This is what I am working on for NanoWriMo. Just thought I’d share where I’m at up to this point…

At twenty-three, my family was already getting worried that I’d turn into an old maid. I never made any time for socializing. I went to school and I worked. I had little interest in dating and I was not exactly the kind of girl that most men wanted in those days. I was an attractive enough girl.  Slightly below average in height, small but not fragile, with distinct green eyes that made everyone comment and long brown hair that my classmates had always tried to style for me during my school days.  But I wasn’t at all domestic, I didn’t cook or sew or patronize the idea that a woman should be a man’s servant in any way.  I was really quite bull-headed.  Not the kind of girl that most men were looking for in those days.

I supported my grandmother after running away from my mom and my mother’s new husband when I was just a girl. I was only beginning to come to terms with her second marriage at that time. I really did not fully understand what it meant for her to have to marry in order so that we could survive the revolution. I spent most of my childhood so angry at her for marrying so soon after father was killed. I hated the Communists for killing him and now it was as if everyone around me had converted. Revolutions have a way of doing that. It is not so much that people just switches sides one day. It’s more that they all just bleed. Bleed into one another until you can’t tell anyone apart. In truth, you want to believe the propaganda, but, as a witness, you are unable to convince your memory.  You know that if you could believe that it would be easier.  Your suffering is in large part because you are unable to forget how things were and to believe the official history.  

My father’s story is complicated by intrigues.  My mother’s family were wealthy merchants.  They owned a hotel and sold textiles.  Their estate was seized during the revolution and they lost everything. Despite this, my mother fell in love with a revolutionary.  Of course, she was estranged from her family after that.  Then, as the paranoia of power overwhelmed the leaders, many of whom were only naive students and powerless intelligentsia to begin with, my Father, Isaac Sokolovsky disappeared.  I have heard various accounts.  In one, I was told that he was a Cheka, a group of special forces that are part of an intelligence service, one that preceded the KGB and that he was killed confiscating land from a Kulak during the period of farm collectivization.  Another version of the story is that he was coopted by a rival group in a conflict over ideology during an executive committee meeting.  The Bolsheviks turned against him and a couple of his comrades, a group of Mensheviks, and they were accused of treason.  I know that in the first revolution he played a role that was not insignificant, but by the second revolution, as the civil war continued, the power dynamic had shifted.  

The situation got worse quickly.  Other members of our family disappeared.  First, my father’s sister went missing.  Then, my mother’s parents, who had already lost everything, were taken away.   It is at that point my mother went on the run.  For this reason I have always believed that the communists were at the root of my Father’s death.  At that age, I can clearly remember that I didn’t feel scared so much as terribly angry.  I was angry about a lot of things. Angry that we had lost everything that we’d had – which was not much to begin with.  My father was gone, and my Aunt who had been so close to our family.  It just seemed as if it made no sense. All the sudden we had nothing. I had no father, no home, no place to go… Having no place to go is something all together different than not having a home.

Over time that anger just turned inside and I just couldn’t let it go. I think that I must have hated people. Men and their wars and their abuse, their filth, their drunkenness. But I don’t know if you can call it hate what I felt. It was a distant simmering, a combination of feelings so confused that I was too overwhelmed to feel anything. I was certainly quite different from the girls at my school. They were eager to find a boy and marry him before he was conscripted into army or sent off to a new communal project somewhere. I was not in any kind of hurry, that’s for sure.

My mother married almost immediately after my father was killed. Stepfather had his own sons and didn’t have much room in his life or his home for a girl with my problems. Mother never really explained it all to me. She wanted me to be respectful and obedient, but I think it was too difficult for her to tell me the truth. She had given herself away in order to survive, in order to change her name and to disappear. So I left. I took very little with me. I didn’t have much to take. A dress. A pillow. An old jacket. I still remember it. It was dark gray and thick wool with flowers woven into the bosom. It was nothing special. But it kept me warm on the train to grandmas. I also took a pair of earrings. The ones my father had given my mother. My mother had given them to me when stepfather had asked her to sell them. She found a way. Only much later did I realize that we are often not in a position to understand the things that others do in order to protect us. The irony is that we are often too absorbed in our own hurt to understand the sacrifices that others must make. We only miss what has been taken, but don’t understand the sacrifice. It is not only children who are unable to see this.

So, when, shortly after completing nursing school, a classmate of mine suggested that I join her and her boyfriend on a date with one of his friends, I was more than a little reluctant. He was, like her man… ten years my senior and had already fought in one war. Though she assured me that he had all of his limbs and intellect in tact… I rather wished that he had been damaged. It would have given me an excuse… not for her but for my grandmother and her sister. They would not relent on the matter.

