Ice Road, page 40
Here they are, the compromises that once obsessed if not a nation then at least those men, like Boris Aleksandrovich, who thought they could reshape the nation, now reduced to this: survival. And the irony is that it’s easier in some ways, at least for Boris Aleksandrovich, than it ever was before. Now the decisions he must take are clear and for the good of all the city. Now he is one of them. Also hungry. Also determined to survive.
He must soon go: the cold is eating into his bones. He looks around. Dusk is already on its way, the grey of a pendulous sky tinged a vague pink glow, either a sunset or a distant battle, he can’t tell which. He knows they should get going, that they must be back by dark. He turns and begins to retrace his steps, thinking as he does so that with his mother dead, Lina at the front and Ilya evacuated, he could move in with Tanya, but knowing that he won’t – why change the habit of a lifetime? – and then, climbing the fence, he gives brief thanks that Natasha has Dmitry Fedorovich to look after her. Then it’s back into the car, and he’s off.
A Promise Delivered
It took a war to get Natasha into a factory. A war to get her to do Dmitry Fedorovich’s bidding (his wife at last a living example of Soviet womanhood, a worker), although it wasn’t Dima who had made her volunteer: it was entirely her decision.
She could have gone elsewhere. With most of the able-bodied men out of the city and the proscription against employing the wife of an enemy of the people cancelled by the requirements of unity, even the Kirov theatre would have had her back. And if she had opted for the Kirov, Dmitry Fedorovich wouldn’t have stopped her. Since that moment in the station when he pulled Katya out at her command, he seems more scared of her than she of him.
She didn’t, however, choose the Kirov. As part of the unspoken bargain she had made with an unnamed deity (in whom, of course, she does not believe), in return for his sparing of Katya, she chose one of Leningrad’s newly established small munitions factories.
A bargain delivered: Katya was spared while the train in which she would have left was bombed, the survivors being eventually returned, battered, to the city.
A fair bargain then? Of course: Katya is alive. For the moment. And anyway, the passion Natasha once felt for the Kirov – for anything other than her daughter – has drained away. She has learned what it is just to make do.
There is comfort in this life of set routine, in getting up to lay out the breakfast and to eat, in making the journey on foot to work and thus increase her rations and their food, to stand all day in the makeshift munitions factory, her hands pushed through two holes in the protective mesh screen while she, carefully, carefully, threads fuses into the noses of 45mm artillery shells. Hers is an exclusive task, those nimble fingers that once constructed fantastical models from soft materials – damasks, crêpes, satins and velvets – having been remarked on and selected for the factory’s especially dangerous top floor.
It doesn’t bother her. She has little sense of personal danger. Unthinking she mostly is at work, insensate, an automaton whom few can rival for the speed and accuracy with which she arms each shell. She has become like Kolya, both of them Stakhanovites, although in his case he worked zealously to achieve his status, while what she does, she does almost by default. She has a talent for this work, a talent, if not for killing, then at least for the arming of those who do.
Her work is now over for the day and she must hurry. Katya, who spends most of the day alone indoors, is waiting.
Thinking about Katya is something she will not allow herself to do at work in case it makes her fingers slip. Now, as she walks towards the exit, her heart starts beating faster. What if there had been an air raid? Or, just as dangerous, what if the stove went out?
No. She will not think like that. She will not panic. Panic is destructive. She breathes in, carefully, to calm herself but not so deeply as to bring on a fainting fit.
It will be dark outside. These days it mostly is. And cold as well. Deathly cold. She winds her long scarf first around her head, then her neck and, finally, she uses it to overlay her mouth, tucking it in so only her eyes and nose are left exposed. Her boots she has already stuffed with paper: now she pulls them on. Next her gloves: they have been frozen, defrosted and dried out twice today (she collected her ration in her break). They also go on. Only one more task, one that she almost forgot, before she can step out. She slips a gloved hand into her coat pocket and – yes – precautions confirmed for there it is, that hard piece of bread, a makeweight that she has saved for the journey home. Preparations complete. She pushes at the door.
