Elise Blackwell: Hunger

Only once had I seen her verbally agitated — happily so, over research results that were better than she had dared to hope. She had reported them to me rapidly, even breathlessly. When she stopped speaking, it was abrupt. She tucked some loose hair behind her ear, looked up at me from that cut angle, turned, and walked away. It was the only time I had seen her speak unnecessarily.

Some months later, when the findings that had so animated Efrosinia appeared in the very best international journal and caused a stir across the Atlantic, she said nothing but acknowledged our congratulations with only a nod.

So it was surprising, to say the least, that she called a meeting — invited everyone. She invited those of us who had been at the institute with the great director, and she invited the horrid blend of libelers, quacks, opportunists, and mere quietists who had come in since.

And everyone came, nearly filling our large conference room. Efrosinia said what we had been saying tentatively to one another. “We will not eat from the collections, then. We will protect them at all cost.”

Efrosinia spoke no more that day. It was others who debated, though the debate was less than I might have thought, less than I might have wanted. Perhaps I wished for a loud din of opposing voices in which to conceal my meek objections to the noble plan. I said nothing.

My Alena spoke briefly in favor of the plan. Vitalii spoke elegantly and — the only one to do so — at length. Even then we all knew that he would be the first to die.

It was not that he was the smallest or weakest. Indeed he was tall and as hardened off as a plant that had never known the indoors. He had been an alpine skier of some renown and had taken an Olympic medal and other awards during the 1920s. He still had the great, wide shoulders, and now, in middle age, plenty of extra pounds around his once athletic waist.

We knew that Vitalii would be the first to die — not, as I have said, because he was the slightest or most vulnerable, not because he had the fewest stores. We knew because it was plain on his face, as plain as the square outside in the bright winter sun on one of Leningrad’s thirty-five cloudless days, plain for all but him to see.

Would he have been so brave and clear in our deliberations, the staunchest advocate of martyrdom, our standard-bearer, had he known he would not only die but die first of all? No, I believed then and believe even now.

But Vitalii and Efrosinia and, yes, my Alena, carried that day.

• • •

Forty days into the nine hundred, scientists from our institute and from others braved German fire to pull tubers from the ground of the experimental fields that lay just outside the city’s reach. As the count of days rose into the hundreds and was dropped altogether by everyone but historians and masochists, botanists moved to the city’s defense. They analyzed land camouflage, carefully — but with strained eyes and stiff fingers — reading over serial air photos of woodland, tundra, bog. They cultivated mushroom spawn, developed collecting and processing methods to render antiseptics from sphagnum. They hunted for new sources of vitamins and medicine. Through their work, they expanded the very definition of edible.

Part of our collection was taken to an experimental station in Estonia in a convoy of twenty trucks — a move that I helped to plan but was unable, at only the last moment, to join. Those who were able to go posed as Soviet peasants seeking war profits by selling grain to the Hitlerite soldiers. At the Estonian station, Leppik, one of the great director’s esteemed colleagues, cared for the seeds for two years. The collection that was under his protection was seized by the German Army late in the war. But it was, quite miraculously, eventually returned intact.

• • •

I see that it could occur to someone that I am a coward. Maybe I am a coward and maybe I am not. It is not something that matters much to me.

But I would like it to be known that I have also been a brave man. The great director and I had many adventures. We crossed Afghanistan’s mountain region of Kafiristan without maps and with only a schoolboy and his old grandfather as guides. It was me, and not the great director, who was bitten by a cobra and took his own knife to his leg. I was the pilot when we had to put down in the Saharan desert and spend the night amid crazed hyenas. We should have stripped off our packs and run when a landslide of rocks and boulders came down on us in the Caucasus, but instead we held our packs and our ground — all to save a few specimens of rare apple. We survived the ridicule and bullets of bandits who overtook us when we were collecting sorghum in Eritrea, and we outsmiled hostiles up and down the Orinoco.

Never did I flinch nor give a thought to running away. Never did I leave a trip early nor decline to enroll at the top of the list for the next. Throughout the institute people commented on my courage.

So maybe I am a coward and maybe I am not, but I am also a brave man. Brave of body and weak of mind, perhaps, lacking in my Alena’s long-term, determined moral bravery or the great director’s intellectual courage.

If I wished to draw a conclusion, the conclusion I would arrive at is this: if I am a coward, then what I fear are my own thoughts. And my own thoughts were precisely what cold and hunger delivered to me. Brave of body and weak of mind, yes, and alive to think about it.

• • •

There were many women before Alena, of course. Neighbor girls when I was a boy and then students, waitresses, women I met on the street, on trains, on boats. I would joke, though only to myself, about the perils of transportation.

Most of these women I knew only briefly. A few I loved and stuck with for a time. But I always met the next one.

I thought I could give them all up when I met my Alena. She was kind and cool to me from the start, and I watched her furtively, watched her working harder, earlier, later than everyone else. Small and clear and even, with pleasant features spread neatly, economically, across her face — certainly pretty, but not, upon a single look, remarkably so.

But if you let your eyes linger, let them follow her gaze through her long, straight eyelashes, let them settle on her fine hands as they prepared glass slides and readied the microscope, let your eyes see her bite her lip when perplexed by something she saw but you did not, let yourself watch the bitten lip redden and slightly swell — then you saw a beautiful woman.

I prepared Alena for weeks and weeks, trying to speak to her a bit more — and more personally — every few days, but then sometimes walking past her without comment, a studied neglect that she did not seem to notice. I borrowed a book, loaned her an umbrella. I joined her when I saw her drinking a cup of tea outside on a warm day. I invited her to have lunch with me, to attend an outdoor concert, offered to cook a large dinner for her and then offered again.

But each time she said she was unable to go. Never did she give a reason. It was always and only “I am unable to go.”

I continued to see other women, to spend nights with one or two of them. But more and more I thought of only Alena. And always when I thought of Alena, I pictured the Alena who worked and studied and worked more.

Then one day, completely out of the blue, as Americans like to say, she asked me to go with her to the new park of culture and rest just outside the city.

It was styled after Moscow’s famous Gorky Park. A few years earlier, I had taken a young woman to Gorky Park’s first nighttime carnival, held to celebrate Constitution Day.

Everyone had worn costumes. There were Onegins in green and Tatianas in purple, a black-and-white Charlie Chaplin. I had gone as Mark Antony, and my girlfriend — a tall and stunning brunette — as a beautiful Cleopatra.