Winter Garden

Vera kisses them both one last time and stands.

Across the room, she meets her mother’s gaze. It is all there, in their eyes—the good-bye, the promise to take care and come back, and the worry that this is good-bye. Vera knows she should hug her mother, but if she does that she’ll cry, and she cannot cry in front of her children, so she instead grabs a heavy winter coat off the hook by the door and slings it over her shoulder. In no time at all, she and Olga are crammed together in the back of a transport truck, surrounded by dozens of other young women; many of them are dressed in flowery summer skirts with sandals on their feet. In other times, they would look like girls going off to camp, maybe to the Urals or the Black Sea, but no one would make that mistake of them now. There is not a one of them smiling.

When they reach the Luga line, there are people—girls and women, mostly—as far as the eye can see; they are building the massive trenches and fortifications that will stop the enemy from reaching Leningrad. Bent above the ground, stabbing at the dirt with pickaxes and shovels, these women are exhausted; their faces are streaked with sweat and dirt and their dresses are ruined. But they are Russians—Soviets—and no one dares to pause or complain. No one even imagines doing such a thing. Vera stands in the sunlight, with the forest only a few miles away, while a comrade tells her what to do.

Olga moves in close to her, takes her hand. They listen like soldiers and look like children, though they do not know this. It is their last moment of peace for many nights. After that, they take up pickaxes and trudge to the line, where the ground has been chewed up already. Dropping into the trench, they become two more in an endless line of girls and women and old men who hack at the earth until their hands blister and bleed, until they cough up blood and cry black tears. Day after day, they dig.

At night, they huddle in a barn with the other girls, who look as dazed and tired and dirty as Vera feels. The whole place smells of dust and mud and sweat and smoke.

On their seventh night, Vera finds a quiet corner in the barn where they stay at night and builds a small fire of twigs. It will not last long, these flames that feed on so little, so she works fast, boiling a cup of water for her sister, handing it to her. The watery cabbage soup they had for dinner has long ago given way to hunger, but there is nothing to be done about that.

Beside them, a heavyset older woman leans against the bales of hay, looking at her dirty fingernails as if she’s never seen her own hands before. Her fleshy, dirty face is unfamiliar, but there is something comforting in her eyes.

“Look at my hands,” Olga says, putting down her cup of water. “I’m bleeding. ”

She says it with a kind of confused wonder, as if the pain is not hers, nor really even the blood.

Vera takes her sister’s hand, sees the matted blood and broken blisters on her palm. “You have to keep your hands wrapped. I told you this. ”

“They were watching me today,” Olga says quietly. “Comrades Slotkov and Pritkin. I know they know about Papa. I could not stop to adjust the wraps. ”

Vera frowns. She has heard this from her sister before in the past week, but now she recognizes that something is wrong. Olga does not make eye contact with her. Already they have seen girls die around them. Only yesterday, Olga spent half the day deafened by a bomb that landed too close.

Outside, the alarm blares. The sound of aircraft is a faraway drone at first, not unlike the murmur of a distant bee at a summer picnic. But the sound builds, and fear in the barn becomes palpable. Girls move and shift and lie flat, but really there is nowhere to go.

Bombs drop. Fires flash red and yellow and black through the slats in the barn siding. Somewhere, someone is screaming. The air turns gray and gritty. Vera’s eyes sting.

Olga flinches but doesn’t move. Instead, she stares at her wounded palm, and begins methodically ripping off the dead, blistered skin. Blood bubbles up from her wounds.

“Don’t do that,” Vera says, pulling her sister’s hand away.

“Honey. ”

Vera hears the word spoken aloud. At first it makes no sense; all she can really comprehend is the bombing. Near her, someone is crying.

Then she hears it again. “Honey. ”

The old woman is nearer now. Deep wrinkles bracket her smoker’s mouth and purplish bags buttress her tired eyes. She pulls a small vial from her apron pocket. “Put honey on your sister’s wounds. ”

Vera is stunned by the generosity of the act. Honey is more valuable than gold on this Luga line. Food and medicine in one.

“Why are you doing this?” Vera says after she smears a small drop on Olga’s wounds.

The woman looks at her. “We are all we have left,” she says, scooting back into her place amid the hay bales.

“What is your name?” Vera says.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman says. “Watch your sister closely. I have seen eyes like hers before. She is not doing well. ”

Vera nods bravely, though the words are like a cold wind. She has been telling herself that this change in Olga is ordinary sleep deprivation and hunger, but now she sees what the old woman sees: the speck of craziness in her sister’s wide eyes. Olga cannot stand these days and nights—the screaming, the endless work, the horror of watching a girl your own age blown apart. The suddenness of the danger; that’s the worst of it. Olga is unraveling. She talks to herself and hardly ever sleeps. She pulls out her hair in clumps.

“Come here, Olgushka,” Vera says, pulling her sister into her arms. They crawl back into their bed of hay, which is neither soft nor sweet-smelling.

“I see Papa,” Olga says, her voice dreamy-sounding. It is as if she has forgotten who they are and where they are and of whom they do not speak.

“Shush. ”

“Tell me a story, Vera. About princesses and boys who bring you roses. ”