Leningrad Nights by Graham Joyce.

This is the story of a city so old and so beautiful and so terrifying that no one knows its true name. That is, it has many names, but they refuse to harden or fix and set. Every few decades the City fathers have the task of thinking up a new name, one which will last no longer than the others. And each time the name is changed, the city sheds a skin. The skins litter history, and the cities of the old names hover like ghosts, in a time and space of their own.
But what a city it was when Leo was a boy! Where even puberty passed him by, because he was too busy-trying to stay alive.
Before it happened, he was a boy happily playing one summer, in a great mythical city of slender golden spires and dazzling cupolas and secret waterways. He fished, all the time; he could talk the fish on to his line. Then the sky darkened and there was the nine hundred days siege. Then he was a man. The nine hundred days taught him everything this world had to teach him, and by then he was still only fourteen years old.
His father was killed very early in the war. It crushed his mother so deeply that it crippled her spirit and she surrendered the will to live. She was one of the first victims of the siege, contracting dysentery and dying of infection. Later he would thank the guts of the martyrs that all Russians were not so weak, or the nine hundred days would have been the ninety days and the Nazis would have been swilling vodka in the Winter Palace before the end of the first Autumn.
'Weak,' croaked Uncle Yevgeny, as they buried her. They were still burying people properly at that stage. He made a minimalist gesture with his hand. 'She was weak.'
When Yevgeny croaked like that, it was not out of sentiment. Uncle Yevgeny was a gnarled, bitter old Russian with a face carved from a bulb of knotted pine. He drank tea soaked in tincture of opium and lived alone up by the Museum of Atheism. His throat had been corrupted by smoking thick twist low-grade Turkish tobacco; now he only ever croaked or growled, or more typically abandoned speech altogether. Mother had disapproved of him, but now he was all Leo had left.
'What must I do? Uncle? What must I do?'
'Do?' Yevgeny said, turning from the fresh grave. 'What must you do? You must stay alive.'
That was the only advice or help he ever got from his uncle. Everyone else was preoccupied with surviving the siege. He stopped going to school and no one seemed to notice.
He was already accustomed to shortages. There had always been a shortage of this or that and rationing had been introduced long before the Nazis were hammering on the gates. He'd been raised with an ability to improvise, to eke out whatever was there, and he could barter like a Cossack. But nothing could have prepared him for what was to come.
Vast guns, hunkered like grey wolves on the dark horizon, pounded them from the German lines; usually with clockwork regularity, and then sometimes at any hour, just to keep the Russians on their toes. Sometimes it seemed they were making a joke out of the bombardment. Every day they would shell precisely at six o'clock for one hour, over several days. It was like waiting for the rain to give over before you could go about your business. Then one day for laughs they would start an hour early, or pause before slipping in an extra burst and everyone would be sent scurrying like rats. The guns taught Leo a lesson in the absolute laws of uncertainty.
The people would crawl out of their houses to assess the damage: this family's house demolished, or a cinema gone forever. And while everyone was full of sympathy and patriotic anger, they were secretly relieved that it was not their own miserable hovel that had sucked in the whistling shells. There would be smoke everywhere. Ribbons of dirty blue or yellow smoke suspended, unmoving, in loops and coils three feet above the street, or hanging in the blasted doorways and broken windows of the wrecked houses.
Leo did what he'd been told to do. He concentrated on staying alive. He prayed, and not to God, but to the blind justice of The Whistling Shell, that he and his house might be spared but that it might take the Godenuvs because they were dirty and known thieves, or the Kuprin family because their eldest boy now fighting on the lines had bulled Leo at school. And if he was right -and sometimes he was - he thanked the blind justice of The Whistling Shell with a selfish heart, and promised to offer up another prayer the next day, if only he might be spared.
He hoarded; anything he could get his hands on: food, firewood, matches, salt, anything which he saw was becoming scarcer. In the streets people were selling their watches, their jewellery, whatever might bring in a crust, but Leo hoarded. It got so bad that the people ate their horses. Then when they had eaten the horses, they ate what the horses ate. They ate rough oats. They even boiled up grass with the oats to make it go further. Leo learned about the colour of shit after he had eaten grass.
In desperation he turned to Uncle Yevgeny. Even though there were things about the district which scared him, he made his way to Yevgeny's apartment to beg for help.
There was no electricity to light his way as he clambered over rubble and squeezed through the blocked stairway to Yevgeny's freezing apartment. A rat scuffled on the steps, and on the third floor the handrail on the stairs swung out over the stairwell, and Leo went with it. Somebody had taken the banisters for firewood, and Leo swung out over the dark stairwell and back again as the handrail opened and closed over the death drop like a pair of shears.
