“Ladies! Do you need a hand carrying that ice?”
The girls exchanged a glance. They were both about my age, sisters or cousins, with the same broad faces and downy upper lips. They were Piter girls, untrusting of strangers, but at the same time, climbing the stairs to their apartment with four pails of ice . . .
“Who are you here to see?” asked one of them, with a librarian’s prim correctitude.
“We’d like to speak to a certain gentleman about his chickens,” said Kolya, choosing honesty for unknown reasons. I expected the girls to laugh at us, but they didn’t.
“He’ll shoot you if you go up there,” said the second girl. “He doesn’t let anyone get near those chickens.”
Kolya and I stared at each other. He licked his lips and turned back to the girls, flashing his most seductive smile.
“Why don’t you let us carry the pails. We’ll worry about the old man.”
By the fifth floor, sweating through all my layers of wool, my seagull legs trembling with the effort, I was starting to regret the decision. There must have been an easier way into the building. We took long breaks at each landing, where I panted and flexed my hands, pulling off my mittens to inspect the deep grooves the pail handles were sawing into my palms. Kolya quizzed the girls about their reading habits and their ability to recite the opening stanzas of Eugene Onegin. To me the girls seemed spiritless, cud chewers, with no mischief in their eyes and no spark in their speech, but nobody bored Kolya. He chatted with them as if they were the most delightful creatures ever to grace a ball, looking one in the eye and then the other, never allowing silence. By the fifth floor it was clear that both girls were taken with him, and I got the sense they were now trying to determine which of them held the upper hand.
A surge of envy rose in me again, that sense of injustice compounded with anger and self-loathing—why did they like him? The long-winded braggart! And why did I begrudge him their attention? I didn’t care about these girls, after all. Neither was remotely attractive to me. This man saved my life yesterday and today I cursed him because girls grew awkward in his presence, blood rushing to their faces, staring at the floor and playing with the buttons on their coats?
But Sonya I liked. Sonya with her crescent dimple and her warmth, welcoming me into her home, offering me a place to stay whenever I needed it, even though one more week without food would kill her—the shape of her skull was too easy to read beneath her near-translucent skin. Perhaps I liked her so much because I met her thirty minutes after seeing the tombstones of the Kirov. Maybe the sight of her kept me from dwelling too much on all my neighbors, trapped beneath the slabs of fallen concrete.
Even when those images slipped through my mind, they lacked barbs, passing cleanly through, and I would find myself thinking again about the colonel’s daughter, or the colonel himself, or the giant chasing us down the steps with his steel pipe, or the woman at the Haymarket selling glasses of Badayev dirt. If I thought about the Kirov at all, it was the building itself that I remembered, my childhood playground, with its long corridors so well designed for footraces, its stairwells with the lead glass windows so layered with dust you could draw your self-portrait with your fingertip, the courtyard where all the kids gathered after the first big snowfall of every year for the annual snowball fight, floors one through three against floors four through six.
My friends and neighbors—Vera and Oleg and Grisha and Lyuba Nikolaevna and Zavodilov—seemed unreal already, as if their deaths had erased their lives. Perhaps I had always known they would disappear one day, and so I had kept them at a distance, laughed at their jokes and listened to their plans but never really trusted their existence. I had learned how to protect myself. When the police took my father, I had been a dumb boy, unable to understand how a man—that willful, brilliant man—could cease to exist at the snap of an unseen bureaucrat’s fingers, as if he were nothing but cigarette smoke exhaled by a bored sentry in a watchtower in Siberia, a sentry who wondered if his girlfriend back home was cheating on him, who stared over the wintry woods, unaware of the great blue maw of sky above him that waited to swallow the curling smoke and the sentry and everything growing on the ground below.
Kolya was saying good-bye to the girls, dropping his pails inside their apartment door and motioning for me to do the same.
“Be careful up there,” said one of the girls, the bolder one, I suppose. “He’s eighty years old, but he’ll shoot you in a second.”
