The Blockade

 
No questions here and no decisions
But abundance and a steely order:
Whether you chose the thick of things or lived on the side
Lie down now, someone will stand beside.
 

E. Kliachkin

Dusya, sturdy, strong, full of vitality, with small eyes and clear traces of the Tartar-Mongol invasion in her face, was left to her own devices during the Blockade, with two girls of ten and twelve to look after. At first the girls had been in the evacuation. Then rumours appeared that the trains full of children were being bombed. Dusya threw herself at the feet of her boss, imploring «I won't ran away, let me go and get my kids!» She managed to get permission for a trip, located her daughters in Valdai and took them back to Leningrad. There they lived through the entire blockade together with their mother.

Dusya came from the town of Torzhok, from a prosperous peasant family. In the past they had been «middle peasants», not rich, but well-to-do. Dusya was sullen and silent. Muscular and strong. With large, unfeminine hands and feet. Her education consisted of four years of parish school. Her husband, Nikolai, was tall and very handsome. With large brown eyes. They had been introduced by Nikolai's mother, a smart peasant women with business sense, a former innkeeper who sometimes travelled from Petersburg to Torzhok. Dusya was 22, by the standards of the time an old maid already. She had had a groom once. A good-for-nothing, when he was drank he would ran through the streets with a rifle and fire at random. They had to get rid of such a groom. On top of that Dusya didn't love him. It would be good to marry her off to a man from the city. Their parents matched Nikolai and Dusya up and married them. They spent a lot of time apart. Nikolai in Petersburg and Dusya in Torzhok. They lived without love. But they managed to have two daughters who, naturally, lived with their mother. Only right before the war did the family manage to find housing in a suburb of Leningrad and started living together. At that time Nikolai had just finished technical college. He became a production engineer. They were very different, Nikolai and Dusya. Nikolai used to read books and wear eyeglasses. Even with his glasses his eyesight was zero. Dusya thought little of her husband. A man who was good for nothing. Incapable of lifting stuff. Of getting things done. Of taking a decision, hammering a nail into the wall. He kept forgetting everything. A bungler. Constantly thinking about something. Lazy and useless. He brought his food ration home, at least something. Well no, Nikolai wasn't quite as useless and clumsy. Before he graduated from technical college he had been a worker at the Putilov Factory, and he'd coped well with the workload. He hadn't been sent to the front because of his eyesight. Certificate of exemption from military service. And suddenly… In the changing room someone took his documents from his clothes. Stole them. Perhaps it didn't happen in the changing room; perhaps someone picked them from his back pocket in the street. Somebody was very keen to help himself to a passport with an exemption certificate inside in these war times. Just at that moment recruitment was underway for the emergency volunteer corps. For some reason recruitment was always underway for the volunteer corps. Come on, Nikolai. We must defend the city against the enemy. We need to get a company together. That's an order. What exemption certificate? Where is it, your exemption certificate? Oh, you don't have it? Where nothing is, nothing can be had. What do you mean, you don't see a thing? Can you see five meters ahead? Do you see the rifle in the corner over there? Take it, and into service with you. There. We'll put a tick there. Nikolai Oref'ev the fighter. What kind of a fighter was he when he couldn't see further than his own hand even when wearing his eyeglasses? So he left with the emergency volunteer corps, to fight in the Siniavinsk swamps. And he didn't send a single message to either Dusya-Evdokia or his girls. Not a single triangular envelope. Not a single message. And no «killed in action» notice either. He vanished just as he had left. What kind of a fighter was he? His eyesight was zero point zero. He disappeared without a trace. He vanished to rot in the icy cold slush of the swamp. And left Dusya to fight for herself with the two girls. No, there is no monument to the fighter Nikolai Sergeevich Oref'ev anywhere in the world. To him who was fashioned from different stuff. For a life in a different space and a different time. Who ended up in this incomprehensible, terrible world and lived here as best he could, preserving his immortal soul as best he could. He chose a woman, not the most beautiful woman, but one who was strong and stubborn and capable of saving and protecting two thoughtless, long-legged girls. What could he have done? He joined the emergency voluntary corps to shield the city against the enemy with his own body. In order to… «lie down in peace when the time comes». «The green leaf from the dead head will cover them all – the gentle and the violent alike.» He left two girls behind. He left fragments of his genes to his offspring. The pensive penchant for quiet reflection. Great sensitivity. And unusually beautiful, eastern, slightly slanted eyes. Those were passed right down to my youngest along the generations.

