The Siege Read online

  In the nursery, you can sort it out. You can break up the gang. You can put your arm around Seryozha. There, in her little world within a world, things still make sense. But then out comes her boss, Elizaveta Antonovna, with the latest directives in her hand. Her eyes are fixed to the text. She has got to take the correct line. She must not make an error.

  Elizaveta Antonovna doesn’t even see the children. She’s frightened, too. The bosses are all frightened now. How should she interpret the directive? If she gets it wrong, who will inform on her?

  Anna’s father still goes to the Writers’ House on Ulitsa Voinova, but not very often, although as a member of the Union of Soviet Writers he’s entitled to eat there every day. ‘I don’t feel like it today, Anna,’ he says. ‘And besides, I’ve got to rewrite these last two pages.’

  He had a dream one night. He dreamed he was lying in bed and someone clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. A firm, fleshy, well-fed hand. The fingers were thick and greasy. They squeezed his nostrils until he couldn’t breathe.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I twisted my head from side to side to try and shake him off, but he pressed harder. And then I –’

  ‘What?

  ‘I bit his hand. I could taste his blood.’

  ‘Whose hand was it?’

  And then his whisper, in the frightened room that held only the two of them: ‘Koba’s.’1

  Anna didn’t answer. She knew there was more.

  ‘And then I woke up. I looked in the mirror and there were marks on my face. Dirty fingerprints. I tried to wipe them off but they wouldn’t come off. I filled a basin with water and dipped my head into it and when I looked in the mirror my face was streaming with water, but the marks were still there.’

  He looks at her. She half-expects to see the fingerprints rise to the surface of his skin and show themselves. But there’s nothing. ‘It was a dream, that’s all.’

  ‘I know that.’ He raps it out. There she goes again, stating the obvious, not thinking before she speaks.

  ‘A nightmare,’ says Anna.

  ‘Don’t shut the door.’

  ‘No, I’ll leave it open.’

  Her father has always been afraid of a shut door. He was afraid of getting trapped in a lift, that was why he always took the stairs. When they went to the cinema he had to sit near the exit.

  Her father’s income is down to a fifth of what it was three years ago. Each summer Anna has increased her vegetable plot at the dacha. She’s dug up all the flowerbeds now, except for her mother’s three rose-bushes.

  Three rose-trees, bearing dark-red, velvety roses which open helplessly wide and spread out their perfume. Before winter her mother packed straw around them, then sacking, and bound it with twine. Anna can see her now: the quick, expert fingers, the way she brushed soil off her knees as she stood up. There, it was done for the winter. Strange, how easy it is to remember her doing that, and yet there are long, blank patches when it seems as if Anna’s mother never lived at all.

  But she lived. Remember it.

  Anna and the sledge. Little Anna on her sledge, long ago. Mammy loved sledging as much as Anna did. They would go out, the two of them, while Anna’s father worked. He would have liked to come with them but he had a deadline to meet.

  Walking through snow, with the red sledge bumping along behind them, Anna wished that everyone she knew was there to see what a beautiful sledge she had. There were curls of green and gold on the smart, bright red. The rope was new and Anna was allowed to pull the sledge herself. Her mother swooped down to pick up Anna when snow went over the top of her boots. When she set her down again, Anna took up the thick, new rope. A bit farther on, near the park, someone stopped them. She stood so close that Anna smelt her smoky perfume. Her boots had shiny silver buckles on the side, and Anna wanted to touch them.

  ‘Hasn’t she grown! How are you all, Vera?’

  ‘We’re well,’ said Vera. Her hand squeezed Anna’s tightly. There was a silence, but Vera didn’t put any more words into it.

  ‘I haven’t seen Misha for weeks – he’s not ill, I hope?’

  Her mother’s voice was steady. ‘He’s perfectly well, Marina Petrovna. We are all perfectly well. And now, if you’ll excuse me, Anna mustn’t stand in the cold…’

  ‘Of course –’

  When Anna looked back she was still standing there. She didn’t move, and no one said goodbye.