I have to admit, he was a handsome man. He was tall and very well educated. He was quiet too, which was good for me. In fact, we spoke little the entire evening. We let our friends do most of the talking. This was good for the both of us. It was actually quite comfortable. The very next day he asked me out on a second date. I agreed. He was only slightly more talkative. We had a pleasant time and I actually felt I could trust him. He was a calm man. Though he was a soldier he was a specialist, an arborealist, so he did more with his mind than his fists. He could talk about trees and woodworking with greater ease than he could discuss people or politics. He loved books, but did not go into detail about his readings. I wondered if his love was more about the paper than the ink. I was warming up to him and he to me, this I could tell, but I had no reason to expect what would happen next. When he brought me home that night he told me that he had to return to Saint Petersburg the next day. And then he asked me to marry him. He was not romantic about it. He explained that he did not have much, but that he would do what he could to make a good life for us, but that if I wanted to marry him that I would need to come to be with him in Saint Petersburg.

Perhaps I should have been detoured by the fact that he did not even offer to pay for my travel. It was as if the thought did not even cross his mind to do so. Or that he did not offer to return to help me move. He simply presented the option to me and left me to resolve it. I think it was partially his lack of chivalry that appealed to me. Something about his complete lack of machismo made his offer even more sincere and gave me the courage. It was a slow moving whirlwind made even more surreal by a lack of passion. I was not swept up exactly but I was changed.

It took me several days to make my decision. I had little to keep me from going. I dreamt of Saint Petersburg often, even as a little girl. It had seemed such a perfect crystal, clean and cold. Pristine like a fairy tale etched in ice. I had finished nursing school and I knew I could find work anywhere. I had very little to pack. That is when I sold the earrings. They were my only jewelry… not that I cared much for jewels. After all, it was the jewels that my father possessed that had made him a target for the Red Army in their war against kulaks, the merchants and the bourgeois. But those earrings were my last connection to my father and it broke my heart to part with them.

I sent a letter that I expected would arrive several days before I did. Zalman met me at the station. He looked so happy when he saw me, I could see so much light in his watery eyes. He held my hand and gave me a ring as soon as we were close enough to touch. I only learned years later that he had sold several suits, most of his books and his prized chestnut table to buy me that ring. We ate on a plain pine board he had fashioned into a table with mismatched legs for several years after. I often remember the feel of that smooth pine table. I can still remember the knots in its face. I would circle them with a wiping cloth meticulously, sometimes several strokes after all the food had been wiped away.

Our wedding was a quiet and private affair. It was mostly his family and a few friends of his from work or the service. It did not take long for us to have kids. He was already older, and ready. Our two boys were born before the beginning of the second war. We lived with Zalman’s family for a while. We shared an apartment with several others.  There was no privacy but this was normal at that time.  Companies often offered housing to employees but would only give private apartments to senior managers.  Beside us there was an old couple and their adult son who was a miscreant. He came home with stolen items stinking of cheap champagne all the time.  Zalman was a very quiet and patient man, sturdy and competent with his work, but completely unable to take care of even the basics of home life.  Left to his own devices he was an unbearably poor dresser and would never so much as warm up a premade pirog.  He ate everything cold and thought nothing of eating sauerkraut and cold meat meal after meal. 

I did not have much more complicated needs, but as I began to truly grow to love him in a deeper way… in a way that was perhaps less selfish than the giddiness of early love… in a way that made me want good things for him, I began to want to do the things for him that he would not do for himself.  I decided to learn to cook.  Now, believe me when I tell you that I did not know the first thing about cooking.  I had never paid attention when my grandmother cooked for me and mostly I ate at the cafeteria at school or at work.  Food was just something that was provided, not something that I really considered.  Nevertheless, I decided to make a meal for him that I knew was one of his favorites and that did not seem too difficult – gretski style macaroni.  This is basically ground meat and macaroni fried together.  So, what did I do?  I took the dry noodles and I put them on the frying pan with a spoon of butter.  As soon as the pan got hot the noodles began to pop right out.  In moments, they were splattering all over the kitchen – burning hot and smoking.  I think an oily macaroni must have landed under the pan because the next thing I know there was a fire burning all around the pan.  I didn’t even think about it, I just grabbed the handle and threw the pan into the sink.  I doused the stove with water and was able to get the fire out pretty quickly. 

