Burying the Sun

by Gloria Whelan

  My heart was in my throat. Mama was working late at the hospital that night. I ran after Dmitry, sprinting across the bridge to the Petrograd side, where the hospital was located. When I saw how near to the hospital the bomb was, I could scarcely get my breath. Though I knew the danger, I could not keep from drawing close to watch the men defusing the bomb. Dmitry and I climbed under the rope meant to keep people away. The huge bomb was fifteen feet into the ground.

  Someone said, “There’s a soldiers’ barracks next to the hospital, full of ammunition. If the bomb goes off, the hospital and everyone in it will go with it.” He looked around and smiled. “And ourselves as well.”

  Dmitry kept pulling on my shirt and urging me to move away, but I was too wrapped up in watching the men to pay attention. When he gave a tug so hard I nearly fell over, I looked up.

  “Over there,” he said, pointing to the hospital entrance. The hospital was being evacuated. Nurses and orderlies dressed in white were helping patients to leave. I ran over, looking for Mama. When I couldn’t find her, I went up to one of the nurses. “I’m looking for Ekaterina Ivanova Gnedich.”

  The nurse pushed me out of her way, saying over her shoulder, “Ekaterina Ivanova is staying in the hospital with the patients who are too ill to move.”

  It was nearly time for the curfew, and Dmitry tried to get me to leave.

  “No,” I said. “Not as long as my mother is in the hospital.”

  He shook his head and left along with the others.

  I was the only onlooker when an officer strode over and grabbed me by the shoulder. “Don’t you know there’s a curfew on? I’m taking you to the station.”

  I shook loose. “My mother is a nurse in the hospital, and she’s staying there with the sick people. I’m not leaving here until I see the bomb is defused.” I didn’t care what the officer said.

  He looked at me for a long time, and then he took an official piece of paper out of his pocket. “This is a pass,” he said. “It will allow you to remain here, but just for the night.” With that he turned on his heel and left.

  The bomb squad worked all night; the dark hole in which they worked was lit by lanterns, which made the workers’ long shadows move with them. By early morning the bomb was defused and the men climbed out of the crater, wiping the dirt and sweat from their faces. The ambulances returned with the evacuated patients and hospital staff. After a half hour or so I saw Mama with two other nurses leaving the hospital. At first I was going to run up to her, but I didn’t want her to know I had been there all night, right next to the bomb. Racing down the backstreets, I got to the apartment and pulled the covers over my head before she walked through the apartment door.

  At our breakfast of a small hunk of dry bread and a mug of hot water, I asked Mama, “Why did you get home so late?”

  “We were shorthanded last night,” she said. “What did you do while I was at the hospital?”

  “Dmitry and I just did a little sightseeing.”

  “You shouldn’t be on the streets, Georgi. It can be dangerous, what with the bombs.”

  “What about you, Mama?”

  “Oh, you needn’t worry about me. The hospital is safe.”

  October brought the first snow and more bad news. The city of Kiev had fallen, and Moscow was in danger. For us the bombing was worse than ever. Thousands of bombs fell. Our apartment shook as if we were in the midst of an earthquake. All night long you could hear the fire engines racing from one fire to the next. There were burned-out houses and stores on every street. People lost what little they had, and the worst thing you could lose was your ration book. Without it you could get no food. At first the lost ration books were replaced, but people cheated and said they had lost their books when they hadn’t, so the government refused to replace them. The unfortunate people who had lost their houses now had no food.

  We thought about food all day long. We were allowed only a little over two ounces of bread a day. And what bread it was! Everything they could find went into its making: flaxseed, cottonseed, sawdust, cellulose, and moldy flour. It was all we could do to swallow it. Sometimes we got a morsel of fish, and when there was no more food for the horses remaining in the city, the horses were slaughtered and we had a bit of delicious meat.

