Leningrad, September 1941
ALMOST OVERNIGHT, MARIA FOUND HER EVERY WAKING thought was about food. What could she serve for a meal that evening? Where could she find supplies to top up their bread ration?
She lay awake in bed remembering what Peter had taught her about edible plants. There were dandelions and borage, nettles and cow parsley in the cemetery where he lay. When she found a crop of white mushrooms there one Sunday it felt like a gift he had sent from beyond the grave. She decided she would cook them with wild thyme leaves and serve them on bread, so their juices were soaked up.
Stepan helped by going fishing whenever he had time off, so at least once a week they had fish to share. Maria eked out the last of the potatoes and served the fish baked, with boiled greens on the side.
There was one more mouth to feed because Stepan had returned from digging trenches and was now being trained to operate the big guns on an antiaircraft battery.
“Does that not mean you will be the Germans’ first target?” Maria fretted.
“They’re not going to waste a bomb on a few of us when they can target the docks or the warehouses. Don’t worry, Mama,” he assured her, with calm rationality.
“But I hear firing during the day. Will their soldiers not try to shoot you?”
“We are well camouflaged,” he promised. “I’ll make sure no German bullets have my name on them.”
At the end of September, just as freezing gusts of rain brought the first sign of winter, the oil and gas supplies to the city were cut. Maria turned on her stove and struck a match but no gas hissed out. She would have to burn wood in the burzhuika to heat food. That meant foraging for firewood after she finished work, when she was bone-weary from the day’s toil.
The factory switched to production of shell cartridges. They were heavy to carry and the steel shavings cut into the palms of her hands, but she was grateful for the job because it meant her ration was bigger than it would otherwise have been and she got canteen meals at lunchtime. When a vacancy arose, Irina came to work there too, and between them they were able to smuggle home jugs of soup to supplement the family’s evening meal and some porridge to heat for their breakfast. It was just as well, because the bread ration was reduced to two slices a day. How could anyone live on that? Especially when you could tell it was made of flour substitute, with an odd texture so that it fell apart when you tried to cut it, and a taste that was bitter and unpleasant.
Meat was a distant memory, and stories circulated of pets being stolen and killed for their flesh. One evening there was a knock on their door and Maria opened it to find a stricken Raisa.
“Have you seen my cat?” she pleaded. “It’s been two days. I didn’t let him out of the courtyard so I wondered if someone here might . . .” She couldn’t finish her sentence.
For the first time since Peter was arrested, Maria felt a twinge of fellow feeling for Raisa. “I’m sorry, I haven’t seen him. But I will look out for him, I promise.”
She could understand why someone might take a cat. Hunger made otherwise moral people desperate. She had heard of ration cards stolen in the street, of people trading fur coats for a sack of potatoes. Her family were lucky that so far they had not had to resort to desperate measures, but life got tougher as the days passed and the temperature dropped.
The electricity became intermittent, then in November the water supply failed after bombs ripped open the pipelines. Now they had to fetch buckets of water from a fire hydrant at the end of the street, and use a kerosene lamp for light in the evening. Maria gave each child his or her own job: Yelena and Mikhail got the water and Katya collected firewood; Irina brought home the canteen food, and Maria went for the bread and any other food she could forage.
At night, when the planes flew overhead, they sang songs in the shelter to drown out the noise. “The Little Blue Scarf,” in which a soldier pined for the girl he loved, was a particular favorite.
It can’t last much longer, Maria told herself. Where was the Red Army? Stalin called himself “father of the nation”; now was the time for him to prove it.
* * *
“My tummy hurts,” Mikhail complained one night in November as he slumped over the dinner table. He was thirteen years old and tall for his age. Maria touched the back of her hand to his forehead and noticed that his skin was gray, his eyes dull, and he had a sore at the corner of his lips. She put her arms around him and felt his ribs sticking out. They were all getting thinner, but his weight loss seemed more severe than the others’.
“Have some soup,” she told him, ladling a generous portion into a bowl; then she dissolved a teaspoon of vitamin powder in water and told him to swallow it.
