In Germany you cannot have a revolution

because you would have to step on the lawns.

VLADIMIR LENIN

Meanwhile, at the end of September, the Red Lieutenant was posted to Kamyshin on the Volga, and Stasia telegraphed her sister in Tbilisi to say that she couldn’t get away from Moscow, the roads were impassable, and besides, Kostya was stationed near Leningrad. She stayed on alone in the Moscow barracks, and gradually began to realise the absurdity of her plan. In retrospect, the desire to make her way to Kostya in Leningrad seemed like utter foolishness. She asked herself how she could have acted so impetuously, leaving her daughter and Andro behind.

Before his departure, Simon had promised that as soon as an opportunity presented itself he would get her out of the city so she could make her way home. However, given the situation, this too seemed to her an impossible undertaking. No one could guarantee her safe passage any more. Once again, she was trapped in a theatre of war, fearing for her family, enduring cold and hunger, and wondering how she could have been so stupid. She asked herself why every attempt she made to unite her family ended in war.

This time, though — unlike before, in Petrograd — Stasia was better prepared. She knew to whom she could turn to get black-market goods; she knew how to deal with the soldiers who had remained, which of the superior officers looked favourably on her husband, and which were in Simon’s debt. She actually succeeded in requisitioning the room at the barracks for herself alone. She made herself useful in the barracks kitchen. She darned and sewed coats, shirts, uniforms. But her main thought was of escaping this dangerous, child-devouring place.

Christine hadn’t told her that Andro had been called up. But Stasia guessed it wouldn’t be long before he was sent to the front — and, unlike Kostya, Andro was no fighter. Stasia thought of Sopio, focused her mind on her friend, and begged her forgiveness for not staying in Tbilisi and taking better care of Andro.

When the first bombs fell, making Stasia’s ears ring; when, for the first time in her life, she found herself in one of the air raid bunkers that had been set up in the metro stations, she finally realised that not only had she failed to save her son and protect her adoptive son, she had also put her own life at risk. And then she really was mortally afraid.

Suddenly, she was no longer an observer: she had become part of this terrible spectacle, and many years lay between her and the ordeals she had survived in Petrograd.

Some half a million citizens, the majority of them women, erected fortifications outside Moscow. Façades were painted over in painstaking detail to camouflage them during German air raids.

And Stasia laughed at herself, a cynical, violent laugh, at how naive she had been to think you could drive war out of a person, when you inevitably ended up becoming part of the war yourself.

The mass mobilisation began. Stasia hauled sandbags with the other women, and lent a hand when another barricade needed building, or windows needed covering, as a total blackout had been imposed during the air raids. Some of the Red Army officers’ wives moved into the barracks with their children. The men had been pulled out. On these dark nights, Stasia sat over cabbage or potato stew in the barracks kitchen and couldn’t believe how real the prospect seemed that she might never get out of here again; that she might never see her children, her sister, her husband again.

The great rain stopped, the mud dried out, and the Germans marched on Moscow. Mass panic erupted when the evacuation of the city began. Frantic people burned files in the street. Men ineligible for military service were deployed to lay mines in important buildings. Careful as jugglers, they could be seen walking along the pavements with the explosive in their hands, as if part of a choreography both elegiac and macabre.

Lenin’s body was removed from the mausoleum, the Kremlin painted green. Captive balloons floated up from the arterial roads to deter low-flying aircraft. Documents were burned in the archives. All factories, schools, and institutions were closed, and finally public transport was suspended, too.

The train stations were overcrowded. The trains were heading to Kyrgyzstan, Tatarstan, Kazakhstan, to places one had never heard of before; far, very far away, train journeys of several days, weeks by boat. Lists were compiled of professional groups, and a destination for evacuation was assigned to each. Communist Party members, the Authors’ Association, the Academy of Sciences, doctors, botanists, engineers, chemists, physicists, train drivers, even brass bands were all assigned to specific trains. The privileged were able to jump the queue; those who had little to boast of had to wait, keep pushing; occasionally someone without a seat reservation managed to secure themselves standing room in one of the carriages.

