uneau was the epitome of the Alaskan spirit—a state capital built with no roads leading in or out. The only way to get there was by boat or air. Surrounded by towering, snow-clad mountains and tucked in between ice fields larger than some states, it was a rough-and-tumble city that clung tenaciously to its pioneer and Native roots.

If they hadn’t been on a quest—or it hadn’t been raining so hard—Nina felt sure they would have taken an excursion to see the Mendenhall Glacier. But as it was, the three of them were standing at the entrance to the Glacier View Nursing Home instead.

“Are you afraid, Mom?” Meredith asked.

“I wasn’t under the impression that he’d agreed to see me,” Mom said.

“Not precisely,” Nina said. “But sooner or later, everyone talks to me.”

Mom actually smiled. “God knows that is true.”

“So are you afraid?” Nina asked.

“No. I should have done this years ago. Perhaps if I had... No. I am not afraid of telling the story to this man who is collecting such memories.”

“Perhaps if you had, what?” Meredith asked.

Mom turned to look at them. Her face was shadowed by the black woolen hood she wore. “I want you both to know what this trip has meant to me.”

“Why do you sound like you’re saying good-bye?” Nina asked.

“Today you will hear the terrible things I did,” Mom said.

“We all do terrible things, Mom,” Meredith said. “You don’t have to worry.”

“Do we? Do we all do terrible things?” Mom made a sound of disgust. “This is the talk-show babble of your generation. Here is what I want to say now, before we go in. I love both of you.” Her voice cracked, turned harsh, but her gaze softened. “My Ninotchka... my Merushka.”

Before either could even respond to the sweetness of their Russian nicknames, Mom turned on her heel and walked into the nursing home.

Nina rushed to keep up with her eighty-one-year-old mother.

At the desk, she smiled at the receptionist, a round-faced, black-haired woman in a beaded red sweater.

“We are the Whitson family,” Nina said. “I wrote ahead to Dr. Adamovich and told him we’d be stopping by to see him today.”

The receptionist frowned, flipping through a calendar. “Oh. Yes. His son, Max, is going to be here at noon to meet you. Would you like to have some coffee while you wait?”

“Sure,” Nina said.

They followed the receptionist’s directions to a waiting room filled with black and white images of Juneau’s colorful past.

Nina took a place by the window in a surprisingly comfortable chair. Behind her, a large picture window looked out over a green forest threaded by falling rain.

The minutes ticked past. People came and went, some walking, others in wheelchairs, their voices floating in and out with their presence.

“I wonder what the belye nochi is like here,” Mom said quietly, gazing out the window.

“It’s better the farther north you go,” Nina said. “According to my research anyway. But if you’re lucky, sometimes you can see the northern lights from here.”

“The northern lights,” Mom said, leaning back in her orange chair. “My papa used to take me outside in the middle of the night sometimes, when everyone else was asleep. He’d whisper, ‘Verushka, my little writer,’ and take my hand and wrap me in a blanket and out we would go, into the streets of Leningrad, to stand and stare up at the sky. It was so beautiful. God’s light show, my papa said, although he said it softly. Everything he said was dangerous then. We just didn’t know it.” She sighed. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever just talked about him. Just remembered something ordinary.”

“Does it hurt?” Meredith asked.

Mom thought about that for a moment and then said, “In a good way. We were always so scared to mention him. This is what Stalin did to us. When I first came to the United States, I could not believe how free everyone was, how quick to say what was on their minds. And in the sixties and seventies...” She shook her head, smiling. “My father would have loved to see a sit-in or the college kids demonstrating. He was like them, like... Sasha and your father. Dreamers.”

“Vera was a dreamer,” Nina said gently.

Mom nodded. “For a time.”

A man dressed in a flannel shirt and faded jeans walked into the room. With a thick black beard that covered half of his angular face, it was hard to make out his age. “Mrs. Whitson?” he said.

Mom slowly stood.

The man moved forward, his hand outstretched. “I am Maksim. My father, Vasily Adamovich, is the man you have come so far to see.”