“Eat slowly,” she cautioned. “Don’t make yourself sick. Tomorrow I will try to find extra.”
When she picked up her bread the next day, counting out the precious coupons carefully, she asked, “Is there any way to get more for my son? He is unwell.”
“Marry a Party boss?” the woman suggested, with a cynical look. “I notice they aren’t suffering any hardships.”
“Besides that?” Maria shuddered at the thought. She would never marry again. Peter had been the only man for her.
“I hear you get extra rations if you donate blood,” the woman said. “But be careful not to weaken yourself. Personally speaking, I need all the blood I’ve got.”
Maria didn’t have to be told twice. On her way to work, she stopped at the Hôtel de l’Europe on Nevsky Prospekt, which was being used as a military hospital. Her reward for a pint of blood was coupons for an extra two days’ family ration of bread, along with a bag of root vegetables. “Can I come back next week?” she asked, and was disappointed to be told that she could not donate again for another month. At least they ate well that night—a stew of potatoes, onions, carrot, and turnip, with fresh parsley sprinkled on top—and she made sure Mikhail got a bigger portion than his sisters. This deprivation seemed to be harder for men than for women, so she was relieved when Stepan told her that he was receiving army rations at his post on the antiaircraft battery.
* * *
When the snow came and the rivers iced over, the sense of claustrophobia intensified. There were bombs dropping most nights, gunfire by day, and a cold that felt crueler than in any winter Maria could remember. When Katya couldn’t find firewood for their burzhuika stove, Maria began to break up items of furniture and rip the baseboards from the walls. It was only December, with at least three more months of winter stretching in front of them. How would they survive? When would the city be relieved? She was beginning to think Stalin had abandoned them. Did he know of their plight? How could he let them starve?
On December 15, a Monday, Maria and Irina were walking to work through the snow. No one had cleared the pavement, so they walked in single file along a track worn by the footsteps of those who had gone before, dodging the rubble from bomb-damaged buildings. At the corner of Ulitsa Pestelya, there was a man lying on his side in the snow. Maria’s first thought was that he must have slipped, and she crouched to grasp his elbow and help him up.
“Sir? Are you all right?” she asked. It was then she saw that his eyes were wide open and staring out of a face tinged blue and sparkling with frost.
“He’s dead, Mom,” Irina said, a sob in her throat. “What should we do?”
Maria had seen dead people before—her family in the basement in Ekaterinburg; her baby Pavel lying in the bed beside her—and she knew straightaway that Irina was right. His body was here, but this man’s spirit was long gone. She closed his eyes then searched through his coat pockets until she found a ration card with an address on it. His name was Pavel, like her son, and his apartment block was just around the corner.
“You go ahead to the factory. Tell them I will be half an hour late,” she instructed Irina. “I’ll see if any family members are at home.”
When she rang the bell of the man’s apartment, she could hear a shuffling noise inside, but it was a long time before the door was opened by a gaunt woman who looked to be in her seventies.
“I’m so sorry,” Maria said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, “but I have bad news.”
The woman nodded when Maria told her and did not seem unduly surprised. She was thin as a pole herself and seemed very frail.
“Do you have children who can help you fetch the body and bury him?” Maria asked.
“My two sons are in the army,” the woman told her. There was a tear glinting in her eye, but it was as if she did not have the strength to cry.
“How about a neighbor? Or a friend?”
“Maybe the man at number twelve would help?” She didn’t sound too sure.
Maria went to knock on his door, and the man who answered agreed to come with her, although he did not seem too robust himself.
“I heard they are running out of coffins,” he told her. “Bodies are being taken to old churches for storage until a funeral can be arranged. Perhaps we should take Pavel to St. Panteleimon’s. That’s probably the nearest.”
He sighed when he saw the body still lying where Maria had found it, covered with a sprinkling of fresh snow. “Poor man. What an end,” he said. “A year ago, none of us would have left a dog lying in the snow like this, but now . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
Between them they lifted the dead man. Maria held his feet while the neighbor clasped his chest, and they staggered slowly to the church, slithering on the icy pavement. In her head, Maria prayed for him, commending his soul to God.
