Bird

by Sophie Cunningham

And the moon move like a pendulum

  The new year is worse than the old one. You would’ve thought that is impossible, but I am learning that nothing is impossible. Mama must go to greater and greater lengths to find us extra food. One day she walks to the markets and trades her diamond engagement ring for some potatoes and meat patties. Another day she scrapes down our wallpaper, which is dark red and gold. The walls underneath are grey, like everything else in the city. Then she scrapes the paper, and boils it for the jelly. ‘This paste is made from potato,’ she tells me, ‘it is very nutritious.’ I spread it on my bread and Mama eats hers with a tiny spoon, ‘It tastes like caviar,’ she jokes, before passing me her piece of bread. ‘In fact it fills me up so much I cannot possibly eat a thing more.’

  I take these extra slices of bread whenever she offers them to me. My Mama seems to survive on air, and I will not think about how this can be true. Twice I asked her if she was hungry also, only twice. The first time she waved her hand to shoo the question away. ‘Women don’t need as much food as growing girls,’ she told me. The second time she ran her hands down her bony sides and winked at me. ‘A lady,’ she said, ‘has to watch her figure.’

  On New Year’s Eve Mama cooks her best pair of leather shoes to make a gluey kind of soup and then we go to the library to meet our friends. ‘We are having a party!’ Mama says, sounding so excited that I become happy. I don’t even notice the dead bodies piled along the wall at the back of the basement. Lots of other people are there too, reading books alongside the corpses. We walk past them all, the living and the dead, to find Saskia and Peter sitting in their usual place in the staffroom.

  Mama smiles when she sees them. ‘Shoe soup,’ Mama says, swinging the pot in her arms around as if it is a lover, and they are dancing together, before putting it on a desk, with a flourish. I can see the bones moving under her skin. Her beautiful eyes look very big.

  Saskia runs and throws her arms around her. ‘Sofia! We cannot live another second without you,’ she says. ‘You must move into the basement. With us.’

  Suddenly Mama looks exhausted by the effort of cheering us all. She shakes her head. ‘There are no bodies in our apartment. For a moment here and there, we can pretend things are normal.’

  ‘Normal?’ Saskia stares at Mama like she’s gone crazy. ‘There is no pretending. There is no fuel for stoves, no electricity, no running water. With no heat you cannot melt snow and ice to eat. You have only one slice of bread a day.’

  ‘The rations go up and down from week to week. And we still have our tins.’ But Mama is lying. There are no more tins because she has given too many away to friends, and let me eat the rest. There is not much radio anymore and radio is her favourite thing. I think she is lying to Saskia because if she stops pretending to be happy, the sadness will kill her.

  Saskia touches Mama on the arm. ‘Sofia, I am thinking it is only being with people, only having nights like tonight, that will save us. That is why I work with the brigades. It is something. What do you and Anna do at night, sitting there in the dark?’

  ‘We tell stories,’ Mama says. ‘We play games. Anna can make anything up. You know, sometimes I do not know my own daughter, she is so convincing.’ She changes the subject. ‘But actually, I miss André very much. To not be touched feels like a kind of death.’ She turns to me with an apologetic smile.

  ‘Nyet smysla prodolzhat. I have renounced sex. Vsyo, koncheno!’ Saskia says, melodramatically. I love how Saskia talks. Even with everyone going crazy, she talks like that. Like herself. ‘It is as if, to stay alive, that part of me must be dead.’

  Peter, whose cheeks are sunken and greenish grey, laughs. ‘I gave up sex long before this famine. Or should I say sex gave me up.’ He leans over and kisses Saskia on the cheek. ‘You will not consider making an old man happy just once, before he dies?’ Saskia laughs. We all laugh. The idea of Saskia and Peter having sex is funny anyway, but much funnier now when everyone is so starved that you can’t even tell who is a man or a woman.

  When we stop laughing we talk about food again. ‘Promise me,’ Peter says to me, ‘you will not go near the markets? Children are going missing. Now people wonder what is in the patties they sell.’

  Mama puts her hand over her mouth. The two of us are thinking about the patties she got for us a week ago.

