Winter of the World

Behind the hedgehog field an anti-tank ditch was being dug with pickaxes and shovels, and beyond that a sandbag wall was going up, with gaps for defenders to shoot through. A narrow zigzag path had been left between the obstacles so that the road could continue to be used by Muscovites until the Germans arrived.

Almost all the workers digging and building were women.

Volodya found Zoya beside a sand mountain, filling sacks with a shovel. For a minute he watched her from a distance. She wore a dirty coat, woollen mittens and felt boots. Her blonde hair was pulled back and covered with a colourless rag tied under her chin. Her face was smeared with mud, but she still looked sexy. She wielded the shovel in a steady rhythm, working efficiently. Then the supervisor blew a whistle and work stopped.

Zoya sat on a stack of sandbags and took from her coat pocket a small packet wrapped in newspaper. Volodya sat beside her and said: ‘You could have got exemption from this work.’

‘It’s my city,’ she said. ‘Why wouldn’t I help to defend it?’

‘So you’re not fleeing to the east.’

‘I’m not running away from the motherfucking Nazis.’

Her vehemence surprised him. ‘Plenty of people are.’

‘I know. I thought you’d be long gone.’

‘You have a low opinion of me. You think I belong to a selfish elite.’

She shrugged. ‘Those who are able to save themselves generally do.’

‘Well, you’re wrong. All my family are still here in Moscow.’

‘Perhaps I misjudged you. Would you like a pancake?’ She opened her packet to reveal four pale-coloured patties wrapped in cabbage leaves. ‘Try one.’

He accepted and took a bite. It was not very tasty. ‘What is it?’

‘Potato peelings. You can get a bucketful free at the back door of any Party canteen or officers’ mess. You mince them small in the kitchen grinder, boil them until they’re soft, mix them with a little flour and milk, add salt if you’ve got any, and fry them in lard.’

‘I didn’t know you were so badly off,’ he said, feeling embarrassed. ‘You can always get a meal at our place, you know.’

‘Thank you. What brings you here?’

‘A question. What is isotope separation by gaseous diffusion?’

She stared at him. ‘Oh, my God – what’s happened?’

‘Nothing has happened. I’m simply trying to evaluate some dubious information.’

‘Are we building a fission bomb at last?’

Her reaction told him that the information from Frunze was probably sound. She had immediately understood the significance of what he’d said. ‘Please answer the question,’ Volodya said sternly. ‘Even though we’re friends, this is official business.’

‘Okay. Do you know what an isotope is?’

‘No.’

‘Some elements exist in slightly different forms. Carbon atoms, for example, always have six protons, but some have six neutrons and others have seven or eight. The different types are isotopes, called carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14.’

‘Simple enough, even for a student of languages,’ Volodya said. ‘Why is it important?’

‘Uranium has two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. In natural uranium the two are mixed up. But only U-235 is explosive.’

‘So we need to separate them.’

‘Gaseous diffusion would be one way, theoretically. When a gas is diffused through a membrane, the lighter molecules pass through faster, so the emerging gas is richer in the lower isotope. Of course I’ve never seen it done.’

Frunze’s report said that the British were building a gaseous diffusion plant in Wales, in the west of the United Kingdom. The Americans were also building one. ‘Would there be any other purpose for such a plant?’

She shook her head. ‘Figure the odds,’ she said. ‘Anyone who prioritizes this kind of process in wartime is either going crazy or building a weapon.’

Volodya saw a car approach the barricade and begin to negotiate the zigzag passage. It was a KIM-10, a small two-door car designed for affluent families. It had a top speed of sixty miles per hour, but this one was so overloaded it probably would not do forty.

A man in his sixties was at the wheel, wearing a hat and a Western-style cloth coat. Beside him was a young woman in a fur hat. The back seat of the car was piled with cardboard boxes. There was a piano strapped precariously to the roof.

This was clearly a senior member of the ruling elite trying to get out of town with his wife, or mistress, and as many of his valuables as he could take; the kind of person Zoya assumed Volodya to be, which was perhaps why she had declined to go out with him. He wondered if she might be revising her opinion of him.

One of the barricade volunteers moved a hedgehog in front of the KIM-10, and Volodya saw that there was going to be trouble.

The car inched forward until its bumper touched the hedgehog. Perhaps the driver thought he could nudge it out of the way. Several more women came closer to watch. The device was designed to resist being pushed out of the way. Its legs dug into the ground, jamming, and it stuck fast. There was a sound of bending metal as the car’s front bumper deformed. The driver put it in reverse and backed off.