“Will you look after the widow?” she asked before they parted.
“My wife and I will do what we can,” the neighbor said. “I wish you and your family strength.”
* * *
A month later, Maria looked back on the day she found Pavel lying in the snow and remembered how little they suspected then of what was to come. By mid-January 1942, it was common to find bodies in the street. Some folk sat down on a wall for a moment’s rest and never got up again; others lay in gutters, half buried in snow, their faces blackened and mouths gaping to show lost teeth. Every time she came across a body, Maria searched for a ration card so she could notify a relative, but sometimes it had already been stolen. Coats and shoes were often missing too. There was no longer any respect for the dead, and that felt unbearably sad.
By popular demand, a few Orthodox priests came out of hiding and began to conduct church services. Maria went to St. Vladimir’s Cathedral every Sunday and prayed for her own family, for her baby Pavel, for Peter—always for Peter—and for all the souls whose bodies she had found in the streets that week. She no longer visited the cemetery where Peter lay. As her strength ebbed, the walk was too much, and she could not bear to see the piles of corpses waiting for burial. The temperature had dropped to minus thirty and the earth was too hard to dig graves anymore.
All her children were thinner, but Mikhail’s pallor had improved since she started finding ways to slip him a little extra food.
“More supplies will be on the way soon,” her friend at the factory told her. “The Ice Road has opened at last.”
Maria wanted to jump for joy. For some weeks they had been waiting for the ice on Lake Ladoga to freeze to a depth of eight inches, because then it could take the weight of a truck driving over it and their city would once more be connected to the rest of the Soviet Union. She felt proud of her nation’s engineers. Germans would never manage such a feat. Only Russians with their long, cold winters knew how to use the elements to their advantage. She remembered the French Emperor Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812 because his troops did not know how to survive the cold, and felt a glimmer of confidence that the war would soon be over.
“What food do you think they will bring first?” she asked, and they began to salivate as they talked of succulent beef cooked in a cream sauce, of rich cakes laced with honey, of potatoes baked on the fire and slathered in butter.
She went home that evening to a watery soup made of dandelions and nettles, and half a slice of crumbly, sour-tasting ration bread.
* * *
Toward the end of January, a neighbor’s boy caught whooping cough. The residents of the block sat in the air-raid shelter listening to his painful bouts of coughing followed by the distinctive whooping sound.
“Have you taken him to hospital?” Maria asked his mother. “That sounds nasty.”
“They say most children recover in time,” she replied, fear in her eyes.
Raisa leaned across to whisper to Maria. “I think we should tell her not to bring him to the shelter anymore in case he infects the rest of us.”
Maria ignored her, but huddled her children close. When they got back upstairs, she gave them a double dose of vitamin powder, just in case.
Over the next three weeks, every time she walked past her neighbor’s door, she heard the boy coughing and wheezing, and she said a prayer for him and crossed herself. And then, one morning, the entire block heard howls like those of a wolf echoing around the corridors and across the courtyard. Maria rushed out to the landing in time to hear the mother scream, “God has taken my son. My only son.” She hurried down to embrace her, but the woman fought her off. No comfort could be given.
That evening, Maria was thinking of the boy as she wiped the supper dishes clean with a dampened cloth to save water. How lucky we have been, she thought. She felt guilty that she had five living children while her neighbor had lost her only son. Ingenuity in finding food was important in this siege, but survival was also a matter of luck. Maria had suffered incredibly bad luck in losing her parents and siblings, then poor little Pavel and Peter, but now she had another generation to comfort her, and hers were all good children.
She put the plates in her cupboard and wiped the stove clean, ready for the next person to use, before heading back to her apartment. As she stood outside the door, hand poised to turn the handle, she heard coughing and paused. It was Mikhail; she could tell. He coughed hard, as if there was something stuck in his throat, then went silent. Maria waited, scarcely daring to breathe. And then it came: an unmistakable whooping sound. It felt as though a shard of glass had pierced her heart.