3 Great Historical Novels (66 page)

Looking back, Elias thought of the winter as a long tunnel. Darkness so complete there was no rest from it. Cold so intense his bones felt frozen to their very centre. But worst of all was the hunger, for it reduced human beings to animals, fighting in the street for food, grovelling through piles of rubbish for scraps, and dying where they fell.

He could feel himself slipping. The civilised exterior he’d built up so painstakingly over twenty years was crumbling, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The process had begun that day in December, shortly after what had proved to be the final concert, when he’d closed the official orchestral logbook for the last time. Even writing had become an effort. With a hand so cold he couldn’t feel what he was doing, he picked up his pen; its weight felt enormous, dragging down onto the page. Clumsily, he managed a few lines in child-like letters. ‘Rehearsal cancelled from today. Nebolsin dead. Malko dead. Petrov too ill to walk. Orchestra can no longer work.’

And from the moment he’d closed the book, everything became a blur. As long as he’d been in front of the orchestra, it had seemed as if he could fight off starvation and fear. Keeping his musicians motivated, though one by one they were collapsing from malnutrition and disease, had driven him on. But at one point during the performance of the
1812
, he’d known they were in serious trouble. The faces in front of him were deathly pale and covered in welts; many had a greenish tinge. During bars of rest, the players put their heads between their knees, or laid down their instruments as if they were made of lead. Each time he raised
his arms to bring in a section, he feared there would be no response.

After the concert was over, no one said a word. The musicians barely looked at each other as they packed up, their heads bowed with exhaustion. The cloths in which they used to wrap their instruments were now used to bind hands and feet blistered from cold. They left silently: without farewells, without talk of a future. Only Nikolai raised a parting hand to Elias, giving him a weak but encouraging smile. There was no energy left for emotion.

Elias walked down the corridor very slowly, stopping several times to lean against the wall. His shoulders burned, and his teeth chattered from a deep-seated chill. That was it, he thought. After what the sharp-eyed assessors had just witnessed, an official order to abandon rehearsals was only a matter of time. But already he and his orchestra were done for. Tchaikovsky’s victory overture had been played by an orchestra of defeated men.

As he headed home through streets blackened with frost and fire, he felt his little remaining strength leaking away. By the time he got back to his apartment block, he’d lost everything he’d ever struggled for: position, status, respect. He was back where he’d started, and his vision blurred from the shame and tragedy of his loss. He sat in the icy stairwell for some time before he could make it up to his own front door.

‘Have you brought the bread?’ His mother’s voice seemed to be
whispering
down the years, an echo from a pre-Revolution St Petersburg, when he’d run errands in a world he’d known nothing about.

‘There’s no bread today, Mother,’ he answered like a dutiful boy.

In the long winter weeks that followed, he crawled through the days half-blinded by grief and rage. The frozen city splintered under the German shells, and bodies piled up at the sides of Nevsky Prospect. Stick-thin women stumbled to the Neva and drew water through holes drilled in the ice. Because Elias’s vision was failing, he tried to make sense of the disintegrating world by listening to it. What sounds did he hear? The grating of sled-runners loaded with corpses. Huge explosions as mass burial pits were created with dynamite. The howls of stray dogs and cats, slaughtered by Leningraders desperate for meat.

Most of all, he remembered the sound of his mother’s breath, rasping through the icy apartment. He would pause at the door, exhausted from the long haul of the stairs, and listen for her breathing, terrified that while he’d been gone her heart would have stopped. But then he heard it, hoarse, irregular, sawing the darkness in two. And her voice also
reached him, creeping out from the heap of moth-eaten wool on her bed. ‘Karl Elias? Is that you?’

