Hunger (7 page)

Still skin tore open to edemas and bowels drained faster than mouths could drink.

Alena had never had many pounds to spare. My dear, small Alena, whose only extra flesh curved in a few crescents. The crescents that were the bottom halves of her breasts, the crescent low on her abdomen made by the babies that had not been born, the slivers where her legs met her body. These beautiful bows remained for a time, even as her flesh caved through her ribs and her arms shrunk into matchsticks, snappable.

Now that the city recovered and my Alena did not, now toward the end, I rested my hands, sometimes the side of my face, on these last
purses of flesh to stop myself from climbing on top of her and using up the strength that she lost so fast, to stop myself from using up the last of her.

•   •   •

According to ancient records, stone, otherwise almost unheard of in ancient Mesopotamia, was twice used to build in Babylon. Stone was incorporated in the north wall of the city's northern citadel. And stone slabs — covered by layers of reed, asphalt, tile, and metal — were used in the foundation cellars of the hanging gardens. The mud brick that constructed most of the rainless city would have eroded away under the gardens' impressive irrigation and flowing channels.

There exists more than one theory about which ruler should be credited with the gardens, and when they were built and why. Some believe they were built by the Assyrian queen Semiramis centuries before Nebuchadrezzar.
For some time it was thought that Sennacherib was the mind behind them. And many historians, noting that the gardens are mentioned only by later Greeks and appear nowhere in the Babylonian record, have argued that they never existed.

But the most widely accepted version has it that they were conceived by Nebuchadrezzar as a gift to his homesick queen, Amyitis. Originally from Media's lush green mountains, Amyitis found the brown baked flatness of Babylon depressing and pined for home.

What can be sure about the hanging gardens is that — whoever ruled at the time, whichever brilliant mind conceived of their unexpected lushness — the stone slabs that form their base were laid by slaves, also homesick, pining for wives they either would or would not see again.

•   •   •

I remember Alena's last meal: a roll made from rye flour and a bowl of broth made by boiling
garlic, carrot peelings, and one fat, perfect potato in salted water. She trembled when I set the hot bowl before her, steadied her hand by resting it on the roll, laughed in a laugh I had never before heard as she breathed in the soup's steam. “It will be funny if I wait,” she said.

It was the most frightening thing I have ever heard.

“I will wait for half an hour,” she said. She waited, but only for a few minutes, before drinking the bowl dry and eating the roll gone.

•   •   •

During the hunger winter, I was justified to take what I needed, and I barely took more. I had to discipline myself to remember this truth only a few months later, after my Alena and the others died, making way for those remaining, now all reasonably well fed.

Survival did strange things to people — I knew this. Viktor from the cytology laboratory, who had always been generous, always quick to
give away even something he needed, to accept blame but not credit, suggested that we deserved our lives for some reason, obvious or occluded.

Lidia, who had always been generous only to herself and seemed well on her way to madness said that was not so, but that we must behave as though what Viktor said was true.

I held neither position, believing only in meaningless fortune most of the time, or acknowledging simply that I had been willing to do more to save my life than some of those who had died — a trait that made me neither better nor worse than any other man or woman.

•   •   •

I can admit that the deprivation was even harder for Lidia than for me. For me, the pain was fear of slow death. For Lidia, I believe it was sheer physical and emotional torment.

At first she just went sour, but then came meanness, followed by the madness. I thought
she would warm with the weather when the first winter finally, finally broke, and sun melted the snow, and there was a little more food — some grown in Leningrad, some lorried across Lake Ladoga in the last weeks it was frozen. Bread came out of the Kirov bakery. Rations were strict, but enough to keep those still healthy alive.

But Lidia did not return to herself. She got more and more desperate even as things improved. The extra food she had managed to get — and I continued to have my suspicions about how — had kept her weight on, even added a few pounds back, but did not stop the scurvy sores from appearing on her arms.

By the second winter, when my Alena was many months gone and I might have yielded to Lidia's comfort, she was not lucid. She rarely left the institute, and she would not take off her once glorious but now filthy sable coat. Like all of us, she carried a rod to beat off the rats, but unlike the rest of us, she looked equally willing to strike human beings.

And of course she had refused to speak to me since she discovered me with grain in my mouth.

•   •   •

Lidia was not the only one to have found me out during the hunger winter.

One evening, as I began my watch, the wife of Ivanovich was concluding hers. “Perhaps I should stay and guard you,” Klavdiya said, smiling, solicitous.

My heart seemed to beat sideways. Brief images of a dozen places I had been in my life tumbled through my mind: the second row of a streetcar in New Orleans as it passed a certain blue house, a particular crook in the port at Fez, a small store on the other side of Leningrad, a hallway in Moscow. Each vividly specific, felt in the body.

“I'm quite sure I don't take your meaning” is what I replied through the corporal memories, now all Leningrad. That charming spot by the River Moyka, the European height of
Lomonosov Square, the spreading, clean, red-and-green angles of Pushkin Square.

“None of that. No pretense between scientists.” She smiled and added, “But you have no need to deny anything. I will not tell anyone what you are doing, why you weigh more than your wife. I merely wanted you to know that I know. And understand.”

I wanted to ask what she meant by
understand
. How did she know? Was she guessing, or could she tell because she was doing the same thing? A sneak spots a sneak.

“Not me,” she said, “not the same. But I do understand. We all have our ways. Now I know yours and you do not know mine.”

I paced for hours, too frightened to touch a single grain of anything until the first hint of morning, when I was unable to stand the proximity of food any longer. I chewed a few, just a few, seeds of sunflower and melon.

•   •   •

More than twenty of us died, the majority during or at least from the winter of hunger, but a few later from Hitlerite shells.