The kitchen was a mess.  The stove was blackened and splattered with burnt oil.  The floor was covered in noodles.  The room stunk of smoke and ruined butter.  What a disaster.  Now, I may not have been a good cook, but I really could never stand for a mess.  I cleaned up everything before Zalman got home, but I could not hide the smell.  I was so embarrassed.  Of course, he just laughed it off.  He told me that he did not marry me to be his cook.  That he could get a meal anywhere.  But, I was determined at that moment that I would learn to cook, and that one day I would make Zalman a meal that he could not eat anywhere else.   

I got much of my primary culinary education from an old neighbor woman.  Though
she laughed at my ineptitude, she was a good teacher and patient.  Boiling macaroni before frying seems obvious now, but it was a little epiphany when I first learned of it.  She
directed me in the basics, in understanding the appropriate combination of flavors
that is essential especially when the ingredients are minimal.  In techniques to prepare staples and improve flavors.  I learned how to reduce the scent of cabbage by shocking it with boiling water and draining it first.  That onions become bitter after boiling for more than an hour.  She taught me the order in which to add ingredients, how to tenderize meat and make it less fatty using marinades.  She taught me to strain the flavor of blood from soups and to crystallize the starch on potatoes with cold water before frying.  Sauces became especially exciting because I could make them from almost anything in the cubbard once I knew what flavors worked together.

We would cook our dinners together, combining the few things we could each get our hands on into meals.  After I began to understand the essentials I started to enjoy myself.  I began to feel creative.  I asked everyone I could for recipes.  I collected books and tips.   It became a little bit of an obsession.   At that time, Leningrad was a cultural center.  It was very cosmopolitan and there was tremendous diversity in the population.  There were Georgians and Balkans, I had a friend who was originally from the Baltics, there were Turks and Greeks and of course many Jews.  This made for great variety in the food that I learned to cook.

The build up to the war was slow. As a nurse and a specialist commander, we were scared that we would both get called up for the war. At that time, it was not unusual to leave children in state custody. They found a way to use everyone. That was their equality. To steal children and to put them in orphanages, into the Komsomol if they showed any brains at all, or to send them to factories, would help them become good citizens, leaders of the next generation – without unnecessary ties to family and attachments. Those animals could justify anything.

It is hard to describe those days. The world around us was collapsing but we were isolated in a way that you could never imagine. Not with your television and your computers. We knew almost nothing except what we heard from rumors. If we had not lived in the city, we would have known nothing. Not only did the government conceal everything from us, but what it did tell us was so surreal that to believe it would be to accept a dream as real only because it was more comfortable than being awake. Meanwhile, friends and family disappeared, the war closed in on us and the propaganda escalated as it does only in war. We, most of us, did not care who we feared: the Fascists or the Communists or the remnants of the White Army. It did not matter anymore.

When the Nazis invaded it was summer. Zalman had to go to the front immediately. I was lucky to have government care to help with the kids so that I could continue to work. But working was hard. As soldiers returned wounded from the field, I would hear such terrible stories. I would ask every one of them whether they knew Zalman and occasionally a man would. It was good to know that he was okay, but the stories got worse and the injured increased by the day.

By now it was late August. The Nazis were quickly closing in on Leningrad. We were completely overwhelmed by wounded, but in truth, most were not coming back at all. Many of the residents had fled to the Urals in the first wave of evacuations. But enough remained too that the city was an eerie metropolis – half empty, strangely silent. I was obligated to stay as essential to the war effort. At that point I had already received several summons to join the war effort on the front and had deferred with various bureaucratic requests. God only knows what would have happened to the boys then. Zhena was seven and Edjik was four. They were just old enough to understand some things, which made much of it even harder for them.

Now I was expected to stay as everyone fled. I decided to go to the office of the commissioner to beg him to let me go. He agreed to let me come despite the chaos, despite the advance of the panzers and the constant fear that anything anyone said or did might make them an enemy of Stalin. The office was a wooden bunker in a cold stone basement. A divider of thin and widely gapped strips of board decorated with propaganda to conceal the cheap finish acted as a wall between the receptionist and the commissar. She was not there. Her desk was still covered in personal artifacts including a makeup kit and random evidence of a vain woman. I realized then that he could see me from his back den through the gaps in the wood and I had a sudden feeling of deep discomfort. I was distinctly aware that I was alone in this basement of a half empty city with a man who could alter my destiny at his whim. He shuffled around behind the wall and called me in with a brash holler.

