Sasha is beside me suddenly.
He folds me into a hug and I press my face into the cold curl of his neck.
“We will be away from here someday,” he promises. “We will go to Alaska, just like we talked about. It won’t always be like this.”
“Alaska,” I say, remembering this dream of his, of ours. “Land of the Midnight Sun. Yes. . . .”
But a dream like that—any dream—is far away now and it only makes my pain worse.
I look at him, and though he says something, I see his thoughts in his green eyes, or maybe it is my own thoughts reflected. Either way, we break apart and Sasha says to our slumped, red-eyed children, “Mama and I must go take care of Baba.”
Leo, sitting on the kitchen floor, starts to cry, but it is a pale imitation of my son’s sadness, of his tears. I know. I have seen him burst into tears when he is healthy. Now he just . . . leaks water from his eyes and sits there, too hungry and exhausted to do more.
“We’ll stay here, Papa,” Anya says solemnly. “I’ll take care of Leo.”
“My good children,” Sasha says. He keeps them busy while I wash Mama, and dress her in her best dress. I try not to notice how shrunken and thin she is . . . not really my mother at all, but . . .
It is true what they say. Children become adults who become children again. I cannot help thinking of this cycle as I gently wash my mother’s body and button her buttons and pin her hair. When I am done, she looks like she is sleeping and I bend down and kiss her cold, cold cheek and whisper my good-bye.
Then it is time.
Sasha and I dress for the cold. I put on everything I own—four pairs of socks, my mother’s oversized valenki, pants, dresses, sweaters. I can barely fit into my coat, and once I have wrapped a scarf around my head, my face looks like a child’s.
Out we go, into the cold, black day. Streetlamps are on in places, their light blurred by falling snow. We tie Mama to the little red sled that once was a family toy and now is perhaps our most important possession. Sasha is strong enough to drag it through the heavy snow, thank God.
I am weak. I try to hide it from my husband, but how can I? Every step through the knee-deep snow is a torture for me. My breath comes in great, burning gasps. I want to sit down but I know better.
In front of us, a man weaves drunkenly forward, clutches a streetlamp, and bends over, breathing hard.
We walk past him. This is what we do now, what we have become. When I look back, breathing hard myself, he has fallen in the snow. I know that when we go home we will see his blue, frozen body. . . .
“Don’t look,” Sasha says.
“I see anyway,” I say, and keep trudging forward. How can I not see? Rumors are that three thousand people a day are dying, mostly old men and young children. We women are stronger somehow.
Thankfully, Sasha is in the army, so we only have to stand in line a few hours for a death certificate. We will lose Mama’s food ration, but lying about her death is more dangerous than starving.
By the time we leave the warmth of standing in line, I am beyond exhausted. The hunger is gnawing at my belly and I feel so light-headed that sometimes I cry for no reason. The tears freeze on my cheeks instantly.
There are streetlamps on at the cemetery, although I wish it were dark. In the falling snow, the bodies are hidden, coated in white, but there is no mistaking them: corpses stacked like firewood at the cemetery gates.
The ground is too frozen for burial. I should have known this. I would have known it if my mind were working, but hunger has made me stupid and slow.
Sasha looks at me. The sadness in his eyes is unbearable. I want to give in then, just slump into the snow and stop caring.
“I can’t leave her here,” I say, unable to even count the bodies. Neither can I bring her home again. It is what too many neighbors have done, just set aside a place for the dead in their apartments, but I cannot do it.
Sasha nods and moves forward, dragging the sled around the snowy mounds and into the dark, quiet cemetery.
We hold hands. It is the only way we can know where the other is. We find an open space beneath a tree laced with snow and frost. I hope this tree will be the protector for her I was not.
Our voices echo through the falling snow as we tell each other this is the place. I will always know this tree, recognize it, and here I will find her again someday, or at least I will stand here and remember her. From now on, I will always remember her on the fourteenth of December, wherever I am. It is not much, but it is something.
I kneel in the snow; even with gloves on, my fingers are trembling with cold as I untie the ropes and release her frozen body.
“I am sorry, Mama,” I whisper, my teeth chattering. I touch her face in the darkness like a blind woman, trying to remember how she looks. “I’ll come back in the spring.”
“Come on,” Sasha says, pulling me to my feet. I know better than to kneel, even for this, in the snow. Already my knees are colder. Soon I will not be able to feel my legs.
We leave her there. Alone.
“It is all we can do,” Sasha says later as we trudge for home, our breathing ragged.
All I want to do is lie down. I am so hungry and so tired and so sad. I do not even care if I die.
“Yes,” I say. I don’t care. I just want to stop.
But Sasha is there, urging me forward, and when we get home, and our children climb into bed with us, I thank God my husband is there.
“Don’t you give up,” he whispers to me in bed that night. “I will find a way to get you out of here.”
I promise.
I agree not to give up, though I don’t know what it even means then.
