Winter Garden

Mama is beside her then, clutching her arm. “Of course you are going, Sasha,” she says evenly, and Vera hears the warning in her mother’s tone. Always it is about appearances. Even now, as the gunfire explodes all around them, a black van prowls in the street.

“It is the right thing to do,” Sasha says. “We are the Soviet Army. The best in the world. We will kick the Germans’ asses in no time and I will be home. ”

Vera feels little Anya beside her, holding her hand, listening to every word, and so, too, their neighbors, and even strangers. She knows what she is supposed to feel and to say, but doesn’t know if she has the strength for it. Her father had once said to her much the same thing: Do not worry, Veronika Petrovna, I will always be here for you.

“Promise you’ll come back to me,” she says.

“I promise,” he says easily.

But Vera knows: there are some promises that are pointless to ask for and useless to receive. When she turns to her mother, this truth passes between them, and Vera understands her own childhood. She will have to be strong for her children.

She looks up at her husband. “It is a promise I will hold you to, Aleksandr Ivanovich. ”

In the morning, she wakens early; in the quiet darkness, she finds her one photograph of them, taken on the day of their wedding.

She looks down at their bright and smiling faces. Tears blur the image as she takes it out of the frame and folds it in half and then in half again. She tucks it in the pocket of his coat.

She hears footsteps behind her, feels his hands on her shoulders.

“I love you, Veruskhka,” he says softly, kissing the side of her face.

She is glad he is behind her. She is not sure she has the strength to look him in the eyes when she says, “I love you, too, Sasha. ”

Come back to me.

In no time at all, he is gone.

Nineteen

Vera and Olga are lucky in their jobs. Olga works in the Hermitage Museum and Vera in the Leningrad Public Library. Now both of them spend their days in dark, quiet rooms, crating up masterpieces of art and literature so that the history of the Soviet state will never be lost. When work is over for the day, Vera walks home by herself. Sometimes she goes out of her way to see the Summer Garden and remember the day she met Sasha, but it is getting harder and harder to recall. Already the face of Leningrad is changing. The Bronze Horseman is covered in sandbags and wooden planks. Camouflage nets hang over the Smolny; gray paint has been splashed over the golden spires of the Admiralty. Everywhere she looks, people are busy—building air-raid shelters, standing in line for food, digging trenches. The skies overhead are still blue and cloudless, and no bombs have dropped on them yet, but it is coming and they know it. Every day the speakers blare out reports of the advancements of the German troops. No one believes that the Germans will reach Leningrad—not their magical city built on mud and bones—but bombs will fall here. They have no doubt about that.

On her way home, Vera stops by the bank and withdraws the two hundred rubles she is allowed for the month, and when she has her money, she stands in line for three loaves of bread and a tin of cheese. Today she is lucky; there is food at the end of her long wait. Sometimes she gets to the front of the line only to see it close.

When she finally gets home at eight o’clock, she finds Anya and Leo playing war in the living room, jumping from bed to bed, making shooting sounds at each other.

“Mama!” Leo cries when he sees her. His face breaks into a gummy grin and he runs toward her, throwing himself in her arms. Anya is close on his heels, but she doesn’t hug Vera so tightly. Anya is aggrieved by this business of war and she wants everyone to know it. She does not like spending her days in nursery school and not coming home until six o’clock, and then with “smelly Mrs. Newsky from next door. ”

“How are my babies?” Vera asks, pulling Anya into her arms anyway. “What did you two do in school today?”

“I am too old for baby school,” Anya informs her, scrunching her face in concentration.

Vera pats her daughter’s head and goes into the kitchen. She is at the stove putting water on to boil when Olga comes into the apartment.

“Have you heard?” she says breathlessly.

Vera turns around. “What is it?”

Olga glances nervously at Anya and Leo, who are playing with sticks. “The children of Leningrad,” she says, lowering her voice. “They’re being evacuated. ”

On the morning of the evacuation, Vera wakens feeling sick. She cannot do it, cannot put her babies on a train bound for somewhere far away and then just go on with her life. She lies in bed, alone, as private a time as exists in this crowded apartment, staring up at the rust-stained, water-marked ceiling. She can hear her mother turning restlessly and Olga snoring quietly in the bed only two feet away.

“Vera?” Mama says.

Vera turns onto her side.

Mama is looking at her. They are close, in their side-by-side beds, almost close enough to touch. A threadbare blanket falls from Mama’s shoulder when Olga rolls over. “You cannot think it,” she says, and Vera wonders if one day she will know what her children are thinking before they do.

“How can I not?” Vera says. All her life she has understood what it is to be a good Soviet, how to follow the rules and keep one’s head down and make no move that draws attention. But this . . . how can she blindly do this thing?