Winter Garden (24 page)

“We are too late already,” Mama says.

“What is happening?” Olga asks, pulling nervously at her hair again, looking around. Beside her, an elderly woman makes a moaning sound and thumps to the ground in a heap. In seconds she is lost amid the crowd.

“The banks are closed for now. Too many people tried to take out their money.” Mama chews on her lower lip until blood appears and then leads them down to the grocer’s. Here, people are leaving with whatever they can carry. The shelves are practically empty. Already prices are doubling and tripling.

Vera has trouble making sense of this. War has just been announced and yet the supplies are gone already and the people around her look dazed and desperate.

“We have been here before,” Mama says simply.

In the store, they have only enough money for buckwheat, flour, dried lentils, and lard. Carrying their meager supplies back through the crowded streets, they make it to the apartment at just past six.

Vera can hear her children crying and it breaks her heart. She opens the door and scoops them up. Leo throws his arms around her neck and hangs on, saying, “I missed you, Mama.”

Vera thinks then that she will never again follow her mother’s advice about this one thing: she will never leave her children alone.

“Where is your papa?” she asks Anya, who shrugs her small shoulders.

He should have been home by now.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” her mother says. “It will be difficult to get through the streets.”

Worry gnaws at Vera, though, sharpening its bite with every passing minute. Finally, at eight o’clock, he comes into the apartment. The side of his face is dirty and his hair is damp with sweat.

“Verushka,” he says, pulling her into his arms, holding her so tightly she cannot breathe. “The trolleys were full. I ran all the way here. Are you okay?”

“Now we are,” she says.

And she believes it.

That night, while her grandmother snores in the hot darkness, Vera sits up in her bed. The big crisscross of tape and newsprint on the windows lets only the merest light through. Beyond it, the city is strangely, eerily silent. It is as if Leningrad itself has drawn in a sharp breath and is afraid to exhale.

In this shadowy darkness, their apartment seems even smaller and more jumbled. With three narrow beds in the living area and the children’s cots in the kitchen, there is barely room to walk in here anymore. Even at mealtimes they cannot all be together. There isn’t enough room at the table or chairs to go around it.

Not far away, Mama and Olga are awake, too, sitting up in their bed. Beside Vera, Sasha is as silent as she’s ever seen him.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” Olga says. At nineteen, she should be thinking of love and romance and her future, not war. “Maybe the Germans will save us. Comrade Stalin—”

“Shhh,” Mama says sharply, glancing over at her sleeping mother. Some things can never be said aloud. Olga should know this by now.

“Tomorrow we will go to work,” Mama says. “And the next day we do the same, and the next day after that. Now we must go to sleep. Here, Olga, roll over. I will hold you.”

Vera hears the squeaking of the tired bed as they settle down to sleep. She stretches out beside her husband, tries to feel safe in his arms. There is too little light to see his face clearly; he is just gray and black patches, but his breathing is steady and sure and the sound of it, in rhythm to the beating of her heart, calms her down. She touches his cheek, feels the soft stubble of new growth, as familiar to her now as the wedding band she wears. She leans forward to kiss him, and for a moment, when his lips are on hers, there is nothing else, but then he draws back and says, “You will have to be strong, Verushka.”

“We will be strong,” she says, holding him in her arms.

Two nights later they are awakened by gunfire.

Vera launches out of bed, her heart pounding. She falls over her mother’s bed as she tries to get to her children. Gunfire rattles the thin windows, and she can hear footsteps in the hallway and people screaming.

“Hurry,” Sasha says, sounding surprisingly calm. He herds them all together while Mama takes as much food as she can carry. It is not until they are outside in the street, huddled with the crowd of their neighbors beneath a pale blue sky, that they understand: these are Russian antiaircraft guns, practicing for what is to come.

There are no shelters on their street. It is Mama who organizes the people in her building: tomorrow they will go to the storage area in the basement and make a shelter.

Finally, amid the sound of gunfire and the preternatural silence between bursts, Sasha looks down at Vera. Leo is asleep in his arms (the boy can sleep through anything) and Anya is beside him, worriedly sucking her thumb and caressing the end of her blanket. It is a baby habit that was long gone before the start of the war and is now back.

“You know I have to go,” Sasha says to Vera.

She shakes her head, thinking suddenly that this gunfire means nothing; the look on her husband’s face is infinitely more frightening.

“I am a university student and poet,” he says. “And you are the daughter of a criminal of the state.”

“You haven’t published any of your poetry—”

“I am suspect, Vera, and you know this. So are you.”

“You cannot go. I won’t let you.”

