The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE SIEGE

  ‘Dunmore slowly and relentlessly guides us deep into the territory of famine and winter as motherless Anna, her small brother Kolya and her father, a dissident writer, endure the inexpressible attrition of the Siege of Leningrad… In this wise, humane and beautifully written novel she has written a masterpiece’ Independent

  ‘A searing historical novel. Dunmore vividly evokes the unbelievable cold, privations and violence as people struggle to survive… an extraordinary description of the horrors of the time’ Sunday Express

  ‘Terrifying and absorbing… Dunmore skilfully evokes the perilous fragility of the city as Leningrad is surrounded by German troops and the supply routes are cut off. An impressive, disturbing novel. Read it, and give thanks for your warm, well-provisioned home’ Tablet

  ‘Enthralling… A woman’s-eye view of war, with the daily struggle to find food and fuel raging through her characters’ bodies and minds… An important as well as a thrilling work of art’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘A moving and powerful novel in which Dunmore employs all her celebrated descriptive and narrative skills… beautiful’ Daily Mail

  ‘Tragically haunting and unforgettable’ Big Issue

  ‘A harrowing, urgent narrative of cold, starvation and the battle to survive’ Sunday Times

  ‘Dunmore captures the siege’s sense of estrangement and disorientation in bold, unexpected images’ New Statesman

  ‘Beautiful writing, brilliant imagery, expert pacing… we are pinned to the page by exquisite descriptions of starvation, cannibalism and frozen corpses… an important novel’ Sunday Tribune

  ‘Convincingly narrates a horrifying war story from the point of view of the hearth, not the trenches’ Observer

  ‘Dunmore describes what is happening in language that is elegantly, starkly beautiful… Without a trace of sentimentality, Dunmore manages to sound a fierce note of humanism that relieves the relentless grimness… The Siege is both quieter and more powerful than her earlier work.’ New York Times

  ‘This is a novel of psychological delicacy and poetic strength as well as a meditation on suffering and endurance’ Washington Post

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Helen Dunmore has published seven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness, winner of the 1994 McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, winner of the 1996 Orange Prize for Fiction; Talking to the Dead; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; and The Siege, shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and the Orange Prize. Helen Dunmore is also a poet, children’s novelist and short-story writer. Her two collections of short stories, Love of Fat Men and Ice Cream, are also published by Penguin. Her poetry collections include The Sea Skater, winner of the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; The Raw Garden, a Poetry Book Society Choice; and Secrets, winner of the 1995 Signal Poetry Award.

  Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire and now lives in Bristol

  HELEN DUNMORE

  The Siege

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Viking 2001

  Published in Penguin Books 2002

  30

  Copyright © Helen Dunmore, 2001

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN-13: 978-0-141-92497-7

  To Ros Cuthbert

  Naval Staff Berlin

  Ski la 1601/41 g. Kdos. Chefs. 29 Sep. 1941

  Top Secret

  Re: The future of Leningrad

  … The Fuehrer has decided to have Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth. The further existence of this large town is of no interest once Soviet Russia is overthrown. Finland has also similarly declared no interest in the continued existence of the city directly on her new frontier.

  The original demands of the Navy that the shipyard, harbor, and other installations vital to the Navy be preserved are known to the Armed Forces High Command, but in view of the basic principles underlying the operation against Leningrad it is not possible to comply with them.

  The intention is to close in on the city and blast it to the ground by bombardments of artillery of all calibres and by continuous air attacks.

  Requests that the city may be handed over, arising from the situation within, will be turned down, for the problem of the survival of the population and of supplying it with food is one which cannot and should not be solved by us. In this war for existence, we have no interest in keeping even part of this great city’s population…

  Naval staff

  [From the Fuehrer Directives and other top-level directives of the German armed forces, 1939—1941. The original US army translation from the German is held in the Naval War College, Newport, R.I., USA.

  With thanks to the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Potsdam, Germany.]

  1

  June, 1941

  It’s half past ten in the evening, but the light of day still glows through the lime leaves. They are so green that they look like an hallucination of the summer everyone had almost given up expecting. When you touch them, they are fresh and tender. It’s like touching a baby’s skin.

  Such a late spring, murky and doubtful, clinging to winter’s skirts. But this is how it happens here in Leningrad. Under the trees around the Admiralty, lakes of spongy ice turned grey. There was slush everywhere, and a raw, dirty wind off the Neva. There was a frost, a thaw, another frost.

  Month after month ice-fishermen crouched by the holes they’d drilled in the ice, sitting out the winter, heads hunched into shoulders. And then, just when it seemed as if summer would forget about Leningrad this year, everything changed. Ice broke loose from the compacted mass around the Strelka. Seagulls preened on the floes as the current swept them under bridges, and down the widening Neva to the sea. The river ran full and fast, with a fresh wind tossing up waves so bright they stung your eyes. Everything that was rigid was crumbling, breaking away, floating.