“I’ve been on the lines fighting Fritz,” said Kolya, reassuring her with a smile and a wink. “I think I can handle a cranky grandfather.”
“If you want something to eat on your way down, we’re making soup,” said the second girl. The bold one shot her a look and I wondered, with little real curiosity, if she was peeved at the offer of free food or at the flirtatious gesture.
Kolya and I climbed the final flight of stairs to the roof door.
“Here’s the plan,” he told me. “Let me do the talking. I’m good with old people.”
I pushed open the door and the wind came at us, blowing bits of ice and dust into our faces, the grit of the city. We lowered our heads and pressed forward, two Bedouins in a sandstorm. Ahead of us was a mirage, what could only be a mirage—a shed nailed together with wood planks and roofing felt, the gaps stuffed with scraps of wool and old newspapers. I was a city boy to the bone; I had never been to a farm or even seen a cow; but I knew this was a chicken coop. Kolya looked at me. Our eyes were watering from the wind, but we were both grinning like madmen.
There was a crooked door on one end of the coop with an unfastened hook-and-eye latch on the outside. Kolya knocked softly on the door. No one answered.
“Hello? Don’t shoot us! Ha, ha! Ah, we just wanted to visit with you. . . . Hello? All right, I’m going to open the door. If that’s a bad idea, if you’re thinking of shooting, just say something now.”
Kolya stepped to one side of the door frame, motioned for me to do the same, and prodded open the door with the toe of his boot. We waited for a shouted curse or a shotgun blast, but neither came. When it seemed safe, we peeked into the coop. It was dark inside, lit by a single wick lamp hanging from a hook on the wall. The floor was covered with old straw that stank of bird shit. One wall was lined with empty nesting boxes, each big enough for a single chicken. A boy sat at the far end of the coop, his back against the wall, his knees drawn to his chest. He wore a woman’s rabbit fur coat. He looked ridiculous but warm.
A dead man sat in the straw beneath the nesting boxes, back against the wall, limbs stiff and splayed like an abandoned marionette. He had a long white beard, the beard of a nineteenth-century anarchist, and skin like melted candle wax. An antique shotgun still lay across his lap. From the looks of him he’d been dead for days.
Kolya and I stared at this grim tableau. We had entered into someone else’s private misery and we felt the guilt of interlopers. I did, at least. Shame didn’t afflict Kolya the way it did me. He walked inside the coop, knelt beside the boy, and gripped his knee.
“Are you all right, little soldier? You need some water?”
The boy didn’t look at him. His blue eyes seemed enormous in his starved face. I broke off a square of the library candy, stepped into the coop, and held out my hand. The boy’s eyes shifted slowly in my direction. He seemed to register my presence and the food in my hand before he looked away again. He was very far gone.
“Is this your grandfather?” asked Kolya. “We should bring him out to the street. Not good for you to be sitting here alone with him.”
The boy opened his mouth and even that effort seemed to cost him. His lips were crusty, as if they had been glued together.
“He doesn’t want to leave the birds.”
Kolya glanced at the empty nesting boxes.
“I think it’s all right now. Come on, there are some nice girls downstairs, they’ll give you some soup, some water to drink.”
“I’m not hungry,” said the boy, and I knew
he was doomed.
“Come with us anyway,” I said. “It’s too cold in here. We’ll warm you up, get you a little water.”
“I have to watch the birds.”
“The birds are gone,” said Kolya.
“Not all of them.”
I doubted the boy would last until tomorrow, but I didn’t want him to die here, alone with the bearded corpse and the empty nesting boxes. The dead were everywhere in Piter: stacked in great heaps behind the city morgue; burned in the fire pits outside the Piskarevsky Cemetery; scattered across the ice of Lake Ladoga, something for the seagulls to pick at, if there were still seagulls. But this was a lonelier place to quit than anywhere else I’d seen.
“Look,” said Kolya, shaking one of the empty nesting boxes. “Nobody home. You were a good watchman, you protected the birds, but they’re gone now. Come with us.”
