As I trudged slowly down the road, occasionally vehicles would pass me, mostly small trucks, a size it was hoped that Nazi fighter planes and dive bombers wouldn’t bother with.
There was no longer any public transportation in the city except feet. What the bombs and artillery barrages didn’t destroy were covered by snow and ice: cars, trucks, buses, trams, frozen in place by the winter storms when the trains and vehicles ran out of fuel or electricity. The frozen forms were ghosts reminding us of the world that existed before the Great Patriotic War erupted and the world became a living hell.
After walking for an hour, the lack of food caught up with me. My legs felt weak and I slowed my pace until I walked staring down at my feet, willing one foot forward after another. I could barely lift them. It seemed like I was wearing concrete shoes. I just kept pulling them off the ground and putting them back down, over and over. Finally, weak, I staggered to a post and leaned against it.
I felt the jar with watery soup inside my coat, keeping warm against my skin. I hadn’t had any food since the partial ration the driver gave us last night. I needed the food but I couldn’t take it. A little nourishment might be all that stood between my mother and her slipping beyond life.
I had to keep moving or I would freeze to death. I pushed away from the pole and again forced one foot in front of the other, more of a shuffle than a walk, half-dragging my feet.
A small truck, a little bit larger than a pickup, pulled up next to me. It had the markings of a soap factory on the side door. With the changes in production, the factory probably now produced explosives.
The driver leaned over from behind the wheel and rolled down the passenger window.
“Where you going, boy?”
“Gorky Hospital, to see my mother.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Gone.”
“Get in, I’ll give you a ride into the city.”
I stared at him, locking eyes. During the past three years, the world kept shifting and changing configuration under my feet, as if I was standing in a dark kaleidoscope that someone was turning. Before my father left us and the Germans came, I would not have given a second thought to jumping into the truck. Now I stared at the man, sizing him up.
He was big, bear-big, with long hair falling from under his fur hat, a heavy beard and large frame covered by a long animal-hair coat. His eyes were dark and hard and he reminded me of the pictures I’d seen of Rasputin, the mad monk who had whispered dark words into the ears of the imperial family before the revolution.
But there was one other thing I noticed. His face was pale and I could tell from the way the hat and coat fit him that he had lost weight. That made me trust him. Like most good people, he lacked sufficient food. It was the fat cats who bought and sold God-knows-what on the black market that I feared.
I climbed into the truck.
12
“What are you doing out on the road?” the man asked.
“I was in a transport.”
“You left it to return to your mother?”
I nodded.
“Good boy. Stay with your mother. No one knows what’s happening to the children trucked out. Besides, the war will be over soon.”
He patted my leg.
“The Boss himself is coming to Leningrad to fight the Germans. Those bastards will put their tails between their legs and go home when our Josef comes after them.”
He went on and on about how the tide of the war was going to turn, going down the list of Soviet heroes who would do the fighting. Some were names I’d heard my mother speak of as being dead or have fallen out of favor and shipped off to Siberia. The old bear of a man was quite mad. But as we came onto city streets and I saw the familiar stacks of bodies piled on corners and the frozen ghost of a street car with a passenger, frozen in death, still sitting in it, I realized that he was the lucky one. When horrors became unimaginable, to retreat inside your mind to a place where life was good was not insanity but salvation.
The streets were almost empty. Before the war, the sidewalks and roadways were crowded with people from early morning until late at night. Now, no one left their living space except to get their ration or report for their work, if they still had a job and were able to physically do it. I’d heard that people who held down jobs got an extra ounce or two of bread each day.
The people on the streets looked as gray as the day. No one moved with a spirited step. I suppose if they did, they would be accused of black marketeering, hoarding or cannibalism.
There was no snow removal except where necessary to keep military traffic moving.
He pulled over on Voinoya Street, letting a battle tank rumble by.
“The hospital is down that street, to your right. Here, this is for being a good boy.”
Out of his pocket he handed me a small, round piece of hard candy. I examined it as I went down the street, pinching off a piece of black hair, and smelled the candy—who knew what the old bear could be passing out for candy? It had a distinctive smell, but I couldn’t remember what it was called.
I licked the piece of candy. It tasted a little soapy but I realized what the smell was—mint, it was a piece of hard candy with a mint taste. I hadn’t had a piece of candy for months. I broke it in half with my teeth and put one piece away for my mother. I sucked on the other piece as I walked down the street. My mouth puckered a little at the strange sweetness, but I couldn’t remember anything that tasted so good. I sucked it, careful not to get greedy and break it down with my teeth because it wouldn’t last as long if I crushed it. The sweetness made my heart beat faster and my step lighter.
As I came up to the long set of granite steps leading into the hospital, an old woman came down the street. She stared at me with horror in her eyes as I went by her.
“They stole it,” she kept repeating, “they stole it and now I’ll die.”