Nina and Meredith rose as one.

“It is many years since your father wrote to me,” Mom said.

Maksim nodded. “And I’m sorry to say that he has suffered a stroke in the years between. He can barely speak and can’t move his left side at all.”

“So we are wasting your time,” Mom said.

“No. Not at all. I have taken up a few of my father’s projects and the siege of Leningrad is one of them. It’s such important work, gathering these survivor stories. It’s only in the last twenty years or so that the truth is coming to light. The Soviets were good at keeping secrets.”

“Indeed,” Mom said.

“So if you’d like to come into my father’s room, I’ll record your account for his study. He may not appear to react, but I can assure you that he is happy to finally include your story. It will be the fifty-third first-person account he has collected. Later this year I am going to St. Petersburg to petition for more records. Your story will make a difference, Mrs. Whitson. I assure you.”

Mom simply nodded, and Nina couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking, now that they were coming to the time when the story would end.

“Follow me, please,” Maksim said. Turning, he led them down the brightly lit corridor, past hunched old women with walkers and tiny old men in wheelchairs, to a room at the very end of the hall.

There was a narrow hospital-style bed in the center of the room and a couple of chairs that had obviously been brought in for this meeting. In the bed lay a shrunken man with a bony face and toothpick arms. Tufts of white hair sprang from his bald, spotted head and his wrinkled pink ears. His nose was like a raptor’s beak and his lips all but invisible. At their entrance, his right hand began to tremble and the right side of his mouth tried to smile.

Maksim leaned down close to his father, whispered something into his ear.

The man in the bed said something, but Nina couldn’t understand a word.

“He says he is so glad to see you, Anya Whitson. He has waited a long time. My father is Vasily Adamovich and he welcomes you all.”

Mom nodded.

“Please, sit down,” Maksim said, indicating the chairs. On a table by the window were a copper samovar and several plates of pierogies and strudel and sliced cheese with crackers.

Vasily said something, his voice crackled like a dried leaf.

Maksim listened, then shook his head. “I’m sorry, Papa. I cannot understand. He is saying something about the rain, I think. I am not sure. I am going to record your story, Mrs. Whitson. Anya—may I call you Anya? Is the recording okay?”

Mom was staring at the gleaming copper samovar and the row of silver-wrapped glass teacups. “Da,” she said softly, flicking a hand in dismissal.

Nina hadn’t realized that she was the only one still standing. She went to the chair next to Meredith’s and sat down.

For a moment, the room was utterly still. The only noise in it was the tapping of the rain on the roof.

Then Mom drew in a long, slow breath and released it. “I have told this story in a single way for so long, I hardly know how to start now. I hardly know how to start.”

Maksim hit the record button. It made a loud clicking sound and the tape started to roll.

“I am not Anya Petrovna Whitson. This is the name I took, the woman I became.” She took another deep breath. “I am Veronika Petrovna Marchenko Whitson, and Leningrad is my city. It is a part of me. Long ago, I knew those streets like I know the soles of my feet or the palms of my hands. But it is not my youth you are interested in. Not that I had much of one, when I look back on it. I started to grow up at fifteen when they took my father away, and by the end of the war, I was old....

“That is the middle, though. The beginning, really, is June of 1941. I am coming home from the country, where I’d been gathering vegetables to can for the coming winter....”

Nina closed her eyes and sat back, letting the words form pictures in her imagination. She heard things she’d heard before as a fairy tale; only this time they were real. There were no Black Knights or princes or goblins. There was only Vera, first as a young woman, falling in love and having her babies... and then as a woman afraid, digging on the Luga line and walking through bombed-out landscapes. Nina had to wipe her tears away when Olga died, and again when Vera’s mother died.

“She is gone,” Mom says with a terrible simplicity. “I hear my son say, ‘What’s wrong with Baba?’ and it takes all my strength not to cry.

I pull the blanket up to Mama’s chest, trying not to notice how bony her face has become in the last month. Should I have forced her to eat? This is a question that will haunt me for the rest of my life. If I had, I would have been pulling the blanket up on one of my children, and how could I have done that?

