Elise Blackwell: Hunger

So Alena happened to be sitting with Vanessa when they came for her, when they pried her daughter’s fingers open to free her skirt from the little girl’s desperate grip.

Alena was instructed to locate a relative to file guardianship papers within six days or to prepare the girl for the orphanage.

And so it was that Albertine, the girl with the shiny, grain-colored hair, came to spend several days in our flat.

Without first consulting me, Alena moved the girl through our doorway. “She has no one else right now,” Alena stated.

“Perhaps Vanessa should have thought of that.” I despised the words even as they left on my breath. No one could have known that such things would be happening, that so many would be taken for so little.

Alena, as though sensing that I was already berating myself, declined this line of argument. Instead she shrugged and simply, flatly repeated herself. “She has no one else.”

I smiled at Albertine. She nodded at me but did not smile. Why should she, I asked myself.

“You’ll sleep here until Mama and Papa come home, no?” I moved some of our bedding onto the sofa and organized it as best I could.

Albertine held Alena’s hand and watched.

“Yes, you’ll be strong until they come home?”

“Will they?” she asked not me but Alena.

Alena pressed her own small hands around the girl’s small cheeks. “They will if they can.”

It was Alena, not stoic Albertine, who permitted herself quiet tears.

• • •

Sometimes, to feel less false, I would remind myself — as though it made a moral difference, as though I was less odious because she was a scientist and not a club dancer or a waitress — that Lidia was one of the world’s foremost authorities on the taxonomy of New World beans, an expert on their relationship to the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that cleave to their roots.

In the Americas, on expeditions I had joined and on other trips, Lidia had collected hundreds of legume specimens. Since I had known her, she had often worn a few dozen examples, dried and strung as a necklace. She could finger each one and, without looking down, say its name and tell when and where she found it.

Her fingers on a compact black-and-white speckled bean, she would say, Tarahumara carpinteria , Nayarit, summer 1937. Touching a large beige bean with black mottling at the hollow of her throat, she would say, Hopi black pinto, middle mesa, Arizona, August 1936. And she could go on like that, her fingers making their way around the full circumference of her pretty neck, her mouth circling the strange words: Tohono O’Odham tepary, Zuni Shalako from the Sonoran desert, Quiche fava, Tarahumara chókame from Batophiles Canyon, Chihuahua. Her favorite, hidden behind her hair, was a tan tepary bean with deep blue speckles — a rare Mayan folkrace.

Once, in our earliest days, I asked her if she collected men like her bean beads and, if so, could she remember when and where she had picked each one. She had only laughed and said, “Naturally, and you are my favorite.” A joke that ended my line of inquiry.

• • •

It was after I arranged for Albertine to be deported to distant relatives in France — an amazing feat for which I received no credit — that Alena signed the letter.

I had advised her not to sign, advice echoed by almost everyone, including the imprisoned director’s brother, himself an important scientist. He is beyond help, I told her. Sergei and Vanessa are beyond our touch now. Albertine is safe, I whispered.

But a few, including Alena herself, I must admit, believed that she should sign the letter because she had no children and the others left did. The cruelest joke.

In the end, all of the signatures save Alena’s were removed. (My pen, wisely, had never signed.) The letter’s sharpest points were sanded, but not so much that it was not still extremely dangerous, a tightrope walk over water vipers. Others had been taken in for much less. It was probably not enough to warrant a sentence of death, though in the two years prior to the blockade, that took very little if you were associated with the institute. And imprisonment could easily be death. Who would send food and blankets to a prison filled with garden-variety class enemies?

None of our number had been released yet. At the least, I thought, Alena would be put to labor on a collective.

I tried again, quietly, to dissuade her. He cannot be saved, I told her, not by you. You flatter yourself to think so. Those who have tried have succeeded only in joining him, I reminded her, and for all we know made his treatment worse.

Alena, even more quietly, completely without words in fact, resisted my wishes. And in the end, my fear of having her think me a coward overcame my other fears. I did not insist, for which I should be given some due. The letter was delivered.

She was taken from our apartment many weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon as we prepared a meal together. Her fingers were bright pink with the juice of a beetroot when she held her hand in farewell, my quiet wife again wordless and ever so brave.

I finished the cooking alone, basting the meat as it baked with sugar dissolved in vinegar, pounding the grated horseradish into a paste, slicing the beets my wife had boiled and peeled so that they stained my fingers the exact color of hers. I cooked the beet greens in fat until they fell apart. I cooled the food and wrapped it, though I could not be certain that I would ever see Alena again.

But on Tuesday, she returned on foot, exhausted and filthy but seemingly unharmed, her fingers still pink under the dirt. I warmed the food and set the table while she washed and put on a clean skirt and shirt.

Then we sat down to our belated Sunday dinner. The meat was sour from its extended contact with the cider vinegar, and I had overcooked the greens like I always did. But the meal was good nonetheless, and I was not alone.

The following day, Alena’s salary was removed, and she was dismissed from the institute. She was lucky, everyone said.

In the coming year, Hitlerite Germany would put its iron kerchief around Leningrad’s neck, and the definition of luck would fall even lower.

• • •

The first time I cheated on my Alena, it was brief, nameless, and far away from home. It was out of time, underground, undiscoverable, unrecognizable. It did not count, or it would not have counted except that I remembered it not only in my mind but with my fingers and nostrils and ears. I could not forget the texture of the skin, the up-close smell, the quality of voice — none of these better than my Alena’s, but so certainly different.

I could never again tell myself that I had always been faithful, could never again take my wife’s lovely hands, look into her eyes, and say, “I have been true to you, my wife.”

And so, of course, others came, some at a great expense of conscience, some quite easily.

• • •

Cold in the skin. Cold in the bones of the arm. Cold in the eyes. Cold in the ribs. Feet gone from feeling, from knowledge. There was pain only in odd places, centered in a heavy, aching groin but otherwise intense in its asymmetricality, the finger of one hand, two knuckles on the other, a nostril’s interior, a shrapnel-sized piece of jawbone, a small concentration in the kidney.

• • •

The hanging gardens of Babylon are believed to have been a magnificent and enormous quadrangle of lush foliage and flora, suspended atop stone columns, with trees rooted above the heads of men.

An homage to fecundity and water in an arid land, they were built in staggered terraces, arched vaults, and stairways. Their invisible irrigation system — an elaborate feat of human engineering hidden behind or under stone — revealed itself only in beautiful streams, water cascades and falls, permanently green grass, and the perfect smell of damp soil.