He was surrounded on three sides by a mahogany stained wooden wall covered in plaques of various acknowledgments from the Communist party. His cherry red desk seemed to brighten the red flush of his folded and plump face. Surrounded by so much rich wood I couldn’t help but wonder if Zalman had chosen any of these trees. The thought gave me a moment of comfort followed by an even deeper sadness.

There was bronze everywhere, from the lamps to the ornaments. It was a mess of paperwork and littered with plates of dried food remnants. It smelled of stale body odor and cheap vodka. From the sunken glazed look of his eyes it was clear that he had obviously been drinking for some time, a long-term kind of drunkenness. “What can I do for you young lady?” he slurred.

“I am requesting the opportunity to evacuate.”

“Welcome to the club lady,” he snarled. “What makes you special?”

“My husband is at the front sir, and we have two young boys. We have no family near to send them to. They are too young to endure here if we are invaded.”

“Then put them in the care of the state. That is the policy. Why is it that you have been ordered to stay here? Can you remind me who you are?”

“I am a nurse.”

“Then you must stay. You do not have a choice.”

“But… sir. My boys are all the family I have. I have already lost everyone, everything to wars. I…” I couldn’t continue on. It felt hopeless. I could feel my eyes getting hot and my vision blurring. I felt my vulnerability too, and a perceptible leaden lechery starting to creep over him.

I felt anger rising up… more anger than fear, or even grief. The anger even overtook the hopeless feeling. He mistook my moment of despair for weakness and seemed to be preparing to take advantage of it. I was horrified. At that moment a strange thought crossed my mind.

“Sir, I warn you. I have lost family in the war. My father was an Operatchik, a key part of the revolution in Smolensk before he was killed. If you help me, you will be honored by Father Stalin.” I don’t know where this lie even came from. Not only was it a fiction, it was a complete reversal of my family’s history. And yet, I felt no shame. The politics of it all was a meaningless distraction. If there were any chance to save my children I would say anything now.

“Well then, you should be honoring your father with your service instead of running like a coward.”

“I want my sons to have the opportunity to honor him. They can be great Soviets. They have been raised with pride. But they need a chance.”

“What was his name?”

He had me cornered. I could not give his name.  Whether he’d been executed as a traitor or had once been honored before he had been disappeared, I might never know. His name could give it away. That is what my mother had sacrificed a second marriage to a cruel man to conceal. I dug into the corners of my communist schooling to recall a name that I could claim. “Vasilievich”, I said.

“I know the name.” I could not tell if he knew the name or if he was trying to conceal his ignorance. But something in his drunken countenance ebbed over into a softer manner.  “But, it does you no good. You must stay. We need every medical specialist here. These are desperate times. But, check in with me. There may be something I can help with.” He then dug around behind his desk and handed me a partially eaten salami. “Take this for your boys. They will need their strength. I’m sorry that I can not do more.”

In hindsight, I realize that the only reason that I didn’t leave the city anyway is because I feared the Soviets more than I feared the invading army. I suppose it is natural to fear what you know will cause you pain over something that you’ve never experienced. Of course, nobody knew how bad it would get. At that time what I feared most was going to a gulag. Had I run and been caught then, that would have surely been my fate… and the fate of the boys was far less certain. So I stayed. After the evacuations there were no more institutional daycares.  The boys were cared for at the hospital during my shift. We all split the work of watching each other’s kids in the unscheduled hours. Nobody really wanted to go home, so we mostly stayed at the hospital, and stayed together as much as we could.

Nobody knew what the Nazis planned once they had barricaded the city. We expected them to attack, to enter the city and overrun us in the streets. There were rumours that they were merciless in rounding up people, creating ghettos and even worse.  I had heard from a boy who returned from the front of a mass execution explicitly of Jews in Romania only several months before. We packed our most precious things and hid what we could in preparation for invasion. As the days passed it became less and less clear what they would do. It was our good fortune that we had not been at the hospital when the bombings began. We were home that night, me with the boys, when that horrible hammering began. It is so difficult to explain the dread that you experience during a bombing. You are blind while the rolling booms get closer and then more distant in slow waves. And the smell is not just like a fire. It is a smell that carries so many strange overtones. Metal smells, sulfur, petrol, animal. Smells too strange to identify. When the sugar factory burned it smelled like candy. Another night it smelled like burnt bread. Often after a bombing, food remains and other salvage from the destruction would circulate across the city. The people were like rats. They would not even wait for the fires to die.

