WHEN ALIK, MISHA, AND I GOT HOME FROM THE BADAYEV — DIRTY, SWEATY, EXHAUSTED — IT WAS ALMOST AN HOUR AFTER CURFEW. OUR MOTHERS AND AUNTIE WERE WAITING in our apartment. They turned as one, looking hopeful and fearful as I opened our front door.
“It’s about time!” Mrs. Bukova exclaimed, storming up to her sons and grabbing Alik by his left ear. “Are you trying to kill me? First the bombing, and now this?” She whacked Misha on the shoulder with the back of her hand while continuing her tirade. “Is this what I work for? To see my sons disrespect their mother and her rules? I should be asleep right now, but no, I’m waiting up to see if my boys are dead or alive!” She stopped for breath and spied me. “And you, Ivan Savichev, I thought you were smarter than this. How did you think three boys were going to help with the Badayev fires? I’ve been worried half sick.”
“But we did help! We —” Mrs. Bukova, never at a loss for words, had much more to say on the subject and didn’t let me finish. She kept up a steady flow of outrage after crying, “Home, now! March!” Grabbing her two sons by the backs of their collars like a feral cat mother might do, she half pushed, half dragged them out of our apartment and into their own next door. We could hear the muffled sounds of her reprimands even through the wall.
I turned to my mother, who stared at me. “I told you to be back by ten o’clock,” she declared firmly.
“Yes, Mama, I know. But it was impossible.” My mother was as unlike Mrs. Bukova as day from night. While my friends’ mother would yell, scold, and give her boys a solid smack on their backsides, my mother punished me with the weight of her expectations and her disappointment. I almost wished she would have yelled instead.
“Why was it impossible?”
“The Badayev is so far away —”
“I know where it is.”
“— and we had to walk all the way home in the dark.”
“The curfew is serious, Ivan. Anyone can be put in jail for violating it, even a child.”
“I know,” I mumbled.
“Alik and Misha look up to you. If you don’t behave responsibly, they won’t, either. You saw Mrs. Bukova. Isn’t it bad enough that her husband is at the front? Do you think she needs the extra burden of worrying about her children’s safety?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I’m very disappointed. You’re old enough to have learned these lessons already. You shouldn’t have to learn them again and again.”
I stared at my battered shoes. I hated upsetting my mother. My usual way of making up with her was to try to make her laugh, but I couldn’t come up with even one joke about the awful things we’d witnessed. If laughter was unavailable, distraction was my second line of defense.
“I see Auntie is still up. Should I walk her to her door and make sure she’s comfortable for the night? We saw a hole in her ceiling and —”
“Auntie will be staying with us for the time being.”
Auntie smiled briefly and looked at my mother.
“That’s good,” I answered. “May I help her bring some of her things down from upstairs?” I looked at them, hopeful that this would end my chastisement.
“That’s what the three of us did while we waited for you,” she said, but in a tone that told me she was ready to stop being angry.
“I’m sorry, Mama; it won’t happen again.” She sat down in one of our four kitchen chairs, and I realized how weary she was, how strained, and probably still shaken from the bombing.
“Why don’t I make tea?” Auntie suggested, picking up the kettle and carrying it to the sink. My mother nodded her assent with a tired smile. “Oh, and Ivan, while the water boils I’d like you to come upstairs with me. There’s one more thing I need help with. We’ll be back in a few minutes, Elena,” she assured my mother, settling the kettle over the flame on our sturdy stove. I got up and followed her to her apartment just above us. Once inside, she turned on the overhead light, and I saw that most of the mess left by the bombing had been cleaned up. Closing the door, she turned to me.
“Ivan, I need to talk to you.” The serious look on her face made me nervous. “You’re twelve, almost thirteen, and I’m going to speak to you bluntly, like you were an adult.” I nodded. “Everything I tell you must be our secret. Will you agree to that?”
“Yes, Auntie.”
She took a deep breath and glanced briefly around her overcrowded apartment. “Our lives are going to be different from now on.”
“What do you mean?” I’d half expected her to lecture me about obeying my mother and was taken by surprise.
“Leningrad has been surrounded by the Germans. There is no longer a way in or a way out of our city. Ivan, do you understand? No one and nothing can get in, and no one can get out. The food warehouses have burned. We’ve had food rationing for two and a half months. It will now become severe.” Her words scared me. She continued, “I lived through our revolution in 1917. I lived through the time when the government took over all the farms and industry in this country.” She looked pained by the memories, her face pinched and tense. “I survived because someone talked to me as I will now talk to you. Sit down.” I pulled out one of the kitchen chairs, never taking my eyes off of her. “Look around you. What do you see?” She was confusing me; I didn’t know what to say.
“Well?” she prompted me.
“I … I see lots and lots of furniture. Too much! And pictures on the wall, several small rugs. Your birdcage by the window, a stove.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know — your cupboards are full of dishes and glasses. The table, three chairs, your sofa, and the comfy chair you like to read in. Books. Lamps. Very little walking space.” I glanced back at her, knowing I wasn’t understanding whatever it was she was trying to tell me.
“I survived because I prepared for the worst.” I nodded, but only because I had nothing intelligent to say. “You see a room, an ordinary room. I am going to show you what you don’t see. It may save our lives. If anything happens to me, you must continue to use whatever is left.”
“You’re scaring me, Auntie.”
“You can’t afford to be scared, Ivan. From now on, your attention must be focused on survival.” Tiny Auntie Vera walked to the birdcage at the front window, its gray prongs sculpted gracefully to a point at the top, its door destroyed long ago since she didn’t believe in caging birds. Instead she kept a small houseplant inside it. The bottom rim of the cage was about three inches high, a simple scored piece of metal. “Come here. Watch me,” Auntie commanded.