  When they had turned the corner, her mother stopped and placed Anna carefully on the sledge. She wrapped the shawl around Anna in the usual way, making sure that her chest was covered.

  But suddenly she changed and did something new. She dropped on her knees in the snow in front of the sledge. She grasped Anna and pulled her close. She pressed her tight, tight, so that Anna felt the cold of her mother’s cheeks burning her.

  ‘Mammy, you’re hurting me.’

  Her mother moved back. Anna saw her face close-up.

  ‘Mammy, are you all right?’

  Her mother stood up, brushing snow off her coat. ‘I’m fine. Don’t worry, Anna.’

  Anna said nothing. Carefully, she tucked in the ends of the shawl which her mother had forgotten. She looked up and she saw that her mother’s face was stiff with anger. She was drumming her fingers on the rope, staring up the street as if she’d forgotten about Anna.

  ‘Mammy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can we go?’

  ‘You want to go back home?’

  ‘I’m cold, Mammy.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was thinking about some things at work. Let’s go. Hold on tight now, Anna.’

  How old was she then? Five, six? All through that spring and summer there was trouble hanging in the air like thunder. At night Anna woke up and there were voices slashing the dark. When holiday time came her mother took Anna away to the dacha, but her father didn’t come with them. He had things to do in Leningrad.

  ‘Too much work to do, Anna. I want to come, but –’

  Her mother had two weeks’ holiday, and every single minute Anna was with her. Nobody came to visit. Her mother belonged entirely to Anna. In the morning, they ate their breakfast on the verandah, and Anna put a lump of sugar in her mouth and sucked it before she drank tea, exactly as her mother did. Her mother read, while Anna cut out paper dolls and painted their clothes. Sometimes it was hot, high noon before they dressed. Toys and paper scraps lay on the verandah where Anna dropped them, and two days later they were still there. There wasn’t a breath of wind.

  Her mother sat on the verandah, stretched her bare feet into the sun, and read to Anna. Her mother’s feet were tired and lumpy, but she stretched them like a dancer.

  ‘Did you ever dance, Mammy?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘With Daddy?’

  ‘Your father never liked dancing.’ ‘Show me how.’

  ‘Not now, Anna, I’m reading to you.’

  They slept in the same bed. Anna would roll over and grasp her mother’s waist, pretending to be asleep so her mother wouldn’t be cross with her. She would say in a sleepy, just-woken voice, ‘Mammy?’

  ‘Sh. Go back to sleep now. It’s late.’

  But her mother didn’t push Anna away. In Leningrad, in the apartment, there was no room for Anna in her parents’ bed. Here, the old iron bedstead creaked as her mother turned over and settled to sleep, with Anna curled at her back, and Anna’s arm around her waist.

  ‘Are you all right, little pigeon? Go to sleep.

  ‘I love it when you call me little pigeon.’

  In the middle of the night, Anna woke. There was her mother’s shoulder, warm and broad. She was turned away from Anna. Anna moved her mouth across her mother’s back. She licked her mother’s skin and smelled it. It smelled quite different where she’d licked it. Her mother tasted good. Anna swam up her mother’s body until her mouth was against the soft, creamy pad of flesh behind her shoulder. She opened her mouth and, without knowing what she was going to do, she bit.
Her mother startled all over, throwing Anna off. But she still didn’t wake. Anna wanted her to wake. Squaring her mouth, she began to make a crying noise, and then to cry. Her mother sat up and lit the bedside candle.

  ‘Anna, what’s the matter?’ Her mother’s plait swung forward and touched Anna’s face. ‘Are you ill?’

  Anna doesn’t remember any more. Her mother was herself again, calmly in charge. It was like a change in the weather. Anna settled neatly back to sleep, on her own side of the bed. The next morning, before Anna had even woken, her mother had picked up all the toys, thrown away the dead flowers, and put her research papers into a pile on the table.

  ‘We go back tomorrow,’ her mother said.

