The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  All those bodies he’s seen opened. The smell of gangrene in stomach wounds. The glistening, blue-purple slide of intestines. He has seen a man try to pack his own intestines back into his body. He’s seen a frill of bubbles around the eyes of a man with facial burns, who had also had a leg amputated above the knee.

  ‘Remember that patients always pick up your reaction,’ said the surgeon in charge, before they went into the ward. Andrei watched him take the wrist of the burned man, and talk to him about his amputation. He looked directly into the frilled, sightless eyes. When he released the hand of his patient, he patted it gently, turned to Andrei and remarked, ‘Very good progress in this case.’

  She smells of soap and of her own hair. Her body presses against his, whole and unpenetrated. Now there’s nothing but their two quick, hot bodies, pumping with life. He wants to dive deep into her, part her flesh, put his face between her breasts, open her buttocks. He wants to penetrate her, sinking deep into flesh that is made to be opened.

  She makes a noise in her throat. They’re alive, hungry, tasting the salt and spit of each other’s mouths. Suddenly Anna twists in his arms, pulls back, puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes him sharply away. ‘Not like that. Not yet.’

  ‘I’ll be careful’

  ‘You won’t. I’ve already got Kolya, I don’t want to get caught for another baby.’ She says it crudely, as Lyuba would say it.

  ‘But I’m-’

  A burst of sound cuts across them.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Only a whistle.’

  ‘There’s something going on.’

  They freeze, listening. He hears the pant of her breath. The whistle blasts again.

  ‘It’s the militia.’

  Far off, to the south-west of the city, there’s the drone of a plane.

  ‘Is it theirs? Can you tell?’

  ‘They’ll only be dropping leaflets.’

  The blackout stands thick around them, blotting out what they strain to see. She’s still in his arms, warm and damp, but she’s already gone away.

  ‘You must get back.’

  ‘And you.’

  ‘There’s a doorway here.’

  They back into the doorway. Several streets away, there’s a burst of anti-aircraft fire, then silence. They wait, but nothing else happens, and the engine noise dies into the distance.

  ‘It’s coming soon.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ll need you at the hospital.’

  ‘Yes, I must go.’

  ‘Tell me why you didn’t come before.’

  ‘I couldn’t come,’ he says, stroking her face then holding it between his hands and kissing her on the mouth, with slow, deep kisses, between the words. ‘I couldn’t leave the hospital.’

  ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘I can’t tell any more. It all seems normal to me now.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? Everything becomes normal so quickly, until you look back and see how far you’ve come away from how things used to be.’

  ‘Maybe not so far at all yet, compared to how far we’ve got to go.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  They stand close for a while, not touching, but breathing each other’s breath. The city is silent now, as if at peace. She combs Andrei’s hair back with her fingers.

  ‘You know I wanted to?’ he says.

  ‘To come? Yes.’

  ‘And then I saw you today, on your bike, with all those sacks.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d seen me, that’s why I called to you.’

  ‘But I had.’

  ‘You’re just saying that.’

  ‘I swear I had. I knew you were there. Didn’t you see me smiling?’

  ‘It was dark.’

  ‘Not quite dark.’

  ‘We must go.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They step out of the doorway, and turn right.

  ‘You know, in the blackout, the pavement feels so uneven. And yet it looks smooth by daylight.’

  ‘There’s going to be a curfew any day. This might be the last time we can walk round like this.’

  ‘Tell me about Irkutsk.’

  ‘You’re not interested in Irkutsk. You’re a Leningrader.’

  ‘You’re a Leningrader now. You live here.’

  ‘Yes, but I can go away. Real Leningraders can’t. Wherever they are, no matter how beautiful it is, no matter how happy they are, they’re always pining to be back. They can’t live without a cold in their head, and someone’s boot on their neck.’

  ‘You’re telling me there’s no boot on your neck in Irkutsk?’

  ‘It’s a question of degree. God and the Tsar are farther off, as they say.’