Just under where the door once fastened was a small, round, buttonlike protrusion. She pushed it, which allowed the rim of the birdcage to slide about eight inches to the right, revealing an empty space of about three inches under the bottom of the cage floor. Auntie reached in and pulled out a gun. I gasped.
“Is it real?”
“Very real.” She handed it to me. “The bullets are in a bag in back of it.” She reached in again and pulled out a black cloth drawstring bag the size of a large bar of soap and placed it on the table. My mouth fell open; I was amazed.
“Do you know how to use a gun?”
“A little,” I said, having taken some rifle training with a boys’ camping group one summer.
“The enemy is at the gate, Ivan. The gun is to be used only for protection of your family and loved ones. Do not touch it under any other circumstances. Now …” She looked around briefly. “My table. Help me turn it on its side.”
At this point I wasn’t surprised by such a strange request and quickly put the gun and bullets on her sofa and helped her turn her smallish wooden table on its side. Auntie pulled a butter knife out of a drawer.
“Do you see these pads on the bottom of the legs?” I nodded, fascinated that my diminutive neighbor had a side to her I’d never dreamed of. She pried one of the wooden pads off to reveal that the leg had been hollowed out. Reaching into it with her index finger, she gently pulled out a thick roll of bills.
“Rubles! How much money is that?” I looked at her in astonishment. She smiled broadly.
“If there is one thing I learned during the revolution when the tsar was overthrown, it is not to expect help from the authorities in a time of chaos or war. You have to be responsible for yourself and your family. The other three legs are the same.” She laughed lightly as she straightened up. “And all of us became hoarders.”
“Hoarders?”
“If you’ve ever lived through a time when there was no food, afterward you become like a squirrel. You bury food to see you through the next crisis. You hide it, you preserve whatever you can, so that you never have to face that kind of hunger again.” There was a haunted look on her face as she told me this, while continuing to peruse her apartment. “Let me show you something.”
Near what I called her comfy chair, where I’d often seen her reading, Auntie pulled back two small, worn rugs. Again using the butter knife, she pried loose a board from her wooden floor. “Take a look.” I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. It looked like a row of silver-colored circles until I realized they were the tops of cans. With a little groan, Auntie reached down and pulled out a can of navy beans. She held it up with a smile like a farmer might have as he proudly showed off a prize tomato.
“This is amazing!” I said with a laugh. “What next — a tank hidden under the bed?”
“This area,” she said, motioning to a six-by-six-foot area in front of her chair, “and the space between my bed and the window in the other room are full of cans like this.”
“All beans?”
“They’ll keep you alive and nourished better than most things.”
I sat back on my heels, looking at her in admiration. “You have food, money, protection … there’s nothing else you need!”
“You need fuel. All this furniture and these books can be burned to keep you from freezing to death.” That was almost too much for me. I didn’t like school, but I loved to read; the idea of burning a book was sacrilegious. “And your papers,” she continued. “You keep your identification papers and your ration card hidden at all times. Where do you and your mother keep yours?”
“In a drawer in the desk in the living room.”
“You’ll have to change that immediately.”
“Why?”
“People will be desperate soon. Very soon,” she said quietly. “Their behavior will change. They will do things they never imagined they were capable of.” She gazed intently at me as she said this.
“Like what?”
“They will steal your ration card knowing that means starvation for you. Some will even kill for them.” She must have sensed the growing fear and confusion in me because she reached out and touched my shoulder. I thought of the men I’d overheard at the food warehouses and how they said there was food enough to feed the city for only a week or two. “From now on you must keep your door locked at all times.”
“Even in the day?” I was incredulous.
“As I said, things are going to be different now. Food will be all that matters. It will be more valuable than gold.” She reached in the pocket of her skirt and pulled out a small brown leather coin purse; from it she produced a long silver key. “This is the key to my apartment; there’s another one hidden in the hall that I’ll show you on our way out. You need to know where it is in case something happens to me.”
“Don’t talk that way, Auntie.”
“That’s something else we must all learn at a time of war.”
“What?”
“You accept the truth of your situation. Immediately. If you don’t” — she gave a little shrug — “you can’t take the actions you need to survive.”
“Have you shown my mother these things?”
She shook her head. “No. Your mother carries the battle on her shoulders eleven hours a day at the factory. It’s up to you to take care of her, to protect her, to be ready.”
I sat quietly in thought for a moment as I felt my new role taking hold of me. “I’m short, Auntie, like you,” I teased. “But I’m also strong. I can do this.”
“Strong is good,” she said with a kind smile. “You must also be clever. Together they will give you at least a chance at staying alive. Come,” she said, glancing at the clock on the kitchen wall. “We must go.”
“What about the gun?”
“Put it and the bullets back in their place, then close the little door. Let me see you do it.” I did as she requested, still marveling at all she’d told me, at the hidden secrets in her simple room, feeling exhilarated and amazed by all I’d experienced in one day.
“Remember, you may tell no one of what I’ve just shown you — not Alik, not Misha, not even the police. Understood?”
I nodded, knowing I could keep a secret.
As we locked the front door, she silently pointed to the baseboard near it and lifted off a five-inch piece of wood from the top, revealing the hiding place of her other key. She slipped the wood back in its place. You would never notice it unless you knew it was there and you were looking for it. Finally, we descended the stairs to my apartment, where my mother was opening the door.
“I was just going to go looking for you two! The tea’s ready,” my mother said.
“Ivan helped me do a little cleaning up,” Auntie Vera lied.
“Yes, Mama, just a little …” I hesitated, remembering what Auntie said, that my mother’s burden was already great enough. “… a little cleaning up. That’s all.”