  ‘Couldn’t people just eat the bodies in the street?’ I ask him, because now the streets are covered in corpses. Some people used sleds to drag them to the cemeteries, but that is hard work when you are hungry so mainly they just dump the bodies against walls.

  Most of the time they are wrapped in a sheet so you can’t see the faces, but the first body to appear outside our apartment wasn’t wrapped at all. When I looked at it closely I saw that it was Mrs Amadova. Mrs Amadova had stopped coming to school before I did but I thought of her often. She used to tell me about warm places and because it was so cold, I liked to think about places like that. She once told me that in India people wore colours like pink and red and orange and blue every day, even when they are walking around the streets. In a history book Mrs Amadova gave me—was that her, lying on her frozen back, legless, clawing at the sky?—there were stories of people in India burning bodies by a large river. I wished I could burn Mrs Amadova. I wanted to keep her warm.

  The night I found her, I couldn’t sleep, so even though it was very cold I put on my clothes and went outside. The moon was full and bright. Light bounced off the snow. Mrs Amadova looked like a ghost and I wondered, for a moment, if she would talk to me. Over the next few days her clothes were taken, and Nikolay and I were very shocked at that. It seemed wrong to see our teacher naked. Wrong, and a little bit exciting so that when Nikolay first saw her breasts he giggled. But actually, what can shock changes, minute to minute, hour to hour, because the next day her breasts were cut off, and the day after that, her legs. Her arms remained, and when I asked Nikolay why, he said he thought it was because arms are bony.

  Soon Mrs Amadova was joined by others. One morning there was a man wearing a fur hat sitting next to her, as if they were having a gossip. I thought he was just resting, but when I went closer I saw that he was dead also. I leaned over and poked at him to make sure he really was dead, and then I took his hat.

  I went down again in the afternoon with Nikolay to show him, but the man had gone. All the bodies had gone. The air smelled of turpentine.

  ‘The trucks must have been through,’ Nikolay told me. Nikolay knows everything anyone can ever know about trucks. ‘The trucks collect the bodies then spray turpentine to disinfect everything.’ We stared at the spaces where the bodies had been. I tried to imagine how much turpentine it would take to disinfect Leningrad. I thought it would take more turpentine than there was in the entire universe.

  *

  ‘The problem with the bodies in the street,’ Peter tells me, ‘is that they have no flesh on them. Best to eat those that have not starved. If we are killed by shells we taste better. Or if we have been freshly slaughtered for the purpose of eating. Best though,’ he tickles me under the chin, ‘not to eat meat at all. We will survive without.’ He looks over and sees that Mama is crying. ‘I am sorry, Sofia. I am just joking. Don’t listen to me, Anna. I am just an old man and what I am telling you is a bad fairy tale.’

  Soon comes the time when everyone is clinking glasses filled with the vodka that Peter has somehow got hold of. Even I am allowed to have some.

  ‘Happy 1942,’ Saskia says. No one really thinks it will be happy, but we all smile at her, then drink.

  Now that I have stopped swelling, I have become bone. When I walk to the ration lines in the morning I am so light that if it became windy I’d be picked up, like a leaf, and spun into the air. I close my eyes and think of it sometimes: how it would feel to fly.

  Soon after our New Year’s party I see that the scarf of the woman in front of me in the ration queue is moving, like it is alive. There are little insects all over her and as I look at them I realise I am
scratching at myself. Everyone standing in the line is covered and is scratching at themselves.

  When I get home Mama is standing in front of the mirror and cutting her hair off. One long, fair lock lies on the dresser and she gestures towards it. ‘A keepsake,’ she says, then she picks up a razor and shaves off her remaining tufts. Soon there are little cuts all over her head because the razor is blunt. She concentrates on what she is doing for a few moments before turning to me. ‘I am sorry Bird,’ she says, ‘but it is your turn now.’

  I fall to my knees. She takes my hair in her hand and snips one piece as a memento to place alongside her own, then begins to cut more roughly. My lank hair falls to the ground. I stare at the growing pile and think it’s strange that even hair can look hungry. After the cutting, Mama starts with the razor. It makes a scraping sound that echoes through my head but at least my scalp is too cold to feel any pain. I don’t say anything to Mama, but it seems to me that there is no point to this. There are still lice in my clothes, and running all over my body. I can feel them.

