Burying the Sun

by Gloria Whelan

  The next day we learned the terrible results of the bombing. With the smoke still covering the city, an announcement was made that our rations would be cut in half. In the past, if you had a little extra money there were stores where you could buy what you needed without ration coupons. No more. When Mama went for a loaf of bread, the bakery was closed. For breakfast I had one of Mama’s dried rusks with a little jelly and weak tea. Since the beginning of the war I had been able to eat my fill, but now I was hungry.

  Olga knocked on our door. “Katya, what am I to do? Yesterday I traded my ration coupons for a jar of caviar. I know it was wrong, but the conductor of the symphony is cross with us all of the time and caviar always cheers me.” She looked longingly at Mama’s bag of dried bread rusks, the crock of cabbages in brine, and the row of jellies on our shelf.

  “We will help you, Olga, but you must also trade. I will have to do the same,” Mama said.

  “But I have nothing to trade.”

  “Nonsense,” Mama said. “You have a closet full of clothes you don’t need. You can take those to the outskirts of town, where there are farms, and trade with the peasants for food. I mean to do it myself.”

  We all trooped into Olga’s apartment. Yelena looked surprised. “What will the farm women do with Mother’s clothes?”

  Mama smiled. “They will turn the dresses into quilts to help them keep warm. The shoes they will take apart and turn the leather into something sensible.”

  When Olga opened her closet door, it was like one of the paintings in the Hermitage. It looked like a hundred paint pots had been spilled. Hanging up were Gypsy skirts, embroidered blouses, and fringed scarves in rainbow colors. Shoes were heaped up on the closet floor.

  “Not this one,” Olga said, tenderly holding a silk scarf covered all over with flowers. “I wore it at my first concert. I would never give it up.”

  Mama swept up the scarf and several others, as well as an armful of shoes. Olga watched, tears in her eyes. “Listen,” Mama said. “Soon even the food the peasants have on the farms will be gone—or, worse, we won’t be able to get to the farms. What good will these things do you then? Can you eat them?”

  Yelena was searching through her own things, adding to the brightly colored heap. I recognized a dress she had worn the first time we had gone out together on our own. We had attended a movie, the great director Eisenstein’s Aleksandr Nevsky. Yelena had cried when the Russian prince had died. I had tried to comfort her, but she only shook her head and sobbed, “I love pictures that make me cry.” I was sorry to see the dress go.

  The next morning Olga and Mama left with their packages, and that evening when they returned, Olga proudly showed off sausages, cereal, and dried berries.

  “Look, Yelena,” she said, “six fresh eggs!” I couldn’t help noticing that her beloved flowered scarf was poking out of her pocket.

  Viktor, looking hungrily at the eggs, congratulated Olga. “I hear there is still food to be had on the outskirts of the city, where the Germans are bombing,” he said. “The farmers left some of the root vegetables in the ground when their houses were destroyed.”

  I got out our map and asked Viktor to show me where those fields were. Immediately, Mama said, “Georgi, put that map away. Don’t even think of going there. I have enough worry without thinking of bombs falling over you.”

  I took one more quick look at the map and folded it up. Early the next morning I was at the Trushins’ apartment, calling for Dmitry. As soon as I walked into their apartment, I noticed something missing. There was no smell of fresh baking. I think until that minute I hadn’t really understood what the fire at the food warehouses would mean. Mr. Trushin had just come home. He was black with soot and ashes.

  “There is nothing left in the warehouses,” he said. “Only a little melted sugar we are trying to scrape up from the ground. Every little bit counts.” He sighed. “No more little presents for my dear wife.”

  “Ivanovich, what are you talking about?” Mrs. Trushin said. “I have the greatest gift of all. You weren’t burned up in that terrible fire. What a day I had until I saw you, but it’s true we will miss the things you brought home. We have nothing but a little kasha and some cabbage, and the stores have nothing.”

