The End of Sorrow: A Novel of the Siege of Leningrad in WWII

by JV Love

  "My pa made me skin a squirrel once," Igor said. "It was really hard. I hated it."

  As poorly as Petya was handling the sudden decrease in food, Igor was in even worse shape. He moped around the apartment all day and rarely went outside anymore. Petya hated that the boy had to live through something like this at his age. Igor was on the verge of adolescence, and Petya knew from his own life how difficult that time was.

  Petya took his gloves off and laid his hands on the cat. "I'll skin it," he said. It seemed so strange to him that the cat was dead when its body was still warm. "I put that little stove up on the roof. You go make sure the fire is going good. We'll need some hot coals so we can roast the meat."

  Igor left the apartment and Petya carried the cat into the kitchen and set it on the counter. He opened a drawer and grabbed the sharpest knife they had. He decided to cut the cat's head off first since its eyes were still open and looking at him. As he did so, a strange voice whispered loudly, "You snake. You're going to burn in hell."

  Petya spun around quickly, his eyes searching frantically for the voice's owner. He gripped the knife in his hand and held it out in front of him. "Who's there?" he called out. He looked down the hallway and under the kitchen table. No one answered, and he wondered if the voices from long ago were coming back to play tricks on his mind again.

  So many times Petya felt like an imposter, a fraud who only looked like everyone else. They didn't hear voices without owners. They took sanity for granted. Petya didn't. He couldn't. Sanity to him was the ice of a frozen lake. Most of the time, the ice was thick and Petya stood firmly on top and only had to deal with the fear. But that he pushed as far back in his mind as he could.

  The fear was with him because the ice wasn't always so thick. There were times - sometimes hours, sometimes days - when the ice was thin and as he walked across, it would splinter and crack. This was his advanced notice that the faces he saw and the voices he heard may no longer be real. A few times the thin ice had given way under his feet and he'd fallen in. Those had always been the most terrifying times of his life: not being able to tell right from wrong, dreams from reality, real voices from those only in his head. It was like being caught between two worlds - unable to be in one or the other. Looking in from the outside, and looking out from the inside.

  Those instances when the thin ice of sanity had given way, Petya had been able to pull himself out fairly quickly. His greatest fear was that one day he would fall so far through the ice that he wouldn't be able to pull himself out, and instead be caught underneath looking up through the ice where he had once been. Longing to be as he was. Unable to get back on the right side of that ice. Forever trapped beneath its surface.

  He returned to skinning the cat, deciding the voice hadn't been real. If the voices were indeed coming back, it was vitally important that he maintain his composure. It seemed that his life was always one misstep away from spinning out of control.

  Today was October 8th and Petya still hadn't been able to find a position that would increase his rations. He was completely out of food except for a small bag of sunflower seeds he'd stolen from Oksana. He had lost twenty-eight pounds in the last six weeks, going from 206 pounds down to 178. If he hadn't been so overweight before the war started, he thought he might have already starved to death.

  Igor arrived with some wooden skewers and Petya sliced the meat into square chunks and put it on them. They went up to the roof and roasted the meat over the orange coals in the small stove. It was a gray, cloudy day, but at least there was no wind so the temperature was bearable.

  When the meat was done, they sprinkled it with salt and the only seasoning they had left - dried parsley. Petya chewed each bite thoroughly, and tried to imagine that it was chicken and not cat. Igor sat as far away as he could be, curled up in the corner like a desperate animal, ready to lash out at anything that came close to him or his food.

  Petya took out his bread ration for that day and ate it along with the meat. The bread was hard and heavy and tasted terrible. It was filled with barely edible ingredients that gave Petya a stomachache every time. He heard another voice and wondered whether or not it was real, whether or not he should ignore it. "Did you say something?" he asked Igor.

  "Yeah," Igor said, "you didn't hear me? I asked you why God hates us."

  "Why does God hate us?" Petya thought it an odd question, coming from Igor.

