Elise Blackwell - Hunger

I told myself that pain was the price of life; its absence was the step into death.

• • •

There are many ways to manipulate seed dormancy and germination, to shorten or lengthen the vegetative periods of cereals. Seeds can be stratified, brought out of dormancy with an imposed change of temperature. Scarification — the nicking and scratching of the hard-seed coatings of plants such as morning glory and okra — can end dormancy and begin germination so long as care is taken not to damage the embryo within the coating.

And even Lysenko’s infernal vernalization has its uses. Soaking wheat in certain conditions until it is swollen can shorten, by a few days, the vegetative phase of some spring varieties, thereby slightly increasing yields if the second half of summer is dry. But it is time consuming and wastes seed. It causes some varieties to fail outright, and should summer’s second half be moderately wet, yields will fall.

By the time the war started, Lysenko himself had quietly dropped vernalization, but not before he had made it an issue of class and turned Stalin against all of genetics. What the cost of this would be, I could only guess. But the ends of wars bring change, and this was what we had to rest our small hope upon.

• • •

“Stop by my office when you have a few minutes,” he had said. And so I found myself knocking on the door of the new director, a man who had no doubt earned his position through both ability and libel, hard work and treacherous cunning, good luck and petty remarks.

Sitting in a surprisingly comfortable chair, I watched the man and the driving snow through the window behind him. The man was my age and just barely remarkable. He would have been unremarkable, but he was just a bit slighter of frame and more handsome than what might be considered average.

“The delightful wife of Ivanovich speaks highly of you. She feels you to be a most useful colleague.”

Be careful, I told myself. In those times, one day’s patron was the next day’s doom. “It pleases me to hear these words, certainly, though I am not particularly well acquainted with Ivanovich’s wife.”

“But what I really wanted to tell you, why I asked you to stop in, is what Pryanishnikov has been up to since he managed to get himself evacuated from Leningrad.”

“Ah, that’s right, I had forgotten that he had been evacuated.” I said this in a way so as to seem disinterested, or better, interested only in passing and upon being reminded.

“And of course you know that our disgraced former director was a student of his back in the old days.”

“I knew that, yes, at least at one time. But I have not thought of such connections in many years.” I met the new director’s gaze, but tried not to hold it beyond a moment, letting my eyes refocus on the ever-stronger snow.

“It seems that Pryanishnikov has gone and nominated his star pupil for a Stalin prize.”

Against every voluntary physical power, I laughed loud and hard.

“You find that funny.”

I could not stop laughing. Finally, I managed to say, “Funny is exactly what I find it. Would you not say that it is funny that a man in prison is nominated for a Stalin prize?” My boldness so surprised me that I thought it possible that I had been insane for some time and was only now noticing it.

The director began to laugh with me — a shrill, ringing laugh like a mynah bird. Despite its peculiar tone, it seemed genuine enough. But the director stopped so abruptly that I realized it must have been false. “It is indeed funny,” he said.

He stared at me for a time. His eyes were pale blue, but speckled with dark spots of green and black. His gaze was softer than I might have expected, almost kindly. Then he looked down and began to read through some stapled papers on his desk.

I watched the snow, still hard, small, and driving in at an angle. “Was there something else you wished to speak to me about?” I asked.

He looked up, as though startled to see me still sitting across from him. “I merely wanted to know what you thought about the disgraced former director, whom I know you worked closely with, being nominated for a Stalin prize. And now I know: you think it is funny.” He returned to his papers.

As I was leaving, he looked up one more time and said, “Oh, and how is your fine wife?”

“Well enough, thank you,” I said. “We are getting by as well as anyone — no worse, no better.”

• • •

Among the evacuees of 1942 were the great director’s wife and son, who were settled in Saratov. They were told that the great director was imprisoned in Moscow, when he actually slept, malnourished, only a few kilometers from them. Did they feel his proximity or are such things not possible, I wondered later, when I heard.

His death sentence commuted but his death imminent, he was moved from Saratov prison to Magadan, where his cell was chilled by the cold but unseen Sea of Okhotsk. The precise details would never emerge, but he certainly died of mistreatment and malnourishment, perhaps more of one than the other, probably in late January of 1943.

When he arrived in my dreams or in my waking mind as if in dreams, he appeared emaciated, pocked by the hunger edemas of lengthy albumin starvation. He appeared as my Alena had one year earlier.

• • •

My Alena survived the winter of hunger. In early March, I stood in Sennaya Square. It had been underwater in 1924, when people had waded neck deep, carts floated, and horses were forced to swim.

The square had been under food in 1934, when the new economic policy claimed credit for the bumper crops of cabbage, greens, and root vegetables. Carriage wheels and horseshoes locomoted dry over the flagstones of Nevsky-Voznesensky Prospect.

Submerging the square now were coffins — less scarce despite the wood that was still scavenged for warmth and the bodies that still succumbed to months of wasting, even after being fed bread and broth and potatoes. Even after more than one million left the city, evacuated against the currents of oil and electrical charge that now surged into Leningrad through pipeline and cable across Lake Ladoga, our road of life. Even now, after food was almost not scarce and newspapers prepared to print and small signs pronounced the imminent reopening of theater, cinema, and production house.

Still skin tore open to edemas and bowels drained faster than mouths could drink.

Alena had never had many pounds to spare. My dear, small Alena, whose only extra flesh curved in a few crescents. The crescents that were the bottom halves of her breasts, the crescent low on her abdomen made by the babies that had not been born, the slivers where her legs met her body. These beautiful bows remained for a time, even as her flesh caved through her ribs and her arms shrunk into matchsticks, snappable.

Now that the city recovered and my Alena did not, now toward the end, I rested my hands, sometimes the side of my face, on these last purses of flesh to stop myself from climbing on top of her and using up the strength that she lost so fast, to stop myself from using up the last of her.

• • •

According to ancient records, stone, otherwise almost unheard of in ancient Mesopotamia, was twice used to build in Babylon. Stone was incorporated in the north wall of the city’s northern citadel. And stone slabs — covered by layers of reed, asphalt, tile, and metal — were used in the foundation cellars of the hanging gardens. The mud brick that constructed most of the rainless city would have eroded away under the gardens’ impressive irrigation and flowing channels.

There exists more than one theory about which ruler should be credited with the gardens, and when they were built and why. Some believe they were built by the Assyrian queen Semiramis centuries before Nebuchadrezzar. For some time it was thought that Sennacherib was the mind behind them. And many historians, noting that the gardens are mentioned only by later Greeks and appear nowhere in the Babylonian record, have argued that they never existed.