The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  Heads down, scattered on the white streets like flakes of soot, a few figures fight their way onward. If she collapsed, no one would be able to help her. No one has the strength. It’s hard enough to survive, to get the bread ration, to fetch water if you’re in an apartment where the pipes have already frozen, to toil from empty shop to empty shop in search of milk for a sick child.

  ‘But I’m fine,’ Anna says aloud, and tastes a flake of snow on her lips. It’s only being alone in the snow that makes her nervous. Her heart’s beating so hard. If only she had some valerian drops, to calm herself. Even though the snow is moving, and she is moving, it’s all like an icy dream from which life has fled. She could look down on herself and watch herself struggling on, an insect which doesn’t know that it’s winter and it shouldn’t be out. It’s quite funny, when you look down on yourself like that.

  There’s life in the Sennaya market. It has become the crossroads where those who have meet those who want. Those who want bring their jewels, rolls of paper roubles, icons, silver knives and forks, velvet dresses, rolled-up canvases cut from paintings, Venetian glass wrapped in layers of woollen cloth, war medals and porcelain plates. Journey by journey, they bring the accumulated wealth of several lifetimes. On each journey, they get less back for it.

  The prices are never fixed. Here, the laws of supply and demand apply in their purest form. A woman who possesses lard, bread, oil or a scrap of bacon can set them against whatever her heart desires. If she has a jar of sugar, she can cover herself with rubies. The market operates with ruthless force, inflating its prices day by day and sometimes hour by hour. As Anna moves close to the stalls, she sees a stallholder flip an offered gold locket with his finger. He has bread to sell.

  ‘I’ll give you a hundred grammes for it, that’s all. Take it or leave it’

  ‘But it’s worth-’

  ‘Take it home and eat it, then.’ And he turns huge, bored shoulders on the trembling woman whose locket has slipped through her fingers into the snow.

  No one says, ‘I’ll sell you this bread.’ They say, ‘I’ll give you this bread.’ The brutal truth is that before the Tsar of bread everything else must sink to its knees. Everyone knows it. Your jewels? Your father’s life-savings? Can you eat them? No. What use are all your possessions, if you haven’t got the means to keep life in your body? Hand over everything, and I might give you life for another half a day.

  Everyone now knows what it takes to keep life in a body. You can be separated from your life so easily. It might happen in the street, or in the bread queue, while you’re typing or while you’re sleeping. You can die from a cold, an ear infection, or a miscarriage. If you have a stomach ulcer, it will open and bleed. You can die so casually these days.

  The stallholder attends to another customer, while the woman with the locket grovels at his feet, scrabbling for gold in the snow. When she holds it out to him again, submissively this time, he simply nods, pockets it and hands her a little chunk of bread. She stares round, unfastens coat and jacket, and thrusts the bread into her blouse. Then she stands still for a moment as if she has forgotten where she is and what she is doing. Her blue-tinged face is vacant. She’s a goner, Anna thinks, making the rapid, automatic assessment she’s learned in the past few weeks.

  Anna skirts the stalls, making eye-contact with no one. Her cotton bag of bread, lard and sugar bumps against her waist. She is sure that others can see the bulge it makes in her coat, and so she hunches forward, walking more slowly than ever, hiding herself in the shroud of falling snow. She hasn’t yet seen any burzhuiki for sale. Three men stand guard over a stall where a few small pots of meat pâté are on display. She walks on, lowering her eyes, dragging the empty sledge which hurts her arms as much as if Kolya and two of his friends were packed on to it and she were pulling them uphill. For a moment she almost believes they are there behind her: Kolya, Alyosha and Shura, squeaking and giggling, their cheeks burning crimson with frost and health, their plump little legs encased in winter trousers and felt boots.

  ‘Please, Anna, please, just give us one more turn!’

  But her empty sledge sticks in a snowdrift, shudders, and then comes free.

  ‘Anna!’

  ‘Oh my God, Evgenia, you frightened me.’

  ‘I saw you by Lavra’s stall. Don’t go near there again. He’s dangerous.’

