“Will we see Mama tomorrow?” Olga asks sleepily.
“Not tomorrow, no,” Vera says, tightening her hold. “But soon.”
The day is sunny and bright. If not for the Germans bombing everything in sight, and their tanks rolling forward, forward, the birds would be singing here, the pine trees would be green instead of black. As it is, the beauty of the place is long gone. The trench is a huge, gaping slash in the earth, a mortal muddy wound. Girls crawl all around it; soldiers run back and forth between here and the front line, not far away. If this line breaks, if the Germans get past it, Leningrad will fall. This they all believe, so they keep digging, no matter that their hands are bleeding and bombs are as ever-present as sunlight.
Vera is trying not to think about anything except the spoon in her hand. The pickax broke last week. For a while she was lucky enough to find a spade, but she didn’t hide it well and one morning when she woke up it was gone, so now she digs with a serving spoon.
All day long. Stab, push, twist, pull. Until her shoulder aches and her neck hurts and her blistered palms burn. No amount of salt water can help (the honey and the old woman are long gone). And now she is having her monthly bleeding as well. Her body is turning against her, it seems, and yet all she can worry about is Olga. Her sister digs without complaint, but she can’t sleep or eat, and when the bombs start falling, Olga just stands there with a hand tented across her face, staring up at the planes.
In the past few weeks, Vera has learned that anything can become ordinary—sleeping in the dirt, running for cover, digging holes, watching people die, stepping over bodies, smelling flesh burn. But she cannot accept the new Olga, who moves like the blind and laughs giddily when bombs explode around her.
The air-raid alarm rings out. Girls and women scurry out of the trench and into it. They are screaming to one another, pushing each other aside.
Olga is standing beside the trench, her dress torn and dirty. Her long strawberry-blond hair is filthy, frizzy, and held back from her blackened face by a once-blue kerchief. Overhead, German planes begin to fill the sky, their engines droning.
Vera yells for her sister as she scrambles over the broken earth, leading the way, pushing debris aside. “Come on—”
“It sounds like Mama’s sewing machine.”
Vera turns at that, looks back. Olga is still standing there, too far away, her hand tented over her eyes.
“Run!” Vera yells at the same time the bomb hits.
Olga is there and gone, flung like a rag doll to the side. She falls in a broken heap on the other side of the trench while debris rains down. . . .
Vera is screaming, crying; she crawls out of the trench and over the broken earth to where her sister lies beneath a pile of dirt and rubble. A brick is on Olga’s chest—where did it come from?
Blood gushes from the side of Olga’s mouth and slides through the soot and mud on her cheek. Her breathing is a phlegmy, bubbling cough. “Vera,” she says, shuddering. “I forgot to get down. . . .”
“You’re supposed to listen to me,” Vera says. She holds her sister to her chest, trying to keep her alive by loving her. “I am your big sister.”
“Always . . . bossing . . .”
Vera kisses her sister’s cheek, tries to wipe the blood away, but her hands are so dirty she is just making a mess. “I love you, Olga. Don’t leave me. Please . . .”
Olga smiles and coughs. Blood gushes from her nose and mixes with dirt. “Remember when we went—”
And she is gone.
Vera sits there a long time, kneeling in the dirt. Until the soldiers come and take Olga away.
Then she goes back to digging. It isn’t that she doesn’t care or doesn’t hurt.
But what else can she do?
Twenty-two
In August, Vera is released from work on the line. She is one of thousands of dazed, solitary women walking in silent groups for home. The trains are still running, although most of them are full all the time, and only the luckiest find space enough to sit or stand. They are evacuating the children of Leningrad again—this time with their mothers—but Vera does not trust her government anymore and will not follow the evacuation order again. Only last week she heard of a train of children that was bombed near Mga. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. She does not care. It could be true, and that is enough for her.
She is tougher now, after two months spent digging in the black earth and running for shelter. Tough enough to make her way home through countryside she’s never seen. When she is lucky, a transport or a lorry picks her up and takes her as far as they are going, but luck is a thing she has never counted on, and most of the miles to Leningrad, she walks. When she meets soldiers on the road, she asks about Sasha, but she does not get answers. It is no surprise to her.
When she finally makes it to Leningrad, she finds a city as changed as she. Windows are blacked out and crisscrossed in tape. Trenches cut through parks, tearing through grass and flowers. Everywhere she looks are mounds of broken cement—dragon’s teeth, they are called—meant to bar the tanks. Huge iron beams crisscross the city boundaries like the ugly, misplaced bars of a prison. And soldiers move in marching columns through the streets. Already many of them look as broken as she feels; they’ve lost on one front and are moving to another, closer to the city. In their tired eyes, she sees the same fear that is now lodged inside of her: Leningrad is not the impervious city they’d imagined her to be. The Germans are getting closer. . . .