  Inside the houses there was no heat, for there was no kerosene nor wood, and only an hour of electricity each day. Now Mama proudly brought out her little burzhuika, which was so small it could be heated with the pieces of wood she had gathered from the barges. It did not warm us, but its flame was cheering and we could still boil water and warm our hands on the hot glasses that held the water.

  There was one bit of good news. Many German tanks had been called away from Leningrad to the outskirts of Moscow, where a battle was going on. For the moment the danger of invading Leningrad was over. General Zhukov was needed in Moscow and left our city to darkness and hunger, but he left it free of Germans.

  The new enemy was hunger. It raged about the city like a savage wolf. It was all any of us could think about. We awakened hungry, went to bed hungry. There was no hour of the day when you did not long for food. Yelena and I argued. “Better to eat every crumb of your ration all at once,” I insisted, “and be a little satisfied at least once a day.”

  “No, no,” Yelena said. “Better to dole the bread out a little at a time—then there will be something to look forward to.”

  We tried to outdo each other with imagined meals.

  “First,” I said, “a fish soup, with big lumps of codfish and potatoes.”

  “No, Georgi, chicken soup with carrots and leeks and tender little dumplings.”

  “Boiled beef with pickles.”

  “Pork paprikash with sour cream.”

  We always agreed on the dessert—ice cream made with plenty of thick cream and fresh strawberries. After our game we would settle down to our single slice of bread that tasted of sawdust, or there would be a thin soup made from a bit of cabbage and a bone with no meat.

  “They had better give me a little more,” Olga said, “or I won’t be able to lift my violin.”

  It was true. Olga, who had been plump, was now thin and drawn. Even the music we heard through the walls of the apartment was weak and, for the first time, sad.

  Yelena’s dresses hung on her as if she were wearing the hand-me-downs of a much larger sister. Most frightening of all was Viktor. His face had been carved away by hunger. His eyes were sunken and there were craters where his cheeks had been. Mama ate at the hospital canteen, but she couldn’t have eaten much, for she brought home bits of bread and lumps of potato concealed in her purse. I would not eat her hoardings but passed them on to Olga and Yelena.

  Yelena was still working in the library. “Hundreds of thousands of our rarest books have been sent away for safekeeping. “The people are coming to us with such sad questions. They want to know how to make jelly from glue and how to make a soup from a leather belt.”

  “Doesn’t anyone come in to read?”

  “Yes, more than ever. There’s no heat, but they come wrapped in their coats and look for a table where a bit of warm sunshine comes in through the window. They read books about faraway places where the sun shines and food hangs from trees, but we have to be careful about lending books or there would be none left. People take them home and burn them as fuel for their stoves.” She looked truly horrified.

  Cold was added to hunger. When you went to bed at night, you wore as many clothes as you did in the daytime—and, though Mama protested, sometimes the same clothes.

  During the hour of electricity in the evening, Yelena and I sat together listening to the radio, but we no longer heard Anna Akhmatova. For her survival Akhmatova, like Shostakovich, had been urged to leave Leningrad. A plane carried her away, and a spark went from the city. Still, we listened to the symphony orchestra with Olga on her violin. The poets who had stayed in the city read their latest works on the blockade. If there was no news, no readings, and no music on the radio, a metron
ome was set in motion so that all would know that Leningrad was still there. It was surprising how you would just sit and listen to its sound. Yelena wrote a poem about the metronome.

  Silent trolley cars

  silent ruined houses

  a mute woman at the window

  speechless with hunger

  only the sound of the bombs

  and the city’s heartbeat

  At the end of October the electricity stopped altogether: no more light, no more heat, and no more radio. To hear the radio you had to go to the loudspeakers on St. Isaac’s Square. In spite of the cold, many people went, some to hear the latest news, or the music, or the sound of the metronome. Many went, as Yelena and I often did, just for the comfort of being with others.

