by JV Love
Katya usually loved it when it snowed - things both big and small, wide and narrow getting covered in a soft, silvery blanket. Everything slowing down from its usual hectic pace. It seemed like a betrayal of Mother Nature to be in a hurry when she was so diligently painting the most exquisite art right before your eyes.
She didn't feel that way about snow now. More snow meant more death. For many people, it took all their energy merely to walk. To have to wade through snow drifts was too much for them - it was on the other side of that ever shrinking line between what was doable and what wasn't.
She walked past another newly constructed street barricade - a barbarous thing made of ferroconcrete and railroad iron. Even the pretty white snow piling up on top of it couldn't mask how hideous it was. Stretching from one sidewalk to the other, it was built to withstand not only tanks, but air bombardment as well. Past it, a sentry at the bridge shouted, "Halt! Who goes there?"
"It's me. Katya. How are you today, Nikolai?"
"Cold," Nikolai said. He looked at her papers as a formality.
"You seem rather down," Katya said.
He handed her papers back to her. "Tikhvin has fallen," he said.
"Yes, I heard."
"We're dead," he said, motioning with his hands all around him. "We're all going to die here."
"No, we're not," Katya said. "We'll get Tikhvin back."
"Before or after we all starve to death?" he said sarcastically.
"The lake will freeze soon," Katya said, "then we'll be able to evacuate people if the food supply gets any worse." She knew it wasn't really feasible to evacuate many people (and where would they go?), but she kept that part to herself.
"Yes, that's true," he said, sounding cautiously optimistic. "You've got a point there. When will it freeze?"
"That's what I need to figure out."
"If my grandfather were still alive, he'd know," Nikolai said. "He loved to play hockey and was the one who decided when the ice was thick enough for us to make our rink. I remember he used to . . ."
Nikolai's story reminded Katya of Felix telling her about his ice fishing trips with his father, how they drilled holes through the ice, then dropped their line through and waited for a fish to bite. It sounded rather boring to her, but Felix said he enjoyed it because he got to spend time with his otherwise extremely busy father.
Katya stopped with a sudden realization. That was it! That was the solution to her problem.
She bid a quick farewell to Nikolai and hopped on a streetcar heading toward the university. She wondered why she hadn't thought of it earlier. Felix's father could help her. He was a brilliant scientist, and one of the very few who had refused to be evacuated from the city. She was sure he could help. She just didn't know if he was still alive.
The hallways of the university building where Felix's father worked were cold, unlit, and smelled of ammonia and dog feces. Katya could hear the dogs yelping and scratching at the walls of their cages. She was surprised that lab animals still existed. Except for one small pack of stray mutts that she saw or heard in the distance from time to time, it was a rare thing to see cats or dogs in the city anymore. Many of them had already starved to death or been eaten by their owners.
Katya last saw Felix's father three weeks ago at his apartment. She went there once a week to check on him and his wife and help them out with little things. The last time she went, she noticed how pale his face had become and that he had puffy eyes - the first sign of dystrophy. She'd stopped going after that. She didn't have the strength, either physically or emotionally, to continue it. It was too far to walk. It was too cold. She didn't have the time. She couldn't bear seeing him and his wife wither away. But more than all of that, his dimming iron-grey eyes reminded her too much of his son.
She knocked on his office door warily, equally afraid that he wouldn't answer and that he would. He was doing research for the army now, she knew, and members of the armed forces (in particular the front line troops) received much better rations than civilians. But even then it wasn't always enough. Felix's father was proof of that.
A voice finally answered from the other side of the door. "Yes?" it said. "What is it?"
Katya wasn't sure if it was Felix's father or not. The man's voice sounded so nasal and strained. And she thought it strange that he didn't open the door, but given how paranoid most people were these days, it wasn't all that out of place.
She took a chance that it was him. "Hello," she called out. "It's me. Katya."
"Katya?" the man repeated. "Katya who?"
She imagined he was being spiteful because she'd stopped visiting them. "Katerina Selenaya," she said.
He still hesitated.
"Felix's girlfriend," she added.
"Oh, Katya," he said, suddenly sounding like the man she knew. He opened the door and held out his arms for a hug. "You'll have to forgive me my dear. Lately, my brain has been a bit . . . umm . . . foggy."
He looked even worse than when she'd last seen him. His whole body was rigid and his arms and legs shook visibly when he moved. His eyes had sunk so far into his head as to be nearly unseeable.
"Come in. Come in," he said. "It's not much warmer in here, but a little at least." His office consisted of a desk crammed into the corner of a small laboratory. In the middle of the room were counters filled with microscopes and beakers and vials. The windows had been broken, and - like Katya's office now - were covered over with plywood. Two koptilkas (smoky lighting devices) provided the sole lighting for the room.
There was an uncomfortable silence between them that Katya let linger because it was even more uncomfortable to ask the usual questions. She didn't want to look at him and tried her best not to without him noticing. After another long minute, she gave in and asked how his wife was getting along.
She waited with a sense of dread as he cleared some papers off a chair.
