“I’m afraid I am useless at this,” he said. He was looking at his hands, which were soft and white and now covered with cruel blisters.
“Look—make your foot do the work, and that will save your hands.” I slammed my foot against the shovel to give him a lesson.
“Ah, so that’s the way,” he said, and tried it out with his own shovel.
There was something familiar about his face. “Prastitye, I beg your pardon, but what work did you do before the war?” I asked.
“I work a little with music,” he said, and turned back to his shovel.
I looked at him again and turned beet red. It was Dmitry Shostakovich, the great composer.
“Prastitye, prastitye,” I mumbled. “I had no idea.” I couldn’t keep myself from asking, “What are you doing here?”
“I tried to get into the army, but my eyesight kept me out.”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “With me it’s my age.”
By now several people had recognized him. They began to crowd around us. Shostakovich looked nervously about and then, clasping his shovel, hurried away.
When I went back to Dmitry, he asked, “Who was that funny little man?”
“That funny little man was just the greatest composer in Russia.”
Dmitry refused to believe me. In the early evening, as we left the Summer Garden, I saw Shostakovich from a distance. He was using his foot to good effect.
Dmitry grinned. “There is your great composer,” he said. “Now will you admit you made a mistake? What would Shostakovich be doing with a shovel?”
Olga believed me at once. “Yes, I have heard he has worked as an air-raid warden and is now working as a laborer, but every minute he is away from his piano and his desk is a terrible waste.”
“He wants to do his part,” I said.
“He is writing a great symphony for our city. That is work enough. Why should he dirty his hands?”
Olga was so upset, I said nothing more, but I understood what he was doing. It must have been very lonely for him there in his study. He was writing about Leningrad, and he wanted to be a part of the city.
Though I looked each afternoon, I never saw Shostakovich again. I guessed that some officials felt the way Olga did and the composer was confined to his study.
It was impossible to recognize the Summer Garden as the same place where only weeks before I had chased Yelena among the trees. There were ugly piles of dirt from the air-raid excavations, the fountains were boarded up, and the statues had been taken down and laid to rest under the ground like so many dead people. The rose garden and flower beds had been torn out by their roots to make the shelters. It was no longer a garden but a muddy scene of destruction. The shelters we were building were to protect us, but the craters we were digging made the Summer Garden look like it had already been bombed. And not only the Summer Garden, but all the parks.
The beauty of the city was gone. The bronze horses on the Anichkov Bridge were underground, and saddest of all, The Bronze Horseman, the impressive statue of Peter the Great, had been covered with sandbags. In school we had all learned Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman and its terrible story of the Leningrad flood of 1824, with coffins from the graveyards floating in the streets. When I told Yelena the poem scared me to death the first time I read it, she said, “A sign of a great poem.”
With its buried statues, its camouflage nets and gray paint, and its ruined parks, I no longer recognized my city. As I always did when I was discouraged, I took my worry to Yelena. Somehow she always found a way to cheer me. “How,” I asked her, “will Leningrad ever to be the same again?”
For an answer she wrote a poem.
Seed the earth with people
burrowing beneath the ground,
in air-raid shelters,
in trenches,
with spring will come
the resurrection.
I guess she meant eventually everything would be all right, only it looked to me as if it might take a while.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARYA LEAVES
July 1941
Yelena’s patriotic work took place on the roof of the Winter Palace, where she worked for three hours each night as an air-raid warden. Though German Messerschmitts sometimes flew over the city, they flew at very high altitudes. As yet there were no bombs, but they could come at any time, and the city had to be prepared. I hated the idea of Yelena risking her life every night, but she was proud of her assignment.
“You are digging air-raid shelters, Georgi, and I will warn everyone when to go into them. You will protect the people, and I will protect the buildings.”
“A building isn’t worth a life. Promise me you will get down and into the safety of a shelter if the planes come.”
She wouldn’t promise. “There are thousands and thousands of girls like me in Leningrad,” she said, “but there is only one Winter Palace. Come and see for yourself, Georgi.”
“There are hundreds of palaces,” I argued. And to myself I said, But there is no one like you. Still, I agreed to join her one night after my digging was over. I was eager to see the palace where long ago my mama had lived with the empress and the tsar and their children. She had told Marya and me stories of ballrooms with golden ceilings and a room whose walls were made of precious stone.
“Mama,” I said, “I’m going with Yelena tonight to the Winter Palace. Would you like to come with us?”
Mama smiled sadly. “I’d give a great deal to visit the Winter Palace I remember, but not today’s Winter Palace.” In a hushed voice she said, “There was a great deal of injustice when the tsar lived there, Georgi, but it was spoiled for me when the Bolsheviks took it over. They planned the arrests and murders of thousands of people there. I have no wish to see it again.” After a moment Mama relented, for her anger never lasted long, burning and then cooling just as quickly. “Of course you must go with Yelena. She’s a brave girl, and whatever has happened in the palace, the building itself must not be blamed. It has always been one of the glories of St. Petersburg.”
