The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

The stupidity of what I had said suddenly struck me. All the cats had been eaten long ago. I furrowed my brow trying to think of something else.

“Maybe we ought to buy a mousetrap,” I said indecisively.

“What would that do?”

“We’d eat mice.”

“That’s an idea,” he exclaimed, sitting up.

“I think the mice would taste no worse than the cats,” said I, encouraged.

“Not a bit.”

Elena I. Kochina, Blockade Diary

243

“Everyday we would have meat.” “That would be terrific,” he murmured indistinctly.

His animation was gone. He lay down again, his back to me, and pulled his hat over his ears. I understood that he had no faith in my plan.

19December 1941. Having gotten up before me, Dima circled the room re

peatedly, bumping into furniture and cursing. Finally he left, slamming the

door. He was gone the whole day.

“Where have you been?” I asked when he returned.

“Walking around,” he said vaguely. Suddenly, he winked and said, rapid-fire: “Looking for a little loaf of bread.”

“What are you saying?” I was frightened. He looked at me with curiosity.

“You seem to think that I’ve lost my mind.”

“No, no. But, after all . . .”

“Cut it out. I know that bread doesn’t lie in the streets. That’s not the point.”

“What is the point, then?”

He didn’t respond. I stood staring at him. Then he began to talk. At first slowly, then faster and faster. Suddenly he was seized by an incomprehensible agitation. He had encountered a child’s sled loaded with bread. A convoy of five men was escorting the sled. A crowd followed, fixedly staring at the bread. Dima fell in with the rest. The sled was unloaded at a bakery. The crowd attacked the empty cases, fighting for crumbs. He found a large crust trampled into the snow. But some urchin grabbed the crust from Dima’s hands. This vile snot-nose began to chew it, drooling and chomping. An insane rage seized Dima. Grabbing the kid by the scruff of the neck, he began to shake him convulsively. The kid’s head on its thin neck began to flail back and forth like that of a Petrushka doll. But he continued chewing hastily, his eyes closed.

“It’s all gone, all gone, uncle! Look!” he shouted suddenly, opening his mouth wide. Dima threw the kid on the ground. He was ready to kill him. But fortunately, a clerk rolled out of the store like a breakfast bun.

“Kish! Kish!” he shouted, waving his arms.

“As if humans were sparrows,” noted Dima with offense, “and the most amazing thing is that no one pasted that scoundrel in the face.” He became painfully pensive and stared at one spot.

Sensing that he was holding something back, I looked at him quizzically. But Dima sat disconnected from everything, seeing nothing and hearing nothing. This would happen to him more and more.

20December 1941. Dima was gone again, having sharpened the stick which

served him as a walking cane. He was back in about an hour. His appearance

was strange. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked inadvertently.

244

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Nothing . . . I’m just very hungry,” he said, his face in a weepy grimace.

I shrugged my shoulders. We simply did not talk about hunger anymore: it was our normal condition. Suddenly he broke into a convulsive laughter, pulled a loaf of bread from under his clothes, and threw it in my lap. “Here, you silly thing, eat,” he said tenderly.

I stared at the bread, dumbstruck. When my stupor passed and we ate our fill, he said: “I found a bakery where the bread is easy to steal. It’s very dark there.”

“Steal?”

“Yes, steal, of course. You don’t think that they gave me this loaf of bread as a gift.”

I was silent. Little flames of anxiety began to dance in the depth of his pupils. And suddenly a malevolent vexation scorched his face. Rubbing his face with the palms of his hands, he continued. It turned out that it wasn’t all that difficult. You had to get unobtrusively to the counter, wait for the right moment, and quickly spear a loaf with the stick. That was it.

When the bread was under his coat filling his senses with its hot exhalation, Dima wanted to laugh, shout, and dance with joy. But he forced himself to leisurely leave the bakery, maintaining external calm.

Now, telling me this, he laughed like a madman. I looked at him with horror. What could I say? That stealing was wrong? That would have been idiotic. So, I only said: “Be more careful.”

28 December 1941. The trams are not running. Children’s sleds are the only means of transport. They move along the streets in endless convoys. They carry planks, men, corpses.

There are corpses everywhere. In these times death is not just an occasional guest. People have become accustomed to death. It constantly bumps up against the living. People die easily, simply, without tears. The dead are wrapped in bed sheets, tied with rope and pulled to the cemetery where they are laid in rows. There they are buried in common pits.