He extended his gloved hand, but the boy ignored it.
“Ruslan would have shot you.”
“Ruslan?” Kolya glanced at the old man’s body. “Ruslan was a fierce old fellow, eh? I can tell. I’m glad you’re the peaceful sort.”
“He told me everyone in the building wanted our birds.”
“He was right.”
“He said they’d come up here and slit our throats if we let them. Steal our birds and boil them for soup. So one of us always had to stay awake, hold the shotgun.”
The boy spoke in a monotone, never looking at us, his eyes vague and unfocused. I could see now that he was trembling, his teeth clacking together when he wasn’t speaking. Patches of light brown down spread across his cheeks and neck, his body’s last effort to insulate itself.
“He told me they’d keep us alive till the siege was over. Couple of eggs a day, that and the rations would do us. But we couldn’t keep them warm enough.”
“You need to forget about the damn chickens. Come on, give me your hand.”
The boy continued to ignore Kolya’s outstretched hand and finally Kolya motioned for me to help him. But I had seen something, a movement where there shouldn’t be movement, a stirring beneath the boy’s fur coat, as if his giant heart were beating so loud its thump was visible.
“What do you have there?” I asked.
The boy stroked the front of his fur coat, calming whatever lay beneath. For the first time the boy’s eyes met mine. Weak as he was, millimeters from the finish line, I could see the toughness in him, the stubborn will he inherited from the old man.
“Ruslan would have shot you.”
“Yes, yes, you keep saying that. You saved one of the birds, didn’t you? That’s the last one.” Kolya looked at me. “How many eggs can a chicken lay in a day?”
“What the hell do I know?”
“Listen, boy, I’ll give you three hundred rubles for that bird.”
“People used to offer us a thousand. He always said no. The birds can keep us alive all winter, he said. What are we going to do with rubles?”
“Buy yourself some food? That bird’s going to die like all the others if you keep it here.”
The boy shook his head. All the talking had wearied him and his eyelids drifted lower.
“All right, how about this? Here, give me that,” Kolya said to me, snatching the library candy from my hand. He added it to his last sliver of sausage and the three hundred rubles and placed them all in the boy’s lap.
“That’s everything we have. Now, listen to me. You’re going to die here tonight if you don’t move. You need to eat and you need to get off the roof. We’re going to bring you down to those girls on the fifth floor—”
“I don’t like them.”
“You don’t have to marry them. We’re going to give them this money and they’ll feed you some soup and let you stay a few nights, get your strength back.”
The boy didn’t have the energy for more than the slightest of head shakes, but his meaning was clear. He wasn’t leaving.
“You’re staying here to protect the bird? What the hell are you going to feed it?”
“I’m staying for Ruslan.”
“Let the dead bury the dead. You’re coming with us.”
The boy began to unbutton his coat. He held the brown-feathered bird against his chest like a suckling newborn. It was the saddest little chicken I’ve ever seen, bedraggled and dazed. A healthy sparrow would have torn it apart in a street fight.
He held the chicken out to Kolya, who stared at it, unsure what to do or say.
“Take it,” said the boy.
Kolya looked at me and then back to the boy. I had never seen him so confused.
“I couldn’t keep them alive,” said the boy. “We had sixteen in October. And this is all that’s left.”
We had wanted the chicken so badly, but now that the boy was offering it for free something seemed wrong.
“Take it,” said the boy. “I’m tired of them.”
Kolya took the chicken from the boy’s hands, holding the bird away from his face, worried she might claw at his eyes with her hook-nailed feet. But the chicken had no violence in her. She sat limp in Kolya’s palms, trembling in the cold, staring dully at nothing at all.
“Keep it warm,” said the boy.
Kolya opened his coat and slipped the bird inside, where she could bundle between layers of wool and still find space to breathe.
“Now go away,” said the boy.
“Come with us,” I said, one last effort though I knew it was useless. “You shouldn’t be alone right now.”
“I’m not alone. Go away.”
