The Siege

by Helen Dunmore

  Kolya was still talking. ‘You know, Anna, your chicken soup. I like that soup.’

  Anna swallowed the gush of saliva in her mouth.

  I’ll make you some soup.’

  She made him bread-soup, crumbling a half-slice in water and heating it over the stove with a pinch of salt. He drank it greedily, like a convict, clutching the cup to him.

  Yes, Kolya’s getting better, but he’s so weak they don’t let him out of the one room they can keep above freezing. The pipes in the bathroom are frozen anyway, so he doesn’t need to go in there. The toilet’s frozen too. They use an old chamber-pot which Anna empties into a snowdrift in the yard. Sometimes she hasn’t got the strength to carry it downstairs, and then she puts the pot out on the landing, its sullen stew of urine and faeces covered by a tin plate. It’s so cold that soon the chamber-pot freezes, too, and the next time she goes down to the yard she has to hack out the frozen sludge before she can throw it away. Everything takes so long. Every day she is slower. Her hands are stiff, joints swollen, fingers raw. She cut the web of skin between thumb and finger on her left hand, when she was chopping wood, and it won’t heal. She’s never been clumsy like that before.

  Evgenia’s wood is all gone, but Andrei got another sackful when the wooden fence around the hospital was torn down, and there are still books to burn. Her father’s Shakespeare is on the shelf above his bed.

  Anna draws the quilt up around the back of Andrei’s head. But where’s Marina? The burzhuika is almost out. Anna opens the stove, where the fire is down to red ash. Kneeling, she teases it with scraps of paper and splinters of wood until flames lick up out of the ash. She makes a little wigwam of kindling, and then adds two larger chunks of fencing. Even in here, with the stove going, the windows are blank with frost. Yesterday the temperature outside fell to twenty degrees below zero. The radio says that newspaper pads should be used to wrap children’s chests. Newspaper, because of its insulating properties, provides excellent protection. If you have no newspaper, you can take a book apart and stitch layers of pages into a child’s vest. You might think it was better to burn the book as fuel, but in the fight against cold you need long-term weapons as well as short-term ones. A paediatrician gave details of how she had stitched together layers of Tolstoy into a vest for her six-year-old son.

  The door to the kitchen is closed.

  ‘Marina?’ But no one answers. Perhaps she’s gone down for water. But what if she can’t carry it back up, the way she couldn’t last time? What if Anna’s got to haul the water upstairs and support Marina as well? It’s bad enough to make the ascent alone with a bucket of water. She has to grope her way upwards because the lights don’t work, stopping every few steps, terrified of slipping on a patch of ice left where someone else spilled their water. Tears of anger and weakness spring to Anna’s eyes.

  ‘Marina?’

  ‘I’m here,’ answers Marina, from behind the closed door of Anna’s father’s room. Anna hasn’t been in there since he was laid to rest. She pushes the door, and it opens easily, sending out a coil of freezing air. Quickly, she steps inside and shuts the door behind her so Kolya won’t be chilled.

  There’s a light fur of frost on her father’s face. He lies on his back, with a book between his hands. It’s a battered volume of Pushkin, folded there by Marina before Mikhail’s body stiffened. Marina, wrapped in coat and shawl, sits beside the bed. The shawl is wound around her face, so that only her eyes show as she turns to the door. But her hands are bare and they are wrapped around Mikhail’s.

  ‘But Marina, your hands – you’ll get frostbite. You mustn’t stay in here.’

  She lifts Marina’s hands. They are stiff, marbled blue and red.

  Anna rubs them between her own, as Evgenia did. Marina’s hands feel dead between hers.

  ‘It’s all right,’ says Marina. ‘I’ve only just taken off my gloves. I wanted to touch him.’

  Anna continues to rub for a while, then fumbles Marina’s fingers back into their gloves. Marina doesn’t help her. She seems not to understand why Anna is moving her hands about.

  ‘We can’t stay in here. You could freeze to death.’

  ‘It’s all right. You go in the other room. It’s just that I wanted to be with him for a while,’ Marina explains, as if everything is perfectly normal.

