Burying the Sun

by Gloria Whelan

  Your letter was forwarded to me from the hospital. Thank the Lord that Marya is safe and back in Leningrad. I am so happy that the two of you are once again together. I am writing to Olga and Yelena. Such sad news you sent about Viktor. He was a good man, and only a pessimist because he was so good himself, it was sad for him to see that others could not live up to his high expectations.

  I cannot tell you where I am, except to say that I am close to the front and that all day long soldiers are brought in to us. We do all that we can, but often it is not enough. There are days when I want to pick up a gun and go out to fight the enemy myself.

  I have saved the good news for the end. Last week a soldier came in with a bad leg wound, but we have a fine doctor here and after an operation the leg is doing well. I was the one who assisted at the operation. And who is the soldier? It is Andrei. He is alive and well and is shortly to be sent back to Leningrad to work at General Staff headquarters, for it will be a long time before he can fight again. I am enclosing a letter he has written to Marya.

  God bless you both,

  Mama

  Marya danced me around the room, laughing and crying, while little Fyodor looked on with wide eyes.

  “When are you going to show me Andrei’s letter?” I asked.

  “Never. I don’t want any of your teasing.”

  The following week when I got home, Andrei was there. At least I thought that was who it was, but he looked very unlike Andrei. The stranger supported himself with a walking stick, and he was as thin as the stick. His head was shaved, and the well-groomed look and proper uniform had given way to the stubble of a beard and a uniform put together from bits and pieces that were either too large or too small. What was even more puzzling was Andrei’s manner. There was none of his easy friendliness. I noticed a puzzled look on Marya’s face.

  After we welcomed each other, Andrei said, “So, Georgi, Marya tells me you are traveling across Ladoga’s Road of Life. I’m impressed.”

  “They should have let me into the army,” I said. “I could have fought as well as the next one.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Georgi, but to tell you the truth, you are doing more good bringing food into the city. Anyone can walk backward.”

  “Backward? Surely the army has won a few battles.”

  “Not many. How could they? The soldiers have no weapons, and the artillery is always someplace else. We are sacrificing our lives because we don’t have the means to fight. They were none too happy to see me at General Staff headquarters. They don’t want to hear my sad stories.”

  Marya quickly said, “Andrei, watch what you say. You know what happens to anyone who speaks out.”

  “I’m not telling them anything they don’t know.”

  “What they know and what they want to hear are two different things, Andrei.”

  All the time we were talking, Fyodor was peeking at Andrei from under the table, where he had retreated at the sight of an unknown person, and one in a uniform.

  Andrei bent down. “Come here, young man, and see what I have for you.”

  Fyodor poked his head out a bit, and Andrei offered him a piece of toffee wrapped in silver foil. “They were good to us in the hospital,” he said.

  Fyodor grabbed at the candy and burrowed under the table again.

  “Fyodor, shame on you,” Marya said. “Thank Andrei politely.”

  Instead Fyodor spat out the candy and began to cry. Marya got on her knees to see what the trouble was. “Oh, Fyodor, I never thought.” She held up the piece of toffee, which now had a tooth in it. “All the children’s teeth are loose from their diet. Come and I’ll give you a little warm tea with a bit of jam.” At this Fyodor emerged, brushing away his tears.

  In a bitter voice Andrei said, “See what has become of our little ones. The war has robbed them of their childhood, all those years when they should be happy and carefree. Their lives are ruined.”

  “You have become like a bear with a sore head, Andrei,” I said. “You are a pessimist. Look at what happened to my mother when she was little—her dearest friends executed. Look at Marya and me, our parents snatched away in the middle of the night, Papa dead, and still there have been happy days for all of us. The war can’t last forever.”

  “And you are too much of an optimist, Georgi. Being a little hungry here in Leningrad or driving trucks across the lake is not like a battlefield.”

  That was too much. In an angry voice I said, “You should have been here to see Viktor die because he wanted to keep Olga and Yelena from starving. You should have seen the trucks that went through the ice with the drivers going down into the icy water! I have seen bad things as well as you have.”

