Hunger (3 page)

Lysenko had already started to call the institute Babylon. “Babylon must crumble,” he would say. “Dust.”

The following summer, the government's decree on selection demanded that the required ten or a dozen years to develop cereals for different regions be reduced to four and that the crops be uniform and high-yielding. The great director spoke his skepticism, his voice cascading down to the heavy wooden table around which sat the men who mattered. Lysenko pressed his soft hand into his soft belly, stained his face with a smile, his swine eyes almost disappearing into skin. He promised to do it in fewer than three years.

Of course he could not, but doing mattered so much less than saying, something I tried to make the great director understand. He would only stare at me, pull his hand into a fist in such a way that it would twist the papers sitting on the surface of his desk, and whisper the word
mutant
. Mutated mutant, he would hiss.

And then he would say, so rationally, that science is not compromise. Things are either
true, not true, or unknown. Yes, I would say, unknown.

But he always elected to ignore this and to continue by saying that he did not decide the results of his experiments before he conducted them. Once, he finished the conversation by saying, “There is nothing we can do but stand up for what is true, or at least state the truth and nothing else.”

Of course, he was both right and wrong. He was right that we could not honestly say that we could produce what Stalin demanded in four years. But he might have found a way to say something other than no, hidden our disgust for Lysenko, who had seized on the class issue with all his surprising vigor — and with increasing success.

A few years later, Lysenko and the plagiarist Prezent announced a new concept of heredity to replace the old chromosome theory, which they denounced as reactionary, idealist, metaphysical, barren, and all things bad. Lysenko
kept pushing his idiotic wheat vernalization and had farmers across the Union soaking their seeds and cursing their yields.

In 1939 the great director was denied papers to travel to a meeting in Scotland. He shrugged and declared he would rather spend the week collecting. At the Scottish meeting he did not attend, he was elected president of the International Congress of Genetics.

•   •   •

At least at first, I laughed when Lysenko called the institute Babylon. He meant to insult us as corrupt and decadent, of course, but I always heard it as a compliment. The ancient Babylonians had impressed me ever since I studied the early history of agricultural science back in the university.

Like the members of our own expeditions, the Babylonians traveled widely to collect medicinal herbs and unusual fruits. Either they or the Assyrians, who inhabited Babylon for a
time, planted the world's first botanical garden. Babylonian agriculture was a thing of envy.

The ancient Babylonians ate dates, figs, pomegranates, apples, pears, and plums. They ate onions, leeks, garlic, and turnips, as well as cucumbers and lettuces. They made cheeses from the milk of sheep and goats and dined on game, pork, and mutton. Locusts were a delicacy. In old Babylon, no fewer than fifty kinds of fish were eaten, though fish apparently went out of fashion later, as the word
fisherman
came to mean something closer to
ruffian, opportunist
.

The Babylonians seasoned their food with mustard, coriander, and cumin. They had bread, oil, butter, beer, and eventually honey, and both red wine and white. Several kinds of grain, including a spelt, were also part of Babylonian meals.

But barley stood at the center of their diet and was preferred over silver for exchange. When Hammurabi attempted to standardize
interest rates, the rate for borrowed barley was much higher than that for a loan of silver.

Anything could be purchased with sacks of barley. It united wealth and weight, joined prosperity and health.

•   •   •

We were collecting spelt emmers in western Ukraine. A very old peasant, one of the few in the area who survived both collectivization and the hideous great famine to farm alongside his sons and daughters, directed us — based on the great director's description — to an untended field. We were searching for a plant we believed would reveal itself to be descended from one of the grains eaten by the Babylonians. The breeze wrapped cool around our shoulders, but the sun was warm on our heads and heat radiated near the ground. The day was, simply, perfect.

The Ford cars that appeared in the distance and drew slowly larger shone like fat beetles
against a field that was pressed low under the tall, late-summer sky. They crawled as close as they could. The men emerged in black suits and white shirts and dark ties, like the businessmen I had seen in larger American cities, except that their ties were thinner and not smoothly knotted.

Two of them flanked the great director, holding his arms in a way neither rough nor gentle but rather disinterested and insectlike. Two more took Sergei, which was surprising, for there were others among us who had spoken more sharply and more publicly.

They were back in the cars quickly, and the cars quickly gone, as though they had never come and our party had always been two men smaller.

I bagged the grain sample that the great director had dropped when seized. I remembered seeing Sergei's daughter at an institute picnic the spring before. A girl of four, maybe five years, she had stood with her back to me.
I had registered only her hair, long and smooth and the exact color of the field from whence the spelt of Babylon had just been picked.

•   •   •

On July 9, 1941, the military collegium of the Supreme Court found the great director guilty of belonging to a rightist conspiracy, spying for England, sabotage of agriculture, and, proving that judges have a sense of humor, leadership of the Labor Peasant Party. He was sentenced to death. The meeting lasted several minutes.

•   •   •

The window of my New York apartment affords me a view of a row of Chinese markets. Instead of curtains, ducks — some uncooked and others glazed and roasted whole, with heads on — fill their windows. When there is no snow and no rain, the families who run the shops set out bins of foods that are mostly strange to me: dried cuttlefish and shrimp,
fresh litchi nuts and foul-smelling but sublimetasting durians.

People buy these things all day long.

•   •   •

A few blocks from my flat with Alena, in the direction of the institute, stood a posting board where people wanting to sell and buy could find one another. Before the siege, rectangles of paper, large and small, offered to sell all manner of thing, from bicycles to purebred cats to cookware. As the siege took hold and day followed day, the papers were most often tattered scraps. And food became the board's only subject.

By late November, no one found odd the little card offering a grand piano as payment for half a loaf of bread, though few were in the position to trade away anything that could be eaten for anything that could not — no matter how rare, fine, or beautiful.

