THE SIEGE
Helen Dunmore
Grove Press
Historical Fiction
ISBN: 0802139582

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Naval Staff                                                              Berlin
Sk1 Ia 1601 / 41 g.Kdos. Chefs.                             29 Sep. 1941

It’s half past ten in the evening, but the light of day still glows through the lime leaves. They are so green that they look like a hallucination of the summer everyone had almost given up expecting. When you touch them, they are fresh and tender. It’s like touching a baby’s skin.

Such a late spring, murky and doubtful, clinging to winter’s skirts. But this is how it is here in Leningrad. Under the trees around the Admiralty, lakes of spongy ice turned grey. There was slush everywhere, and a raw, dirty wind of the Neva. There was a frost, a thaw, another frost.

Month after month ice-fisherman crouched by the holes they’d drilled in the ice, sitting out the winter, heads hunched into shoulders. And then, just when it seemed as if summer would forget about Leningrad this year, everything changed. Ice broke loose form the compacted mass around the Strelka. Seagulls preened on the floes as the currents swept them under bridges, and down the widening Neva to the sea. The river ran full and fast, with fresh wind tossing up waves so bright they stung your eyes. Everything that was rigid was crumbling, breaking away, floating.

People leaned on the parapets of the Dvortsovy Bridge, watching the ice-floes rock as they passed under the arch. Their winter world was being destroyed. They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin.

But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?

These are hard times. You can’t trust anyone, not even yourself. Frightened men and women scuttling in the dusty wind. Peter’s great buildings hang over them, crushingly magnificent. In times like these the roads are too wide. How long it takes you to fight your way across Peter’s squares, and how visible you become. Yes, you’re a target, and you don’t know who’s watching. So many disappearances, so much fear. Black vans cruise the streets. You listen for the note of their engines, and your heart pumps until it chokes you as the van slows. But it passes this time, and halts at the doorway to another courtyard, where you don’t live. You hear the van doors clang and the sweat of relief soaks you, shamefully. Some other poor bastard is in the van this time.

Spring stripped everything bare. It showed the grey and weary skin of everyone over thirty. It lit up lips set in suffering, with wrinkles pulling sharply at the corners of the mouth.

But the lime trees’ bare branches were spiked by the glitter of sunlight and birdsong. The birds had no doubts at all. They sang out loudly and certainly into the still-frozen world. They knew that winter was on the move.

Now it’s June, and night is brief as the brush of a wing, only an hour of yellow stars in a sky that never darkens beyond deep, tender blue.

No one sleeps. Crowds surge out of cafes and wander the streets, not caring where they go as long as they can lift their faces and drink the light. It’s been dark for so many months.

A line of young men, arm in arm, drunk, stern with the effort of keeping on their feet, sways on the corner of Universitetskaya Embankment and Lieutenant Schmidt’s bridge. They won’t go home. They can’t bear to be apart from one another. They’ll walk, that’s what they’ll do, from one end of the city to another, from island to island, across stone bridges and shining water.

These are the nights that seal each generation of Leningraders to their city. These nights are their baptism. The summer light will flood every grain of Leningrad stone, as it floods from every cell of their own bodies. At three o’clock in the morning, in full sun, they’ll find themselves in some backstreet of little wooden houses, miles from anywhere. There’ll be a cat licking its paws in a doorway, a lime tree with electric-green leaves hanging over a high wooden fence, and an old woman slowly making her way down the street with a little bunch of jasmine pinned to her jacket. Each flower will be as white and distinct as a star against the shabby grey. And she’ll smile at the young men as if she’s their grandmother. She won’t disapprove of their drunkenness, their shouting and singing. She’ll understand exactly how they feel.

However old you are, you can’t stay indoors on a night like this. It stirs again, the promise and recklessness of white nights. Peter’s icy, blood-sodden marshes bear up the city like a swan. The swan’s wings are still folded, but they are trembling in the summer light, stirring, and getting ready to fly. Darkness scarcely touches them.

The wind breathes softly. Water laps under the midnight bridges. And suddenly you know that there’s no greater possible happiness than to be here, even when you’re so old you’re beyond walking. You lean out of your apartment window, with stiff joints and fading strength, over the city that will outlive you.