  “I didn’t mean to attack you, Georgi. Marya has told me how you have risked your life on the lake. Olga said they would never have survived without your help.” Andrei hid his face in his hands. “Forgive me. I’m not myself.”

  Fyodor, who clutched his glass of tea with both hands, looked at Andrei. He took a quick sip and then held out the glass to Andrei. “Don’t cry,” he said. “You can have some of my tea.”

  Andrei looked at him. For the first time, a smile spread over his face. “No, thank you, Fyodor, but come and sit beside me.” Andrei turned to me. “You are right to be an optimist. If a hungry child can share his food, anything is possible.”

  I think at General Staff headquarters they did not want to hear what he had to say and were glad to be rid of him, so Andrei was often at our house. As soon as Fyodor heard the tap of Andrei’s walking stick on the stairway, he ran to the door. Andrei would lay down his stick and swing Fyodor about until the boy was breathless with laughter. Andrei and Fyodor knew that they had both come to the edge of a cliff and, by holding on to each other, had stopped just short of tumbling off.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SPRING THAW

  March 1942

  Every place we went, cold and hunger were there. We bundled up in our coats and mittens, inside as well as outside. When a sweater or a mitten wore out, Marya would unravel and reknit it. When we sat together in the apartment, our words came out in little white puffs. We stayed near one another, not just Yelena with me and Andrei with Marya, but all of us, sitting close beside the others, keeping away any little drafts we could, sharing a bit of the other people’s warmth. At night Marya, Fyodor, Olga, and Yelena slept all together in a little heap like a basket full of puppies. When I wasn’t on the lake, I joined them.

  Our closeness was for the warmth but also for the company. As deaths in the city increased, we were afraid to let one another out of our sight. We pretended there had been no change in our appearance. We stayed away from mirrors, not wanting to see our sallow faces, hollowed cheeks, mangy hair, cracked lips, and rheumy eyes. Marya no longer had the strength to walk to the Hermitage. She stayed home all day with Fyodor.

  Together Andrei and Marya would try to make Fyodor forget his hunger with stories and games, and in the trying for a few minutes they would forget their own hunger. Marya told him stories of our travels with the Samoyeds through the woods and how we had had our own reindeer to ride. Andrei made little soldiers from bits of wood and set up battles. Fyodor loved to move the soldiers about and knock down all the German soldiers. As long as they could keep him amused, Fyodor would forget about his empty belly. The jam and cabbage and the winter vegetables had long been used up. Even the dried rusks were gone. We would use the same meatless bone over and over again with a potato to make soup. Andrei ate at the army canteen, and each day he would come with some bit of food he had saved from his meal: a nugget of bread spread with a teaspoon of lard, a slippery piece of cooked onion to toss into the pot for flavor and nourishment, and, one glorious day, a half slice of bacon. I knew what a sacrifice he was making, for Dmitry’s brother Vladimir had told him that the soldiers were so hungry at General Staff headquarters that there were fights over a crumb of bread that fell to the floor.

  Yelena was bringing home books. We would carefully take
them apart to get at the paste that held the books together, for the paste was made with flour. When all the paste had been scraped into the soup bowl, we burned the books in our little stove. Each book we burned brought tears to Yelena’s eyes. She tried to pick out books that meant little, such as a report from some bureaucratic committee on the gross product of the steel industry, but still it was a book and she cried.

  I no longer had a job. The number of trucks had been cut down because the ice on Lake Ladoga was breaking up. With nothing to do, I stayed around the house, getting on Marya’s nerves. I got on Andrei’s nerves as well, with my daily complaints at not being able to join the army. I had heard they were taking seventeen-year-olds now, and I kept asking, “If seventeen, why not sixteen? I’ll be sixteen in September.”