  ‘Who’s Lavra?’

  ‘Don’t look. The one with the meat. What’re you doing down here, anyway?’

  ‘I’m looking for a burzhuika’

  Evgenia glances at the empty sledge, then at Anna’s empty arms.

  ‘Got the price? They won’t take money, you know.’

  ‘I’ve got it.’

  ‘Come with me. I know the woman who trades them. She had two, last time I went by. Her name’s Galya, not that she’ll want you to know her name. But she knows me. She doesn’t want to get in wrong with me, in case things turn out different from expectations.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Galya’s canny enough to realize that we might not all die. She’s done all right out of the war so far, but the customers she’s screwed into the ground won’t forget her, if any of them are still alive, that is. The only thing people like her are afraid of is life returning to normal. She knows I’ll be back to see her, unless she treats me right. I’m not going to die.’

  They are standing very close, but even so, flakes of snow are falling between them. Evgenia’s red hair is wound up in a thick shawl. The planes of her face are flattened by hunger, and her freckles stand out yellowly. In normal times you’d say that she looked terrible. You’d ask her what was the matter, and what she was doing out of bed. But Anna believes her. Evgenia will live, and not die.

  ‘Is your kid all right?’

  ‘He’s at home.’

  ‘You keep him there, Anna. Don’t let him out. The streets round here aren’t safe for kids. Let’s go and get that stove.’

  The woman with the burzhuiki is tucked away, standing in the shadow of a wall. As Evgenia and Anna approach she glances round, darting her head this way and that with a strange, inhuman movement.

  ‘Looking for her bloke. Her minder. She got set on the other day when she wouldn’t sell for a kilo of bread.’

  ‘Do you come here a lot?’

  ‘I’m here most days,’ says Evgenia. ‘Here, Galya, this is a friend of mine. She wants a stove, and a stove-pipe. She doesn’t want any of your rubbish either.’

  ‘Stoves and stove-pipes are sold separately,’ chants the woman, staring at Anna with flat, expressionless eyes. Then she retracts her head into the folds of her scarf. She’s a lizard, that’s what she is, Anna realizes. Lizards are cold-blooded.

  ‘Not to me and my friends they aren’t,’ says Evgenia.

  ‘What’s she got?’

  ‘I’ve got a kilo bag of sugar,’ begins Anna, when a shove from Evgenia silences her.

  ‘My friend’ll give you the sugar for the stove and the stovepipe.’

  The stove-seller just shrugs. ‘Don’t make me laugh. I could get twice that. These burzhuiki are like gold-dust these days.’

  ‘You could, but it wouldn’t do you any good,’ says Evgenia quietly.

  ‘What are you saying? Are you threatening me? Piotr, come over here!’

  ‘I’m not threatening anyone. We’re neighbours, aren’t we? Good neighbours. And we want to go on being neighbours. Neighbours’ve got to sort things out themselves, haven’t they? We can’t always be running off to the authorities, or our lives won’t be worth living. Did you know, Anna, they aren’t bothering with arrests or trials or any of that stuff now? Anyone who looks like a speculator, they just get shot. Stopped on the street, open your bag, and if you’ve got stuff in there you shouldn’t have, that’s it, you’re a speculator. No more questions: bang. Galya knows that, don’t you, Galya? Neighbours need to stick together in times like this. We’ve all got to help each other, that’s the way it goes.’

  Evgeni
a speaks so quietly that Piotr, hulking outside the little cluster of women, can’t hear a word.

  ‘A kilo of sugar and three days’ bread ration,’ says Galya rapidly. Her tongue flicks over her lips. ‘I’m giving it to you.’

  Anna half-turns, so the stove-seller won’t see the contents of her bag when she opens it. She extracts the sugar and bread, and pushes the rest of the stuff to the bottom of the bag.

  ‘Give us the stove first,’ says Evgenia. The woman reaches down, and pulls out a stove from under the stall.

  ‘Where’s the stove-pipe?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘That section’s cracked. Do you want to poison her?’

  ‘Most of those I sell to don’t even buy a pipe.’

