“Come,” I shout into the wind, or mean to. I am so cold my knees hurt. It hurts even to bend my fingers enough to hold Anya’s hand.
I walk
and walk
and walk
and there is nothing. Just ice and black sky and the distant popping of antiaircraft guns.
I think, I must hurry, and, My babies, and then Sasha is beside me. I can feel the warmth of his breath. He is whispering about love and the place we will build for ourselves in Alaska and he tells me it’s okay for me to rest.
“Just for a moment,” I say, falling to my knees before the words are even out of my mouth.
The world is totally quiet then. Somewhere, someone laughs and it sounds just like Olga. I will go find her as soon as I have a nap. This is the thought I have.
And I close my eyes.
“Mama.”
“Mama.”
“Mama.”
She is screaming in my face.
I open my eyes slowly and see Anya. My daughter has pulled off her scarf and wrapped it around my neck.
“You have to get up, Mama,” she says, tugging at me.
I look down. Leo is limp in my arms, his head lolled back. But I can feel his breathing.
I uncoil the scarf from around my neck and rewrap Anya’s face. “Never take your scarf off again. Do not give it to anyone. Not even me.”
“But I love you, Mama.”
And there is my strength. Gritting my teeth against the pain that will come, I stagger to my feet and start moving again.
One step at a time, until a lorry materializes in front of me.
A man dressed in baggy white camouflage is standing beside the door, smoking a cigarette. The smell of it makes me think of my mother.
“A ride across the ice?” I say, hearing how cracked and weak my voice is.
The man’s face is not drawn or gaunt. This means he is Somebody, or in the Party at least, and I feel my hope plummet.
He leans forward, looks at Leo. “Dead?”
I shake my head. “No. Just sleeping.
“Please,” I say, desperate now. All around me trucks are leaving and I know we will die tonight, here, if we do not find a ride soon. I pull out the cloisonné butterfly made by my grandfather. “Here.”
“No, Mama,” Anya says, reaching for it.
The man just frowns. “What good is a trinket?”
I pull off my glove and give him my wedding ring instead. “It is gold. Please. . . .”
He looks me over as he takes one last drag of the cigarette and then drops it to the snow. “All right, Baba,” he says, pocketing my ring. “Get in. I will take you and your grandchildren.”
I am so grateful, I don’t even realize what he has said to me until later, when we are all packed into the cab of his truck.
Baba.
He thinks I am an old woman. I pull the scarf off and glance in the mirror above the windshield.
My hair is as white as my skin.
It is daylight when we get across the ice. Not much light, of course, but enough. I can really see where we are now.
Endless snow. Trucks lined up, filled with food for my poor Leningrad. Soldiers dressed in white. Not far from here—three hundred yards, maybe—is the train station that is our next destination.
The bombing starts almost immediately. Our driver stops and gets out.
Honestly, I do not want to get out of the truck, even though I know how dangerous it is to sit here. There is gasoline in the tank, and no camouflage on the truck. It is a clear target from the air. But we are warm and it has been so long. . . . Then I look down at my Leo and I forget all about the danger.
He is not breathing.
I shake him hard, ripping open his coat and pulling up the newspaper. His chest is really just a brace of bones and blue skin and boils. “Wake up, Leo. Breathe. Come on, my lion.” I put my mouth on his, breathing for him.
Finally, he shudders in my arms and I feel a sour little breath slip into my mouth.
He starts to cry.
I hold him to me, crying, too, and say, “Don’t you leave me, Leo. I couldn’t bear it.”
“His hands are so hot, Mama,” Anya says, and I see how scared she is by the suddenness of my yelling.
I touch Leo’s forehead.
He is burning up. My hands are shaking as I reposition the newspaper and button up his sweater and coat.
We are going out into the cold again.
Anya leads the way out of the truck. I am so focused on Leo that I hardly notice the bombing and gunfire going on around me. Somewhere nearby a truck explodes.
It is like being in the eye of a hurricane. All around us trucks are rolling past, horses are clopping forward pulling wagons, soldiers are running, and we poor, starved Leningraders are looking for rides.
At last I find the infirmary. It consists of flapping, dirty white tents spread out across a snowy field.
Inside, it is no hospital. It is a place for the dying and the dead. That is all. The smell is horrible. People are lying in their own freezing filth, moaning.
I dare not put Leo down for fear he’ll get worse. It seems like hours we wander around, looking for someone to help us.
Finally, I find an old man, hunched over a cane, staring at nothing. Only because he is wearing white do I approach him.
“Please,” I say, reaching for him. “My son is burning up.”
The man turns to me. He looks as tired as I feel. His hands are trembling slightly as he reaches for Leo. I can see the boils on his fingers.
He touches Leo’s forehead and then looks at me.
It is a look I will never forget. Thank God there are no words with the look. “Get him to the hospital at Cherepovets.” He shrugs. “Maybe.”