  “Georgi, you don’t know what you are saying. First of all they are not taking sixteen-year-olds, and secondly if you could hear the reports of the battles and see the number of dead and injured, if you could hear the pleas of the generals for more guns and ammunition so they could at least defend themselves, you wouldn’t be talking about joining the army.”

  “All you are doing is showing me how much I am needed and giving me more reason to join.”

  “If what I say makes you eager to join the army, you are a fool, Georgi.”

  “I’ve heard you say you are going back when your leg is healed.”

  “That is another matter entirely,” Andrei said.

  “If you can go, why can’t I?” And so it went. With empty stomachs and freezing hands, we were all irritable. March still seemed like the middle of winter—and then a miracle happened.

  The weather warmed. One day there was snow on the ground, and the next day the snow had turned into puddles. We heard dripping as the icicles that hung from the roof melted in the spring sun.

  Andrei burst into the apartment to announce, “The towns along the railroad have been freed. More food is sure to come by the railroad.” By the end of the week rations were increased. You did not have to get up at four in the morning and get in line to get your ration of bread. If you were in line by six, the bread would be there.

  It was possible to walk about without freezing. The city was still being shelled, and you never knew when your building might be hit; even a walk down the block was dangerous. Still, Dmitry and I walked bravely about, enjoying the sun and the unaccustomed warmth and trying not to notice all the bombed-out houses missing walls and roofs.

  The public baths had been closed for lack of water and heat, but now a few of them opened. For the first time you could get clean. There was less water in the baths than usual and the water was none too pure, but washing away the grime was heaven. Dmitry and I thrashed about in the water, splashing each other like seals until the manager of the bath threatened to throw us out. Marya and Yelena went off to wash their hair for the first time in weeks and came home skipping up the stairway.

  But the city itself was foul and filthy with dirt. People who hadn’t the strength to take their dead to the cemetery had left them on the sidewalks. The only thing missing was garbage, for there was none. Every bit of peel and every bone was eaten or gnawed.

  Notices began to appear all over the city declaring March 15 as Cleanup Day. There were announcements over the loudspeakers at St. Isaac’s Square. Posters were everywhere. Even those weak with hunger looked forward to the day.

  More than two hundred thousand people turned out. They poured from bombed-out houses that had looked as if they were empty. They crept out of hovels and alleyways and the shelter of boxes. We were all shabby and bedraggled. If any one of us had stood still, we surely would have been scooped up as a bit of rubbish.

  Dmitry and I came with shovels, Olga and Yelena with brooms. Andrei had made Fyodor a toy shovel. You could not imagine such a sight. People who looked as if they could not move a matchstick were scraping mounds of dirt from the streets and sidewalks. For months strangers, full of fear and despair, had not spoken to one another on the street. Now we called to one another, laughing cheerfully at our ugly, gruesome tasks. Trucks were deployed to pick up dirt and carry it from the city. Trucks also came for the dead. Our little party chose the Summer Garden, heading for the spot where we had had our picnic in June. How different it was. The trees were gone, scraped for bark and then cut altogether for firewood. The last tatters of snow lay like dirty gray rags on the lawn. Refuse was everywhere. We set ourselves a small task.

  “We’ll clear the space where we held our picnic,” Olga said. With a great sigh at its weight, I lifted my shovel. Once we started, there was no stopping us. We could not guess where our strength was coming from, but when we had finished, there was a little patch of the Summer Garden as it used to be. All around us other workers were clearing their own spaces. It was late afternoon when we finished. We were too tired to walk home and cheerfully sat there on the warm March day. Olga had her eyes closed, her face raised to the sun. Fyodor leaned against Marya, who was telling him that one day she would bring him to the garden and he could play in the fountain and they would have a picnic and all the piroshki he wanted to eat. Fyodor’s eyes were very wide at this fairy tale.

  “The blockade must come to an end soon,” Yelena said.

  Dmitry and I looked at each other. I shook my head at him. I did not want to take Yelena’s hope from her, for hope was as nourishing as food, but Dmitry’s brother had been home from the front and reported to Dmitry that the soldiers were as weak and hungry as we were.