Already in a state of shock, he stumbled into Yevgeny's apartment, finding the door open. Yevgeny was seated in his usual chair, gazing out of the frozen window at the ice-bound river Neva and the Museum of Atheism.
'Uncle?'
Uncle didn't stir. His eyes were open, but the frost on the window had jumped across the room to ice his blue-eyes. His hands rested in his lap, bearing a shred of cardboard. Another piece of cardboard was in his mouth, but dry. Leo wondered how many hours his uncle had been sitting there.
'What do you do. Uncle?' Leo tried to imitate Yevgeny's guttural inflections. He stood behind the seated corpse and nudged Yevgeny's elbow so that his dead uncle's bluish hand flicked in a tiny gesture. 'You survive'
Leo left Yevgeny gazing at the golden dome of the Museum of Atheism.
There was nothing edible to salvage from the apartment. Instead Leo went to the cupboard where he knew his uncle kept the samovar. What a vessel it was! It had been in the family for generations, and it had always been a matter of chagrin to Leo's mother that the samovar had fallen to Yevgeny. On the few occasions when the family had visited, Yevgeny used to take down the samovar for all to admire, and, Leo observed, to annoy his mother.
'It's too fine to make tea in!' his mother would protest.
T agree,' Yevgeny would growl, proceeding to do so anyway.
But it was true: it was too unique an object to spoil with use. The silverwork was a delight and the porcelain was decorated with pictures of serpents harried across the earth by the fiery sword of a winged saint. 'Everything that makes our family special is written on that samovar,' Leo's mother would complain bitterly after every visit. 'All my memories of childhood. Your babushka, Leo, and even my own grandfather. All my memories kept alive under the engraved silver lid. I wanted it for the family ashes, and Yevgeny cooks up his stinking brews in it!'
He would no longer. Leo took down the samovar from the shelf and wondered what he might get in return for such a beautiful object.
'Bye, Uncle,' he said, bearing the samovar out of the apartment.
'Uggh,' he croaked on his uncle's behalf, a passable personation of the old boy's minimal salutations.
Leo had no misgivings about parting with the object. His guts were clawing with hunger and besides, everyone in his neighbourhood had made sacrifices of their most personal possessions, and he felt a pleasant righteousness in joining the people in communal suffering. It was fitting. He could hold up his head.
After bearing the samovar home, he waited indoors until the pounding of the guns was over, so that he could go out when most of the people would be out of doors. Then he carried the samovar proudly into the street, plainly affording everyone equal opportunity to view this splendid artefact before they put in their bid.
He found a knot of old men and women on a street corner. They were surveying a building that had sucked in a shell. It had been a tailor's shop, and now it was a pile of rubble. Grey smoke writhed like a serpent over a broken tailor's dummy, and thence along the litter of plaster and broken lath and smashed masonry.
He marched confidently up to the whispering crowd. 'What will you give me for this rare and beautiful samovar?' he asked, thrusting the object under their noses.
They looked, first at the samovar, and then at him. Then they looked at each other. Then they laughed in his face. 'What's the use of a samovar without any tea?' cackled one of the old women.
Stung, Leo advertised the ceramic drawer at the back of the samovar, where he had seen Yevgeny keep his opium-soaked tea.
One of the old women peered into the drawer. 'What's that? Mouse droppings? The lad's trying to pass mouse droppings off as tea!'
'Here!' said another. 'Come into my house. I'll give you some mouse doings.'
One of the men inspected Yevgeny's tiny twists of tea. 'You sure it's not your own doings?' he said. They all laughed again.
it is tea!' Leo roared. He felt his cheeks flame and his eyes water. Hunger gnawed his bowels like a rat. He had marched out to make a sacrifice of his family's most treasured possession, thereby to join the suffering of the people, and the people had laughed. He was paralysed with humiliation. He couldn't even make a move to run away or hide his face.
One of the old men approached him and steered him away from his tormentors. 'No one wants a samovar,' he said gently. 'Take it home.' Leo only looked at him angrily. 'Wait here,' the man said, before going into one of the nearby houses, returning with a rough biscuit.
'One small biscuit for this?' Leo stammered.
'Look,' the man said, 'I'm only trying to save your face in front of these old women. A samovar is worth less than nothing in this city now. and maybe never will be again. Give it to me and take the biscuit; then at least you can walk home with your head up. What do you say?'