The roof of the palace stretched for acres, so Yelena was only one of many air-raid wardens assigned to the roof. To reach Yelena’s section, we went through door after door and climbed stairway after stairway. The part of the palace we traveled through was unoccupied. I gasped at what I saw: gilded walls, ceilings painted with cupids flying about in blue sky and pink clouds, marble columns, and floors so shiny you could see your reflection in them. Though the crystal chandeliers and all the valuable furniture and paintings had been put away, I could still imagine them as Mama had described them.
The great empty rooms of the palace were so eerie, to break the tension I let go of Yelena’s hand and, taking off my shoes, began to slide about over a polished floor. At first Yelena was shocked, but after a moment she slipped out of her shoes, and the two of us glided back and forth, trying to see who could slide the longest distance. When we heard one of the guards coming, we hurriedly got into our shoes and, laughing, raced up the stairway.
At each roof station there were pails of water and sand as well as a wicked-looking ax. I tried to imagine Yelena flailing about with the ax.
“I’ve tried it, Georgi. It’s heavy, but if I had to, I know I could do it.”
Yelena’s section looked northwest across the Neva to Vasilevsky Island. We settled comfortably against one of the chimneys. Though it was night, a pale sun gilded the Neva. In the sky there was nothing more dangerous than a few pink clouds. The palace was only four stories high, yet we looked down on the green roofs of Leningrad, with their hundreds of chimneys, like so many mushrooms springing up from a forest floor. More than two hundred years ago Peter the Great had built a city where there had been nothing but marshes and sea. When it was finished, he ruled that no building could be taller than his palace.
“Up here on the roof we are like kings and queens,” Yelena said, “looking out over our kingdom.”
Across the Neva was the camouflaged
spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and on Vasilevsky Island the university buildings.
Yelena said, “With the war it looks like we will never be students at the university, Georgi. Still, it’s nice to think about, like keeping yourself from freezing in the cold by imagining what it would be like to walk into a warm room.”
“What would you study at the university?” I asked.
“Russian literature,” she said. “I want to read Pushkin and Lermontov and every Russian poem that has ever been written.”
I looked around nervously. I didn’t want anyone to overhear Yelena if she was going to recite Lermontov, since she always recited his love poetry.
But she only asked, “Georgi, what will you study if the war ends?”
“I want to go back to Siberia,” I said. Quickly I added, “Not to Dudinka and the cold and the exile, but to the Siberia Marya and I saw in the summer, the birch trees and the great river and the reindeer and, most of all, the Samoyed people who were so good to us. The Communist Party has shut them and their reindeer up in farms. The Samoyeds must hate it. I want to study the native peoples of Russia—I want to become an expert and convince the Party to let the Samoyeds and their reindeer roam free. We still have the boots and parka they made for my father. I’ll show them to you sometime.”
Across from Vasilevsky Island were Petrograd Island and the Lenfilm movie studio where all the famous movies were made.
“Maybe I’ll write a great film,” Yelena said, “like Ivan the Terrible.”
“And I’ll play Ivan.”
So we sat talking for three hours in the twilight of the white night. At midnight the next shift arrived, and we made our way back down the stairs and through the empty palace rooms with their ghosts of the dead tsar and empress and their poor dead son and daughters.
Because of staying up so late, I was half asleep the next morning when I reached the Hermitage. Marya was already there. Although some of the museum employees had left for the army and some had been sent off, like Viktor, to the Luga River to build fortifications against the Germans, Comrade Orbeli had managed to recruit new workers. One trainload of the museum’s treasures had already left with hundreds of crates. As I had loaded them onto the railroad cars I couldn’t help but notice the antiaircraft guns mounted on the cars like giant nursemaids to watch over their charges.
Now the second shipment was nearly ready. There was little left in the museum, only the empty frames. While I was packing one of the last boxes, a soldier wandered into the gallery. Vera, one of the guards, hurried to stop him, calling, “Ostanovka!” “Halt!”
Embarrassed, the soldier stopped in his tracks. “Prastitye,” he mumbled. “I am from the country and have never been in Leningrad. When our company passed through the city, I wanted a look at the great museum. We learned about it in our school. Prastitye,” he said again, and turned to leave.
“That’s all right, Vera,” I said. With the way the war was going, the soldier might never get to the museum again. “Since you’ve come this far,” I told him, “I’ll give you a tour.”
The soldier looked around the gallery, disappointed and puzzled. “The frames are all empty.”
“Never mind, I packed every painting in this room, and I know them like the back of my hand. All Dutch, every one. There, for example.” Guessing what would be sure to interest him, I pointed to an empty gold frame. “That is a picture of a Dutch farm. You can see a man at his spring plowing. He has two big white horses. They look strong enough to pull the whole country to another place on the map, great muscly fellows.”
The soldier was staring hard at the empty frame, nodding his head. “Very few trees,” I went on, “only one or two starting to bud out. Holland is built on the sea, so you don’t have a lot of trees. And in the background the steeple of a church. Over on the right-hand side is a windmill. The Dutch have to spend their lives pumping away the sea. The best thing of all is the sky. In all these paintings it’s the finest thing. Holland is flat, so you get as much sky as you want, miles of it. The painters make the most of it. This one is filled with rosy clouds spread like sour cream on a dish of borscht so that just a bit of the beet juice seeps through.”