Feeling the bottle of food for my mother inside my clothes, I continued on. I knew what she meant. Someone had taken or tricked her out of her ration card. It was a death sentence in the starving city. She would not be able to get the card replaced. There was a process for replacing a lost or stolen card, but it took weeks. And it only took a day or two to starve to death when you were malnourished to begin with.
I stopped halfway up the stairs and thought for a moment, trying to remember what the world was like before it became hell. Maybe it was because of the bitter cold, but I couldn’t remember the good times. I continued going up the steps but at a slow pace, worried about what was waiting for me, that my mother might already be gone. I went up the steps with dread.
The interior was dark, lit only by the gray light coming through windows. Interior corridors leading off the main reception area were dimly lit, small wattage bulbs taking the edge off darkness. People were lined up six deep at the long reception counter, many of them sitting on the floor as they waited their turn to be admitted or check on relatives. Despite the number of people, there was little noise and no aggressive behavior. No one had the energy.
I headed for the dark stairwell to the second-floor ward where my mother had been the last time I saw her.
There were only a few beds in the long, high-ceiling ward for all the patients. It was a woman’s ward and most of the women were on mattresses on the floor. I felt the coolness in the ward, not bitter cold but not entirely comfortable, either. The nurse in the room wore a heavy sweater. She was busy with a woman and paid no attention to me.
I went directly down the line of women in the direction of where I had last seen my mother. I avoided meeting the eye of the patients who looked up at me as I walked by. There was no hope in any of them. No matter what illness they suffered, for a certainty the condition that would kill them was the same disease that was pandemic in the city under siege: starvation.
It was a matter of supply and demand, my mother had told me the first night we went to bed hungry. There simply wasn’t enough food to feed the people in the city. But unlike the
truck driver’s notion that great numbers of people dying created a bigger supply for the living, the ration given to each person remained the same. If it created any spare food, it went to the troops fighting the war—and as everyone knew, to high-ranking apparatchiks.
I almost passed my mother. I stared down at her, my heart squeezed by icy fingers. She was pale and gray, her hair gone almost white even though she was still a young woman in terms of her age. Her pallid, brittle, and undernourished skin was pulled tight across her bones, creating the look of a skeleton with dried skin.
She was still breathing, but her eyes were closed. She lay without a blanket covering her. The woman next to her had two blankets and I pulled one off of her. As I did, I realized the woman was dead, so I took both blankets and covered my mother with them.
I knelt down beside her. “Mama, Mama, it’s me.”
Her eyes opened and I could see that she was having a hard time focusing.
“Mama, I’ve brought food.”
She said something, a mumbled whisper, but I couldn’t make out the words.
I struggled out the bottle from under my bulky clothes and unscrewed the cap. I tried to lift her into a sitting position but couldn’t and managed to spill some of the precious contents of the soup jar.
She spoke my name in a hoarse whisper.
“I’m going to take care of you,” I told her. “I’m not leaving you again.”
“Nicky…” She stared up at me and clutched at my coat.
“It’s okay, Mama, I’ll take care of you.”
“Watch out,” she said with that hoarse whisper, “don’t let them … don’t let them hurt you.”
She released air through her mouth and went limp in my arms. I dropped the jar and hugged her. “Mama, Mama.”
I don’t know how long I held her. The nurse pulled me away and covered her with the blankets.
“Look at your finger,” she said.
I shook my head, my mind too soaked with emotion to comprehend what she was talking about.
“Your little finger, it’s frostbitten. You’re going to lose it.”
13
Red October Home for Boys, Leningrad, 1945
“Here comes Four-Fingers!” Pavel Ivanovich yelled as I came out of the building.
I stopped two steps from the bottom, making me taller than I would be if I was on ground level with Pavel.
Lev, my bunkmate, was surrounded by Pavel and his pals. We called them the Gang of Nine because there were nine of the bastards, all a year older than my fourteen, getting around that age when they would be sent to work camps to get them out of the orphanage and mold them into model Soviet workers.
Pavel wasn’t the biggest of the bunch but he was the meanest and the toughest. He had that kind of build that was hard to fight—short, stocky, solid. He’d put down his big shaved head and ram your face while he slammed both fists like pistons into your stomach. I kept to myself and didn’t belong to a gang, but I had had a lot of fights because that was just the way of life when you spent twenty-four hours a day with twelve hundred other boys. I hadn’t fought Pavel yet, but because I had a reputation as the toughest kid in my barracks, I would be a target. Especially when he had his pals around to back him up.
We were all survivors of the siege of Leningrad, all had lost our families, our homes. Some, like Pavel, had lost their humanity. I didn’t have a list of what I lost, though the most obvious was my little finger. It had been amputated because of frostbite. It saved my life, because I was kept in the hospital for weeks and given an extra ration each day because I had had an operation.
The German siege of the city was over, but it had lasted over two years, nearly nine hundred days. Our troops had finally pushed back the invaders and kept up the pressure. Now it was said our troops were in Berlin itself.