The hospital was destroyed early in the siege. Soldiers, nurses, doctors, children all were killed. We were fortunate to be home. I did not need to go to work to learn of it. The destruction of that entire area of the city was visible from across town. We stayed at the apartment after that. It was a small tenement with four floors and eight apartments on each level. More than half of the residents had evacuated. Those that had remained were often in similar situations as we were, forced by some obligation or perceived need to stay and maintain the city or serve the war effort. A city official remained, and his adult daughter and wife who refused to leave him. An invalid veteran from the first war remained on the ground floor. Two old women, sisters who had refused to leave lived on the second floor in an apartment near ours. There were few men who could fight that remained in the city.

I was one of the most able of the residents who could take trips to get supplies and learn news. The official and his family also helped. We would collect ration cards to send with whomever would go pick up supplies. After the main food depot had been destroyed the rations began to dwindle quickly. A piece of bread per person was often all we would get. Meat grew scarce. The nights grew long and an arctic winter unlike anything any of us could remember set in as if conjured by some evil god too horrible to name.

When the coal ran out and we had no more heat we thought that was as bad as it could get. We retreated to the cellar where the temperature was constant but it was always damp and dark. All of us sleeping together to preserve heat. At first we would leave in spells to sit in our cold apartments to be alone. But, over time, that luxury seemed meaningless. Over just a few weeks we began to lose our sense of humanity. Edjik stopped talking all together. He acted as if dumb and became despondent. Zhenia turned into a miniature man as if overnight. Not always in good ways. He would have fits of rage like an alcoholic… at times mean unlike a boy his age. But, he also became courageous and mature, willing to give or do anything for anyone, especially his brother. He also seemed to develop a crush on the daughter of the official, who, though younger than I, could have been his mother, that was both childish and well beyond his years. His favors for her were sometimes rare rays of light for us all.

We made do by raiding the abandoned apartments and dismantling the furniture for firewood. When the pipes froze and we lost our water, that is when desperation really set in. We were forced to take more trips into the streets to see the deteriorating condition of the city and its inhabitants. It had been dark late and at the first of dusk people were out in packs. There were many more women than men. Even through their layers of rags and ragged clothes you could see how skinny many of them had become. Where slivers of skin peaked out from under wraps you could see that people were becoming dusty colored and hyaline like bandaged moths. There was a crowd gathered at a corner, water pails gleaming with frost and ice crystals in the sun.

The crowd was so dense that I couldn’t see why everyone had gathered. But I could see a stream of black ice running across the street. A woman I asked confirmed that a pipe had broken under the street and was leaking water. They were looking for tools to use to get at the plumbing. Soon several women from the nearby apartments made their way towards the center with shovels and picks. More and more buildings were broken burnt husks, exposed apartments with people’s abandoned possessions covered in snow and ash.

The crowd worked efficiently, forming a line to distribute the dirt so the excavation could move quickly. The line than moved the pails through for filling. I can still remember the sound of that frigid wet metal as it literally tried to fuse with whatever it touched, whether it be skin, wool or leather.  Though I remember the cold, it is the sound of the pail latching on to each hand in the relay that is with me somehow… like an old clock ticking.  After I got my water I stayed. This was a rare moment that winter. So, when I remained, it wasn’t just out of obligation to help. There was a spirit in that morning’s alliance. I felt the elation, the encouragement that people are good and that they are capable of good. After the pails had been filled water continued to run. A group salvaged a large sink from a nearby restaurant that had closed with the evacuation and fixed the pipe, fitting a valve to preserve the water. I was glad to have been a part of that moment.

We used that sink for a time, but it eventually must have broken open further ahead. At that point I did not have the energy as some did to excavate and heat the pipes to drain the last of their life.

A day I remember fondly was when Katarina brought candies down to the cellar. Sweet and sour suckers. She had saved them, and confessed that she had been sneaking one from time to time, but wanted to give them to the kids. She was usually a brassy woman who did a lot of grumbling but rarely offered personal information. So though we were almost always together I didn’t know her much at all. Katarina was the elder of the two sisters. She gave the boys candies and left me with a handful more for them.

She wanted to talk about school with Zhenia. He would have just started his second year of school. She asked him what his favorite memories were and whether he was practicing his alphabet and number charts. She told a story of her youth when she’d returned home from school and first moved back in with her parents after so many years away, now as a young woman. How she’d had a couple of suitors coming to visit her in that few months before she’d started as a teacher at the local school and met her husband, a carpenter who did maintenance on the building. Katarina offered to teach Zhenia as a way to pass the time and he was really grateful and willing. It helped him to be busy too.

