Burying the Sun by Gloria Whelan
The loaded sleighs began their return trip across the ice, and the next morning we brought the first load of food into Leningrad.
We unloaded the sleighs onto trucks and climbed onto the trucks ourselves. Once the trucks reached the warehouses, we unloaded them again. We all had been dreaming of taking a bit of food for our efforts, but that dream soon ended. As we were unloading, we heard a shot and saw one of the drivers fall to the ground. A soldier put his gun back into his holster. “There are plenty of bullets,” he said, “for the next man who tries to steal food.”
Near the end of November the ice was thick enough for the trucks. Sasha was chosen to be a driver. I begged to go along to help with the loading and unloading. “If your truck breaks down, I know all about engines,” I said.
Sasha agreed. “You are only a boy, but you are strong and good-natured and you don’t argue with me. If you know something about trucks, so much the better.”
I expected the trucks to be empty crossing the lake, but half of the city wanted to escape. The authorities agreed. The more people left the city, the more food there would be for those who remained, but there was only so much room in the trucks. Unless they had the proper papers, people were turned away, so the place from which the trucks set off was crowded with pushing, hysterical people offering money and jewelry and gold to get on one of them. If a passenger was taken on without the proper papers, the truck driver was severely punished.
“They shoot us,” Sasha said.
The refugees were punished as well, for the trip in the bed of a truck across the lake with the cold and the wind was a fearful ordeal. Some did not make it.
On our return the trucks took their loads of food to the warehouses in the freight yards; from there it was distributed across the city. Once a week I would get a day off, and after unloading the truck, I would make my way across the city to our apartment. In Kobona I could sometimes get a little extra butter or cereal, so Olga looked more cheerful and Yelena began to have a little color to her face.
Yelena had worked out a scheme with the library that pleased her. “I worried about all the people not strong enough to come to the library. How terrible I should feel if I didn’t have a book close by. Even on the coldest day and no matter how hungry I am, a favorite book will give me a minute or two of peace. They are allowing me to take books to the hospitals, and oh, Georgi, if you could see the faces of some of the patients when I put a book in their hands—it is nearly as good as bread.”
At the end of November the weather turned warm. People breathed a sigh of relief, thinking they would be saved from freezing to death, but on the lake it was a disaster. The ice began to thaw. One day on the way back we came to a soft spot. Sasha did not pause but gunned the engine, and we roared across, almost flying over the ice. When I looked behind me, I saw the truck that had tried to follow us sink into the water and disappear. I covered my eyes with my hands and groaned.
“Nichevo, never mind,” Sasha said, as he said to everything.
“We have to go back,” I shouted. I was shaking at our narrow escape and horrified at what I had seen.
Sasha said, “We would fall through ourselves. Besides, the food we are carrying will save a thousand lives.”
I knew he was right, but it was terrible to me that people were dying in the city from hunger and dying on the lake to end the hunger.
CHAPTER TEN
RETURN
December 1941
We had our first good news from the front. The town of Tikhvin had been recaptured from the Germans, and our soldiers had retaken the railroad as far as the crucial Mga station. Along with all the food our trucks were bringing into the city, small amounts of food were also beginning to arrive by train.
The temperature the day before Christmas was below zero with a heavy snow. There was no electricity and so no radio for an official announcement; nevertheless, the word spread from house to house and person to person. Rations were going to be increased. It did not matter that the increase was only a very little—the movement for the first time was upward. People in the streets were slapping one another on the backs, tears were flowing.
At the bakery the women behind the counters, who were usually sullen and unhappy over having to say the word no all the time, were now smiling. It was only a little more, but what a Christmas surprise!
The people of Kobona provided tea and food, bread with butter, and farm cheese as a Christmas treat for the truck drivers. I kept a knapsack with me, and into the knapsack went most of my food. In the freezing cold everything would keep. Sasha saw what I was doing and scolded me. “You need your strength to heave those boxes and barrels in and out of the truck.”
On Christmas morning I prepared a feast of real tea with sugar, thick slices of bread—dried but, still, with the taste of butter on them, and slices of cheese. Olga and Yelena were speechless.
At last Olga said, “Where have you stolen the food from? Let’s hurry and eat the evidence before we are all dragged off to prison.”
Yelena said, “It’s a dream. If we touch it, it will disappear.”
The government discouraged the celebration of Christmas. But Yelena was in great spirits after our feast. Laughing, she let a candle drop its melting wax over a bowl of water. It was an old superstition that a girl would find some sign of her future husband if at Christmas she dropped wax into water.
“Let’s see what we have.” She stared at the puddle of wax. “It looks like four wheels. Why, it’s a truck!” She smiled. “Who can that be?”
Olga got into the spirit of the day, and taking up her violin, she played while Yelena and I sang Christmas hymns. It was the first time I had seen her smile since Viktor’s death. That night we wished one another S Rozhdestvom Khristovom, Merry Christmas, and went off to our beds with, miracle of miracles, full stomachs. If only Mama and Marya had been there, I thought, the day would have been perfect.
