Burying the Sun by Gloria Whelan
The pine bark was said to contain vitamins that would help to keep people from starving. With such terrible tales to consider, that day we worked harder than ever at tearing off the bark.
We were at our lowest when I came home from work to find a package from Marya. It was battered and dented and the wrappings were loose; still, it was a miracle that it had arrived. These days the postmen were wanted elsewhere, and the mail was often not delivered. Mama opened the package and, with trembling hands, took out one unimaginable thing after another and placed them on the kitchen table. There were three chocolate bars, a large hunk of cheese, packets of dried soup, and a handful of crumbs that must have been cookies.
Hearing our shouts of joy, Olga, Viktor, and Yelena came running into the apartment.
“Are you all right?” Olga asked.
“Never better,” Mama said.
They saw the glorious treats set out on the table like so many priceless jewels. No one touched a thing. Starved as we were, we did not fall upon them and stuff them into our mouths. We just stared at them as if we were travelers who had come upon some rare sight that we ought to memorize, knowing we would never see it again.
After a few minutes Mama reached for a chocolate bar. She carefully broke off a square and divided it into five pieces, being sure that all the pieces were equal. She solemnly passed them out. I saw that our friends wanted to refuse them, but it was impossible; anyhow, we would never have allowed that. Slowly the bit of chocolate melted in our mouths. No one chewed. No one swallowed. We just sat there with that bit of chocolate on our tongues, all of us with smiles on our faces, happier than we had been for days. Then Mama carefully put it all away, first handing Olga some cheese and a packet of soup.
Olga shook her head. “No, no, that’s impossible. We could not take it.”
Mama got very angry. “If it had come your way, wouldn’t you have shared it with us? What about the beans? Do you think we can sit here in the kitchen gorging ourselves while our dearest friends are next door starving?” Olga and Mama were both crying. They kissed, and Olga took the food. Yelena and I wet our fingers and had a battle to see who could get up the most cookie crumbs.
After the good news came bad news. The next day when I got home, I could tell Mama had been waiting for me. “Georgi, sit down. I must tell you what I have decided. There are not enough doctors and nurses at the front with the soldiers. The soldiers are giving their lives for us with no one to help and comfort them when they are injured. They are drafting nurses from the hospital. I am not sure I could say no if I wanted to. I hate to leave you, but everything must be done to help our soldiers. If they don’t defeat the Germans, we will all die. I remember in the last war how much comfort the nurses were to the soldiers at the Catherine Palace. And Georgi, when I am gone, the food that we have will go further. I wouldn’t leave if I didn’t feel you could manage on your own. I am so proud of you, Georgi. I don’t know what I would have done without you, and Georgi, I count on you to take care of Yelena and Olga.”
I didn’t want Mama to go. I had told myself that I was a man and doing a man’s work, but at her words I didn’t feel like it; instead, I felt like a child again. I was always struggling to get Mama to realize I was grown up. Now she had, and I wasn’t so happy about it.
Mama was watching me. “Georgi, I wouldn’t push you out of the nest unless I was sure you could fly.”
The volunteers from the hospital were leaving the next day, so Mama had little time for preparations. Olga came with a warm scarf and Yelena contributed gloves. At first Mama would not take them, but Olga said, “The hospital tents at the front will not be heated. What good will you be to the soldiers if you are sick with cold and your fingers numb?”
The morning she left, Mama put her arms around me. “It breaks my heart, Georgi, that you should have to grow up in such times.”
“Mama, it was the same with you and Papa.” When they were only a little older than me, Mama and Papa had faced starvation and imprisonment.
“All the more reason I didn’t want it for you, Georgi, but I know you are strong. Only promise not to do anything foolish.”
The apartment was empty with Marya and Mama away. Having an older sister is like having an extra mother. Now both of my mothers were gone. As sad as I was to see Mama go, still, I tried to cheer myself up by telling myself I could do as I pleased. But when there is war, you do not do as you please. I still had to tumble out of bed while it was dark and fetch a pail of water, and I still had to hurry to one of the parks where we were scraping bark.