“Mama,” Leo says again.

“Baba has gone to be with Olga,” I say, and as hard as I try to be strong, my voice cracks, and then my children are crying.

It is Sasha who comforts them. I have no comfort left inside of me. I am cold to the bone, afraid that if one of them touches me I will crack apart like an egg.

I sit next to my dead mother for a long time, in our shadowy, cold room, with my head bowed in a prayer that comes too late. Then I remember a thing she said to me long ago, when I was the child who needed comfort. We will not speak of him again.

At the time, I thought it was because of his danger to us, his crimes, but as I sit next to my mother, I feel her move beside me—I swear I do—she reaches over and touches my hand and I feel warm for the first time in months, and I understand what she was saying to me then.

Go on. Forget if you can. Live.

It is not so much about who my father was, this advice; it is what life is about. What death does to you. When I look down, of course she is not moving, her skin is cold, and I know she did not really speak to me. But she did. And so I do what I must. I stand up, feeling out my new role. I am a motherless daughter now, a sisterless woman. There is no one left of the family I was born into; there is only the family I have made.

My mother is in all of us, though especially in me. Anya has my mother’s solemn strength. Leo has Olga’s easy laughter. And I—I have the best of both of them in me, and the dreams of my father, too, so it is my job to be all of us now.

Sasha is beside me suddenly.

He folds me into a hug and I press my face into the cold curl of his neck.

“We will be away from here someday,” he promises. “We will go to Alaska, just like we talked about. It won’t always be like this.”

“Alaska,” I say, remembering this dream of his, of ours. “Land of the Midnight Sun. Yes....”

But a dream like that—any dream—is far away now and it only makes my pain worse.

I look at him, and though he says something, I see his thoughts in his green eyes, or maybe it is my own thoughts reflected. Either way, we break apart and Sasha says to our slumped, red-eyed children, “Mama and I must go take care of Baba.”

Leo, sitting on the kitchen floor, starts to cry, but it is a pale imitation of my son’s sadness, of his tears. I know. I have seen him burst into tears when he is healthy. Now he just... leaks water from his eyes and sits there, too hungry and exhausted to do more.

“We’ll stay here, Papa,” Anya says solemnly. “I’ll take care of Leo.”

“My good children,” Sasha says. He keeps them busy while I wash Mama, and dress her in her best dress. I try not to notice how shrunken and thin she is... not really my mother at all, but...

It is true what they say. Children become adults who become children again. I cannot help thinking of this cycle as I gently wash my mother’s body and button her buttons and pin her hair. When I am done, she looks like she is sleeping and I bend down and kiss her cold, cold cheek and whisper my good-bye.

Then it is time.

Sasha and I dress for the cold. I put on everything I own—four pairs of socks, my mother’s oversized valenki, pants, dresses, sweaters. I can barely fit into my coat, and once I have wrapped a scarf around my head, my face looks like a child’s.

Out we go, into the cold, black day. Streetlamps are on in places, their light blurred by falling snow. We tie Mama to the little red sled that once was a family toy and now is perhaps our most important possession. Sasha is strong enough to drag it through the heavy snow, thank God.

I am weak. I try to hide it from my husband, but how can I? Every step through the knee-deep snow is a torture for me. My breath comes in great, burning gasps. I want to sit down but I know better.

In front of us, a man weaves drunkenly forward, clutches a streetlamp, and bends over, breathing hard.

We walk past him. This is what we do now, what we have become. When I look back, breathing hard myself, he has fallen in the snow. I know that when we go home we will see his blue, frozen body....

“Don’t look,” Sasha says.

“I see anyway,” I say, and keep trudging forward. How can I not see? Rumors are that three thousand people a day are dying, mostly old men and young children. We women are stronger somehow.

Thankfully, Sasha is in the army, so we only have to stand in line a few hours for a death certificate. We will lose Mama’s food ration, but lying about her death is more dangerous than starving.

