The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1)

The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1) Page 48

7

A week passed. Tatiana could not flush the toilet. She could not brush her teeth. She could not wash. Alexander would not be happy with that, she thought. They hadn’t heard from Alexander. Was he all right?

“When do you think they will repair the pipes?” Dasha asked one morning.

“You should hope not too soon,” said Tatiana. “Otherwise you’re going to have to start doing laundry again.”

Dasha came over to Tatiana and hugged her. “I love you. You’re still making jokes.”

“Not good ones,” said Tatiana, hugging her sister back.

Living with small buckets of water was hard. The freezing of the water pipes was worse. But the worst was the spilling of the water that people carried upstairs from the first floor. The water splashed out of the buckets onto the stairs and froze. It was five to twenty degrees below zero every day, and the stairs remained perpetually covered with ice. Every morning, to get the water, Tatiana had to hold the bucket with one hand and the railing with the other, sliding down on her bottom.

Carrying the full bucket upstairs was much harder. She would fall at least once and have to go back for more water. The more water was spilled on the stairs, the more easily she fell and the thicker the ice on the stairs became. The back stairs were even more treacherous. A woman from the fourth floor fell down a flight, broke her leg, and could not get up. She froze on the stairs, into the ice. No one could move her, before or after.

Tatiana, Marina, Dasha, and Mama sat on the couch and listened to the radio’s metronome pound its own relentless heartbeat over the airwaves, its frequencies open and occasionally interrupted by a steady stream of words, some sensible, like “Moscow is fighting the enemy for its very life,” some nonsensical, like “The bread ration is cut once again to 125 grams a day for dependents, 200 grams for workers.”

Other words sometimes followed: “losses,” “damage,” “Churchill.”

Stalin talked of opening a second front in Volkhov. But not until Churchill opened a second one of his own to distract the Germans in the North European countries. Churchill said he had neither the men nor the resources to open a second front, but said he was prepared to repay Stalin for the material losses he had suffered. To which Stalin tartly replied that he would be presenting that bill straight to the Führer himself.

Moscow was in death throes, every last breath expended in the struggle against Hitler. The city was bombed as Leningrad was bombed.

“Haven’t heard from Babushka Anna in a month,” said Dasha one late November evening. “Tania, have you heard from Dimitri?”

“Of course I haven’t,” said Tatiana. “I don’t think I’ll be hearing from him again, Dasha.” She paused. “We haven’t heard from Alexander for a while either.”

“I have,” said Dasha. “Three days ago. I just forgot to tell you. Want to read his letter?”

Dear Dasha and all the girls,

I hope this letter finds you well. Are you waiting for me to return? I am waiting to come back to you.

My commander sent me up to Kokkorevo — a fishing village with no fishermen left. It’s a bombed-out hole where the village used to be. We had practically no trucks on this side, certainly no fuel for the ones we do have. There were twenty of us standing around with a couple of horses. We were there to test the ice, to see if it could hold a truck with food and munitions, or at the very least a horse with a sledge filled with food.

We walked out onto the ice. It’s so cold you’d think the ice would have formed by now, but no. It was surprisingly thin in places. We lost a truck and two horses right away, and then we just stood on the banks of Lake Ladoga and looked at the ice spreading before us, and I said, forget this, give me the damn horse. I hopped on it and rode the mare for four hours — on ice — all the way to Kobona! Temperatures were a dozen degrees below zero. I said this ice will suffice.

As soon as I came back — with a sledge full of food, I was instantly put in charge of a transport regiment — another name for a thousand People’s Volunteers. No one would spare real soldiers for this.

Before the ice got thick enough for the trucks, the volunteers had to ride the horses with the sledges to Kobona to pick up flour and other supplies and ride the horses back. I tell you, your Babushka would have done better than some of those men. They had either never ridden horses or never been out in the cold, or both, because I can’t tell you how many accidents we had with men falling off their horses, falling through the ice, drowning. First day we lost a truck and a load of kerosene right off. We were trying to bring fuel into Leningrad. The fuel shortage is almost as bad as the food shortage. There is no petroleum to fire up the kilns to bake the bread.

We said, let’s forget the trucks for a few days, let’s just use the horses. Little by little, the horses from Kobona made the thirty-kilometer journey to Kokkorevo. One day we brought in over twenty tons of food. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something. I’m in Kobona now, loading food onto the sledges, having a hard time looking at flour and knowing you are in your apartment without any. The front-line troop rations have been reduced to half a kilo of bread a day. I heard the dependent ration fell to 125g. We’ll try to get it back up.

I don’t need to tell you that the Germans are not happy about our little ice road. They bomb it mercilessly, day and night. Less at night. During our first week we lost over three dozen trucks and much food with them. Finally it became clear that I couldn’t be driving the trucks anymore; it was just not putting me to the best use. Now I’m on the Kokkorevo side, as an artillery gunner against the German planes. I’m behind a Zenith antiaircraft weapon. It shoots either machine-gun fire or bombs. It gives me a great feeling of satisfaction to know that I blew up a plane that was going to sink a truck that was bringing food to you.