  People leaned on the parapets of the Dvortsovy bridge, watching the ice-floes rock as they passed under the arch. Their winter world was being destroyed. They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin.

  But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?

  These are hard times. You can’t trust anyone, not even yourself. Frightened men and women scuttling in the dusty wind. Peter’s great buildings hang over them, crushingly magnificent. In times like these the roads are too wid
e. How long it takes to fight your way across Peter’s squares, and how visible you become. Yes, you’re a target, and you don’t know who’s watching. So many disappearances, so much fear. Black vans cruise the streets. You listen for the note of their engines, and your heart pumps until it chokes you as the van slows. But it passes this time, and halts at the doorway to another courtyard, where you don’t live. You hear the van doors clang and the sweat of relief soaks you, shamefully. Some other poor bastard is in that van this time.

  Spring stripped everything bare. It showed the grey and weary skin of everyone over thirty. It lit up lips set in suffering, with wrinkles pulling sharply at the corners of the mouth.

  But the lime trees’ bare branches were spiked by the glitter of sunlight and birdsong. The birds had no doubts at all. They sang out loudly and certainly into the still-frozen world. They knew that winter was on the move.

  Now it’s June, and night is brief as the brush of a wing, only an hour of yellow stars in a sky that never darkens beyond deep, tender blue.

  No one sleeps. Crowds surge out of cafes and wander the streets, not caring where they go as long as they can lift their faces and drink the light. It’s been dark for so many months.

  A line of young men, arm in arm, drunk, stern with the effort of keeping on their feet, sways on the corner of Universitetskaya Embankment and Lieutenant Schmidt’s bridge. They won’t go home. They can’t bear to part from one another. They’ll walk, that’s what they’ll do, from one end of the city to another, from island to island, across stone bridges and shining water.

  These are the nights that seal each generation of Leningraders to their city. These nights are their baptism. The summer light will flood every grain of Leningrad stone, as it floods every cell of their own bodies. At three o’clock in the morning, in full sun, they’ll find themselves in some backstreet of little wooden houses, miles from anywhere. There’ll be a cat licking its paws in a doorway, a lime tree with electric-green leaves hanging over a high wooden fence, and an old woman slowly making her way down the street with a little bunch of jasmine pinned to her jacket. Each flower will be as white and distinct as a star against the shabby grey. And she’ll smile at the young men as if she’s their grandmother. She won’t disapprove of their drunkenness, their shouting and singing. She’ll understand exactly how they feel.

  However old you are, you can’t stay indoors on a night like this. It stirs again, the promise and recklessness of white nights. Peter’s icy, blood-sodden marshes bear up the city like a swan. The swan’s wings are still folded, but they are trembling in the summer light, stirring, and getting ready to fly. Darkness scarcely touches them.

  The wind breathes softly. Water laps under the midnight bridges. And suddenly you know that there’s no greater possible happiness than to be here, even when you’re so old you’re beyond walking. You lean out of your apartment window, with stiff joints and fading strength, over the city that will outlive you.

  But Anna is not in Leningrad tonight. She’s out in the country, at the dacha, alone with her father and Kolya. She doesn’t belong in the crowds of students celebrating the end of their examinations. She doesn’t share the jokes any more, or know which books everyone’s reading. Hers is a daylight city of trams packed with overworked mothers, racing from work to food queue to kitchen and back again.

  The white nights rouse up too many longings. Anna has a duty to crush them. She has five-year-old Kolya, her job at the nursery, and her responsibilities. It’s no good letting herself dream of student life. She’ll never have long days in a studio, mind and body trained on the movement of hand across paper. It’s no good remembering what it was like to be seventeen, only six years ago, with graduation from school a year ahead of her, and a crowd of friends round the table at the Europe, packed together, laughing and talking so loudly that you could hardly hear what anyone said. The words didn’t matter. The noise of happiness was what mattered, and the warmth of someone else’s arm pressed against yours. There was a smell of sunburnt skin, coffee, cigarettes and marigolds.

  Don’t think about all that. She’s at the dacha, leaning out of the window and resting her elbows on warm, silver-grey wood. It’s very quiet. Behind her, Kolya sleeps in his cot-bed. They have a bedroom divided in two by a plywood partition. One half for her father, the other for Anna and Kolya. Downstairs, the living-room opens on to the verandah. Every sound echoes in the dacha’s wooden shell.

  But to have a dacha at all is luxury. There’s no chance of her father ever qualifying for a dacha at the writers’ colony, but they have held on to this little place, which once belonged to Anna’s grandmother. They come here whenever they can in summer, when the city’s airless and full of dust. Anna bikes it, on the precious, battered bike that was her mother’s, with Kolya tied on to his seat behind her.