This was the case for many of us. We often did mundane or even futile tasks to stay busy and to pass for functional. I think more than anything, it really helped everyone to preserve as much order as was possible, and to pretend that certain tasks had to be carried out despite the obvious disconnect from a larger system of order. People would track their paces or their excrements, their cups of water or grams of bread. They would polish clean dishes or count their silver or move shelves and belongings around in unlived in apartments. The bureaucrat, Gregary Ilianovich, had been a transit planner. He spent hours configuring schedules for buses and trains that had been shut down for months. 

    Anyone that could would go to work.  Anything to preserve a semblance of normalcy and to keep the mind busy.  That is a strange thing about such hunger.  Your body can barely carry its own weight some days, and exhaustion can completely overwhelm every step, give you leaden feet and wooden hands.  The skin around your face can feel so weak, tanned and hardened against your bones that you fear to move your lips lest they break and bleed.  Hunger can  make your hands feel like they are no longer under your control and rob your body of precious heat already in short supply.  Despite all this, though the mind may wander, it does not slow.  It may become mad, but it does not preserve energy the way your body does.  Quite the opposite.  It can be quite restless, intransigent even.  You would experience moments of extreme clarity and find yourself in these frightening states of heightened awareness.  It was not uncommon for people who had never written a word or studied theology or philosophy to consider themselves experts on god and existence, to write dissertations and harp endlessly on the subjects of their revelations.  Of course, there is truth to the fact that never are you so aware of such things as when you are confronted by mortality.

    Equipment we were able to salvage from the hospital was assembled in a building nearby and we began to work again.  Unfortunately, the majority of ailments could not be helped.  We had no morphine and no nutrients.  Physical injury could be addressed with wraps.  Amputations for bombing injuries and gangrene were the majority of our work.  Still, it was a way to help.  By that time, soldiers were not being brought in to Leningrad from the front.  With the exception of radio, we were isolated from virtually any outside contact.    

    As the winter advanced the food supply dwindled.  Rations became meager.  2 slices of bread were our daily allowance.  This bread, if you could call it that, was a glue of god knows what.  It tasted nothing like grain.  It was known that anything could be baked into it: wood, grass, paper. The smell of the intestine jelly that came with it, a stinking congealed thing, over time became appetizing.  You could smell it over the musk of  our worn bodies cramped in the cellar.  It had the smell of meat that was not the same as rot, not death, and not living flesh.  It was unmistakably food.  I can still occasionally conjure that smell when the air is cold and my memory overwhelms me.   

       Bodies began to appear in the streets. The ground was too frozen to dig for proper burials. They were often stripped of their clothes and wrapped in linens of bedclothes reminiscent of figures from some ancient biblical world – as if they should be surrounded by desert sand – displaced in this frozen northern city. Often these were small bodies, many children died that November.  Elderly men seemed quick to break.  The women, not surprisingly, were the most resilient – both in body and in spirit.  The dead were left anonymously, or they were stored hidden among the living.  Their ration cards stolen and their identities intentionally obscured so that their names could be used to get food.  Mothers were often forced to conceal the death of one child, or worse, choose to let the weaker child perish in order to feed double rations to the one that had the greatest chance of survival.

    It was under these conditions that Edjik became very sick.  First it was more common maladies, exhaustion and fever, seemingly normal.  But then when his teeth began to hurt and he began to have spasms it became more concerning.  When his legs began to bend it was apparent that he had developed rickets.   I got such advice from the sisters, such advice I would not curse on my enemies.  Olga had lost a child herself, and her argument was better that I lose one over both.  Katarina had grown fond of Zhenia as she’d tutored him, not that this should have given her reason to talk this way.  They believed they were giving me advice that I needed.  It was monstrous.  I would not consider it.

    It is amazing how quickly you become desensitized to seeing the dead, especially the abandoned bodies of anonymous strangers. It became so common to see bodies that when I saw a face that I recognized I was overwhelmed. For the first time the lives of all the other strangers suddenly had meaning. The strangest part of that moment, as I think back on it, was that it was not the face that I recognized first. It was the hand. I knew that hand because he had toasted us at our wedding. I had seen those fingers wrapped around a hundred grams of vodka, alive. He had made sure to click my glass. I remembered those fingers, an apparition of a moment of joy. I followed the blue hand up the arm to see the face of a friend. I would have become sick if I’d had enough food to gag, but the sickness in my stomach just hardened like a rock that rose and stuck in my throat.