It was dark when I returned home. Dinner was simple. I cut off a bit of bread and sliced a little of the pickled cabbage. With no money, there was no place to go; besides, you could not go out into the cold streets, for it would take you hours to warm up once you returned to your unheated home. Olga spent long hours at the radio station, playing music with the symphony. Yelena and I sat close together for warmth and read books aloud to each other. I did most of the reading, for Yelena’s voice was weak. She had been thin to begin with, and when the rations were cut, the small amount of food she got and what little I could spare were hardly enough to keep her going.
“It is so strange at the library,” she said. “Hundreds of people come and sit in the reading room all wrapped up in coats and mittens. They sit by our little oil lamps and read by the hour; they read as if tomorrow all the books will be gone.” She sighed. “And it may happen. A German shell could easily destroy the library.”
Sometimes, if she had the evening shift, Yelena spent the night at the library to avoid coming home after curfew. There were cots in one of the reading rooms for the library staff. On those nights I was shut up in my apartment with nothing to do. It was on one of those nights that I heard a scurrying noise in the cupboard. When I peeked in, a mouse darted away. Most of the Leningrad mice had long since expired of hunger. I thought, Here is a clever mouse who has not given up. I began to leave a crumb or two on the kitchen shelf. The mouse, too desperate for food to be afraid of me, would make a dash for the crumbs and then disappear. After a week the mouse was tame enough to sit and eat in front of me, but to tell the truth, I was so hungry I began to begrudge him even the crumbs. Still, I kept feeding him because when she saw him, the mouse made Yelena smile.
In the evenings I heard Yelena make her way slowly up the stairway, as if in her weakness each step were a mountain. I tried to share my food with her, but apart from a little jam or a bit of Marya’s chocolate—for Yelena loved sweets—she would not take it.
“Viktor is eating at the canteen at the firehouse,” she said, “so Mother and I get his bread ration.” The factory where Viktor had worked had been transferred long since to Moscow from Leningrad. Now he was a volunteer fireman, working night and day to put out the fires from the constant bombing.
I was desperate to find something to do besides scrape bark, and I tried to get a job as a fireman myself, but as usual I was too young. I had nearly given up hope that I would find a proper job when I heard about the lake from Dmitry, who had heard about it from his brother.
“Vladimir is just back from Lake Ladoga. He’s writing a story about it. The lake is starting to freeze. Soon the trucks will be running. He says they’ll go across the lake day and night, bringing food into the city. He says it’s freezing just in time, because the city is running out of flour. Soon there won’t be any bread.”
I began to think about the trucks on Lake Ladoga. I thought about them all the time. I saw them starting out from Leningrad, empty, driving along on the ice, and then returning loaded with flour and sugar and butter and real tea. I saw myself bringing the food to Yelena, to all the hungry people in the hospital and the people dying on the street. “Listen,” I said to Dmitry, “they’ll need people to unload the trucks. Why shouldn’t we do it? I worked at loading and unloading the trucks from the Hermitage.”
Dmitry shook his head. “I don’t think the trucks have even started.”
“We coul
“The streetcars and buses aren’t running. It must be a twenty-mile walk to the lake. We’d be icicles before we got there, and then they might not give us jobs.”
I could tell he wasn’t interested. What he said was true. Still I resolved to go myself.
That evening when I told Yelena, she was against it. “Georgi, there will be men there to do the work. You’ll freeze unloading the trucks in the cold and dark.”
“Just because they won’t let me in the army, I don’t mean to spend the rest of the war stripping bark from the trees. We’re all weak from hunger, and Viktor looks sicker every day. All over the city people are dying. It’s important to send the trucks for the food. Unloading them will be real work.”
Finally Yelena saw that I meant to go. “As for freezing,” I said, “come and let me show you something.”