He motioned for her to sit down. "She passed away last week," he said.
That was the answer she was afraid of, but strangely enough she didn't feel much of anything for him. She had no urge to hug him, take his hand, or even to say she was sorry to hear of the news. It was as if he'd just told her he'd bought a frying pan. That she felt so little disturbed her more than the news itself. "Did she suffer much?" she asked.
"Yes, she was in terrible pain," he said.
"Well, it's a good thing it's over then," Katya said, surprised to hear the words coming out of her mouth.
He looked at her strangely and she berated herself for her insensitivity. She knew how much he loved his wife, and that he must be terribly heartbroken now. Was that the best she could do now? Was that as much compassion as she had to offer?
As difficult as that had been, the next question would be even worse. Every time they saw one another, they stumbled along in their conversation until one of them got up the courage to inquire about Felix. Each time, they hoped that the other had the answer.
Conscious of the time constraints of her mission, Katya broached the subject first. "Have you heard anything of Felix?"
He hung his head. "No, nothing," he answered.
"Well, I'm sure he's okay," she said, hoping to move away from the subject as quickly as possible. "I think we'll hear something soon. I hear that communication with front-line troops is getting better."
"Yes," he agreed. "I'm sure we'll hear from him soon."
Katya ventured a look at his face, saw how sallow his cheeks were, and quickly looked away. He was almost completely unrecognizable from the man she knew before the blockade started.
"I need to get straight to the point," she said, "because I don't have much time. Leningrad itself doesn't have much time. I'm here because I'm hoping you can help me with some calculations on ice formation."
"I see," he said.
Katya thought he sounded disappointed, but realized his feelings were less important to her than the city's survival.
He listened patiently as she explained the situation to him, a
nd when she finished, he asked only one question. "How much weight would the ice need to hold?"
Katya didn't know the answer. Lev hadn't told her anything about that. "I don't know," she said. "I guess however much a truck with supplies weighs."
"A truck?" He raised his eyebrows. "You're going to have to wait quite a while before the ice is thick enough to hold a truck. You might better start out with something smaller."
"Like what?"
"You could start out with horses pulling sledges until the ice can support a truck."
"All right," Katya said. "Perhaps you could make estimates for both, for sledges and trucks?"
"Certainly. I can do that," he said. "But I'm a bit busy right now. They've got me training dogs to run under tanks."
"Why would they want to do that?"
"They're going to strap explosives around the dogs, then detonate them when they're under the tank."
"Oh my," Katya said and gave a little gasp. She hated the way animals were treated these days, was repulsed by it. She had one dark secret in her life, one violent fantasy, and that was to go back in time and burn the teachings of the French philosopher Renee Descartes before the sickening lies spread to the rest of humanity. It was Katya's belief that he had set mankind back at least a thousand years with his misguided writings on separateness - that the human body and mind were two distinct things, and that animals were very different from humans because animals had no souls. It was all because of his teachings that animals were considered 'machines,' and scientists could torture and kill them in experiments and still maintain a clear conscience.
"So now we're forcing animals to fight in our war?" she said aloud. "What next?"
"We've got to win somehow," he replied.
His statement sounded so obvious, but Katya couldn't help but think "at what cost?" Did being at war mean you could throw away your values and ethics? So long as you won, nothing else mattered?
She allowed herself to drift away for a second to the world she thought might have evolved without Descartes' teachings. In that world, everyone understood how they were interconnected with everyone and everything else, and they acted accordingly. It was a peaceful world, and she felt cheated that things hadn't turned out that way. So many opportunities man had been given over the centuries to put an end to war, but here they were in the 20th century engaged in the biggest and bloodiest war mankind had ever known.
She opened her mouth to argue with Felix's father about his statement, but decided against it. "I need to give the information to my director by six o'clock this evening," she said.
He took a pocket watch out and checked the time. "I'll do what I can," he replied.
"Please do," Katya said. "Thousands of people's lives are depending on it."
"I understand."
Katya got up to go. She didn't want to disturb him while he worked. "I'll be back in an hour," she said.
He didn't respond. He was already digging through a thick stack of books piled in the far corner.
Katya opened her eyes, jolted awake by someone grabbing and lifting her legs off the bench she was laying on. "What are you doing?" she cried.
The man immediately put her legs back down. "Oh! Forgive me, comrade," he exclaimed.
There was another man standing near her head. He took a step back as Katya sat up. "We thought you were . . ." he started to say. She saw a cart in front of her with two corpses on it and finished his sentence for him, "dead."
"We're so sorry, comrade," the man who'd grabbed her legs said. He was tall and lanky, with a long nose and a gray fur hat pulled down tight over his ears.
They didn't need to explain anything to her. She'd put the pieces together herself. The two men were gathering corpses from the university grounds. They saw her laying motionless on a bench in the hallway and assumed she must be dead.
"It's all right," she said. She looked at the bluish corpses and shuddered. One of them was a young female about her age. Her eyes were still open and Katya turned away. "Be on your way, please," she said to the men.