  ‘Are we going to die?’ I ask.

  ‘Maybe,’ Mama says. She is hard now. Hard like me.

  ‘Will we go to hell?’ I am thinking of the food I have stolen. And of the hat I stole. I am thinking of the bodies I’ve stepped over.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Hell is here. When we die, there is only heaven.’

  Nikolay and I go to the market. The light in the streets is thick and white. When we hold our hands out in front of us the mist is so thick we can’t see them. It is like we aren’t real anymore. Like we are ghosts. We walk through the tiny streets between Fontanka and Griboyedov canals. In summer these streets are very hot but it is hard to imagine that now. Because the mist is thick we can’t tell when we’ve arrived at the square—we can’t even see the curve of Sadovaya. The church we stand in front of is just a blur: an echo of a church—but we hear the murmur of voices and then we know we are there.

  Nikolay takes my hand and we walk until we are close enough to the stalls to see the piles of clothing, of sausages, of formless meat patties.

  I point at a jar that is filled with dirt. ‘Badayev earth,’ the stall keeper tells me. ‘Candy,’ she elaborates. I still don’t understand. I look at Nikolay and he says, ‘This is the dirt they dug out from the warehouse floors after the fires. Where the sugar melted.’ He turns to the stall keeper. ‘Where in the floors does it come from?’

  ‘The cellars. That is why it is cheap.’

  ‘You call that cheap?’ Nikolay haggles. I am impressed.

  ‘Eat dirt. Don’t eat dirt. What do I care?’

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Nikolay.

  At the next stall a man is selling rissoles. ‘How can we tell,’ I ask Nikolay, ‘if the patties are made from people?’

  ‘My big brother says it’s okay to eat people if they have died already, but Mother won’t let him. We had a fight about it.’ He stands closer to the meat and peers at it. ‘But I don’t know how you can tell.’

  The old man watches us. He has a big pink scar on his cheek. He sees me looking at the scar and puts his hand to it. ‘A knife,’ he says, ‘but don’t worry about the rissoles, it’s not human meat.’ He grins and we see that most of his teeth are missing. The ones he has left swing loosely, like window shutters into an empty room. He looks like a cartoon more than a person. ‘Rats!’ he says, trying to sound enticing. ‘You won’t find no human meat here. Trust me.’

  ‘Rats? That doesn’t sound so bad!’ I start to giggle and pull Nikolay away from the stall. A young man comes towards us, out of the mist, and he looks to me like one of the cannibals from Peter’s story. He is very tall and a bit fat. His eyes are blue and his cheeks are red. He has a long fur coat, a fur hat with earflaps and knee-high boots. He walks like a healthy man.

  ‘Well!’ the man says. His voice is loud. ‘Do you want some sausages? Do you have something to trade?’ I shake my head then put my hand to the fur hat on top of it. I have been thinking I would trade it. But actually, now we are here, I don’t think I can eat people.

  ‘Do you have bread?’ I take the hat off and give it to the man but he waves me away.

  ‘It will take more than that,’ he says, before looking at me more closely. ‘You look better than some children, I’ll give you that,’ his pale eyes seemed to bore into me. He knows that Mama has been giving me her rations; he knows I have been taking them. He knows, and he is going to punish me. He steps a bit closer and pinches me on the cheek. ‘Still something there,’ he laughs, well aware of the impression he is making. ‘You look positively tasty. But as for your young friend,’ he cuffs Nikolay over the head, ‘he looks like he’ll go in a minute.’

  I am frightened. Nikolay steps closer to me so I think he must be frightened also. Then the man claps his hands together for effect and walks back into the fog.

  I shriek out loud, half laughing and half in terror, and then we run in the direction of the ghost church. When we get to it our chests are heaving with the effort and I worry, for a moment, that Nikolay will fall over. His face is all red. The church door is open and we step inside. It is dark but I can see a crumbling plaster Jesus up on the pulpit. His loincloth is faded and dusty, his cheek is caved in and his wrists have fallen away around the nails that have been used to attach him to the cross. But still, the place is peaceful.

  ‘You can’t hear the shells,’ Nikolay says. ‘And I don’t just mean from in here. I mean from anywhere. Have you noticed that there are not so many bombs now?’