  Back in Leningrad, her parents shared their bedroom again. Every night Anna settled in her cot-bed in her parents’ room, and then they moved her into the living-room when they went to bed. But some mornings she woke to find her father huddled in a blanket, asleep on the leather sofa beside her. The thunder growled and rumbled, but far away so she could scarcely hear it any more.

  That summer at the dacha grips Anna. It keeps unpacking in her mind. Eighteen years ago. The only time, maybe, when her mother gave way and bound Anna to her, because she needed her. But in all the years afterwards nothing was said. Never again was she as close to her mother as on those summer nights, listening to her mother’s breath.

  ‘You won’t ever die, will you, Mammy?’

  ‘One day I will,’ her mother said, in her usual clear and serious way. ‘But not before you are able to live without me.’

  ‘I’ll never be able to live without you.’

  ‘Of course you will. You think you won’t now, but you will.’ Did Vera think of that, when she was really dying?

  It was a postpartum haemorrhage. Neither Anna nor her father was there. Vera was unconscious and had already had a heart attack by the time they arrived.

  She’d been so practical about her pregnancy, right from the start. Practical, realistic, and humorous with colleagues who teased her about being caught out. Vera, who wrote everything down in her small black memo-book, and never forgot an appointment. She stood there in her cotton maternity smock, and smiled at the teasing. She said, rather oddly, ‘Well, none of us is immortal.’

  ‘Immortal?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that, do I? What’s the right word?’

  ‘Infallible?’

  ‘Yes, that’s it.’

  Her colleagues laughed with her. It was nice, the way Vera never tried to know everything. They suspected that maybe she’d wanted this last-chance baby, now that Anna was seventeen. After all, think how good Vera was with the younger members of the team. Always encouraging, taking time, able to teach people without them noticing it. Never losing her temper when they made mistakes.

  But Anna knew that it was not her mother who had wanted this baby. She was forty when she became pregnant, almost forty-one. She was an expert in her field, and was beginning to travel, lecturing in Moscow, Odessa, Kiev.

  ‘Are you going away again?’ her father asked.

  ‘It’s only five days, Misha. You knew about it, it’s been planned since last August. It’s in the diary.’

  ‘You’re never here these days.’

  ‘Anna is old enough now.’

  ‘Is that all you think about?’

  Dark stains grew under Vera’s eyes. Her ankles swelled so much that the straps of her sandals cut into her pale, puffy flesh. The baby was due in late summer.

  ‘Go and lie down, Mammy. I’ll cook.’

  ‘It’s all right, Anna, I’m fine. I’ve just got to finish this.’

  Work went on as it had always done. Vera was writing a paper which she would give at a conference in Kiev, three months after the baby was born. Nothing was going to change, she said to her colleagues on the telephone. She would fulfil her responsibilities. When her eyes met Misha’s across the room she stared him down.

  Kolya’s birth was easy, and immediately afterwards everything seemed fine. He was a big baby, a strong, fine child they said to her, slapping the soles of his feet to make him cry. Vera sat up and took the baby. A nurse told Anna about it afterwards.

  ‘I want to know everything that happened,’ said Anna. ‘Don’t leave anything out because you think it will upset me.’

  The nurse looked at her, frightened.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s only – it’s just that you sound exactly like your mother.’

  Anna brushed that away. Don’t think of it now, think of it later.

  ‘Go on, please. Tell me what happened.’

  The delivery of the placenta was difficult. Immediately afterwards, before Vera’s uterus had contracted fully, there was an emergency in the next ward. A prolapsed cord, it was. They had to leave Vera alone for a few minutes. ‘It was only a few minutes, Anna Mikhailovna, no more than seven. I swear it.’

  Vera would not have been frightened when she lifted her sheet and saw blood, even though she’d have known what the bleeding meant. This was her world, the hospital world. She’d have guessed what had happened. Part of the placenta had not been expelled. Now she would continue to haemorrhage until it could be removed. The situation was urgent, but not yet dangerous.

  She rang a bell beside the bed. A nurse came. Vera said calmly, ‘I think I’m bleeding.’

  ‘Is that exactly what she said?’

  ‘Yes, it was me who came, you see. Those were her words.’