By the time we leave the warmth of standing in line, I am beyond exhausted. The hunger is gnawing at my belly and I feel so light-headed that sometimes I cry for no reason. The tears freeze on my cheeks instantly.

There are streetlamps on at the cemetery, although I wish it were dark. In the falling snow, the bodies are hidden, coated in white, but there is no mistaking them: corpses stacked like firewood at the cemetery gates.

The ground is too frozen for burial. I should have known this. I would have known it if my mind were working, but hunger has made me stupid and slow.

Sasha looks at me. The sadness in his eyes is unbearable. I want to give in then, just slump into the snow and stop caring.

“I can’t leave her here,” I say, unable to even count the bodies. Neither can I bring her home again. It is what too many neighbors have done, just set aside a place for the dead in their apartments, but I cannot do it.

Sasha nods and moves forward, dragging the sled around the snowy mounds and into the dark, quiet cemetery.

We hold hands. It is the only way we can know where the other is. We find an open space beneath a tree laced with snow and frost. I hope this tree will be the protector for her I was not.

Our voices echo through the falling snow as we tell each other this is the place. I will always know this tree, recognize it, and here I will find her again someday, or at least I will stand here and remember her. From now on, I will always remember her on the fourteenth of December, wherever I am. It is not much, but it is something.

I kneel in the snow; even with gloves on, my fingers are trembling with cold as I untie the ropes and release her frozen body.

“I am sorry, Mama,” I whisper, my teeth chattering. I touch her face in the darkness like a blind woman, trying to remember how she looks. “I’ll come back in the spring.”

“Come on,” Sasha says, pulling me to my feet. I know better than to kneel, even for this, in the snow. Already my knees are colder. Soon I will not be able to feel my legs.

We leave her there. Alone.

“It is all we can do,” Sasha says later as we trudge for home, our breathing ragged.

All I want to do is lie down. I am so hungry and so tired and so sad. I do not even care if I die.

“Yes,” I say. I don’t care. I just want to stop.

But Sasha is there, urging me forward, and when we get home, and our children climb into bed with us, I thank God my husband is there.

“Don’t you give up,” he whispers to me in bed that night. “I will find a way to get you out of here.”

I promise.

I agree not to give up, though I don’t know what it even means then.

And in the morning, he kisses my cheek, whispers that he loves me, and he leaves.

In late December, the city slowly freezes to death. It is dark almost all the time. Birds drop from the sky like stones. The crows die first; I remember that. It is impossibly cold. Twenty degrees below zero becomes normal. The streetcars stop in their tracks like children’s toys that have fallen out of favor. The water mains burst.

The sleds are everywhere now. Women drag them through the streets to carry things home—wood from burned-out buildings, buckets of water from the Neva River, anything they can burn or eat.

You’d be amazed what you can eat. There are rumors that the sausage sold in the markets is made from human flesh. I don’t go to the markets anymore. What is the point? I see beautiful fur coats and jewels selling for nothing and oil cakes made of warehouse sweepings and sawdust going for exorbitant prices.

We do as little as we can, my children and I. Our apartment is black all the time now—there is only the briefest spasm of daylight and very few candles are left to light the darkness. Our little burzhuika is everything now. Heat and light. Life. We have burned most of the furniture in our apartment, but some pieces are still left.

The three of us are wrapped tightly together all night, and in the morning we waken slowly. We lie beneath all the blankets we have, with our bed pushed close to the stove, and still we waken with frozen hair and frost on our cheeks. Leo has developed a cough that worries me. I try to get him to drink hot water, but he resists me. I cannot blame him. Even after it is boiled, the water tastes like the corpses that lie on the river’s frozen surface.

I get up in the cold and take however long I must to break off a chair leg or shatter a drawer, and feed the wood into the stove. There is a ringing in my ears and a kind of vertigo that often sends me sprawling at the merest step. I know my own body by its bones now. Still, I smile when I kiss my babies awake.

Anya groans at my touch and this is better than Leo, who just lies there.