  ‘But here in Leningrad, they’re our next-door neighbours. You’re right. We’re all packed in together, and we don’t trust one another. We have to suspect everyone. If you’ve got a bigger room than someone else in a communal apartment, you’ve got to watch your back in case he denounces you to get hold of it himself. I keep thinking, how did we get to where we are? Nobody wants it, so how did it ever happen? I look back, and I just can’t see how we got here.’

  ‘It’s not so bad. The people in my apartment aren’t like that.’

  ‘Only because you don’t notice it. It’s that pure Siberian air you carry around with you. Don’t be fooled. There’ll be someone in your apartment who’s watching you. There always is.’

  ‘With the Germans so close, all those other things will stop.’

  ‘Let’s not talk any more.’

  They hurry on, through the blacked-out city that crouches beneath a blacked-out, starless sky. At the entrance to Anna’s apartment building, they stop. There’s a smell of rubbish and drains. A drop of water tocks off the roof, and then another.

  ‘Here we are,’ says Andrei.

  ‘I know. Not the Astoria, is it?’

  ‘We’ll get there one day, I promise.’

  We always seem to be standing in doorways.’

  He pulls her up, close to him. They shut their eyes, drifting. One drop of water falls, then another.

  ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A sharp wind teases Anna’s bare legs. The end of summer. It’s come suddenly, just like this, as it always does. He pulls up her dress, sliding the ruck of fabric over her thighs.

  A big, pale-haired guy in a vest, with muscled shoulders, leans out of an upper window. He thought he heard something. He thought he caught movement. The Germans are sending agents into Leningrad, infiltrating. He peers out, snuffing the air which smells of autumn. Nothing. Nobody there.

  A rat darts across the courtyard entrance, but Anna neither sees it nor feels it.

  ‘You know I wanted to come.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  *

  In the apartment, Marina sits by Kolya’s bed until he’s asleep, and then goes into the other room, the dark room where Mikhail lies. She switches on the shaded, low-watt lamp beside his bed, and examines his face. Although he’s breathing steadily, she doesn’t believe he’s asleep.

  It’s me,’ she says. ‘Do you want to talk?’

  What about?’

  No, he doesn’t want to talk, or eat, or move. The process that began in him years ago, when Vera died and they stopped publishing his books, is now completing itself. He opens his eyes, and looks at her sternly and critically.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing. Kolya’s asleep. Anna’s gone out.’

  He blinks impatiently at these names which force him to come back into the present.

  ‘She’s gone out with your friend Andrei.’

  ‘Yes.’ He moistens his lips. He’d like to tell Marina to go out too, and leave him alone. Why is she always hovering over him like this, expecting things of him? Doesn’t she know that all he wants is to sleep? No, not to sleep exactly. But to drift, to let go, to cease to feel.

  ‘Is your shoulder hurting?’

  �
�No.’

  Marina considers him. Then she says clearly and deliberately: ‘You know that the Germans have broken through.’

  He moves again, more restlessly. ‘They took Kingisepp. We couldn’t stop them.’

  ‘They are almost at Pushkin.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he whispers.

  ‘You would think so. But they are there. They have encircled us.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  Why not? Why should you be the only man in Leningrad to have the luxury of not knowing it? You have a son who is five years old.’

  A flicker of amusement lights his face. ‘You’re a hard woman, Marina.’

  ‘It’s about time someone was hard on you. I’m not going to let you lie here and give up. You aren’t dead yet. You haven’t lost your children. You haven’t been arrested. You’ve got your papers and your ration card, and God knows there are enough families jammed into one room who would kill for this apartment. You’ve got Anna out slaving morning to night, and on top of that carting back potatoes and onions so you won’t starve to death – at least, as long as you deign to open your mouth and swallow the food she puts in it – and all you can think of is what a pity it is that she’s not an intellectual. Well, thank God for that, when you look at the way most of the Writers’ Union have behaved over the past few years.