  “I think I know where we can dig up some vegetables,” I said, “if Dmitry wants to come with me.”

  Her face lit up. “What a good boy. How I would like to have some carrots for our soup. Dmitry, you go with Georgi.” She found some sacks and a knife for each of us and sent us on our way.

  If she had known me the way my mother did, Mrs. Trushin wouldn’t have been so quick to send Dmitry with me, but Dmitry knew me. The minute we were outside he said, “What do we have to do to get these vegetables?”

  I explained.

  “What do you mean, bombs?”

  “They’re probably not bombing there anymore, since everyone has left.”

  “Everyone has left because they are smarter than we are,” Dmitry said, but he didn’t turn back. He was thinking, as I was, that if we could not be soldiers, we could at least have our own adventures.

  As we neared the farmland, the artillery grew louder and louder. I looked at Dmitry and he looked at me. Each of us was waiting for the other to turn back, but neither of us wanted to be the first to make a move.

  I had been here before. On summer days I had come with Mama and Marya for a day in the countryside. We would bring picnic baskets, and after asking permission from the farmers, we would sit under a tree and have our lunch. The grain would be golden in the fields and cows fat and sleek. Before we returned to the city, we would buy eggs, and milk still warm from the cows. The farms had looked like a child’s drawing with a big sun in the sky; now it looked as if someone had taken a black crayon and scratched out the pretty drawing.

  It would be quiet for a few minutes, and we would think the shelling was over, but just as we started to relax, there would be a crack like thunder and I could feel the ground shake under me.

  As we neared the deserted farms, we began to see more people like ourselves, and we felt a little better. It was unlikely that we all would be killed; some of us at least would escape. The first farmhouse we reached was a burned-out skeleton. The windows were shattered and the roof gone. Two women were digging in the ground, filling sacks. They looked at us as if to say, “We were here first.” We turned away.

  Every farm was occupied by people from the city with their sacks. If you approached, they stopped their digging and gave you a threatening look. After a bit we came to a farm where there was a terrible smell from a cow that lay dead next to what must have once been a stable. No one was digging there. Dmitry and I took our handkerchiefs and wrapped them around our noses. “They say you get used to bad smells,” I said.

  “I hope I get used to it before I throw up,” Dmitry said.

  We spotted the wilted ferny leaves of carrots and began to dig. There were turnips and parsnips in the ground as well. By then we were so hungry, we chewed away at the carrots, no longer caring about the smell or all the dirt we were swallowing. We had almost become used to the shelling and the distant explosions, but we were unprepared for the great clap of thunder as a shell hit close to us and clouds of earth shot up into the sky and then rained down on us. I don’t know which one of us ran faster. Sometimes I was ahead and sometimes Dmitry, the sacks slamming against our legs. We were not the only ones running. Everyone was heading for the city.

  We made our way through the backstreets, ready, should we be stopped, with a story that we had visited relatives in the country, but no one stopped us. It was nearly dark when I left Dmitry at his house and reached our own apartment. I was sure Mama would be so pleased to have the vegetables that nothing would be said about where I had found them. I should have known Mama better.

  “Georgi, where have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you. I went to the Trushins’ and Dmitry was gone as well. They said you were out digging vegetables. Georgi, tell me you didn
’t go where the bombing was.”

  I handed her my bulging sack. “They’re root vegetables, Mama. They’ll last us all winter.”

  “Do you think I would exchange my son for a bag of turnips?” She looked very angry.

  “There are carrots and parsnips as well,” I said.

  “That makes it better?”

  For a minute I thought she was going to pitch the bag out the window, but she only threw her arms around me. A moment later she was pushing me away. “What is that terrible smell? Take a bath at once.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  UNDER FIRE

  September, October 1941

  “Moscow must finally be paying some attention to Leningrad,” Viktor said. “They’ve sent General Zhukov to us. I hear that since the old man came, everyone on the General Staff has been on duty twenty-four hours with no sleep. He’s like a dog with a rat between his teeth. He’s shaking up the whole General Staff, but whether Moscow sent him to save the city or destroy it, who knows?”

