Burying the Sun

by Gloria Whelan

  On the prospekt, people wandered in and out of the stores. On the bridge across the Griboyadov Canal, a man was selling gaily colored scarves. Reflected in the canal, the brightly painted domes of the Church of the Resurrection were all the colors of the scarves. Seeing a girl walk along with an ice-cream sandwich reminded me it was nearly lunchtime.

  Back at the apartment I turned on the radio for a little company while I heated up a pot of cabbage soup. Instead of the news that came on at noon, I heard the word unimaniye—“attention.” I turned off the fire under the soup and stood listening. The next voice was Comrade Molotov speaking from Moscow. Molotov was deputy premier, just below Stalin himself. I thought, The war is coming.

  Molotov spoke in a calm, almost boring voice, as if he were reading the everyday news, but the words sounded in my ears like shouts.

  “Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union,” he greeted us, and then he announced that German troops had attacked Russia. German planes had bombed our cities of Kiev and Sevastopol.

  My heart was racing. Andrei had been right.

  Molotov called for us to rally around “the glorious Bolshevik Party,” and around “our great leader, Comrade Stalin.”

  Why isn’t our great leader talking to us now? I wondered. And why did he make us friends with Germany in the first place?

  When the speech was over, the radio played patriotic songs. I didn’t take the time to pour the soup into a bowl but spooned it lukewarm from the pan. A moment later I was running out of the apartment, still chewing on a crust of bread. I headed back to the General Staff Building, where I marched up the stairway. Before I could enter the building, a guard grabbed my arm.

  “Where do you think you are going?”

  I took a deep breath. “I heard the radio. We are at war. I want to enlist in the army at once.”

  I saw the guard holding his lips tightly together to keep from smiling.

  Furious, I said, “There is a war. Comrade Molotov said so. Russia needs all the men she can get.”

  “Men, yes. Not boys. Show me proof you are eighteen and I’ll send you to the recruiting office.”

  I walked away, trying to hold up my head. I knew Mama would never sign anything that said I was eighteen, but maybe Marya would.

  I pushed my way through the crowds. I was not the only one who had heard the news. All of Leningrad, like a swarm of bees let loose from its hive, was buzzing into this store and that. There were long lines in front of the State Bank. People left the bank counting their money, worried looks on their faces. Soon they would turn the money into gold and jewelry. We had learned in school what bad things can happen to money when a country is at war.

  A woman came out of one of the gastronoms, the grocery stores, with a peck of potatoes under one arm and a sack of cabbages under the other. Strung around her throat was a necklace of onions and, poking out of her pocket, a bottle of vodka. When she saw me staring at her, the woman spat angrily at my feet. “Don’t come to me for food when you are starving, you idle boy.”

  I hurried to the Hermitage. I would show the woman who was idle and who was not.

  A handwritten sign announced that the museum was closed, but the guard at the door recognized me. “Your sister is in the Dutch gallery. What a terrible thing. Everything here is confusion. Comrade Orbeli is ready to throw himself into the Neva.” Comrade Orbeli was the director of the museum. The guard warned, “Everyone is upset. You had better stay away.”

  I thanked him, and ignoring his advice, I hurried to the gallery. Marya was balanced on top of a ladder, lifting a picture off the wall, helped by an elderly woman whom I recognized as one of the museum guards. I could see ladders in other galleries and men and women snatching pictures off the walls as if a fire were raging just inches away. There was the sound of pounding and sawing as carpenters hammered together crates.

  Marya’s blouse was pulled out of her skirt, and her hair was every which way. When she saw me, she said, “Georgi, you are an angel to come so quickly. You’ve heard the terrible news. Take this Rembrandt from me—and be careful, it’s priceless.”

  I grasped the painting and laid it against the wall. I knew the picture well, for Mama had often brought me to this room. It was An Old Man in Red. The man’s gnarled, wrinkled hands with their little rivers of blue veins had fascinated me. “Marya, I have to talk with you at once. You need to write something that says I am eighteen.”