  ‘You could get up. You could be better. You just don’t want to. You refuse to heal yourself.’

  ‘My God, Marina, this is like having Jesus in the bedroom. You’ll be telling me to take up my bed and walk next.’

  ‘You may laugh. All right, look at me. My career is finished. I’m turning into an old woman. I’ve lost years when I should have been playing roles I’ll never play now. There may be Germans in my dacha by now, smashing up my furniture for firewood. Here I am back in Leningrad, worse off than when I was eighteen. But Misha, for God’s sake, let’s stop making such a tragedy out of it. We’ve done far too much of that. Other people have lives, but we just keep on having emotions. We think things have been so terrible for us, but we’re alive. We’re not even in prison. With any luck our former colleagues will be too busy filling their store-cupboards to spare any time for denouncing us.

  ‘I’ve got a ration card on the black market, and I’ve got somewhere to live, because your daughter’s had the generosity to take me in. I’m in good health. I know how to keep Kolya happy. And I want to be here, with you. But you –’

  She stops, breathing hard. What began as an attempt to stir him from his lethargy now shocks her. It is much too close to what she really feels.

  ‘You are not trying,’ she finishes, keeping her voice even.

  ‘I’m dying, Marina.’

  ‘By choice.’

  ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘I can say anything I want to you. You are letting it happen. I know, you loved Vera. ‘I know, they stopped publishing you. I know, they wounded you.’

  ‘Marina-’

  ‘You don’t even notice the people who love you. To you, they are nothing. You don’t value yourself, and that belittles everyone who loves you.’

  His eyes are open now, round with surprise and fixed on her. The childishness of his expression makes her want to relent, but she won’t. How dare he lie there like a stone, cold and withdrawn?

  ‘But you know, Marina, it does hurt.’

  ‘I do know. It hurts because you’re not dead yet. You’ve got to promise that you’ll let us help you. No more letting soup dribble away down your chin into that scrub of a beard you won’t let us shave.’

  ‘Dribble?’

  ‘Yes, dribble. And very unattractive it looked, I have to tell you. People of our age, Misha, can’t permit ourselves to behave like useless old fools. It was one thing wiping your backside when you first came back from hospital, but I’m sure Anna doesn’t want to make it a permanent arrangement.’

  ‘Marina, I – I really don’t know what to say –’

  It is hard work to fight down her pity. ‘You must get up,’ she says. ‘Every day you spend in bed is weakening you. Your muscles are wasting. Even if it hurts you must get up and walk around the room.’

  ‘Did Andrei tell you all this?’

  She pauses, stroking his hand. ‘In a way. He said there’s a point in every illness, no matter how serious, where the patient has to cooperate. And you’ve reached that point.’

  It’s enough. His face is the colour of tallow.

  ‘Go to sleep now.’

  He nods. She continues to stroke his hand as his eyelids seal down over the prominent eyeballs. The beard sprouts, dirty grey from greyish-yellow skin. He is old and sour and battered. She would defend him with her last breath, and he is the only man for whom she has ever bothered to become angry.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ she says. ‘You’ll see, Misha, it’ll all be all right, as long as you don’t ever believe that you’re going to be beaten.’

  14

  Sugar burns. It sends up columns of black and acrid smoke into the night air. It hisses, crackles, runs like a river of flame. A volcano of sugar spews smoke and sparks into the night sky until its white-hot molten core drives back the fire-fighters. This is the devil’s kitchen. The flaming wooden carcasses of the Badayev warehouses are ovens which devour the food they were built to protect. Smoke seethes from the city’s stores of cooking-oil, lard, butter, meat and flour. Leningrad’s food reserves are burning, sending up gouts of flame, sweeping thick, greasy smoke low over the rooftops.

  Thousands of tons of sugar, flour, fats and meat vanish overnight. A coating of soot and food-grease lies on window-ledges all over Leningrad. If you lift a hank of your own hair you can smell the stink of burnt fat.