  Viktor’s words, “save the city or destroy it,” took on new meaning. The German shelling of the city and the bombing increased. The German army crept closer and closer to Leningrad. Word was that any day they would enter the city. No one believed that they would be merciful to us.

  Olga told us that the composer Shostakovich had left Leningrad. “When there was no electricity, he worked by candlelight on his symphony. He didn’t want to leave, but Moscow ordered it. They came and told him to pack up, that it was too dangerous in Leningrad. He says he will be back and that the new symphony will be for our city.”

  The air-raid shelters were finished, and Dmitry and I had a new assignment. We were given buckets of paint and told to paint over all the street signs in the city. “If the Germans come,” we were told, “they won’t know where to go.”

  Dmitry and I looked at each other.

  Under his breath Dmitry said, “If the Germans are strolling down our streets, what does it matter whether they know whether to turn left at the Nevsky Prospekt and right at the Ligovsky Prospekt?”

  Still, it was an order, and we took the black paint and splashed it about, leaving as much on ourselves as on the signposts. We joked about the signs, but still it was not pleasant to think that General Zhukov expected German soldiers in the city. Worse was to come. We were ordered to the sewers.

  We weren’t volunteers any longer, but workers in the city’s brigades. The officer who commanded our sector of workers told us our job would be crucial in saving the city, which made us feel better until our brigade was marched to one of the entrances of the sewer system. It had never occurred to me that you could actually go where what you flushed down the toilet went. We were all prepared to hold our noses, but as we climbed down the steel ladder into the darkened tunnel beneath, it wasn’t so bad.

  “It’s mostly rainwater from the storm sewers,” the officer reassured us. Still we hugged the sides of the walkways. “This far down,” the officer said, “it is safe from the German bombs. What we want to do is establish a whole system of communications. Up above you painted out the street signs. Down here we are going to put up street signs. If the city is threatened, we can move guns and ammunition to wherever they are needed.”

  All that week, armed with maps of the sewer system, we explored the little byways and turnings, working our way slowly from one manhole to another and from one entrance to another and marking them all. It was like a game of hide-and-seek.

  At the same time, we discovered, men were wiring all the bridges of the city so that they could be blown up if the Germans marched in. And not only the bridges, but the city’s docks, the railway that circled the city, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the General Staff Building, and even the Winter Palace. There was a rumor that the whole Russian navy was to be scuttled, completely destroyed to keep it out of the hands of the Germans. Even the newspaper finally admitted our danger. The headline in Leningradskaya Pravda said LENINGRAD—TO BE OR NOT TO BE?

  “Mama,” I said, “the whole city will disappear.” I knew how much she loved the city.

  Usually she managed a smile, no matter how bad the news. Now her face was cold. “Would you have the Germans marching down the prospekt and Hitler giving a speech at Palace Square with the angel looking down? Never.”

  “Mama, the French let the Germans march down the Champs-Elysées, their main street, rather than destroy the whole city.”

  “The French have their own priorities and may do as they please,” Mama said, and would not say another word.

  I remembered the watercolors of St. Petersburg Marya had made for Mama and Papa when we were in Siberia, but this was not the same city. The early-fall weather was mild and the sun like gold, yet the city was ugly. After supper one evening Yelena and I walked along the prospekt. We could hear guns in the distance. To stop the German tanks, there were machine-gun posts and concrete blocks and cruel-looking steel contraptions called hedgehogs because of their bristly steel teeth. Lumber was piled every which way. Everything that could be done to stop the German army from rolling through the city had been done.

  “It’s as if some witch had put a curse on the city,” Yelena said. “I can’t even remember what it used to be like.”

