He went back to the bench, crouched down, and sang softly, as if crooning a lullaby. “To you, my beloved, I shall confide my dream…” His memory prompted him with the words that came next. He sang a little louder and was not surprised when the woman’s lips responded to him. Her eyes were closed, she was smiling softly, allowing the other being awakening within her to sing. Volsky helped her to get up. She walked beside him, still sunk in her melodious lethargy.
Several hours of that pale night sufficed for Mila to tell him what she had lived through since their last concert. If she had wept in recounting it, uttered cries of distress, her story would, doubtless, have been less painful to listen to. But she went behind a screen and a moment later Volsky saw a woman who bore little resemblance to the tipsy “blond tramp” of just now. After she had splashed her face with cold water it became more refined, her hair drawn back onto her neck gave her features the look of someone facing a powerful, icy night wind. The trace of an old scar marked the top of her brow. On a wall he noticed several drawings, doubtless made by children, and a sketch: a woman with dark hair, a very thin face, and great, shadowed eyes… The woman who sat down before him now bore a resemblance to this drawing.
They did not switch on the light, contenting themselves with the bluish luminescence filtering through the window, and the red glow of the little stove beneath a kettle (both of them referred to plain boiled water as “tea,” for this was the tea they used to drink during the blockade: and the word became their first sign of recognition).
“The last time we saw one another was in December, you know, at our concert… But after that things became worse than ever…”
She spoke calmly, no sighs, no tears. “Worse than ever,” he repeated mentally. “No. Worse could only be death. And we stayed alive.” He wanted to say this, so that Mila’s voice should relax, but the doomed city he had known was already taking shape in her account and the more she spoke, the more he realized he did not know everything, not this other frontier, beyond life.
Yet there was nothing new in Mila’s recollections: two million human beings waiting to die in a city that was an architectural fairyland. He saw this young woman leaving the hospital, with a bandaged forehead, embarking on a long journey across Leningrad to reach the apartment they had left a week before. One had to imagine her hunger, her attempts to light the fire, and even, perhaps, her emotion at the sight of a scarf of his, hanging from a hook on the door.
There was nothing surprising either in the existence of the children who came to Mila’s during the great frosts in January. First of all, twins aged twelve, a brother and sister, whose mother had just died. Then a much younger child, possibly five, who remained obstinately silent by day but emitted screams of horror in his sleep. Another, with bright red hair and the nickname “Mandarin,” boasted, at the age of eight and a half, of having run away from his orphanage twice. “And now they’ve evasculated the orphanage. And they’ve forgotten all about me…” Mila guessed that he had taken advantage of the evacuation to light out yet again. Mandarin’s vitality was disconcerting, as was his constant good humor. He was the one who taught the others to eat sunshine. The ravenous children would sit in a row facing the window embellished with hoarfrost, open their mouths and bite into the light illuminating their pale faces, pretending to chew, to swallow… Among these stray children there was also a boy with transparent skin, his eyelids always a little lowered, for whom it was a great effort to speak. This languid air contrasted oddly with the brisk resonance of his name in Russian, Edward. Mila noticed that, though generally in the background, he became extremely alert at the time when their bread ration was being shared out, eager to obtain a little more than the others… Almost every week another child would come to join the “family.” At the end of January Mila brought two little girls in from the street, the elder was carrying her sister like a mother carrying her baby.
Shortly after this their small tribe moved to other quarters. Mila decided to house the children in that empty workers’ hostel on the outskirts of Leningrad. The center of the city was being bombed far more, the suburbs were left alone. Wood for heating was easy to find in that great deserted building. But, above all, on the road that ran beside that district one could beg for bread from soldiers going to or returning from the front.
As with the lives of everyone in that dying city, whether they survived or not could be a matter of several extra degrees of frost, a fall in the street just before collecting your slice of bread, extra tiredness that could suddenly shatter the body. And above all, the chance of the scrap of food that might or might not be tossed out from an army truck. Yes, one little mishap was enough to threaten the existence of her “family,” which already comprised sixteen children.
It was not just one mishap but a whole sequence of events, taken together, on one particular day, that became fateful. On her way back from the city Mila slipped and twisted her ankle. The next day she was unable to go and beg for bread at the roadside. That night, after a week of thaw, the winter unleashed a blizzard that covered the footpaths linking the hostel to the rest of the district in three feet of snow. Several of her children were no longer getting up and only Mandarin remained lively and merry. He helped her light the stove and called out to the others. “Come on, stir your stumps, you bunch of lazybones! I’m going to show you how to eat fire…” Some of them, roused by his energy, dragged themselves over to the stove and imitated him, opening their mouths to bite into the warmth given off by the flames.
“He’s indestructible, that one,” thought Mila, watching Mandarin’s red head bobbing up, now in the entrance hall, now in the dormitory installed around the stove.
And yet it was him she found one evening stretched out in the corridor, with a fixed stare, his body frozen. He was gasping for breath, then, when carried close to the fire, he managed to whisper: “I’ve got bells ringing in my chest…” The last scraps of bread had been eaten the day before.
She went out and, after an hour of wading through the snow, reached the road. For the first time she did not have the strength to remain upright, collapsed against a lamppost, waited, no longer able to feel her hands in her mittens or her frozen feet in her felt boots. A truck appeared, she rushed out, barred its way, resolved to snatch what food there was from the people it was carrying to the front. The driver jumped down off the running board, advanced through the snow flurry, ready to knock aside this phantom that was obstructing him. “Sixteen kids. Nothing to eat for two days…,” she stammered. The soldier replied in a voice shredded by the wind: “Fifty-two corpses in the truck. We’re eating dead horses. I can give you tobacco, nothing else…”
Next morning she was able to bring back a few slices of bread from the city. She heated the water, prepared to throw the crusts in to make a brew intended for the whole household… While she was getting the bowls ready the bread disappeared. The child who was eating it (it was Edward) did not hide himself, looked at her like an animal that knows it has done wrong. She slapped him, yelled oaths never uttered in front of children, wept. Then went rigid, helpless, staring at this young face disfigured by fear and the instinct to survive. Still chewing, he sniffled, “I was very hungry… My uncle works in the Party administration.” These words disarmed her, so absurd did this reference to the apparatus of power sound coming from a boy of eleven standing at a table where there were still several crumbs of bread left. She knew he was lying. With a highly placed uncle he would not have been there among these lost children. He must have heard someone using the phrase, sensed the weight of authority that lay behind it, and repeated it like a parrot, hoping for privileged treatment. Other children, attracted by the smell of bread, were busy nibbling at the crumbs in the expectation of a meal.