Sometimes, if he had any energy left, he’d make a joke. No, he would say, it was the delivery man, bringing cod-liver pâté and lingonberry sauce. The first time he’d said this, his mother laughed — the first laugh he’d heard for a long time. But as her flesh melted off her bones and her mind grew cloudier, she stopped hearing what he said. She simply asked, over and over, for food. In fact, there was nothing but soup, usually made from grey cabbage and water boiled on the tiny oil-fuelled stove. The stench from the hard leaves was unbearable; it seeped into the walls and bedding, and when Elias lay down in his clothes to sleep, he smelt it in his hair, and it made him retch.

‘This tastes odd,’ his mother would croak. ‘Did you make it the way I taught you?’

‘Yes, Mother,’ said Elias, spooning cabbage water into her mouth.

‘You must always put the meat in at the same time as the onions. That’s the trick, to spread the flavour through.’

When the sirens began, they no longer went to the cellar; she couldn’t make it, and he no longer cared. They simply stayed where they were, Mrs Eliasberg lying in her bed and Elias sitting next to her. Even walking a few blocks to queue for food or buy water seemed an insurmountable task.

On a day when the temperature fell to minus twenty-five and the air cracked with cold, he stumbled down the stairs and knocked on the Shaprans’ door.

‘Who is it?’ Olga’s voice was wary. In a city where you could be beaten and robbed for a small hunk of bread, it was better not to trust anyone.

The cold was so intense it sat in his mouth and stopped his tongue; he tried several times before he could make a sound. ‘It’s me, Karl Elias.’

Olga opened the door slightly, keeping her body behind it like a suspicious official who might close a barrier at any moment.

‘I’ve come to ask a favour.’ He spoke very slowly. He’d blacked out that morning, and there was a low ominous buzzing in his ears.

‘Of course you have. Why else would a person come knocking these days?’

Elias pulled his hat lower over his ears. ‘I was wondering if I might borrow some lard, or a little sunflower oil? I’ve given all we had to my mother, and I find I’m close to collapse. A tiny amount of protein would help me get to the bread queue.’

Olga stared at him expressionlessly.

‘I couldn’t help noticing,’ ventured Elias, ‘that you and Mr Shapran seem —’ His brain was working as poorly as his tongue; he didn’t know how to phrase it tactfully. ‘You look healthier than most people. I thought, therefore, that you might be in a position to lend me a very little oil, which I promise to pay back with my next ration card.’

Olga flushed, and she gripped the edge of the door. Her hand was thinner than before, but far from skin and bone. ‘What are you implying? Do you think we’re cheating the system? Using fake ration cards?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Perhaps you think we’re cannibals?’ Her eyes were full of dislike and distrust. ‘Cutting flesh off bodies from the roadsides and boiling it up for soup, or buying human meat-cakes from the black market?’

Elias, who hadn’t even heard of this practice, began to shake. ‘I’m s-s-sorry. I’ll leave.’

‘Yes, you’ll leave! You’ll leave me and my husband alone! Some way to thank us for our help, especially after Mr Shapran saved us all from the incendiary bomb.’ She slammed the door, and Elias half-fell against the wall.

‘Pssst!’ A small sound came from above. ‘Pssst!’

Dazed, he looked up. There was Valery Bobrovsky, staring at him through the stair railings. His hair stuck up like feathers and his boyish face was pinched, but his eyes gleamed in the old way. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he hissed. ‘They eat rats.’

‘Who eats rats?’

‘Mr Shapran and his missus. They trap them out in the back alley at night. Mice, too. I seen them.’

‘
I’ve
seen them,’ corrected Elias automatically.

‘You, too?’ Valery nodded. ‘Then I guess you know why they’re surviving all right. Mrs Shapran makes soup from them. Guess she doesn’t want you to know they’re virgin-eaters, huh?’

‘
Vermin
-eaters,’ said Elias, starting slowly back up the stairs.

‘And last week I saw Mr Shapran strangling that ginger tomcat that’s been hanging around,’ said Valery. ‘The mean old bastard!’ He extracted his head from the railings and got up, dusting off his knees. ‘I’d better go. I’m not supposed to be out these days without saying where I am. I hope your ma’s all right.’

