The front entrance to the building, once beautiful Italian marble with two etched-glass doors, is demolished, so Marina makes her slow way around to the side yard. Rubble and refuse is heaped in the yard in frozen piles. She rings the bell and waits. She rings again. Perhaps everyone has left. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone could still be living here, and she is on the verge of tears. She has no door key for the service entrance. All this way for nothing. She cannot feel her legs, and it is impossible to believe that they will carry her back over the distance she has come.
And then the door opens a crack.
“Who is it?” A hoarse voice crackles, and the face of an ancient hag peers around the doorjamb.
“It’s Marina from Five East.”
“Marina Anatolyevna Krasnova?”
Marina realizes with a start that the hag is Vera Yurievna, the building’s janitor, a woman in her early forties. The door opens wide and Vera throws her arms around Marina and hugs her as though Marina were a long-lost relation.
“You’re a block of ice, child. Come in, come in. I’ll put some water on the stove,” she offers, and draws Marina inside and down a black hallway to her apartment.
Vera lights a candle that gutters, spitting flickers of light into the gloom and revealing a dank little warren. She has moved into her kitchen, boarding up the window and closing off the other room. Into this room she has moved a narrow bed, a single chair, and a small table, all arranged around a burzhuika, the ubiquitous little iron stove that everyone uses now.
She offers Marina the chair and pulls a blanket off the rumpled heaps on the bed. “Here, put this around you. We’ll have some heat in a moment.” The blanket is still warm from Vera’s body, and Marina accepts it gratefully.
Vera starts a fire, all the while asking after Marina ’s family, her aunt, her uncle, the two little chicks. She pulls a book off the table, a collection of fables, and tears out two pages, crumples them, and places them in the stove. This is followed by what is clearly part of a table leg. Vera lights the paper and carefully nurses the flame into a tidy little fire.
“Pull that chair closer. Warm your hands.” Then she dribbles some water from a jug into the kettle and sets it back on the stove.
“Are you the only one here?” Marina asks. As much as she hates being cheek by jowl with the crowds huddled in the basements of the Hermitage, this desolation seems a far worse alternative.
“Oh, no. Of course, a lot of them left after the shelling, moved in with friends or whomever.”
“When was that?”
“December twelfth, just after midnight. Terrible.” Vera stares into some private vision. “Terrible.
“But there are still twenty-three of us. The apartments in the rear are unharmed. Your apartment is just as you left it. Anna Ostromovna Dudin and her mother, next door to you, they’re still here. And there’s seven in Four East, Maria Volkova and her little chicks and three cousins.” Vera ticks off the residents still living in the building and the fates of those who have gone. “Sofia Grechina, do you remember her, the poet, that odd woman on the first floor with the two poodles? Her apartment was buried, but she was working the swing shift. You’ve never seen such hysteria. The two dogs, she had managed to keep them alive, I think she fed them part of her own rations, but of course they were buried in the rubble. She’s moved in with Georgi Karasev’s mother.”
Marina recalls the two coats left hanging on their pegs, the swinging light shade, and asks about the Magrachevs. Vera shakes her head.
The water comes to a boil, and Vera pours it into two porcelain cups.
“To our loved ones at the front,” Vera intones and lifts her cup.
Marina cups the warm china in her hands, breathing in the steam and then taking shallow sips. The water is luxuriously hot and cuts a molten swath down Marina ’s throat to her middle. It feels like new life.
“Oh, goodness, that reminds me,” Vera says. “I have a letter for you.” She crosses to a shelf and, after a bit of rummaging, produces a thin envelope. “It came a few weeks ago,” Vera apologizes. “I was going to forward it to you, but the postwoman has stopped coming.”
Her name and address are written out in Dmitri’s careful script. The letter trembles in Marina ’s hands. He is alive. She tears open the envelope and pulls out two sheets. They are ribbed with strips of blue paper pasted over Dmitri’s script by the censors.
My dearest Marinochka,
I think of you every moment and hold the image of you in my heart to remind me of why I am here. We are
But despite all this, I remain hopeful to see you again soon. Everything reminds me of you. Last night, a girl came to our camp with a goodwill delegation from She had your hair and from a distance, she looked so much like you that I called out your name and ran like an idiot halfway across the camp. But, as you know, my distance vision is poor and when I got closer, she actually bore little resemblance to you. I tried to explain my mistake, but I fumbled so, and I think I may have frightened her a little. As a token of apology, I gave her some sunflower seeds.
but then I feel the warmth of the sun on my back, and the vivid green of the trees just beyond our camp and I feel hopeful again that
Marina stops reading, puzzled, and then looks in the upper left corner and finds a date: 21 September 1941. The letter is almost three months old. She feels a flash of anger toward Vera, but before it can bloom she thinks to check the postmark. It reads 28 November.
News comes to us here from the city that How are your aunt and uncle? And what does he think of our engagement? It occurred to me after I left that perhaps I should have asked him for your hand, and I hope you will tell him that I regret not thinking of this sooner. Perhaps he will not mind so much.
Write to me, dearest, and tell me everything you can think of. It needn’t be important, but just the daily things, what you ate for dinner or how the packing is coming. When everything seems so weighted with significance, it is nice to hear of inconsequential things.
Give Tatiana a big hug for me. I don’t imagine that Mikhail will endure a hug, but tell him that he must study hard, that he is the hope of our country. And for yourself, you must imagine that I am kissing your hair, your eyelids, the tip of your nose, your lips, et cetera.
With all my love,
Dima
Vera is watching her face. “Is he well?”
“I don’t know. The letter is very old.”
“I’m sorry, dear. I didn’t see that it was yours before the postwoman had gone, or it would have been forwarded.”
“No, no. You’re not to blame. Thank you for saving it for me.” She feels grief welling up inside her, surging like nausea, but she tamps down her thoughts and forces the darkness back down her throat. She carefully refolds the letter, returns it to its envelope, and puts it into her coat pocket.
“I suppose I should go upstairs.” She does not tell Vera why she has come, but makes up something about needing to fetch some papers for Uncle Viktor. She has brought her door key but stupidly forgotten to bring a candle, so Vera gives her the stub of her own candle. Her generosity makes Marina ashamed of her secret about the chocolate.
“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t go up with you,” Vera says. “The stairs, you know.”
It is a herculean effort to climb up the dizzying stairwell. Marina pulls herself one step at a time up five flights of stairs. By the time she reaches the door to her apartment and turns the key in the lock, she is panting shallowly and can barely find the strength to push open the heavy door.
The dim candlelight laps at a dead gray interior webbed with frost. Uncle Viktor sold off the Oriental carpet in the front room back in October and pieces of the wooden furniture were sold later for firewood, so the room is nearly bare. A lone divan hunkers like a gray beast in the corner.