There were other cards as well, offering
more than musical instruments, referring outright to bodies and souls.

I saw a woman, thin as everyone, spit in disgust upon reading such a notice. But its author plainly understood something the woman did not. The bravery to survive is a ruthless one. Martyrdom leads, by its very definition, only to the cold ground.

The only thing that struck me as truly strange about these postings was that they were not pulled down when the whole city ached for kindling. Neither was the poster of a woman holding a small, dead child that declared:
DEATH TO THE KILLERS OF CHILDREN
, though people risked the capital crime of picking up the flyers dropped by German planes, the flyers that outlined our surrender and prodded us to kill our leaders, give up, and eat again.

My own Alena brought home these flyers to start our small fires, telling me she would rather risk death and burn Hitlerite propaganda than set fire to even one page of her beloved books.

Of course the books would go too, one page at a time, from the title page of a less-favored novel and the dessert section of a cookbook after sugar could not be had to the dearest segments of the most precious classics — the plot turns of Turgenev, letters from the great director himself.

•   •   •

In the week before his death, Vitalii did not appear emaciated like so many, and it was not just because his face bloated. It was as though his body refused to burn its stores — holding on to them just a bit longer, just in case — and instead shrank around them, leaving pockets of fat like jokes in the midst of his gauntness.

Despite his tragic, comical appearance, he had been humorless for weeks. I am ashamed of my colleagues to say that there were some among us who held this against him, as though he owed not only his life but his cheerfulness to our all-important work.

But in his very last days, he only told jokes. He told Lidia the old one about the tombstone whose epitaph read:
I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK
. She burst into tears, and he laughed harder.

He told Alena highbrow jokes about philosophers and astronomy and me raunchy ones about strippers and widows.

He wouldn't stop joking and he wouldn't stop laughing, until, of course, he did.

The acting director arranged to have Vitalii's body taken away in a manner that he would have to repeat two dozen times, though some of our number did him the favor of dying at home. One young man, a research assistant in fruit breeding, was just never heard from again. We assumed that he had died anonymously. But I like to think that perhaps he merely slipped into another life somehow, or perhaps, like many, into insanity.

•   •   •

Rumors flew in unplanned and shifting patterns, like flocks of geese disturbed to the air by dogs.

We were winning the war; we were losing the war. We were losing the war because the German soldiers were stronger and better equipped; we were losing the war on purpose, part of our leaders' malevolent design. We were winning the war through heroism; we were winning the war with snow. Hitlerite soldiers would pour into the city in three days. On the streets of other cities, they were marching Russian heads on poles and taking their pick of the prettiest girls. They would bring food; they would take what food we had left. They felt special sympathy for Leningrad; they hated Leningrad above all and were saving special savageries for us.

And everywhere the hunger stories seeped, sewagelike, from office to office, home to home. Stories were told of tremendous sacrifice and honor. The man who gave up his own parcel of bread and oil to save an old woman's ration card from thieves. The mother who ate nothing for three weeks so that her children might take a bit more nourishment.

I took these stories with, so to speak, a grain of salt. I could see with my own eyes that deprivation debases more often than it ennobles.

I was more inclined to believe the stories of murder and cannibalism, however far-fetched they might have sounded only one year earlier. I believed the story of the man who killed his own brother for his ration card and then cooked him for meat. The story of the woman who self-amputated her leg for food. The story of the mother who starved her dullest child so that she might survive with her bright favorite.

I believed, in short, the stories about people who did things worse than I did, the stories about people less human (or perhaps more human) than I was.

•   •   •

Of all of us who endured after Vitalii's quick decline, Lidia was the one who changed the most and fastest. Lidia had been so beautiful that I would have married her instead of Alena
had I met her first. As it was, I came very near — I fill with shame at how near — to leaving Alena for her.

But I was lucky that I did not, because the secret to Lidia's beauty was comfort. She was at her most beautiful, witty, and generous when her skin was warmed by the sun — and food was perched between her hand and mouth.

She was so subject to strong cravings that if she got a certain kind of cake in mind, she would walk clear across Leningrad to the bakery that made it best. She would leave work in the middle of the day to steam a fig pudding, coming back hours later with a riddle inside her broad smile. If it was me on her mind, she would have me in any vacant room or, barely concealed, outside.

My enchantment with her began during an expedition to Malta, in the island's hottest month. I would allow my arm to fall onto Lidia's, gaze at the ribbon of her neck between her heavy black hair and white clavicle, watch
her dark lips while she tore
pan chocolat
with her strong teeth. She could eat three at a single sitting.

My Alena, with her more subtle, almost colorless attractions, had stayed home from that trip on account of the second of the babies that never came. After it was all over, I knew that I would stay with Alena until death divided us.

Yet on many nights, after Alena and I made love or if we did not, I would lie awake and think about Lidia's colors, her deep-bellied laugh, her vigorous appetite for sweets, her hips wide enough to pass infants.

But, as I have said, I am lucky, if you can call anyone who lived through Leningrad's starvation winter lucky — and, in truth, we all were — to have stayed with my small, dear, strong wife. When Leningrad emptied of comfort and became only the case of a pillow on hard ground, all of its downy feathers blown away, Lidia's attractions, physical and metaphysical, gusted away as well.

Without comfort, her clever sarcasm was deboned into mere complaint. Without sun, her translucent skin turned sallow. Our trips to warm places had always kept her touched by air and sun, kept her skin clear, its white stained pink in just the right places. After the longest winter, she yellowed like inexpensive paper, and bumps rose from her forehead and chin. She had always carried a few more pounds than she needed. They had suited her, made her stomach soft and her bosom large, while the effort of collecting kept her strong.