It’s as she expected: cold and dark. Not completely dark, however: the moon is rising, its soft yellow light turned an electric blue by the undulating layers of snow that envelop the pavements and the road. It is very quiet, deathly quiet, the drifts of untouched snow deadening any sound from those flitting figures who, like black and muffled bats, go about their business. A whitened world. A world passed by.
This snow has lain untouched for some three weeks, only the main roads being now kept clear. Without the manpower to shift the others, these high drifts will remain either until the blockade is lifted or until the spring thaws arrive. Whichever is sooner.
Inhaling sharply against the bite of cold, Natasha steps out. Her boots sink in but only to ankle depth. She takes another step. The snow has compacted, a hard crust forming, which makes it easier to walk, snow crunching underfoot. It’s colder even than she expected. It always is these days, a result either of the hunger she permanently feels or of an especially savage winter: she can’t tell which.
It has been a terrible winter so far, a legendary winter, although the freezing temperatures have at least brought one benefit: the relative absence of disease. Despite the continued bombing which has left large sections of the city without water or functioning drains, there has been no outbreak of cholera and little typhus. There isn’t much disease at all in fact, only death brought about by bombing or through that syndrome – dystrophy – that has insinuated itself into the collective vocabulary. Dystrophy – the effects of starvation, that along with dysentery, diphtheria and bronchopneumonia, comes, like a medal, in first and second classes. There is no third class. Only death.
A biting wind. Her eyes water as she feels its sting against her nose. Pulling the scarf tighter, she speeds up, but not too much: if she were to slip, she might not be able to summon up the strength to drag herself out. And so she walks in this hushed and whitened world, still enough of the romantic to see the beauty in the rolling snowdrifts that make such contrast to the stalactites of sharp ice that cling to every surface. She loves its serenity, and the vastness of its canvas, and she also loves the silence that, when there is no bombardment, is almost total.
The city has been like this before, in her parents’ and her grandmother’s time. The old woman never tired of telling Natasha of one such period, after the revolution, when the roads were also left unswept. Her grandmother who has herself now been relegated to memory for, despite the extra rations Papa’s position generated, his mother was one of the earliest victims of this modern, dystrophic plague.
A lucky victim. She died before the ground had hardened. Not for her the fate of countless others who were to follow, their bodies either remaining where they fell, buried by the snow, or else taken in one of those pine-scented lorries to the Piskarovskoye cemetery and there piled up in preparation for a lessening of the cold that might allow the digging of one deep, communal grave.
Death. In all its manifestations and extremes. In private, behind closed doors, death by starvation, old people’s beds turned into their hidden tombs, or half-dead children discovered cradling their fully dead mothers, or bodies sinking without trace under drifts of snow. Or a much more public death, people blown from sleep, their dying selves hurled out, flesh shredded or turned to brittle stone as they lie, abandoned, the iced-up shell of human beings, while around them their possessions, clues to a life ended, litter the street, exposed for all to see .
That’s what must have happened in that building over there. Natasha stops to look. Only for a moment, or so she tells herself. She looks. One whole wall has been blown away. Two floors annihilated although one remains, so that there sits, half-exposed, a three-walled room, stranded up in space, like a stage set whose play is a testimony to the end of life if not of all possessions for there, in front of a textbook window, a samovar stands neatly on a small table on which a white, embroidered cloth is laid, and, beside it, on a divan bed, are pillows piled in orderly fashion as if the bed has just been made. A stage set whose actors might be imminently expected except for the fact that, directly above the bed, the ceiling has been blown away, the wallpaper droops down low enough to cover a picture, and there, a little further along, is a pile of bricks that once made up a wall.
Strange. Natasha doesn’t remember noticing this destruction on her way to work. Which means the damage must be recent. So was there an air raid so close to the factory today? An air raid? That didn’t register with her? She can’t believe it. No matter that she has grown used to working through sirens and the thundering of bombs, a bombardment strong enough to fell a building could not have seemed so insignificant that it slipped her notice. Could it? No. It isn’t possible. There must be another explanation. Perhaps the building was already like this and she hadn’t noticed, or perhaps, memory lapses being a side-effect of near starvation, she had noticed and has since forgotten.