On Lake Ladoga the Germans never stopped shelling our trucks or dropping bombs on us, so the only time it was safe to be on the ice was at night, which was when we made most of our runs. The trucks had begun to break down. I would tell Sasha what was needed, and he would scrounge parts from old trucks in the city that could no longer run because there was no gasoline for anything but authorized vehicles. I would replace the worn parts and hold my breath while Sasha turned on the ignition.
The German shelling increased. Signs went up along the prospekt that read: the sunny side of the street is the dangerous side. That was where most of the bombs fell. While the shelling went on, we all walked on the less dangerous side.
The weather on the ice road was below zero, then ten, twenty, and one night forty degrees below zero. Still we drove on. Men were sent to establish posts every mile along the ice road to control the traffic and see to the trucks that broke down. All along the route there were antiaircraft batteries fighting off the German planes that tried to pick off our trucks. There were only a few hours of light now, and the whole world seemed wrapped in darkness, but the darkness protected our trucks.
The number of people escaping from Leningrad was increasing every day. It was said several hundred thousand had left the city. We were offered every kind of bribe—rubles, gold, vodka—to take passengers who had no proper papers. Many of the drivers took the bribes, but Sasha would not. “What good would the gold and vodka do me in the grave?” he said. The penalty was immediate execution, no questions asked.
Very few tried to return to the city. Who would want to come into poor starving Leningrad? It was the last day of the year when I saw a woman climb onto the load of supplies in the truck ahead of us and find a protected spot for herself in the back. She was wrapped in a heavy coat, and her face was hidden by a cap pulled almost over her eyes. The rest of her face was covered to her nose with a scarf, but I had seen her covered in the same way a hundred times in Siberia, and I recognized the coat. It was Marya. I rushed toward the truck, but the truck took off and my cries were lost in the wind.
“Sasha,” I pleaded, climbing up beside him. “Can you catch up with that truck? My sister is in it!”
“Your sister! How can she be so stupid? Only a fool would come back to a dying city.”
“Hurry. I don’t want to lose sight of her.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Never mind. She has a boyfriend who is a soldier and bigger than you.”
“Why should I hurry and risk the truck breaking down if I don’t have a chance?” Still, always happy for a challenge, he raced along as fast as the old truck could manage.
Across the ice we went, my eyes never off Marya and Marya with no idea I knew she was there.
The ice road was secure now, with several feet of ice, and we made the trip in the usual four hours. I jumped out of our truck and began running. All the while Sasha was calling after me, “Hey. We have to unload. Come back.”
Before she knew what was happening, I was lifting Marya from her truck.
“Georgi! It’s a miracle. Where did you come from?”
We both were so stuffed with coats and mittens that we could hardly get our arms around each other.
“What are you doing back here?” I demanded.
“I had to come back. The treasures from the museum are all safely tucked away underground. There was nothing more to be done. Every time I put a bit of bread in my mouth, I could not swallow it for thinking of how hungry you and Mama must be, and I’ve heard nothing from Andrei. I had to come back. Georgi, what are you doing here?”
Sasha was shouting to me. “Listen, Marya,” I said. “Come with me to the warehouse. I have to unload our truck. Then we’ll go home and I’ll tell you everything.”
We had had no way of writing to Marya, so there was much to tell. Mama was at an army hospital and Andrei was still somewhere at the front, I told her on the way home.
“Mama gone! I can’t believe it. Oh, Georgi, what a sad homecoming.”
For Marya the walk through the city was terrible. She was seeing the ruined Leningrad for the first time. “Why is that man selling dirt?” She was horrified.
“It isn’t exactly dirt. When the warehouses burned, the sugar burned as well. It melted into the earth. They have dug up the earth with its bit of sugar.”
The Gostiny Dvor, the market where we had loved to shop as children, had been bombed and was now only a blackened shell. Hundreds of starving people stood in lines at the stores, waiting for their rations. There were women dragging sleds with grown men too weak to walk. We passed the cemetery with its stacks of bodies that could not be buried in the frozen ground, and I had to tell Marya how we had taken Viktor there. Crater holes from the German shelling were everywhere, stores were boarded up, the trolley cars stood like silent ghosts. Everything was dark and blacked out, as if the city were not there at all.
“Mama used to say our city was safe as long as the angel still stands on the column in Palace Square, but how can our poor city survive this?” Marya began to cry; in the cold the tears froze on her cheeks as if all the warmth had gone out of the world.
When at last we were seated in our apartment with Olga and Yelena, drinking the real tea Marya had brought, Marya was more cheerful. “I’m glad I came back. Things are sure to get better—they can’t be worse.”
Yelena said, “I hope so, but things at the library are certainly getting worse. The ink is frozen in the inkwells. All the pencils have been burned for fuel in peoples’ burzhuikas. What is even worse, more and more books are being stolen to burn for fuel. I can’t blame people, but they are carrying off some of my favorites. Yesterday I saw a man put a book under his coat, and I was sure it was our last copy of Lermontov’s poems. Before I could stop myself, I ran up to him with a copy of The Collected Works of Stalin and said to him, ‘Surely this will make better reading for you,’ and I snatched away the poems, saying nothing about the theft. He seemed satisfied, since the Works was much fatter than the poems. Now I am putting out government books and hiding the poets.”