  "Yeah, if he didn't hate us, he'd rescue us, right?"

  The thought occurred to Petya that perhaps God was a lonely child, like Igor. A lonely child with a child's mentality of good and evil, love and vengeance, judgment and eternity.

  "Since when did you develop an interest in religion?" Petya asked. It felt strange to him to talk about God and religion so much these days. Before the war, the subject was taboo. But now everywhere he turned he saw old ladies making the sign of the cross, children saying prayers, and now Igor opening a discussion with him on God.

  It all reminded Petya very uncomfortably of that part of his childhood spent with his aunt. A terrible memory flashed through his mind of him as a six-year-old boy being whipped by her for using the Lord's name in vain. The part that hurt the worst was that Petya hadn't actually said it. She'd misheard him.

  "Katya talks about it all the time," Igor said. "She says there's nothing to be afraid of as long as we keep our faith in God." He took his last bite of food, then licked his fingers. "But I don't believe her," he added.

  "Well, maybe God hates us because we haven't praised him enough," Petya said.

  "Why do we have to praise him?"

  At first, Petya thought Igor's innocent question was just childish ignorance, but then he wondered the same thing himself. Does an omnipotent God have low self-esteem? Does he need his creation to stoke his ego like a parent to a child? And if he doesn't get his way, he throws a temper tantrum and floods the earth - destroying all who don't appease him?

  "I honestly don't know, Igor," Petya said. "I don't know why we have to praise him, and I don't know why he doesn't rescue us. Maybe it's because he's dead - like the philosopher Nietzsche says."

  "He's not dead," Igor said. "He's just not coming back."

  "What?" Petya exclaimed, surprised to hear such a shrewd notion coming from Igor's lips.

  "I said I don't think he's coming back. He's seen what's happened here." Igor moved closer to the stove and held his hands over the top. "Maybe he can't face it."

  Petya couldn't believe his ears. Did Igor just say what he thought he did, or were the voices conspiring against him again? Either way, he felt lost. He was accustomed to looking at Igor as a witless juvenile, but found it difficult to think of him in those terms after what he just said.

  Petya leaned his head back, looking up at the endless gray sky. He had so much hate for religion. It had poisoned so many people, and they, in turn, had passed that poison on to their children. The whole world was infected. Even here in the Soviet Union, where religion had been banished as a relic from the past, people still worshiped and believed. If he could, Petya would burn every holy book, every church, every synagogue and mosque in the world. People needed to be educated. They needed to understand how cruel and detrimental religion really was.

  The air raid sirens began their unearthly wailing again, echoing through the cavernous streets and lifeless ruins of collapsed buildings. Petya heard them, but kept walking. He wouldn't go to a shelter unless they forced him to. There was a time when he would have ran to the nearest shelter, a time when he valued safety above all else. But he was beyond that now.

  He was dying. Little by little, day by day, cell by cell. Not an hour passed when he didn't think about that. Let the German planes come and drop a bomb on him. That wouldn't be such a bad way to die - quick and painless.

  And symbolic too. What more could a writer ask for?

  He was coming back from another failed attempt to get a position that would increase his rations. He wasn't bitter about it not working out though. He'd le
arned to lower his expectations so that he wouldn't be stung by rejection.

  There were a lot of lessons he'd learned about protecting himself, like not getting too close to anyone because they would eventually leave or be taken away. His parents were taken from him. His uncle would leave almost as soon as he got back from some trip, and his aunt, for all the beatings and abuse she directed at Petya, was also his sole friend and confidante, and she was arrested by the communists and shipped to a gulag in Siberia for her religious beliefs.

  Petya was sent to live in an orphanage after that, where the other kids mercilessly picked on him because of his disfigured leg. His only saving grace had been his intelligence, and he'd learned to wear it like a coat of armor.