I opened a chest and took out a box. Inside the box were the parka and boots the Samoyeds had made for Papa in Siberia. My parka and Marya’s, now much too small for us, had long ago been sold. Mama wanted to keep Papa’s things as a reminder of him, but I was sure she would approve.
“They look new,” Yelena said. “Someone will be sure to steal them from you.”
I knew she was right and took them outside and rubbed them with dirt.
“Georgi, I wish you wouldn’t take the risk.”
I was almost ready to back down when later that night, while I was still sleeping, there was a loud knocking on my door. Olga burst into the room.
“Come quickly, it’s Viktor.”
Viktor was lying on his bed, his breathing so weak I could not be sure he was alive. There was hardly any flesh on his face, and his hands were like a skeleton’s.
“He took sick at the firehouse and the men brought him home. They said he was starving.” Olga was shaking with sobs.
In a whisper Yelena said, “Mama asked if he wasn’t eating at the firehouse canteen, and the men said there wasn’t any canteen.” Two great tears slid down Yelena’s cheeks. “Georgi, Viktor was just making that up so that we got his bread ration.”
Olga was trying to get some hot tea between Viktor’s lips, but it only dribbled out. He took a long breath, like someone about to plunge into deep water, and he was dead.
The next hours were terrible. We wrapped Viktor in a sheet and tied it around him. As soon as it was light, I found someone with a wagon and gave him the last chocolate bar to carry Viktor to the cemetery, where there would be no burial in the frozen ground. But it was the only place I knew.
I didn’t want Yelena to come. I knew what the horror looked like, but she insisted on accompanying the wagon. In a whisper she said to me, “Mama is too upset, and one of us must be there.”
As we left, Yelena sighed, “If only we had flowers for Viktor, but the ground is covered with snow.”
“Wait,” Olga said. She choked back her tears and rummaged through a drawer, drawing out her flowered scarf and laying it over the body. We stood awkwardly by Viktor. I said a prayer. Olga took up her violin and played a bit from the Rachmaninoff violin concerto that Viktor loved and that we had often heard through the thin walls of the apartment.
The man and I carried Viktor down the stairway and laid him in the wagon. In a snowstorm Yelena and I followed the wagon to the cemetery, where the bodies were piled outside the gates, one upon the other, some not even decently wrapped. I helped the man to lay Viktor with the others. Yelena made the sign of the cross, and we turned away. Neither of us said a word. On the way back we took off our gloves and held hands, not caring about the cold, each wanting only to feel the hand of the other.
When we returned, there was no comforting Olga, for she was sure she had killed Viktor.
“He gave us his food,” Olga said.
“But not only his food, Mama,” Yelena told her. “He gave us his love as well. With such love we will never be hungry again.”
The next day I left for Lake Ladoga.
CHAPTER NINE
“THE ROAD OF LIFE”
November 1941
I set off before light so that I would reach the lake before darkness set in. The trip through the city was one sad sight after another. Weakened by their hunger, people seemed to move in slow motion, a hopeless look on their faces. I wanted to shout at them that I was going to Lake Ladoga and that trucks laden with food would soon be moving across the ice. Just outside the city I hitched a ride part of the way with a truck carrying supplies from a Leningrad factory to the army.
“You must have a long way to go,” I said.
The truck driver laughed bitterly. “I wish I did. I can’t tell you where I am going, but believe me, it’s not far.”
So the front was close.
When I finally got to the lake’s edge, it was late afternoon and already dark. There were no trucks to unload and no trucks to be seen, only a crowd of men and soldiers standing looking across a field of ice that was the lake.
“Where are the trucks?” I asked a soldier.
He laughed bitterly. “Trucks? There are no trucks. We don’t know yet if the ice is safe. We have to plow a road thirty miles long across the ice. We can’t do that until we are sure we have at least eight inches of ice, or the trucks will fall into the lake. They may try to get across on sleighs tomorrow. If you came for food, you might as well go home—the sleighs will never make it.”