She comes to. Time has elapsed. Danger. She doesn’t know how much time she’s wasted but she knows that it is far too much: she is beginning to feel sleepy and, more frightening, also warm. She must get going. She has to. For Katya’s sake.
She takes the hard bread from her pocket and, having moistened its tip with her saliva, bites off a tiny piece. It isn’t really bread. Not as they once knew bread to be. It has a muddy flavour and is hard to chew, baked with more wood cellulose than flour. She feels it in her mouth, gumming up. She swallows hard.
Despite the way her feet are hurting, she forces them forward. Hurting is good: danger in these snow-filled wastes lies not in pain but in its absence. She walks, steadily, without enthusiasm, driven by her need to reach Katya, trudging down the street. Her head is lowered, and her ears alert, not to the threats from the skies, but to that twin of dystrophy – cannibalism – that stalks the streets. Even though rumour has it that it is children who, with their sweeter flesh, are the target for roving cannibals, who knows whether she, hungry but not yet starving, might not, now that parents keep their children in, make an acceptable substitute. Granted she is much bonier than she used to be, but she still has flesh on her, a result not of her father’s beneficence but of her husband’s.
Dmitry Fedorovich will be wondering where she is. She speeds up a little, turning the corner. She is in a main road now: the going is much easier, for although its centre has been cleared of snow, fuel shortages ensure that what traffic passes is only sporadic. She walks beside the abandoned tram line, past the dark hulk of a burnt-out tram and another one that, although undamaged, is utterly iced up.
It’s been some weeks now – she can’t remember how many – since the trams stopped running. Since then, what activity survives, its impetus and focus being the maintenance of life, is carried on by foot, the only other method of transportation being a sled like that one over there, a child’s sled which, hauled behind a slowly trudging woman, contains a bundled, lumpy form, the child herself, perhaps, or her corpse, or just a pile of wood.
Natasha keeps moving, slowly following the tram lines until they bend to the right, when she parts ways with them, going to the left. Her journey nearly over.
One glance towards the frozen Neva. There is no water on its surface, only a long sweep of snow and ice out of which the occasional dark outline of a sunken boat extrudes, and there, by the bank, a queue of dark-shawled women, ignoring the shrouded corpses of the dead, waiting to fish water out of an ice hole. Natasha turns away, walking a few more blocks. And then finally she is: home.
Home. Either the outside door is iced up or else she is weaker than she’d thought. It takes an effort to push through and when she does she’s met by a darkness and cold almost as intense as outside. No lamp to light her progress. No fire, either, in the hallway. She walks gingerly and with great attention, feeling her way not only because it is dark but also because the floor is bound to be slick with ice – the result of water spilling from buckets as they’re carried in. And in addition to these reasons, slowly is the manner in which she always walks when on her way to Dmitry.
Katya. She reminds herself: Katya will be there. That’s why she goes home. For Katya whom she loves.
As to her feelings for Dmitry Fedorovich: it’s not only that she no longer fears him. It is more than that. It is, she says it to herself: it is that she hates him, when, that is, she has the strength to summon up her hatred.
Her hatred is irrational. What Dima did to her and Katya she knows to have been inadvertent: his taking of the child to the station was not his way of making sure she didn’t leave. It couldn’t have been. She’d found her letter where she’d left it. Unopened. He hadn’t known of her intentions.
Nevertheless she hates him. She hates him for . . . For everything he represents. For being alive when Kolya is dead. For being there when Jack is gone. She hates that twisted smile of his, that unchanging plainsong of his instruction that is his only form of conversation and she also hates his silence. She hates him. Full stop. She is consumed by her hatred, as if that slogan: Death for death. Blood for blood . . . that is everywhere in Leningrad has wormed its way inside of her, turning her detestation of her husband into something live. She hates the Germans, yes, of course she does, for everything they have done and everything they want to do, but on top of that she hates an individual. She hates Dmitry Fedorovich. With all her strength. All her waning strength: She. Hates. Him. And hates herself for being with him.
