Hunger (8 page)

The Botanical Gardens' famous palms were dead, but its lime trees bloomed in June. I finally returned the cacti that my Alena had
saved with her own saliva and touch and that somehow survived first my inattention and then my attention. I was thanked profusely by her friends there. A brave woman, a remarkable scientist, a pure mind. Yes, I nodded, all of that.

By July we had strawberries, red currants, raspberries, veal, dill, baby turnips, marrow. Mussolini resigned, and Italy capitulated. Roses could be had.

August brought late lilacs and rains fine as hair. But the shellings turned more deadly as the Germans, sensing a turn and knowing that the first shell is always the most dangerous, tried to kill more of us by exchanging long, almost boring shelling sessions for many short ones. I would hear the whistle, then the burst, and scan the white sky for the pillar of smoke, colored by whatever was hit. Sometimes the smoke would be the gray of stone, the red of brick. Sometimes it was the precise, unlikely hue of human flesh.

On my way to the institute, after a series of shellings occurred not so very far from our flat,
I saw an arm, separated from an unseen woman, holding a still-burning cigarette. The availability of tobacco signaled better times to come, I thought, and then castigated my mind for the direction it had traveled.

A block farther along, I saw a man on a stretcher, the left half of his head gone and stuffed with cotton wool, as though the fabric could sort numbers, direct his limbs, feel pain, remember a beloved.

•   •   •

Two millennia before Christian-measured time commenced, the Babylonians began to celebrate their New Year every spring. The eleven-day festival of gloom and purification and finally joy came to be known in later Babylonia as Akitu. It was believed that the gods ended each festival by setting human fortunes for the coming year.

I always liked the idea of the Festival, or Mardi Gras, celebrated in Catholic countries,
with full debauchery preceding the purification of self-denial and with people in at least tenuous control of their own fate.

One of Leningrad's most important celebrations came not in spring but on the anniversary of the October revolution.

And of course our gods, if we had any — and no one could claim that we did — were not interested enough to set the lots of individuals. Ours was a collective fate, and we had suffered and survived.

This year's festival was less energetic, of course, yet also less dour than before we had suffered. People wore brighter colors: it seemed that everywhere I looked, I saw yellows and reds and purples. Women adorned their hair with fabric flowers, and people lacking access to more valuable ornaments pinned pieces of colored paper to their shirts. Relief was everywhere spoken and felt. Signs read:
I AM HERE
and
WE HAVE SURVIVED
.

I remembered one of the banners from the
Gorky Park celebration:
HE WHO DOES NOT LAUGH, DOES NOT EAT
. Now the sign would have to read:
HE WHO DOES NOT EAT, DOES NOT LAUGH
. The joke, of course, would have been on all of us.

•   •   •

Within a generation of Hammurabi's rule, an Indo-European people known as the Hittites swelled with military and political power. In 1595
B.C.
, Hittite armies marched to Babylon from Anatolia and sacked the great city, bringing the old Babylonian Empire to its humiliating end.

But the Hittite king, amid ugly internal politics, abandoned Babylon, returning to his own capital and his almost immediate assassination.

Thus Babylon was left to the Kassites, who ruled it for four centuries.

Babylon was sacked again in 1225
B.C.
, this time by the Assyrians, who kept the city for only seven years before its citizens successfully
revolted. Again, Babylon had its indirect revenge: the Assyrian king was murdered by his own circle for bringing evil onto Babylon, whose city god was now worshiped by Assyrians as well as Babylonians.

But it would not be long before the Assyrians — notorious for their brutality and population redistributions — brought more suffering to Babylon. Their long and bloody struggles with the Egyptians led to a siege of the city that lasted almost precisely as long as the siege of Leningrad would, so many years later.

Within two decades, the Assyrian Empire fell after only a three-month siege of its capital, Nineveh. Then, in 550
B.C.
, the Persian king Cyrus the Great sacked Babylon yet again, this time killing off the Babylonian Empire once and for all.