  “At least,” I said, “summer is coming and there will be daylight and warmth.”

  From the subdued tone of my voice Yelena understood what I was thinking. “Yes,” she said, “and we will have the grass to eat.”

  It was only the next evening that Olga pounded on our door. When I opened it, Olga and Yelena burst into the room. Olga was holding a sheaf of papers in her hand and waving it in the air like a banner.

  “You needn’t knock me down,” I said. “What do you have in your hand? The German surrender?”

  “Just as good,” Olga said. “It’s the score for Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. You must promise not to tell a soul.”

  Marya and I looked at each other in amazement. There had been rumors that Shostakovich had finished the symphony, but it was something else to see it in Olga’s hands. We nodded our heads.

  “The orchestra is going to perform the symphony. It’s an extraordinary piece of work, and Shostakovich has dedicated it to the city of Leningrad. Our orchestra will play it this spring. They even sent the manuscript from Moscow in a plane.”

  “It was just a little plane,” Yelena said, “and the pilot risked his life flying over the German troops.”

  “Our director, Eliasberg, says it is a masterpiece. The problem is we don’t have enough copies of the violin parts. We need more. Yelena and I want you to help us.”

  “Olga,” Marya said, “Georgi and I know nothing about music.”

  “We will teach you. All you have to do is copy it onto this music paper they sent. You just go one note at a time, but you must copy it exactly or there will be chaos.”

  We sat down at the kitchen table and note by note, hour by hour, we worked until one in the morning. The spring warmth had not yet crept into the apartment. We tried to copy with our gloves on, which was impossible, so we cut the fingers off the gloves. The four of us worked away until we had all the copies completed. Although I couldn’t read a note of the music, I was sure the composer was much better with his pen than with his shovel.

  Gathering up the pages, Olga promised, “For all your work, I’ll see that you have the best seats in the house when we give the concert.”

  The next week the streetcars began to run along the prospekt. It was only a small thing; still, the trolleys had been such a part of the prospekt that it was like sleeping giants coming to life. You had the feeling that you could go somewhere even if there was no place to go.

  The city was smaller now. With all the evacuations and all the
deaths, it was only a third of the size it had once been. The new emptiness was frightening, but the food stretched a little more. The ice was floating out of the river—no more struggling to a well with the pail and walking up the icy steps. Now that I could dip my pail into a canal or the river, one more misery had disappeared with the ice.

  The thought of a fish cooking on the stove had occurred to everyone, and the banks of the Neva were crowded with fishermen, including me. If it hadn’t been for the desperately eager look on the faces of the fishermen, it might have been any holiday. First there was the question of what to use for bait. I had stopped by the Summer Garden and dug several worms. For just a moment I wondered how they would taste, perhaps cooked in a broth.

  I joined some other fishermen at the Moika Canal. My heart was racing as the hook descended into the water. Would I be lucky? At the end of the crowded row, a man pulled in a large codfish. Everyone took heart and waited expectantly. Unhappily, few fish were biting. Why weren’t they as hungry as we were? The lucky man with the fish was cutting off a hunk of flesh in exchange for a measure of flour. I thought of the times I had fished in Siberia, first with Marya and then with the Samoyeds, when we had nearly met a terrible fate for fishing in the territory of their shaman.

  Overhead the gulls were screeching, wanting their share. One hour followed another with only a few disappointing pulls at the hook as a clever fish grabbed a bit of worm and went his way. At last I felt a pull on the line and I yanked. There was an ugly-looking sucker, a bottom-feeder and scavenger that no one in good times would have eaten, yet I called out, “Look at this beauty” and hurried home with the ugly beast, as pleased as I would have been with a bowl of caviar.

  What rejoicing there was. Marya took the creature out to the balcony and scraped away at its scales and pulled out all the innards, to the delight of Fyodor, who wanted to hear the story of each slimy bit.

  “He is sure to grow up a great scientist,” Marya said, trying to decide whether any of the insides should go into the soup.