Back in his apartment, Elias stumbled to the bedroom. The cold in there was so intense he recoiled: they’d used only the main room now
for many weeks. Under a stack of cartons, he found a small jar, still almost full. He rarely used hair oil, reserving it for concerts and other special occasions; the last time had been at Sollertinsky’s leaving party, and that seemed an eternity ago.

He moved slowly in the semi-darkness of the kitchen, boiling water and stirring in two spoonfuls of hair-oil. After adding a tiny pinch of salt, he sipped it. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.

‘Is that sausage soup?’ queried his mother. ‘Don’t hog it all for yourself.’

After she’d been fed a few spoonfuls, she nodded slowly. ‘Much better. See how the flavour’s improved by putting the meat in first?’

Nikolai knew he would eat the whole of his bread ration as soon as he left the bakery. It seemed impossible, today, to save it till he got home: to cut it into three thin slices and make them last for the next twenty-four hours. He shoved Tanya’s share deep inside his pocket and stepped into a doorway. There had been too many violent attacks recently; it wasn’t safe to eat where people could see you, nor to linger for long in public places.

He bit off a chunk of the bread, then crammed the whole crust into his mouth. It tasted mouldy; recently the city’s bread had been made out of grain dredged from the lake, salvaged from supply barges sunk by German bombers. But the sensation of having his mouth full was compensation enough for taste. Chewing hard, breathing through his nose, he shifted from foot to foot to keep warm. The wind was icy, the wall damp. He swallowed the last morsel. It had taken him two minutes to eat a whole day’s worth of food.

Turning up his collar, pulling down his hat, he plunged back into the driving sleet. The snow underfoot was so heavy that every step was an effort. Over the past weeks he’d felt himself shrinking by degrees, so that even his feet, layered in socks and bound with rags, slipped around inside his boots. When he curled up in bed, his knees grated against each other and his hipbones jut ted painfully through two pairs of trousers so he could never lie comfortably.

Shostakovich had written to him, begging him to get out of Leningrad. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he wrote, with typical self-deprecation and naivety,
‘I’ll add my weight to an official appeal. You can stay here in Kuibyshev with us. Until then, I’m sending you some coffee.’ The letter had arrived minus the coffee. Nikolai kept the scribbled page in his shirt pocket; its rustling was strangely comforting. But never once had he considered leaving the city.

Around him people moved like sleepwalkers. Some towed
sheet-wrapped
corpses towards the already full cemeteries, rolling them off the sleds, leaving them at the gates without looking back. He passed a vacant lot where bodies were stacked in piles, half-covered in snow. Quite dispassionately, he looked at their frost-blackened faces, their stiff outstretched arms. He felt little emotion these days, only a dogged determination to make it through to spring, when he would begin searching for Sonya once more.

At Sennaya market, a handful of women were scanning public notices on the wall, hoping to exchange china, cutlery, jewellery — anything that had once been precious and was now worthless — for rice, oil and smoked lard. Most of the notices were weeks old, ripped and barely legible. Somewhere among them, he supposed, was Tanya’s offer: her father’s collection of lead soldiers in return for coffee substitute.

‘Keep them,’ he’d said, when she first suggested this sacrifice. ‘You might have sons some day.’ He doubted this — Tanya had always had the trenchant air of a spinster and seemed to consider all men idiots — but small miracles did sometimes occur.

‘It’s a significant collection of soldiers,’ she said slightly huffily. ‘Papa succeeded in attaining complete regiments, from the Napoleonic war onwards.’

‘Well, exchange them if you must,’ said Nikolai, although it was common knowledge that even grand pianos had been traded for nothing more than a few slices of black bread. What Tanya was doing, he knew, was more significant than offering up a family treasure for a pound of dried lentils. Ever since the day she’d been caught red-handed with the cello, she’d been different: nervous, apologetic. Often she tried to give Nikolai some of her rations — half a spoonful of sugar, a slice of bread — as if these would make up for the moment when she’d shouted that Sonya was lost forever. Now the cello, wrapped in newspapers and an old blanket, was hidden somewhere Tanya would never find it. Leningraders were chopping up furniture and burning books to keep themselves warm: Nikolai would go to his grave before telling anyone where the Storioni lay.