I am not counting those who died or rotted slowly in prison — not counting the great director, not counting Sergei or Vanessa, not counting so many who, of course, count and should be accounted for on some other register.

But they are another list, a different group. They belong to the life before. The siege destroyed continuity as much as it destroyed all of the other ideas it ruined. There would always be before, during, and after. And nothing would ever bridge the three.

Among those who began the siege but did not come out the other side of that concrete space were friends and enemies, my beloved wife, and men and women I barely knew outside of their research results. Some were perfect to work with. I think now of Ilya, one of our bureaucrats, a man with a gentle nature and a wide and dry humor. He poked fun at everyone
equally, and treated everyone with true respect. I think also of kind and earnest Natalia, who was beautiful into early old age.

Some of those who died were annoying, such as fastidious Anton, always more concerned with the inventory and cleaning of equipment — and with not being exposed as a second-rate mind — than with getting any real work done. Some, such as stern but brilliant Efrosinia, I had never given much thought to. But I would come to honor all of them as they shrank and grew ill before me.

And I miss each of them, even Anton, with his round-eyed defensiveness and ridiculous little beard. More than many of the things I might want, I would like to run into Anton in the street, buy him a drink, and talk about old times and new. Perhaps now, both smoothed by long years of living, we could be great friends.

But of course Anton turned out to be brave and strong, and so he died while he was still unlikable.

•   •   •

Only a few years ago, I ran into Leppik, the mycologist who had guarded some of our collections at the Estonian experimental station. We were both at the Botanical Gardens for a seminar on microtoxins. One of the presenters spoke of a case in the Middle East. Others talked about the possibility that unfriendly governments were using microtoxins to develop agents of biological warfare.

The talk that most interested me — and the one where I saw Leppik — was about the
Fusarium
poisoning that hit Byelorussia at the end of the war with Hitlerite Germany. A crop of millet had been left unharvested through the wet winter. By the time it could be collected in spring, it had molded, but there was little else left to eat. Perhaps a million people, perhaps not quite so many, died from the contaminated grain. Some died from direct poisoning, others from secondary infection. But most died from
asphyxiation caused by the swelling of their throats.

Fusarium
does not, it is believed, enter the milk of nursing mothers, so small babies were spared. But it does survive the brewing process, and a number of people were sickened or killed from drinking beer.

Leppik invited me for a coffee after the seminar. We avoided the past, though the mycologist did tell me about his efforts to make the great director's theories known to American scientists. We made no plans to meet again.

•   •   •

Everyone I overheard spoke of the concert. The score would be brought to Leningrad by plane, it was said. Because only sixteen of more than one hundred were left in our orchestra, the military was granting leave to professional musicians, even from the front. Practicing trumpeters blistered their lips with cold mouthpieces. Eliasberg would conduct but was deeply worried
about the stamina of the surviving and arriving musicians. One flutist and a trombone player were so emaciated that they could not sit on their chairs without cushions. The symphony was quite strenuous, it was said — Shostakovich's finest work. “He's always been a true Leningrader,” some said.

Of course many layers of human pettiness returned with food and warmer weather. As appetites shrank and the sun warmed bodies, I heard whispers that the symphony was not really so fine, that many in Moscow were not so impressed, that inferior musicians were seeking opportunities that should never have been open to them.

The date was set for the ninth of August. Those stationed at the headquarters of the Forty-second Soviet Army were ordered to prevent shelling that night no matter the cost. They would take out German artillery, it was said. Music would spare the city. It would save not only our souls but our bodies and buildings.

It was Klavdiya who offered me a seat. “My husband cannot attend, and I require an escort.”

I nodded. I was not a music lover and could not be comfortable with a woman who knew what I had done, what I was. But neither could I resist vanity and history. The Philharmonic Hall was the place to be. The concert sold out rapidly.

Klavdiya sat to my left. A gas mask sat on the lap of the man to my right. A woman behind held one to her face. People wore their former finery, most often in rags. Men and some women carried guns.

The bombardment subsided. Eliasberg lifted his baton, his oversize tux hanging off his arms comically, tragically. Instruments were placed on the stage's many empty seats, both a tribute to the dead and a suggestion of fuller sound. I stared at an orphaned piccolo as the first movement began its savage march.

At the end of the second movement, I felt Klavdiya's long fingers climb onto my arm. I let them remain, but only that.

The strings bounced, almost jaunty, then gave way to Ksenia Matus's sad oboe. A bassoon entered, and then the oboe disappeared under the returning strings, which tore open a pizzicato melody. They were joined by clarinets, one shy, and then brass, not quite strong enough but brave indeed, and the flutes.

No one spoke, and it seemed that no one breathed. The Hitlerite shells did not fall. At the end, applause, sobbing, Eliasberg's wild grin.

I might have succumbed to Klavdiya, but she chose the wrong time and place: that night of homage to Leningrad's weakness and strength, in the flat that I could think of only as Alena's, on the sofa that had been for so few nights little Albertine's bed.

I accepted Klavdiya's full-lipped kiss, her cool hand inside my shirt, her breath in my ear, the knowing tip of her hips into my leg. But when she paused to say that we should be together because we were so much alike, I pulled away.

“No,” I said. “For that very same reason, we
should never pair. If we are alike, we should stay far apart.”

I had never refused an even mildly tempting offer of indulgence, so I was unsure what would follow. I expected anger but instead saw resignation. Perhaps even understanding. For the many years I would know Klavdiya, the night of the symphony would always be between us, as though everything had happened and nothing had happened. As though both versions were true at the same time.

•   •   •

During the summer of 1943, kittens were bought and sold through the posting board near my flat for as much as two thousand rubles. They were no longer eaten, but in demand to kill the rats, themselves once scarce protein, now a nuisance. No one in Leningrad would now eat a rat or admit to ever having done so.