  ‘My friend’s buying a pipe, one with four sections. The other one, the one you’ve got tucked away behind the stall. The one that’s not cracked. That’s the one she’s paying you for.’

  Grumbling, Galya crouches down and ferrets out a second stove-pipe.

  ‘Get it on to the sledge, Anna.’

  ‘I want my payment first.’

  ‘You’ll get your payment when my friend’s got her stove fixed on her sledge.’

  Evgenia stands over Anna, arms folded over the sugar and bread, while Anna packs sections of stove-pipe beside the squat body of the stove. She wraps her torn sheet over stove and stove-pipe, and ties it down with her strips of hem.

  ‘You ready now, Anna?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right then, Galya, there’s your sugar and there’s your bread. Mind out for those patrols on your way home. They don’t think any more of shooting a speculator than shooting a pigeon. There aren’t any pigeons around any more, ‘cos they’ve all been eaten, and there’s plenty of speculators. Not many as nice and plump as you, though, are there, Galya? Maybe we can eat speculators for a change? We could have a little chat with Lavra about it.’

  Galya’s head darts out of its collar. She looks as if she’s going to hiss like a lizard.

  ‘Watch what you’re saying,’ she mutters, almost inaudibly.

  ‘I know what I’m saying,’ says Evgenia, ‘and so do you. You mind what I say, Galya. Bang!’

  Side by side, Evgenia and Anna walk across the market. The stove feels heavy, but already snow is falling on to the sheets that cover it, disguising it.

  ‘You’d better get off home quick,’ says Evgenia.

  ‘Evgenia, here.’ Anna fumbles with the flap of her bag, and gets out the lard and the five hundred roubles. ‘You have this. I’d never have got the stove without you.’

  Evgenia takes the lard and tucks it into her coat pocket. ‘I don’t need the money,’ she says.

  ‘Evgenia, how’s your mother, and your little boy?’

  ‘He’s had this same cough everyone’s had. Mum bought some cod-liver oil for him, but it’s all gone. There’s nothing else wrong with him, once he gets rid of his cough. Only hunger.’

  ‘If that woman had been on her own, I’d have taken the stove, knocked her into the snow, and run.’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon she knows that. That’s why she keeps Piotr close at hand. She has to give him a cut, of course, but I should say he’s worth it. If even a nice girl like you is thinking of bashing Galya over the head and running off with her stoves, there’ll be plenty who’d do much more than think about it. Me, for a kick-off.’

  ‘Have you got a burzhuika?’

  ‘I got one off Galya two weeks ago, when it turned cold.’

  ‘So you’re doing all right? I mean, you’ve got money? You’re still working?’

  ‘I’ve got my job, though the power’s been off so much we’re only on about twenty per cent production. I’m still on a worker’s ration, which is the main thing. But I’m working with my left hand as well.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘You know. Down the market.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘Quick, aren’t you? Mind you, they say hunger slows down the brain. Two hundred grammes is the going rate at the moment. You can guess what type of man has two hundred grammes to spare these days. They’re a real portrait gallery. But I’m not much of a one for men anyway, as you know, so it doesn’t make a lot of difference to me. Whereas bread does. And I don’t really –’ Just for a moment, Evgenia’s tone falters. ‘I don’t really notice it at all. D’you ever get that feeling, Anna, as if things won’t still be there when you reach out to touch them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s lack of vitamins, that’s what it is. We’re suffering from what polar explorers get. Only we’re not going to discover anything except that if you don’t eat, you end up dead. When I was short for the stove, Galya found me a bloke with a thing about red hair. So she’s not all bad, is she? Even though I agree that she’d be a lot better-looking arse-over-tip in a snowdrift.’

  ‘We’ll fix that up for her one day, shall we?’

  ‘Just wait till all this is over. The German bastards’ll be running in one direction, and those Sennaya bastards in the other. There’ll be some arses kicked then, I can tell you. But listen, Anna. Don’t you even think about going in for what I’m doing. Shits like Piotr will mince you up in a week, if you don’t know how to deal with them. And you don’t, anyone can see that. You get home with that stove. I’ll see you again. On the Patriotic Day of Workers’ Arse-Kicking, if not before.’

