Ice Road, page 39
I thought: I’m seeing things, but no, I looked again and there it was. A hand. Four fingers. A gash where the thumb should be. I looked some more, expecting, hoping to find the arm to which the hand belonged, but there was no arm, just that hand where I had fallen, me, looking at it, wondering if it was mine, and then suddenly, just as suddenly as it had earlier gone, my hearing came back and I could hear the shriek of a warden’s whistle and, above that, high-pitched screaming and I raised myself, using my two, whole hands, thinking that other wasn’t mine, and looking to the bridge where an engineer was winding frantically at its mechanism. Those wheels turning as another bomb came cannonading down, hitting the water, water spraying up and then a torrent splashing down, the pavement awash as the teeth of the bridge cogs bit one against the other, the engineer winding, his responsibility, his bridge being raised, winding against the falling of more bombs and the screams of those who, caught on the bridge, were fighting to hold on, even as more bombs fell, and me, kneeling there, unable to tear my eyes from the sight of that engineer who, winding with all his might, had tears coursing down his cheeks, winding because he had to raise the bridge or lose it, crying because he could see that same woman as I could, that one, over there, with the dark red scarf, her fingernails scrabbling vainly at the surface of the now almost vertical bridge, her grip slipping, herself silent now as slowly she slid off, and still the engineer kept winding. He had to save the bridge.
Whether we saved the woman, even though we eventually managed to fish her from the river, is anybody’s guess. The water was cold and she, like all of us, malnourished. She was shivering when we brought her up, and for a long time afterwards, even though we poured cups of hot water down her throat.
That’s all it takes these days – a chill – to snuff out a human life. That’s the lottery we endure. The first shell falls on you – you die; you get wet – you die; you slip and can’t get up: you die; and if it isn’t you, then it’s somebody else, somebody you have never seen before, somebody you don’t necessarily ever see, but only their unattached hand.
Death. In all its many variations.
And here it comes again: impending death. That monotonous knocking of the metronome, that pulse of wireless life, has been disrupted. Listen to its speeding up: a warning. And now, into the silence created by the absence of the metronome travels a wailing siren and a voice calling out through loudspeakers, that unchanging piece of agitation, rising above the siren and the tolling of church bells:
‘This is the local air-defence headquarters. Air raid! Air raid!’
‘Air raid! Air raid!’ Anya hears.
She is on the roof and has been there for a while. She has been checking everything is in place, intending when that is done to go inside. Now, however, hearing the loudspeaker, she pulls her coat to. She will not leave. Not until the air raid is over: not until her job is done.
She stands. Waiting. From a distance she looks to be a slim, almost fragile figure. Close up, however, she does not look so frail. There’s a toughness about the way she holds herself, a wiriness displayed not so much in her muscle definition, although she does have some of that, as in her expression. She’s a plain girl whose features are evenly spaced and unexceptional, as if the whole has been put together to escape attention, everything that is except her eyes and it isn’t even the eyes themselves, for they are also ordinary, a common brown and sized to match her inoffensive nose and conventional mouth. No, what makes her, if not beautiful, then at least striking, is the expression in those eyes, for no matter where she looks and for how long, she never blinks, her gaze remaining hard-edged, impenetrable and, at the same time, startlingly ferocious. She stands, a stick figure on the roof tops, glaring, as if that fierce gaze could hold back war.
‘Air raid! Air raid!’ The fourth in as many hours and yet she doesn’t flinch.
How old is she? Fourteen? Fifteen? Sixteen? There is no way of knowing. She is grown, that’s all that can be confidently said. She is no longer at school and hasn’t been since the outbreak of war. She doesn’t mind. She, who had been the most diligent of students and the most successful, always top of her class, no longer even thinks of school. This is the way she lives, that stern gaze of hers focused not on what has gone, but on what needs doing next. And so she stands, as darkness falls, solitary in her place, on the roof top of her building. Her domain. Hers. She chose it or it chose her: it doesn’t matter which. All that matters is that she is there.
