era and Olga are lucky in their jobs. Olga works in the Hermitage Museum and Vera in the Leningrad Public Library. Now both of them spend their days in dark, quiet rooms, crating up masterpieces of art and literature so that the history of the Soviet state will never be lost. When work is over for the day, Vera walks home by herself. Sometimes she goes out of her way to see the Summer Garden and remember the day she met Sasha, but it is getting harder and harder to recall. Already the face of Leningrad is changing. The Bronze Horseman is covered in sandbags and wooden planks. Camouflage nets hang over the Smolny; gray paint has been splashed over the golden spires of the Admiralty. Everywhere she looks, people are busy—building air-raid shelters, standing in line for food, digging trenches. The skies overhead are still blue and cloudless, and no bombs have dropped on them yet, but it is coming and they know it. Every day the speakers blare out reports of the advancements of the German troops. No one believes that the Germans will reach Leningrad—not their magical city built on mud and bones—but bombs will fall here. They have no doubt about that.

On her way home, Vera stops by the bank and withdraws the two hundred rubles she is allowed for the month, and when she has her money, she stands in line for three loaves of bread and a tin of cheese. Today she is lucky; there is food at the end of her long wait. Sometimes she gets to the front of the line only to see it close.

When she finally gets home at eight o’clock, she finds Anya and Leo playing war in the living room, jumping from bed to bed, making shooting sounds at each other.

“Mama!” Leo cries when he sees her. His face breaks into a gummy grin and he runs toward her, throwing himself in her arms. Anya is close on his heels, but she doesn’t hug Vera so tightly. Anya is aggrieved by this business of war and she wants everyone to know it. She does not like spending her days in nursery school and not coming home until six o’clock, and then with “smelly Mrs. Newsky from next door.”

“How are my babies?” Vera asks, pulling Anya into her arms anyway. “What did you two do in school today?”

“I am too old for baby school,” Anya informs her, scrunching her face in concentration.

Vera pats her daughter’s head and goes into the kitchen. She is at the stove putting water on to boil when Olga comes into the apartment.

“Have you heard?” she says breathlessly.

Vera turns around. “What is it?”

Olga glances nervously at Anya and Leo, who are playing with sticks. “The children of Leningrad,” she says, lowering her voice. “They’re being evacuated.”

On the morning of the evacuation, Vera wakens feeling sick. She cannot do it, cannot put her babies on a train bound for somewhere far away and then just go on with her life. She lies in bed, alone, as private a time as exists in this crowded apartment, staring up at the rust-stained, water-marked ceiling. She can hear her mother turning restlessly and Olga snoring quietly in the bed only two feet away.

“Vera?” Mama says.

Vera turns onto her side.

Mama is looking at her. They are close, in their side-by-side beds, almost close enough to touch. A threadbare blanket falls from Mama’s shoulder when Olga rolls over. “You cannot think it,” she says, and Vera wonders if one day she will know what her children are thinking before they do.

“How can I not?” Vera says. All her life she has understood what it is to be a good Soviet, how to follow the rules and keep one’s head down and make no move that draws attention. But this... how can she blindly do this thing?

“Comrade Stalin has eyes everywhere. He is surely watching the Germans, and he knows where our children can go so that they will be safe. And all workers’ children must go. That is all there is.”

“What if I don’t see them again?”

Mama peels back the cover and gets out of bed, crossing the tiny space between them. She gets into bed, takes Sasha’s side, and pulls Vera into her arms, stroking her black hair as she used to when Vera was young. “We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we... bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do.”

“Sasha told me I would have to be strong.”

Mama nods. “I don’t think men understand, though. Even your Sasha. They march off with their guns and their ideas and they think they know courage.”

“You’re talking about Papa now.”

“Maybe I am.”

They lay for a while longer without talking.

For the first time in a long time, she is thinking about her father. As much as it hurts, it is better than dwelling on what is to come. She closes her eyes and in the darkness she is on the street in front of their old apartment, watching her papa leave.

Her fingers are freezing beneath her woolen gloves and her toes tingle with the cold.

“I want to come to the café with you,” she pleads, tilting her face up to him. A light snow is falling around them; flakes land on her bare cheeks.

He smiles down at her, his big black mustache beetling above his lip. “This is no place for a girl, you know this, Veruskha.”

“But you’ll be reading your poetry. And Anna Akhmatova will be there. She is a woman.”