  It’s normal for a dead man to stay in the next room until he’s covered with a pall of frost. It’s the same in rooms all over Leningrad. Anna knows that, because she’s talked to other women in the queues.

  ‘I’m alone now, but he’s still with me. I’ve made a corner for him.’

  In some rooms, whole families lie and wait for spring.

  They can’t bury her father yet. The ground’s too hard. Crowds of bodies are piled at the cemetery gates, waiting. And even if there were graves, their combined strength wouldn’t get her father down all those stairs. And there’s no sledge, she finds herself explaining to him. And so we’ve got to keep you here, we can’t help it –

  He has drawn her close to him, too. She’s right by the bedside now. There’s the Shakespeare on the shelf above her father’s head. Seven volumes, with their red leather covers and thick, creamy sheets of paper. Marina sees her glance, and says, ‘But it was his Pushkin he wanted.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  Marina pulls her shawl down so her mouth is uncovered. ‘No. But I knew.’ Her pallid, drawn face lightens. ‘Do you remember what happens after the duel?

  Onegin rushes to the youth,

  Peers at him, calls his name – useless:

  He’s gone.

  And how Zaretsky puts Lensky into the sleigh, cold and dead? Remember that? And so it’s all happening again, exactly as Pushkin said. It happened to Pushkin, and it’s happening to your father. The snow, and the sledges, and the dead man. Did you ever hear your father read that passage?’

  ‘I don’t remember it. But he was always reading Pushkin.’

  ‘Of course. I remember him reading it aloud one evening. No, he wasn’t reading, he was reciting it. He had the book in front of him, but he knew it by heart. His eyes were closed. He didn’t need the book, but I think he liked the feel of it in his hands.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. He used to say his memory was going, and that’s why he always had the book.’

  Her father in his chair, perfectly upright, face raised up a little, eyes shut, mouth faintly smiling. He would begin to recite, and she would listen for a while and then become bored – or perhaps not bored, exactly, but restless. She’d want to be elsewhere. And then Kolya would clatter in wanting something to eat, and she’d have an excuse to get away. All those pieces of paper he was always writing on. What was going to become of them? She’d tried to read his stories, but she had never enjoyed them. Everything in them had to be explained to her.

  Don’t think of that now.

  ‘He didn’t recite like an actor, so that you became aware of him and his personality,’ said Marina. ‘He had too much respect for the life of the poem.’

  ‘Marina, you must come out of here.’

  ‘Could you draw him for me now, Anna?’

  ‘What? As he is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘He’ll be forgotten. All of it will be forgotten and they’ll say it never happened.’

  ‘You’ve got to stay alive yourself, if you don’t want things to be forgotten.’

  ‘Get your paper, Anna. Please. Just a quick sketch. We’ve got to have a record.’

  ‘My paper’s finished.’

  ‘You could draw in one of his books. The Shakespeare. That’s got wide margins. And the end-papers are good.’

  Stiffly, Marina stretches up and lifts down the book. ‘Look, I’ve even got a pencil. Draw him. Please. Otherwise it will all disappear.’

  ‘You promise you’ll come out of here and sit by the stove when I’ve done it?’

  ‘I promise.’

  Anna draws badly, with gloved hands. Sh
e’s not going to risk frostbite for this. And she’s angry with Marina, for making her look at what she doesn’t want to see. The trouble with drawing is that you have to look, if it’s going to be any good.

  Her father, who is now iron flesh on an iron bed. His head is uncovered, and there’s ice in his hair. She draws the wasted lines of cheek and jaw, the jut of his nose, and the bony hollows of his temples. She draws carefully, as if she loves what’s lying there. But she doesn’t. He’s gone, and Marina suffered for nothing when she touched him with her bare hands like that. He’s somewhere else, not thinking about them at all.

  But Marina – no, Marina doesn’t understand that. She believes that they are together, her and Misha, as she always calls him now. She’s not afraid of him. She leans forward to watch the lines as they sprout from Anna’s pencil.

  ‘That’s him,’ she murmurs. ‘You’re right, do it like that.’

  The sketch is done. Anna hands the book to Marina, averting her face from her father.