I shake him hard, yell his name; when he opens his eyes I can’t help falling to my knees. “Silly boy,” I say, wiping my eyes. I can’t hear anything over the roaring in my ears and the hammering of my heart.

I would give anything to hear him say he is hungry.

I make us each a cup of hot water laced with yeast. It is no nutrition, but it will fill us up. Carefully, I take a piece of thick black bread—the last of this week’s rations—and I cut it in thirds. I want to give it all to them, but I know better. Without me, they are lost, so I must eat.

We each cut our third of a piece of bread into tiny pieces, which we eat as slowly as possible. I put half of mine in my pocket for later. I get up and put on all of my clothes.

My children lie in the bed, snuggled close. Even from across the room, I can see how skeletal they look. When last I bathed Leo, he was a collection of sharp bones and sunken skin.

I go to them, sit by them on the bed. I touch Leo’s cheeks, pull his knit cap down far enough to cover his ears.

“Don’t go, Mama,” he says.

“I have to.”

It is the conversation we have every morning, and honestly, there is very little fight left in them. “I will find us some candy, would you like that?”

“Candy,” he says dreamily, slumping back into his flattened pillow.

Anya looks up at me. Unlike her brother, she is not sick; she is just wasting, like me. “You shouldn’t tell him there will be candy,” she says.

“Oh, Anya,” I say, pulling her into my arms and holding her as tightly as I can. I kiss her cracked lips. Our breath is terrible, but neither of us even notices anymore.

“I don’t want to die, Mama,” she says.

“You won’t, moya dusha. We’ll make sure of it.”

My soul.

She is that. They both are. And because of that, I get up and get dressed and go to work.

Out in the freezing darkness of early morning, I drag my sled through the streets. In the library, I go down to the one reading room that is open. Oil lamps create pockets of light. Many of the librarians are too sick to move, so those of us who are able move books and answer research questions for the government and the army. We go in search of books, too, saving what we can from bombed buildings. When there is nothing left to do, I queue up for whatever rations I can get. Today I am lucky: there is a jar of sauerkraut and a ration of bread.

The walk home is terrible. My legs are so weak and I can’t breathe and I am dizzy. There are corpses everywhere. I no longer even go around them. I don’t have the energy.

Halfway home, I reach into my pocket and pull out my tiny piece of bread from the morning meal. I put it in my mouth, let it melt on my tongue.

I can feel myself swaying. That white roar of noise is back in my ears; in the past few weeks I have grown accustomed to the sound.

I see a bench up ahead.

Sit. Close your eyes for just a moment...

I am so tired. The gnawing in my belly is gone, replaced by exhaustion. It is a struggle just to breathe.

And then, amazingly, I see Sasha standing in the street in front of me. He looks exactly as he did on the day I met him, years ago, a lifetime; he isn’t even wearing a coat and his hair is long and golden.

“Sasha,” I say, hearing the crack in my voice. I want to run to him, but my legs won’t work. Instead I crumple to my knees in the thick snow.

I can feel him beside me, putting his arm around me. His breath is so warm and it smells of cherries.

Cherries. Like the ones Papa used to bring us...

And honey.

I close my eyes, hungry for the taste of him and his sweet breath.

I can smell my mama’s borscht.

“Get up, Vera.”

At first it is Sasha’s voice, deep and familiar, and then it is my own. Screaming.

“Get up, Vera.”

I am alone. There is no one here beside me, no lover’s breath that smells of honeyed cherries. There is just me, kneeling in the deep snow, slowly freezing to death.

I think of Leo’s giggle and Anya’s stern look and Sasha’s kiss.

And I climb slowly, agonizingly, to my feet.

It takes hours to get home, although it is not far. When I finally arrive and stumble into the relative warmth of the apartment, I fall again to my knees.

Anya is there. She wraps her arms around me and holds me.

I have no idea how long we sit there, holding each other. Probably until the cold in the apartment drives us back into bed.

That night, after a dinner of hot sauerkraut and a boiled potato—heaven—we sit around the little burzhuika.

