The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  It’s very quiet. Snow sifts across the windscreen while Vasya fastens his ear-flaps and reaches down for the screwdriver. He opens the door and the wind hits him. A wind straight from the north, stinging with snow. Thirty below, fifty with this wind. It’s like being skinned. A shocked sound comes out of Vasya’s throat. He shuts his mouth, and feels his way round to the front of the lorry, keeping one hand on the metal. In this whiteout he could be five metres from the lorry and lost for good.

  The hood creaks open. He props it and clambers up to peer inside, but snow’s falling so thickly he can’t see the wiring. He wipes his face and starts again. It’s not the same connection. He tugs gently, but these wires are secure. Right. Try again. Snow spits and melts on the warm metal. There it is. The wire’s snapped and he can’t see the end of it. It’s frayed now, and too short. It won’t reconnect. Still, that doesn’t matter, all he needs is another piece of wire, and he’s got some back in the cab. No problem, now he knows where the problem is. He feels his way back to the cab, gasping with the punch of the wind, climbs up, and looks for his wire. Nothing. Some bastard’s nicked it.

  No. It was him. He used the wire yesterday and forgot to replace it. Vasya’s face darkens but he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t punch the steering-wheel this time.

  Got to think of something quick. Any piece of metal’ll do. Wire securing the crates in the back, maybe.

  A hair-grip would do. What if he’d had a girl in the cab and her hair-grip fell out when they were doing it and he found it now, closed his hand on it, just the right length. He could get the job done in no time.

  Round the back, untie the straps over his load, get a look at those crates. Suddenly he thinks he hears an engine. Coming closer, someone behind him, one of the boys, maybe Ugly Yuri or Mitya.

  ‘Here, mate!’ Vasya shouts. ‘I’m over here!’

  And he’s let go of the straps, he’s waving his arms, he’s stepped away from the lorry towards the engine noise. He’d never have done it if it hadn’t been for the wind knifing up his brain.

  He’s on his own. He’s left his load. People get shot for less. He reaches out, sweeping about him with his arms. Snow that way. Is that the way the engine noise came? He can’t hear it now. The wind’s so loud, beating into his skull. Snow this way. He takes another step, reaching out for metal. Snow falls into his arms.

  His sacks of flour with the stamps on them: FOOD FOR LENINGRAD. He won’t be above plan if he doesn’t get a move on. Get back to the lorry, find a piece of wire, make the connection, start the engine.

  But he can’t find it. His lorry won’t tell him where it is. It stays quiet, playing hidey in the snow.

  ‘Where are you, you fucker?’ shouts Vasya Sokolov.

  The wind drives. The snow pours on to him. He puts up his hands to shield his eyes but the snow stings its way into them. Now he doesn’t know where he is.

  A hair-grip, that’s all he wants. Like little girls wear to keep their hair back. They’re always losing them and then their hair flops over their faces.

  ‘Vasya, Vasya, can you see my hair-grip? It’s fallen in the water. I’ve got to find it!’

  Who said that?

  Andrei stops in the shelter of an apartment doorway. He knows where he is. Straight on, third turning on the right, and down to the hospital. He can find his way, even in this whiteout. Perhaps he could let himself rest for a few minutes. If he kicks the snow off these steps, and sits down, just for a little while, it will be quite easy to lever himself up again. He’s got the stick to help him.

  He’s used to worse blizzards than this, and he knows what to do. He doesn’t come from Irkutsk for nothing. It’s peaceful here, in this little doorway which is fantastically hung with icicles. Here, there’s time to think. Imagine little Kolya, asking if we were going to die, just as if he were asking about a trip to the zoo. And I said no.

  But in the hospital there’ll be more patients than ever. Children with shiny skin stretched over swollen bellies, old men dead in corridors, fever, dysentery, dystrophy, frostbite, failing eyesight, suppurating gums, tuberculosis, pneumonia. Most of them will die, but before they do they need a doctor there to look carefully into their eyes and mouths and ears, to sound their chests, to take their pulse and offer water, and such drugs as we have. They must have what there is. There must be someone who is still on his feet, to take the baby out of the arms of its dying mother and tell her, ‘It’s all right, we’ll take care of him.’ We are men, not beasts.

