Other people are handling her babies now, grabbing them, handing them to other people.
They are crying and waving. Anya is holding Leo’s hand; she shows her mama how tightly she is holding on, how strong she is being.
And then they are gone.
At first Vera cannot make herself move. People push her out of the way, muttering desperate, feral curses. Do they not see that she is paralyzed, that she cannot move? Finally someone pushes hard enough that she falls to her knees. She can feel children being handed off over her head, passed from one to another of the adults.
Vera climbs slowly to her feet, noticing dully that her stockings have ripped at the knees. She moves aside, searching the train’s windows, starting to run from car to car until she realizes that her children are too little to be seen.
So little.
Has she told them everything?
Keep your coat; winter comes on fast, even though they say you’ll be back in a week.
Never be apart from each other.
Brush your teeth.
Eat your food. All of it. And get to the front of the line at every meal.
Watch out for each other.
I love you.
At that, Vera stumbles, almost falls. She didn’t tell them she loved them. She’d been afraid it would make them all cry harder, so she’d withheld the precious words, the only ones that really mattered.
She makes a sound. The pain of it comes from someplace deep, deep inside and it just erupts. Screaming, she shoves her way back into the crowd of people, elbows her way past women who stare at her with blank, desperate eyes. She fights her way to the train.
“I am a nonessential worker,” she says to the woman at the head of the line, who looks too tired to care.
“Paperwork?”
“I have dropped it in that mess,” she says, indicating the crowd. The lie tastes bitter on her tongue and makes her sick to her stomach. It is the kind of thing that draws attention, and nothing—not even war—is as frightening as the attention of the secret police. She draws herself upright. “The workers are not controlling the evacuation. It’s not efficient. Perhaps I should report this to someone.”
The criticism works. The tired woman straightens, nods briskly. “Yes, comrade. You are right. I will be more careful.”
“Good.” Vera’s heart is pounding in her chest as she walks past her into the train. At every step she is certain that someone will come for her, yell, Fraud! and haul her away.
But no one comes and finally she slows down, seeing the sea of children’s faces around her. They are packed like sardines in the gray seats, bundled in coats and hats on this sunny summer’s day—proof that no one believes they’ll be home in two weeks, although no one would dare say it. Their faces are round and sheened with tears or sweat. They are quiet. So quiet. No talking or laughing or playing. They just sit there, looking broken and numb. There are a few women around. Evacuation workers, nursery school teachers, and probably some like Vera, who could neither let their children go nor defy an order of the state.
She does not want to think about what she has done or what it will mean to her family. They desperately need the money she earns at the library. . . .
The train seems to waken beneath her. The whistle blows and she can feel it start to move. Barely touching the seats, unable to make eye contact with the children around her, she keeps going, from one car to another.
“Mama!”
She hears Anya’s voice spike above the rattling wheeze of the train. Vera claws her way forward to the small seat where her children sit huddled together, their heads too low to allow them to peer out the window.
She slides into the seat, pulling them both onto her lap and smothering them with kisses.
Leo’s round face, wet with sweat and tears, is already dirty, although she cannot imagine how he made that happen. His eyes are damp with tears, but he doesn’t cry this time, and Vera wonders if her good-bye did something to him, if now he is less innocent or not quite so young. “You said we had to go.”
Vera’s throat feels so tight it is all she can do to nod.
“I held his hand, Mama,” Anya says solemnly. “Every minute.”
Like all good Soviets, Vera does not allow herself to question the government. If Comrade Stalin wants to protect the children by taking them south, she puts them on the train. Her great act of defiance, going with them, seems like a small thing, and the farther she gets from Leningrad, the smaller it seems. She will see that they are safe at their destination and when she knows that all is well, she will return to her job at the library. If she is lucky it won’t take more than a day or two. She will explain to her boss, Comrade Plotkin, that it was her patriotic duty to accompany the children on this state-mandated evacuation.
Words matter here in the Soviet Union. Words like patriotic, efficient, essential. No one wants to question the wrong thing. If Vera can act certain and fearless, perhaps she will be okay.
If only Mama will not worry too much. Or Olga.
“Mama, I’m hungry,” Leo says grumpily. He is curled into her lap like a tiny fiddlehead fern; his stuffed gray bunny clutched in his arms. He is sucking his thumb and stroking the soft pink satin inside the rabbit’s floppy ear.
They have been on the train only a few hours and no one has said a thing about meals or stopping or when they will arrive at their destination.
“Soon, my little lion,” Vera says, patting his padded shoulder. She can see the way the children on the train are coming out of their numbness, growing restless. A few whine; someone starts to cry. Vera is about to reach down for the small bag of raisins she has brought with her when the train’s whistle shrieks. It doesn’t stop this time, doesn’t blast once as if at a crossing and then go still. Instead, the sound goes on and on, like a woman’s scream. The brakes lock, make a grinding noise, and the train shudders in response, starts to slow.