But Leo thought he was being cheated. He couldn't see that the man was acting out of kindness, and that things were going to get even worse. 'Peasants!' he shouted. 'You're all too stupid to see the value of this samovar!'
The mood of the small crowd turned. He now realised he'd made a mistake in drawing attention to himself. 'You make sure you eat that biscuit,' said another woman, 'because tomorrow it'll be your turn to go to the line. Make yourself useful and kill a few Germans.'
'Give me a gun and I'll go now,' he said, his thirteen-year-old voice cracking.
'You'll have your gun soon enough. This tailor,' she said, indicating the still-smoking ruins of the shop, 'was already measuring up your uniform. Now we'll have to find you another tailor.'
He didn't know at the time, but they didn't have any guns; and that if they had, then he would already have been sent up on the line.
'Meanwhile,' said another of the old women, for they'd rounded on him now, 'why don't you take a leaf out of those Young Pioneers' books, and stop whining about self self self all the time.' She was referring to a hand of boys and girls who went around the city trying to help people in their suffering. 'Don't think we haven't noticed you scurrying in the shadows like a canal rat, trying to pass off samovars to folk for what little they've got. Don't think it hasn't been noticed. Gel out and help folk if you can't fight and you've got nothing to do with your time.'
He was stung with tears. He ran from them, ran back to his house with the wretched samovar, and flung himself on the bed, sobbing, the breath gone out of him. His heart was lacerated with shame. He hated the old crones. He wanted to die. Hunger tore at his belly and the reproach of the old women echoed cruelly in his ears.
He regretted not accepting the biscuit, for he'd nothing left. Leo opened the ceramic drawer and surveyed the tea ruefully. Soaked in Yevgeny's tincture, it had indeed been compressed into tiny pellets. He used one of the pellets to brew himself a cup in the beautiful samovar, and when he drank the cup of tea he'd made, his hunger pains subsided almost immediately.


Tea-coloured; and gold; and immeasurably older than ever he'd suspected the city to be. That was how it appeared to him when he went outside. The entire city gone the colour of, well, if not tea, then perhaps stale chocolate, but with a soft pulsating under-radiance. And a double-image, as if there were now a second Leningrad, this one inaccurately superimposed over the first one he had known; but he knew without doubt that this new version was the real Leningrad.
He took with him a flask containing more of the tea. He floated through the streets like a wraith, marvelling at the architecture still standing and the demolished buildings equally, seeing a rhythm in the spaces between, an exceptional order to the dispensations of The Whistling Shell. And the staircases revealed by half-blasted walls were everywhere, proliferating and multiplying until he could see through walls to all the staircases in the entire city, vertiginous stairways, flights of steps, dizzying ladders, criss-crossing fire-escapes, comprising a kind of music and proportion. Astonishing to see so many hundreds and hundreds of staircases running up and down. He walked until his neck ached from gazing up at them.
He found a small girl, maybe four years old, grubbing in a pile of bricks. She wore a dirty blue smock and was half-starved. Her eyes were disproportionately large for her face and she looked at him with suspicion as he approached. When she asked him for something to eat he offered her a sip from his flask, which she took before running off into the shadows like an alley cat.
The act of dispensing that drop of narcotic tea made him feel whole again. Unable to shake the image of the
girl from his thoughts, he returned home, his heart in shreds for love of her dirty blue smock and her hunger. He saw it very clearly: a new Leningrad had been triggered, in which he could be a new person. He resolved from that moment  on  to spend his  time looking for people to help, to seek out suffering and to do what he could wherever he could. He'd been stung into action by the bottomless eyes of a tiny girl. No longer would his own  hunger,  safety or comfort be the motivating principle of his life. And there was suffering. Everywhere. His eyes had suddenly been opened. The people were dying like flies. Winter had locked in the very breath of the city and the lung-cracking cold was unbearable. If they weren't dying of starvation, the people were freezing to death. In one street he encountered the body of a woman solidly frozen in a standing position: she had leaned against a wall, exhausted, snow-covered, no food to keep her going, and had fallen asleep on her feet. She just never woke up.
He went about the city trying to do good, helping here and there,  finding a stick of fuel for this old person, scratching a bite of food for this family. He became well-  known: they called him the red-faced angel. In the places    he visited, he was very glad to see a rat. He became an expert rat-catcher, skinning them and stewing them, perhaps with a potato. With melted snow he made pans of stew this way and took it to hungry people. 'What is it?' they would invariably ask. 'Best steak,' he would say without a wink, and they thought it wonderful. 
