When they came close, she extended her and Alexander’s bread to them without a word. Two of them grabbed her and pulled her into a doorway. She struggled, but there was nothing of her to struggle with. The third boy, the hyena from before, took her bread but then looked at her with his beastly eyes and said to the other two, “Ready? Let’s go.” A shiny metal blade flashed in front of Tatiana.

Without blinking or breathing, Tatiana looked the boy in the eye and said, “Go, get away while you have time. Go on, now. He is going to kill you.”

The boy looked at her and said, “What?”

“Go!” Tatiana said, but in that instant a pistol handle came down hard on the boy’s head and he dropped to the snow. The other two didn’t have even a moment to let go of her. Alexander smashed his gun into one, then the other. In seconds they were all motionless on the ground.

Pulling Tatiana out of the doorway and behind him, he said, “Step away,” and cocked his gun, aiming it at her assailants.

Her hand came up from behind and rested on the gun. “No,” she said.

He pushed her hand away. “Tatiana, please. They are going to get up and terrorize someone else. Step back.”

“Shura, please. No. I saw their eyes. They won’t last till morning. Don’t let their deaths be at your hands.”

Alexander reluctantly put away his gun, then picked up their bag of bread off the ground and, with his arm around Tatiana, walked her back home in the blistering cold. “Do you know what would have happened to you if I hadn’t been there?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, wanting to look up at his face but not having the energy to look anywhere but down at the ground. “Same thing that’s happening to me when you are.”

The next morning Alexander brought her a gun. Not his own standard-issue Tokarev, but a P-38 self-loading German pistol he had acquired near Pulkovo two months earlier.

“Remember the boys are all cowards; they will only pick on you because they think they can. You don’t have to use the gun. Just flash it at them. They won’t come up to you again.”

“Shura, I’ve never used a—”

“It’s war, Tania!” he exclaimed. “You remember how you played war with Pasha? Did you play to win? Well, play now. Just remember the stakes are higher.”

Then he gave her a handful of rubles.

“What’s this?”

“A thousand rubles,” he said. “It’s half my monthly pay. There is no food, but you can still get something on the black market. Go, and don’t even think about the prices. Just buy what you have to. In Haymarket they’re still selling flour, maybe some other things. I’m afraid to leave you, but I have to. Colonel Stepanov wants me to go with our trucks and men to Lake Ladoga.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Alexander’s face was drawn. “The girls need to go with you to the store, Tatia. Please don’t go by yourself. I won’t be back for a week, maybe ten days. Maybe longer.” The unspoken hung in the crushing cold. “Don’t worry about me.” He paused. “Bad news is we’ve lost Tikhvin,” he said grimly. “Dimitri shot himself just in time. Tikhvin was—” He broke off. “Never mind.”

“I can imagine.”

Nodding, he continued. “There is no railroad going to the other side of the lake. The only way to bring food into Leningrad is by Ladoga, but now there’s no way to get the food to Ladoga.” He paused. “The bread you’re getting—it’s made from reserve flour. We have to get Tikhvin and the railroad back. Without them we have no realistic way of getting food into the city.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“Oh, yes. Meanwhile, the council has issued a command that we have to build a road through the barely inhabited villages up north near Zaborye that lead to the other side of the lake. There’s never been a road there, but we have no choice. Either build the road or die.”

“How do you get food from there across a barely iced lake?” She shuddered.

Alexander’s brown eyes were sadder than a calf’s. “If we don’t get Tikhvin back, there will be no food to bring no matter how well iced the lake is. We have no chance without it,” Alexander said, not touching Tatiana. “No chance at all.” Reluctantly he added, “Hang on to whatever provisions you’ve got left. The ration is going to be reduced again.”

“There’s not much left, Shura,” she whispered.

As they were walking to the corner of Nevsky and Liteyniy where he was going to say good-bye to her, Alexander said, “Yesterday you called me Shura in front of your family. You have to be more careful. Your sister is bound to notice that.”

“Yes,” Tatiana said mournfully. “I will have to be more careful.”

On Haymarket, Tatiana bought less than half a kilo of flour for 500 rubles. Two hundred and fifty rubles a cup. She bought half a kilo of butter for 300 rubles, some soy milk, and a small package of yeast.

At home they still had a bit of sugar. She made bread.

That’s what a thousand rubles bought the Metanovs—half of Alexander’s monthly salary for defending Leningrad bought them a loaf of bread with a smear of butter. Dinner for one night. At least Alexander had gotten them some wood for the stove, and even a little kerosene.

They broke the bread Tatiana made into five portions, put it on their plates, and ate it with a knife and fork, and afterward Tatiana didn’t know about anyone else, but personally she thanked God for Alexander.

5

It was November, and the mornings were dark. They had covered their windows with blankets to keep out the cold, but in doing so they also kept out the light.

What light? thought Tatiana, as she slowly made her way from the bed to the kitchen with her toothbrush and peroxide one morning in the third week of November. She used to have peroxide and baking soda, but she had left the baking soda on the kitchen sill one evening, and someone had eaten it.

Tatiana turned on the tap. And turned. And turned.

There was no water.

Sighing, she shuffled back to her room with her toothbrush and her peroxide and got back into bed. Dasha and Marina groaned a little.

“There is no water,” said Tatiana.

When it was nine in the morning and there was light, Tatiana and Dasha walked to the local council office. An emaciated woman with sores on her face told them that a few days ago power had been cut from the Fifth City Electric Plant because Leningrad had run out of fuel.

“What does it have to do with our water?” asked Dasha.

“What pumps the water?” asked the woman.

Dasha, slowly blinking, said, “I give up. Is this a test?”

Tatiana pulled her sister by the arm. “Come on, Dasha.” She turned to the woman. “The power will be restored, but the pipes will have frozen for good.” She spoke in an accusing tone. “We won’t have water till the spring thaw.”

“Don’t worry,” said the woman, going back to her business, “none of us will be alive in the spring.”

Tatiana asked around the Fifth Soviet building and found out that the first floor had water—there just wasn’t enough pressure to pump it all the way up to the third. So the next morning Tatiana went down to the street and got a bucket of snow to carry upstairs. She melted the snow on the bourzhuika and used that water to flush the toilet. Then she went back down to the first floor and got a bucket of clean cold water to wash herself and Dasha and Mama and Marina and Babushka.

“Dasha, can you get up and come with me?” Tatiana said to her sister one morning.

Dasha was still in bed under the covers. “Oh, Tania,” Dasha mumbled. “It’s so cold. It’s too hard to get up these days.”

Tatiana couldn’t get to the hospital before ten, sometimes eleven, by the time she was done with the water and the ration store.

They had no more oatmeal left, just a little flour, a little tea and some vodka.

And three hundred grams of bread a day each for Tatiana, Dasha, and Mama, and two hundred grams of bread each for Marina and Babushka.