Finally, Vera stands on her own street and looks up at her apartment. Except for the blacked-out windows, it looks as it always did. The trees out front are in full summer bloom and the sky is as blue as a robin’s egg.
As she stands there, afraid to go forward, a feeling moves through her, as powerful as hunger or desire: she shivers with it.
It is wanting to turn and run, to hold on to this terrible truth a little longer, but she knows that running will not help, so she takes a deep breath and walks forward, one step at a time, until she is at her own front door.
It opens at her touch and suddenly she is in her home again, as small and cluttered as it is. Never has the broken-down furniture and peeling paint looked so beautiful.
And there is her mama, standing at the stove in a faded dress, with her gray hair all but hidden beneath a threadbare kerchief, stirring something. At Vera’s entrance, she turns slowly. Her bright smile is heartbreaking; worse is the way it fades away and is replaced by sorrow. Only one has come home.
“Mama!” Leo screams, coming at her like a windstorm, toys dropping from his hands. Anya is beside him in an instant and they throw themselves into Vera’s arms.
They smell so good, so pure. . . . Leo’s cheeks are as soft and sweet as ripe plums and Vera could eat him up. She holds them too long, too tightly, unaware that she has begun to shake and to cry.
“Don’t cry, Mama,” Anya says, wiping her cheek. “I still have the butterfly. I didn’t break it.”
Vera slowly releases them and stands up. She is shaking like a leaf and trying not to cry as she stares across the kitchen at her mother. In that look, Vera feels her childhood leave her at last.
“Where’s Aunt Olga?” Leo asks, looking past her.
Vera cannot answer. She just stands there. “Olga is gone,” Mama says with only a slight tremble in her voice. “She is a hero of the state, our Olga, and that is how we must think of her.”
“But . . .”
Mama takes Vera in her arms, holding her so hard that neither can breathe. There is only silence between them; in that silence, memories pass back and forth like dye in water, moving and fluid, and when they pull back and look at each other, Vera understands.
They will not speak of Olga again, not for a long time, not until the sharp pain rounds into something that can be handled.
“You need a bath,” Mama says after a time. “And those bandages on your hands need changing, so come along.”
Those first days back in Leningrad seem like a dream to Vera. During the day, she works alongside other library employees, packing up the most valuable books for transport. She, who is so low on the roster, finds herself actually holding a first edition of Anna Karenina. The pages have an unexpected weight, and she closes her eyes for just a moment. In the darkness she sees Anna, dressed in jewels and furs, running across the snow to Count Vronsky.
Someone says her name so sharply she almost drops the treasured volume. Starting, she flushes and lowers her gaze to the floor, mumbling, “Sorry,” and goes back to work. By the end of the week, they have packed up more than 350,000 masterpieces and sent them out of harm’s way. They’ve filled the attic with sandbags and moved other important works to the basement. Room after room is cleared out and boarded up and shut down, until only the smallest of the rooms is left open for readers.
By the end of her shift, Vera’s shoulders ache from all the lifting and dragging of boxes, but she is far from finished for the day. Instead of going home, she trudges through the busy, camouflaged streets and gets into the first queue she finds.
She doesn’t know what they are selling at this market and she doesn’t care. Since the start of bread rationing and the limitations placed on the withdrawal of banking accounts, you take what you can get. Like most of her friends and neighbors, Vera has very little money. Her rations allow her four hundred grams of bread a day and six hundred grams of butter a month. On this, they can live. But she thinks often of a decision she made years ago: if she worked now in the bread factory, her family would be better fed. She would be an essential worker, with higher rations.
She stands in line for hours. At just past ten o’clock in the evening, she comes to the front. The only thing left for sale are jars of pickles, and she buys three—the amount she can afford and carry.
In the apartment, she finds her mother and grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, passing a cigarette back and forth between them.
Saying nothing—they all say little these days—she goes past them to the children’s beds. Leaning down, she kisses both tender cheeks. Exhausted and hungry, she goes back into the kitchen. Mama has put out a plate of cold kasha for her.
“The last transport left today,” Baba says when Vera sits down.
Vera looks at her grandmother. “I thought they were still evacuating the city.”
Mama shakes her head. “We could not decide and now it is decided for us.”
“The Germans have taken Mga.”
Vera knows what this means, and if she did not, the look of despair in her mother’s eyes would have been enough to inform her. “So . . .”
“Leningrad is an island now,” Mama says, taking a drag off the cigarette and handing it back to Baba. “Cut off from the mainland on all sides.”
Cut off from supplies.
“What do we do?” Vera asks.
“Do?” Baba says.
“Winter is coming,” Mama says in the silence. “We need food and a burzhuika. I will take the children and go to the marketplace tomorrow.”
“What will you trade?”
“My wedding ring,” Mama says.
“So it has begun,” Baba says, stubbing out the cigarette.