  ‘You promised you’d come away now.’

  ‘Yes, I will. You don’t understand how important this is, Anna. I can see that you don’t like it. But that’s because you don’t understand, not because I’m wrong. Your father was a great man.’

  And suddenly everything changes. Anna turns and looks at her father, but this time without anger. He’s gone, he’s where he wants to be. And he’s a lump of frozen meat, but also he’s magnificent, with the book between his hands and his nose jutting at the ceiling. He is what he is. He hasn’t changed.

  ‘Maybe he was born to bring a blessing

  Or even great things to this world.

  His silenced lyre might have sent music echoing

  Through times to come like thunder. For this poet

  Maybe, on the ladder of the ages

  A high rung waited. Maybe his martyr’s spirit

  Carried away with it a holy secret…’

  goes on Marina. ‘Surely you remember, Anna, how your father used to recite that passage?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I think so,’ answers Anna, and this time she really thinks she does remember. And now it doesn’t matter that Marina’s wrong, that her father’s stories are dull and hard to understand, and that even if they keep all those pieces of paper nobody will want to read them. He wasn’t a great man, but that’s of no importance at all.

  She does remember. At the dacha, under the honeysuckle, her father with his book, a heavy cloud of the Sokolovs’ bees booming in the blossom, and then the words spilling quietly out from the shade where he sat to the verandah where Anna stirred her cloudberry jam over the stove. Her father, upright, preoccupied and slightly absurd, turns and gives her his rare, sweet smile. ‘How’s that jam getting on? It smells wonderful. Cloudberries always make the best jam of all.’

  Was that what he said? Something, anyway, that made her wave the wooden spoon at him in greeting so that little drops of cloudberry jam spattered her blue cotton dress.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ she says. Marina nods, satisfied.

  29

  Marina is so cold she’s barely able to reach the stove. She hobbles across the room, leaning on Anna. Shudders run through her and into Anna.

  ‘Here. Sit down.’ Anna speaks gently, although she wants to shake Marina off and push her into the chair. But Marina continues to stand stiffly. The cold has got into her, as Anna knew it would. She’s been holding hands with the dead, and you mustn’t do that. You must let go straight away, as soon as they touch you.

  Anna presses her down into the chair.

  ‘Stay there, warm yourself,’ she says. But she can’t leave Marina. They are trapped together, in their dark wood. There, the trees grow so thickly that rain and sun don’t spill through. There’s a bed of brown needles, and sometimes the skeleton of a bird that has hidden itself away to die. Anna stares around for rescue, and there is the heap of Kolya and Andrei, sleeping. She can only see the back of their heads, in their fur caps. Kolya always wears his fur cap now without any arguments, because Andrei wears one.

  ‘At home, hunters always sleep in their clothes like this. They make a shelter out of pine bark, and they plaster it with snow, and then they’re quite warm. Snow is an insulator, you see, Kolya.’

  ‘Is it? Can we make one of those shelters?’

  ‘Yes, why not? When it’s safe to go out in the forest again.’

  ‘You and me and Anna.’

  The birds will come back. There’ll be orioles in the woods again, and corncrakes where the meadow flows into the stream, down by the Sokolov farmhouse. There’ll be the upheaval of spring again. Tumult of birds drilling out song in the wet branches. There’ll be ice breaking on the Neva, sparks of green on black earth, morning light as sharp as lemons, and a rush of brown froth where snow-water melts. It will all come back again. I believe in it, says Anna to herself, folding her hands around Marina’s knuckles.

  ‘What a beautiful colour,’ says Marina. She’s looking intently at the scrap of Turkish rug under her feet. It’s almost threadbare, but it’s been an article of faith all Anna’s life that ‘It’s valuable, you know. Hand-made. You can’t get rugs like it now.’ The colour is dark, subtle crimson, shading into deep brown. ‘Really beautiful.’

  ‘It’s worn out,’ says Anna.

  ‘But I’m glad you use it. You should use beautiful things, not put them away.’

  Andrei and Kolya have woken. Andrei takes off his blanket, warm from his body, and wraps it around Marina so that she’s tented from head to foot, with an open flap to gather the heat of the stove. Anna puts water on to heat.

