A HANDSOME FELLOW
When people starve, their eyes become large and luminous, enough so as to invite comparisons with visages of saints on the icons. Which makes sense, since the saints were traditionally ascetic— anorexic even. I forever remember those golden-light eyes, softly unfocused, radiant, otherworldly, so sharply contrasting with frost-bitten fingers and red, peeling skin on wind-burned cheeks.
This is how it went: Svetlana, aged twenty-four and still unmarried despite her beauty, now heightened by hunger, woke up before dawn (which wasn’t all that early in Leningrad, in December), and went to check on her mother. The children, Yasha and Vanya, slept in a separate room—a surprising luxury after most of the neighbors of their communal apartment had died. So did Svetlana’s father—a large, strong man. People like that were built for peace, for hard work and big rations; it’s the small and frail that could last on one hundred grams of adulterated bread a day. His death meant even less food for everyone else—Svetlana was the only one now who worked at the factory and received rations. The only other survivor in their apartment was a young kindergarten teacher Lyuda, all alone in her room adjacent to the communal kitchen fallen into disuse.
Mother was still alive, and she weakly gestured to Svetlana— her hand a scrap of parchment in the dark—to go pick through her jewelry box. They were clever with things they had—most of the rings and nylons were already traded on the black market, for sugar lumps for the children and for extra bread. Sunflower oil and broth from unknown sources were a rare luxury. They avoided meat because of the stories of cannibals who dug up the newly buried bodies and attacked the weak and those who walked alone in the dark—and this is why Svetlana always carried her father’s pistol, with a single shot in it.
Svetlana picked through the box. There were pieces left in it, but who knew how long the blockade would last? They should pace themselves, she thought, and picked up a single brooch—a pink cameo with carved white border, like seafoam made stone. “It’s grandma Anna’s,” mother said. Svetlana could detect no expression in her voice—no argument, no affirmation.
“Don’t wake the children,” Svetlana said. “Let them sleep while I’m gone. When they sleep, they’re not hungry, not cold.” That day, she didn’t have to work her factory shift, and the best pickings at the market were in the morning.
“They sleep longer every day.” Mother sighed. “My boys.”
Big strong boys, one nine, one twelve, with bodies that would soon be too large to live. “We should evacuate them. They send children out every day. And you could go too.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere better than here.”
“But the bombardments.”
“They’ll die here for sure.” She bit her tongue—no mother
wants to hear these words; then again, no sister wants to say them. “You know it’s true.”
“There’s still time.”
The Road of Life was all ice—thick white Ladoga ice, sturdy ice of an unmoving lake. It would hold until at least March. “I’m going, mama.”
“Don’t be long.”
Svetlana wraps her head in a thick grey woolen shawl and wraps her body in an old, oily shearling—her dead father’s—and walks down the six flights of stairs (one per floor, third floor is lucky). The cameo brooch is hidden in her mitten and she toggles it on her fingertips, the golden tip of the pin prickling ever so slightly.
The streets shine ghostly white in the dusk, and she watches her felt boots, making sure that they don’t step on ice slicks— treacherous pools of darkness in the soft powdery white. She is so focused on avoiding ice, not falling, not breaking her fragile bones, not being caught helpless by the roving gangs of cannibals, that she doesn’t notice when someone starts walking along with her, step in step, the smooth swing of his long legs shadowing the uncertain stumble of hers. He smells of earth (its fat, musty aroma was so out of place in the frozen starving city, the stone embankments strangling the black Neva and the sluicing green ice in it in its slow embrace), and she starts thinking of summer without noticing the reason for her thoughts.
Svetlana looks up, finally, as the sun rises and she turns into one of the side streets. A familiar route to the out-of-the-way, the hidden. Wide spaces between old manor houses, narrow streets. She follows the Fontanka embankment for a bit, and then turns again, into Grafskiy Pereulok. Women in thick aprons and boots, clapping their hands in the cold and stomping their feet, speaking in quick hushed half-whispers, “Come here, come here, handsome, potatoes fresh from the fields of out the city, buy a potato for your girl.”
Only then Svetlana notices the man who is walking next to her, even though the smell of him is so deep in her nostrils it makes her sneeze. His face is just as out of place as his smell—full and red-cheeked, bright-eyed, healthy. So handsome, so untouched— like a wax sculpture under museum glass. Lips so red.
“How much for potatoes?” she asks the woman.
“What have you got?” The woman draws away a thick covering of canvas off the top of a wooden crate, exposing a few small tubers, malaised and bruised with frost. They would be so sickly sweet in a pot, cooked over their metal stove. More floorboards will have to be peeled off that night—the boys can help with that. And maybe then she could go to the roof with other girls from the neighborhood, to watch out for incendiary bombs. Their building has been lucky so far, but they always have buckets of sand with them to extinguish the foul things should one fall. She stares at the potatoes and lets her thoughts roll leisurely, to distract her from the handsome man standing so close to her, as if he knows her—but how could one know something so alien?
Satisfied with the sight of the potatoes, Svetlana shows the woman her treasure—the cameo brooch left to her mother by grandma Anna.
She nods, and scoops the measly tubers into a newspaper cone; it takes Svetlana all her willpower not to gnaw on them as soon as the newspaper rustles in her mittens.
“Do you mind if I walk with you?” the handsome man says, somewhat belatedly.
She hesitates for a moment—of course, it would be safer with him, unless he decided to hit her and take her potatoes away. She shifts her weight so that the pistol in the shearling pocket rests against her jutting hip. “I don’t mind,” she finally says. “You can walk where you please.”
And back they go, as the dusk slowly lifts and the snow sparkles weakly, as if touched by malaise. They pass two dead bodies, lying by the curb—faces up, eyes closed—and Svetlana wonders if they died like this, side by side, slowly keeling backward, or if someone put them there, pushed them aside to let the traffic through. They pass a small girl carrying half a loaf of bread, clearly visible in its messy newspaper nest— rations for an entire family, looks like, and Svetlana worries that someone would take the bread away from the girl, little as she is and unaware that carrying such treasures openly is dangerous. She stops and waits for the girl to catch up to her, and the man waits too.
The little girl eyes them with suspicion.
“Let me walk you home,” Svetlana says. “Do you live far?”
The girl motions east, to the rising sun. “Ulitsa Marata,” she says. “Not far.”
Svetlana turns to face the man. “Are you coming with us?”
He nods, wordlessly, one corner of his mouth curling shyly but happily.
She wonders if her asking somehow negated her aloof demeanor, rendered it a pretense. Still, she has to take the girl home, even though the two boys wait for the potatoes, all the way back by Neva’s embankment.
She follows the girl in silence, and the man follows her—a hierarchy of silent guardians, each watching over the smaller and the weaker one.