“I’m going to stomp this little anti-Communist toad,” Pavel told me. “He believes in God. You want some of it?” He shook his fist at me. It was a small, solid, mean fist, all bone, and scarred from use on people he didn’t like or just wanted to stomp.
Lev was my age, but like many of the children of the siege, his growth had been stunted by the earlier starvation. His family had been Jewish. I guess that somehow equated to Pavel as a belief in a higher authority than the Party. Pavel was one of those whose main objective in life was to become a member of the Party so he could be above other people and bully them. That didn’t exactly fit into the Communist theory we got a dose of every day in the classroom, but no one would accuse Pavel of thinking too much—or of the theoretical system working well in actual practice.
Pavel reminded me of someone, I could never remember who, but his round shaven head, bull neck and flat broad features had struck a cord in me from the first time I met him. He had only been here at the Home for a year after being transferred from another orphanage. There were stories he’d been shipped out because he’d beaten another boy so bad the kid was permanently brain damaged. Since Pavel’s own boasts were the source of the stories, and he had stomped more than one kid since he’d arrived, I didn’t doubt that he had a history of violence.
“I hear you’re a God-lover, too,” Pavel said. “Your mother was Jewish, your father was British. Think you’re better than the rest of us?”
I shook my head. “I really don’t think anything about you, or God, or anything else except what’s for supper.”
My knees weren’t shaking but I was worried. Pavel was an animal and he was out to get me. Because I didn’t belong to a gang and was a loner pretty much, he knew I wouldn’t have anyone backing me up. My usual good sense told me to turn around and go back into the building. I had an idea that picking on Lev was just an opportunity to pick a fight with me. There was something about me that ticked Pavel off. Maybe it was the fact that I had a reputation for not permitting myself to be bullied, even by older boys. Or maybe I just breathed the same air Pavel did and he wanted more of it.
There had been trouble brewing between me and the bastard, rumors that he was going to stomp me. Now he was here, in front of my barracks, picking on a kid identified as my friend. Not that Lev was actually a friend. I had no friends, I was a loner. But we shared the same bunk and he liked to hang around with me. I kind of ran interference for him because he was scrawny, and he helped me with my school work because I hated paperwork.
“I can take care of myself,” Lev said. His voice trembled and his knees were shaking, but he had his fists clenched and he was going to go down fighting. Not that it would take much for Pavel to stomp him. Pavel was twice as thick as Lev and the extra was all muscle.
I didn’t need a fortune-teller’s ball to tell me that Pavel was picking a fight with Lev to pick one with me. He was a smart bastard. He didn’t pick the fight directly with me because he knew I’d have to fight if painted into a corner by him coming at me. He thought he could take me—so did I—but why risk it when he could get more mileage out of arranging a situation in which I could show a yellow back and walk away while he beat up Lev?
No one would ever accuse Pavel of having too many brains, but he was cunning like a feral animal, and in a stone-age environment where brawn was king, brainy guys like Lev had no chance.
Pavel head-butted Lev, hitting him in the nose, sending the smaller boy flying backwards, blood squirting.
Like a bull that had just gored one picador and quickly swung around to gut another, Pavel turned to smash me. I went into motion the moment his head spattered poor Lev’s nose. As his head came back around, I kicked, the tip of my shoe catching him in the jaw. We wore steel-capped shoes because they lasted longer and could be handed down time after time. You could run a truck over the caps and it wouldn’t dent them.
It was a beautiful kick, not one I would have managed had I been standing on the ground, but being two steps up, and a little taller than Pavel, the kick had the force of a shoed horse.
Pavel’s lower jaw drove his teeth up against his upper. Shattered teeth and blood sprayed.
I didn’t quite get the door opened when fists started pounding my head and bodies slammed into me.
“Stop it!”
A voice of authority roared and the world stood still.
T-34 stood in the half-open door and gave us a look that would have turned lesser boys into stone. One of the boys attacking me stumbled against her because he didn’t quite have his footing. She hit him back-handed, smacking him across the face. He flew backwards, down the steps.
She was all muscle, built a little like Pavel, but taller and broader. Before the war, in her younger days, she had been selected for the All-Soviet shot-putting team. She had a real name, Comrade Renko, but we all knew her as T-34, the name of the Soviet battle tanks that drove over the backs of Germans all the way to Berlin.
“Get outta here!”
Eight of the Gang of Nine scrambled to get clear of T-34’s fury, with me on their heels. I would have taken a stomping by the gang over facing the fury of T-34. A school with twelve hundred orphans who had survived hell and damnation and were almost all completely unmanageable was not a job for the timid. And Comrade Renko was about as timid as a wolfhound.
I never made it off the landing. She caught me by the ear and jerked me back, nearly ripping off my ear.
“Akkkkk!”
She pulled me inside the building and down the corridor. I went, staggering off balance alongside her to keep my ear attached to the side of my head. At her office door, she let go of my ear and gave me a shove into the office.
The Betrayers Page 6