And in the morning, he kisses my cheek, whispers that he loves me, and he leaves.
In late December, the city slowly freezes to death. It is dark almost all the time. Birds drop from the sky like stones. The crows die first; I remember that. It is impossibly cold. Twenty degrees below zero becomes normal. The streetcars stop in their tracks like children’s toys that have fallen out of favor. The water mains burst.
The sleds are everywhere now. Women drag them through the streets to carry things home—wood from burned-out buildings, buckets of water from the Neva River, anything they can burn or eat.
You’d be amazed what you can eat. There are rumors that the sausage sold in the markets is made from human flesh. I don’t go to the markets anymore. What is the point? I see beautiful fur coats and jewels selling for nothing and oil cakes made of warehouse sweepings and sawdust going for exorbitant prices.
We do as little as we can, my children and I. Our apartment is black all the time now—there is only the briefest spasm of daylight and very few candles are left to light the darkness. Our little burzhuika is everything now. Heat and light. Life. We have burned most of the furniture in our apartment, but some pieces are still left.
The three of us are wrapped tightly together all night, and in the morning we waken slowly. We lie beneath all the blankets we have, with our bed pushed close to the stove, and still we waken with frozen hair and frost on our cheeks. Leo has developed a cough that worries me. I try to get him to drink hot water, but he resists me. I cannot blame him. Even after it is boiled, the water tastes like the corpses that lie on the river’s frozen surface.
I get up in the cold and take however long I must to break off a chair leg or shatter a drawer, and feed the wood into the stove. There is a ringing in my ears and a kind of vertigo that often sends me sprawling at the merest step. I know my own body by its bones now. Still, I smile when I kiss my babies awake.
Anya groans at my touch and this is better than Leo, who just lies there.
I shake him hard, yell his name; when he opens his eyes I can’t help falling to my knees. “Silly boy,” I say, wiping my eyes. I can’t hear anything over the roaring in my ears and the hammering of my heart.
I would give anything to hear him say he is hungry.
I make us each a cup of hot water laced with yeast. It is no nutrition, but it will fill us up. Carefully, I take a piece of thick black bread—the last of this week’s rations—and I cut it in thirds. I want to give it all to them, but I know better. Without me, they are lost, so I must eat.
We each cut our third of a piece of bread into tiny pieces, which we eat as slowly as possible. I put half of mine in my pocket for later. I get up and put on all of my clothes.
My children lie in the bed, snuggled close. Even from across the room, I can see how skeletal they look. When last I bathed Leo, he was a collection of sharp bones and sunken skin.
I go to them, sit by them on the bed. I touch Leo’s cheeks, pull his knit cap down far enough to cover his ears.
“Don’t go, Mama,” he says.
“I have to.”
It is the conversation we have every morning, and honestly, there is very little fight left in them. “I will find us some candy, would you like that?”
“Candy,” he says dreamily, slumping back into his flattened pillow.
Anya looks up at me. Unlike her brother, she is not sick; she is just wasting, like me. “You shouldn’t tell him there will be candy,” she says.
“Oh, Anya,” I say, pulling her into my arms and holding her as tightly as I can. I kiss her cracked lips. Our breath is terrible, but neither of us even notices anymore.
“I don’t want to die, Mama,” she says.
“You won’t, moya dusha. We’ll make sure of it.”
My soul.
She is that. They both are. And because of that, I get up and get dressed and go to work.
Out in the freezing darkness of early morning, I drag my sled through the streets. In the library, I go down to the one reading room that is open. Oil lamps create pockets of light. Many of the librarians are too sick to move, so those of us who are able move books and answer research questions for the government and the army. We go in search of books, too, saving what we can from bombed buildings. When there is nothing left to do, I queue up for whatever rations I can get. Today I am lucky: there is a jar of sauerkraut and a ration of bread.
The walk home is terrible. My legs are so weak and I can’t breathe and I am dizzy. There are corpses everywhere. I no longer even go around them. I don’t have the energy.
Halfway home, I reach into my pocket and pull out my tiny piece of bread from the morning meal. I put it in my mouth, let it melt on my tongue.
I can feel myself swaying. That white roar of noise is back in my ears; in the past few weeks I have grown accustomed to the sound.
I see a bench up ahead.
Sit. Close your eyes for just a moment . . .
I am so tired. The gnawing in my belly is gone, replaced by exhaustion. It is a struggle just to breathe.
And then, amazingly, I see Sasha standing in the street in front of me. He looks exactly as he did on the day I met him, years ago, a lifetime; he isn’t even wearing a coat and his hair is long and golden.
“Sasha,” I say, hearing the crack in my voice. I want to run to him, but my legs won’t work. Instead I crumple to my knees in the thick snow.
I can feel him beside me, putting his arm around me. His breath is so warm and it smells of cherries.
Cherries. Like the ones Papa used to bring us . . .
And honey.
I close my eyes, hungry for the taste of him and his sweet breath.