  She gave me a puzzled look. “But you are not yet fifteen.”

  “Yes, yes, I know that, I’m not a fool, but I’m nearly fifteen, and I want to go into the army.”

  “Georgi, you are out of your mind. What would Mama say? Anyhow, you need something official. Even if I would do such a thing, and I wouldn’t, there is no way I can put words on paper that will get you into the army.”

  “I have to do something. I won’t spend the war mopping floors!”

  Marya climbed down the ladder and, reaching up, grabbed me by the shoulders. “You must listen to me for once. Look around you. A room full of Rembrandts, and next door two da Vincis—the greatest artists who ever lived. What if the bombs fall tomorrow? What if they fall on the Hermitage? Room after room of treasures that can never be replaced. There are thousands of such treasures here. You want to save Russia? Here is the best of what Russia has. Georgi, help me.” She was crying.

  I imagined a bomb exploding and An Old Man in Red crumbling into a thousand pieces. “But where will you put them?”

  “We don’t know yet. Comrade Orbeli is making arrangements. Our job is to choose what is to go and to pack it. Now give me a hand.” She began very carefully to take the painting from the frame.

  After that I lost track of time. We went from one gallery to the next. As we took the pictures down, the wooden crates were constructed around them and carefully labeled. I wondered what the pictures must feel, torn from their homes and shut up into boxes.

  We emptied the galleries of farmyards with cows and horses, of neat Dutch rooms with everything in place, as if no one lived in them. We packed away picture after picture of kings and empresses and naked ladies. There were hundreds of pictures from the Bible: David with the head of Goliath, Moses with the Ten Commandments, the Holy Family, the return of the prodigal son, and pictures of saints and angels. Stalin had shut all the churches and synagogues but here in the state museum God was everywhere. It made me a little nervous to shut those pictures up in boxes.

  Someone brought in sandwiches and tea for us, and we worked on until one in the morning. The sun was low, and there were long shadows on the pavement as we walked home. The prospekt was crowded, as if no one wished to be alone. Several of the stores we passed had signs listing things they were out of. Leningradskaya Pravda had put out an extra. The headline was just the one large word: VOINA, war. Still, none of it seemed real to me. “Marya,” I asked, “what if the Germans never bomb Leningrad? All our work at the Hermitage will be for nothing.” Our backs and arms were aching, and our stomachs were growling with hunger.

  For an answer Marya pointed to the covers that had been hastily thrown over the lights of the trolleys to dim them. I noticed that few buildings were lighted. Around us people were looking up at the sky. There, hovering over the General Staff Building like a giant’s toy, was an antiaircraft balloon.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PREPARING FOR BATTLE

  June 1941

  Early each morning Marya and I headed for the Hermitage. As gallery after gallery was emptied of its treasures, Comrade Orbeli insisted that the empty frames be replaced on the walls.

  “It will make it easier to put back the pictures,” Marya said, and I could see that in her heart, however long the war took, it would not be over for Marya until the moment the pictures were safely back in their frames.

  I was assigned to help in the loading and unloading of the trucks that carted the works of art to railroad cars, which pleased me because I was no longer cooped up in the museum—and besides, it paid more mo
ney. Riding on the trucks gave me a chance to see what was going on in the city. It looked as if a mad wizard had waved his wand over Leningrad, turning it into a shabby forest. All the important buildings were camouflaged with green netting. The Party leaders had been quick to think of themselves, for the first nets were cast over the Communist Party headquarters at Smolny. When Mama saw the net, she said, “I wish they would draw the net tight and throw the whole building and all those in it into the Neva. The Party made a bargain with the devil when it joined with Germany, and now it is surprised to see the devil turn on it.”

