After the girls wrapped Babushka in the sheet, Mama sewed up the top and the bottom, making a sack. Tatiana crossed herself, quickly wiped her tears, and went to the council.

Later that afternoon two men from the council came. Mama paid them with two shots of vodka each. “Can’t believe you still have vodka, comrade,” one of the men said. “You’re the first one so far this month.”

“Did you know vodka is the number-one trading item?” said the other man. “You can get yourself some nice bread if you’ve got any more.”

The Metanov women exchanged looks. Tatiana knew they had two bottles left. After Papa died, and with Dimitri away, no one drank the vodka except Alexander when he came, and he drank only a little.

“Where are you taking her?” Mama asked. “We’ll come with you.” They had all stayed home from work.

The council men said, “We’ve got a full truck waiting outside. There is no room for you on this truck. We’ll be taking her to the closest cemetery. That would be Starorusskaya. Go and see her there.”

“What about a grave?” Mama said. “A casket?”

“Casket?” The man opened his mouth and silently laughed. “Comrade, give me the rest of your vodka and I still won’t be able to get you a casket. Who is going to make them? And out of what?”

Tatiana nodded. She would take a casket and burn it for firewood herself before she used it to bury her grandmother. She shivered, buttoning up her coat.

“What about a grave?” asked Mama, her face ashen and her voice cracking.

“Comrade,” the council man exclaimed, “have you seen the snow, the frozen ground? Come outside with us, come and take a look, and while you’re at it, take a look at our truck.”

Tatiana stepped forward, putting her hand on the man’s arm. “Comrade,” she said quietly, “just get her downstairs for us. That’s the hardest thing. Get her downstairs and we’ll take care of her from there.”

She went to the attic, where once upon a time they used to hang their washing. There was no washing there now, but she did find what she was looking for—her childhood sled. It was a brightly painted blue sled with red runners. She carried it downstairs to the street, careful not to slip. Babushka’s body had already been taken down and left on the snowy pavement. “Come on, girls, on one-two-three,” Tatiana said to Marina and Dasha. Marina was too weak to help. Tatiana and Dasha lifted Babushka onto the sled and pulled her three blocks to Starorusskaya, with Mama and Marina following. Tatiana did reluctantly glimpse in the back of the open council truck. The bodies were piled three meters tall, one on top of another.

“These are all the people who died today?” she asked the driver.

“No,” he said. “That’s just what we picked up this morning.” He bent toward her. “Yesterday we picked up fifteen hundred bodies off the streets. Sell your vodka, girl, sell it and buy yourself some bread.”

The entrance to the cemetery was barricaded with corpses, some in white sheets, some without.

Tatiana saw a mother with a young child who had been pulling their dead father to the cemetery when they themselves froze in the entrance, in the snow. Closing her eyes, Tatiana shook the image out of her head. She wanted to get home. “We can’t get through. We can’t clear the path. Let’s leave our Babushka,” Tatiana said. “What else can we do?” She and Dasha took Babushka’s body and laid it gently in the snow next to the cemetery gates. They stood over her for a few minutes.

Then they went home.

They sold their two bottles of vodka and received only two loaves of white bread for it on the black market. Now that Tikhvin had gone to the Germans, there was no bread even on the black market.

7

A week passed. Tatiana could not flush the toilet. She could not brush her teeth. She could not wash. Alexander would not be happy with that, she thought. They hadn’t heard from Alexander. Was he all right?

“When do you think they will repair the pipes?” Dasha asked one morning.

“You should hope not too soon,” said Tatiana. “Otherwise you’re going to have to start doing laundry again.”

Dasha came over to Tatiana and hugged her. “I love you. You’re still making jokes.”

“Not good ones,” said Tatiana, hugging her sister back.

Living with small buckets of water was hard. The freezing of the water pipes was worse. But the worst was the spilling of the water that people carried upstairs from the first floor. The water splashed out of the buckets onto the stairs and froze. It was five to twenty degrees below zero every day, and the stairs remained perpetually covered with ice. Every morning, to get the water, Tatiana had to hold the bucket with one hand and the railing with the other, sliding down on her bottom.

Carrying the full bucket upstairs was much harder. She would fall at least once and have to go back for more water. The more water was spilled on the stairs, the more easily she fell and the thicker the ice on the stairs became. The back stairs were even more treacherous. A woman from the fourth floor fell down a flight, broke her leg, and could not get up. She froze on the stairs, into the ice. No one could move her, before or after.

Tatiana, Marina, Dasha, and Mama sat on the couch and listened to the radio’s metronome pound its own relentless heartbeat over the airwaves, its frequencies open and occasionally interrupted by a steady stream of words, some sensible, like “Moscow is fighting the enemy for its very life,” some nonsensical, like “The bread ration is cut once again to 125 grams a day for dependents, 200 grams for workers.”

Other words sometimes followed: “losses,” “damage,” “Churchill.”

Stalin talked of opening a second front in Volkhov. But not until Churchill opened a second one of his own to distract the Germans in the North European countries. Churchill said he had neither the men nor the resources to open a second front, but said he was prepared to repay Stalin for the material losses he had suffered. To which Stalin tartly replied that he would be presenting that bill straight to the Führer himself.

Moscow was in death throes, every last breath expended in the struggle against Hitler. The city was bombed as Leningrad was bombed.

“Haven’t heard from Babushka Anna in a month,” said Dasha one late November evening. “Tania, have you heard from Dimitri?”

“Of course I haven’t,” said Tatiana. “I don’t think I’ll be hearing from him again, Dasha.” She paused. “We haven’t heard from Alexander for a while either.”

“I have,” said Dasha. “Three days ago. I just forgot to tell you. Want to read his letter?”

Dear Dasha and all the girls,

I hope this letter finds you well. Are you waiting for me to return? I am waiting to come back to you.

My commander sent me up to Kokkorevo—a fishing village with no fishermen left. It’s a bombed-out hole where the village used to be. We had practically no trucks on this side, certainly no fuel for the ones we do have. There were twenty of us standing around with a couple of horses. We were there to test the ice, to see if it could hold a truck with food and munitions, or at the very least a horse with a sledge filled with food.

We walked out onto the ice. It’s so cold you’d think the ice would have formed by now, but no. It was surprisingly thin in places. We lost a truck and two horses right away, and then we just stood on the banks of Lake Ladoga and looked at the ice spreading before us, and I said, forget this, give me the damn horse. I hopped on it and rode the mare for four hours—on ice—all the way to Kobona! Temperatures were a dozen degrees below zero. I said this ice will suffice.

As soon as I came back—with a sledge full of food, I was instantly put in charge of a transport regiment—another name for a thousand People’s Volunteers. No one would spare real soldiers for this.