Swept along by other women from the barracks, Stasia vanished in the crowd, got lost, resurfaced; someone pulled her by the hand, let go of her again. The certificate of evacuation to Tatarstan was in her passport in the inside pocket of her coat. At Kazan Station the crowd of people blurred into a single, enormous body with two huge arms and two legs, a formless trunk and a monstrous head. Stasia stood still, fell back from the other women hurrying to the platforms with children and suitcases. A small group of people, unlike all the others, had caught her attention, and she stood there, unable to look away.

These people were boarding the train with almost unnatural slowness and elegance; they were helping each other with their luggage, and kept looking around, as if it was hard for them to leave the city. Stasia asked a man which professional group these people belonged to, and the man replied irritably that they were dancers from the Bolshoi Theatre.

Stasia couldn’t tear her eyes away from the dancers. One dainty young woman spotted her and waved. Stasia stepped closer.

‘Which theatre are you from?’ the young woman asked, giving Stasia an empathetic smile. Hearing this question from a Bolshoi ballerina gave Stasia a childish rush of joy, and for a moment her breast was filled with pride. She’d thought she was a dancer, too! Stasia bowed her head, embarrassed, and murmured something about a provincial town.

‘That doesn’t matter. We artists must stick together more than ever in these terrible times, mustn’t we?’ the young ballerina said encouragingly. She beckoned to Stasia. ‘You’ve got your evacuation certificate with you, haven’t you? We’re sure to find you a seat, don’t worry.’

Stasia came within a whisker of accepting the invitation and boarding the train for which she had no authorisation. For a moment, she succumbed so effortlessly to her illusion, picked up so easily where she’d left off years ago, imagining herself seventeen again, with Paris and the Ballets Russes waiting for her, and if she just worked hard enough and took enough ballet classes she was sure to be able to dance Scheherezade at the Théâtre du Châtelet.

Her hand wandered across her breast, and there, inside her vest, she felt something heavy that she carried with her always, that gave her a peculiar sense of calm: Thekla’s gold watch. She stepped back, caught the dancer’s puzzled expression, shook her head with a grateful smile, and disappeared again into the crowd.

An officer’s wife from the barracks had seen her and was waving at her.

‘Hurry, Stasia! The train’s already so full — come on!’

But suddenly Stasia felt a terrible emptiness. An all-encompassing indifference. She kept looking back, trying to catch a glimpse of the dancer, but there were too many people thronging between them.

Why in the world would she go to Tatarstan?

The only sensible destination was home. She didn’t want to get on this train, she didn’t want to chase after the wrong life. She should have lived a life that would have led her to the train with the dancers, not the one to Kama, Tatarstan. Not there. She didn’t belong there. And she didn’t belong here, either.

The officer’s wife waved and waved, called her again and again, but Stasia turned her back on her and pushed through the crowd in the station concourse, emerging into the cool air, the grey daylight; she ran blindly through the streets, simply following her feet, further and further away from this station with its overcrowded trains. She lugged her old suitcase along with her, like an abdicated king dragging his sceptre. As she reached a wide, alarmingly empty boulevard the sirens began to wail: even then she still felt nothing.

She turned into a side street and sat down in the empty entrance to a house. She took a cigarette out of the bag and lit it. She looked up at the sky. No bombers to be seen. Good. That was something, at least.

*

In another city, at this moment, another woman also sat down and looked up at the sky. This city, though, had been cut off from the world for months; survival there was akin to a miracle. The woman was gaunt, taller than Stasia, with olive skin; she was bony, like Stasia, but she looked older, sickly, and there were grey streaks in her jet-black hair. She was wearing a patched autumn coat and her hands were covered in earth. Her cheeks were sunken, her lips dry and cracked, and her fingers bare, not a single ring left on them. She had just been harvesting vegetables alongside other women in one of the public parks, and had sat down, exhausted, on the damp ground. This last winter she had lost more than eleven kilos, and had sold the most precious thing she owned: her piano, which was used not to make music, but for firewood. Almost all her records had gone, too, as she could no longer bear to hear music, since the blockade; music made her vulnerable, and she couldn’t allow that. Not any more.

