Suddenly Tatiana got unexpectedly good news, and good news was becoming as hard to come by as oil. Babushka Maya was coming to live with them on Fifth Soviet! Sadly, Mikhail, Mama’s stepfather, had died of TB a few days earlier, and when the Germans burned Dubrovka, Babushka Maya escaped to the city.

When Babushka came, she took one room, and Mama and Papa moved back in with Dasha and Tatiana. No more please, Tania, go away.

Babushka Maya had lived all her long life in Leningrad and said that it had never even occurred to her to evacuate. “My life, my death, all right here,” she told Tatiana as she unpacked.

She had married her first husband back at the turn of the century and had Tatiana’s mother. After her husband disappeared in the war of 1905, she never remarried, though she lived with poor tubercular Uncle Mikhail for thirty years. Tatiana had once asked Babushka why she never married Uncle Mikhail, and Babushka had replied, “What if my Fedor comes back, Tanechka? I’d be in quite a pickle then.” Babushka painted and studied art; her paintings had hung in galleries before the revolution, but after 1917 she made her living by illustrating propaganda materials for the Bolsheviks. Everywhere in her house in Dubrovka, Tatiana would find sketchbooks filled with pictures of chairs and food and flowers.

After she arrived, Babushka told Tatiana that she didn’t have time to get anything out of her house before it burned. “Don’t worry, Tanechka. I’ll draw you a nice new picture of a chair.”

Tatiana said, “Maybe you can draw me a nice apple pie instead? It’s the season for them.”

The following evening, on September 7, Marina finally arrived—just before dinner. Marina’s father had died in the fighting around Izhorsk, died as an untrained assistant gunner in a tank he had made himself. Uncle Boris was beloved by the Metanovs, and his death would have been a terrible blow, had the family not been reeling from their own nightmare of losing Pasha.

Marina’s mother remained hospitalized; unrelated to the war, she was slowly dying of renal failure. Tatiana’s naïveté surprised even herself. How could anything that happened nowadays be unrelated to the war? First Uncle Misha, now Aunt Rita. There was something universally unfair about that—for people to be dying of causes unrelated to the trenches Alexander had been digging.

Papa looked at Marina’s suitcase. Mama looked at Marina’s suitcase. Dasha looked at Marina’s suitcase. Tatiana said, “Marinka, let me help you unpack.”

Papa asked if she was staying for a while, and Tatiana said, “I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Papa, her father is dead and your sister is dying. She can stay with us for a while, no?”

“Tania,” Marina said, “have you not told Uncle Georg that you invited me? Don’t worry, I brought my ration card, Uncle Georg.”

Papa glared at Tatiana. Mama glared at Tatiana. Dasha glared at Tatiana.

Tatiana said, “Let’s unpack you, Marina.”

That night there was a small problem with dinner. The girls had left the food on the stove for a moment, and when they came back to the kitchen, they found that the fried potatoes, onions, and one small fresh tomato had disappeared. The frying pan had been left empty and dirty. A few of the potatoes had stuck to the bottom, and there they remained, encrusted and covered with a bit of oil. Dasha and Tatiana looked around the kitchen incredulously and vacuously, even coming back inside, thinking maybe they had already brought the dinner in and simply forgotten.

The potatoes were gone.

Dasha, because that was her way, dragged Tatiana with her, knocking on every door of the apartment, asking about the potatoes. Zhanna Sarkova opened the door, looking unkempt and haggard, almost as if she were related to crazy Slavin.

“Is everything all right?” Tatiana asked.

“Fine!” barked Zhanna. “Potatoes—my husband’s disappeared! You haven’t seen him in Grechesky, have you?”

Tatiana shook her head.

“I thought maybe he was wounded somewhere.”

“Wounded where?” Tatiana gently wanted to know.

“How should I know? And no, I haven’t seen your stupid potatoes.” She slammed the door.

Slavin was lying on the floor, muttering. His small room reeked of everything but fried potatoes.

“How is he going to feed himself?” asked Tatiana as they walked by.

“That’s not our problem,” said Dasha.

The Iglenkos were not even home. After the loss of Volodya alongside Pasha, Petr Iglenko spent all his days and nights at the factory that melted down old scrap metal for ammunition. They had just got more bad news. Petka, their eldest son, had been killed in Pulkovo. Only their two youngest, Anton and Kirill, remained.

“Poor Nina,” said Tatiana as they headed back down the corridor to their rooms.

“Poor Nina!” exclaimed Dasha. “What the hell are you talking about, Tania? She still has two sons. Lucky Nina.”

When they returned to the door that led to their own hallway, Dasha said, “They’re all lying.”

“They’re all telling the truth,” said Tatiana. “Fried potatoes with onions are not easy to hide.”

The Metanovs ate bread with butter for dinner that night and complained the whole time. Papa yelled at the girls for losing his dinner. Tatiana kept quiet, heeding Alexander’s warning that she should be careful around people who were likely to hit her.

But after dinner the family wasn’t taking any more chances. Mama and Babushka brought the canned goods, the cereals and the grains, soap and salt and vodka into the rooms, stacking it all in the corners and in the hallway behind the sofa. Mama said, “How fortunate we are that we have the extra door partitioning our corridor from the rest of the scavengers. We’d never keep our food otherwise, I see that now.”

Later that night, when Alexander came by and heard about the potatoes, he told the Metanovs to keep the rear entrance to the kitchen locked.

Dasha introduced Alexander to Marina. They shook hands and both stared at each other for longer than was appropriate. Marina, embarrassed, stepped away, averting her gaze. Alexander smiled, putting his arm around Dasha. “Dasha,” he said, “so this is your cousin Marina.” Tatiana wanted to shake her head at him, while a perplexed Marina remained speechless.

Later on in the kitchen, Marina said to Tatiana, “Tania, why did Dasha’s Alexander look at me as if he knew me?”

“I have no idea.”

“He is adorable.”

“You think so?” said Dasha, who was heading past the girls to the bathroom, leaving Alexander in the corridor. “Well, keep your hands off him,” she added cheerfully. “He’s mine.”

“Don’t you think?” Marina whispered to Tatiana.

“He’s all right,” said Tatiana. “Help me wash this frying pan, will you?”

Adorable Alexander stood in the doorway, smoking and grinning at Tatiana.

Papa continued to grumble about Marina’s arrival. Her student rations would bring little to the family, and another mouth to feed would only drain their resources further. “She just came here to eat my father’s cans of ham,” he said to Mama, gazing at the cans. Tatiana couldn’t tell if Papa wanted to eat the cans or to kiss them. “She is your niece, Papa,” Tatiana whispered, so Marina wouldn’t overhear. “She is your only sister’s only daughter.”

2

The following day, on September 8, there was unrest in the city from early morning. The radio said, “Air raid, air raid!”

At work, Vera grabbed Tatiana’s hand and exclaimed, “Do you hear that noise?”

They walked out the front entrance of the hospital on Ligovsky Prospekt, and Tatiana heard distant heavy thundering that didn’t get closer, just increased in frequency. Calmly, Tatiana said to Vera, “Verochka, it’s just the mortars. They make that sound when they release the bombs.”

“Bombs?”

“Yes. They set this machine in the ground—I don’t know exactly how it works—but it fires big bombs, little bombs, explosive bombs, short-fuse, long-fuse. Fragmentation bombs are the worst,” said Tatiana. “But also they have these little antipersonnel bombs. They fire them a hundred at a time. They’re lethal.”