But Anna is not in Leningrad tonight. She’s out in the country, at the dacha, alone with her father and Kolya. She doesn’t belong in the crowd of students celebrating the end of their examinations. She doesn’t share their jokes any more, or know which books everyone’s reading. Hers is a daylight city of trams packed with overworked mothers, racing from work to food queue to kitchen and back again.

The white nights rouse up too many longings. Anna has a duty to crush them. She has five-year-old Kolya, her job at the nursery, and her responsibilities. It’s no good letting herself dream of student life. She’ll never have long days in a studio, mind and body trained on the movement of a hand across paper. It’s no good remembering what it was like to be seventeen, only six years ago, with graduation from school a year ahead of her, and a crowd of friends round the table at the Europe, packed together, laughing and talking so loudly that you could hardly hear what anyone said. The words didn’t matter. The noise of the happiness was what mattered, and the warmth of someone else’s arm pressed against yours. There was a smell of sunburnt skin, coffee, cigarettes and marigolds.

Don’t think about all that. She’s in the dacha, leaning out of the window and resting her elbows on warm, silver-grey wood. It's very quiet. Behind her, Kolya sleeps in his cot-bed. They have a bedroom divided in two by a plywood partition. One half for her father, the other for Anna and Kolya. Downstairs, the living-room opens on to the verandah. Every sound echoes in the dacha's wooden shell.

But to have a dacha at all is a luxury. There's no chance or her father ever qualifying for a dacha at the writers' colony, but they have held on to this little place, which once belonged to Anna's grandmother. They come here whenever they can in summer, when the city's airless and full of dust. Anna bikes in, on the precious, battered bike that was her mother's, with Kolya tied to his seat behind her.

Anna does most of the cooking outside on the verandah. She chops onions, kneads pastry for meat pies, peels potatoes, prepares sausage. She even makes jam outside, on the little oil-stove.

All through each summer Anna builds up stores for the winter. She gives grammar and handwriting lessons to the Sokolov children at the farm, in exchange for honey, jars of goose-fat, and goat's cheese. She dries mushrooms, and makes jams and jellies for the fruit she and Kolya pick. Lingonberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, wild strawberries. She buys a drink made from fermented birch sap, which is packed with vitamins and said to be particularly good for asthmatic children like Kolya. Then there are red cabbages to be pickled, onions to be tied into strings, garlic to be plaited, beans to be preserved in brine, potatoes to be brushed free of earth, sorted, then brought back to the apartment sack by sack, strapped to the back of her bike. You have to be careful with potatoes, because they bruise more easily than you think, and then they won't keep.

Anna doesn't know how she'd have got them through the last two winters without produce from the dacha. Not only are there food shortages all the time, but her father can't get his work published. He survives by translating, but even that might dry up. Editors have got their own families to consider. Her father's near perfect French and German are dangerous assets now. He can't help speaking like someone who has spent time abroad. A year in Heidelberg in 1912, a summer in Lausanne. He could be pulled in for questioning as an individual with foreign contacts'.

Her father wanted to take it lightly, the first time one of his stories was rejected. He was asked to appear in front of a magazine committee, where the shortcomings of his story were explained to him. They told him that his tone was pessimistic. He had failed to take on board and reflect on his work the principles drawn from Stalin's speech of the first of December 1953: 'Life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful.'

'And yet in your story, Mikhail Ilyich, there is no sense that any of the characters are making headway! Publication of this would do nothing to advance your reputation. In fact, it would damage it.'

'Frankly, we were surprised that you submitted it, Mikhail Ilyich,' said the chairman of the committee. 'We try to be understanding, but really in this case it's impossible, as I'm sure you'll agree.' And be chucked the manuscript face-down on the table, lightly, pityingly, humorously, just as he would have done if a schoolboy had submitted his outpourings to a top literary magazine, and expected to get them published. 'No, we can't have this kind of stuff!'

He twinkled at Mikhail, begging him to see the joke. Other members of the committee looked down at their blotters, or played with their pens. Their faces were dark with the resentment we feel towards those we are about to injure.

Mikhail looked at the familiar faces. A flush of hot blood ran under his skin. Was the shame in himself, standing there with his unwanted manuscript, unable to accept the criticism of his contemporaries? The room itself seemed washed with shame. Even his story was stained with it.

'No,' he muttered, 'I should never have brought it here.'

'Ex-actly so,' said the chairman, rising. 'But allow me to say, dear Mikhail Ilyich, that I've always been an admirer of your work. All you need is a little --- ' his fingers sketched adjustments --- 'a little less gloom and doom. That's not what people want these days. That's not what we’re here to do.'

He smiled, showing white, strong teeth in healthy gums. The room pricked with agreement. The room knew what was wanted these days.

Mikhail continued to submit his stories, which were always rejected. One evening a colleague from the Writers' Union appeared at the apartment.

'Don't send anything else in just now. It's for your own good, Mikhail Ilyich.'

"I'm writing as I've always written.'

"Yes, that's it, that's exactly it. Do you really not see? We all have to make adjustments.'

'They are good stories.'

'For God's sake, what has that got to do with anything?'

On his way out, he paused. He was waiting for something, but Mikhail couldn't think what. After the man had gone, it dawned. He expected to be thanked. He'd taken a risk. He'd tried to help. Not may did that these days, because it was too dangerous. Each person taken in for questioning could drag a hundred more down. 'Who was in the room with you when this occurred? Their names. Write them here.'

'Better put it in the drawer,' Anna's father would say, as he typed out the final draft of a new story. His fingers pecked at the keys. He had never learned to type properly. When Vera was alive, she typed for him. 'Let the drawer read it. Well, here we are, Anna, I'm back to my youth again, pouring out rubbish that nobody wants to print. People pay thousands for rejuvenation treatments, don't they? I could sell my secret.'

His attempts at humour make her wince. All this is changing him, month by month. It's scouring him out from the inside. He even walks differently. Anna can't think what it all reminds her of, then one day she's at work and she sees little Seryozha hide behind the binds as a gang of big boys charges around the playground, windmilling their arms, bellowing, knocking into everyone. They're the gang. They're the ones who count. Seryozha shrinks against the wall.

In the nursery, you can sort it out. You can break up the gang. You can put your arm around Seryozha. There, in her little world within a world, things still make sense. But then out comes her boss, Elizaveta Antonovna, with the latest directives in her hand. Her eyes are fixed to the text. She has got to take the correct line. She must not make an error.

Elizaveta Antonovna doesn't even see the children. She's frightened, too. The bosses are all frightened now. How should she interpret the directive? If she gets it wrong, who will inform on her?

Anna's father still goes to the Writers' House on Ulitsa Voinova, but not very often, although as a member of the Union of Soviet Writers he's entitled to eat there every day. 'I don't feel like it today, Anna,' he says. 'And besides, I've got to rewrite these last two pages.'

He had a dream one night. He dreamed he was lying in bed and someone clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. A firm, fleshy, well-fed hand. The fingers were thick and greasy. They squeezed his nostrils until he couldn't breathe.

'What did you do?'

'I twisted my head from side to side to try and shake him off, but he pressed harder. And then I --- '

'What?'

"I bit his hand. I could taste his blood.'

'Whose hand was it?'

And then his whisper, in the frightened room that held only the two of them: 'Koba's.'

Anna didn’t answer. She knew there was more.

'And then I woke up. I looked in the mirror and there were marks on my face. Dirty fingerprints. I tried to wipe them off but they wouldn't come off. I filled a basin with water and dipped my head into it and when I looked in the mirror my face was streaming with water, but the marks were still there.'

He looks at her. She half-expects to see the fingerprints rise to the surface of his skin and show themselves. But there's nothing. 'It was a dream, that's all.'

'I know that.' He raps it out. There she goes again, stating the obvious, not thinking before she speaks.

'A nightmare,' says Anna.

'Don't shut the door.'

'No, I'll leave it open.'

Her father has always been afraid of a shut door. He was afraid of getting trapped in a lift, that was wahy he always took the stairs. When they went to the cinema he had to sit near the exit.

Her father's income is down to a fifth of what is was three years ago. Each summer Anna has increased her vegetable plot at the dacha. She's dug up all the flowerbeds now, except for her mother's three rose-bushes.

Three rose-trees, bearing dark-red, velvety roses which open helplessly wide and spread out their perfume. Before winter her mother packed straw around them, then sacking, and bound it with twine. Anna can see her now: the quick, expert fingers, the way she brushed soil off her knees as she stood up. There, it was done for the winter. Strange, how easy it is to remember her doing that, and yet there are long, black patches when it seems as if she never lived at all.

But she lived. Remember it.

Excerpted from THE SIEGE © Copyright 2002 by Helen Dunmore. Reprinted with permission by Grove Press. All rights reserved.

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