Hunger (4 page)

Though she never got as skinny as some during the starvation winter — and I have my ideas about why this was so — she went slack with lack of food and exertion.

Of course, like so many, Lidia found ways to eat. She had lost much of her charm, had lost the things that had come so close to tempting me away from my Alena, but still she was a woman and never an ugly one. For such a woman there was the possibility of associating
with particular men, the kind of men who could still receive packages from Moscow with cans of evaporated milk, dried salmon, a square of chocolate.

And there was meat on the black market. Horse meat, it was said, but there could not have been more than one or two bony horses left in the whole city by the end of the hunger winter.

•   •   •

The bakeries produced a bread made of five parts stale rye flour and one part each of salt, cake, cellulose, soy flour, hack dust, and bran. By November, the official ration for this vile loaf fell to 250 grams per day for manual workers, half of that for clericals and children.

No tree in the city had bark below the reach of the tallest man. It had all been stripped off and boiled for whatever nutrients it might contain and used as a salve for stomach pain.

All manner of animals — dogs and cats,
sparrows and crows, rats and mice — and then their excrement were eaten. Soups were made from tulip bulbs stolen from the soil of the Botanical Gardens, pine needles, nettles, rotten cabbage, lichen-covered stones, cattle-horn buttons torn from once-fine coats. Children were fed hair oil, petroleum jelly, glue. Root flour and floor sweepings were baked into scones. Dextrin appeared in fritters, cellulose in puddings. Pigskin machine belts and fish glue were spirited from closed factories and boiled into jellies.

People did anything to feed their children. They traded away the valuable and sentimental. They killed and cooked beloved pets. They peddled their flesh. They peddled the flesh of the children needing to be fed. They stole, connived, and killed. They starved their spouses. They starved themselves.

So many times, dozens of times, I was told how lucky I was to have no children, how it was easier for us with fewer mouths to feed, not
having to hear the horrible cries, to watch those we cherished more than anything, those who depended on us solely, suffer. Oh, the responsibility, people would say. And I would think, oh, the clarity.

I longed for the lucidity of parenthood during the bad time — maybe every measure as fully as Alena had hungered for the love and sweet smell of a baby before times turned bad.

The murky moral territory in which I stepped would have been another landscape entirely with children. Who faults a father for stealing if it is to feed his little child? A father tells himself this: I do what I must so that my child lives through this time. Parents may do anything at all and say this: We have to make sure our children survive, and we must survive to care for them.

I did not have this luxury. It did not matter if I lived, not even to me. Only I could not stand the pain that stood between me and death. It was that gray hunger, and not death itself, that
I feared, avoided at the cost of all honor. As the smartest politicians repeat and know, ideals are nothing to the man who sits at an empty table.

•   •   •

“Are you angry with me?” Lidia asked me during the time that my Alena was wasting.

I laughed and shook my head. “No, Lidia, merely disenchanted.”

“Yes,” she said. “That's best. It's best that way.”

This answer startled me, and I wondered if I knew her.

Lidia, as she had been, came often to my mind. I thought of her as a woman who could accept pain but not mild discomfort. Tie me up, she would say, make it hurt. Always more, harder, rougher. Her chest flushed when I gripped her wrist. Her lips reddened with pleasure when I bit her thigh. Turn me over, she would say, turn me over.

And yet she dissolved, character dissipating,
personality irrelevant, unable to string together two thoughts, follow an idea, or laugh at a good joke the moment her stomach growled. She was undone by one early morning or a modest day's work. Thus she came to mind and I would think that I was just like her and then that, no, I was a different sort of person altogether.

•   •   •

A few weeks after the great director had been arrested and I had bagged the grain descended from the ancient Babylonians, Alena was visiting Sergei's wife, Vanessa. They spoke about strategies to win the release of Sergei and the others.