•   •   •

By the midpoint of December, Leningrad still had not seen the winter's first blizzard. But it was cold as I stood outside, looking up through
the very last fragment of daylight, at the window of our flat, imagining Alena just inside the paper, cleaning her small, important collection of cacti, caressing the succulents, never pricking her fingertips.

But I was not deluded. I knew that she was not there but gone forever. My eyes moved up the facade of the building to the open square of blackening sky above, and I saw the aurora borealis of the new winter for the first time.

The colored lights were not as spectacular as they sometimes are, as they are when I have to remind myself of their scientific explanation to stop from staggering.

No, this night they were soft and appeared hand tossed. Lofted by small strong fingers.

One afternoon when Albertine was with us, I entered the flat and found Alena sitting on the floor. Albertine sat on a chair behind her, brushing and braiding her shiny pale hair. They looked up at me briefly, but otherwise ignored me.

“What happens to my mother and father if they die?” Albertine asked, taking a thick plait of Alena's hair in her mouth.

“There are many answers to that. People believe many things.”

Albertine firmly took the plait into her hand, spitting out a loose piece of hair, showing her first impatience. “That I know, but who is right?”

“It depends on where they live and who rules them,” I said.

Albertine gave me the longest, clearest gaze she ever had and nodded.

“No,” said Alena. “Only one answer is right. It's just that we don't know which. I believe you will see your parents again.”

“If anywhere, not here,” said Albertine.

•   •   •

When they spoke of it, and they spoke of it seldom, the Babylonians described the place of the dead as a place where dust is nourishment, clay is food. Convinced that their sins would be
punished in this world, this life — whether by men or by gods — they had little use for hell.

•   •   •

People suffer, of course, but less for their sins than for merely being human. More often than not, we get away with our crimes. Our slights are forgiven by those we slight. Our secrets remain secret. We blaspheme, and lightning does not strike.

Exceptions, of course, abound. Sometimes in life, as in literature, people get their just deserts. The greedy man loses everything because he cannot resist seeking more riches. The town gossip is undone by her own tongue. The merciless judge must beg quarter for his personal sadisms.

But usually fate is not so direct, and there is no one to punish us if we do not punish ourselves.

I had enjoyed so much pleasure in my life. I tried to remember the names of the women
whose pleasure I would trade for one last hour with my Alena, in health or even in sickness. Some I could remember and some I could not. And I knew that the trade I desired was not available to me.

Now that I avoided Lidia and had turned down Klavdiya, I could only laugh at my belated fidelity. The Americans I know like to say, “Better late than never,” but this means nothing to me.

•   •   •

Klavdiya was turned more toward the window than from it, so I could see less than her profile against the day's gray light. It was a spy's view that revealed only one odd angle of an entire woman.

Yet with nothing more to go on, no slumped shoulders, no downward dip to her chin, I could see that she was both very sad and very tired. The sadness seemed deeper than the tiredness, below and behind it, the sadness the
cause of the tiredness and not the other way around.

She did not startle when she sensed my presence, and she waited a few moments before turning.

“My husband was killed by a shell,” she said. “Ivan is dead.”

I cannot say what I felt, and my memory of it as only an emptiness makes me worry that I felt nothing at all. “I did not realize, until maybe now, that you loved him.”

“Of course I loved him,” she said, and returned to her odd watch over the view outside her laboratory window, a view I knew so well but for the life of me cannot remember.

•   •   •

When the Leningrad front offensive was officially announced, all the lucky citizens of Leningrad could feel that the blockade would soon enough be broken, could feel like a pulse the trembling of the ground caused by the Soviet
naval guns, continuous, nearly subliminal, and life preserving.

Every day the radio chanted and droned the names of the liberated communities. Krasnoy Selo, Ropsha, Peterhof, and Duerhof; then Uritsk, Ligovo, Strelna, and Novgorod. All places where people lived, I thought.