“It is done, Vera,” is what he says. “I joined the People’s Volunteer Army.”

Mama is beside her then, clutching her arm. “Of course you are going, Sasha,” she says evenly, and Vera hears the warning in her mother’s tone. Always it is about appearances. Even now, as the gunfire explodes all around them, a black van prowls in the street.

“It is the right thing to do,” Sasha says. “We are the Soviet Army. The best in the world. We will kick the Germans’ asses in no time and I will be home.”

Vera feels little Anya beside her, holding her hand, listening to every word, and so, too, their neighbors, and even strangers. She knows what she is supposed to feel and to say, but doesn’t know if she has the strength for it. Her father had once said to her much the same thing: Do not worry, Veronika Petrovna, I will always be here for you.

“Promise you’ll come back to me,” she says.

“I promise,” he says easily.

But Vera knows: there are some promises that are pointless to ask for and useless to receive. When she turns to her mother, this truth passes between them, and Vera understands her own childhood. She will have to be strong for her children.

She looks up at her husband. “It is a promise I will hold you to, Aleksandr Ivanovich.”

In the morning, she wakens early; in the quiet darkness, she finds her one photograph of them, taken on the day of their wedding.

She looks down at their bright and smiling faces. Tears blur the image as she takes it out of the frame and folds it in half and then in half again. She tucks it in the pocket of his coat.

She hears footsteps behind her, feels his hands on her shoulders.

“I love you, Veruskhka,” he says softly, kissing the side of her face.

She is glad he is behind her. She is not sure she has the strength to look him in the eyes when she says, “I love you, too, Sasha.”

Come back to me.

In no time at all, he is gone.

Vera and Olga are lucky in their jobs. Olga works in the Hermitage Museum and Vera in the Leningrad Public Library. Now both of them spend their days in dark, quiet rooms, crating up masterpieces of art and literature so that the history of the Soviet state will never be lost. When work is over for the day, Vera walks home by herself. Sometimes she goes out of her way to see the Summer Garden and remember the day she met Sasha, but it is getting harder and harder to recall. Already the face of Leningrad is changing. The Bronze Horseman is covered in sandbags and wooden planks. Camouflage nets hang over the Smolny; gray paint has been splashed over the golden spires of the Admiralty. Everywhere she looks, people are busy—building air-raid shelters, standing in line for food, digging trenches. The skies overhead are still blue and cloudless, and no bombs have dropped on them yet, but it is coming and they know it. Every day the speakers blare out reports of the advancements of the German troops. No one believes that the Germans will reach Leningrad—not their magical city built on mud and bones—but bombs will fall here. They have no doubt about that.

On her way home, Vera stops by the bank and withdraws the two hundred rubles she is allowed for the month, and when she has her money, she stands in line for three loaves of bread and a tin of cheese. Today she is lucky; there is food at the end of her long wait. Sometimes she gets to the front of the line only to see it close.

When she finally gets home at eight o’clock, she finds Anya and Leo playing war in the living room, jumping from bed to bed, making shooting sounds at each other.

“Mama!” Leo cries when he sees her. His face breaks into a gummy grin and he runs toward her, throwing himself in her arms. Anya is close on his heels, but she doesn’t hug Vera so tightly. Anya is aggrieved by this business of war and she wants everyone to know it. She does not like spending her days in nursery school and not coming home until six o’clock, and then with “smelly Mrs. Newsky from next door.”

“How are my babies?” Vera asks, pulling Anya into her arms anyway. “What did you two do in school today?”

“I am too old for baby school,” Anya informs her, scrunching her face in concentration.

Vera pats her daughter’s head and goes into the kitchen. She is at the stove putting water on to boil when Olga comes into the apartment.

“Have you heard?” she says breathlessly.

Vera turns around. “What is it?”

Olga glances nervously at Anya and Leo, who are playing with sticks. “The children of Leningrad,” she says, lowering her voice. “They’re being evacuated.”

On the morning of the evacuation, Vera wakens feeling sick. She cannot do it, cannot put her babies on a train bound for somewhere far away and then just go on with her life. She lies in bed, alone, as private a time as exists in this crowded apartment, staring up at the rust-stained, water-marked ceiling. She can hear her mother turning restlessly and Olga snoring quietly in the bed only two feet away.

“Vera?” Mama says.

Vera turns onto her side.

Mama is looking at her. They are close, in their side-by-side beds, almost close enough to touch. A threadbare blanket falls from Mama’s shoulder when Olga rolls over. “You cannot think it,” she says, and Vera wonders if one day she will know what her children are thinking before they do.