So many of us had been taken. Karpechenko, head of the genetics lab, a man whose school of thought had solved the problem of infertility in distinct hybrids. Govorov, who had been in charge of the legumes. Levitsky, the cytologist. Hovalev, the director of the pest
department and a leading breeder of fruit. Flykaberger, known for his expertise in wheat.

All in jail, if not dead.

Others had been deported by the new director, supported by orders from the commissar to dismantle the institute's departments and laboratories, to perform “productive” work on collectives.

So Alena happened to be sitting with Vanessa when they came for her, when they pried her daughter's fingers open to free her skirt from the little girl's desperate grip.

Alena was instructed to locate a relative to file guardianship papers within six days or to prepare the girl for the orphanage.

And so it was that Albertine, the girl with the shiny, grain-colored hair, came to spend several days in our flat.

Without first consulting me, Alena moved the girl through our doorway. “She has no one else right now,” Alena stated.

“Perhaps Vanessa should have thought of
that.” I despised the words even as they left on my breath. No one could have known that such things would be happening, that so many would be taken for so little.

Alena, as though sensing that I was already berating myself, declined this line of argument. Instead she shrugged and simply, flatly repeated herself. “She has no one else.”

I smiled at Albertine. She nodded at me but did not smile. Why should she, I asked myself.

“You'll sleep here until Mama and Papa come home, no?” I moved some of our bedding onto the sofa and organized it as best I could.

Albertine held Alena's hand and watched.

“Yes, you'll be strong until they come home?”

“Will they?” she asked not me but Alena.

Alena pressed her own small hands around the girl's small cheeks. “They will if they can.”

It was Alena, not stoic Albertine, who permitted herself quiet tears.

•   •   •

Sometimes, to feel less false, I would remind myself — as though it made a moral difference, as though I was less odious because she was a scientist and not a club dancer or a waitress — that Lidia was one of the world's foremost authorities on the taxonomy of New World beans, an expert on their relationship to the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that cleave to their roots.

In the Americas, on expeditions I had joined and on other trips, Lidia had collected hundreds of legume specimens. Since I had known her, she had often worn a few dozen examples, dried and strung as a necklace. She could finger each one and, without looking down, say its name and tell when and where she found it.

Her fingers on a compact black-and-white speckled bean, she would say,
Tarahumara carpinteria
, Nayarit, summer 1937. Touching a large beige bean with black mottling at the hollow of her throat, she would say, Hopi black pinto, middle mesa, Arizona, August 1936. And she could go on like that, her fingers making their way around the full circumference of her
pretty neck, her mouth circling the strange words: Tohono O'Odham tepary, Zuni Shalako from the Sonoran desert, Quiche fava,
Tarahumara chókame
from Batophiles Canyon, Chihuahua. Her favorite, hidden behind her hair, was a tan tepary bean with deep blue speckles — a rare Mayan folkrace.

Once, in our earliest days, I asked her if she collected men like her bean beads and, if so, could she remember when and where she had picked each one. She had only laughed and said, “Naturally, and you are my favorite.” A joke that ended my line of inquiry.

•   •   •

It was after I arranged for Albertine to be deported to distant relatives in France — an amazing feat for which I received no credit — that Alena signed the letter.

I had advised her not to sign, advice echoed by almost everyone, including the imprisoned director's brother, himself an important scientist. He is beyond help, I told her. Sergei and
Vanessa are beyond our touch now. Albertine is safe, I whispered.

But a few, including Alena herself, I must admit, believed that she should sign the letter because she had no children and the others left did. The cruelest joke.

In the end, all of the signatures save Alena's were removed. (My pen, wisely, had never signed.) The letter's sharpest points were sanded, but not so much that it was not still extremely dangerous, a tightrope walk over water vipers. Others had been taken in for much less. It was probably not enough to warrant a sentence of death, though in the two years prior to the blockade, that took very little if you were associated with the institute. And imprisonment could easily be death. Who would send food and blankets to a prison filled with garden-variety class enemies?

None of our number had been released yet. At the least, I thought, Alena would be put to labor on a collective.