  Andrei heaves himself up. As he emerges from the shelter of the doorway, a blast of wind hurls snow into his face. He blinks, hunches his head between his shoulders to protect it, grips the cherry-wood stick, and walks into the wind.

  30

  It is May. The sky is a high, clear blue, and although there are a few white clouds floating at the horizon, towards the Gulf of Finland, they never cross the sun or dim the radiance of summer light.

  In streets, in parks, on bridges and along the water, people are strolling. They blink in the bright sunlight. They are thin, marked by sickness and weakness. Some lean on sticks, although they are young. They keep away from the side of the street which is signed as the most dangerous in case of shelling, even when this means that they must walk in shadow. Leningrad is still under siege.

  But there is food. These are people who have eaten this morning, and will eat again tonight. They’re hungry, they’re underfed, but they’re not starving any more. Trams are running, electricity is flowing. In January the ice road began to fulfil its promise. All through the rest of the winter, and until the ice thawed, it brought in food and fuel. Most of those who are still living will now live.

  There’s a new military commander in charge, an artillery specialist. Govorov, he’s called. ‘Let’s hope he gets our guns talking a bit louder,’ people say, when they learn their new commander’s name. He’s a real strategist. When it comes to shelling the German positions he’s a tiger. Doesn’t wait for their guns to open up, but belts into their artillery first. Well, that’s clear enough; anyone can see the sense of that, provided you’ve got the guns to do it. And Govorov seems to have the knack of getting the guns.

  But on the ground he’s more of a puzzle. His line seems to be that sometimes you have to fall back, in order to attack. But you wouldn’t think there was anywhere to fall back to, what with the Germans so close, shelling us from the Pulkovo Heights, making camp in the Peterhof Palace. Soldiers on the front line say they can hear the Germans yelling sometimes, in what they think is Russian. ‘All Russkies kaput! Stalin kaput, Leningrad kaput!’ Funny to hear them bawling away about you-know-who like that.

  Govorov’s already pulled the 86th back from Nevskaia Dubrovka, our foothold on the other side of the Neva, from which maybe, one day, we could have pushed outward, deep into German flesh. Nevskaia Dubrovka had already used up so many lives. Surely we should never have abandoned it. Surely you’ve got no choice but to keep on paying for a piece of land, once it’s already cost you so much in blood. You’d have thought Govorov would have held on to it, whatever happened. Doesn’t he know how many men have coughed up their guts into that soil, and laid down their bones for the next man to walk on, as if they were building Petersburg all over again? But what does Govorov care about that? He’s been airlifted in, another high-up with his orders straight from God.

  ‘Govorov’s all right. Govorov knows what he’s up to. You’ll see, he’s got a plan,’ say the infantry of the 86th, who might have had enough of being the symbol of Leningrad’s heroic resistance.

  The shelling is not so bad today. The sheer, sharp quality of light bathes everyone and reveals everything. These are the survivors, emerging from their winter of starvation. Lips are pale and cracked, faces drawn into triangles, hair dry and dusty. The siege has gutted them.

  It’s not half over yet, or even a quarter over. The radio keeps telling them to brace themselves, go forward and continue their heroic resistance. The Germans are still advancing dee
p into Russia. Intelligence suggests that a new German offensive on Leningrad is planned, and meanwhile the blockade continues to grip. But there are supplies in hand now. Even now that the ice has gone, there’ll be shipping to transport food and ammunition into the city.

  Pavlov is no longer walking a bare wire. He has got figures to add to his columns now. Already it’s vanished, the terror of nothingness that gripped Leningrad that winter. That winter. To speak of it, or not to speak, that’s the question. It’s too close, too vast, like an immense fall you have only just not fallen. Behind, there are the sheer, icy sides of the pit that might have swallowed you.

  The dead are gone from streets and houses. Heaps of snow and filth have been cleared. The Neva sparkles blue, where women crawled across wastelands of ice, with buckets of water that smelled of corpses.