“Tell us a story, Mama,” Anya says. “Don’t you want a story, Leo?”

I scoop Leo into my arms and stare down at his pale face, made beautiful by firelight. I want to tell him a story, a fairy tale that will give him good dreams, but my throat is tight and my lips are so cracked it hurts to speak, so I just hold my babies instead and the frosty silence lulls us to sleep.

You think that things cannot get worse, but they can. They do.

It is the coldest winter on record in Leningrad. Rations are cut and cut again. Page by page I burn my father’s beloved books for warmth. I sit in the freezing dark, holding my bony children as I tell them the stories. Anna Karenina. War and Peace. Onegin. I tell them how Sasha and I met so often that soon I know the words by heart.

It feels further and further away, though. Some days I cannot remember my own face, let alone my husband’s. I can’t recall the past, but I can see the future: it is in the stretched, tiny faces of my children, in the blue boils that have begun to blister Leo’s pale skin.

Scurvy.

Lucky for me, I work in the library. Books tell me that pine needles have vitamin C, so I break off branches and drag them home on my sled. The tea I make from them is bitter, but Leo complains no more.

I wish he would.

Dark. Cold.

I can hear my babies breathing in the bed beside me. Leo’s every breath is phlegmy. I feel his brow. He is not hot, thank God.

I know what has wakened me. The fire has gone out.

I want to do nothing about it.

The thought hits before I can guard against it. I could do nothing, just lie there, holding my children, and go to sleep forever.

There are worse ways to die.

Then I feel Anya’s tiny legs brush up against mine. In her sleep, she murmurs, “Papa,” and I remember my promise.

I take forever to get up. Everything hurts. There is a ringing in my ears and my balance is off. Halfway to the stove, I feel myself falling.

When I wake from my faint, I am disoriented. For a second, I hear my father at his desk, writing. His pen tip scratches words across the bumpy linen paper.

No.

I go to the bookcase. Only the last of the treasure is left: my father’s own poetry.

I cannot burn them.

Tomorrow, perhaps, but not today. Instead, I take the ax—it is so heavy—and crack off a piece of the side of the bookcase. It is thick, old wood, hard as iron, and it burns hot.

I stand by the bed, in front of the fire, and I can feel how I am swaying.

I know suddenly that if I lie down, I will die. Did my mother tell me this? My sister? I don’t know. I just remember knowing the truth of it.

“I won’t die in my bed,” I say to no one. So I go to the only other piece of furniture left in the room. My father’s writing desk. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I sit down.

Can I smell him, or am I hallucinating again? I don’t know. I pick up his pen and find that the ink in the well is frozen solid. The little metal inkwell is as cold as ice, but I carry it to the stove, where we both warm quickly. Making a cup of hot water to drink, I go back to the desk.

I light the lamp beside me. It is silly, I know. I should conserve this oil, but I can’t just sit here in the icy black. I have to do something to keep alive.

So I will write.

It is not too late. I’m not dead yet.

I am Vera Petrovna and I am a nobody....

I write and write, on paper that I know I will soon have to burn, with a hand that trembles so violently my letters look like antelopes leaping across the sheet. Still, I write and the night fades.

Some hours later, a pale gray light bleeds through the newsprint, and I know I have made it.

I am just about to put the pen down when there is a knock at the door. I force my legs to work, my feet to move.

I open the door to a stranger. A man in a big black woolen coat and a military cap.

“Vera Petrovna Marchenko?”

I hear his voice and it is familiar, but I cannot focus on his face. My vision is giving me problems.

“It is me. Dima Newsky from down the hall.” He hands me a bottle of red wine, a bag of candy, and a sack of potatoes. “My mama is too ill to eat. She won’t make it through the day. She asked me to give this to you. For the babies, she said.”

“Dima,” I say, and still I don’t know who he is. I can’t remember his mother, either, my neighbor.

But I take the food. I do not even pretend not to want it. I might even kill him for it. Who knows? “Thank you,” I say, or think I do, or mean to.

“How is Aleksandr?”