I tried again, quietly, to dissuade her. He
cannot be saved, I told her, not by you. You flatter yourself to think so. Those who have tried have succeeded only in joining him, I reminded her, and for all we know made his treatment worse.

Alena, even more quietly, completely without words in fact, resisted my wishes. And in the end, my fear of having her think me a coward overcame my other fears. I did not insist, for which I should be given some due. The letter was delivered.

She was taken from our apartment many weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon as we prepared a meal together. Her fingers were bright pink with the juice of a beetroot when she held her hand in farewell, my quiet wife again wordless and ever so brave.

I finished the cooking alone, basting the meat as it baked with sugar dissolved in vinegar, pounding the grated horseradish into a paste, slicing the beets my wife had boiled and peeled so that they stained my fingers the exact
color of hers. I cooked the beet greens in fat until they fell apart. I cooled the food and wrapped it, though I could not be certain that I would ever see Alena again.

But on Tuesday, she returned on foot, exhausted and filthy but seemingly unharmed, her fingers still pink under the dirt. I warmed the food and set the table while she washed and put on a clean skirt and shirt.

Then we sat down to our belated Sunday dinner. The meat was sour from its extended contact with the cider vinegar, and I had overcooked the greens like I always did. But the meal was good nonetheless, and I was not alone.

The following day, Alena's salary was removed, and she was dismissed from the institute. She was lucky, everyone said.

In the coming year, Hitlerite Germany would put its iron kerchief around Leningrad's neck, and the definition of luck would fall even lower.

•   •   •

The first time I cheated on my Alena, it was brief, nameless, and far away from home. It was out of time, underground, undiscoverable, unrecognizable. It did not count, or it would not have counted except that I remembered it not only in my mind but with my fingers and nostrils and ears. I could not forget the texture of the skin, the up-close smell, the quality of voice — none of these better than my Alena's, but so certainly different.

I could never again tell myself that I had always been faithful, could never again take my wife's lovely hands, look into her eyes, and say, “I have been true to you, my wife.”

And so, of course, others came, some at a great expense of conscience, some quite easily.

•   •   •

Cold in the skin. Cold in the bones of the arm. Cold in the eyes. Cold in the ribs. Feet gone from feeling, from knowledge. There was pain only in odd places, centered in a heavy, aching
groin but otherwise intense in its asymmetricality, the finger of one hand, two knuckles on the other, a nostril's interior, a shrapnel-sized piece of jawbone, a small concentration in the kidney.

•   •   •

The hanging gardens of Babylon are believed to have been a magnificent and enormous quadrangle of lush foliage and flora, suspended atop stone columns, with trees rooted above the heads of men.

An homage to fecundity and water in an arid land, they were built in staggered terraces, arched vaults, and stairways. Their invisible irrigation system — an elaborate feat of human engineering hidden behind or under stone — revealed itself only in beautiful streams, water cascades and falls, permanently green grass, and the perfect smell of damp soil.

Sometimes we joked that our institute was the hanged garden of Leningrad. Unlike the
famed gardens of Babylon, ours was not planted. We were mere and wonderful potential.

•   •   •

Eleven thousand starved in November. More than fifty thousand died in December, when wood for coffins was long gone. Daily I heard the dynamite crack, loosening the terrible frozen earth to sneak in the sheet-wrapped corpses, tall and short but almost all bone thin, pulled in on sleds, abandoned at the cemeteries for group burial. Too many to name or count or care about. But I would not come to such an anonymous end, I told myself, even then as though looking back from a great distance of years.

•   •   •

In a small town near the Pacific Coast, Alena and I had walked the square, taken in a colonial church with an unusually fine and simple wooden altar, and purchased a fabulous melon from a stall on the street.

The melon was unlike any I had previously encountered, and I have seen only one since, on another trip to Central America. It was large and oblong like a watermelon but with a pale, ridged, almost-white rind that made it look more like a winter squash than a summer fruit.