  There’s another factor that doubles the survival chances of those who have survived so far. There are fewer mouths to feed now. No one speaks of it, but the truth is that Leningrad’s population is down to half of what it was. ‘Of course, they’ve evacuated thousands over the ice road – hundreds of thousands,’ people say to one another, and this is true. They know, and do not say, how many more death has taken.

  From every row of wooden houses, from every apartment building, shop, museum, library, factory, hospital, orphanage, school, the corpses of winter have now been removed, leaving empty, sunlit apartments, unswept doorsteps, classes without their teachers, teachers with classes of ten children instead of thirty, empty seats at library desks, shops that don’t open, poems that will not be written, operations that will fail to be performed, and little boats that will not, this season, be uncovered, repainted, and launched from shallow, sandy shores on to the waters of the Baltic.

  The sun shines. Everything’s possible now that the sun is here, warming flesh and drawing dandelions and nettles out of wasteground. As long as you can still walk, no matter how slowly, and pause from time to time to hold up your face to the sun and let a haze of glowing red soak through your eyelids, everything is still possible. Radio Leningrad advises mothers to expose their children’s skin to the sun, because it’s a valuable source of vitamins. It seems impossible, but children are still being born.

  An old couple shuffles into the sunlight. Now that they are close, you can see that they are in fact young. He wears a cap which sits oddly on his huge, exposed skull. She wears a headscarf with a pattern of roses. They walk in step, supporting each other.

  ‘Look,’ says Anna. ‘Isn’t that Zina and Fedya?’

  ‘I don’t think I know him.’

  ‘He’s changed…’

  Yes, he must have been ill. He’s wearing slippers on swollen feet, and Zina’s the one doing the supporting, not him.

  ‘Zina?’ she calls uncertainly.

  ‘Is that you, Anna?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘Forgive me. It’s only that everyone looks so different.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘We’re alive. I thought I should lose Fedya as well, but look, here he is.’

  And here he is. His powerful body has disappeared. Skin stretches like paper over his nose and jaw, but his legs and feet are swollen. His thick, fair hair has fallen out.

  ‘Yes, he’s been very ill. He’s been in hospital. Anybody else would have died, but not him. You weren’t going to let it happen, were you, Fedya?’

  She covers his hand with her own. Her smile is proud, tender, maternal. He’s not only lived, but he’s brought her back to life. Without his illness, she would have followed Vanka.

  ‘I like your scarf,’ says Anna.

  ‘I know, it’s pretty, isn’t it? I love roses. When all this is over, Fedya’s going to buy me some real roses, aren’t you, Fedya?’

  He nods, but doesn’t speak. The effort of standing is enough for him.

  ‘And with you,’ asks Zina delicately, ‘how are things?’

  This is how you put it these days. You never ask directly.

  ‘My father died, and Marina Petrovna died.’

  Zina puts her hand on Anna’s arm. ‘But your little one?’

  ‘He’s over there.’ Anna points down the sunlit street, where two little boys are playing by a wall. They are crouched down with their heads close together, and they have wiped from their minds everything in the world but their game.

  ‘It’s nice for him to have someone to play with,’ says Anna.

  ‘So he lived,’ says Zina.

  ‘Yes.’

  They stand in a silent group. Winter is over, and the dead are still dead, because it was never true that they had only died for the duration. The mounds of bodies are being buried as fast as the authorities can handle them. More than a hundred thousand were buried last month. The streets are quiet and people walk in little groups, not crowds. They say a million have died. But the figures are only approximate.

  The bird-like cheepings of Kolya and the other child suddenly darken.

  ‘It’s my turn to attack!’

  ‘No it isn’t’

  ‘It is. You’re a liar.’

  ‘Give me back my truck then, I’m not going to play with you any more.’

  A mother appears in the entrance to the apartment house, shading her eyes. ‘Now that’s enough – can’t you ever play for five minutes without arguing, Grisha? You’ve been moaning about having no one to play with for long enough.’ She looks up the street, catches Anna’s eye, shrugs and calls across, ‘Kids! They never give you five minutes’ peace, do they?’

  ‘Kolya, if you don’t want to play, then don’t play. But if you’re playing, play nicely.’

  The children stare up at her with their sharpened faces. They know what grown-ups can do, and what they can’t do.