  He stopped now and looked at the sky above him, then laughed, though he didn't know why. Every day seemed to bring something new and unexplainable into his world. Like now, everywhere he turned, he saw everything saturated in a strange, purplish tint - the dark, bombed-out buildings, the wet pavement, the streetcars that passed slowly and quietly down their tracks. He felt like a ghost walking up the stark streets of a deserted city. Even when others passed by, they seemed surreal, like they were a backdrop to a dream he was having.

  Petya began to wonder if he really did exist. Perhaps he had already died and was a lost spirit condemned to haunt the streets of the city that he loved, but never really appreciated when he was alive.

  The more he thought about it, the more he terrified himself. What proof did he have that any of this was real? How could he prove that it wasn't all just a dream?

  The only way he was able to calm himself was to accept the fact that he couldn't prove it. He didn't know that it wasn't all just a dream, but he did know that - whatever it was - it was beautiful. It was mayhem and despair and destruction, and it was also beautiful beyond words.

  He shivered and wondered if ghosts could feel cold. And why shouldn't they? They were probably forever cold, he thought.

  He came to his favorite statue in all of Leningrad - one of the few that wasn't surrounded these days by planks and sandbags. Pushkin, the greatest Russian writer ever to live, towered over him, a pigeon perched on his left shoulder.

  Petya continued on, thinking again how it was October 8th, 1941 already. It occurred to him that time was constantly being burned, that his past was being deconstructed, dissolved by the simple passing of day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year.

  He had spent three years of his life in Odessa, on the Black Sea. Three wonderful years. And yet he could barely recall anything he had done there - the people he knew, the music he listened to, the major events that took place. What had happened to that time? Was it lost forever?

  It seemed sometimes that it wasn't really he who had lived there. He tried to picture himself in his apartment doing something - anything! What did he sit on? What did he think? What did he look at?

  He couldn't recall anything. Nothing at all, besides that the apartment had high ceilings that he was quite fond of. In general, they had been good years. He remembered that much. But the life he'd lived was slipping away, slipping through his grasp like a handful of sand. He needed something to hold onto, something to think back on and look forward to again. How could one live life without that? What was life except a collection of memories and accomplishments?

  He climbed over the rubble of a bombed-out building and felt so very weary. It was more than just physical exhaustion. He was tired of the anger and hatred and fear that ran his life. He wanted to feel more often like he felt now. He wanted the freedom that this spaciousness gave him. The freedom to take a step back from the habitual thoughts and reactions that dictated every minute of his life. Why must he be doomed to live his life trapped by what other people said or did to him? Why did he give this power to others to make him angry or jealous or irritable? Why couldn't he let go of his hatred of religion?

  If he could live his life over, he'd do it differently. He'd laugh more at himself, rather than others. He'd take more walks with no destination or goal in mind. He'd be more vulnerable and less guarded. He'd sleep in on Saturdays and not feel guilty about it. He'd read more poetry and less news. He'd listen to more music and less gossip. He'd notice more often when people smiled, and less when they frowned. If he could live his life over again, he'd notice more often how wonderful the smell of the ocean was, and the sheer perfection and simplicity of a wave crashing to shore and dissolving into nothingness.

  * * *

  Felix peeked his head above the rocks and watched Misha walking toward him over the narrow, winding road. After he saw Misha wave his right arm high in the air, Felix prepared to light the match. But then Misha unexpectedly fell to the ground. Felix stopped and listened intently, but could hear no gunfire or anything else out of the ordinary. There was a squirrel chattering in the large oak tree next to him, but nothing else.

  He glanced at the dynamite he'd wedged into a crack in the rock, and deliberated whether to light the fuse and run or go check on Misha first. Misha was lying face down in the road, and Felix wondered if he'd merely passed out. He knew Misha had been drinking heavily that day, even more than usual. As Felix looked down the slope, he saw Misha begin to move his right arm, then his left, then shake his head and climb back to his feet. Felix struck the match, lit the dynamite, and scrambled down the side of the massive rock, jumping the last six feet to the road below.

  Misha was still brushing himself off when Felix reached him. "What happened?" Felix asked.

