Moscow but Dreaming (29 page)

Ilya shows up, unbidden and silent, and the girls titter more and then silence, after they notice how he follows Svetlana, how he’s always helping her with her bucket even though she tells him not to. How both of them avoid accidentally touching their hands together.

He shows up every night they keep watch on the roof ever since. Svetlana doesn’t know how he knows—he just appears and sits by her when they rest, or helps with the buckets. They have enough sand up there to extinguish a hellfire, Svetlana thinks, if there was such a thing—but she’s a materialist, and knows that there isn’t.

He also comes by in the mornings when she goes out to wait in a breadline or to work at the factory, or to take the boys to visit Valya, the girl they walked home on the day of their first meeting. He never goes in with them though, but waits outside, through the cold, through the wind.

Valya’s grandmother, Olga Petrovna, is old enough to die soon even without the hunger. She often cries that she’s not strong enough to refuse her portion entirely, even though she only eats half and gives the rest to her granddaughter, and to Svetlana’s brothers when they happen along. Sometimes she gives Svetlana jewelry to take to the black market. “Get some bread. Don’t bring it here though,” she says, “or we’ll eat it all up. Take it to the hospital across the river. They need it.”

Svetlana does as she is told, and Ilya follows, asking for nothing but mute solidarity. He refuses food when offered, but doesn’t seem to suffer as much as Olga Petrovna does.

Olga Petrovna has stories and theories. She tells Svetlana that there’s food in the city, only Zhdanov and other party officials keep it to themselves; she says that there’s grain in Vavilov’s Institute, the Genofond scientists keep all kinds of wheat and rice and every grain known to man. She also doesn’t think cannibals are really cannibals. “You’re young,” she tells Svetlana. “You don’t even know who upyri are.”

“I know,” Svetlana whispers, eyes downcast. The very word, Upyr, makes her skin crawl, materialism notwithstanding. There was never a Russian child not scared half to death by the stories of those dead who rose from their graves and ate the living.

“You just remember,” Olga Petrovna says, “if they ever come for you, all you have to do is to call them for what they are. ‘Upyr,’ you must say, and he’ll turn into a man—for a little bit, at least.”

Svetlana smiles, imagining herself confronting a gang of cannibals with words. “Men are still men. They’re still dangerous.”

“But if they’re human, they won’t try to eat you.” Svetlana shrugs, not convinced. With hunger like that, why wouldn’t they try to eat anything alive and made of meat?

4.

In her mind, Svetlana never recognized her relationship with Ilya as courtship. It was only when Yasha and Vanya, re-energized by playing at Valya’s quiet, cavernous apartment, as barren of floorboards as any other, and by her grandmother’s stories and slivers of bread she fed them throughout (children ate from her hands, opening their mouths wide and stretching their thin necks, like baby birds) started teasing. “Bride and groom,” they started in a whisper and then, growing bolder, in a singsong, when Ilya and Svetlana walked side by side behind them, heading home to mother. “Bride and groom.”

Svetlana blushed and looked at her boots, the slicks of ice, the river swelling up leaden and white up ahead, and at the boy’s shaven heads, blue under their hats—anywhere but Ilya’s steady gaze and his hale earth smell.

Ilya murmured under his breath, as embarrassed as she felt. She couldn’t quite make out the words, but thought that he said “Heart” or “My heart,” and her stomach felt warm and tight.

When they reached her house, she looked up at him, into his sparkling eyes. “You can come in, if you wish.”

She told the boys to be quiet or she’d box their ears if they breathed a word to mother, probably asleep in her room. The boys tittered, and she twisted Yasha’s ear harder than she meant—that quieted them right down. Ilya waited patiently as she herded the boys to kiss their sleeping mother (her breath so shallow) and then to their own room.

She was not on the air-raid duty that night, and she motioned for Ilya to follow her into her room; he instead remained standing as if stuck to the spot, until she whispered fiercely, “What are you waiting for? Come on.”

She didn’t light the candle and undressed in the dark. She could feel Ilya’s solid presence, smell him as she unbraided her hair. She slipped under the covers and soon he followed, the mattress shifting under his weight, his body dense like iron. They lay side by side, their arms barely touching, until Svetlana fell asleep.