  Out they pour, the streams of banality that have made up Anna’s life for years. ‘Socialization’, Elizaveta Antonovna calls it, though she does very little of it herself. But although the nursery has re-opened, Elizaveta Antonovna’s not back from Moscow yet. She’s too important where she is. There will be a new director, but so far one hasn’t been appointed. It’s hard to find anyone.

  ‘Are you going to evacuate your Kolya, now that there’s the chance?’ asks Zina.

  ‘No. He stays with us. Andrei’s got us a little plot of land behind the hospital, and we’ve planted potatoes and cabbages.’

  ‘We must be getting on,’ says Zina.

  There was something she wanted to say to Fedya, Anna remembers. Something she’d forgotten. But she can’t remember it now. She hopes Andrei’s right when he says it’s lack of vitamins that makes her forget so much. Her brain only seems able to hold one idea at a time.

  ‘Fyodor Dimitrievich…’

  His eyes turn to her, dull with sickness. Of course, that was it. When they last faced one another, in the snow, when he was bringing home the wood on his sledge. After Vanka died. She almost steps back as it rises up and possesses her. The snowy street, the houses packed with dead, the man who put the steel tip of his boot by her head. It isn’t the past. It isn’t history and it never will be. But what is it then?

  Don’t think of all that now. Here’s Fedya, not handsome any more, looking at her without curiosity. She’d told him a line from that Pushkin poem. ‘We’ll find them space in Russian earth,’ she’d said. And there’d been a flash of understanding between them, as if at last they knew they were the same kind, fighting the same thing. He’d answered, ‘You’re right there. We’ll bury them.’ But it was only later that she’d remembered the rest of the lines.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I remember it all now. The whole poem.

  ‘Because we made our earth swallow

  The juggernaut which crushed nation after nation

  And with our blood redeemed the freedom,

  Honour and peace of Europe…’

  Fedya still doesn’t speak. Perhaps a shade of lightness crosses his face.

  On the landing, Fedya with his towel slapping his bare shoulder, in singlet and trou
sers, pushing into the bathroom first. A real Leningrad boy, a boy of the courtyard. Grey eyes, muscled shoulders, and thick fair hair.

  ‘Come away now,’ says Zina to her husband. ‘You’ll wear yourself out, standing here. There’s nothing more tiring than standing. You know what, Anna, my Fedya was defending the Works right up to the day they took him off to the hospital. They had to stop him, he wouldn’t stop himself. He ought to get a medal.’

  ‘Yes, he ought,’ says Anna. The May sunlight is piercing her eyes and making them sting. Zina’s right: standing here like this, talking to old friends, is the most exhausting thing of all,

  Anna and Andrei watch as the couple shuffles away.

  ‘Kidney disease,’ says Andrei.

  ‘You can’t know that.’

  ‘No,’ he agrees, ‘you’re right. I can’t be sure.’

  They call Kolya to them, and walk on.

  ‘Look, dandelions!’ says Anna, and kneels to grub up a handful of leaves. ‘Keep a lookout for more, Kolya. You’re closer to the ground than I am.’

  He runs off to scavenge between stones, while she examines the new green leaves. This colour won’t last. As the sun grows stronger, so these leaves will darken and toughen. The indented pattern is cut into the leaves like toothmarks, just the same as every other year. She lifts a leaf to her lips and nibbles it.

  ‘Full of vitamin C,’ says Andrei. ‘And I think there may be useful traces of folic acid as well.’

  ‘If we find any more, I’ll prepare a salad. We’ve got enough oil to coat the leaves.’

  ‘Yes, a salad’s better than soup. It preserves the nutrients.’

  ‘Andrei, will you please stop talking like that?’

  He smiles at her. She’s wearing that green dress again, her favourite dress. She put it on so carefully, patting the folds into place before drawing the belt tight around her waist, and then loosening it again. It looked better loose. He could see her thinking that. She was still very thin. When she stood naked he saw her ribs rise and fall with the quick pants of her breath. She got out of breath so easily. And her breasts were shallow. She felt him looking, and quickly huddled on her dress. But the image of her hung on his mind like a photograph: her skin winter-pale, her pelvic bone showing, her knees startlingly bony and protuberant.