“Yes,” he says, trying to look stern. “A woman. You are still a girl.”

“One day,” he says, pressing a gloved hand to her shoulder, “you will write your beautiful words. By then they will be teaching literature again in our schools instead of this terrible Soviet realism that is Stalin’s idea of progress. Be patient. Wave to me when I’m across the street, and then go inside.”

She stands there in the snow, watching him go. Tiny kisses of white fire land on her cheeks, almost immediately turning to spots of water that slide downward, slipping like cold fingers beneath her collar.

Soon he is only a blur, a smear of gray wool moving in all that white. She thinks perhaps he has stopped to wave to her, but she cannot be sure. Instead, she sees how night falls on the snow, how it changes the color and textures, and she tries to place this in her memory so that she can describe it in her journal.

“Do you remember when I used to dream of being a writer?” Vera says quietly now.

It is a long time before her mother says, even more softly, “I remember all of it.”

“Maybe someday—”

“Shhh,” her mother says, stroking her hair. “It will only hurt more. This I know.”

Vera hears the disappointment in Mama’s voice, and the accep tance. Vera wonders if one day she will sound like that, too, if it will seem easier to give up. Before she can think of what to say, she hears Leo in the kitchen. No doubt he is talking to the stuffed rabbit that is his best friend.

Vera thinks, It has begun. She feels her mother’s kiss, hears words whispered at her ear, but she cannot understand them. The roar in her head is too loud. She eases out from the bed and sits up. Although this morning is warm, as was the night before, she is dressed in a skirt and a sweater. A battered pair of shoes waits at the end of the bed. They are all sleeping in their clothes now. An air raid can come at any time.

The sound of movements overtake the small apartment: Olga whines that she is still sleepy and her arms ache from loading art into boxes; her grandmother blows her nose; Anya informs everyone that she is hungry.

It is all so ordinary.

Vera swallows the lump that has formed in her throat, but it will not go away. In the kitchen, she sees Leo—the spitting image of his father, with angelic golden curls and expressive green eyes. Leo. Her lion. He is laughing now, telling his poor one-eyed, tattered rabbit that maybe they will get to feed the swans in the Summer Garden today.

“It is war,” Anya says, looking impossibly superior for a five-year-old. Her lisp turns the sentence into something softer, but all of Anya’s fire is in her eyes. She is pure steel, this girl; exactly how Vera once imagined herself to be.

“Actually,” Vera says. “We are going on a walk.” She feels physically ill when she says it, but her mother comes up behind her; with a touch, Vera can go on. She crosses the room and picks up their coats. Last night, Vera stayed up late, sewing money and letters into the lining of her babies’ coats.

Leo is on his feet in an instant, gleefully clapping his hands, saying, “Walk!” over and over. Even Anya is smiling. It has only been five days since the announcement of war, but in those days their old life has disappeared.

Breakfast passes like a funeral procession, in quiet glances and lowered gazes. No one except Mama can look at Vera. At the end of the meal, her grandmother rises. When she looks at Vera, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.

“Come, Zoya,” her grandmother says in a harsh voice. “It does not look good to be late.”

Vera can see that her mother’s lip is bleeding from where she has bitten it. She goes to her grandchildren and kneels down, taking them in her arms and holding them.

“Don’t cry, Baba,” Leo says. “You can walk with us tomorrow.”

Across the room, Olga bursts into tears and tries immediately to control herself. “I am going now, Mama.”

Mama lets go slowly and gets back to her feet. “Be good,” is the last thing she says to her grandchildren. She hands Vera one hundred rubles. “It is all we have left. I’m sorry....”

Vera nods and hugs her mother one last time. Then she straightens. “Let’s go, children.”

It is a beautiful sunny day. The six of them walk together for as long as they can; Mama and Baba leave first, turning toward the Badayev food warehouses where they both work; Olga leaves next. She hugs her niece and nephew fiercely and tries to hide her tears and she runs toward her trolley stop.

Now it is just Vera and her children, walking down the busy street. All around her, trenches are being dug, shelters are being built. They stop in the Summer Garden, but the swans are gone from the pond and the statues are sandbagged. There are no children playing here today, no bicycle rings bleating out.

Smiling too brightly, Vera takes her children by the hands and leads them to a part of the city where they have never been.

Inside the building that they enter there is pandemonium. Queues snake through the hall in every direction, flowing away from desks overrun with paperwork, manned by Party members in drab clothing with dour, disappointed faces.

