broth, and Kolya can chew the pigskin.

  Andrei glances up. The angle of candlelight flushes his hollow, old man’s face with youth. He smiles at her. Although his eyes are only shadows in this light, she knows their exact colour. They are blue-black, like the waters of Lake Baikal. Andrei says that Lake Baikal is ten kilometres deep. No one knows what is down there, though they say that Baikal sturgeon can live for three hundred years. The waters of the lake are pure and life-giving. Even the stones from its shores bring luck.

  How much you could hide, in water ten kilometres deep. But Andrei’s eyes don’t conceal anything from her in their depths. However deep she goes, there is still love, so complete and undistorted that it frightens her. She is used to living with tangled people, and their tangled stories. But Andrei isn’t like that. I love you, I want to be with you, come with me. She hasn’t grown up with such words. Maybe that was why she turned him away when he asked his question. Maybe he frightens her, just a little, because he’s at ease in such deep waters. He is going to make her join him there. And he asks her questions no one has ever asked before. ‘So you wouldn’t sit beside me?’

  ‘You look so nice,’ she says now, ‘you and Kolya.’

  Andrei smiles without answering.

  ‘Yes, I would,’ she goes on, so quietly that he can’t possibly hear her. But he does.

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘Sit with you.’

  *

  Outside, the wind whines. It brings snow with it, which will swallow up Andrei as soon as he steps out of the apartment building’s shelter. It will buffet him, blind him, cover his cap and his eyelashes. It will sting his eyes with particles of ice. He will stumble on, hugging walls, and feeling for the edge of the pavement with his cherry-wood stick. It’s a blizzard in which anyone could be forgiven for dying.

  ‘Anna, when’s Andrei coming back?’

  ‘Not until tomorrow. I’ve already told you, so don’t keep on asking. He’s doing the night shift.’

  ‘He’s been gone ages.’

  She blows out the candle, and lifts a corner of the blackout. But there’s nothing to see.

  ‘Is it still snowing, Anna?’

  ‘Yes, it’s still snowing. Go to sleep.’

  In the German lines sentries stamp their feet. Christmas is over, and here’s a new year of filthy Russian weather. We should have been halfway to China by now. Soon will be. A few more weeks ought to do it.

  In Leningrad, a tank rolls down towards the Moscow Gates, on its way to the front line. Its thirty tons of steel rock and grind over the tramway. From city to battle is no distance at all.

  By the Baltic shores,
the sea is frozen, too, and snow lies so thickly on it that it’s impossible to tell where the sea ends and the land begins.

  Snow falls between the birches, and on to the frozen Neva. It covers the rubble of shelled apartments, and the burned-out farmyard where Mikhail bought his eggs. It drifts into abandoned, looted villages, hiding shallow graves. Two armies stare through the blizzard, straining for enemy movement. All planes are grounded, and there will be no bombing tonight. Over the ice road, the road of life, lorries move slowly forward from control post to control post. The ice is thickening every day, as winter grips more deeply. The ice road is beginning to do its job.

  *

  Vasya Sokolov never expected to end up driving lorries over the ice road, but that’s where they’ve posted him, and that’s what he’s doing. He knows he’s lucky. He’s kept hold of the Sokolov luck. He hasn’t ended up on the front line. This is his second crossing of the day, loaded up with flour and ammunition. He’s going to be several barrels above plan if he manages a third crossing. Comrades! Every extra bag of flour you carry will save a hundred Leningrad children from starvation! Yeah, but you can’t think like that. Not all the time. Not when there are delays, and the bags of flour sit on the back, getting nowhere.

  This lorry’s a bastard anyway. Something’s been wrong with the steering all week. Vasya smashes his hand down on the steering-wheel. Don’t play tricks with me, you fucker. People are getting shot for less. The lorry groans and heaves itself on over the rutted ice, slipping and sliding. Still dragging to the left. How far back was that repair station? A couple of hundred metres? Could head back there. No. Go on, you bastard. Don’t fuck with me.

  The lorry mounts a ridge of ice. Its wheels spin, then catch. The engine labours. At that moment the lorry’s juddering loosens a connection. The electrical spark can’t quite jump across. The engine stops.

  Vasya knows immediately what the problem is. It’s happened before. All he has to do is get the hood open and restore the connection. Vasya’s got a real feel for engines and he’s done a maintenance course. It won’t take him five minutes to get this bastard going again, at least for long enough to push on to the next control post.