The ice is thick now except for a few weak patches, and we have some good trucks. They can go as fast as forty kilometers an hour across the lake. The other soldiers and I are calling the ice road the Road of Life. Has quite a ring to it, don’t you think?

Still, without Tikhvin, we’re unable to bring much into Leningrad. We must recapture Tikhvin. What do you think, Dasha, should I volunteer my services for that? Charge the Germans on my starving gray mare, with my brand-new Shpagin machine gun in my arms? I’m just kidding, I think. The Shpagin is a superb gun, though.

I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to Leningrad again, but when I do, I’m bringing food with me, so hang on and keep going.

Courage, all.

Yours,

Alexander

Walk, walk, don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana told herself. Pull that scarf over your face, pull it over your eyes if you have to, just don’t look up, don’t see Leningrad, don’t see your courtyard where the bodies pile up, don’t see the streets where the bodies are laid out on the snow, lift your foot and step over them. Walk around the corpse. Don’t look — you don’t want to see. That morning Tatiana saw a man freshly dead, lying in the street missing most of his torso. Not from a bomb. His flanks had been cut out with a knife. Feeling for Alexander’s pistol in her coat pocket, Tatiana mutely moved through the snowdrifts, her gaze on the ground in front of her.

She had to brandish Alexander’s pistol twice, out in the street by herself, in the dark of the early morning.

Thank God for Alexander.

At the end of November an explosive wave blew out the glass in the room where they ate. They covered the hole with Babushka’s blankets. They had nothing else. The room temperature dropped by thirty degrees, from just above freezing to much below.

Tatiana and Dasha carried the bourzhuika into their room, placing it in front of Mama’s couch, so when Mama sewed the uniforms she would be warm. Continuing to encourage private initiative, the factory paid her twenty rubles for every extra uniform she sewed above her norm. It took Mama the whole of November to sew five uniforms. Then she gave Tatiana a hundred rubles and told her to go and find something in the stores.

Tatiana returned with a glass of black dirt. It was the dirt into which the sugar had melted when the Germans bombed the Badayev warehouses in September. As cheerfully as she could, Tatiana said, “Once the dirt settles to the bottom, our tea will be sweet.”

Step over, don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana, just stand in line and keep your place; if you lose your place they won’t have any bread for you, and then you’ll have to scavenge the city for another store. Stay, don’t move, someone will come and clear this up. A bomb had fallen into the street, into the line Tatiana was in, right on Fontanka, fell and blew apart half a dozen women. What to do? Take care of the living? Of her family? Or move the dead? Don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana.

Don’t lift your eyes, Tatiana, keep them peeled to the snow, and look at nothing but your falling-apart boots. Mama once could have made you another pair. But Mama can’t even hand-sew one extra uniform nowadays, with or without Dasha’s help, with or without your help, when in October she was sewing ten a day by machine.

Alexander! I want to keep my promise to you. I want to stay alive — but I just don’t see how even I with my small needs and stunted metabolism can make it on 200 grams a day, of which 25 percent is edible cellulose — sawdust and pine bark. Bread doused with cottonseed cake, previously thought to be poisonous to humans — not anymore. Bread that is not bread but hardtack — flour and water. Sea biscuit, you called it? Bread that is as dark and heavy as a cobblestone. I cannot make it on 200 grams a day of that bread.

I cannot make it on clear soup. I cannot make it on watery porridge.

Luba Petrova could not. Vera could not. Kirill could not. Nina Iglenko could not. Can Mama and Dasha? Can Marina?

Whatever I have been doing so far is not enough.

To live is going to require something more from me, something not of this world. Some other force is needed that can crowd out want with nothing, cold with nothing. Hunger with nothing.

The desire for food gave way to a terminal malaise, a poxy pallid loss of interest in everything and everybody. The shelling Tatiana completely ignored. She had no strength to run from it, no strength to drop down, no strength to help move bodies or lift victims. A pervasive numbness, an encompassing apathy like a fortress permeated and surrounded her, a fortress broken into by only a spattering of twinges that resembled feeling.

Her mother tweaked her heart; Dasha stirred her affections. Marina — even Marina, despite her miserable greed — moved something inside Tatiana, who didn’t judge her but was disappointed. Nina Iglenko had aroused some pity as she waited for her last son to die before she died herself.

Tatiana had to stop feeling. Already she set her teeth to get through her day. She would have to set them harder. Because there was no food anymore.

I won’t shudder, and I won’t flinch from my short life, I won’t lower my head. I will find a way to lift my eyes.

Keep everything out. Except for you, Alexander. Keep you in.