Val Hall, page 7
The barrages and air attacks continued, though, just so as to make sure that the city knew what was out there. Buildings cracked and crumbled; debris littered the streets; people hurried and scurried, desperate to be in a sheltered place before the next wave came.
Irina Morozova and her son Yuri were caught in the open on Nevsky Prospekt when a particularly vicious air assault was hurled onto the city on September 19th. They never came home.
Masha initially froze into a figure of despair and disbelief when her father stammered out the news to her. It could not be true – her mother, her little brother, they could not just be gone, not like that. But the day on which they were scattered into the bright air faded into night, and another day came, and then another, and Masha woke to how desolate Vassily was, and how much he needed the last member of his family, how much they needed each other – and she turned and clung to him. They began to share every hour, giving each to the other – every hour survived was a gift, from daughter to father, from father to daughter. It was sheer existence, bare and dull, and things only got worse. As September wound down to its burned out close, the city’s supply of food began to look critical, and the fuel reserves, no matter how strictly husbanded, were only adequate to the city’s needs for a month or two, no longer. And winter – the great white Russian winter with its grip of iron-hard ice – winter was crawling towards them now, first slowly then ever faster, a winter with no heat, no food, no comfort. Only a determination, only a pure core of survival.
There was only one way – dangerous, deadly, well within the firing range of the German artillery – in and out of the city – across Lake Ladoga, first by water craft and then, when the lake froze, on a precarious road across the ice that became known as The Road of Life. It was woefully inadequate, and the small amounts of food it could bring in did not begin to take the edge of the increasing hunger. But it served to take out some evacuees.
One of them, together with other musicians of the Philharmonic and a handful of government officials, was Dimitri Shostakovich.
Masha saw him leave, on the first day of October.. She saw him notice her, recognize her, pause – they held each other’s eyes once again for a long moment, and she read in his that he was not done yet, not done with what he was laboring to complete. The strings mourned around him. The high woodwind notes trembled.
Masha nodded at him, once.
Finish it. Write it. Make it worth it.
He might have heard those thoughts, understood them. Or not. His eyes slid away from hers, he frowned again, and turned away. Masha’s head sank, her chin falling to her chest, gathering her coat around her with one thin hand. She did not watch him go; but she felt him leaving, felt him taking the music with him, only the faintest, most tenuous of melodies left to link Masha to him. She closed her eyes, fighting back sudden tears. Somehow she knew that she would never see him again, not face to face, not like this. What she could do, she had done.
Do it for the living. Do it for the ghosts.
October died, and November came.
In a city with no heat, pipes froze and drinking water became hard to get. The city authorities issued ration cards, with workers being handed a daily allowance of 250 grams of bread a day, with everyone else permitted only half of that – and it was only nominally bread, anyway, with half the ingredients in it degenerating into sawdust and cellulose as admixture to eke out supplies of increasingly scarce flour.
The city bared its teeth into the face of all this. That winter, more than two thousand students graduated from the University, and found ways to celebrate. Museums were still open, and even boasted visitors. And despite the Leningrad Philharmonic orchestra having been evacuated, the Leningrad Radio Orchestra struggled on, as the only remaining orchestra in the city. Before she was killed, Irina Morozova had been part of the string section; Vassily still was, playing passionately, playing for both of them now. The orchestra chose – a little ambitiously – Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture’ as their piece for their performance in the dark days of December of 1941; it was broadcast on the first day of January, a brand new year which nobody could bring themselves to think of as being particularly happy. But that was their last hurrah. Vassily came home from the next scheduled rehearsal and told Masha that it had been cancelled – several musicians had died since that last concert, and others were too sick and starved to continue.
“Srabian and Borishev are both dead,” Vassily reported, naming friends. “Petrov is too ill to walk. The Orchestra is disbanded.”
That was the bitter, bitter day on which, in order to keep just a little bit of warmth in the freezing apartment empty of furniture and even of books, Vassily Morozov had burned his violin.
Temperatures dropped to well below freezing. By the end of January, more than 100,000 people were dead, and others were too weak to drag themselves to the food distribution kiosks, even if they were only yards away. There were bodies in the street; the first time she had seen one Masha had been frightened and upset, but she had become used to seeing them. She had become used to seeing people simply drop where they stood in a food queue, and she had become used to seeing others, standing close to them, readying to seize a dropped ration card and spirit it away so that they could maybe get an extra dole of what passed for sustenance – she had even become aware that a person too weak to resist was sometimes helped on their way, so that somebody could get hold of such an extra card. There were so many people dying, everywhere, that it was hard for the authorities to keep track of things; such criminal actions were punished, when perpetrators were caught, but they weren’t pursued.
It had been a while since Masha had seen anything stirring on Leningrad’s streets – no dogs, cats, rats, even crows and the once ubiquitous sparrows. People ate what they could – food, if it was available; anything that might fool them into thinking that they were eating, if it was not. Masha saw things, and heard of more. She saw children abandoned in the street, eating dirt they had dug out from the frozen ground. She saw her neighbors chewing paper and even wood; she saw one woman, a stranger to her, peeling wallpaper in an abandoned apartment not her own and carefully picking off and eating the crusty remnants of the paste that remained on the back of it. She saw two men come to blows over a leather belt – not because of the item itself but because one man wanted to boil the leather for whatever sustenance it still might have held.
She herself was emptied out, hollow, her ribs prominent over her concave stomach. She’d eaten things she could not have conceived of as food. She’d found moldy rind, and gnawed it; there were radishes, once, raw, that tied her abused entrails into knots and nearly killed her. She ate things that simply made her retch them up again, weakly, helplessly, taking out the thing that had offended and every other morsel she had scraped up before, and she could not even weep about it, so tired and so hungry was she.
She even heard, with horror but not without understanding and perhaps even a stab of that pure hunger that told her that the horror might have been easily overcome, rumors of desperate women using one dead child to feed others. What authorities remained took a grim view of this – they went so far as to differentiate between people caught eating meat from corpses, and people who killed another human being for food – the former were imprisoned, and the latter simply shot. Too many of the cannibals were women, with no other way of feeding children. The authorities tried to use clemency where they could.
Masha was stopped on the stairs of their apartment building, as January turned into February and then February began to slide into March, by a gaunt, bearded man she did not initially recognize at all – his eyes were sunken, burning embers in the hollows of his face. He clutched the frightened girl’s shoulders with both bony hands, with more strength than such a walking skeleton should have possessed, and brought that monstrous head closer to peer into her face; she could smell his breath, and it made her gag. There was something in his expression, something that she had become terribly familiar with – something that told her that this man would be dead in twenty four hours, or less.
“Where is my body?” the gargoyle asked her, in a voice barely more than a whisper. It was only then that she really knew him – it was Pyotr Vassilievich Rodinov, who lived in the apartment above theirs. She would still not have been able to identify him by looking at him, if she’d been asked. But it was him – it was definitely him – and he was no longer completely sane. “I don’t know what is happening to me. Where is my body?”
Masha tore free, and ran; she heard him collapse on the stairs as she fled. When she returned, much later, he was still lying there, in a heap of bones that didn’t look like it could ever have been alive, right there on the stairs. There wasn’t even enough meat on him for someone to bother spiriting away the cadaver to gnaw on.
It was supposed to be almost spring outside but it didn’t seem to matter what the calendar said – there was a bonechilling cold outside, but Masha felt as though she needed that as she stumbled into the street, needed that icy touch, as though to cool a fever. She moved without conscious will or destination; huddled against a building was at least one more dead body that she could see, a woman by the looks of it, a black babushka scarf on her head and straggling grey hair escaping from underneath that, but Masha just stared at it as she went past. She’d seen many bodies, by that stage. Another was being pulled listlessly past her, on a sled, by a barely human form who didn’t seem to have enough shape under the huge old army coat that it wore to be even called human – the body on the sled , pitifully muffled in a coat of its own although it clearly no longer needed its comfort, was a child, a little girl; she wore no hat and Masha could see strands of long, lanky hair, long unwashed, that might once have been blonde. Masha pushed her shoulders up around her ears and stuffed her cold hands into her pockets, and staggered on. She had no idea of what time of day it was – public clocks were history and even church bells were not recording the passing of hours, as though they didn’t want to remind the city that another hour of agony was past. She saw a couple of children, no older than Yuri might have been if he was alive, trudging hopelessly while hugging the building for what shelter it could provide. There had been many like them. Too many. Abandoned on the streets, or wandering onto them when all the adults of the family had died and there was nobody left to look after them. She’d asked her father if there was anything they should do and he had just made a helpless gesture with his hands. They could not take on another mouth. Nobody could.
Masha paused, shivering in the cold, as she came upon what had become of the Hotel Astoria – once a stylish hotel, now turned into a sort of hospital where people were brought at practically death’s door, to be given vitamin pills and similar placebo items that the overworked medical staff, what there was of them, could muster. But there seemed to be as many bodies carried out as there were stumbling in. There was little that could be done in the circumstances when the only treatment was wholesome food and wholesome food (or any food) was not to be had.
For a moment she thought she smelled bread, fresh bread, good bread, and her head came up like a hunting dog’s – and then she collapsed back down into herself, knowing it was dream, it was memory, it was impossible, it was the animal instincts in her responding to the thing that seemed like something out of a mythological past, or out of a fairy story, doled out by a princess named Vasilissa standing on a street corner dressed in the raiment of a Firebird and smiling, with the bread hot and steaming in her hand. It felt like something that she might have remembered, something that she would never know again. Overcome with self-pity and with complete hopelessness, Masha stood and wept in the street, with the tears freezing on her cheeks. There were times things had mattered to her – she knew that, she could remember that. There were times that she could think of other things except food. Aimless, disembodied thoughts, like ghosts, wandered across the stage of her consciousness, as though she were listening to someone quite other than herself speak, but recognizing the voice in her head as her own: I am turning into a beast... all I can think about is hunger...
By the time she turned back for home, barely alive, hungry and cold beyond measure, she found her father sitting with a piece of paper in his hand. It looked luminous to her, oddly so, like it was giving out a strange light, and then she shivered as she heard a whisper of violins, a distant rumble of drums.
Shostakovich had finished it. The thing she had heard inside of him. He had begun it here, in the besieged city, and then he had taken it with him when he left; he had finished it before the year was out, in late December, in a place called Kuybushev, where they had brought him when he had left Leningrad. That was sixteen weeks into the siege. That paper in Vassily’s hand...
“They performed Mitya’s symphony, in Kybushev,” Vassily said. “On the fifth of March. He said... he dedicated it to Leningrad. To us. And now it’s been performed, by the Bolshoi Orchestra, in Kuybushev.”
A warmth spread into Masha. Write it, she had said and he had done it – and it was as she had known, it was Leningrad’s music, it was the city’s spirit that lived in it.
“What have you got there, Papa?” Masha asked, looking at the paper trembling in her father’s hands, his fingertips blue with cold where they poked out of the fingerless gloves that he wore.
“This?” he said, and managed a tired smile. “This is from Eliasberg. The conductor. From the Radio Orchestra. He’s had word from Zagorsky and Babushkin, of the Leningrad City Arts Department.”
“There’s a... Leningrad City Arts Department...?” Masha asked, finding it strangely difficult to speak.
“Of course there is,” Vassily said.
“What do they want?”
“They want... they want to have the symphony here. In Leningrad. They want to start rehearsals, they want to start them now. Eliasberg is trying to gather up what’s left of the orchestra. He himself is sick – and it doesn’t matter, that – but many of us... many of us... are gone... or beyond being in any kind of shape to play a symphonic...” He coughed, and lifted one hand to cover his mouth, his face crumpling into a tragic mask. “Some of us don’t even have an instrument left to play on...”
Masha stood watching him for a moment, and then turned and left him sitting there, going into the other room, rooting around in a pile of rags in a corner until she came up with a box with an unmistakable shape, a shape she barely remembered. She opened it, very gently. Inside, cradled in red plush, was a violin – her mother’s violin. The one she could not bear to hand to her father to burn, not even if she froze to death without a fire. She lifted it out now, as though it were made of crystal, and padded back into the room where her father still sat as she had left him. Carrying the violin on both hands, like something rare and precious, she laid it across his forearms, like a child.
Vassily dropped the paper, his hands instinctively curling around the instrument, in love, in astonishment, in disbelief. He raised eyes wide with shock and filled with tears to his daughter’s face.
“Where did this... how did you... this is your mother’s...”
“You have an instrument to play, Papa,” Masha said quietly, the sounds she had once heard swirling around Shostakovich now swirling in this room – she could almost see them, streamers of bright colour, smelling of fresh bread. “You will need it. To play Leningrad’s song.”
VAL HALL 2018
“What do you know about Leningrad?” Eddie asked, sitting with Garvin Grant on a couple of chairs from where they could watch Marya Morozova slump, round-shouldered and with her head bowed, her knotted old hands folded on top of the rug over her lap, and move her lips as though she was holding a silent conversation with someone whom they could not see.
“What’s in the history books,” Garvin said. “I know... the name. I know what you’re talking about. I know what happened.”
“You have no idea what happened,” Eddie said quietly. “History books are always skimpy on details, especially when they are written by people with a vested interest in the details never being known, not really. The Soviet Union – like many before it, and many after, although arguably it was one of the champions at this – was always about saving face. There are many things you will never have heard about – or you wouldn’t have heard about until half a century had passed, and it didn’t seem to matter any more.”
“There was a siege, of sorts. I know that,” Garvin said.
Eddie grimaced. “Of sorts. It lasted for 871 days from September of 1941 to January 1944. By the end of that first year, there was almost no electricity, no heating, no water, and very little by way of sustenance – and there were two more years of this to come. With endless artillery barrages and air raids by the Germans during the siege, with starvation in the city, with at least two failed Russian operations to lift the siege before they finally succeeded. And in those 30 months of siege... the airport and other transport facilities, the factories, the schools, the hospitals, and any number of other buildings that could provide hope or shelter... it was all pounded by long-range artillery and in endless air raids, the church bells were silent but the air raid sirens were always screaming...”
“You sound as though you were there,” Garvin said quietly.
“No, but I know something about such things,” Eddie said. “The history books might tell you that the place had two and a half million residents when the blockade began, nearly half a million of them children. Some of them were evacuated – little by little – over the ‘Road of Life’ across Lake Ladoga, but gaining that road was not in itself a guarantee of any sort, it was sort of open but it was also well within range of enemy guns if it needed to be, and there are accounts of people literally dying as they waited for evacuation to begin, too weak to make it out. More than a million died in that city in less than two a half years. Some died in the barrages or the air raids – but most of them starved to death. There’s a memorial cemetery in St. Petersburg – what was Leningrad that was – today, with almost half a million of those victims buried in it, in mass graves without a stone or a marker, because most of them had nobody left to put one up for them.”
