Vera is weary to the bone, but she strokes her sister’s dirty, matted hair and uses the only thing she has—her voice—to soothe their spirits. “The Snow Kingdom is a magical, walled city, where night never falls and white doves nest on telephone lines. . . . ”
Long after Olga has fallen asleep, Vera is still stringing her pretty words together, changing the world around them in the only way she can. When her own eyes grow too heavy to keep open any longer, she kisses her sister’s bloody palm, tasting the metallic blood mixed with the sweetness of the honey. She should have put some of the honey on her own blistered palm, but she didn’t think of it. “Sleep now. ”
“Will we see Mama tomorrow?” Olga asks sleepily.
“Not tomorrow, no,” Vera says, tightening her hold. “But soon. ”
The day is sunny and bright. If not for the Germans bombing everything in sight, and their tanks rolling forward, forward, the birds would be singing here, the pine trees would be green instead of black. As it is, the beauty of the place is long gone. The trench is a huge, gaping slash in the earth, a mortal muddy wound. Girls crawl all around it; soldiers run back and forth between here and the front line, not far away. If this line breaks, if the Germans get past it, Leningrad will fall. This they all believe, so they keep digging, no matter that their hands are bleeding and bombs are as ever-present as sunlight.
Vera is trying not to think about anything except the spoon in her hand. The pickax broke last week. For a while she was lucky enough to find a spade, but she didn’t hide it well and one morning when she woke up it was gone, so now she digs with a serving spoon.
All day long. Stab, push, twist, pull. Until her shoulder aches and her neck hurts and her blistered palms burn. No amount of salt water can help (the honey and the old woman are long gone). And now she is having her monthly bleeding as well. Her body is turning against her, it seems, and yet all she can worry about is Olga. Her sister digs without complaint, but she can’t sleep or eat, and when the bombs start falling, Olga just stands there with a hand tented across her face, staring up at the planes.
In the past few weeks, Vera has learned that anything can become ordinary—sleeping in the dirt, running for cover, digging holes, watching people die, stepping over bodies, smelling flesh burn. But she cannot accept the new Olga, who moves like the blind and laughs giddily when bombs explode around her.
The air-raid alarm rings out. Girls and women scurry out of the trench and into it. They are screaming to one another, pushing each other aside.
Olga is standing beside the trench, her dress torn and dirty. Her long strawberry-blond hair is filthy, frizzy, and held back from her blackened face by a once-blue kerchief. Overhead, German planes begin to fill the sky, their engines droning.
Vera yells for her sister as she scrambles over the broken earth, leading the way, pushing debris aside. “Come on—”
“It sounds like Mama’s sewing machine. ”
Vera turns at that, looks back. Olga is still standing there, too far away, her hand tented over her eyes.
“Run!” Vera yells at the same time the bomb hits.
Olga is there and gone, flung like a rag doll to the side. She falls in a broken heap on the other side of the trench while debris rains down. . . .
Vera is screaming, crying; she crawls out of the trench and over the broken earth to where her sister lies beneath a pile of dirt and rubble. A brick is on Olga’s chest—where did it come from?
Blood gushes from the side of Olga’s mouth and slides through the soot and mud on her cheek. Her breathing is a phlegmy, bubbling cough. “Vera,” she says, shuddering. “I forgot to get down. . . . ”
“You’re supposed to listen to me,” Vera says. She holds her sister to her chest, trying to keep her alive by loving her. “I am your big sister. ”
“Always . . . bossing . . . ”
Vera kisses her sister’s cheek, tries to wipe the blood away, but her hands are so dirty she is just making a mess. “I love you, Olga. Don’t leave me. Please . . . ”
Olga smiles and coughs. Blood gushes from her nose and mixes with dirt. “Remember when we went—”
And she is gone.
Vera sits there a long time, kneeling in the dirt. Until the soldiers come and take Olga away.
Then she goes back to digging. It isn’t that she doesn’t care or doesn’t hurt.
But what else can she do?
Twenty-two
In August, Vera is released from work on the line. She is one of thousands of dazed, solitary women walking in silent groups for home. The trains are still running, although most of them are full all the time, and only the luckiest find space enough to sit or stand. They are evacuating the children of Leningrad again—this time with their mothers—but Vera does not trust her government anymore and will not follow the evacuation order again. Only last week she heard of a train of children that was bombed near Mga. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not. She does not care. It could be true, and that is enough for her.
She is tougher now, after two months spent digging in the black earth and running for shelter. Tough enough to make her way home through countryside she’s never seen. When she is lucky, a transport or a lorry picks her up and takes her as far as they are going, but luck is a thing she has never counted on, and most of the miles to Leningrad, she walks. When she meets soldiers on the road, she asks about Sasha, but she does not get answers. It is no surprise to her.
When she finally makes it to Leningrad, she finds a city as changed as she. Windows are blacked out and crisscrossed in tape. Trenches cut through parks, tearing through grass and flowers. Everywhere she looks are mounds of broken cement—dragon’s teeth, they are called—meant to bar the tanks. Huge iron beams crisscross the city boundaries like the ugly, misplaced bars of a prison. And soldiers move in marching columns through the streets. Already many of them look as broken as she feels; they’ve lost on one front and are moving to another, closer to the city. In their tired eyes, she sees the same fear that is now lodged inside of her: Leningrad is not the impervious city they’d imagined her to be. The Germans are getting closer. . . .
Finally, Vera stands on her own street and looks up at her apartment. Except for the blacked-out windows, it looks as it always did. The trees out front are in full summer bloom and the sky is as blue as a robin’s egg.