  Anna does most of the cooking outside on the verandah. She chops onions, kneads pastry for meat pies, peels potatoes, prepares sausage. She even makes jam outside, on the little oil-stove.

  All through each summer Anna builds up stores for the winter. She gives grammar and handwriting lessons to the Sokolov children at the farm, in exchange for honey, jars of goose-fat, and goat’s cheese. She dries mushrooms, and makes jams and jellies from the fruit she and Kolya pick. Lingonberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries. She buys a drink made from fermented birch sap, which is packed with vitamins and said to be particularly good for asthmatic children like Kolya. Then there are red cabbages to be pickled, onions to be tied into strings, garlic to be plaited, beans to be preserved in brine, potatoes to be brushed free of earth, sorted, then brought back to the apartment sack by sack, strapped to the back of her bike. You have to be careful with potatoes, because they bruise more easily than you think, and then they won’t keep.

  Anna doesn’t know how she’d have got them through the last two winters without produce from the dacha. Not only are there food shortages all the time, but her father can’t get his work published. He survives by translating, but even that might dry up. Editors have got their own families to consider. Her father’s near-perfect French and German are dangerous assets now. He can’t help speaking like someone who has spent time abroad. A year in Heidelberg in 1912, a summer in Lausanne. He could be pulled in for questioning as ‘an individual with foreign contacts’.

  Her father wanted to take it lightly, the first time one of his stories was rejected. He was asked to appear in front of a magazine committee, where the shortcomings of his story were explained to him. They told him that his tone was pessimistic. He had failed to take on board and reflect in his work the principles drawn from Stalin’s speech of the first of December 1935: ‘Life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful.’

  ‘And yet in your story, Mikhail Ilyich, there is no sense that any of the characters are making headway! Publication of this work would do nothing to advance your reputation. In fact, it would damage it.’

  ‘Frankly, we were surprised that you submitted it, Mikhail Ilyich,’ said the chairman of the committee. ‘We try to be understanding, but really in this case it’s impossible, as I’m sure you’ll agree.’ And he chucked the manuscript face-down on the table, lightly, pityingly, humorously, just as he would have done if a schoolboy had submitted his outpourings to a top literary magazine, and expected to get them published. ‘No, we can’t have this kind of stuff!’

  He twinkled at Mikhail, begging him to see the joke. Other members of the committee looked down at their blotters, or played with their pens. Their faces were dark with the resentment we feel towards those we are about to injure.

  Mikhail looked at the familiar faces. A flush of hot blood ran under his skin. Was the shame in himself, standing there with his unwanted manuscript, unable to accept the criticism of his contemporaries? The room itself seemed washed with shame. Even his story was stained with it.

  ‘No,’ he muttered, ‘I should never have brought it here.’

  ‘Ex–actly so,�
� said the chairman, rising. ‘But allow me to say, dear Mikhail Ilyich, that I’ve always been an admirer of your work. All you need is a little –’ his fingers sketched adjustments – ‘a little less gloom and doom. That’s not what people want these days. That’s not what we’re here to do.’

  He smiled, showing white, strong teeth in healthy gums. The room prickled with agreement. The room knew what was wanted these days.

  Mikhail continued to submit stories, which were always rejected. One evening a colleague from the Writers’ Union appeared at the apartment.

  ‘Don’t send anything else in just now. It’s for your own good, Mikhail Ilyich.’

  ‘I’m writing as I’ve always written.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it. Do you really not see? We all have to make adjustments.’

  ‘They are good stories.’

  ‘For God’s sake, what has that got to do with anything?’

  On his way out, he paused. He was waiting for something, but Mikhail couldn’t think what. After the man had gone, it dawned. He’d expected to be thanked. He’d taken a risk. He’d tried to help. Not many did that these days, because it was too dangerous. Each person taken in for questioning could drag a hundred more down. ‘ Who was in the room with you when this occurred? Their names. Write them here.’

  ‘Better put it in the drawer,’ Anna’s father would say, as he typed out the final draft of a new story. His fingers pecked at the keys. He had never learned to type properly. When Vera was alive, she typed for him. ‘Let the drawer read it. Well, here we are, Anna, I’m back to my youth again, pouring out rubbish that nobody wants to print. People pay thousands for rejuvenation treatments, don’t they? I could sell my secret.’

  His attempts at humour make her wince. All this is changing him, month by month. It’s scouring him out from the inside. He even walks differently. Anna can’t think what it all reminds her of, then one day she’s at work and she sees little Seryozha hide behind the bins as a gang of big boys charges round the playground, windmilling their arms, bellowing, knocking into everyone. They’re the gang. They’re the ones who count. Seryozha shrinks against the wall.