She is at the inner door, pushing it open, carrying her hatred in and then setting it aside to call:
‘Katya,’ for which she is almost instantly rewarded. Katya, all bundled up as Natasha makes sure she always is, comes running from the kitchen, Katya squealing in excitement, wrapping her arms around Natasha’s legs, this undersized six-year-old who, like six-year-olds all over Leningrad, has learned to stay alone all day.
Natasha leans down and, with an effort that daily increases, picks up Katya, hugging her, kissing her repeatedly, until finally she stops long enough to say: ‘Is Dyadya Dmitry home?’
Katya’s answer is a nod.
Pleasure dispensed with. Natasha puts Katya down. They go into the kitchen. The place where life is lived.
Dmitry Fedorovich is sitting at the table, a living testimony to correctness who says,
‘Good evening, Natasha,’ as he always does, while she answers, with equal and habitual formality:
‘Good evening, Dmitry Fedorovich,’ before taking off her gloves and boots and coat and unwinding her scarf, laying them all close to the fire to ensure that they will be dried by the morrow.
He has fuelled the stove as he always does. He hasn’t, however, bothered to start the food. He never does. She hates him for that also. She sets to.
Thanks to this same intolerable man there is on the table the makings of a feast the like of which few people in Leningrad can these days boast. Apart from what’s left of his bread ration to which she adds her own, he has brought back (has scavenged is the way she thinks of it) a couple of turnips, a few slivers of compressed meat, some discoloured potatoes, a dried herring, some small spoonfuls of powdered egg, a portion of sheep-gut jelly, and there, wonder of wonders, a half-tin of condensed milk.
So that’s why Katya was so excited, Natasha thinks, looking at her daughter, thinking also that it’s not that Katya’s eyes have enlarged, it’s that her face has shrunk and then she thinks that it’s just like Dmitry to leave the condensed milk under Katya’s nose, making the poor child wait. She says: ‘Do you want some?’
That’s all the permission Katya needs. She grabs the tin, gripping it with both hands and, throwing back her head, sucks up the thick syrup so greedily and so fast that Natasha is forced to grip hold of her daughter and to straighten her up, saying: ‘Gently, Katya, gently,’ before removing the tin not because she begrudges Katya this treat (although, by the look on Dmitry Fedorovich’s face, he does) but because, in this time of death, vomiting on your own gluttony is just one of many ways to go.
‘I’ll make something equally delicious,’ she promises Katya, picking her up and depositing her in a chair by the stove, before setting to work.
The herring and powdered egg she sets aside. Although Dmitry Fedorovich never comes home empty-handed (where does he get it all?) she is careful to preserve their stocks. That’s the thing about a siege: you never know. His supplies might dry up, or one of them might get sick or even (and she watches this thought passing almost wistfully) he might get himself killed. But then she smiles at the absurdity of this, for he is the type who always survives.
‘Mama?’
Katya’s voice pulls her back from hatred, and Katya is right. She needs to cook. They need to eat. She uses a small portion of the jelly as an oil in which to fry some of the vegetables and a half-portion of the meat, which she serves along with a kind of porridge she makes from bread.
A feast indeed.
They sit together at the table which has been pushed near to the stove. This is the way it also goes: their living space depleted day by day. First, the retreat into the kitchen, and then, gradually, this homing in on the circle of maximum heat around the stove, where everything, cooking, eating and sleeping, is accomplished. Which brings her to another way in which to hate Dmitry Fedorovich. She hates his body, hates its proximity that after such a long period of separation stays close to hers in sleep. She hates him for the way he lies, instantly asleep, and the way he sleeps, as still as stone, and for the way he wakes, quietly, like a thief and the way, awake, he is so predictable for she knows that any moment now he’ll say those same words, ‘very good’. He always says it at this point in the evening, and she mouths the two words to herself, ‘very good’, as his voice confirms her expectation:
