5
Tatiana used to leave at six-thirty to get the rations — herself as punctual as a German — so that even with waiting in line and the ration store being all the way on Fontanka, she could be back by eight when the bombing formations flew overhead and the air-raid sirens sounded. But she had noticed that either the raids were starting earlier or she was getting out later, because three mornings in a row she got caught in the shell fire while still on Nekrasova returning home.
Only because she had promised, sworn to Alexander that she would, Tatiana waited out the bombing in a shelter in someone else’s building, holding her precious bread to her chest and wearing the helmet he had left her and made her promise and swear to wear when she went out.
The bread Tatiana was holding wasn’t delicious bread; it wasn’t white, and it wasn’t soft, and it didn’t have a golden crust, but still a smell emanated from it. For thirty minutes she sat while thirty pairs of eyes glared at her from all directions, and finally an old woman’s voice said, “Come on, girlie, share with us. Don’t just sit there holding the loot. Give us a bite.”
“It’s for my family,” Tatiana said. “There are five of us, all women. They’re waiting for me to bring it to them. If I give it to you, they will have no food today.”
“Not much, girlie,” the old woman persisted. “Just a bite.”
The shelling stopped, and Tatiana was the first one out. After that she made sure she didn’t lag behind anymore.
But despite her best efforts she could not seem to get to the ration store and back before the bombs came.
To go at ten was impossible. Tatiana had to be at work; people depended on her there, too. She wondered if Marina would do better, or maybe Dasha. Maybe they could move faster than Tatiana. Mama was sewing uniforms by hand in the morning and at night. Tatiana couldn’t possibly send her mother, who practically never looked up from her sewing nowadays, trying to finish a few uniforms so she could get some extra oatmeal.
Dasha said she couldn’t go because she had to do laundry in the morning. Marina also refused, which was just as well. She had nearly stopped going to university. Taking her ration card, she picked up her own bread and ate it immediately. At night when she came back to Fifth Soviet, she demanded more food from Tatiana. “Marinka, it’s just not fair,” Tatiana would say to her cousin. “We’re all hungry. I know this is hard, but you have to keep yourself in check—”
“Oh, like you keep yourself in check?”
“Yes,” Tatiana said, sensing that Marina was not talking about the bread.
“You’re doing well,” Marina said. “Very well, Tania. Keep it up.”
But Tatiana didn’t feel she was doing well.
She felt that she was doing worse than ever before, and yet her family was lauding her efforts. Something was not right with the world in which her family thought Tatiana was making a success out of a big botch. It wasn’t that she felt herself to be slow that bothered her, but that she felt herself slowing down. All her efforts at haste, at deliberate speed, were met with an unknown resistance — resistance from her own body.
It wasn’t moving as fast as it used to, and the inarguable proof of that lay with the German bombers, who at precisely eight o’clock flew their planes over the center of the city and for two hours sounded the mortar clarion call, the high-explosive bugle, to disrupt the rush hour of the morning.
Sunrise came at eight also. Tatiana walked to the store and back in near-dark.
One morning Tatiana was walking on Nekrasova and without much thought passed a man walking in the same direction. He was tall, older, thin, wearing a hat.
Only when she passed him did it occur to Tatiana that she hadn’t passed anyone in a long time. People walked at their own pace, but it was never an overtaking pace. Either I’m walking faster, she thought, or he is even slower than me.
She slowed down, then stopped. As she turned around, she saw him drift down like a parachute by the side of the building and keel over to his side. Tatiana walked back to him, to help him sit up. He was still.
Nonetheless, she tried to straighten him up. She lifted his hat. His unblinking eyes stared at Tatiana. They remained open, as they were just minutes ago when he had been walking on the street. Now he was dead.
Horrified, Tatiana let go of the man and his hat and hurried on without turning around. On the way back with her rations, she decided to take Ulitsa Zhukovskogo instead so as not to walk by the corpse. The air raid had started, but she ignored it and walked on. If they wanted to take my bread in the shelter, there would be nothing I could do to stop them, Tatiana thought, pulling Alexander’s helmet down over her head.
That morning she told her family she had seen a dead man on the street. They barely acknowledged it. “Oh?” said Marina. “Well, I saw a dead horse in the middle of the street, cut open, and a crowd of people helping themselves to the horse’s flesh. And that’s not the worst part. I walked up behind someone and asked if there was anything left for me.”
The man’s face, his walk, his silly hat stayed in Tatiana’s mind as she closed her eyes at night. It wasn’t his death that tormented her, because, unfortunately, Tatiana had seen death before — in Luga, in the abject absence of Pasha, as she watched her father burn. But it was this man’s walking gait that Tatiana saw when she closed her eyes, because when he died, he had been walking, and though he was walking slower than Tatiana, he was not walking slower by much.