In the morning, he was gone.

5.

In the morning, she also discovered that her mother was up unusually early—a fat lardy candle burned in the communal kitchen, and mother, wrapped into two shawls over her nightgown, coat, and boots, her bare venous legs ghostly white in the dusk, sighed and pulled the folding kitchen table to the center. Svetlana’s heart sank.

“The neighbor’s dead,” mother said. “Something awful happened.”

Svetlana raised an eyebrow—dead was normal. “Awful?”

“The door was ajar this morning,” mother said. “Someone must’ve broken in. Yasha heard her whimpering and woke me, but when I got there, she already bled out. People are turning savage.”

On numb feet, Svetlana hurried down the hall, to the usually closed Lyuda’s door. Thoughts buzzed in her head, without taking shape but content with general notions—cannibals, someone killed her, wonder if Ilya’s all right.

The woman lay in her bed, and one could think her sleeping if it wasn’t for the wide gash in her neck, an extra mouth, blooming in a red obscene flower across her neck. The mattress was soaked with dark blood, but they could probably still sell it, or give it to someone who needs a bed, even if blood-soaked.

The edges of the wound were torn and raw, and there were definitive toothmarks. Svetlana tried to imagine a serrated knife that would leave a cut like that, but the mind rejected the possibility. She folded a doily from the bed table into a dense white rectangle, and stuffed it into the wound, and watched the doily turn slowly pink.

6.

It is important for a city in crisis, no matter how terrible, to maintain elements of normalcy, something people can anchor their sanity to. This is why there’s still theater and musical concerts, and this is why when Ilya invites her to see a play, Svetlana accepts. She insists that the boys should come too, and Ilya buys them tickets to see Les Miserables—Gavroche is being played by a middle-aged woman, but otherwise the play is fine, and the boys seem to enjoy themselves. Both have been subdued lately and laugh little. They don’t even tease when Ilya comes home with them again.

This time, Svetlana is asleep—a sick heavy nightmare sleep— before her head even touches the pillow.

And as I tell you this, I know that you’re wondering the same thing that I and my brother, although still too young at nine, wondered about: why didn’t she have any suspicions? I have my own theory. I do think that some facts are merely too terrible to consider. Love complicates everything further.

She has nightmares about Ilya leaning over her, his chest pressing on top of hers like a tombstone, stilling her heart, stealing her breath, “My heart,” he says. “I hold you in my hands. For the sake of your brothers . . . ”

Mother is dead next morning.

7.

Svetlana decided now that she was the head of the household, the boys would have to go. She bundled up Yasha and Vanya—or rather, Vanya, my brother, and me, and gave us all the food she managed to scavenge in these past days. She gave us our clothes, wrapped in blankets, and we stood in the hallway like two tiny transients. “They will be taking more children out this morning,” she told us as we walked side by side with her. “Or maybe the next. You must go though, while the ice is still strong. We’ll go by Valya’s house, see if Olga Petrovna would send her out too.” All the while, her gaze cast about, looking for Ilya, but he failed to show up that day. Who can tell why.

None of us mentioned the dead kindergarten teacher and our mother, lying side by side on the kitchen table, with their windpipes torn out and gnawed raw.

Olga Petrovna, superstitious as she was (Svetlana said to the children that it was because she was from a village, not city-born like us), crossed herself. “When you take them to be buried,” she said, “don’t take them out of the door—go through a wall or a window. And don’t carry the bodies along the roads.”

Svetlana sighed. “We live on the third floor, we can’t just toss them out of the window. And it’s silly anyway.”

“Not when an upyr takes a life. Do you want your mother to become one of the cursed? Do you want the devil to take her?”

“There’s no such thing as upyr,” Svetlana said, and paced back and forth across the cold corridor while the children waited, huddled, by the entryway. “Or devil, for that matter.”

“Who gnawed them then?”

“Cannibals broke in.”

“And left the bodies?”

“Someone startled them.” Svetlana froze to the spot. “I think it was my friend who did—he . . . ”

Olga Petrovna didn’t need to hear the rest. “Dear child!” she cried. “Daughter! You brought a stranger home? Do you even know what he is?”

