Winter Garden

“Dima,” I say, and still I don’t know who he is. I can’t remember his mother, either, my neighbor.

But I take the food. I do not even pretend not to want it. I might even kill him for it. Who knows? “Thank you,” I say, or think I do, or mean to.

“How is Aleksandr?”

“How are any of us? Do you want to come in? It is a little warmer—”

“No. I must get back to my mother. I am not here long. It’s back to the front tomorrow. ”

When he is gone, I stare down at the food in awe. I am smiling when I waken Leo that morning and say, “We have candy. . . . ”

In January, I strap poor Leo to the sled. He is so weak, he doesn’t even struggle; his tiny body is bluish black and covered in boils. Anya is too cold to get out of bed. I tell her to stay in bed and wait for us.

It takes three hours to walk to the hospital, and when I get there . . .

People have died in line, waiting to see a doctor. There are bodies everywhere. The smell.

I lean down to Leo, who is somehow both bony and swollen. His tiny face looks like a starving cat. “I am here, my lion,” I say because I can think of nothing else.

A nurse sees us.

Even though we are two among hundreds, she comes over, looks down at Leo. When she looks up at me, I see the pity in her eyes.

“Here,” she says, giving me a piece of paper. “This will get him some millet soup and butter. There’s aspirin at the dispensary. ”

“Thank you,” I say.

We look at each other again, both knowing it is not enough. “He is Leo. ”

“My son was Yuri. ”

I nod in understanding. Sometimes a name is all you have left.

When I get home from the hospital, I cook everything I can find. I strip the wallpaper from the walls and boil it. The paste is made of flour and water, and it thickens into a kind of soup. Carpenter’s glue will do the same thing. These are the recipes I teach my daughter. God help us.

I boil a leather belt of Sasha’s and make a jelly from it. The taste is sickening, but I get Leo to eat a little of it. . . .

In the middle of January, a friend of Sasha’s arrives at our apartment. I can see that he is shocked by what he sees. He gives me a box from Sasha.

As soon as he is gone, we crowd around to look at it. Even Leo is smiling.

Inside are evacuation papers. We are to leave on the twentieth.

Beneath the papers is a coil of fresh sausage and a bag of nuts.

In utter darkness, I pack up the whole of my life, not that there is much left. Honestly, I do not know what I have taken and what I left behind. Most of our possessions have either frozen or been burned, but I remember to take my writings and my father’s, and my last book of poetry by Anna Akhmatova. I take all the food we have—the sausage, half a bag of onions, four pieces of bread, some oil cakes, a quarter of a jar of sunflower oil, and the last of the sauerkraut.

I have to carry Leo. With his swollen feet and boil-covered arms, he can barely move, and I don’t have it in me to waken him when he sleeps.

The three of us leave in the darkness of midmorning. Little Anya carries our only suitcase, filled with food. All our clothes we are wearing.

It is bitter cold outside and snowing hard. I hold her hand on the long walk to the train station, and once there, we are both exhausted.

In the train, we cram together. We are three of many, but no one talks. The air smells musty, of body odor and bad breath and death. It is a smell we all recognize.

I pull my babies close around me. I give Leo and Anya some wine to drink, but Leo is not happy with that. I cannot take out my food, not in this crowded train car. I could be killed for the oil cakes, let alone the sausage.

I dig deep in my coat pocket, which I have filled with dirt from the ground outside the burned Badayev food warehouses.