We heard reports of the sappers who, with their trained dogs, searched for mines in the liberated outlying areas of Leningrad, all now treeless, covered with only the lowliest vegetation.

Soap was being made again, and the piano factory would soon be running. Also, every day, both morning and afternoon, came the radio committee's advertising for trumpeters and piccolo players. The dead still had not been replaced. Forgotten perhaps in a necessary amnesia, but not replaced.

Pushkin and Pavlovsk were liberated on the twenty-fourth of January, and then, three days later, Leningrad, emancipated, rejoined the living world.

That night more than three hundred guns fired twenty-four salvos. At first only green rockets were used, and the sky glowed, phosphorescent like the Gulf of Mexico with its tiny ethereal dinoflagellates and ctenophores. Then it flashed red, and next gold like jewelry, shining and reflecting white as the searchlights of ships lightened the whole weight of the sky.

•   •   •

Lidia declined a post in Moscow, instead lobbying for and landing a quiet research position in Tbilisi. I learned of the success of her plan only upon seeing her packing boxes. The muscle on the front of her arm twitched below her dark sweater as she hoisted a full box from the floor to her desk. Her black hair had been shorn at an angle just below her chin, which made it look as thick as it ever was. Under it, her skin had cleared, though it was still unstained with color, even with the physical effort of lifting the heavy box.

Behind her were the microscopes and petri dishes full of agar that she would leave for microscopes and petri dishes in another, warmer laboratory.

She opened the box before her, lifting out a stack of books.

“So many new books?” I asked, in a tone harsher than intended.

“Not new. These are the only ones I did not burn.” She handed me one whose location she seemed to remember exactly.

I accepted it, taking note only that it was worn, not registering what it was, relieved that she would speak to me. “You go to Georgia then,” I said.

I pictured her there, in the cornucopia of the Union, surrounded by hanging pomegranates ripened to a red-orange color like no other. I saw her mouth stained a pale but fresh and purpling red, not the color of blood, from their seeds. She was dipping flat bread into a rich walnut paste and spooning potato soup, scented
with fresh dill, between her lips. She was wearing her necklace of dried beans from the New World, and it lifted slightly as she swallowed.

Though I said none of this aloud, she nodded and smiled broadly.

•   •   •

More than half a million victims of the blockade are buried in the expansive Piskariovskoye Memorial Garden. More than half a million, mostly civilians. These bones that were people are gulped by mass graves — 186 slightly raised mounds that conceal so much.

The bronze figure of a woman, symbol of the mother country, leans toward them, hips rounded, grieving but herself ample.

•   •   •

Though I took the last of no variety of the institute's collections, many are now gone. In the absence of money, and, in certain years, interest, some of Lidia's rainbow of legumes,
some of the rare landraces of rice that Alena used for her breeding program, were lost to improper storage. What we saved from rats and cold during the winter of hunger fell to rats and heat and humidity in less meager times. Some varieties that needed to be grown out and re-collected every four or five years were left unsowed for decades, as the scientists who cared about them begged money from international conferences and foundations.

A building cannot save what belongs to the fields and gardens of living people.

•   •   •

Voltaire got it right in
Candide
, I believe: a bit of decency and the physical labor and small rewards of cultivating a garden from seed are the best we can strive or hope for to dull the pain of lost expectation, or to cover our vices of weakness, boredom, and need.

But I've always preferred the endings of his earlier works, when he still believed that we
could find sense in suffering and make meaning through history. I prefer the image of Zadig, married to his beautiful and virtuous (if somewhat dull) wife and crowned king of a Babylon of peace, glory, and abundance. “Men blessed Zadig, and Zadig blessed heaven.”

But unlike Zadig, we do not inhabit a world guided by Providence. Ours is a world with only apparent design.

Even in
Candide
, Voltaire was an optimist.

•   •   •

The Komarov Institute, where Alena had refused to ask for a job because it housed so many of the great director's libelers, lost twenty-four of its twenty-five greenhouses to Hitlerite bombs and shells.