“How can I not?” Vera says. All her life she has understood what it is to be a good Soviet, how to follow the rules and keep one’s head down and make no move that draws attention. But this . . . how can she blindly do this thing?

“Comrade Stalin has eyes everywhere. He is surely watching the Germans, and he knows where our children can go so that they will be safe. And all workers’ children must go. That is all there is.”

“What if I don’t see them again?”

Mama peels back the cover and gets out of bed, crossing the tiny space between them. She gets into bed, takes Sasha’s side, and pulls Vera into her arms, stroking her black hair as she used to when Vera was young. “We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we . . . bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do.”

“Sasha told me I would have to be strong.”

Mama nods. “I don’t think men understand, though. Even your Sasha. They march off with their guns and their ideas and they think they know courage.”

“You’re talking about Papa now.”

“Maybe I am.”

They lay for a while longer without talking.

For the first time in a long time, she is thinking about her father. As much as it hurts, it is better than dwelling on what is to come. She closes her eyes and in the darkness she is on the street in front of their old apartment, watching her papa leave.

Her fingers are freezing beneath her woolen gloves and her toes tingle with the cold.

“I want to come to the café with you,” she pleads, tilting her face up to him. A light snow is falling around them; flakes land on her bare cheeks.

He smiles down at her, his big black mustache beetling above his lip. “This is no place for a girl, you know this, Veruskha.”

“But you’ll be reading your poetry. And Anna Akhmatova will be there. She is a woman.”

“Yes,” he says, trying to look stern. “A woman. You are still a girl.”

“One day,” he says, pressing a gloved hand to her shoulder, “you will write your beautiful words. By then they will be teaching literature again in our schools instead of this terrible Soviet realism that is Stalin’s idea of progress. Be patient. Wave to me when I’m across the street, and then go inside.”

She stands there in the snow, watching him go. Tiny kisses of white fire land on her cheeks, almost immediately turning to spots of water that slide downward, slipping like cold fingers beneath her collar.

Soon he is only a blur, a smear of gray wool moving in all that white. She thinks perhaps he has stopped to wave to her, but she cannot be sure. Instead, she sees how night falls on the snow, how it changes the color and textures, and she tries to place this in her memory so that she can describe it in her journal.

“Do you remember when I used to dream of being a writer?” Vera says quietly now.

It is a long time before her mother says, even more softly, “I remember all of it.”

“Maybe someday—”

“Shhh,” her mother says, stroking her hair. “It will only hurt more. This I know.”

Vera hears the disappointment in Mama’s voice, and the accep tance. Vera wonders if one day she will sound like that, too, if it will seem easier to give up. Before she can think of what to say, she hears Leo in the kitchen. No doubt he is talking to the stuffed rabbit that is his best friend.

Vera thinks, It has begun. She feels her mother’s kiss, hears words whispered at her ear, but she cannot understand them. The roar in her head is too loud. She eases out from the bed and sits up. Although this morning is warm, as was the night before, she is dressed in a skirt and a sweater. A battered pair of shoes waits at the end of the bed. They are all sleeping in their clothes now. An air raid can come at any time.

The sound of movements overtake the small apartment: Olga whines that she is still sleepy and her arms ache from loading art into boxes; her grandmother blows her nose; Anya informs everyone that she is hungry.

It is all so ordinary.

Vera swallows the lump that has formed in her throat, but it will not go away. In the kitchen, she sees Leo—the spitting image of his father, with angelic golden curls and expressive green eyes. Leo. Her lion. He is laughing now, telling his poor one-eyed, tattered rabbit that maybe they will get to feed the swans in the Summer Garden today.

“It is war,” Anya says, looking impossibly superior for a five-year-old. Her lisp turns the sentence into something softer, but all of Anya’s fire is in her eyes. She is pure steel, this girl; exactly how Vera once imagined herself to be.

“Actually,” Vera says. “We are going on a walk.” She feels physically ill when she says it, but her mother comes up behind her; with a touch, Vera can go on. She crosses the room and picks up their coats. Last night, Vera stayed up late, sewing money and letters into the lining of her babies’ coats.

Leo is on his feet in an instant, gleefully clapping his hands, saying, “Walk!” over and over. Even Anya is smiling. It has only been five days since the announcement of war, but in those days their old life has disappeared.

Breakfast passes like a funeral procession, in quiet glances and lowered gazes. No one except Mama can look at Vera. At the end of the meal, her grandmother rises. When she looks at Vera, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.

“Come, Zoya,” her grandmother says in a harsh voice. “It does not look good to be late.”

Vera can see that her mother’s lip is bleeding from where she has bitten it. She goes to her grandchildren and kneels down, taking them in her arms and holding them.