Vera knows they should go directly into the first processing queue and wait their turn, but suddenly she is not as strong as she needs to be. Taking a deep breath, she takes her children to a corner. It is not quiet here—the sounds of people are everywhere—footsteps, crying, sneezing, begging. The whole place smells of body odor and onions and cured meat.

Vera kneels down.

Anya is frowning. “It smells in here, Mama.”

“Comrade Floppy doesn’t like this place,” Leo says, hugging his bunny.

“Do you remember, when Papa went off to join the Peoples’ Volunteer Army, he told us we would all have to be strong?”

“I’m strong,” Leo says, showing off a pudgy pink fist.

“Yes,” Anya says. She is suspicious now. Vera sees that her daughter is looking at the coats in Vera’s arms and the suitcase she has brought from home.

Vera takes the heavy red woolen coat and puts it on Anya, buttoning it up to her throat. “It is too hot for this, Mama,” Anya whines, wiggling.

“You’re going on a trip,” Vera says evenly. “Not for long. Just a week or two. And you might need your coat. And here... here in this suitcase I have packed a few more clothes and some food. Just in case.”

“You are not wearing a coat,” Anya says, frowning.

“I... uh... I have to work and stay at home, but you will be home before you know it and I’ll be waiting for you. When you get back—”

“No,” Anya says firmly. “I don’t want to go without you.”

“I don’t want to,” Leo wails.

“We have no choice. You understand what this means? War is coming, and our great Comrade Stalin wants you children to be safe. You’re going to take a short train ride south until our Red Army triumphs. Then you will come home to Papa and me.”

Leo is crying now.

“You want us to go?” Anya asks, her blue eyes filling with tears.

No, Vera thinks, even as she nods. “I need you to take care of your brother,” she says. “You are so strong and smart. You will stay with him always, and never wander off. Okay? Can you be strong for me?”

“Yes, Mama,” Anya says.

For the next five hours, they stand in one queue after another. The children are processed and sorted and sent to other lines. By the end of the afternoon, the evacuation center is literally overrun with children and their mothers but the place is strangely quiet. The children sit as they are told, their faces shiny with sweat in the coats they shouldn’t need, their legs swinging in front of them. None of the mothers look at each other; it hurts too much to see your own pain reflected in another woman’s eyes.

And finally the train arrives. Metal wheels scream; smoke billows into the air. At first the crowd just sits there—no one wants to move—but when the whistle pierces the silence, they run like a herd, mothers bustling past each other, elbowing hard, trying to get their babies seats on the train that will save them.

Vera pushes her way to the front of the queue. The train seems alive beside her, breathing smoke, clanging. Party members patrol the area like sharks, forcing mothers to part with their children. Leo is sobbing, clutching Vera. Anya is crying, too, but in a silent way that is somehow worse.

“Take care of each other and stay together. Do not give your food to anyone else. There is money sewn into your pockets if you need it, and my name and address, too.” She pins little name tags on their lapels.

“Where are we going?” Anya asks. She is trying to be grownup; it is heartbreaking in one so young. At five, she should be playing with dolls, not standing in lines to leave her home.

“To the country, a summer park near the Luga River. You will be safe there, Anya. And in no time, I will come for you.” Vera plays with the tag pinned to Anya’s lapel, as if touching the little piece of identification will help.

“Get on board,” a comrade yells out. “Now. The train is leaving.”

Vera hugs her daughter, and then her son, and then she straightens slowly, feeling as if her bones are breaking as she does it.

Other people are handling her babies now, grabbing them, handing them to other people.

They are crying and waving. Anya is holding Leo’s hand; she shows her mama how tightly she is holding on, how strong she is being.

And then they are gone.

At first Vera cannot make herself move. People push her out of the way, muttering desperate, feral curses. Do they not see that she is paralyzed, that she cannot move? Finally someone pushes hard enough that she falls to her knees. She can feel children being handed off over her head, passed from one to another of the adults.

Vera climbs slowly to her feet, noticing dully that her stockings have ripped at the knees. She moves aside, searching the train’s windows, starting to run from car to car until she realizes that her children are too little to be seen.

So little.

Has she told them everything?

Keep your coat; winter comes on fast, even though they say you’ll be back in a week.

Never be apart from each other.

Brush your teeth.

Eat your food. All of it. And get to the front of the line at every meal.

Watch out for each other.

I love you.