“Just a young man,” Svetlana said. “A handsome fellow. In any case, I only came to ask if Valya would like to come with us. I want to send the boys out, by the Road of Life. I know there are bombs, but at least they have a chance of getting out.”

Olga Petrovna nodded slowly. “Better than them dying here, of hunger or worse.” She gave Svetlana a piercing look. “Listen to me, daughter, and if there’s anything you’d do, do this one thing: find out where your handsome fellow goes when you’re not with him.”

“How’d I do that?”

“By cunning.” Olga Petrovna hobbled into the darkened cave of her living room, and returned momentarily with a ball of uneven black yarn. “Next time you see him, you tie that string to the hem of his coat. And then you follow along. I’ll go get Valya ready now.”

Svetlana took the children to the rallying point, where they waited for hours in a long, silent throng of children, old people, a few pregnant women. It was almost dark when the crowd started to move and the engines revved up ahead. Svetlana hugged the boys and cried over them and made them promise to be good and to write and, after the war is over, to find her. Just as she kissed the boys tearfully goodbye, a woman—short, squat, in military boots and a man’s jacket—walked up to her.

“We’re taking the smallest ones today,” and motioned at Yasha (me). “Bring him back next week—they promise more trucks then. Today we have no space for him now, just the little ones.”

“Please,” Svetlana clutched her hands to her chest. “He’s just one boy.”

The woman nodded. “And there’s no place for him. Do you know how many we turned away today? We’re taking the small ones though.” Her large mittened hands swallowed Vanya’s and Valya’s, and the three of them were gone.

Svetlana and Yasha returned home.

The girls from the neighborhood—the same ones that were on air-raid duty with Svetlana—helped her dress the two dead women and to cover up the gashes on their throats. They took them on a sled and carted them to the site of the nearest common grave, near Nekropol. The earth was too hard to dig, and they left them with the rest of the bodies awaiting burial, alone in the dark.

Only two of them in the large communal apartment now, and barely any wood. They sat together under the covers, their breath white mist, shimmering in the darkness like anti-materialist ghosts. They sleep with their arms around each other, secretly grateful for a warm body to hold.

8.

Many children died while evacuating. Many survived, and were placed into orphanages around the country. Most went to school at their new places of residence, and lied about where they were from and what their fathers died of (a living father was a rare treasure, and yet a potential embarrassment—he better be a war hero.) Most of the fathers died in the war, best if it happened in Germany or in the Stalingrad battle. Having a father who died in the siege is a liability, and this is why most of the siege kids lie—having a father who starved to death is only a step above a father who was executed for being the enemy of the people. On the playground, every father is a war hero. Some kids are lucky enough to have fathers and brothers who are war heroes, and they never fail to mention the fact. I hope that Vanya learned the correct lies quickly.

9.

The next morning, Svetlana tells Yasha to sleep and not to open the door to anyone, and leaves for the factory. She is not sure if it’s her shift or if the factory is even open, but she goes anyway. She is relieved and terrified to discover Ilya waiting just outside.

“Where are your brothers?” he asks.

“Gone. Evacuated, the boys and Valya.” (She is hoping that Yasha is not looking out of the window, like he often does— seeing her coming and going. She is too afraid to look herself and betray him.) “I have to be at the factory.”

“I’ll walk you,” he says.

She wraps her arm under his, gingerly, and they walk arm in arm, step in step, in silence. The sun is out and the river sparkles, and all the while her fingers are working, working, to wind the ragged black thread Olga Petrovna gave her through the buttonhole of his sleeve.

He doesn’t seem to notice as they walk, or even as he kisses her goodbye, his mouth moist and cold, lips liver-colored, pressed against hers for one suffocating moment, and then he is gone— walking away toward the embankment, the left bank. He never even noticed that the factory gates were closed.

She waits for the black thread to unravel and lets it slack as he disappears from view. Then, she follows him. They walk again, step in step, separated by a length of black woolen thread. It hangs like silk of a monstrous spiderweb, like a curving meridian line—she imagines it as a thick jagged crack in white ice, running across lake Ladoga, separating her from the evacuated and the saved, a thick woolen thread, fuzzy and itchy, that connects her to him without ever touching. Cleaved, in both senses of the word, along the embankment.