Dusya and Nikolai's daughters turned out very likeable. Both of them were strong and stocky, taking after their mother in build. Tamara, the older one, looked like a proper Tatar with her broad face and small, slanted eyes. She was always laughing, nimble and lively. And ruling the roost. The younger one, Vera, also had black hair, not black in fact, but blue-black. She took more after her father, that was visible in everything. Light skin. Large brown eyes, soft features – a foreign beauty out of an Italian film. She was pensive and shy, evidently. She loved books, just like her father. But both girls had inherited their mother's tough-as-leather character. Decisive. The knew what they wanted. They wouldn't miss out on what was theirs. But all this would become evident later. When the girls grew up. When their teeth had cut through.

For the time being they were simply two girls, two adolescents. Left in the care of their mother. How to survive, how to feed them? They were living on the Petrograd Side. The girls went to the 'Lightning' cinema. They were watching a film when suddenly the lights went out and the film stopped. Come back tomorrow. They came back the next day, but there was no electricity, and the day after there was none either. When will you show the film? Why do you keep coming, girls? Do you have electricity in the house where you live? No electricity. See, we don't have any either, how silly you are. This was the war. There would be no more electricity in Leningrad until the early winter of 1942.

Dusya was working at a factory for packing materials. Sometimes as a packer. Sometimes as a stock keeper. She received food rations for herself and the two girls. The first year of the blockade was very hard. During the second year her enterprise set up a farming co-operative. They were allocated a plot of land in Kuzmolovo and went there in the summer to farm. Dusya, who came from the countryside and had worked in agriculture before, was appointed head of the co-operative. They grew vegetables, herbs, pumpkins, marrows, sunflowers, and turnips. In their free time they would go into the woods and collect mushrooms and berries. They put away stock for the winter. Her girls Dusya had sent to children's summer camps, Tamara to Ozerki and Vera to Koltushi. For weeding the fields during June and July. What kind of weeding I don't know. But the children lived fairly well in the camps. Some food always came their way. Moreover, their mother would come and bring them food from the vegetable patch or from the woods. During the winter the girls went to school. At school they received food on ration cards, breakfast and lunch. The city was making an effort to look after the children. Lunch was two courses, sometimes there was even stewed fruit. But what kind of food were they given? Skilly.

During the winter life was very hard. Inside the houses the temperatures were below freezing. The heating was destroyed, everything was covered in blocks of ice. People were using small wood-fired stoves for heating. The storeroom at the factory where Dusya worked was warm. There were packing materials, so there was always something for firing the stove. That's where the family went to warm themselves up. Often they would stay there for the night. There wasn't enough food. The fear that there would not be enough food remained with the girls for life. As did the habit to buy too much, to stuff their children and grandchildren with food. The girls became emaciated. Dusya gave blood to receive additional food. But many didn't survive. It was mostly men who died, as they needed more food. In the family next door the father and a 14-year old boy died from hunger. The girls saw that nobody removed the dead bodies for a long time. Their relatives kept the deceased in the house until the end of the month to retain their ration cards and receive their food. Then they took the bodies of their loved ones on a sledge somewhere near the empty People's House in the Lenin Park. From there the city services would take them to different cemeteries.

This is how the sisters lived. School during winter, camp during summer. When the war was over they entered technical college. Tamara studied to become a cinema technician. Fidgety as she was, she wanted to be close to the film world. She was soon thrown out, as at college one needs to think and Tamara wasn't too good at that. Vera joined food college. Closer to sustenance, so to say. They lived comfortably, one might say. But all three of them were capable of yelling. Tamara and her mother would gang up against the younger sister, or Vera and Dusya would rally against Tamara. All three were sharp-tongued and slightly rude. Dusya received a large number of awards and recognitions. This didn't save her from trouble. In 1947 she started working in a bakery. The spiteful manager with the crooked teeth gave food to her young lover. And three bakery assistants were found with a deficit. In Dusya's case an entire 600 grams were missing. Prison, then got parole. But she was inside for ten months. She doesn't like talking about this now, and not about the blockade either. That's completely understandable: these memories are very painful.