The next day Marya hurried to the Hermitage to see her old friends and came back with her own sad story.
“Georgi! There are hundreds and hundreds of people living in the museum. They are down in the cellars in the bomb shelters. Their own homes have been destroyed by German shells. They are commandeering all the building material Comrade Orbeli ordered so that he could restore the damaged museum when the war is over. And what are they commandeering it for? For coffins, Georgi!”
That evening Yelena, Olga, Marya, and I, along with all those who were strong enough to be out in the cold, went to St. Isaac’s Square to listen to the news over the loudspeakers, followed by poets reading their poems. When Marya heard the poet Simonov’s poem “Wait for Me,” with its sad words, “Wait for me, and I’ll return, wait for me in snow, wait for me in rain, only please wait,” cold tears once again ran down her cheeks, and I knew she was thinking of Andrei.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FYODOR
February 1942
Typhus had broken out in the city. I urged Yelena to stay at home.
“What! Leave the library and let people come in and take all my favorite books?”
It was not only the typhus that was making the city dangerous. It was a murderous city. Desperate people were willing to do whatever was necessary to stay alive. People stole and murdered for food or ration cards. Now that a ration card could not be replaced, a stolen card spelled your doom.
Dmitry and I were walking down the prospekt when we saw a man push an old woman down and steal her purse. Though we hardly had the strength to walk, we found ourselves running after the man. Dmitry tackled him and I sat on top of him. We found the ration card.
“Don’t turn me in. They will shoot me. Look, look, I have three little ones and they are starving. My wife died yesterday.” He held out a crumpled photograph of three children gathered around a smiling woman. It was true: If we turned him in, he would be shot, and then his three children would surely die.
“But what about the old woman you shoved to the ground and left helpless with no card?” I demanded.
He only sobbed. Dmitry and I looked at each other. We let the man go and returned her card to the old woman. She blessed us, tears running down her cheeks. Dmitry and I walked on. We had no heart for anything. We no longer recognized our city.
It was on that day that Marya brought home a child. He looked to be about four years old, dressed in rags, his legs like matchsticks, great hollows under his eyes, his arms and hands all blue veins.
Marya carried him into the apartment. He was so weak, he could not stand up but slumped to the floor. She laid him on the sofa and hurried to make him a bit of kasha from the small hoard of cereal that she had brought back from Sverdlovsk.
“Marya,” I demanded, “why have you brought this child here? We said we wouldn’t touch the cereal until the last moment.” I could not see what the child had to do with us.
“The child is dying of starvation, Georgi. His parents were staying at the Hermitage. They are dead, his father last week, his mother today. She begged me to take care of him. His name is Fyodor. The father worked as a guard at the Hermitage. There is no one else to care for the boy. The children’s homes are overflowing. They have no food and they are full of sickness. Between Olga and Yelena and us, we can care for him. I feel so helpless—this at least will be one thing I can do.”
I reached out to pat Fyodor on the head in a friendly manner, and he shrank from me as if I were going to hit him.
“Hey, fellow,” I said, “I just want to be friends.”
Fyodor had eyes only for the cupboard from which Marya had taken the bit of cereal.
Marya said, “It’s not his fault, Georgi. Things are very bad at the Hermitage; it’s dog-eat-dog. You must be patient with Fyodor.”
I thought he might be more friendly after he ate, but no, he curled up under the table and would not come out.
&
It must have been two or three in the morning when I heard the faintest noise. I was on one cot and Fyodor in his nest under the table in a bed Marya had made up for him, or so I thought. In the dark room I saw a shadow creeping toward the cupboard. I reached out to grasp Fyodor’s arm and felt his teeth sink into my hand, which luckily was enclosed in mittens. Hearing my yelp, Marya sprang out of bed, and the two of us pursued the boy, who now was back under the table, rolled into as small a ball as possible.
“Look,” I said, sticking my head under the table, “we know you are hungry, but we are giving you extra food. If you steal what we have, we will all die of starvation, and then where will you be?”
He growled like a dog whose bone has been threatened. Marya made the cupboard fast with a tangle of string, and we all went back to sleep. In the morning the child was calm enough to let Marya wipe his face and hands with a little snow and give him some pine-needle extract that was handed out to keep us from scurvy, since there were no fruits or vegetables in all the city.
We couldn’t tidy up Fyodor nor wash his clothes, for there was no extra water. Every ounce had to be extracted from the icy well, then carried through the streets and up the icy steps. Grimy as he was, he went off with Marya to the Hermitage for the day and I hurried off to Ladoga for my week of trucking. By the end of the week, when I returned, Fyodor gave me a shy smile, and when I held out a lump of sugar I had brought from Kobona, he climbed upon my lap. It seemed a kind of miracle that one person had been saved and would live.
There was more good news. Marya showed me a letter from Mama.
February 23, 1942
My dearest Marya and Georgi,