    I decided to take Edjik with me when I left the cellar, whether to
get food or to go to work.  It was partially because I no longer
trusted the others.  People were quite manic and single-minded in their
deprivation.  The sense of clarity could often be very misleading.   It
was also partially because I needed to try to get Edjik any sun that he
could get. I also hoped that at work we might find something that we
could give him.  But supplies were simply not available.  Eventually I
decided to take a trip to visit the commissar to see if he had indeed
meant it when he’d offered assistance, and to see if there was anything
that he could do. When I went to his office it appeared as if it had
been ransacked. The lock of the door was damaged and the door was
partially open.  Much of the furniture was gone, along with most of the
trinkets and decorations.  Yet, it looked as if he still worked here. 
His desk and a small space around it seemed to have been maintained. 
There were still pens and papers atop it and it looked as if it had not been long since he was last here.  It was cold but not unbearable.  I pulled Edjik tightly against me and settled myself to wait. 
    I’m not sure how long I had slept, but I don’t think it had been long.  By this time, the hunger was so severe that I felt I could collapse at any time.  It was easy to see how the eyes could just close, close and not open. Easy to imagine sudden darkness.  It felt simple.  I awoke to soft shaking from large hands.  It took a moment but I quickly recognized the commissar.  He waited for me to collect myself without a word.  He just walked around to sit behind his desk as if it was just another day in the office, posturing with mock severity in his role as beaurocrat as if the farce was not in itself comical. 
    “I came here to ask if you could help me with my son.  He is only four. He has developed a severe deficiency and is suffering from Rickets.  Is there anything that you can do?”  To my surprise, he smiled. 
    “You won’t believe it, but I might just be able to.  There was a rations package that was intended for the front.  It was left behind.  In it there is a can of cod liver oil.  I have not opened it.  I was waiting until I was desperate.  You can have it.” 
    I could not believe it.  This strike of fortune overwhelmed me.  It just seemed too unreal.  My head collapsed into the brittle bones that had once been my legs. I began to cry.  Soft at first, dry and quiet.  But soon I was heaving.  “Do you still want to leave?”  He asked me.  What I heard was a muddied fragment of a thought, but I made out the sentiment. My head rose without conscious intent. It took a moment to collect myself.  I nodded as a surprise breath jerked me upright.  “Lake Lodoga has almost completely frozen over.  We are going to attempt a small evacuation in a few days.  Would you be ready?”
    “Yes.” I answered.
    “Is this boy your only living child?”
    “No, my other boy is seven.  He is back at the apartment.” 
    “Okay, bring your boys.  But you must not tell anyone.  It has to be a complete secret or we will be overrun.  Do you understand?” I nodded.  “Good.  Meet me here tomorrow morning then and I will have the cod liver oil along with more information.”
    Edjik followed me down into the cellar.  He could barely walk the way his legs bowed, but I could not carry him.  It was another exercise in patience, as if I needed another.  In fact, it probably helped me not to move in a way that would belie my excitement.  There was a stillness in the complex.  The feel of death settled over me. I knew immediately that it was the planner.  It was as if his scent had expanded.  That pungent fecal smell was unmistakable.  We smelled it on the street.  We smelled it in our food.  We smelled it in ourselves.  But it was different when it was fresh and contained.  A sinister set of hunched shadows and shuffling feet moved in the recesses of the darkness. I knew almost intuitively what I saw before I identified the figure. The sisters were working on the body.  They had apparently opened the man from his sternum to his navel and were removing his bowels.  These were not medically trained women, but they knew how to clean a chicken.  I do not know whether they intended to use the old man as meat.  But, from the way they seemed to huddle like animals, instinctively turning their backs on me, I concluded that they had not intended to share the man’s ration card with me.  The lunacy of such a conspiracy in such close quarters only affirmed how mad we had all become.  I could only assume that they had hoped to lighten the corpse enough to lift him out of the cellar and to remove the most foul of the tissue in order to give them more flexibility in how to hide the body.  Zhenia sat alone but within full visibility of the morbid scene.
    I wanted to shout that I did not care, that I would be gone in a day.  Let them keep their putrid corpse and the stinking jelly they would wipe onto the cellulite we called bread.  At that moment, I could not tell who was the monster because I felt as giddy as a school girl despite the horror I was witnessing and the recognition that I would be abandoning this coven.  That I was abandoning these women, who were once good, who once taught me how to cook… to this unsound state.  But then my sympathy was overcome by maternal instincts.  How could they do this in front of a child?  They may not have been strong enough to carry the body up to an apartment, but could they not have waited?  I huddled my boys together and we rocked, a numb and helpless group embrace. 
    As we held one another it suddenly struck me that my disgust was an opportunity.  I realized that without it I had no excuse for leaving the cellar.  Nobody had gone back to the apartments for anything other than a reconnaissance in weeks.  Between the shelling and the cold and exposure, it was too dangerous.  I needed a reason to take my boys and to disappear.  Better to have waited until the morning, but, now was the time. 
    In an instant I turned on the women.  I shouted at them.  I called them animals, savages.  I told them that I knew they were preparing to turn on Edjik next.  That I would no longer risk being a target.  I took my boys and marched from the cellar.  We would survive for a night in the apartment.  It would give us a chance to collect a few sacred items.  We trudged through the dusk light through snow drifts that had collected in hallways that had once been indoors.  It was not until we made it to the apartment.  I must have collapsed when we came into the apartment.  The short burst of adrenaline must have been all that I’d had in me.  When I became aware of time again I realized that I was not in the worst condition in the room.  In fact, Zhenia was completely despondent.  His eyes were glazed over and he seemed a thousand meters away.  He was curled up and mumbling to himself in unrecognizable syllables.  I shook him but he was far gone.  I was too weak to pick him up so I rolled him toward me.  He did not cry.  He would not loosen his grip on his shins.  I wept.
  As I held him he began to thaw in my arms.  He literally melted, becoming softer and muscle by muscle dropping his weight until he was crying in blood harmony with my sobs.  Edjik, unsure what to do, eventually curled up into us and with a maturity beyond his years kept calm and held tight to us both as if he was our protector.  Finally we began to come to our senses.  I pulled the boys up and without direction or a single word  led them out of the cellar.  We made our way up the stairs to our old apartment.  The apartment was not as bad as some, but there were holes in walls and in the roof in places that made it hard to differentiate inside from out.  It was difficult to tell whether pieces where gone because of bombardment or vandalism.  Parts of the building were stripped in order to get access to infrastructure in the early days when people had hopes of getting heating oil or water.  Pieces of wall were simply dismantled because people were too cold or weak to go any further for firewood.

