Winter Garden

All I want to do is lie down. I am so hungry and so tired and so sad. I do not even care if I die.

“Yes,” I say. I don’t care. I just want to stop.

But Sasha is there, urging me forward, and when we get home, and our children climb into bed with us, I thank God my husband is there.

“Don’t you give up,” he whispers to me in bed that night. “I will find a way to get you out of here. ”

I promise.

I agree not to give up, though I don’t know what it even means then.

And in the morning, he kisses my cheek, whispers that he loves me, and he leaves.

In late December, the city slowly freezes to death. It is dark almost all the time. Birds drop from the sky like stones. The crows die first; I remember that. It is impossibly cold. Twenty degrees below zero becomes normal. The streetcars stop in their tracks like children’s toys that have fallen out of favor. The water mains burst.

The sleds are everywhere now. Women drag them through the streets to carry things home—wood from burned-out buildings, buckets of water from the Neva River, anything they can burn or eat.

You’d be amazed what you can eat. There are rumors that the sausage sold in the markets is made from human flesh. I don’t go to the markets anymore. What is the point? I see beautiful fur coats and jewels selling for nothing and oil cakes made of warehouse sweepings and sawdust going for exorbitant prices.

We do as little as we can, my children and I. Our apartment is black all the time now—there is only the briefest spasm of daylight and very few candles are left to light the darkness. Our little burzhuika is everything now. Heat and light. Life. We have burned most of the furniture in our apartment, but some pieces are still left.

The three of us are wrapped tightly together all night, and in the morning we waken slowly. We lie beneath all the blankets we have, with our bed pushed close to the stove, and still we waken with frozen hair and frost on our cheeks. Leo has developed a cough that worries me. I try to get him to drink hot water, but he resists me. I cannot blame him. Even after it is boiled, the water tastes like the corpses that lie on the river’s frozen surface.

I get up in the cold and take however long I must to break off a chair leg or shatter a drawer, and feed the wood into the stove. There is a ringing in my ears and a kind of vertigo that often sends me sprawling at the merest step. I know my own body by its bones now. Still, I smile when I kiss my babies awake.

Anya groans at my touch and this is better than Leo, who just lies there.

I shake him hard, yell his name; when he opens his eyes I can’t help falling to my knees. “Silly boy,” I say, wiping my eyes. I can’t hear anything over the roaring in my ears and the hammering of my heart.

I would give anything to hear him say he is hungry.

I make us each a cup of hot water laced with yeast. It is no nutrition, but it will fill us up. Carefully, I take a piece of thick black bread—the last of this week’s rations—and I cut it in thirds. I want to give it all to them, but I know better. Without me, they are lost, so I must eat.

We each cut our third of a piece of bread into tiny pieces, which we eat as slowly as possible. I put half of mine in my pocket for later. I get up and put on all of my clothes.

My children lie in the bed, snuggled close. Even from across the room, I can see how skeletal they look. When last I bathed Leo, he was a collection of sharp bones and sunken skin.

I go to them, sit by them on the bed. I touch Leo’s cheeks, pull his knit cap down far enough to cover his ears.

“Don’t go, Mama,” he says.

“I have to. ”

It is the conversation we have every morning, and honestly, there is very little fight left in them. “I will find us some candy, would you like that?”

“Candy,” he says dreamily, slumping back into his flattened pillow.

Anya looks up at me. Unlike her brother, she is not sick; she is just wasting, like me. “You shouldn’t tell him there will be candy,” she says.

“Oh, Anya,” I say, pulling her into my arms and holding her as tightly as I can. I kiss her cracked lips. Our breath is terrible, but neither of us even notices anymore.

“I don’t want to die, Mama,” she says.

“You won’t, moya dusha. We’ll make sure of it. ”

My soul.

She is that. They both are. And because of that, I get up and get dressed and go to work.