I do not ask him to say more. In fact, I don’t want him to.
He hands me four white pills. “Two a day,” he says. “With clean water. When did he eat last?”
I shake my head. How can I say the words, tell the truth? It is impossible to get him to eat.
“Cherepovets,” is all he says, and then he turns and goes away. At every step, people are reaching for him, begging for help.
“Let’s go.”
I take Anya’s hand and we make our slow, painful way through the infirmary and across the snowy field to the train station. Our papers are in order and we climb into a car, where we are again packed in too tightly. There is no seat for me or my children, so we sit on the cold floor. I hold my Leo on my lap and Anya at my side. When it gets dark, I take out my small bag of nuts. I give Anya as many as I dare and eat a few myself. I manage to get Leo to take one of the pills with a swallow of water I’ve brought.
It is a long and terrible night.
I keep leaning down to see if Leo is still breathing.
I remember stopping once. The train doors opened and someone yelled out, “Any dead? Dead? Give them to us.”
Hands reach for Leo, try to pull him out of my arms.
I hang on to him, screaming, “He’s breathing, he’s breathing.”
When the door closes and it is dark again, Anya moves closer to me. I can hear her crying.
It is no better in Cherepovets. We have one day to spend here. At first I think this is a blessing, that we will have time to save Leo before we board the next train, but he is getting weaker. I try not to see this truth, but it is lying in my arms. He coughs all the time. Now there is blood in it. He is burning hot and shivering. He will neither eat nor drink.
The hospital here is an abomination. Everyone has dysentery and scurvy. You cannot stand for more than a moment or two without seeing a new Leningrader hobble in, looking for help. Every hour, trucks loaded with corpses leave the hospital, only to return empty. People are dying where they stand.
It is good that I am weak and hungry; I don’t have the strength to run from place to place for help. Instead, I stand in the cold, bleak hallway, holding my son. When people pass, I whisper, “Help him. Please.”
Anya is asleep on the cold floor, sucking her thumb, when a nurse stops.
“Help him,” I say, handing Leo to her.
She takes him gently. I try not to notice how his head lolls back.
“He’s dystrophic. Third stage. There is no fourth.” At my blank look, she says, “Dying. But if we could get fluids into him . . . maybe. I could take him to the doctor. It would be a difficult few days, maybe, though.”
She is so young, this nurse. As young as I was before the war began. I don’t know how to believe her, or how not to. “I have evacuation papers. We are supposed to be on the train to Vologda tomorrow.”
“They won’t let your son on that train,” the young nurse says. “Not one so sick.”
“If we stay it will be impossible to get more tickets,” I say. “We’ll die here.”
The nurse says nothing to this. Lies are a waste of time.
“We could start helping Leo now, couldn’t we?” I say. “Maybe he’ll be better by tomorrow.”
The nurse cannot hide her pity for me. “Of course. Maybe he’ll be better.”
And he is.
Better.
After a night when Anya and I lay curled on the floor by Leo’s dirty cot, I wake feeling bruised and cold. But when I get to my knees and look down at Leo, he is awake. For the first time in a long time, his blue eyes are clear. “Hi, Mama,” he says in a scratchy, froglike voice that cuts right through my heart. “Where are we? Where’s Papa?”
I waken Anya, pull her up beside me. “We are right here, baby. We are on our way to your papa. He will be waiting for us in Vologda.”
I am smiling and crying as I look down at my son, my baby. Maybe it is the tears that blur my vision, or more likely it is hope. I am old enough to know better, but common sense is gone with the sound of his voice. I don’t see how blue his skin is, how the boils have burst on his chest and are seeping yellow; I don’t hear the thickness of his cough. I just see Leo. My lion. My baby with the bluest eyes and the purest laugh.
So when the nurse comes by to tell me that I should get on the train, I am confused.
“He’s getting better,” I say, looking down at him.
The silence stretches out between us, broken only by Leo’s coughing and the distant rat-a-ta-tat of gunfire. She looks pointedly at Anya.
For the first time I see how pale Anya is, how gray her chapped lips are, the angry boils on her throat. Her hair is falling out in clumps.
How did I miss all that?
“But . . .” I look around. “You said they won’t let my son on the train.”
“There are too many evacuees. They won’t transport the dying. You have papers for you and your daughter, yes?”
How is it that I don’t understand what she is saying to me until then? And how can I explain how it feels to finally understand? A knife in the heart would hurt less.
“You’re saying I should leave him here to die? Alone?”
“I’m saying he will die.” The nurse looks at Anya. “You can save her.” She touches my arm. “I’m sorry.”
I stand there, frozen, watching her walk away. I don’t know how long I stand there, but when I hear the train’s whistle, I look down at the daughter I love more than my own life, and the son of mine who is dying.
“Mama?” Anya says, frowning up at me.
I take Anya’s hand and walk her out of the hospital. At the train, I kneel in front of her.