Winter Garden

“It is good you tell them your story,” Mama says to Vera when she comes back into the kitchen.

“I couldn’t think of anything else. ” She sits down across from her mother at the rickety table, putting one foot on the empty chair beside her. Though the windows are closed and blacked out, she can still taste ash on her tongue, still smell that strange burned sweetness in the smoke. The world outside can only be seen in patches, in places where the newspaper droops limply away from the glass; the view is no longer red, but rather a dull orangey gold mixed with gray. “Papa used to tell me wonderful stories, remember?”

“I prefer not to remember. ”

“But—”

“Your baba should have been home by now,” Mama says, not looking at her.

Vera feels a sharp clutch in her stomach at that. With all that has gone on tonight, she’d forgotten about her grandmother.

“I am sure she’s fine,” Vera says.

“Yes,” Mama says dully.

But in the morning, Baba is still not back; she is one of the thousands who are never seen again. And news moves through the city as ruinously as last night’s flames.

The Badayev warehouses are burned; all of the city’s food stores are gone.

Leningrad is isolated now, cut off from all help. September drips into October and disappears. The belye nochi is gone, replaced by a cold, dark winter. Vera still works in the library, but it is for show—and ration cards. Few people visit the library or the museums or theaters anymore, and those who do come are looking for heat. In these darkening weeks, when winter’s icy breath is always blowing on the back of your neck, there is nothing except the search for food.

Every day Vera is up at four o’clock in the morning, bundling up in her valenki and woolen coat, wrapping a scarf around her neck so high only her eyes show. She gets in whatever queue for food she can find; it isn’t easy just getting in line, let alone actually finding food. The strong push the weak out of the way. You have to be careful always, on guard. That nice young girl on the corner could steal from you in an instant; so might the old man standing on the stoop.

After work, she comes home to her cold apartment and sits down to a meal at six o’clock. Only it is not much of a meal anymore. A potato if they are lucky, with some kasha that is more water than buckwheat. The children complain constantly, while Mama coughs quietly in the corner. . . .

In October, the first snow falls. Usually this is a time of laughter, when children run out to the parks with their parents and build snow angels and forts. Not in wartime, though. Now it is like tiny specks of white death falling over their ruined city. Its pretty white layer covers all their defenses—the dragon’s teeth, the iron bars, the trenches. Suddenly the city is beautiful again, a wonderland of arching bridges and icy waterways and white parks. If you don’t look at the crumbling buildings or burned-out heaps of brick where once a store had stood, you could almost forget . . . until seven o’clock. That is when the Germans drop the bombs. Every night, like clockwork.

And once the snow starts to fall, it never stops. Pipes freeze. Trolleys come to a stop and remain stuck in the accumulating snow. There are no tanks or trucks in the road anymore, no marching troops. There are just poor, bundled-up women like Vera, moving through the white landscape like refugees in search of anything resembling food. There is not a pet to be seen in Leningrad these days. Rations are cut almost every week.

Vera trudges forward. She is so hungry that it is difficult to keep moving, difficult sometimes even to want to keep moving. She tries not to think about the seven hours she spent in line today and focuses instead on the sunflower oil and oil cakes she was able to get. Behind her, the red sled she drags glides through the deep drifts, catching every now and then on things hidden in the snow—a twig, a rock, a frozen body.

The corpses began showing up last week: people still dressed for the weather, frozen in place on park benches or on the stoops of buildings.

You learn not to see them. Vera cannot believe that this is true, but it is. The hungrier and colder you get, the more your vision funnels to where you can’t see anyone beyond your own family.

She’s four blocks from her apartment and her chest aches so much that she longs to stop. She even dreams of it—she’ll sit on that bench and lean back and close her eyes. Maybe someone will come by with some hot, sweet tea and offer her a cup. . . .

She draws in a ragged breath, ignoring the gnawing emptiness in her belly. Those are the kinds of dreams that get you killed. You sit down to rest and just die. That’s how it happens in Leningrad now. You have a little cough . . . or an infected cut . . . or you feel sluggish and want to stay in bed for just an hour or so. And then suddenly you’re dead. Every day at the library, it seems, someone fails to show up. In that absence they all know: they’ll never see that person again.

She puts one foot in front of the other and slowly makes her way in the snow, dragging her sled behind her. She has come almost a mile from the Neva River, where she collected a gallon of water from a hole in the ice. At the apartment, she pauses just long enough to catch her breath and then begins the long climb to the second floor. The gallon of water she’d had on the sled feels icy cold against her chest and the cold makes her lungs hurt even more.

The apartment is warm. She notices instantly that another chair is broken. It lies on its side, two legs missing and the back hacked up. They cannot all sit at the table now, but what does it matter? There’s precious little to eat.

Leo is wearing his coat and his boots. He is sprawled on the kitchen floor, playing war with a pair of metal trucks. At her entrance, he cocks his head and looks at her. For a second it is as if she’s been gone a month instead of a day. She sees the way his cheeks have caved in on themselves, the way his eyes seem too big for his bony face. He doesn’t look like a baby boy at all anymore.

“Did you get food?” he says.

“Did you?” Anya says, rising from her place on the bed, carrying her blanket with her.

“Oil cakes,” Vera says.

Anya frowns. “Oh, no, Mama. ”

Vera’s heart actually hurts when she hears this. What she wouldn’t give to bring home potatoes or butter or even buckwheat. But oil cake is what they have now. No matter that it used to be fed to cattle, or that it tastes like sawdust or that it’s so hard that only an ax will cut it. They use shavings to make pancakes that are barely edible. But none of that matters. What matters is that you have something to eat.

Vera knows that comfort will not help her children. This is a lesson she has learned since the snow began to fall on Leningrad. Her children need strength and courage now, as they all do. It does no good to cry or whine for that which cannot be had. She goes over to the fallen chair and breaks off another leg. Cracking it in two pieces, she feeds it into the burzhuika and puts the water she brought home in a pot to boil. She will put yeast in it to fill their bellies. It won’t help, of course, but they’ll feel better for a while.

She bends down, feeling the hot popping in her joints at the movement, and puts a hand on Leo’s curls. His hair, like all of theirs, is stiff from dirt. Baths are luxuries these days. “I have some more of the story for tonight,” she says, waiting for his enthusiasm, but he just nods a little and shrugs.