  One by one, buildings were erased by the camouflage nets; even the column with the angel on the square in front of the Winter Palace was draped with netting. When it came to the spire of the Admiralty, everyone was stumped. No one could figure out how to get to the top so that the gold spire, glistening so invitingly in the sun, could be painted out. They even tried to have an antiaircraft balloon drop a rope ladder onto the tower, but nothing worked. It was dangerous to leave it shining there, for the spire would serve as a guidepost for the German bombers.

  At first there was no shortage of food, and Mama filled the cupboard. She no longer talked about “not taking more than our share.”

  “I have been hungry, Georgi, and I know what it’s like.” She took a part of our savings and bought a burzhuika, a little stove that was fired with small pieces of wood. I remembered such a stove in the house in which we had lived in Dudinka when Mama was exiled to Siberia.

  “Why do we need a burzhuika, Mama, when we already have a stove to cook on and our apartment is heated?”

  “That is now, Georgi. Wait and see.”

  Stranger still was what Mama did with bread. You could buy as much as you liked, and Mama strung slices on a cord and hung the necklace of slices in a sunny window to dry.

  When Olga saw them, she teased Mama. “Who will eat your dried rusks when we have fresh bread to eat?”

  Olga was working longer hours, for the radio symphony had been called upon to broadcast patriotic music hour after hour. The Leningrad symphony had been sent out of the city to protect the musicians. The radio symphony in which Olga played was now the city’s only orchestra. The musicians had even had a little raise in pay, and with her extra money Olga had bought a new dress and shoes. When she brought them to show us, Mama smiled. “Very pretty, but you will regret those high heels. You had better take them back and exchange them for sturdy shoes or, better yet, food.”

  “You are a pessimist, Katya,” Olga said, and twirled around in her new dress and high heels.

  Mama bought sugar and fruit and filled every jar she had with preserves. When the first cabbages were ripe, she put them in a pickling brine.

  “The way they did at the Oaks,” she said. The Oaks had been my grandmother’s country estate, and my mother had told us stories of fields of grain so vast you could not see to the end of them, and a great house that had been burned down during the revolution.

  One evening Andrei stopped by. Marya had seen little of him, for he was busy at staff headquarters day and night. We were sitting around the kitchen table listening to the radio. The orchestra was playing the Fifth Symphony by Shostakovich, Russia’s great composer who lived right in Leningrad. Marya said, “Olga told me that Shostakovich is working on an important piece that will celebrate Leningrad’s victory.”

  Andrei was no longer the cheerful man he had been. Now he had a troubled face and bad news. “If Shostakovich is writing about a victory, he knows something I don’t. There is even a rumor that he is to be flown to Moscow to get him out of danger should the Germans march into the city.”

  “Andrei,” Mama said, “surely it’s not as bad as that?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid it is. Our army is retreating everywhere. The eleventh and the eighth armies are coming apart. In some of the units half the men are casualties.” Andrei knew of my wish, and now he gave me a warning look. “Count your lucky stars that you are too young to join up, Georgi.”

  In a frightened voice Marya said, “Andrei, will you have to go to the front?”

  “No such luck. Everything is chaos here at headquarters. I am working twenty hours a day trying to find food and ammunition for the soldiers.”

  “It was the same chaos under the tsar in the Great War,” Mama said, “and it led to the revolution. Maybe this war will lead to a change in the government, and this time for the better. I’ve heard a rumor that political prisoners in the camps are being released to join the army. At least they are getting their freedom.”

  Andrei nodded. “Yes, it’s true, but will they live long enough to enjoy it?”

  The next day when when my friend Dmitry and I were walking along the prospekt, I told him what Andrei had said. He wouldn’t believe me.

  “Look, here.” He shoved an article in Leningradskaya Pravda under my nose. “It says right here in the newspaper that the Russian army is turning back the Germans.”

  “That’s how much you know. You’re stupid to believe what the newspaper says.” I remembered too late that Dmitry’s brother Vladimir was a reporter for the paper.

  “You’re not patriotic!” Dmitry shouted. “What can you expect from someone whose parents were enemies of the people and exiled to Siberia?”

