Elise Blackwell - Hunger

Fusarium does not, it is believed, enter the milk of nursing mothers, so small babies were spared. But it does survive the brewing process, and a number of people were sickened or killed from drinking beer.

Leppik invited me for a coffee after the seminar. We avoided the past, though the mycologist did tell me about his efforts to make the great director’s theories known to American scientists. We made no plans to meet again.

• • •

Everyone I overheard spoke of the concert. The score would be brought to Leningrad by plane, it was said. Because only sixteen of more than one hundred were left in our orchestra, the military was granting leave to professional musicians, even from the front. Practicing trumpeters blistered their lips with cold mouthpieces. Eliasberg would conduct but was deeply worried about the stamina of the surviving and arriving musicians. One flutist and a trombone player were so emaciated that they could not sit on their chairs without cushions. The symphony was quite strenuous, it was said — Shostakovich’s finest work. “He’s always been a true Leningrader,” some said.

Of course many layers of human pettiness returned with food and warmer weather. As appetites shrank and the sun warmed bodies, I heard whispers that the symphony was not really so fine, that many in Moscow were not so impressed, that inferior musicians were seeking opportunities that should never have been open to them.

The date was set for the ninth of August. Those stationed at the headquarters of the Forty-second Soviet Army were ordered to prevent shelling that night no matter the cost. They would take out German artillery, it was said. Music would spare the city. It would save not only our souls but our bodies and buildings.

It was Klavdiya who offered me a seat. “My husband cannot attend, and I require an escort.”

I nodded. I was not a music lover and could not be comfortable with a woman who knew what I had done, what I was. But neither could I resist vanity and history. The Philharmonic Hall was the place to be. The concert sold out rapidly.

Klavdiya sat to my left. A gas mask sat on the lap of the man to my right. A woman behind held one to her face. People wore their former finery, most often in rags. Men and some women carried guns.

The bombardment subsided. Eliasberg lifted his baton, his oversize tux hanging off his arms comically, tragically. Instruments were placed on the stage’s many empty seats, both a tribute to the dead and a suggestion of fuller sound. I stared at an orphaned piccolo as the first movement began its savage march.

At the end of the second movement, I felt Klavdiya’s long fingers climb onto my arm. I let them remain, but only that.

The strings bounced, almost jaunty, then gave way to Ksenia Matus’s sad oboe. A bassoon entered, and then the oboe disappeared under the returning strings, which tore open a pizzicato melody. They were joined by clarinets, one shy, and then brass, not quite strong enough but brave indeed, and the flutes.

No one spoke, and it seemed that no one breathed. The Hitlerite shells did not fall. At the end, applause, sobbing, Eliasberg’s wild grin.

I might have succumbed to Klavdiya, but she chose the wrong time and place: that night of homage to Leningrad’s weakness and strength, in the flat that I could think of only as Alena’s, on the sofa that had been for so few nights little Albertine’s bed.

I accepted Klavdiya’s full-lipped kiss, her cool hand inside my shirt, her breath in my ear, the knowing tip of her hips into my leg. But when she paused to say that we should be together because we were so much alike, I pulled away.

“No,” I said. “For that very same reason, we should never pair. If we are alike, we should stay far apart.”

I had never refused an even mildly tempting offer of indulgence, so I was unsure what would follow. I expected anger but instead saw resignation. Perhaps even understanding. For the many years I would know Klavdiya, the night of the symphony would always be between us, as though everything had happened and nothing had happened. As though both versions were true at the same time.

• • •

During the summer of 1943, kittens were bought and sold through the posting board near my flat for as much as two thousand rubles. They were no longer eaten, but in demand to kill the rats, themselves once scarce protein, now a nuisance. No one in Leningrad would now eat a rat or admit to ever having done so.

The Botanical Gardens’ famous palms were dead, but its lime trees bloomed in June. I finally returned the cacti that my Alena had saved with her own saliva and touch and that somehow survived first my inattention and then my attention. I was thanked profusely by her friends there. A brave woman, a remarkable scientist, a pure mind. Yes, I nodded, all of that.

By July we had strawberries, red currants, raspberries, veal, dill, baby turnips, marrow. Mussolini resigned, and Italy capitulated. Roses could be had.

August brought late lilacs and rains fine as hair. But the shellings turned more deadly as the Germans, sensing a turn and knowing that the first shell is always the most dangerous, tried to kill more of us by exchanging long, almost boring shelling sessions for many short ones. I would hear the whistle, then the burst, and scan the white sky for the pillar of smoke, colored by whatever was hit. Sometimes the smoke would be the gray of stone, the red of brick. Sometimes it was the precise, unlikely hue of human flesh.

On my way to the institute, after a series of shellings occurred not so very far from our flat, I saw an arm, separated from an unseen woman, holding a still-burning cigarette. The availability of tobacco signaled better times to come, I thought, and then castigated my mind for the direction it had traveled.

A block farther along, I saw a man on a stretcher, the left half of his head gone and stuffed with cotton wool, as though the fabric could sort numbers, direct his limbs, feel pain, remember a beloved.

• • •

Two millennia before Christian-measured time commenced, the Babylonians began to celebrate their New Year every spring. The eleven-day festival of gloom and purification and finally joy came to be known in later Babylonia as Akitu. It was believed that the gods ended each festival by setting human fortunes for the coming year.

I always liked the idea of the Festival, or Mardi Gras, celebrated in Catholic countries, with full debauchery preceding the purification of self-denial and with people in at least tenuous control of their own fate.

One of Leningrad’s most important celebrations came not in spring but on the anniversary of the October revolution.

And of course our gods, if we had any — and no one could claim that we did — were not interested enough to set the lots of individuals. Ours was a collective fate, and we had suffered and survived.

This year’s festival was less energetic, of course, yet also less dour than before we had suffered. People wore brighter colors: it seemed that everywhere I looked, I saw yellows and reds and purples. Women adorned their hair with fabric flowers, and people lacking access to more valuable ornaments pinned pieces of colored paper to their shirts. Relief was everywhere spoken and felt. Signs read: I AM HERE and WE HAVE SURVIVED.

I remembered one of the banners from the Gorky Park celebration: HE WHO DOES NOT LAUGH, DOES NOT EAT. Now the sign would have to read: HE WHO DOES NOT EAT, DOES NOT LAUGH. The joke, of course, would have been on all of us.

• • •

Within a generation of Hammurabi’s rule, an Indo-European people known as the Hittites swelled with military and political power. In 1595 B.C., Hittite armies marched to Babylon from Anatolia and sacked the great city, bringing the old Babylonian Empire to its humiliating end.