“How are any of us? Do you want to come in? It is a little warmer—”

“No. I must get back to my mother. I am not here long. It’s back to the front tomorrow.”

When he is gone, I stare down at the food in awe. I am smiling when I waken Leo that morning and say, “We have candy....”

In January, I strap poor Leo to the sled. He is so weak, he doesn’t even struggle; his tiny body is bluish black and covered in boils. Anya is too cold to get out of bed. I tell her to stay in bed and wait for us.

It takes three hours to walk to the hospital, and when I get there...

People have died in line, waiting to see a doctor. There are bodies everywhere. The smell.

I lean down to Leo, who is somehow both bony and swollen. His tiny face looks like a starving cat. “I am here, my lion,” I say because I can think of nothing else.

A nurse sees us.

Even though we are two among hundreds, she comes over, looks down at Leo. When she looks up at me, I see the pity in her eyes.

“Here,” she says, giving me a piece of paper. “This will get him some millet soup and butter. There’s aspirin at the dispensary.”

“Thank you,” I say.

We look at each other again, both knowing it is not enough. “He is Leo.”

“My son was Yuri.”

I nod in understanding. Sometimes a name is all you have left.

When I get home from the hospital, I cook everything I can find. I strip the wallpaper from the walls and boil it. The paste is made of flour and water, and it thickens into a kind of soup. Carpenter’s glue will do the same thing. These are the recipes I teach my daughter. God help us.

I boil a leather belt of Sasha’s and make a jelly from it. The taste is sickening, but I get Leo to eat a little of it....

In the middle of January, a friend of Sasha’s arrives at our apartment. I can see that he is shocked by what he sees. He gives me a box from Sasha.

As soon as he is gone, we crowd around to look at it. Even Leo is smiling.

Inside are evacuation papers. We are to leave on the twentieth.

Beneath the papers is a coil of fresh sausage and a bag of nuts.

In utter darkness, I pack up the whole of my life, not that there is much left. Honestly, I do not know what I have taken and what I left behind. Most of our possessions have either frozen or been burned, but I remember to take my writings and my father’s, and my last book of poetry by Anna Akhmatova. I take all the food we have—the sausage, half a bag of onions, four pieces of bread, some oil cakes, a quarter of a jar of sunflower oil, and the last of the sauerkraut.

I have to carry Leo. With his swollen feet and boil-covered arms, he can barely move, and I don’t have it in me to waken him when he sleeps.

The three of us leave in the darkness of midmorning. Little Anya carries our only suitcase, filled with food. All our clothes we are wearing.

It is bitter cold outside and snowing hard. I hold her hand on the long walk to the train station, and once there, we are both exhausted.

In the train, we cram together. We are three of many, but no one talks. The air smells musty, of body odor and bad breath and death. It is a smell we all recognize.

I pull my babies close around me. I give Leo and Anya some wine to drink, but Leo is not happy with that. I cannot take out my food, not in this crowded train car. I could be killed for the oil cakes, let alone the sausage.

I dig deep in my coat pocket, which I have filled with dirt from the ground outside the burned Badayev food warehouses.

Leo eats the dirty, sugary particles greedily and cries for more. I do the only thing I can think of: I cut my finger and put it in his mouth. Like a newborn baby, he sucks on my finger, drinking my warm blood. It hurts, but not as much as hearing the congestion in his lungs or feeling the heat in his forehead.

In a quiet voice, I tell them stories of their father and me, of a fairy-tale love that seems so far away. Somewhere along that clackety trip, when I am so afraid and Leo is coughing terribly and Anya keeps asking when we will see Papa, I begin to call my husband a prince and Comrade Stalin the Black Knight and the Neva River takes on magical powers.

The train trip seems to last for a long time. My insides ache from being rattled around for so many hours. My fairy tale is the only thing that keeps us all sane. Without it, I think I might begin crying or screaming and never stop.

Finally, we reach the edge of Lake Ladoga. There is ice as far as I can see; there is almost no difference between my view through a clean window and one through the fog of my own breath.

We are at the start of the ice road.