Elise Blackwell: Hunger

The Babylonians seasoned their food with mustard, coriander, and cumin. They had bread, oil, butter, beer, and eventually honey, and both red wine and white. Several kinds of grain, including a spelt, were also part of Babylonian meals.

But barley stood at the center of their diet and was preferred over silver for exchange. When Hammurabi attempted to standardize interest rates, the rate for borrowed barley was much higher than that for a loan of silver.

Anything could be purchased with sacks of barley. It united wealth and weight, joined prosperity and health.

• • •

We were collecting spelt emmers in western Ukraine. A very old peasant, one of the few in the area who survived both collectivization and the hideous great famine to farm alongside his sons and daughters, directed us — based on the great director’s description — to an untended field. We were searching for a plant we believed would reveal itself to be descended from one of the grains eaten by the Babylonians. The breeze wrapped cool around our shoulders, but the sun was warm on our heads and heat radiated near the ground. The day was, simply, perfect.

The Ford cars that appeared in the distance and drew slowly larger shone like fat beetles against a field that was pressed low under the tall, late-summer sky. They crawled as close as they could. The men emerged in black suits and white shirts and dark ties, like the businessmen I had seen in larger American cities, except that their ties were thinner and not smoothly knotted.

Two of them flanked the great director, holding his arms in a way neither rough nor gentle but rather disinterested and insectlike. Two more took Sergei, which was surprising, for there were others among us who had spoken more sharply and more publicly.

They were back in the cars quickly, and the cars quickly gone, as though they had never come and our party had always been two men smaller.

I bagged the grain sample that the great director had dropped when seized. I remembered seeing Sergei’s daughter at an institute picnic the spring before. A girl of four, maybe five years, she had stood with her back to me. I had registered only her hair, long and smooth and the exact color of the field from whence the spelt of Babylon had just been picked.

• • •

On July 9, 1941, the military collegium of the Supreme Court found the great director guilty of belonging to a rightist conspiracy, spying for England, sabotage of agriculture, and, proving that judges have a sense of humor, leadership of the Labor Peasant Party. He was sentenced to death. The meeting lasted several minutes.

• • •

The window of my New York apartment affords me a view of a row of Chinese markets. Instead of curtains, ducks — some uncooked and others glazed and roasted whole, with heads on — fill their windows. When there is no snow and no rain, the families who run the shops set out bins of foods that are mostly strange to me: dried cuttlefish and shrimp, fresh litchi nuts and foul-smelling but sublimetasting durians.

People buy these things all day long.

• • •

A few blocks from my flat with Alena, in the direction of the institute, stood a posting board where people wanting to sell and buy could find one another. Before the siege, rectangles of paper, large and small, offered to sell all manner of thing, from bicycles to purebred cats to cookware. As the siege took hold and day followed day, the papers were most often tattered scraps. And food became the board’s only subject.

By late November, no one found odd the little card offering a grand piano as payment for half a loaf of bread, though few were in the position to trade away anything that could be eaten for anything that could not — no matter how rare, fine, or beautiful.

There were other cards as well, offering more than musical instruments, referring outright to bodies and souls.

I saw a woman, thin as everyone, spit in disgust upon reading such a notice. But its author plainly understood something the woman did not. The bravery to survive is a ruthless one. Martyrdom leads, by its very definition, only to the cold ground.

The only thing that struck me as truly strange about these postings was that they were not pulled down when the whole city ached for kindling. Neither was the poster of a woman holding a small, dead child that declared: DEATH TO THE KILLERS OF CHILDREN, though people risked the capital crime of picking up the flyers dropped by German planes, the flyers that outlined our surrender and prodded us to kill our leaders, give up, and eat again.

My own Alena brought home these flyers to start our small fires, telling me she would rather risk death and burn Hitlerite propaganda than set fire to even one page of her beloved books.

Of course the books would go too, one page at a time, from the title page of a less-favored novel and the dessert section of a cookbook after sugar could not be had to the dearest segments of the most precious classics — the plot turns of Turgenev, letters from the great director himself.

• • •

In the week before his death, Vitalii did not appear emaciated like so many, and it was not just because his face bloated. It was as though his body refused to burn its stores — holding on to them just a bit longer, just in case — and instead shrank around them, leaving pockets of fat like jokes in the midst of his gauntness.

Despite his tragic, comical appearance, he had been humorless for weeks. I am ashamed of my colleagues to say that there were some among us who held this against him, as though he owed not only his life but his cheerfulness to our all-important work.

But in his very last days, he only told jokes. He told Lidia the old one about the tombstone whose epitaph read: I TOLD YOU I WAS SICK. She burst into tears, and he laughed harder.

He told Alena highbrow jokes about philosophers and astronomy and me raunchy ones about strippers and widows.

He wouldn’t stop joking and he wouldn’t stop laughing, until, of course, he did.

The acting director arranged to have Vitalii’s body taken away in a manner that he would have to repeat two dozen times, though some of our number did him the favor of dying at home. One young man, a research assistant in fruit breeding, was just never heard from again. We assumed that he had died anonymously. But I like to think that perhaps he merely slipped into another life somehow, or perhaps, like many, into insanity.

• • •

Rumors flew in unplanned and shifting patterns, like flocks of geese disturbed to the air by dogs.

We were winning the war; we were losing the war. We were losing the war because the German soldiers were stronger and better equipped; we were losing the war on purpose, part of our leaders’ malevolent design. We were winning the war through heroism; we were winning the war with snow. Hitlerite soldiers would pour into the city in three days. On the streets of other cities, they were marching Russian heads on poles and taking their pick of the prettiest girls. They would bring food; they would take what food we had left. They felt special sympathy for Leningrad; they hated Leningrad above all and were saving special savageries for us.

And everywhere the hunger stories seeped, sewagelike, from office to office, home to home. Stories were told of tremendous sacrifice and honor. The man who gave up his own parcel of bread and oil to save an old woman’s ration card from thieves. The mother who ate nothing for three weeks so that her children might take a bit more nourishment.

I took these stories with, so to speak, a grain of salt. I could see with my own eyes that deprivation debases more often than it ennobles.

I was more inclined to believe the stories of murder and cannibalism, however far-fetched they might have sounded only one year earlier. I believed the story of the man who killed his own brother for his ration card and then cooked him for meat. The story of the woman who self-amputated her leg for food. The story of the mother who starved her dullest child so that she might survive with her bright favorite.