“Don’t cry, Baba,” Leo says. “You can walk with us tomorrow.”

Across the room, Olga bursts into tears and tries immediately to control herself. “I am going now, Mama.”

Mama lets go slowly and gets back to her feet. “Be good,” is the last thing she says to her grandchildren. She hands Vera one hundred rubles. “It is all we have left. I’m sorry. . . .”

Vera nods and hugs her mother one last time. Then she straightens. “Let’s go, children.”

It is a beautiful sunny day. The six of them walk together for as long as they can; Mama and Baba leave first, turning toward the Badayev food warehouses where they both work; Olga leaves next. She hugs her niece and nephew fiercely and tries to hide her tears and she runs toward her trolley stop.

Now it is just Vera and her children, walking down the busy street. All around her, trenches are being dug, shelters are being built. They stop in the Summer Garden, but the swans are gone from the pond and the statues are sandbagged. There are no children playing here today, no bicycle rings bleating out.

Smiling too brightly, Vera takes her children by the hands and leads them to a part of the city where they have never been.

Inside the building that they enter there is pandemonium. Queues snake through the hall in every direction, flowing away from desks overrun with paperwork, manned by Party members in drab clothing with dour, disappointed faces.

Vera knows they should go directly into the first processing queue and wait their turn, but suddenly she is not as strong as she needs to be. Taking a deep breath, she takes her children to a corner. It is not quiet here—the sounds of people are everywhere—footsteps, crying, sneezing, begging. The whole place smells of body odor and onions and cured meat.

Vera kneels down.

Anya is frowning. “It smells in here, Mama.”

“Comrade Floppy doesn’t like this place,” Leo says, hugging his bunny.

“Do you remember, when Papa went off to join the Peoples’ Volunteer Army, he told us we would all have to be strong?”

“I’m strong,” Leo says, showing off a pudgy pink fist.

“Yes,” Anya says. She is suspicious now. Vera sees that her daughter is looking at the coats in Vera’s arms and the suitcase she has brought from home.

Vera takes the heavy red woolen coat and puts it on Anya, buttoning it up to her throat. “It is too hot for this, Mama,” Anya whines, wiggling.

“You’re going on a trip,” Vera says evenly. “Not for long. Just a week or two. And you might need your coat. And here . . . here in this suitcase I have packed a few more clothes and some food. Just in case.”

“You are not wearing a coat,” Anya says, frowning.

“I . . . uh . . . I have to work and stay at home, but you will be home before you know it and I’ll be waiting for you. When you get back—”

“No,” Anya says firmly. “I don’t want to go without you.”

“I don’t want to,” Leo wails.

“We have no choice. You understand what this means? War is coming, and our great Comrade Stalin wants you children to be safe. You’re going to take a short train ride south until our Red Army triumphs. Then you will come home to Papa and me.”

Leo is crying now.

“You want us to go?” Anya asks, her blue eyes filling with tears.

No, Vera thinks, even as she nods. “I need you to take care of your brother,” she says. “You are so strong and smart. You will stay with him always, and never wander off. Okay? Can you be strong for me?”

“Yes, Mama,” Anya says.

For the next five hours, they stand in one queue after another. The children are processed and sorted and sent to other lines. By the end of the afternoon, the evacuation center is literally overrun with children and their mothers but the place is strangely quiet. The children sit as they are told, their faces shiny with sweat in the coats they shouldn’t need, their legs swinging in front of them. None of the mothers look at each other; it hurts too much to see your own pain reflected in another woman’s eyes.

And finally the train arrives. Metal wheels scream; smoke billows into the air. At first the crowd just sits there—no one wants to move—but when the whistle pierces the silence, they run like a herd, mothers bustling past each other, elbowing hard, trying to get their babies seats on the train that will save them.

Vera pushes her way to the front of the queue. The train seems alive beside her, breathing smoke, clanging. Party members patrol the area like sharks, forcing mothers to part with their children. Leo is sobbing, clutching Vera. Anya is crying, too, but in a silent way that is somehow worse.

“Take care of each other and stay together. Do not give your food to anyone else. There is money sewn into your pockets if you need it, and my name and address, too.” She pins little name tags on their lapels.

“Where are we going?” Anya asks. She is trying to be grownup; it is heartbreaking in one so young. At five, she should be playing with dolls, not standing in lines to leave her home.

“To the country, a summer park near the Luga River. You will be safe there, Anya. And in no time, I will come for you.” Vera plays with the tag pinned to Anya’s lapel, as if touching the little piece of identification will help.