At that, Vera stumbles, almost falls. She didn’t tell them she loved them. She’d been afraid it would make them all cry harder, so she’d withheld the precious words, the only ones that really mattered.

She makes a sound. The pain of it comes from someplace deep, deep inside and it just erupts. Screaming, she shoves her way back into the crowd of people, elbows her way past women who stare at her with blank, desperate eyes. She fights her way to the train.

“I am a nonessential worker,” she says to the woman at the head of the line, who looks too tired to care.

“Paperwork?”

“I have dropped it in that mess,” she says, indicating the crowd. The lie tastes bitter on her tongue and makes her sick to her stomach. It is the kind of thing that draws attention, and nothing—not even war—is as frightening as the attention of the secret police. She draws herself upright. “The workers are not controlling the evacuation. It’s not efficient. Perhaps I should report this to someone.”

The criticism works. The tired woman straightens, nods briskly. “Yes, comrade. You are right. I will be more careful.”

“Good.” Vera’s heart is pounding in her chest as she walks past her into the train. At every step she is certain that someone will come for her, yell, Fraud! and haul her away.

But no one comes and finally she slows down, seeing the sea of children’s faces around her. They are packed like sardines in the gray seats, bundled in coats and hats on this sunny summer’s day—proof that no one believes they’ll be home in two weeks, although no one would dare say it. Their faces are round and sheened with tears or sweat. They are quiet. So quiet. No talking or laughing or playing. They just sit there, looking broken and numb. There are a few women around. Evacuation workers, nursery school teachers, and probably some like Vera, who could neither let their children go nor defy an order of the state.

She does not want to think about what she has done or what it will mean to her family. They desperately need the money she earns at the library....

The train seems to waken beneath her. The whistle blows and she can feel it start to move. Barely touching the seats, unable to make eye contact with the children around her, she keeps going, from one car to another.

“Mama!”

She hears Anya’s voice spike above the rattling wheeze of the train. Vera claws her way forward to the small seat where her children sit huddled together, their heads too low to allow them to peer out the window.

She slides into the seat, pulling them both onto her lap and smothering them with kisses.

Leo’s round face, wet with sweat and tears, is already dirty, although she cannot imagine how he made that happen. His eyes are damp with tears, but he doesn’t cry this time, and Vera wonders if her good-bye did something to him, if now he is less innocent or not quite so young. “You said we had to go.”

Vera’s throat feels so tight it is all she can do to nod.

“I held his hand, Mama,” Anya says solemnly. “Every minute.”

Like all good Soviets, Vera does not allow herself to question the government. If Comrade Stalin wants to protect the children by taking them south, she puts them on the train. Her great act of defiance, going with them, seems like a small thing, and the farther she gets from Leningrad, the smaller it seems. She will see that they are safe at their destination and when she knows that all is well, she will return to her job at the library. If she is lucky it won’t take more than a day or two. She will explain to her boss, Comrade Plotkin, that it was her patriotic duty to accompany the children on this state-mandated evacuation.

Words matter here in the Soviet Union. Words like patriotic, efficient, essential. No one wants to question the wrong thing. If Vera can act certain and fearless, perhaps she will be okay.

If only Mama will not worry too much. Or Olga.

“Mama, I’m hungry,” Leo says grumpily. He is curled into her lap like a tiny fiddlehead fern; his stuffed gray bunny clutched in his arms. He is sucking his thumb and stroking the soft pink satin inside the rabbit’s floppy ear.

They have been on the train only a few hours and no one has said a thing about meals or stopping or when they will arrive at their destination.

“Soon, my little lion,” Vera says, patting his padded shoulder. She can see the way the children on the train are coming out of their numbness, growing restless. A few whine; someone starts to cry. Vera is about to reach down for the small bag of raisins she has brought with her when the train’s whistle shrieks. It doesn’t stop this time, doesn’t blast once as if at a crossing and then go still. Instead, the sound goes on and on, like a woman’s scream. The brakes lock, make a grinding noise, and the train shudders in response, starts to slow.

Gunfire erupts all around them. There is the whine of an airplane engine and the explosions start.

Vera looks outside, sees fire everywhere. Panic breaks out in the train. Everyone is screaming and running to the windows.

A woman in a Party shirt and wrinkled blue wool pants makes her way through the car, saying, “Everyone off of the train. Go. To the barn behind us. Now!”

