Elise Blackwell: Hunger

I believed, in short, the stories about people who did things worse than I did, the stories about people less human (or perhaps more human) than I was.

• • •

Of all of us who endured after Vitalii’s quick decline, Lidia was the one who changed the most and fastest. Lidia had been so beautiful that I would have married her instead of Alena had I met her first. As it was, I came very near — I fill with shame at how near — to leaving Alena for her.

But I was lucky that I did not, because the secret to Lidia’s beauty was comfort. She was at her most beautiful, witty, and generous when her skin was warmed by the sun — and food was perched between her hand and mouth.

She was so subject to strong cravings that if she got a certain kind of cake in mind, she would walk clear across Leningrad to the bakery that made it best. She would leave work in the middle of the day to steam a fig pudding, coming back hours later with a riddle inside her broad smile. If it was me on her mind, she would have me in any vacant room or, barely concealed, outside.

My enchantment with her began during an expedition to Malta, in the island’s hottest month. I would allow my arm to fall onto Lidia’s, gaze at the ribbon of her neck between her heavy black hair and white clavicle, watch her dark lips while she tore pan chocolat with her strong teeth. She could eat three at a single sitting.

My Alena, with her more subtle, almost colorless attractions, had stayed home from that trip on account of the second of the babies that never came. After it was all over, I knew that I would stay with Alena until death divided us.

Yet on many nights, after Alena and I made love or if we did not, I would lie awake and think about Lidia’s colors, her deep-bellied laugh, her vigorous appetite for sweets, her hips wide enough to pass infants.

But, as I have said, I am lucky, if you can call anyone who lived through Leningrad’s starvation winter lucky — and, in truth, we all were — to have stayed with my small, dear, strong wife. When Leningrad emptied of comfort and became only the case of a pillow on hard ground, all of its downy feathers blown away, Lidia’s attractions, physical and metaphysical, gusted away as well.

Without comfort, her clever sarcasm was deboned into mere complaint. Without sun, her translucent skin turned sallow. Our trips to warm places had always kept her touched by air and sun, kept her skin clear, its white stained pink in just the right places. After the longest winter, she yellowed like inexpensive paper, and bumps rose from her forehead and chin. She had always carried a few more pounds than she needed. They had suited her, made her stomach soft and her bosom large, while the effort of collecting kept her strong.

Though she never got as skinny as some during the starvation winter — and I have my ideas about why this was so — she went slack with lack of food and exertion.

Of course, like so many, Lidia found ways to eat. She had lost much of her charm, had lost the things that had come so close to tempting me away from my Alena, but still she was a woman and never an ugly one. For such a woman there was the possibility of associating with particular men, the kind of men who could still receive packages from Moscow with cans of evaporated milk, dried salmon, a square of chocolate.

And there was meat on the black market. Horse meat, it was said, but there could not have been more than one or two bony horses left in the whole city by the end of the hunger winter.

• • •

The bakeries produced a bread made of five parts stale rye flour and one part each of salt, cake, cellulose, soy flour, hack dust, and bran. By November, the official ration for this vile loaf fell to 250 grams per day for manual workers, half of that for clericals and children.

No tree in the city had bark below the reach of the tallest man. It had all been stripped off and boiled for whatever nutrients it might contain and used as a salve for stomach pain.

All manner of animals — dogs and cats, sparrows and crows, rats and mice — and then their excrement were eaten. Soups were made from tulip bulbs stolen from the soil of the Botanical Gardens, pine needles, nettles, rotten cabbage, lichen-covered stones, cattle-horn buttons torn from once-fine coats. Children were fed hair oil, petroleum jelly, glue. Root flour and floor sweepings were baked into scones. Dextrin appeared in fritters, cellulose in puddings. Pigskin machine belts and fish glue were spirited from closed factories and boiled into jellies.

People did anything to feed their children. They traded away the valuable and sentimental. They killed and cooked beloved pets. They peddled their flesh. They peddled the flesh of the children needing to be fed. They stole, connived, and killed. They starved their spouses. They starved themselves.

So many times, dozens of times, I was told how lucky I was to have no children, how it was easier for us with fewer mouths to feed, not having to hear the horrible cries, to watch those we cherished more than anything, those who depended on us solely, suffer. Oh, the responsibility, people would say. And I would think, oh, the clarity.

I longed for the lucidity of parenthood during the bad time — maybe every measure as fully as Alena had hungered for the love and sweet smell of a baby before times turned bad.

The murky moral territory in which I stepped would have been another landscape entirely with children. Who faults a father for stealing if it is to feed his little child? A father tells himself this: I do what I must so that my child lives through this time. Parents may do anything at all and say this: We have to make sure our children survive, and we must survive to care for them.

I did not have this luxury. It did not matter if I lived, not even to me. Only I could not stand the pain that stood between me and death. It was that gray hunger, and not death itself, that I feared, avoided at the cost of all honor. As the smartest politicians repeat and know, ideals are nothing to the man who sits at an empty table.

• • •

“Are you angry with me?” Lidia asked me during the time that my Alena was wasting.

I laughed and shook my head. “No, Lidia, merely disenchanted.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s best. It’s best that way.”

This answer startled me, and I wondered if I knew her.

Lidia, as she had been, came often to my mind. I thought of her as a woman who could accept pain but not mild discomfort. Tie me up, she would say, make it hurt. Always more, harder, rougher. Her chest flushed when I gripped her wrist. Her lips reddened with pleasure when I bit her thigh. Turn me over, she would say, turn me over.

And yet she dissolved, character dissipating, personality irrelevant, unable to string together two thoughts, follow an idea, or laugh at a good joke the moment her stomach growled. She was undone by one early morning or a modest day’s work. Thus she came to mind and I would think that I was just like her and then that, no, I was a different sort of person altogether.

• • •

A few weeks after the great director had been arrested and I had bagged the grain descended from the ancient Babylonians, Alena was visiting Sergei’s wife, Vanessa. They spoke about strategies to win the release of Sergei and the others.

So many of us had been taken. Karpechenko, head of the genetics lab, a man whose school of thought had solved the problem of infertility in distinct hybrids. Govorov, who had been in charge of the legumes. Levitsky, the cytologist. Hovalev, the director of the pest department and a leading breeder of fruit. Flykaberger, known for his expertise in wheat.

All in jail, if not dead.

Others had been deported by the new director, supported by orders from the commissar to dismantle the institute’s departments and laboratories, to perform “productive” work on collectives.