She had survived the mass deaths. She had survived the famine. She had survived the reduction of the bread ration to two hundred grams. She had survived the sight of starved, frozen bodies on the streets. She had seen people eating their shoes, or dogs, or cats, starch paste, and crows. She had survived thousands of bombs that had been dropped on her since the city came under siege. But she would not survive music. Music, she believed, would cause her heart, still beating dully in her breast, to contract so unbearably that she would die on the spot.

Because she was unmarried and had no children, because she was neither disabled nor wounded, she was very low on the list for urgent evacuation. Along with the other seven hundred thousand people left in the city, she had braced herself for the coming winter. The last one had seared itself into the minds of the city’s populace with such cruelty that they were now going about preparing for the next coming horror as best they could, mechanically, without feeling. Because no one doubted that the horror would return, in all its shattering glory. She looked down at her cracked and reddened hands, covered in dirt. She was living in the present. In this moment. She asked herself, as she had so often before, whether she actually knew why she was trying so hard, so doggedly, so desperately to stay alive.

*

The thermometer read minus 34 degrees. The Generalissimus issued the order to begin the counter-offensive, led by Zhukov. On 6 November, he gave a ceremonial speech in the Moscow metro, praising the tenacity of the Soviet people and the Red Army’s powers of resistance. The following day, there was even a parade on Red Square to commemorate the October Revolution. The Russian army was marching — with or without winter clothing, with or without helmets. (After the war, General Eisenhower is said to have expressed his outrage to Marshall Zhukov over the way the wartime leadership in the Soviet Union had recklessly thrown away human lives. Zhukov is said merely to have smiled and replied, ‘It doesn’t matter; Russian women will bear more.’)

At the end of November, the Germans were just twenty kilometres from Moscow. On 2 December, a tank battalion penetrated a Moscow suburb; they could see the Kremlin through their binoculars. The symbolic power of this development generated downright euphoria among the German soldiers; the dangers of the Russian winter seemed to have been superseded by joy over the imminent capture of Moscow. In Moscow itself there was talk of a march Hitler had personally commissioned to be played during the capitulation of the city.

As the NKVD was able to confirm that Japan was not planning an attack on the Soviet Union, various divisions were pulled out of the north and sent towards the capital. The infantry marched on Moscow in skis and snowshoes. On the night of 5 December, Soviet parachutists landed near Yukhnov; railway lines and important roads were secured and occupied. At the same time, the counteroffensive was launched in the west.

The Wehrmacht had no longer reckoned with such a fierce counter-attack. Its reaction was belated and uncoordinated. There was no time: the army group only received the order to take evasive action on the evening of 6 December.

On 7 December, the Sovinformburo announced another sensation, this time on the other side of the world: the Japanese had attacked the Pearl Harbor naval base near Honolulu. As a result, the United States declared war on Japan, thereby officially becoming part of the universal apocalypse. And Hitler, for fear of losing Japan as an ally, declared war on America.

It wasn’t until mid-January that Hitler ordered the retreat from Moscow, but by then the German troops had already suffered massive losses, not just from Russian bullets and grenades, but above all as a consequence of the freezing temperatures that winter. During the retreat, the German soldiers had to leave almost all their munitions behind, as they had neither horses nor the machines and fuel at their disposal to transport them back in an orderly manner. Frozen and dejected, the soldiers left the city, singing quietly to themselves:

Before the gates of Moscow stood a battalion,

The proud remains of Wehrmacht 34th Division.

The Kremlin was just in sight

But they were forced to leave the fight

Just like Napoleon.