  The Summer Garden where we had had our picnic was nothing but muddy earthworks to protect the air-raid shelters under the garden. The city’s buildings were covered with nets; even the sky over our heads was full of ugly barrage balloons like so many buzzards. Only when we stood at the edge of the seawall and looked down at the Neva could we forget the war for a moment.

  Yelena said, “Rivers are beautiful, but they are cruel as well. The Neva flows on as it has for thousands of years and will keep flowing on to the sea. It doesn’t care one way or the other what happens to the city.” She sounded discouraged.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  “I feel so helpless, Georgi. All I do is sit all day long in the library.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s the same for me.”

  “Georgi, you have been out every day. You helped to save the paintings, you dug the air-raid shelters, you are a member of the volunteers, you even risked your life to get food from the farms.”

  “All that is nothing,” I said. I felt as useless as Yelena did.

  On the night of September 17 there was a high alert. All of us in the guard were summoned to our posts and told that we would not go home. We were to sleep right there. Dmitry and I were stationed near Palace Square. We were supposed to be armed, but there were not enough guns to go around. Ancient guns were yanked from the walls of the Russian Museum. People brought shovels and brooms.

  “The Germans are going to break into the city tonight,” Dmitry said. “I feel it in my bones.”

  It was hard to know what to be most afraid of, the Germans or the whole city going up in one terrible explosion from the dynamite we had set ourselves. There were rumors everywhere: the town of Pushkin had fallen, the railroad that circled the city had been taken by the Germans, the Baltic fleet at the Kronstadt naval base had been scuttled. No one knew the truth. We knew only that in the morning, after sleeping at our posts, we were still alive and Leningrad was still there.

  The next day we heard the Germans were within ten miles of Palace Square and only two miles from the great Kirov plant where munitions and tanks were being made. The laborers at the plant worked sixteen hours a day turning out munitions, and then at night they armed themselves and slept at the plant to protect it from the Germans. It was known that if the Germans got any closer, the plant would be blown up.

  General Zhukov threatened to kill any soldier who retreated an inch. No one knew where the front was, because where it was a minute ago was not where it was now.

  Little by little we learned the truth. The great ship Marat had been sunk, but most of the rest of the fleet survived at Kronstadt, their guns aimed at the Germans on the Finnish shore. Pushkin, only fifteen miles away from Leningrad, had been taken by the Germa
ns. This news was terrible for Mama. Pushkin was the name given to Tsar’s Village, where Mama had lived in the Alexander Palace, and nearby was the magnificent Catherine Palace, which had been turned into a hospital during the Great War. It was said the Germans were using the Catherine Palace as a stable for their horses.

  When she first heard what had happened, Mama said, “Show me, Georgi, what they taught you of hand-to-hand fighting.” Mama had a furious look in her eye. “I have a mind to go to Tsar’s Village myself and strangle those barbarians.”

  There was an air raid nearly every evening now. The raids were especially dangerous because the Germans were so close to Leningrad, there was little time to get to the shelters. One minute things were peaceful, and the next moment the planes were dropping their bombs on us. You had to decide if you wanted to take the trouble to go to a shelter. It was miserable squeezed in with a lot of other people. It was too dark to read and too noisy to sleep. Just as the all clear was sounded and you climbed out of the shelter, there was another air-raid warning and back you went.

  After a while I just kept on with what I was doing. It was the same with others. If you had been standing for an hour in the bread line at a bakery, you wouldn’t want to lose your place. Yet all around you buildings were going up in flames. Walking was always accompanied by a sickening crunch of broken glass.

  One day a government building was bombed and all the official papers burned. There was so much paper that the fine ashes drifted over the city for hours, shutting out the sun. Viktor laughed. “I always said the government was all paperwork.”

  Mama was more serious. “Let’s hope they were the records of the next wave of poor unfortunates about to be arrested by the government.”

  One evening in late September Dmitry pounded on the door. “Come at once—there’s a huge bomb near the Erisman Hospital. They’re defusing it.”