  Evgenia’s strong teeth gleam in her pallid face, then she turns and is swallowed up in the falling snow.

  It takes a long time to walk home. Already the temperature is dropping again. Tomorrow there’ll be a glossy crust of ice on blue mounds of fresh snow. No one is clearing the streets. There’s no sign of the old women with their brooms who should be out by now, sweeping the doorsteps and the strip of pavement in front of their apartment houses. They haven’t got the strength to come out. They’re huddled in their apartments, which have turned into cells of ice. They sit in hats and boots, gloves, shawls and coats, with their blankets piled over them, and they are cold.

  Anna trudges past a building where an old woman has lain with flu for a week. She lies alone, although at her side there is a half-drunk glass of tea made for her by a neighbour the day before. But now the neighbour is ill herself, and cannot come. There’s ice on the tea. As Anna passes, and as day wheels round into night, the old woman’s lungs cease to resist the secondary infection which she has been holding off for the past twenty-four hours. Pneumonia takes hold, although the old woman feels nothing much, except that she is very weak. In the centre of each grey, seamed cheek there is a small purplish-red spot. It hurts to breathe deeply, so she breathes in shallow pants, sipping the icy air into her body.

  ‘Mama, please light the stove,’ she begs. Pain comes alive in her body, penetrating every grain of her flesh. Slowly and painfully she begins to rock herself from side to side, side to side, in the rhythm of her mother’s heartbeat. It consoled her seventy years ago, when she was in the womb. It consoles her now. She rocks and rocks, sipping in breath. Soon it will be better. The aching will go away, and she won’t shiver any more once her temperature rises. She will burn for a while, and then she’ll die down. There are no sounds in the cold little room but the sounds she makes. Once, very faintly, she hears the flop of new, unstable snow falling from the roof into the courtyard, but she thinks it is something else. The ice on her half-drunk glass of tea grows thicker.

  By the time she gets to the Moyka, Anna is seeing people who aren’t there again. A group of students, arm in arm, the girls in short-sleeved summer dresses, crosses the bridge. They laugh, they look down at the sparkling water. Anna hears their voices ring over the canal, bright with summer happiness. Where are they going, and why so happy? She drops the rope of the sledge and strains to see where they’ve gone, but they have disappeared.

  It’s not snowing so heavily now. Immediately below her on the ice there’s an old woman crouching, drilling a hole with the kind of hand-drill ice-fishermen use. Perhaps she’s going to fish. No,
there’s a bucket beside her on the ice. She’s come for water. She ought to go down to the Neva, the water will be purer there. But perhaps it’s too far. Anna listens to the squeak of drill on ice. As if the woman senses her presence, she glances up, and sees Anna leaning on the canal wall. Recognition passes between them.

  Anna knows the old woman, because she was at school with her.

  ‘Tanya!’ she calls. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me. How are you all?’

  ‘All well. What about you?’

  Your brother, Seryozha, the handsome one. Your little sister, Masha, with her pulled-back hair and startlingly deep blue eyes, who played the piano so well.

  ‘Masha was evacuated. Seryozha’s in the army. It’s just me at home, with my mother.’

  ‘The water’s gone in your apartment, then?’

  ‘Yes, all the pipes are frozen, even the courtyard pipe now. There was a man who came round with a cart, and you could buy water, but he doesn’t come any more. You’ve still got water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Well, I’d better get on.’

  But Tanya doesn’t start drilling again. She stares at Anna, her dark eyes hungry in her drawn, sexless face. Starvation has catapulted her into old age. She used to complain that it was so unfair, the way Masha had those beautiful eyes while her own were a sort of grey, nothing special. But Tanya’s eyes seem to have grown larger, carving out pools of darkness in her face. Suddenly she looks a long way down, like someone at the bottom of a cliff. Will she ever be able to climb back up those steps from the canal ice?

  Anna picks up the sledge rope. ‘See you again.’

  Yes. Good luck.’