 I never quite got used to seeing the carpet of the hallway covered in drifts of snow or seeing the doors to my neighbors apartments, on the fifth floor, crowded with debris as if it was a dacha packed with supplies for the winter.  Firewood, random devices, scraps of god knows what.  The brass knobs of doors, crystal lenses of hallway lamps and other internal decor looked entirely out of place in the broken out-of-doors that the hallway had become. At the time, when the siege first began, it seemed so natural to try living like we would have a century ago out in a village somewhere.  Collecting firewood, hunting, gathering.  Even these rustic survival attempts seemed silly now, futile.  After only a few months of such severe deprivations. 

We thought we could survive as one would out in the wilderness.  But we learned that urban survival is entirely different.  There are no living resources, nothing external to sustain you.  It is a process of self-consumption… of man-made things and then, finally, when hope is gone, of man.  Everything that you can salvage is poison.  Nothing is pure.  The wood reeks when it burns.  The water from the melted snow collects the smell of the buildings.  The rats eat our waste before we eat them.

Once we reached our apartment I set some snow from the window to melt in a cup inside and looked for the cleanest leather I could find to make some soup.  I set an iron kettle up as a cooking pit, used some wood from a chair to burn inside it, and then set a smaller pot full of snow to boil.  The boys helped me peel wallpaper to add to the soup.  The paste added a pungent saltiness to the leather soup and offered some minimal nutrition as well.  We let the soup boil for as long as we could.  As long as we could manage to stay awake.  We gathered anything we could use as blankets and jackets and huddled together as the darkness consumed us.  Soon, the soup actually began to smell good.  We shared the broth directly from the pot, willing to feel the scalding of the metal as we passed it between us for brief moments just to experience something other than the deep unending cold that was in our bones.

Edjik made it clear that he knew we were going somewhere new tomorrow.  He said he hoped it would be somewhere warm.  A place that had kielbasa and salty fish.  I was relieved that I had no choice but to talk to them about it.  I felt that I should be keeping it from them, not only to avoid risk that they would tell someone, but also to protect them from disappointment.  But, this way, we were all together in this.  We would not part before we went to meet the man tomorrow night and we would talk to no one. Zhenia could not stop asking questions.  We drifted off to sleep daydreaming about where we would go and how warm it would be there.