  ‘Why aren’t there so many bombs?’ I ask.

  ‘The cold,’ Nikolay says, ‘is killing the Germans as well. You know what I think?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I think the Germans are going to lose and we are going to live. I think we are going to be best friends for ever.’ Then his cheeks turn an even brighter red.

  I look at my shoes—Mama has put newspaper in them to patch up the holes. They are pretty warm, considering. I look back up at Nikolay. We take each other by the hand then lean together so our foreheads are touching. We stand like that for a while, resting against each other and even though we have held hands since we were small children, this time it feels different.

  I am sure Mama knows Mikhail is dead even though she never asked me about the time I used the ouija board. She is weak. She has stopped going to the library. I try to tell her what I hear about the Ice Road. That more people are getting out that way. That now so many people have died the rations are increasing. She doesn’t care. I go to the library by myself and read about ice: at twenty-three degrees, four inches of ice can form in sixty-four hours. It takes twenty-four days for a foot of ice to be laid down at that temperature, but only eight days if the temperature drops to five degrees. The days are warming and icicles are falling from the buildings. Time is running out. If we don’t hurry we won’t get to the lake in time. We will fall through the ice and drown.

  Saskia comes by as often as she can. These days she needs a stick to walk and she looks so sunken it is hard to remember that she used to be pretty. One day in early March she asks me to join the women and girls of Leningrad for International Women’s Day, to help dig up the bodies before the ice and snow melt. Mama doesn’t want me to go, but Saskia tells her there’s going to be a plague unless we all pitch in.

  ‘Sofia, you must understand. There are bodies in the Hermitage. There are bodies stacked up around cemetery gates. The parks and garden trenches are piled high with them. There are bodies in the vaults of the Alexandrinsky Theatre and in the Nikolsky Cathedral. At the hospitals, too—even the doctors and nurses lie dead in the corridors.’

  ‘She is too young, she must not see.’ Now Mama is going crazy. ‘Bird, you are only a child. Why aren’t you be allowed to be child?’

  ‘I am not a child anymore,’ I tell her, ‘that’s over.’

  Mama squeezes my hand so hard that it hurts. ‘He is close by. He squats beside me on his haunches. He will devour us.’


  I don’t understand what she is saying. I look at Saskia but she seems as confused as I am. Then Mama begins to howl. She is like a wounded animal.

  ‘Your heart is broken! Mine is also!’ she cries. ‘Everybody’s heart is broken now!’

  I have seen bodies but now I have to stand close to them for hours and they are thawing out. The skin on some of them is a mottled red and green colour. It is the warmth that does that. But the warm air also makes us happy. All the ladies are singing and chatting and it is like we are at a fair. After we dig all day Saskia takes me to the concert that is put on for us workers. There is a lady there, in a beautiful evening dress. She sings a song called ‘The Lark’. The music is nice, but it is hard to concentrate because all I want is dinner: we get a piece of black bread, two—two!—slices of sausage, a white roll and two apples. I eat and eat without looking at anyone. That is how everyone eats these days.

  The next day Mama finally gets her letter.

  Dear Mrs Davidoff,

  I regret to tell you that your son Mikhail died defending our great socialist nation. Perhaps it will make it easier in your loss to know that he died quickly, of a shot to the head.

  Yours etc.

  Mama wants to believe. She asks me over and over. ‘Do you think it is true, Bird. That he died quickly? They wouldn’t lie about such a thing, surely?’ Mama always used to call me her special girl: ‘My little Bird. Whatever happens, whatever anyone ever says to you, you must know this: that you are not like other people.’ For this reason I decide to be honest.

  ‘Mama,’ I say, ‘I think he died slowly, of cold and hunger, as we are dying. It is something we can share with him. The pain.’

  Mama nods in resignation. ‘Actually, that is what I think, too,’ she says.

  Saskia comes by again. She gives me a piece of sausage and makes Mama a cup of tea. Mama sips a little but can’t take the bread. She pushes it away and gestures towards me. ‘Give it to my Bird,’ she says. For once, I don’t take food meant for her. I persist with trying to feed her but Mama will not open her mouth. She turns away from us and looks at the wall.