I had no intention of going home. I found a little shack crowded with soldiers and volunteers who had come to drive the trucks. I joined them and made believe I was one of the official volunteers. A little bread was passed around and weak tea. One of the soldiers had a bottle of vodka, and that was passed around as well. Someone started a fire, and someone else was ripping boards from the floor of the shack to keep the flames going. There was a lot of excitement at the idea of testing the ice, and men were wagering rubles as to how soon the first truck would fall through the ice. At last, with the sound of snoring and the smell of unwashed bodies huddled together to keep warm, everyone fell asleep but me. I was too excited to close my eyes.
As soon as someone stirred in the morning, I sprang up and hurried to the lake. A party was getting ready to set out on the sleighs, but they were short some men. There were loud complaints that the volunteers were sleeping off their vodka. Before I thought of what I was doing, I stepped forward. A man called Sasha motioned to me to join him on his sleigh. He was in his thirties, short and stocky like a tree trunk and with a loud voice and a loud laugh. He said, “Young friend, come up here and keep me company. You are a cheerful soul, not like these long-faced types who grumble about this and that. You won’t complain if these sad, bony horses fall over halfway there.”
Pleased to be chosen, I climbed up eagerly onto his sleigh. “They say there will be oats and hay in Kobona,” I told him.
“That’s what I like to hear. Good news. Always look on the sunny side.” He leaned forward and began to talk to the horses.
“Let me tell you, fellows, what you two horses are doing is a great thing. Today you are heroes of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself will pin a medal on your harnesses. Never mind the cold and ice, just say to yourselves you are out on a run for pleasure, galloping across the lake for a lark. That’s the way. Keep going, and on the other side you will have all the oats and hay you can eat.”
We set out slowly, the men in the lead sleigh stopping to measure the ice, which was only six inches. It might support us, but not a truck. When we reached the open lake, the wind blew so hard, we had to clutch each other to keep from being blown away. The leader in the first sleigh would call out, “Thin ice,” and the call would be passed back. We would then have to go to the left or the right to find stronger ice.
I thanked the Samoyeds a million times for their gift. I was hungry and weak, but their parka and boots kept me warm. I thought of my Samoyed friend, the shaman, and how he would walk ahead of his people, pointing out the safest and quickest route. I wished he were guiding us across the lake.
At times the wind blowing across the lake was so strong, the sleigh was blown off its course. We came to a wide crack in the ice. Sasha cursed in a string of words I had never heard before. Along with the other sleighs, we headed south and then east again to avoid the crack. Hours later we reached the island of Zelenets, where we were ordered to rest the horses, whose warm bodies were sending up ghosts of white steam into the freezing air. We were given great hunks of bread and real tea with sugar cubes to drink with it. But there were no oats or hay for our poor horses. Sasha looked at me. Together we looked at our starving, shivering horses. We fed the horses half our bread and smiled at each other as the horses slobbered up the sugar cubes we held out to them.
We were back on the ice again. It was midnight before we reached Kobona, on the other side of the lake. A crowd had waited up for us, and we heard their cheers as we pulled the sleighs onto land. There was food there, real bread with butter and real tea. I put half the buttered bread in my pocket for Yelena and even wrapped the used tea leaves in my handkerchief to save.
There was no time to rest. The sleighs were loaded with cereal, cottonseed cakes, and sugar, but again there was no food for the horses. How were the poor beasts to pull loaded sleighs back the thirty miles across the ice? Yet the food on the sleighs would save many lives. I remembered how the Samoyeds told of the reindeer digging with their hooves to get at the moss that lay under the snow’s covering. I told this to Sasha, who clapped me roughly on the back and said, “You see, I knew from the first you would bring me luck.” Together we swept away snow and pulled up the dried grass, which the horses eagerly munched. When the others saw what we were about, they did the same.