Book Two
THE GOLDEN DOOR
Part Three
LAZAREVO
SCENTING SPRING
ALEXANDER went to Lazarevo on faith.
He had nothing else. Literally nothing else, not a letter, not a single piece of correspondence from either Dasha or Tatiana to let him know they had arrived in Molotov. He had grave doubts about Dasha, but he had seen Slavin survive the winter, so anything was possible. It was the absence of letters from Dasha that worried Alexander. While she was in Leningrad, she wrote to him constantly. Here the rest of January and February sped on, and not a word.
A week after the girls had left, Alexander had driven a truck across the ice to Kobona and searched for them among the sick and dispossessed on the Kobona shores. He found nothing.
In March, anxious and depressed, Alexander wrote a letter to Dasha in Molotov. He also had telegraphed the Soviet office in Molotov asking them for information on a Daria or a Tatiana Metanova but did not hear back until May and by regular post. A one-sentence letter from the Molotov Soviet informed Alexander that there was no information on a Daria or a Tatiana Metanova. He telegraphed again, asking if the Lazarevo village Soviet could receive telegraphs. Here the two-word telegram came the next day: no. stop.
Every off-duty hour he got, Alexander went back to Fifth Soviet, letting himself in with the key Dasha had left him. He cleaned the rooms, swept and washed the floors, and washed the linen when the city council repaired the pipes in March. He installed new glass panes in the second bedroom. He found an old photo album of the Metanovs and started looking through it, then suddenly closed it and put it away. What was he thinking? It was like seeing ghosts.
That’s how Alexander felt. He saw their ghosts everywhere.
Each time he was back in Leningrad, Alexander went to the post office on Old Nevsky to see if there were any letters to the Metanovs. The old postmaster was sick of the sight of him.
At the garrison, Alexander constantly asked the sergeant in charge of the army mail if there was anything for him from the Metanovs. The sergeant in charge of the army mail was sick of the sight of him.
But there was nothing for Alexander, no letters, no telegrams, and no news. In April the Old Nevsky postmaster died. No one had been notified of his death, and, in fact, he remained in his chair behind the desk, with mail on the floor, and on the counter, and in boxes, and in unopened mail sacks.
Alexander smoked thirty cigarettes as he searched through all the mail. He found nothing.
He went back to Lake Ladoga, continued protecting the Road of Life — now a water road — and waited for furlough, seeing Tatiana’s ghost everywhere.
Leningrad slowly came out of the grip of death, and the city council became afraid — with good reason — that the proliferation of dead bodies, of clogged sewers, of raw sewage on the streets would result in a mass epidemic once the weather warmed up. The council initiated a full frontal assault on the city. Every living and able person cleared the debris from the bombing and the bodies from the streets. The burst pipes were fixed, the electricity restored. Trams and then trolleybuses began running. With new tulips and cabbage seedlings growing in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Leningrad seemed to be temporarily reborn. Tania would have liked to see the tulips in front of St. Isaac’s, Alexander thought. The civilian ration was increased to three hundred grams of bread for dependents. Not because there was more flour. Because there were fewer people.
At the start of war, on June 22, 1941, the day Alexander met Tatiana, there were three million civilians in Leningrad. When the Germans blockaded the city on September 8, 1941, there were two and a half million civilians in Leningrad.
In the spring of 1942 a million people remained.
The ice road over Ladoga had so far evacuated half a million people from the city, leaving them in Kobona to their dubious fate.
And the siege was not over.
After the snow melted, Alexander was put in charge of dynamiting a dozen mass graves in Piskarev Cemetery, to which nearly half a million corpses were transported on Funeral Trust trucks and eventually buried. Piskarev was just one of seven cemeteries in Leningrad to which the bodies were carried like cordwood.
And the siege was not over.
American foodstuffs — courtesy of Lend-Lease — were slowly making their twisted way into Leningrad. A few times during spring, Leningraders received dehydrated milk, dehydrated soup, dehydrated eggs. Alexander picked up some items himself, including an English-Russian phrase book he bought from a Lend-Lease truck driver in Kobona. Tania might like a new phrase book, he thought. She had been doing so well with her English.
The city rebuilt Nevsky Prospekt with false fronts to cover up the gaping holes left by German shells, and Leningrad went on slowly, neatly, and mostly quietly, into the summer of 1942.
German shelling and bombing continued daily and unabated.
January, February, March, April, May.
How many months could Alexander not hear? How many months of no news, of not a word, of not a breath? How many months of carrying hope in his heart and of admitting to himself that the inevitable and the unimaginable could have happened, might have happened, and — finally — must have happened? He saw death everywhere. At the front most of all, but hopeless death on the streets of Leningrad, too. He saw mutilated bodies and mangled bodies, frozen bodies and famished bodies. He saw it all. But through it all Alexander still believed.