Gunfire erupts all around them. There is the whine of an airplane engine and the explosions start.
Vera looks outside, sees fire everywhere. Panic breaks out in the train. Everyone is screaming and running to the windows.
A woman in a Party shirt and wrinkled blue wool pants makes her way through the car, saying, “Everyone off of the train. Go. To the barn behind us. Now!”
Vera grabs her children and runs. It occurs to her later, when she is at the front of the line, that she is an adult, that she should have helped the unaccompanied children, but she is not thinking straight. The airplanes keep flying overhead; the bombs drop and fires start.
Outside, all is smoke and screaming. She can hardly see anything but destruction—burning buildings, black and smoldering holes in the ground, ruined houses.
The Germans are here, pushing forward with their tanks and their guns and their bombs.
Vera sees a man coming toward her; he is wearing an army uniform. “Where are we?”
“About forty kilometers south of the Luga River,” he yells as he runs past her.
She pulls her children in closer. They are crying now, their faces streaked with black. They run with the crowd to a giant barn and cram together inside.
It is hot in here, and it smells of fear and fire and sweat. They can hear the airplanes overhead and feel the bombs that shake the ground.
“They took us right to the Germans,” some woman says bitterly.
“Shhh,” comes at once from dozens of others, but it cannot be unsaid. The truth of it sticks in Vera’s mind like a shred of metal and cannot be dislodged.
All of these people—children, mostly—waiting for a night that won’t fall, for protection that may not come at all. How can you trust a leader who sends his country’s children directly into the enemy?
Thank God she is with them. What if they had been alone?
She knows she will think this later, and for a long time; she will probably weep with relief. But later. Now she must act.
“We need to leave this barn,” she says, quietly at first, but when another bomb hits close enough to rattle the rafters and send dust raining down on them, she says it again, louder: “We need to leave this barn. If a bomb hits us—”
“Citizen,” someone says, “the Party wants us here.”
“Yes, but . . . our children.” She does not say what is on her mind; she cannot. But many know anyway. She can see it in their eyes. “I am taking my children out of here. I will take anyone who wants to go.”
There is grumbling around her. She is hardly surprised. Her country is a place of great fear these days, and no one knows which is more likely to kill you—the Germans or the secret police.
She tightens her hold on her children’s hands and begins to move slowly through the crowd. Even the children ease sideways to let her pass. The eyes that meet hers are distrustful and afraid.
“I will come with you,” one woman says. She is old and wrinkled, her gray hair hidden beneath a dirty kerchief. Four children stand clustered around her, dressed for winter, their pale faces streaked with ash.
They are the only ones.
Vera and the woman and their six children make their way out of the barn, past all the silent children. Outside, the countryside is gray with smoke.
“We might as well start walking,” the woman says.
“How far are we from Leningrad?” Vera asks, wondering if she has done the right thing. She feels exposed now, vulnerable to the airplanes flying overhead. To her left, a bomb falls and a building explodes.
“About ninety kilometers,” the woman says. “It will do us no good to talk.”
Vera hefts Leo into her arms and holds on to Anya. She knows that she will not be able to carry her son for long, but she wants to start out that way. Just in case. She can feel his strong, steady heartbeat against her own.
In the years to come, she will forget the hardships of that journey, how her children’s feet blistered until they bled, how their food ran out, how they slept in hay barns like criminals, listening all night for air raids and falling bombs, how they woke in a panic, thinking they’d been shot, feeling blindly for wounds that were not there. Instead, she will remember the lorry drivers who picked them up, and the people who stopped to give them bread and ask them what they’d seen down south. She will remember how she told them what she hadn’t known before: that war is about fire and fear and bodies lying in ditches by the side of the road.
By the time she gets home and stumbles into her mother’s welcoming arms, she is battered and tired and bloody; her shoes have worn through in places and the pain in her feet will not ease, even in a pail of hot water. But none of this matters. Not now.
What matters is Leningrad, her wonderful white city. The Germans are moving toward her home. Hitler has vowed to wipe this city off the map.
Vera knows what she must do.
Tomorrow, very early in the morning, she will get out of her narrow bed and dress in layers. She will pack all the sausage and dried fruit she can carry, and like thousands of other women her age, she will go south again to protect all that she loves. It is every citizen’s job.
“We have to stop them at Luga,” she says to her mother, whose face crumples in understanding. “They need workers there.”
Mama does not ask why or how or why you? All of those answers are clear. It is only the first full week of war, and already Leningrad is becoming a city of women. Every man between fourteen and sixty has gone to fight. Now the girls are going off to war, too. “I will take care of the children,” is all her mother says, but Vera can hear You come back to us as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud.