  Though there was no heat, still everyone was praying for cold weather. Barges had been bringing food into Leningrad across Lake Ladoga, but the barges were large and cumbersome and they took nearly a day to make the trip across the lake. The Germans picked them off one by one. What the Germans did not get, the autumn storms pitched into the lake. When the lake froze, trucks would roll across the ice, trucks loaded with food. That hope kept us alive.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ALONE

  November 1941

  November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, had always been a big holiday in the Soviet Union. Stores were closed and there were parades and dancing. This year there was no celebration. Here and there a tattered red flag was put out, but most of the stores were already closed, and no one had the strength for parades or dancing.

  In our home the holiday had never been celebrated. Mama thought it should be a day of mourning. “It was the day they made the whole country a prison,” she said, “and made us all prisoners.”

  On this November 7 Mama was quiet when she came home from the hospital. “The hunger is hard on the older people,” she said. “They are so weakened, the least little cold or flu and they slip away. We have no heat in the hospital, and there is nothing to do but to pile heavy blankets on the patients, and with their thin bodies they almost smother. And Georgi, one of the doctors in the research laboratory said today that all the guinea pigs were gone.”

  She looked at me. We both knew where they had gone—into someone’s pot. There were no cats or dogs on the streets. There was no food to give to them, and if you could find a scrap for your beloved pet to keep him alive, you did not dare to let him out onto the streets, where he would look like a banquet to some starving person.

  Our apartment was always cold. There was little water for the luxury of washing. If you washed your hands, you saved the water for the next person. I felt dirty all the time. One morning I saw a woman kneeling on the ice around a well, doing her washing in freezing water.

  The toilets didn’t flush, and if you didn’t empty the chamber pots at once, the pots froze and then you were in a pickle. And where to empty the pots? Thousands of pots were emptied on the streets, so walking was disgusting.

  Every morning I had to get up and take a pail to the well at the end of the street to get our water for the day. I waited in line to get to the well, which was no more than a hole in the ice with water bubbling up. The pail seemed heavier each morning, the walk back to the apartment longer. If water was spilled on the steps, you nearly broke your neck on the ice that formed. One morning I saw an elderly woman just ahead of me with her own pail. It seemed to be too much for her, and she set it down on the sidewalk and stood there for a moment. She was so thin, there was almost no body inside the tattered clothes. I started to go up to her, thinking to carry the pail at least a little distance for her. Right there before my eyes she slipped to the ground.

  People were passing by, stepping around her. “Help me,” I said, for I was so weak that even her small weight was too much for me to lift. No one stopped. As I bent down over her, trying to move her away from the stream of people, I saw that she was dead. I had never seen a dead person, yet I knew. I was so frightened that some strength flowed into me, and I was able to pull her to the side of the walk.

  When I looked up, someone had taken her pail and was hurrying off with it. Like the others, I went to the well and stood in line to fill my pail. I walked back to the apartment, but all the time I was thinking of the woman. I had never touched a dead person. I knew from Mama’s work at the hospital that thousands were dying of starvation, but those deaths were only sad stories. Now I had touched death, and I was afraid that somehow it would cling to me and I would bring it back with me and give it to someone else. When I got home I said nothing, but I washed my hands over and over until Mama complained.

  “Georgi, no one knows better than you how hard it is to get a bit of soap or a drop of water. Surely your hands are clean now.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell even Mama the sad story.

  In the dark mornings the ugliness and cheerlessness of the city was even more depressing. On my way to work I had to stumble along dark, filthy streets. Our brigade had finished its work in the sewers and had now joined a brigade stripping bark from all the pine and fir trees in the city parks. The bark was collected and ground up, to be added to the flour and all the other odds and ends that went into the making of our bread.

  It was hard work, because the knives that were given to us were dull and we had no strength in our hands to tear at the bark. It was sad work; each time I wrenched a bit of the bark from a tree, I winced, for I knew it meant a great old tree would die, but Dmitry said, “Better the trees than us.” One afternoon I found a cocoon on one of the tree branches. I was about to toss it away when something stopped my hand. I broke off the twig to which it was fastened and put it carefully in my pocket. That evening I gave it to Yelena.