  It’s the night between the eighth and ninth of September. Mga has fallen, and now there are no more road or railway links to the rest of Russia. The only way out is over the still, grey water of Lake Ladoga. Leningrad is surrounded. Built on many islands, it has become an island, packed with people who need their two thousand calories a day, but haven’t got so much as a window-box to grow a handful of parsley, or a pet rabbit to skin for Sunday dinner. These are urbanites who forage in queues, not in the earth. They’re used to food shortages, unofficial rationing and making do, used to insufficient vitamins, poor-quality meat and erratic supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables. They’re used to coping.

  But in a strange way a state of perpetual shortages can make you feel secure. You believe that because things are bad enough, they won’t get any worse. After all, they can surely manage to keep this up, as a bare minimum. It’s not much to ask. Food will keep on coming in from elsewhere (although never enough of it); it will keep getting distributed (although inefficiently); it will be obtainable in the end (although at high prices, and after long and laborious queuing).

  For years, working the food system has taken up so much energy that you rarely have any spare to question the system itself. You grumble, automatically on good days, bitterly on bad ones. If a queue forms, you join it instantly. Never mind what it’s for, as long as you’re in it, clutching your just-in-case shopping-bag that you carry everywhere, always. Since the beginning of the thirties, the food situation has grown steadily worse, like a winter that keeps looking as if it’s over, before darkening into another grey, obliterating snowfall.

  Your boots wear out, but you mend them somehow, and even if you never get used to the cold, you put up with it. So here you are in one of the richest, most fruitful countries on earth, and grateful if you can get a couple of onions to go with that precious half-kilo of fatty sausage. Georgia may be overflowing with lemons and apricots, roast lamb shanks and sweet wine, but you certainly don’t see any of that up here. Cabbage, a bagful of wizened apples, soup. Kasha and cabbage soup, that’s our grub. The kolkhoz market has better stuff, but it costs a fortune.

  Of course it’s different for the high-up ones. They have special shops with white bread, fresh meat, caviar and everything you could imagine, spread out
like on a magic tablecloth. You can tell who shops there just by looking at them. How do you think they get those plump, rosy skins, without a spot or wrinkle on them? And their children have smooth, glossy hair that bounces around as if it’s got a life of its own. You only get hair like that by eating butter and oranges.

  But this time everyone’s been caught out, even the high-up ones. They didn’t see it coming. The Badayev warehouses: they’re Leningrad’s big store-cupboard. You’ve often joked, just like everyone else: I don’t think I’ll bother with the queue. I’lljust pop down to the Badayev warehouses. They’ll have everything I want. It’s always been nice to think of those vast wooden shells, packed to the gills with food. Comforting. Like thinking of money in the bank, even if it’s not yours.

  It seems like the Germans knew about our big store-cupboards, too. They had a special kind of bomb for them, one that doesn’t just explode, but sets fire to everything. It’s a new type of bomb you can’t put out with water, because it just starts burning again as soon as the water runs off it. And that’s the way they cooked the biggest cake you’ve ever seen, out of the flour and sugar and fat that was in store to last us all winter.

  They say there’s a way of getting back the sugar that’s melted down through the warehouses and sunk into the soil. Reclamation, it’s called. There are some of our scientists down there working on it already.

  But a shock like that kicks you in the stomach. The Badayev warehouses. You didn’t believe it when you first saw the flames go up. Fountains of greasy, black and orange fire. You feel empty. You went to have a look in the morning, but there was nothing left except bits of building jagging up out of black ash. The ash was still smouldering, and every now and then little spurts of flame ran across it. The space where those warehouses were is as big as a park.

  You ought to be thinking of all the poor souls who lost their lives in the raids, but you can’t help thinking about all that butter and flour and God knows what else they kept down there. How many bags of flour would there have been, for example? ‘A ton of flour’ doesn’t mean a lot, but if you can work out how many bags there might have been, then that really means something. Same with butter and sausage.