There exists more than one theory about which ruler should be credited with the gardens, and when they were built and why. Some believe they were built by the Assyrian queen Semiramis centuries before Nebuchadrezzar. For some time it was thought that Sennacherib was the mind behind them. And many historians, noting that the gardens are mentioned only by later Greeks and appear nowhere in the Babylonian record, have argued that they never existed.
But the most widely accepted version has it that they were conceived by Nebuchadrezzar as a gift to his homesick queen, Amyitis. Originally from Media’s lush green mountains, Amyitis found the brown baked flatness of Babylon depressing and pined for home.
What can be sure about the hanging gardens is that — whoever ruled at the time, whichever brilliant mind conceived of their unexpected lushness — the stone slabs that form their base were laid by slaves, also homesick, pining for wives they either would or would not see again.
I remember Alena’s last meaclass="underline" a roll made from rye flour and a bowl of broth made by boiling garlic, carrot peelings, and one fat, perfect potato in salted water. She trembled when I set the hot bowl before her, steadied her hand by resting it on the roll, laughed in a laugh I had never before heard as she breathed in the soup’s steam. “It will be funny if I wait,” she said.
It was the most frightening thing I have ever heard.
“I will wait for half an hour,” she said. She waited, but only for a few minutes, before drinking the bowl dry and eating the roll gone.
During the hunger winter, I was justified to take what I needed, and I barely took more. I had to discipline myself to remember this truth only a few months later, after my Alena and the others died, making way for those remaining, now all reasonably well fed.
Survival did strange things to people — I knew this. Viktor from the cytology laboratory, who had always been generous, always quick to give away even something he needed, to accept blame but not credit, suggested that we deserved our lives for some reason, obvious or occluded.
Lidia, who had always been generous only to herself and seemed well on her way to madness said that was not so, but that we must behave as though what Viktor said was true.
I held neither position, believing only in meaningless fortune most of the time, or acknowledging simply that I had been willing to do more to save my life than some of those who had died — a trait that made me neither better nor worse than any other man or woman.
I can admit that the deprivation was even harder for Lidia than for me. For me, the pain was fear of slow death. For Lidia, I believe it was sheer physical and emotional torment.
At first she just went sour, but then came meanness, followed by the madness. I thought she would warm with the weather when the first winter finally, finally broke, and sun melted the snow, and there was a little more food — some grown in Leningrad, some lorried across Lake Ladoga in the last weeks it was frozen. Bread came out of the Kirov bakery. Rations were strict, but enough to keep those still healthy alive.
But Lidia did not return to herself. She got more and more desperate even as things improved. The extra food she had managed to get — and I continued to have my suspicions about how — had kept her weight on, even added a few pounds back, but did not stop the scurvy sores from appearing on her arms.
By the second winter, when my Alena was many months gone and I might have yielded to Lidia’s comfort, she was not lucid. She rarely left the institute, and she would not take off her once glorious but now filthy sable coat. Like all of us, she carried a rod to beat off the rats, but unlike the rest of us, she looked equally willing to strike human beings.
And of course she had refused to speak to me since she discovered me with grain in my mouth.
Lidia was not the only one to have found me out during the hunger winter.
One evening, as I began my watch, the wife of Ivanovich was concluding hers. “Perhaps I should stay and guard you,” Klavdiya said, smiling, solicitous.
My heart seemed to beat sideways. Brief images of a dozen places I had been in my life tumbled through my mind: the second row of a streetcar in New Orleans as it passed a certain blue house, a particular crook in the port at Fez, a small store on the other side of Leningrad, a hallway in Moscow. Each vividly specific, felt in the body.
“I’m quite sure I don’t take your meaning” is what I replied through the corporal memories, now all Leningrad. That charming spot by the River Moyka, the European height of Lomonosov Square, the spreading, clean, red-and-green angles of Pushkin Square.
“None of that. No pretense between scientists.” She smiled and added, “But you have no need to deny anything. I will not tell anyone what you are doing, why you weigh more than your wife. I merely wanted you to know that I know. And understand.”
I wanted to ask what she meant by understand. How did she know? Was she guessing, or could she tell because she was doing the same thing? A sneak spots a sneak.
“Not me,” she said, “not the same. But I do understand. We all have our ways. Now I know yours and you do not know mine.”
I paced for hours, too frightened to touch a single grain of anything until the first hint of morning, when I was unable to stand the proximity of food any longer. I chewed a few, just a few, seeds of sunflower and melon.
More than twenty of us died, the majority during or at least from the winter of hunger, but a few later from Hitlerite shells.
I am not counting those who died or rotted slowly in prison — not counting the great director, not counting Sergei or Vanessa, not counting so many who, of course, count and should be accounted for on some other register.
But they are another list, a different group. They belong to the life before. The siege destroyed continuity as much as it destroyed all of the other ideas it ruined. There would always be before, during, and after. And nothing would ever bridge the three.
Among those who began the siege but did not come out the other side of that concrete space were friends and enemies, my beloved wife, and men and women I barely knew outside of their research results. Some were perfect to work with. I think now of Ilya, one of our bureaucrats, a man with a gentle nature and a wide and dry humor. He poked fun at everyone equally, and treated everyone with true respect. I think also of kind and earnest Natalia, who was beautiful into early old age.
Some of those who died were annoying, such as fastidious Anton, always more concerned with the inventory and cleaning of equipment — and with not being exposed as a second-rate mind — than with getting any real work done. Some, such as stern but brilliant Efrosinia, I had never given much thought to. But I would come to honor all of them as they shrank and grew ill before me.
And I miss each of them, even Anton, with his round-eyed defensiveness and ridiculous little beard. More than many of the things I might want, I would like to run into Anton in the street, buy him a drink, and talk about old times and new. Perhaps now, both smoothed by long years of living, we could be great friends.
But of course Anton turned out to be brave and strong, and so he died while he was still unlikable.
Only a few years ago, I ran into Leppik, the mycologist who had guarded some of our collections at the Estonian experimental station. We were both at the Botanical Gardens for a seminar on microtoxins. One of the presenters spoke of a case in the Middle East. Others talked about the possibility that unfriendly governments were using microtoxins to develop agents of biological warfare.