  I hit him on the nose. He hit me back. I felt a loose tooth, and there was blood on my fist. I don’t know what would have happened next, but suddenly, all around us, we saw people running. I think we were glad of an excuse to stop the fight and began to run after them. They were headed for the Admiralty.

  “They’re going to climb the tower,” someone shouted.

  For days there had been rumors that several mountain climbers were going to make the attempt to camouflage the Admiralty tower. Their pictures appeared in Leningradskaya Pravda. One of the climbers was a music teacher, Fersova. “Why, I know her!” Yelena had said. “She’s a friend of Mama’s.”

  Now it was going to happen. Half of the city watched the mountain climbers make their slow way up the tower. We were all holding our breath. When at last they reached the top, we all let out a cheer. The climbers took out paintbrushes and began to cover the bright gold with dark paint. When they were safely down, everyone breathed a sigh of relief, but I couldn’t help but be sad that the shining gold that had brightened the city’s sky for so long had disappeared.

  Our fight was forgotten, and Dmitry and I continued down the prospekt with some idea of looking to see what ships were docked. Dmitry didn’t apologize, but he bought two ice creams on a stick and gave me one. We sat at the river’s edge eating our ice cream.

  “Vladimir is going to the front,” Dmitry said. “He’s going to be a war correspondent.”

  I understood why I had made him angry. Even if his brother wasn’t a soldier, Dmitry was worried about his brother going off to war. “He’ll write the truth,” I said, trying to be polite.

  “But they won’t print it,” Dmitry said, trying to be honest.

  While I was stuck at the Hermitage, everyone else appeared to be going off to the war. In spite of what he had said, Andrei was transferred to the front, and for days Marya went about with a gloomy face. Sometimes I would awaken in the middle of the night to find her sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of tea.

  In spite of his old age, Viktor was also going off to the front. A call had gone out for volunteers. The German army was moving rapidly north. Thousands of workers were needed to dig a last line of defense to keep the armies from crossing the Luga River. Once they crossed the Luga, which was less than a hundred miles from Leningrad, the German army could join with the Finns and make a circle around Leningrad. Except for Lake Ladoga on the northeast, we would be ringed around, closed in as surely as if a fence encircled us—no food or help could come in, and we could not escape. We would be rats in a trap.

  “They’ll never get past the Luga,” Viktor said. “Thousands are going down there to dig ditches and build hills to keep the tanks out. You’ll see.” He marched off
with the others, with Olga running after him to give him his carpet slippers and a bottle of wine.

  Even those with jobs were expected to put in three hours of patriotic work each day. Mama chose to unload wood from the barges coming from Finland, although the barges were bringing less and less. The people of Finland hated Russia for invading their country and taking it over. When they saw our soldiers marching south to stop the advancing German army, leaving Finland undefended, the Finns saw a chance to rebel against their old enemy, Russia.

  At first I argued with Mama, for unloading the barges was heavy work, especially after a day at the hospital, but each day she brought home a stick or two concealed in her jacket. The small sticks were piled neatly in the kitchen next to the little burzhuika. “For the day they are needed,” Mama said.

  For my three hours of patriotic work I joined Dmitry and hundreds of others digging air-raid shelters in the Summer Garden. Though our hands were covered with blisters and our backs ached, Dmitry and I took to the tunneling like moles. I had a daydream that one of the soldiers who oversaw the work would tap me on the shoulder and say, “Such a hard worker should be in the army, never mind how old you are. There is a place for you.” It never happened.

  Something even more remarkable happened. One afternoon as we were flinging dirt over our shoulders, we noticed a small, neatly dressed man with glasses handling the shovel as if he had no idea what a shovel was for. While I thrust my foot against my own shovel and pried it into the hard earth, the man hardly made a dent in the ground. When he saw me staring at him, he gave me a smile so apologetic, I could not resist going over to him with a view to showing him how to angle the shovel and how to force it into the ground with a little help from his foot.