He walked on past the market. Ahead of him was an elderly woman hauling a sled on which was slumped a half-conscious old man. ‘The ice road will save us,’ she said over her shoulder. She slipped to her knees, got up, and laboured on. ‘We’ll all be saved by the ice road.’

Nikolai fixed his eyes on the sled-runner tracks, using them as a guide. He’d heard about the ice road from Tanya, who’d heard about it at the hospital. As soon as Lake Ladoga was frozen solid, convoys of trucks would be able to cross the ice more regularly, and bring food and fuel into the dying city. ‘And then,’ Tanya had said, as surely as if it were fact, ‘everything will improve dramatically. No one expected a siege, after all. The authorities were taken by surprise. But they’ll get things running smoothly again once the lake’s frozen.’

Nikolai was less certain. True, flatcars laden with grain had been sighted rolling through the deserted stations. But he’d also heard that German pilots were dropping parachute flares over the lake to light up the Russian convoys and then bomb them. And Ladoga’s icy surface remained treacherous, with cracks opening up under the weight of the three-ton trucks. Blizzards drove vehicles off course, so the drivers got lost and froze to death.
Rations might be slowly increased
, he thought.
But not soon enough to save us
. The city was ruined, wreathed in black smoke, and people were shuffling in hundreds towards their death.

Nearing Troisky Bridge, he passed the old couple without a second glance, heard the woman gasping and the man coughing deep in his lungs. With a shock, he realised how much he’d changed; how, through these hellish months of deepest winter, he’d been driven by a new fierceness. Something to do with grief, but an entirely different grief from that which had felled him nine years earlier. Sonya might be missing, but until she was pronounced dead he would fight. For the first time in his life — and, ironically, through loving someone else — he’d learnt to put himself first.

Already the small amount of energy from the bread had dissipated. Up ahead the bridge rose into the swirling mist, as insurmountable as the steepest mountain. He refused to let himself think of Tanya’s rations lying in his inner coat pocket. It was not his, it was not food, he was not starving.

Reach the post on the top of the bridge
, he told himself,
and then find another marker to aim for.

As he drew closer, he saw that what he’d believed to be a lamp-post was the dark figure of a man. And when he was closer still, he saw the
man fall against the railings and slide to the ground.

He trudged on at a snail’s pace; his legs would move no faster, nor would his brain allow him to try. But when at last he reached the crest of the bridge, he stopped and looked down.

‘Are you all right?’ It was difficult to speak; his lips were as stiff as boards.

The man’s face was covered in blisters, and his eyes rolled. He opened his mouth, revealing bleeding gums and crimson-stained teeth. ‘I’m dying,’ he rasped. ‘Please — help — me.’

Nikolai looked at him for a long moment. Finally, with an effort, he bent and dragged the man to his feet. His body was lighter than Sonya’s had been, and his mottled wrists as thin as the neck of a violin.

‘Stand.’ This was all he could say. ‘Stand.’

But once more the man collapsed against the bridge, slithering onto the muddy ground. His face had the same lime-green tinge as the
snow-laden
sky.

The breath of the frozen water rose up through the bridge, seeping through the soles of Nikolai’s boots. Dangerously, murderously cold, it spread into his legs, filling them with a fierce iron-ache. ‘I’m sorry.’ He bent towards the man. ‘I can do nothing.’

‘Don’t leave me.’ The man gripped his ankle with a raw bleeding hand. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

For a second longer Nikolai stood still. Then he stepped back,
wrenching
his boot out of the man’s feeble grip. ‘I must go.’

He trudged away without looking back. The icy wind made his eyes stream so that he could hardly see to walk.