‘Air raid! Air raid!
She has been guarding this place almost since the start of the war. She knew, you see – she always does – that this is where she had to be. She was here through August and into this September, standing in this same place as the Germans bombed and burned the Badayev warehouses down. She stood, unflinching, watching the conflagration from her high vantage point, the sky brightened by a full moon, lit blue by falling bombs, sirens ringing, and she watched as the fire took hold, tongues of yellow flames licking almost delicately over the distant roof tops before they began to darken and shoot up, burning more fiercely, reddening the horizon until the heavens turned crimson, that blood-red taint of a city half-ablaze, that flush in time driven out and in its place a mountain of thick black smoke, clouds of it billowing, darkening the night and filling it with the smell of burning meat and the acrid aftertaste of caramelised sugar, Leningrad bleeding out its food supply. And all this time, Anya had stood, waiting, for her turn to come.
‘Air raid! Air raid!’
And now, with the moon a dim sliver in the darkness, she hears that sound and still she waits. She is ready to do what is required.
To risk her life?
Yes, perhaps to risk her life, although this is not the way she thinks of it. Not for her such grandiosity. She is a Soviet child. A materialist. A young woman without a past: a comrade constructed by the present, her concentration on the tangible and on the things that are required.
And here it begins again. No need for any loudspeaker. Through the wall of darkness there are sporadic flashes of distant light: the German guns, and the jagged reply of the AA stations. The time has arrived.
If Anya were to lean over the edge, she knows she would see the occupants of her building, Irina Davydovna included, agitated ants, fleeing their building in search of shelter. Not her. She never flees. She never wants protection. She is not frightened. She will stay here until her task is done.
‘Here they come,’ she hears, a fragile human voice reaching out over the roof tops and, yes, here they do come, the planes, that far-off buzzing, an irritation it might seem, if you didn’t know what the sound prefigured, and, yes, again, the noise changing, no longer a distant annoyance but a droning that intensifies until it saturates the air, so loud they must be very close. Yes, here they are, the first, black, shadowed forms in the darkest night, a knot of them swooping, their movement jagged from the upflung panels of light so they seem to be flying in staccato bursts, their deadly choreography driven forward by the gunfire that pursues them, bombs falling. Then the riposte, the crackle of masonry and glass, bricks and windows, breaking up and there, as a cloud of dust precedes them, the planes are almost overhead, the building shaking with the impact of another building’s fall, and she can hear a despairing shout, the jangle of a fire engine, but she takes no notice for she must make sure to keep her footing and to ignore anything but the job in hand. The one she knows so well. That she does so well.
Time distorts as it always seems to do up here. Already the planes have moved on, the sound of their engines fading, and yet what they have dropped is only now floating down, blizzarding the sky, before it lands and drifts along the roof tops. She looks across, watching as this lethal rain of phosphorus bombs begins.
At first there are only small darts of isolated blue that fall, but as they fall they seem to increase in numbers and intensity, small rivulets that interweave until they are merged into one indistinguishable mass, a river of fire, sapphire and white, that dances across the tiles, almost playful in the way it dives and soars, that warmth that burns and that, burning, destroys, and all across the roof tops are other figures, Anya’s compatriots, frenetically at work, trying to stop their buildings burning down, and there, a man has lost the battle, himself alight, rolling across his roof top with the fire, away from it if he can, pursued by fire and bringing fire with him, an unearthly screaming that Anya ignores because her turn has come, the storm lighting up her domain, and she puts away extraneous thought which in this case is any thought at all.
She is fine-tuned, her makeshift pincers catching up a firebomb and, carrying it across the roof so as to drop it in a waiting tin, herself turning away but registering the sound of water spluttering and of the bomb inscribing its angry, dying circles, boiling until eventually it fizzles out, but she is already elsewhere on the roof top, catching up another and, at almost the same time, returning, using her pincers to pick out the used-up remains and throw them off so as to make room in the tin.
Leningrad is burning as bombs continue to rain down, rescue bells clanging desperately, and all the while, this young woman who, with her stiff body and her unassailable consciousness, can often look clumsy but now moves without a pause, stretching up, swooping down, a graceful dancer on the roof tops, caught up in the wildness of necessity, explosives lighting up the sky, planes battling now for the air space above the city, while her intensity is channelled into this one activity, not this saving of this building, but this thing that she must do because . . .
Because she knows she must?
Yes, perhaps, but it’s not only that. It’s because . . .
Because she likes it, yes, the thought pushing through, herself alone, in this moment of her frenzy and she registers the reality that here she can be different because here she feels . . .
She feels herself to be something, such an alien feeling that she has to grope to find the word to describe it, and here, in this moment of her distraction, the word comes to her, a strange word for her to think of at this time, at any time, a strange word for her . . .
Happy.
Yes. That is it. She is happy, that stretch of her mouth not the grimace of her endeavour that she has been telling herself it is, but a smile. A real smile. Her own. That nobody will ever see. *
Down in the shelter we wait for the moment when the all-clear sounds. We are packed together on long benches ranged against the walls. We are women, mostly, young and old with our children, or like me: on my own.
What conversation there is is thin. In the beginning, when war broke out, we would talk to break the tension, but this is all now so normal that some amongst us on the surface don’t even bother coming down. I wouldn’t either, if I had the choice, but as head of our building’s defence I have to set an example. So I lean back against the wall. I am tired: oh, to sleep in my own bed. I close my eyes.
Just as I am dropping off, I hear a voice sounding in my ear:
‘She’s brave, your girl.’
I straighten up, and look to my left. There’s an old woman there who smiles, a toothless grin, and says:
‘We rely on her.’
‘Yes. She’s brave.’
Me smiling back, although what I would rather be inclined to say is that Anya isn’t brave, it’s just that she has no fear, never has, which is not the same. But I don’t say it. I hold my tongue.
And so I sit in silence.
It’s a long raid and a noisy one. No chance of any sleep. The conversation gradually picks up. I half-listen. I hear about a new bomb they’re using, a magnetic, naval mine, especially powerful, that they send down on a long parachute, and, hearing that, I think that’s what I must have seen today, and that’s why its impact was so great. But I’m not really listening any more, not just because the latest advances, especially when it comes to things that can blow me up, never have impressed me but also because I’m thinking.
What am I thinking?
When it dawns on me what it is, it surprises me. I’m thinking about Anya. Now, I grant you, this itself is not unusual. She’s kept me on my toes, that one, over the years. What’s different, though, is the way I am thinking about her now.
I am thinking of her with fondness. Yes, that’s the way I’d put it. Not with love, but definitely with fondness. She’s difficult, no doubt about it. Impossible some might say, either to know or to like. But one thing about her: at least she is consistent. No two sides to her. If she doesn’t seem to like me much, well then, at least I know it isn’t personal: she doesn’t much like anyone. And the thing is, and come on, I might as well spit it out, I’ve got nothing else to do as I sit here, breathing in stale air, the thing is, I am used to her. I am.
‘Your girl’ they call her, and, if anybody were to ask my opinion, I wouldn’t say they’re wrong. In spite of her resistance, and mine as well, she has become my girl. I worry about her on the roof. She has no feeling for her own security. No drive for self-protection. A fanatic, she is, this I have always known, but now she has become my fanatic. I worry. I sit here, worrying, waiting for the all-clear to sound, so I can go out and make sure that she’s survived and thinking all the time, dreaming up a way of making her come down.