He ventured out every day, fuelled only by the occasional sip from his tea-flask. The houses were dead. The city was becoming choke-full of ghosts, smoke hanging in the air and the reek of death and piss and shit everywhere in the streets. It was not unusual for him to stumble across corpses lying in the snow. The apartments stood like grey tombs in a necropolis, all intersecting with tracings of weird staircases. Sometimes he had to break down doors to find if anyone inside was alive.
The fact is that half the population was lost. A million people. By the end of the nine hundred day siege the body-count would be nearer a million and a half. He moved through the dying, seeing the spirits of the recently dead ascending from the bloated or frozen corpses without egress. Ectoplasmic forms stuck to ceilings and door lintels like deflating grey helium-filled balloons. He talked to them, whispering encouragement, suggesting routes through the flickering and ethereal morass of staircases.
He had one good coat but he gave it away and adopted a soiled blanket, clasped at the neck with a talismanic twist of shrapnel. He thought if he wore a piece of The Whistling Shell, the dermis of the Kruppsteel God, then he might be passed over. He was himself surviving on next to nothing. He consumed very little of the meagre food he turned up; he was running on another fuel, the light and heat and energy of the inner flame, the fire of the soul. It seemed enough, and it got him from house to house, day to day. He was inspired by love for the suffering people, by self-sacrifice and untiring hard work.
It goaded him on through the ghost city, through the slums and ghettos, grey smoke weaving and coiling about them like worms. All this suffering, the Germans, the smoky serpents; they fused together in his mind to represent a single common enemy launching all these attacks from a platform high above the city, an enemy which could be defeated if only it were possible to keep the inner lamp burning.
And he had an ally in his work. On the radio, they continued to broadcast the sound of a metronome ticking, an act of defiance, to show that the city still had central control somewhere, a heart beating bravely. Ghost broadcasts crackled over the airwaves to be followed by the dull relentless ticking of the metronome. Loudspeakers set up in the glacial streets carried the eerie rhythm. Sometimes he kicked open the doors of houses to find only corpses, or old people weak beyond speech; but the radio would be turned on and the metronome ticking. It was like the numinous presence of a minor god; Tempo, trailing audial banners the length of the march of time, reminding him that even the grey wolves at the gate would turn to fur and bone and dust. If he could out-survive them.
And his ally came in the shape of the stirring words, broadcast over the airwaves, of the boy-poet. Whatever Leo was doing he would stop and listen to his inspiration. The people talked of the boy-poet, said he was only eleven years old, but his poems rang with courage and patriotism, with defiance and exhortation. His words fell like a momentary sweetness amidst all the rot and despair and the decay. They were food and fuel to the soul. It didn't matter how deep into the hell they were falling, the poet's words were a parachute for the heart.                                                                                         	Leo loved the boy-poet, whoever he was. When he was weary and heartbroken from going about his business, the boy's words reminded Leo of his mission. He envied his spirit and faculty. Such wisdom in such youth! Leo carried his words with him like a flag wherever he went, memorising them and discussing them with the people he helped. The boy-poet betokened Leo's faith, his certainty that one day they would win through. Leo, who had never before written a word of poetry, found himself scribbling pale imitations of the poems he heard on the radio.
Then suddenly one day the boy-poet stopped broadcasting. Leo listened for an explanation, some report of the boy's circumstances amid the diminishing bulletins. There came no word. After a while he went to the radio station clutching a sheaf of his own poems to show the boy-poet and to find out why he had ceased broadcasting. He was received there by a gruff, consumptive, unshaven man who wore one half of a pair of spectacles over his right eye. 'The boy-poet? Maybe he's dead.' There was the rot of vodka on the man's breath. 'What have you got there? Let's have a look.'
The radio-station manager squinted through his single lens, giving Leo's poems the once-over. 'Hmmm. Maybe he's still alive after all. Listen tonight.'
That evening the same boy's fearless young  voice crackled over the airwaves, but this time Leo recognised the words as his own. Leo brewed himself the last of Uncle Yevgeny's tea, and wondered how that could be. Then the answer came to him. The boy was not any one individual, but the living heart and soul of the city itself, choosing with arbitrary conviction to speak through this person or that. And the man from the radio station had told him that he, Leo, had brought the boy back to life. Leo threw himself into the enterprise of poetry with augmented passion.


Though he dreaded the idea of returning, something propelled him back to his Uncle Yevgeny's apartment. He needed to make a search of the place, even though he would have to climb over the man's putrefying corpse. He had no idea of what conditions he might find it in.