  She was delighted. Her thin face broke into a smile. “Oh, Georgi, a perfect gift. I didn’t think I could get through the winter, but now I have something to look forward to.”

  How I envied that little chrysalis, all wrapped up warmly in its cocoon with no need for food and no duty but to sleep and wait to become a butterfly. How I wished I could wrap myself up and fall asleep until the war ended. Each day it was easier and easier to lie in bed. It was such an effort to get up. I hated the thought of pushing off the blankets and coats that made a warm nest. I hated the thought of stumbling up and down the icy stairway for a pail of cold water. I hated the thought of standing out in the cold and snow hacking away at the helpless trees.

  Still, Mama found a way to lure me out of bed. “A rusk this morning, Georgi, and a half teaspoonful of jelly to sweeten your hot water. And tonight when I come home, we’ll have Viktor and Olga and Yelena over to share a rusk or two. We’ll act out another scene from Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard.”

  All at once the day did not seem so terrible. I threw off the blankets and struggled into my coat. I had slept in my hat and gloves. As I struggled down the icy stairway and out into the cold street with the water pail, the darkness seemed punishment for summer’s long days of daylight. It stayed dark now until ten o’clock in the morning, and darkness fell again by afternoon. On the streets no one looked at anyone else, afraid to see a reflection of their own miserable condition. Everyone went silently about their sad business. I saw a woman pulling her sickly husband along behind her on a sled. Another woman was carrying a small girl who must have been five or six but looked no larger than a doll. I trained myself to look straight ahead.

  Rations had been cut for the third time, even for the soldiers, and everyone was so weak, work was almost impossible. Yet we had to work.

  Mama came home with stories from the hospital of people brought in because of what they ate. “They are eating soap for the fat it contains and even motor oil.”

  One day Yelena said, “Mama told me, ‘I have a special treat for you. I fried your bread in a bit of fat.’

  “I asked, ‘Mama, where did you get fat? And why is the bread all red?’ Georgi, my mama used all that was left of her last stick of lipstick for the grease!”

  Yelena had
lost a third of her weight. With her thin arms and sharp collarbones she looked like a fledgling bird. We all seemed shadows of ourselves, as if someone had painted our portraits and now was painting out parts of them.

  One day there was an argument between Olga and Yelena. Yelena had called us to share a treat with them. She had come home from the library with a bag of dried beans. They had been soaking and now were bubbling on the stove. To Mama and me they were as beautiful as pearls, but Olga was slamming the pots and pans about, and Viktor had an angry look on his face.

  “Yelena inherited a first edition of Pushkin’s poetry from a great-great uncle,” Viktor said. “Nothing could be more precious to her. This morning, without saying a word to us, she took it to the library.”

  “There is a book dealer who comes into the library,” Olga said. “He cheated Yelena out of her most prized possession.”

  Tears were running down Yelena’s face. “It was not like that at all,” she said. “The dealer and I have become friends, and I told him about my Pushkin. He has been after me for days to sell it to him. When he promised all these beans, I couldn’t resist. I was as eager to sell as he was to buy.”

  “We should have starved first,” Olga said, but seeing Yelena’s thin body and hungry pinched expression, I could not agree. When it came my turn, I said beans didn’t agree with me. I was glad she had sold the book, but I couldn’t eat the beans. With a sinking heart, I noticed that after Olga spoke sharply to her, Yelena could hardly get a bean down her own throat.

  The next morning Dmitry and I watched a man pulling a sled with something tied to it that looked like a mummy.

  “It’s a body all wrapped up in a sheet and tied up like a package,” Dmitry said. “My father said that if you walk by the Piskorevsky Cemetery, you can see hundreds and hundreds of such bodies, all stacked up like cords of wood because the ground is frozen and there is no place to bury them.”

  “Mama says just the same,” I said. “There’s no place to put the people who die in the hospital. They just leave them in the hospital courtyard.”