7

Dasha wrote to Alexander each day; every single day she wrote him a short letter. How lucky she is, Tatiana thought. To be able to write to him, to have him receive her thoughts, how lucky.

They also wrote to their widowed Babushka in Molotov.

Letters back from her were rare.

The mail was terrible.

Then it stopped coming at all.

When the mail stopped coming to the building, Tatiana started going to the post office on Old Nevsky, where an old gray man with no teeth sat and gave her the mail only after asking her if she had any food for him. She would bring him a remainder of a small cracker. Finally she got a letter from Alexander to Dasha.

My dear Dasha, and everyone else,

The saving grace of war is that most women don’t have to see it, only the nurses who tend to us, and they are immune to our pain.

Across from Shlisselburg we’re trying to supply the island fortress Oreshek with munitions. A small group of soldiers has been holding that island since September, despite intense German shelling from the banks of Lake Ladoga just 200 meters away. You remember Oreshek? Lenin’s brother Alexander was hanged there in 1887 for his part in the plot to assassinate Alexander III.

Now that war has started, the sailors and soldiers guarding the entrance to the Neva are lauded as heroes of the New Russia—the Russia after Hitler. We are all told that after we win, everything will be completely different in the Soviet Union. It will be a much better life, we are promised, but for that life we have to be prepared to die. Lay down your life, we are told, so your children can live.

All right, we say. The fighting doesn’t end, even at night. Neither does the rain. We have been wet all day and all night for seven days. We can’t dry out. Three of my men have died of pneumonia. It almost seems cosmically unfair to die from pneumonia, when Hitler is so intent on killing us himself. I’m glad I’m not in Moscow right now. Have you heard much about what’s going on there? I think that’s what’s saving us. Saving you. Hitler diverted a large part of his Army Group Nord, including most of his planes and tanks, away from Leningrad for his attack on Moscow. If Moscow falls, we’re done for, but right now it’s our only reprieve.

I’m fine myself. I don’t like being wet much. They still feed us officers. Each day I have meat I think of you.

Be well. Tell Tatiana to walk close to the sides of the buildings. Except when the bombs are falling; then tell her to stop walking and wait in a doorway. Tell her to wear the helmet I left.

Girls, under no circumstances give away your bread. Stay clear of the roof.

And use the soap I left you. Remember that you always feel slightly better about things when you’re clean. My father told me that. I will add it’s impossible to keep yourself clean on the winter front. But on the plus side, it’s so cold here that the lice that spread typhus can’t live.

Believe me when I tell you I think of you every minute of every day.

Until I see you again, I remain distantly

Yours,

Alexander

Tatiana wore the helmet. She used the soap. She waited in the doorways. But for some reason all she could think about with a peculiar and prolonged aching, as she didn’t take off her felt boots, her felt hat, and her quilted coat, which Mama had made in the days when there was a sewing machine, was Alexander being wet all day and night in his uniform on the icy Ladoga.

Peter’s Darkened City

THERE was no longer any denying that what was happening to Leningrad was nothing like what they could have ever imagined.

Marina’s mother died.

Mariska died.

Anton died.

The shelling continued. The bombing continued. There were fewer incendiaries falling, and Tatiana knew this because there were fewer fires, and she knew this because as she walked to Fontanka, there were fewer places for her to stand and warm her hands.

As she was making her way to the store one November morning, Tatiana noticed two dead people lying in the street. On the way back two hours later there were seven. They weren’t injured, and they weren’t wounded. They were just dead. She made the sign of the cross as she walked past them, stopped and thought, what did I just do? Did I make the sign of the cross on dead people? But I live in Communist Russia. Why would I do that? She made the sign of the hammer and sickle as she slowly walked on.

There was no place for God in the Soviet Union. In fact, God clearly went against the principles by which they all lived their lives: faith in work, in living together, in protecting the state against nonconformist individuals, in Comrade Stalin. In school, in newspapers, on the radio, Tatiana heard that God was the great oppressor, the loathsome tyrant who had kept the Russian worker from realizing his full potential for centuries. Now, in post-Bolshevik Russia, God was just another roadblock in the way of the new Soviet man. The Communist man could not have an allegiance to God because that would mean his first allegiance was to something other than the state. And nothing could come before the state. Not only would the state provide for the Soviet people, but it also would feed them and it would give them jobs and protect them from the enemy. Tatiana had heard that in kindergarten, and through nine years of school and in the Young Pioneer classes she attended when she was nine. She became a Pioneer because she had no choice, but when it was time for her to join the Young Komsomols in her last year of school, she refused. Not because of God necessarily, but just because. Somewhere deep inside, Tatiana had always thought she would not make a very good Communist. She liked Mikhail Zoshchenko’s stories too much.

As a child in Luga, Tatiana had known some religious women who were always trying to get their hands on her, to baptize her, to teach her, to make her believe. She would run from them, hiding behind the lilac tree in the neighbors’ garden, and watch them shuffle down the village road, but not before they made airy crosses on her with benevolent smiles on their faces, every once in a while lovingly calling out to her, Tatia, Tatia.

Tatiana made another sign of the cross, this time on herself. Why was that so conspicuously comforting?

It’s as if I’m not alone.

She went to sit inside the church across the street from her building. Do churches ever get bombed? she wondered. Did St. Paul’s in London get bombed? If the Germans couldn’t be smart enough to destroy the magnificently conspicuous St. Paul’s, how were they ever going to find the little church she was in? She felt safer.

At the post office Tatiana had to step over a dead man to get inside. He had died on the doorstep. “How long has he been here?” she asked the postmaster.

Toothlessly he grinned. “I’ll tell you for another cracker.”

“I don’t want to know that badly,” she replied, “but I’ll give you a cracker anyway.”

In the dark no one could see what was happening to their bodies. No one could face what was happening to their bodies either. Dasha removed all the mirrors from their rooms and from the kitchen. No one wanted to catch even an accidental glimpse of themselves. They stopped looking at one another. No one wanted to catch even an accidental glimpse of someone they loved.