Winter Garden

In the store, they have only enough money for buckwheat, flour, dried lentils, and lard. Carrying their meager supplies back through the crowded streets, they make it to the apartment at just past six.

Vera can hear her children crying and it breaks her heart. She opens the door and scoops them up. Leo throws his arms around her neck and hangs on, saying, “I missed you, Mama. ”

Vera thinks then that she will never again follow her mother’s advice about this one thing: she will never leave her children alone.

“Where is your papa?” she asks Anya, who shrugs her small shoulders.

He should have been home by now.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” her mother says. “It will be difficult to get through the streets. ”

Worry gnaws at Vera, though, sharpening its bite with every passing minute. Finally, at eight o’clock, he comes into the apartment. The side of his face is dirty and his hair is damp with sweat.

“Verushka,” he says, pulling her into his arms, holding her so tightly she cannot breathe. “The trolleys were full. I ran all the way here. Are you okay?”

“Now we are,” she says.

And she believes it.

That night, while her grandmother snores in the hot darkness, Vera sits up in her bed. The big crisscross of tape and newsprint on the windows lets only the merest light through. Beyond it, the city is strangely, eerily silent. It is as if Leningrad itself has drawn in a sharp breath and is afraid to exhale.

In this shadowy darkness, their apartment seems even smaller and more jumbled. With three narrow beds in the living area and the children’s cots in the kitchen, there is barely room to walk in here anymore. Even at mealtimes they cannot all be together. There isn’t enough room at the table or chairs to go around it.

Not far away, Mama and Olga are awake, too, sitting up in their bed. Beside Vera, Sasha is as silent as she’s ever seen him.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” Olga says. At nineteen, she should be thinking of love and romance and her future, not war. “Maybe the Germans will save us. Comrade Stalin—”

“Shhh,” Mama says sharply, glancing over at her sleeping mother. Some things can never be said aloud. Olga should know this by now.

“Tomorrow we will go to work,” Mama says. “And the next day we do the same, and the next day after that. Now we must go to sleep. Here, Olga, roll over. I will hold you. ”

Vera hears the squeaking of the tired bed as they settle down to sleep. She stretches out beside her husband, tries to feel safe in his arms. There is too little light to see his face clearly; he is just gray and black patches, but his breathing is steady and sure and the sound of it, in rhythm to the beating of her heart, calms her down. She touches his cheek, feels the soft stubble of new growth, as familiar to her now as the wedding band she wears. She leans forward to kiss him, and for a moment, when his lips are on hers, there is nothing else, but then he draws back and says, “You will have to be strong, Verushka. ”

“We will be strong,” she says, holding him in her arms.

Two nights later they are awakened by gunfire.

Vera launches out of bed, her heart pounding. She falls over her mother’s bed as she tries to get to her children. Gunfire rattles the thin windows, and she can hear footsteps in the hallway and people screaming.

“Hurry,” Sasha says, sounding surprisingly calm. He herds them all together while Mama takes as much food as she can carry. It is not until they are outside in the street, huddled with the crowd of their neighbors beneath a pale blue sky, that they understand: these are Russian antiaircraft guns, practicing for what is to come.

There are no shelters on their street. It is Mama who organizes the people in her building: tomorrow they will go to the storage area in the basement and make a shelter.

Finally, amid the sound of gunfire and the preternatural silence between bursts, Sasha looks down at Vera. Leo is asleep in his arms (the boy can sleep through anything) and Anya is beside him, worriedly sucking her thumb and caressing the end of her blanket. It is a baby habit that was long gone before the start of the war and is now back.

“You know I have to go,” Sasha says to Vera.

She shakes her head, thinking suddenly that this gunfire means nothing; the look on her husband’s face is infinitely more frightening.

“I am a university student and poet,” he says. “And you are the daughter of a criminal of the state. ”

“You haven’t published any of your poetry—”

“I am suspect, Vera, and you know this. So are you. ”

“You cannot go. I won’t let you. ”

“It is done, Vera,” is what he says. “I joined the People’s Volunteer Army. ”