I looked at Kolya and he nodded. We headed for the crooked door. On the way out, I turned and glanced back at the boy, sitting there silently in his woman’s coat.
“What’s your name?”
“Vadim.”
“Thank you, Vadim.”
The boy nodded, his eyes too blue, too large for his pale, gaunt face.
We left him alone in the chicken coop with the dead old man and the empty nesting boxes, the wick burning low in the lamp, three hundred rubles and the unwanted food on his rabbit fur lap.
9
Sonya had collected a basket of wood chips from the splintered roof beams of a bomb-blasted nursing school on Vasilevsky Island; her stove burned hot as we sat in front of it, drinking weak tea and staring at the feeble chicken. We had fashioned a makeshift nesting box from an old cookie tin and a bed of shredded newspaper. The chicken huddled there, head against her chest, ignoring the teaspoonful of ground millet we’d sprinkled on the scraps of editorial, Muscovites imploring us to stand strong. Fucking Moscow. The general feeling around Piter was that if the siege had to happen, better it happen to us, because we could survive anything, while the porcine bureaucrats in the capital would probably surrender to the nearest Oberstleutnant if they couldn’t get their weekly ration of sturgeon. “They’re as bad as the French,” Oleg used to say, though even Oleg knew that was going too far.
Kolya had nicknamed the chicken Darling, but there was no affection in her eyes as she stared back at us, stupid and suspicious.
“Doesn’t she have to have sex before she lays eggs?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” said Sonya, picking at a crust of dried skin on her lip. “I think the males fertilize the eggs, but she lays them on her own. My uncle manages a poultry collective in Mga.”
“So you know about chickens?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never even been to Mga.”
We were all children of the city. I had never milked a cow or shoveled manure or baled hay. Back in the Kirov we always made fun of the peasants from the collectives, their bad haircuts and freckled necks. Now the country folk were having their laugh, feasting on fresh-killed rabbit and boar while we tried to survive on moldy ration bread.
“She won’t lay twelve eggs by Thursday,” I said. “She won’t even live till Thursday.”
Kolya sat on a backless steel stool, his long legs spread out in front of him, scrawling notes in his notebook with his ever-smaller stub of p
encil.
“Don’t give up on her yet,” he said, not looking up from his writing. “She’s a Leningrad chicken—she’s tougher than she looks. The Germans thought they’d celebrate Christmas in the Astoria, didn’t they?”
The Nazis had printed thousands of invitation cards to a grand victory party Hitler intended to throw at the Astoria Hotel after conquering what he had called, in a speech to his torch-bearing storm troopers, “the birthplace of Bolshevism, that city of thieves and maggots.” Our soldiers had found a few of the invitations on the bodies of fallen Wehrmacht officers. They had been reprinted in the newspapers, copied by the thousands, and nailed to walls all over the city. The Politburo hacks could not have devised better propaganda. We hated the Nazis for their stupidity as much as anything else—if the city fell, we wouldn’t leave any hotels where the Germans could sip schnapps in the piano bar and bed down in deluxe suites. If the city fell, we’d bring her down with us.
“Maybe she’s shy,” said Sonya. “Maybe she doesn’t want to lay eggs with all of us watching.”
“Maybe she needs to drink something.”
“Mm, that’s smart. Let’s get her some water.”
No one moved. We were all hungry and tired and hoping someone else would stand and fill a cup with water. Outside the light was already fading from the sky. We could hear the drone of searchlights warming up, their massive filaments slowly brightening. A lone Sukhoi circled above the city, the hum of its propeller steady and reassuring.
“She’s an ugly little turd, isn’t she?”
“I think she’s sweet,” said Sonya. “She looks like my grandmother.”
“Maybe we should shake her, see if they fall out.”
“She needs water.”
“Yes, get her some water.”
Another hour passed. Finally, Sonya lit the oil lamps, turned on the radio, and spilled a little river water from a jug onto a saucer, which she placed in Darling’s box. Darling glared at her but made no effort to sip the water.
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