Vera grabs her children and runs. It occurs to her later, when she is at the front of the line, that she is an adult, that she should have helped the unaccompanied children, but she is not thinking straight. The airplanes keep flying overhead; the bombs drop and fires start.

Outside, all is smoke and screaming. She can hardly see anything but destruction—burning buildings, black and smoldering holes in the ground, ruined houses.

The Germans are here, pushing forward with their tanks and their guns and their bombs.

Vera sees a man coming toward her; he is wearing an army uniform. “Where are we?”

“About forty kilometers south of the Luga River,” he yells as he runs past her.

She pulls her children in closer. They are crying now, their faces streaked with black. They run with the crowd to a giant barn and cram together inside.

It is hot in here, and it smells of fear and fire and sweat. They can hear the airplanes overhead and feel the bombs that shake the ground.

“They took us right to the Germans,” some woman says bitterly.

“Shhh,” comes at once from dozens of others, but it cannot be unsaid. The truth of it sticks in Vera’s mind like a shred of metal and cannot be dislodged.

All of these people—children, mostly—waiting for a night that won’t fall, for protection that may not come at all. How can you trust a leader who sends his country’s children directly into the enemy?

Thank God she is with them. What if they had been alone?

She knows she will think this later, and for a long time; she will probably weep with relief. But later. Now she must act.

“We need to leave this barn,” she says, quietly at first, but when another bomb hits close enough to rattle the rafters and send dust raining down on them, she says it again, louder: “We need to leave this barn. If a bomb hits us—”

“Citizen,” someone says, “the Party wants us here.”

“Yes, but... our children.” She does not say what is on her mind; she cannot. But many know anyway. She can see it in their eyes. “I am taking my children out of here. I will take anyone who wants to go.”

There is grumbling around her. She is hardly surprised. Her country is a place of great fear these days, and no one knows which is more likely to kill you—the Germans or the secret police.

She tightens her hold on her children’s hands and begins to move slowly through the crowd. Even the children ease sideways to let her pass. The eyes that meet hers are distrustful and afraid.

“I will come with you,” one woman says. She is old and wrinkled, her gray hair hidden beneath a dirty kerchief. Four children stand clustered around her, dressed for winter, their pale faces streaked with ash.

They are the only ones.

Vera and the woman and their six children make their way out of the barn, past all the silent children. Outside, the countryside is gray with smoke.

“We might as well start walking,” the woman says.

“How far are we from Leningrad?” Vera asks, wondering if she has done the right thing. She feels exposed now, vulnerable to the airplanes flying overhead. To her left, a bomb falls and a building explodes.

“About ninety kilometers,” the woman says. “It will do us no good to talk.”

Vera hefts Leo into her arms and holds on to Anya. She knows that she will not be able to carry her son for long, but she wants to start out that way. Just in case. She can feel his strong, steady heartbeat against her own.

In the years to come, she will forget the hardships of that journey, how her children’s feet blistered until they bled, how their food ran out, how they slept in hay barns like criminals, listening all night for air raids and falling bombs, how they woke in a panic, thinking they’d been shot, feeling blindly for wounds that were not there. Instead, she will remember the lorry drivers who picked them up, and the people who stopped to give them bread and ask them what they’d seen down south. She will remember how she told them what she hadn’t known before: that war is about fire and fear and bodies lying in ditches by the side of the road.

By the time she gets home and stumbles into her mother’s welcoming arms, she is battered and tired and bloody; her shoes have worn through in places and the pain in her feet will not ease, even in a pail of hot water. But none of this matters. Not now.

What matters is Leningrad, her wonderful white city. The Germans are moving toward her home. Hitler has vowed to wipe this city off the map.

Vera knows what she must do.

Tomorrow, very early in the morning, she will get out of her narrow bed and dress in layers. She will pack all the sausage and dried fruit she can carry, and like thousands of other women her age, she will go south again to protect all that she loves. It is every citizen’s job.

“We have to stop them at Luga,” she says to her mother, whose face crumples in understanding. “They need workers there.”

Mama does not ask why or how or why you? All of those answers are clear. It is only the first full week of war, and already Leningrad is becoming a city of women. Every man between fourteen and sixty has gone to fight. Now the girls are going off to war, too. “I will take care of the children,” is all her mother says, but Vera can hear You come back to us as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud.

“I won’t be gone long,” Vera promises. “The library will call me patriotic. All will be fine.”

Mama only nods. They both know it is a fiction, this promise of Vera’s, but they say nothing. Both of them want to believe.