  ‘Tea, Marina. That’ll make you feel better.’

  ‘Look in my boots,’ mumbles Marina from inside her blanket cave.

  ‘In your boots?’ All this has finally sent her crazy. ‘Your boots are on your feet, Marina. Your feet are in them.’

  ‘Not these. My other ones.’

  ‘She means her felt boots,’ says Kolya, in the languid, unchild-like voice that makes Anna’s hair crisp with fear. ‘They’re in the kitchen.’

  They aren’t really Marina’s felt boots. They were Vera’s. They were always too small for Anna, but they’ve been kept for years, carefully packed with newspaper and camphor balls. Who would ever get rid of a pair of felt boots? When the first snow came, her father had remembered them for Marina. To Anna’s annoyance, they fitted Marina perfectly.

  ‘Yes,’ says Marina, ‘in the kitchen. Look inside them, Anna.’

  The boots are behind the kitchen door. Anna lifts them. They’re heavier than they should be. She puts her hand into the right boot, and her touch meets cold glass. She draws out a small pot of jam, labelled in Marina’s bold, spear-like handwriting: Rasberry jam, 1940. She reaches into the left boot, and there, too, is a jar. This time, the jam is cloudberry. They are small jars, holding about four hundred grammes each. How has Marina done it? How has she had the strength to hold these back?

  ‘Marina!’

  ‘Bring it here. We’ll have tea with jam. But this is the last of it, Anna, it’s all I’ve got. I hid them away. But now’s the time to eat it, because it won’t get any worse than this.’

  ‘What is it, Anna?’ calls Kolya, looking at his sister in the doorway, her face blazing, tears sliding down her cheeks as she holds up the two jars of jam, one in each fist, like a boxer in triumph after the last, bloody, flesh-pulping round.

  ‘Jam.’

  ‘Jam!’

  They swoop on Marina, clutching her, hugging one another, on their knees and tangled in blanket. Kolya butts his head into Marina’s lap. ‘Jam, jam, jam!’ He shoves against her. He claws at her clothes. ‘Jam, Marina! Jam!’

  ‘Look, raspberry jam!’ Anna holds it up to the light and the seeds hang like points of straw in ruby flesh.

  ‘And cloudberry…’ says Andrei. ‘Cloudberry – it’s my favourite.’

  For weeks they haven’t dared let such words out of their mouths. They don’t dare talk about the food of the past, thou
gh they’re obsessed by it. Each one of them is locked in silent, separate craving. Little savoury pasties packed with jelly and rich meat. Blini with red caviar and white sour cream. ‘That ice-cream I had last summer – and I didn’t even finish it.’ And the ice-cream marches across your mind to torment you. Chocolate Eskimo, glistening, rich with cream and sugar, scented with vanilla, sliding across the tongue, dripping to the ground, half of it wasted, not even thought about – how could you have done that?

  Raspberry, cloudberry. They sit between her hands, dark, glistening, packed with sugar, sealed with transparent circles of waxed paper.

  ‘Look at it. See how clear it is.’

  ‘Packed with vitamins,’ says Andrei, examining the jars. His fingers shake and the glass chinks lightly. ‘Anti-scorbutic – and so much nicer to take than boiled pine-needles.’

  Many of his patients have scurvy now. In hospital they are given essence prepared from pine-needles. Andrei has obtained the formula, and made an evil-tasting liquid which everyone has to take daily.

  ‘Careful, be careful with those jars. Wait, I’ll get saucers and spoons.’

  Anna comes back with four spoons, and twists the cap on the cloudberry jam. We’ll give Kolya his first. Here, open your mouth.’ He tips his head back, opens his mouth wide, and shuts his eyes. His foul, starved breath makes Anna’s eyes sting as she carefully places the spoonful of jam in his mouth. ‘Don’t swallow it all at once. Taste it.’

  The child’s body shudders all over. He holds the jam in his mouth heroically, his eyes watering, then he gulps it down. He opens his eyes. ‘More.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘More.’

  She spoons in more.

  ‘Now wait. It’s not good to have too much at once.’