He looked from the frame to me and back again, nodding eagerly. “Yes,” he said, “I see it all. We would have given much to have such horses on our collective farm.”
I took him from empty frame to empty frame, pointing out in one picture how cleverly the artist had placed the snow over the countryside and in another how everyone in the village, adults and children alike, was skating on the river, and how a fine big brown dog with a patch of white on his chest was on the ice.
When he left, the soldier took my hand in his and shook it vigorously. “Wonderful pictures,” he said. “I’ll never forget them, and I’ll tell the others on the farm when I get back from the front. Especially the big horses.”
That night there was borscht for dinner, and it reminded me of the farmer-soldier who had come to the gallery. Marya laughed at my story, but I knew she hadn’t really listened to me. I guessed she had something she wanted to say to us. I could always tell, because she bit at her lip and peeked out at you from under her dark lashes.
Mama knew it as well. When I finished my tale, Mama said, “Marya, something is on your mind.”
In one long breath the words tumbled out. “It is Comrade Orbeli. He has assigned me to travel with the train this time when the last shipment from the Hermitage leaves. Several of us are going, for there must be people at the other end who know how to preserve the treasures. It can’t be too damp or too dry for them or they will be ruined. Only I hate to be away from Leningrad. I don’t want to leave you, Mama, and if I go, Georgi is sure to do something foolish.”
With great indignation I threw my napkin at her, yet the truth was I was shaken by the idea that she would leave us. I had never been separated from Marya; without her I might be in an orphanage or lie buried someplace in Siberia.
“How long will you be gone, dear?” Mama asked. Her face was pale, but her voice was strong. Better than anyone, she knew that you could not say no to an order.
“I don’t know, Mama. They won’t tell us or perhaps they don’t know. It could be months—or longer. It depends on the war.”
“Where are you to go?”
From habit Marya lowered her voice. “That’s the worst part of it. It’s a secret. No one has been told.”
“I know,” I said.
Marya stared at me. “Don’t be so smart. Of course you don’t know. I don’t know.”
“But I do know. When we were loading the first train, I got to talking with the engineer—about how fast the train could go and so forth. He told me the train was going to Sverdlovsk. You’ll be safe enough from the Germans there.”
Marya’s brown eyes were very round. She whispered, “Georgi, you shouldn’t have said that.”
Mama began to sob. We both looked at her with alarm. Suddenly I realized what I had done, I and my bragging and my big mouth. The city far away in the Ural Mountains that was now called Sverdlovsk was once called Yekaterinburg, which meant the Empress Catherine’s City. Like all names in Russia that had anything to do with tsars or empresses, the name had been changed, but to Mama Yekaterinburg stood for hell itself. It was in that city that the Bolsheviks had murdered the tsar and the empress and their son and four daughters, the four daughters who had been like sisters to Mama.
“No, Marya!” Mama said. “You can’t go to that terrible place. It’s cursed. I’ll never see you again.”
Marya put her arms around Mama. “Mama, I have to go. Not only is it an order that I mustn’t disobey, but those paintings are everything to me. They are like my children. I must go with them.”
“Not there, not there,” Mama whispered.
“That was long ago,” Marya pleaded.
“In my heart it was only a minute ago,” Mama said, but she wiped the tears from her eyes. She sighed. “You are right, Marya. When all of this is
over, whether we are still here or not, those treasures will be there to remind people what the war was all about. In Germany they are burning paintings. Here we are risking our lives to save them.”
The next day, with many kisses and promises to write, Marya left, her last words to me: “Take care of Mama, Georgi, and stay out of trouble.”
CHAPTER FIVE
DEFENDING THE CITY
August 1941
The second week in August Viktor returned. Olga had knocked on our door on a warm Saturday evening. “Let me sit for a while with the two of you. It’s too hot to sleep, and I worry about Viktor and about Yelena perched on top of the Winter Palace like a dove on a treetop. What if the Germans begin to bomb?”
Olga often knocked on our door. She could not stand to be alone. When there was no one in the apartment with her, we heard the radio going long into the night. I could only guess what voices inside her she was drowning out. I knew Mama was tired after a long day at the hospital as well as the work of unloading wood, but she never turned Olga away.
“I’ll put on the kettle,” she said. Mama believed that hot tea on a hot night would cool you off.
Suddenly Olga sprang from her chair. “What is that?”
Mother took the hissing kettle from the stove, and we all listened. I heard nothing, but Olga ran to the door and opened it. Someone was calling her name. We followed her to the stairway, and at the bottom of the stairs was Viktor.
“Olga, help me,” he cried. We all ran down the stairway, and with me on one side and Mama on his other side and Olga behind pushing, we half carried Viktor up the stairway and into our apartment, where he fell into one of the chairs.
If I had seen him on the street, I don’t think I would have recognized him. He had lost half his weight. His cheeks were sunken, and he had a straggly white beard that didn’t match his dark hair. He was always a neat man, with his hair slicked back, and though he had only two shirts, the one he wore was always clean. Now his clothes were covered with dirt, and there were streaks of dirt across his face.
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