  So Vera was frightened. She said ‘I think’ when she knew. Or perhaps she didn’t want to frighten the nurse. The nurse lifted the sheet. She looked and then she said, ‘It’s all right. You’re fine,’ and then she ran, her feet striking the hard floor all the way down the ward. Next, there was a metal trolley and porters lifting Vera on to it. The nurse ran alongside the trolley as it clattered down the corridor to the lift. Vera said she felt faint, then closed her eyes.

  And then what? Then the clean, shabby hospital wall, and the shut door. Anna can’t go any farther with her mother. And then there was her father, kneeling by Vera’s bed with his hands over his face. Anna touched her mother’s soft, warm cheek, but the gaping face belonged to someone else. All the sense had gone out of it.

  Vera was forty-one.

  ‘There’s always a greater risk, you understand,’ someone said.

  But how could it be Vera who had died in this way? It wasn’t like her at all. She knew about bodies, and hospitals. She understood the limits of what should happen to people. Health was her job and her life. She knew what Anna should eat, and how many hours she should study. She’d talked to Anna about her periods before they started, telling her just enough and not too much. ‘When you have children,’ she’d said. Not ‘When I have children.’ Vera’s days of children were over, it went without saying. She had Anna.

  But she died at forty-one. She left her child to Anna. In the end, instead of freeing her daughter, she put a child into her arms. That red, squirming thing they were swaddling in the next room. Kolya.

  Little Anna stayed at the dacha with her mother, eighteen summers ago, the two of them alone together for the first time. Every night, when she woke, her mother was there, dreaming, her fist up to her face as she slept.

  ‘Mammy?’ said Anna.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said her mother in her sleep-thickened voice. ‘I’m here.’ She said it every night, until Anna slept without asking.

  2

  As soon as the ice melted in the late spring of ’41, Anna began cycling out to the dacha on her days off. It was a long ride, with Kolya on the back of the bike, but she didn’t mind that. She took bread and pickled herrings, and bought milk for Kolya in the village. The cold, fresh air streamed over her face as she pedalled hard. She went faster, faster, her heart pumping, a smile rising from nowhere and breaking on her lips.

  ‘Look, Kolya, look! The Sokolov farm!’

  Out at the dacha, the earth was black and sweet, and it crumbled easily after the frosts. Kolya
played in the dirt, making fortresses with stick-and-stone cannon while she got the heavy digging done. She let him play, but later on he could help to plant the seeds. She was too much in the habit of doing everything for Kolya, because it was quicker and easier. She’d made him lazy. An image of her father rose in her mind. His long fine fingers turned a page, and he asked, ‘What time are we eating, Anna?’ without even looking up from his book. He never knew what food there was in the house.

  ‘You must be more independent, Kolya.’

  ‘In-de-pend-ent…’ he sang to himself, swinging his feet. ‘What’s that, Anna?’

  He would sit there and hold out his feet for her to put his boots on, even though he knew perfectly well how to do it for himself.

  Anna stopped digging to watch him. He crouched over his excavations, running his gun forward, banging out fire at an invisible enemy behind the bird-cherries, then digging furiously with his little wooden spade. All the while he kept up a commentary on his own game.

  ‘Attack! Attack! The Reds are attacking – and the Whites are retreating, their commander fat-ally wounded…’

  Anna sighed. All the little boys at the nursery were the same, locked into old battles. But she kept quiet. Kolya might say something, and Elizaveta Antonovna might overhear it. Anna says playing Reds and Whites is stupid. My God, imagine if she heard that. And she might. Elizaveta Antonovna was always appearing just where you didn’t expect her.

  Anna is a useful worker, but not useful enough for Elizaveta Antonovna to risk failing to denounce her. She wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

  But Anna knows that for the time being she’s as safe as anyone can be. She’s strong, that’s the main thing. She’s never ill, and almost never late. She does half Lyuba’s work as well as her own, which keeps Lyuba sweet. And Elizaveta Antonovna knows she’ll stick at the job whatever comes, because it means she can have Kolya with her.