  "I don't know," Misha said. "It was weird. Everything just blacked out all of a sudden."

  "You and Dima need to stop drinking that poison all day long," Felix said.

  "No, it wasn't from the alcohol," Misha said. "It was something else."

  Felix waited to hear what else it was, but Misha didn't elaborate. They hurried over to the cluster of trees where Dima and another partisan, Yuri, were waiting. Yuri, a large man with wide shoulders and forearms as thick as tree limbs, was the first to meet them.

  "What took you so long?" he asked. "I could have done that in half the time."

  Felix ignored him and searched for Dima. He found him still sitting on the same fallen tree as when he'd left. He was smoking another cigarette and had no reaction when the dynamite exploded and filled the air with its deafening boom. Dima hardly had a reaction to anything anymore, and Felix was troubled by the apathy, and sometimes downright animosity, that seemed to rule his life these days. Dima had fallen under Misha's influence, and the two of them got drunk together nearly every day now.

  Yuri left the thicket of trees to go inspect the road, and Felix followed him. He could see right away that they'd been successful. The dynamite had smashed the humongous rock and caused a mini avalanche that now blocked the road and made it impossible for German trucks, tanks, or cars to pass by.

  The four of them picked up their things and began marching to the little village of Lestovo, where they were to meet up with the rest of the partisans. Several inches of snow covered the ground, and when they stepped, their boots would make either a sucking sound as they sank into the mud or else a crunching sound as they stomped over dead leaves. The sun was hidden behind thick clouds once again and it was cold, but at least they were all dressed for it. They wore thick, heavy coats, wool scarves, hats, and insulated leather mittens.

  Felix walked in front with Yuri, who carried his rifle at his side with his left hand. Yuri was quiet for a change, and Felix used the time to reflect on how Dima hadn't been the same since the fire at the warehouse. Dima seemed to be lost in his own world these days, constantly pondering things and muttering unintelligible thoughts and ideas that only he could hear. Felix tried to engage him, but Dima never talked. He kept it all inside.

  Felix glanced over his shoulder and saw that Misha and Dima were dragging behind once again. He tugged on Yuri's coat and the two of them stopped to allow their comrades to catch up.

  "I'm getting sick of those two drunkards," Yuri said
while he lit a cigarette.

  Yuri had spent the last eight years of his life in a gulag in Siberia and not a day went by when he didn't remind others of it.

  "For eight whole years I suffered injustices that you can't even imagine," Yuri said. "But not once, I tell you, did I ever lose faith in my country. I knew there would come a day when I would be called upon to serve her." He spat on the ground as he watched Misha and Dima walk gingerly around a muddy area. Dima seemed to be the more drunk of the two now and looked like he was focusing all his concentration on putting one foot in front of the other. "Not like those idiots," Yuri continued. "They have no honor. They have no shame!" He shouted the last sentence in their direction, but neither of them acknowledged him.

  Felix thought of his own time spent as a prisoner of the Germans and wondered how similar his experience had been to Yuri's. His interrogators had beat him every day - sometimes two or three times a day. But Felix had told them nothing. He simply went within himself, blocked out the pain, and instead thought of Katya. When they'd finally got to him was when they sat him outside the room where Dima was being interrogated. They made him sit there for two hours and listen to his friend scream and plead for an end to the punishment. Then they told Felix they'd stop torturing Dima and even let his comrade sleep and eat, on one condition - that Felix tell them some piece of information they might find useful.

  "Perhaps you should walk a mile or two in their shoes before you judge them so harshly," Felix said to Yuri. "You know Dima was captured by the Nazis and they . . ."

  "What could be worse than eight years in Siberia?" Yuri interrupted. "Nothing - that's what. Did I tell you how in the winter the frost would be three inches thick on the inside of the windows? It was so cold in those barns they kept us in that you could see your breath. And we had to work outside all day long where it was twenty degrees below zero. You never got warm. A quarter of the men froze to death every winter. You don't know how good you have it here. You get hot food and fresh bread . . ."