More frightening still was a song on the radio. “Arise, our vast country. Arise to mortal battle. With dark fascist forces, with the accursed horde!” After a blood-chilling staccato opening, the vast choral refrain gathered force and crescendoed in a massive wave of sheer terror.
The song was playing when Liza opened Naum’s letter from the Baltic, hand-delivered by his red-haired young adjutant, Kolya.
“Liza, teach the children to throw grenades…”
There was a parcel as well, of raisins and rock-hard prunes for the kids. “Naum, he’s fine…” Kolya assured them. The letter’s jolting past tense and Kolya’s averted gaze told Liza otherwise. And there was something else. A paper slipped out of the parcel. Kolya leapt to tear it up and throw it in the trash. Liza spent half the night assembling the pieces into a photo of a brunette in a nurse’s cap. To my dear Naum, read the inscription. And that’s how my petite grandmother, who was terrified even of mice, decided to leave the children with Dedushka and start north, north toward besieged Leningrad—to claim her husband.
Heading up past Moscow, Liza was already pushing her own version of Naum’s improbable luck. Late for a military chopper, she could only watch helplessly as it took off—and exploded in the air, struck by a bomb. A train carried her now through snowy wastes in the direction of Leningrad. The entire way a general held Liza’s hand, crying. She reminded him of his daughter, who’d just starved to death in the Siege. The train reached Kobona, a village on the span of Lake Lagoda’s frigid southeastern shore still in Russian hands. A makeshift hospital had been set up for evacuees from Peter the Great’s imperial city, which Hitler meant to raze to the ground. The emaciated arrivals, mostly women and children, were given half a liter of warm water and spoonfuls of gruel. Some ate and instantly died, their dystrophied bodies unable to handle the food. I can only imagine my grandmother confronting all this with her characteristic half daze, half denial. In the years to come, she would rarely discuss her own feelings, modestly deferring instead to the collective narrative of the Leningrad tragedy.
The lone route in and out of blockaded Leningrad lay across twenty perilous miles of windswept snow-covered lake ice to the opposite shore—through enemy fire. This was the legendary Doroga Zhizni, the Road of Life, a route desperately improvised by authorities and meteorologists in the second month of the Siege as temperatures sank and the lake froze over. This first terrible winter—the coldest in decades—and the two following, trucks laboring over the Road of Life carried the only supplies into a city where rations fell to four ounces of ersatz bread a day, and vintage parquet floors and precious rare books were burned as fuel in the minus-thirty-degree cold. The besieged ate sweetened soil around a sugar warehouse bombed by the Germans, and papier-mâché bookbinding, even jelly made out of softened carpenter glue—not to mention far more gruesome stuff. More than fifty thousand people perished in December 1941 alone.
On their two daily runs along the Road of Life, exhausted drivers fought sleep by hanging a metal pot from the cab ceiling, which rattled and hit them on the head. German shells and bombs fell constantly. Often the ice caved in. Liza rode on a truck on top of a flour sack. In the open back, wind-whipped snow, like an icy sandstorm, lashed her face.
All my grandmother possessed was a special pass and an official letter asking for assistance. Reaching besieged, frozen Leningrad at last, she had no idea how or where to find Naum. At city naval headquarters, harried men in uniform kept shrugging, waving her off.
Naum Solomonovich Frumkin? Baltic intelligence chief? Could be anywhere.
Finally the desperation in Liza’s gray eyes moved a staffer to suggest she try Baltic Fleet headquarters at Kronstadt—nineteen miles away, in the Gulf of Finland. As it happened, a naval glisser, an ice-gliding hovercraft, was going there shortly. In fact a driver was about to take someone to the glisser that very minute. If Liza rushed…
My grandmother made the hovercraft, too weak and shaken to even hope. Someone brought her to the onboard cafeteria to scrounge for something to eat. A group of naval commanders was sitting at a table. And among them, who else? Naum. Smiling (of course), smelling of cologne. Lucky as ever, he had survived pneumonia and then escaped Zhukov’s execution threat by reporting the Shlisselburg mission to Voroshilov, who still retained a seat on the Soviet High Command—going around Zhukov, essentially. Instead of a firing squad, Naum got a medal.
“I SAW WAR, I SAW DEATH, I SAW BULLETS AND BLOOD!” Grandma would yell years later. “There I was, scratched up, starving, braids flying… and there he is, flashing his idiotic white teeth at me!”
“Lizochka!” Granddad famously greeted my grandma. “And what brings you here?”
The tale of finding Naum on the glisser has always been among my grandmother’s wartime chestnuts. My cousin Masha and I preferred the one about Liza returning to the family in Ulyanovsk and finding Larisa burning with scarlet fever. Every evening Grandma would trudge miles through the snow to the hospital carrying potato peel pancakes for Larochka. Until one night, caught in a blizzard, she fell through a snow slope into a trench and couldn’t climb out.
“I dozed half frozen inside the trench, leaning on some hardened tree trunks,” she’d tell us repeatedly. “At the morning’s first light I realized that those ‘tree trunks’ were…”
Amputated arms and legs! Cousin Masha and I would squeal the punchline in unison.
Of her monthlong hospital stay Mother herself remembers only the pancakes. Indeed, in her mind food dominates all other wartime recollections. For instance, the ration during her first school year in Ulyanovsk. Lunch was at 11:15 during grand recess. From a smudgy zinc tray children were allotted one bublik and one podushechka each. Bublik: a flimsy chewy bagel scattered with poppy seeds. Podushechka (little pillow): a sugar-coated pebble, green, blue, or pink, the size of a fingernail, with a center of jam. Eating them together was a ritual, a sacrament really. You stuck the candy under your tongue and sat without breathing as a pool of sweetened saliva collected on the floor of your mouth. A cautious oral maneuvering delivered a stronger sweet rush and the sublime coarseness of sugar grains against the tip of your tongue. Dizzy with desire you pressed the bublik hard against your face and inhaled for a while. Then you spat out the candy into your hand and took the first careful bite of the bublik; it tasted like the greatest of pastries in your candy-sweet mouth. A bite of bublik, a lick of podushechka. The pleasure had to last the entire fifteen minutes of recess. The hardest part was putting off the rapturous moment when the surface of the podushechka cracked and jam began to ooze from inside. Some stoic classmates managed to spit out the half-eaten candy for younger siblings. Mom wasn’t one of them.
My mother has impeccable manners, is ladylike in every respect. But to this day she eats like a starved wolf, a war survivor gobbling down her plate of food before other people at table have even touched their forks. Sometimes at posh restaurants I’m embarrassed by how she eats—then ashamed at myself for my shame. “Mom, really, they say chewing properly is good for you,” I admonish her weakly. She usually glares. “What do you know?” she retorts.