"Yes, of course," they said, apologizing once more and then trudging down the hallway with their grim cart of death, its wheels squeaking like a rabbit caught in a vicious trap.
When they were out of sight, Katya checked the time and saw that an hour had passed. She had meant to do some work while she waited for Felix's father, but she'd fallen asleep. It's all she wanted to do lately: sleep, sleep, sleep. She was constantly tired and had so little energy because of malnutrition. She packed up her notebook and went back down the hallway to check on Felix's father.
Opening the door a few inches, she stuck her head in and called out.
"Just a little longer," he answered. "I'll come get you when I'm done."
She closed the door and went back to her bench. Taking her notebook out again, she hoped she could do some work, but found she couldn't focus. She thought of so many things, but no matter what her mind started out on, it ended on Igor. She could think of little else lately, and made a vow not to let him leave her like the others had. She'd do everything she could to make sure he made it through this wretched affair alive. He was so precious to her.
After another hour passed, she started to wonder if Felix's father might have forgotten about her. She knocked on the door and slowly opened it. She saw him sitting at his cluttered desk staring straight ahead at the wall.
"Is everything all right?" she asked.
"Katya?"
"Yes, it's me."
"Oh good. I was waiting for you to come back. I'm afraid I'll need your help."
"Sure," she said. "What can I do?" She walked over to him and looked down at the sheet of paper on his desk. It was covered with his handwriting, but she couldn't make out a single word or number.
"I've worked out the basic formula," he said, and pointed with his pencil at some scribbles on the paper. "Here, let me show you." He put his pencil to the paper and wrote something, but his hand shook so badly that the result was just more scribbles. "Actually, this is where I need your help," he said. "It's difficult for me to . . . umm . . . write . . . lately."
Katya took the pencil from his hand. He looked like a ghost, and she mentally added him to the list of people who had left her. "I'll write," she said. "You just tell me what to write."
He coughed loudly then spent a minute clearing his throat. "To support a man on a horse," he began, "the ice will need to be four feet thick. And if . . ."
"Wait a minute," Katya interrupted. "The ice needs to be four feet thick to support a man on a horse?"
He squinted at his scribbles on the paper. "Oh no. I'm sorry. That should be inches. Four inches."
Katya felt a flash of fear. Perhaps this had all been in vain. His numbers might be complete nonsense and if they used them, all the trucks would fall through the ice. "I'm feeling a little concerned about the accuracy of these numbers," she said.
"As well you should be, dear," he said. "My brain doesn't work as well as it once did. But I can assure you that these numbers are correct. I've double checked them, and they agree with my own experience when I used to go ice fishing."
Realizing she had little choice, she asked him to continue.
"Now, according to my calculations," he said, "at twenty-three degrees above zero, four inches of ice will form in sixty-four hours. At fourteen above, it will take thirty-four hours to form four inches. At five degrees above, it will take twenty-three hours. Obviously we need more than four inches of ice since we want to haul supplies over the lake. A horse pulling a sledge with a ton of supplies requires seven inches of ice. A truck carrying a ton of freight needs a minimum eight inches of ice. I'm afraid I don't know how much a tank weighs, so I can't calculate that, but I do know that once the lake freezes - I mean really freezes - you'll have ice three to five feet thick. Enough to hold pretty much anything. If you . . ."
Katya wrote furiously, afraid she might miss some important detail.
When he finished, she looked at
the clock and saw it was already 5:10 p.m.. The trip back to her office took her very close to her apartment and she wanted to stop by and check on Igor. If his fever got any worse, she'd go to the hospital later and beg one of the doctors to come see him that night.
She gathered her things and rushed to the door, so preoccupied with Igor and her deadline that she almost forgot to thank Felix's father. She knew this was the last time she'd ever see him, but she didn't know what to say. "Goodbye" seemed too shallow, but what more was there to say? It really was goodbye. She was surprised at how unemotional she was. What was happening to her?
She said thank you, gave him a hug, and recited her current favorite Akhmatova poem. He bowed his head as he listened.
Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song -
This I pray at your liturgy
After so many tormented days,
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.
* * *
Petya awoke from his nightmare with a gasp. His hands gripped the blankets so tightly that his knuckles turned white, and his whole body was drenched with cold sweat. It was nothing new to him though. It was that same dream, that same image of his parents being shot while he looked on as a four-year-old boy. His mother's blood-stained face was so vivid, like time hadn't passed at all.
He tried again to recall those two days he'd spent clinging to her side after she was killed. What did he do? What did he think? Feel? Did he cry? He didn't know any of the answers. He'd never been able to recall those two days.
He laid in his bed now staring at the cracks in the ceiling. He was still tired, but the prospect of returning to that dream kept him from falling back asleep. It used to be when he was tired and couldn't sleep, he'd toss and turn relentlessly trying to get comfortable. But he didn't have the energy for that anymore. He didn't even have the energy to get up and put more wood in the stove, even though he was quite cold and knew the fire must be nearly out by now.
