Elena Cornelius was working in the Apraksin when she heard from a customer about the forced evacuation of the Raion Lezaryet. She closed the counter immediately and went as fast as she could to the school, desperate to be with her daughters, to see them safe, but when she got there she found the teachers reluctant to let her take the girls away.
‘Our instructions are to keep them all together here,’ the headmaster said, ‘until the trucks come. They will all be taken to a place of safety, far away from the bombs. The whole school is to go, we teachers also. We don’t know yet where we are going, but we are excited about this great adventure and so are the children. It is best for them, don’t you think? I would think you would be pleased for them, Elena Cornelius. Your girls will be safer with us.’
‘I am their mother and I will keep them safe,’ said Elena Cornelius. ‘Not you. Me. They are coming with me now.’
‘But—’
‘I am their mother and you will not stop me taking them.’
‘On your own responsibility, then,’ the headmaster said. ‘I wash my hands of them. Don’t come crying to me later, and do not expect to bring Yeva and Galina back to this school again when the war is over.’
Elena did not return to Count Palffy’s house in the raion–all their possessions, their home, the workshop, it was all lost to them now–but she went instead with her daughters to her aunt Lyudmila Markova, who had a one-room apartment in Big Side. Aunt Lyudmila had never married. She kept a caged parakeet for company and was reluctant to take in her niece and two girls as well.
‘But there’s only the one bed, Elena! Where would you sleep?’
‘On the floor. I’ll buy a mattress.’
‘I don’t know, Elena. That doesn’t sound comfortable for the girls, and Bolto doesn’t like change. It unsettles him. He doesn’t like strangers coming in and out. He has his own little ways.’ Bolto was the parakeet.
‘We are not strangers, Aunt,’ said Elena. ‘And I’ve got a hundred roubles at the workshop. You’ll be glad of the help when the war comes. Things will get expensive.’
‘All this talk of war, I don’t like it, Elena. It’s nonsense. The Novozhd won’t let anything happen to Mirgorod.’
‘The Novozhd is dead, Aunt. The enemy is coming. There’ll be more bombing. There may be fighting.’
‘Oh no, not here. I don’t think so. They wouldn’t dare. Why don’t you just go home and wait till it all blows over? Bolto and I will be fine.’
‘I can’t go home. Everyone in the raion is being taken away on trains and nobody knows where to.’
‘I thought you were doing well at the Apraksin, Elena? I thought they liked you there? You’ve always said—’
‘It’s not to do with the Apraksin, Aunt. It’s everyone.’
In the end Aunt Lyudmila relented.
‘Just for a couple of days, Elena, until you get yourself settled. I must say I’m disappointed in Count Palffy; it’s very shoddy behaviour to put you out like this. You don’t expect it, not from an aristocrat. The Novozhd always said they were enemies of the people.’
When she heard Rizhin’s broadcast on Aunt Lyudmila’s radio, Elena Cornelius knew she had to do something. She could not go to the raion again, she could not go back to the Apraksin and she could not simply hide away in her aunt’s apartment. Sooner or later she would be found and questions would be asked. The girls had to be safer than that. She had to do what she could to protect them. Immediately. That meant she had to have a role. She had to have a place. She had to have a story.
‘This new man, Rizhin,’ said Aunt Lyudmila. ‘He sounds like a strong man. He’ll sort out this nonsense about a war.’
That same evening Elena went to the Labour Deployment Office and filled in a form. Where it said address, she put Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment in Big Side. She waited in line for two hours and handed the form to a woman at a desk.
‘My name is Elena Schmitt,’ she said.
‘Would I be in this job if I couldn’t read?’
‘No,’ said Elena. ‘Of course not.’
The woman studied the form carefully. She had close-cropped fair hair and colourless eyes in a dry, sunless face, striated with fine lines. She must have been about forty. Her fawn uniform blouse was fresh and spotless. Crisp epaulettes. Sharp creases down the outside edge of her sleeves. Elena thought that, close to, she would smell of laundry. The woman pulled out a file and paged through sheets and sheets of typescript.
‘This is your address?’
‘Yes. Well, it is my aunt’s apartment. I live with her.’
‘How long?’
‘I’m sorry? I don’t understand?’
‘How long have you lived there?’
‘Two years.’
‘You’re not listed at that address.’
‘I came to Mirgorod two years ago,’ said Elena. ‘To work at Blue’s. Before that I lived with my parents. At Narymsk, and before that Tuga. Look, I want to work, citizen. I want to do something. For the city.’
‘So. And what can you do, Elena Schmitt?’
‘I am a carpenter. I have my own tools. I have a school certificate in mathematics and a diploma in bookkeeping.’
‘Can you dig?’
‘What?’
‘Can you dig? Can you use a pick and a spade?’
‘I make furniture. Cupboards. Wardrobes.’
‘When the Archipelago tanks arrive, should we put them away in a cupboard?’
‘No. But surely—’
‘There is a requirement for more workers on the inner defence line. People who can dig. Can you dig frozen soil with your fingers on a quarter-pound of black bread a day?’
‘If that is what the city requires of me then I will try, citizen. I will do my best.’
The woman filled in some details on a pink card, stamped it with an official stamp and gave it to her.
‘Report at six o’clock tomorrow morning.’
Aunt Lyudmila had already gone to bed when Elena Cornelius got back to the apartment, and the girls were asleep together on the floor, curled up under an eiderdown on cushions from the couch. Elena found a packet of tea in the cupboard, boiled a kettle on the paraffin stove and made herself a pot. The label on the tea packet had a drawing of ladies in high lacy collars with a samovar on a tablecloth, and underneath was written in curly script:
What follows after taking tea?
The resurrection of the dead.
It was an old saying, some kind of joke or pun. It was traditional. Elena had always wondered what it meant.
She sat in a wicker chair in the window, the curtains drawn back, a blanket wrapped round her shoulders. It was too cold to sleep. The moons bathed the city in a bone-white glare, monochrome and alien. Mirgorod looked like the capital of some other planet. Silent searchlight beams swept the skyline and flashed across the soft silver hulls of barrage balloons. A remembered phrase from childhood came into her mind and would not leave. The beneficence of angels.
At midnight the Archipelago bombers came. Tiny bright antiaircraft shells crackled and flowered briefly in the dark. Searchlights slashed at the raiders but didn’t hold what they caught. Within an hour huge fires were burning on the horizon. Elena watched flames lick high into the air: arches and caverns, sheets and waterfalls of flame. Whirling flame tornadoes. Hurricanes of fire. It was all happening several miles away. She imagined she could feel the heat of the fires against her face, though she could not.