Elise Blackwell: Hunger

The celebrated biologist Nikolai Vavilov collected hundreds of thousands of seed and plant specimens from around the world, housing them at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad. Vavilov became a victim of the antigenetics campaign waged by Trofim Lysenko, who gradually gained control of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. Vavilov died in prison in 1942 or 1943 of some combination of maltreatment and starvation. Many of his associates and staff were imprisoned, exiled, sent to work on collective farms, or dismissed. During the siege of Leningrad, those who remained protected Vavilov’s collections from rats, from human intruders, and from themselves. What follows is a fictional account of such a time and place. The characters are inventions and are in no way based on the courageous people who worked at what today is called the Vavilov Institute .

It is not so uncommon for those near the end of their lives to run their mind’s hand over the contours of those lives. Perhaps that is all that I do here as I reach across the populated spaces of time, geography, and language, reach from a comfortable New York apartment to a city once and again called Saint Petersburg.

• • •

The anniversary of our wedding day fell on the last of the early summer’s white nights, and I could still believe that we would be fine. We dined at a restaurant that had been better a few years earlier but was still very good. Our window overlooked the Neva. The Peter and Paul Fortress lifted from the center of the river. Its bastion tilted slightly over the water, seeming more precarious than fortified, pointing askew to a sky more bright than light, a sky the creamy white color of the anona tree’s sweet custard apple.

Alena’s voice floated lighter on the air than it had in a year, and we ate well, sucking the delicate saltiness from the leg casings of huge crabs, spooning caviar directly into our mouths and sliding it down our throats with a white-grape wine that was just too sweet but good nonetheless.

I kept the check from Alena. She believed that the loss of her salary and the approach of Hitlerite Germany’s young soldiers meant that we should hold tight to our money. Like the smell of rain before drops hit the skin, the coming war told me to spend, to have whatever I could now, before it could no longer be had. It would be later that I would learn to hoard crumbs like a miser.

I desired to go straight home and make love to the only woman I was allowing myself, the only one I really wanted. But Alena had heard on the radio the poet Vera Inber, whose account of the long days and nights ahead would secure her fame and favor, and wished to attend a reading she was giving.

We walked along Nevsky Prospect, which had widened with the crowds out to enjoy the last night of the year when the sun would go to the horizon but no lower. I held Alena close, by her arm, and then closer, my arm around her waist.

Every fabricated thing in Leningrad, from the antique ornaments atop monument gates to the nouveau wire poles, pointed upward, elegant, futile.

The small hall where the reading was held was full and very hot and smoky, something I would savor often in memory but did not enjoy at the time.

I remember few of Vera Inber’s words. But those of the reputationless poet who preceded her have remained long with me. Tall and sturdy, he had been a sailor before he seized a pen. He appeared hale on first glance, but the gray folded into his face and the depth and yellow of his eyes gave away some disease of the internal organs.

He read several poems, none of them particularly to my taste, in a strong voice that was decidedly more naval than poetic. The last is the one I remember. It was called “The Shipwreck Survivor.” I offer it now to begin my own story.

I never saw the poem on paper, so I do not know how the sailor-turned-poet broke his lines. But I recall each word as spoken:

“The ones who drown never change the facts, but those who survive the sea in their lungs must send their stories on words, words like small leaky boats, across the distance, cold, and currents of that water.”

• • •

The volunteers of the opolchenia , including my Alena but not myself, scurried like rodents. Shelters appeared, and trenches. Young women pierced their skin wrapping barbed wire around obstacles built to prevent tanks from penetrating the city. We all waited for the attack and prepared to defend our city block by block, building by building, hand to hand.

But the tanks never rolled in. They stopped outside the city, and how much simpler it would have been had they kept coming.

• • •

In early September, the first Hitlerite shells descended — graceful and even hesitant from their high loft. Then Junkers rose and fell, rose and fell, leaving behind deposits of incendiaries like so much fatal silt.

When they hit the Badayev warehouses, the cramped lines of wooden buildings burned fast, and the fats stored within their boards radiated red heat, turning the close sky to embers and filling the air like summer cooking.

What did not burn were a few thousand tons of sugar, which instead melted through the floor planks to survive, shaped and imprinted by the cellars, as a hard candy. This candy was broken into chips that would be prized and sold for money and sex in the months that followed.

But so much would be passed off and paid for as food.

• • •

Among the many thousands of specimens housed at the institute were several hundred tubers. Small and large. Smooth and warty. White, brown, yellow, purple, and blue. Lidia, my longtime sometime lover, had helped collect the blue potatoes on an expedition to Ecuador and Peru. I had, against my preference, stayed in Leningrad with Alena.

Lidia collected more than the institute needed, and when she returned, we spent an afternoon in her apartment, peeling, cutting, frying, and feeding the blue chips to each other, licking salt and oil from each other’s fingers and the corners of each other’s mouths.

Among its many fine qualities, in addition to its deeply earthy taste and sublime color, that particular species of Peruvian blue potato is resistant to the potato blight that starved a million Irish men, women, and children.

• • •

Heat was gone by the end of September, and all the pipes in Leningrad froze. Until the snow came, we had for washing only muddy Neva water, carried by hand in pails.

• • •

When we made the decision not to eat the obvious, it was not made all at once but by something like attrition. But it was formalized at a particular moment of a particular day. Before that, we could have still backed away, allowed our unofficial resolve to erode.

Efrosinia was known well throughout the institute only for her brilliance. I could not have told you if she was married or single, where she had been born, nor how she spent her leisure. She was a woman of few extraneous words.