Memory (3)
On the way back from a visit to the front, Boris Aleksandrovich emerges from a reverie whose focus was the intricacies of the allocation of food to find himself being driven past a series of snow-covered fields. He looks out absently through the window, watching the fields rolling by. They stretch out, far into the distance, vast and vacant in this section of Leningrad’s suburbs that have been completely evacuated. A picture of tranquillity, it seems, an undisturbed and uniform winterscape, promising the kind of peace that can no longer be found in any other part of life. Taking in the sight, Boris Aleksandrovich thinks that there’s something familiar about that field coming up over there, and before he has time to think about what he’s doing, he hears himself saying:
‘Pull up, comrade.’
They’re at the edge of the front in a place that, if the Germans manage to gain any further ground, will soon also be occupied. Occasional gashes in the snow mounds bear testimony to the way that shells, falling short of the city, have the habit of landing here. Hearing Boris Aleksandrovich’s instruction, however, the driver doesn’t even blink. He’s seen so much danger it no longer frightens him, and, besides, pulling up will give him the chance he’s been wanting to roll a clump of makhorka tobacco along with a sprinkling of nicotine seasoning dust into a piece of Pravda that he’s specially saved, and there to set light to the ungainly, homemade cigarette in the open where the stink and crackling of ersatz tobacco will not bother Boris Aleksandrovich, who has anyway stepped away from the car and is already clambering over a low fence.
It’s so quiet: after the clamour of the front line and the desperation of the city it feels intoxicating. Boris keeps walking, his boots sinking deep, walking for the joy of the moment and for its solitude, and as he goes it comes back to him that the reason he recognised this place is that he was here, once, years ago, with Jack Brandon.
A line of trees, their branches weighed down by heavy clumps of snow, stands stark against the whitened land just beyond the point where Boris stops. To make his way towards them, or to any other point that could conceal the stalking shadow of a man, would be madness, so he continues to stand in place as he tries to remember what it was he could have been doing here with Jack all those years ago.
Jack’s factory, he remembers, was close by – they must have come from there – but that’s as much detail as his memory will release. To work out why they’d settled on that previous stop, or what they could have been talking about in this same field, is to summon back another life, one that took place so long before the onset of war it’s completely out of reach. The only way that Boris Aleksandrovich can even half-recall it is through his senses as he is doing now, standing and remembering the familiarity of the field, how quiet it had also seemed then, and how fresh it had smelled, a contrast he registers with the present because now this emptiness is heavy with the stink of battle, of cordite and the acrid stench of heavy gasoline, of burning meat and rotting flesh, this mixture of odours, although whether it’s being carried to him by the wind or has so effectively penetrated his clothes that it travels with him wherever he might go, he doesn’t rightly know.
What he does know, and of this he is completely certain, is that there is no going back. He can’t stand and remember what he had said to Jack, or Jack to him. He can’t bring back that time. It’s gone, driven away not only by war but by the years leading up to it, by the things Boris Aleksandrovich has had to do, and the things he didn’t manage.
As has Jack. He’s no longer part of the picture. He has gone. Somewhere. Caught up, probably, as Boris Aleksandrovich is, by war.
There is little prospect that they will ever meet again. And little prospect either, Boris thinks, that he and many more of the leningradtsy will survive the war. That any of them will.
That’s what Boris Aleksandrovich was thinking before the familiarity of the field attracted his attention. He was thinking of the people trapped inside the city and of the dwindling food stocks; of the diminishing fuel supplies; of the engineers, hovering at the edges of Lake Ladoga, waiting for the ice to thicken up sufficiently to take the weight of even the lightest horse. All of them are mindful of the fact that an ice road across the lake will probably only become possible after it is already too late to save great sections of the population.
The number of people now collapsing in their schools and streets, their factories and government offices and their apartments, is growing. The corpses are beginning to pile up as the ground hardens, hunger turned to malnutrition and then starvation and finally death, and in the midst of this there’s nothing that men like Boris Aleksandrovich can do but make sure that this deprivation is as evenly distributed as is possible, the city functioning long after the time when the materials that are necessary to keep such a city on its feet have disappeared.