Though there were patrols, there was little looting going on in Leningrad. What was the point, when everyone was trying to get rid of their material possessions in return for a bit of bread? The door to Yevgeny's apartment stood ajar, exactly as he'd left it. The wind whistled through a window where the glass had been blown out by a shell, casting flurries of snow inside the room.
Leo was astonished to find Yevgeny's cold body in fine condition. Certainly the skin was the blue colour of heated steel, but there was little evidence of decomposition. Someone had explained to him that this could be caused by the creation of a micro-climate, Leo felt the cold air circulating around the room and sniffed the body for evidence of decay. 
'I'm still here,' Leo croaked with uncanny accuracy. He had to suppress a smile at his own talent for mimicry.
It was true. The old man's glassy eyes were still fixed ahead on the ice-bound Neva and the Museum of Atheism. 'So I see, Yevgeny, so I see.'
'Uncle Yevgeny. Show a bit of respect. You're still a pup.'
'I'm a different person now, Uncle. I'm doing some good.'
'You think you can do good? No one can do good. You'll find out. What are you doing? Keep off my things.'
'I'm looking for your tea, Uncle. You must have stashed it away somewhere.'
'You stole my samovar, you little whelp. I'll come after you.'
'You'd better not. I've been around a bit since we last spoke. I've seen a few things.'
'You've seen nothing. When I was in the trenches fighting for the Tsar we had to cook and eat the enemy before we were through.'
'And I'll take this old army coat of yours if you don't mind. You won't be needing it.'
'Put it back, you dog. I saluted the Tsar while I was wearing that coat, and I saluted Lenin. None of them were any good. Keep your grubby little paws out of those pockets.'
'Ah, tea! Magnificent! I had a feeling it was in here. And medals. Uncle! I didn't know you were decorated. Mother never told me you were decorated!'
'Your mother was weak little slut with a runt offspring.'
Leo turned and fisted Yevgeny hard in the face. The impact forced the frozen head to the side. Yevgeny looked downcast. 'Don't ever speak of my mother again in that way. Yevgeny.' He re-aligned the head so that Yevgeny could continue to gaze upon the Museum of Atheism. 'I'm sorry to have be part of your moral reeducation. Uncle, and I regret not having time to complete the job. But I have important work. I may not be back this way for some lime.'
Leo pulled on the greatcoat, took the tea and decorated himself with the medals.
'And your slack-mouthed juvenile poetry is piss in the wind.' Yevgeny shouted as Leo tell the apartment.


Leo went about the city doing good wherever he could, seeking out opportunities to help people. He never disclosed to anyone the fact that the radio station had chosen to broadcast his words, fearing it an arrogance. But he encouraged discussion of the boy-poet's passionate appeals. Yes, they agreed, his words are a source of unflagging inspiration to us all, and no, he had lost nothing in nobility of thought or in the power of his invective.
Leo was almost delirious with a mixture of humility and pride on hearing the suffering people speaking about his poems as they came over the radio. Humility and pride. And perhaps that was when the split first occurred.
Sheltering one day from the early evening chorus of The Whistling Shell, he sipped at his tea-flask and composed poems of metronomic metre with a tiny stub of pencil as the agents of pride found their way in. Hiding behind the crump of gunfire and detonations, they winged in on the mortars and infiltrated with the stealth of grey smoke. Leo wrote a line and scratched it out; wrote and scratched. But he was already lost. The whispering of these unseen agents had already found ear. If he could bring the boy-poet back from the dead, they reasoned, could he not also restore life to others? There is no death, he wrote in his notebook. Humility scratched it out. Pride wrote it in again, this time in a firmer hand. When the evening bombardment had given way to the canticles of the howling wind, Leo ventured out again. From that moment on he went from house to house, seeking out the worst cases, the near-corpses, the death-in-life situations, the most hopeless conditions in which he could work.
The cold and ice raged. That winter of 1941-42 had fangs of crystal and steel. The people he passed in the streets wore full-face masks to protect their skin from being stripped by the wind: red masks, blue, green, black. Lustreless eyes looking back at him from the peepholes cut in the masks. The trolleybuses stood dead on their tracks, hung with ice, creatures of extinction. Leo had to give up poetry when the ink froze in his inkwell and his last centimetre of pencil vanished in his hands in the middle of a sprung rhythm. He was still finding bodies, stiff as sticks frozen in the street having given up the ghost on their way home after collecting water from holes hacked out of the Neva ice.
His search for the worst cases took him to the Haymarket district. Around the Haymarket the scum and cutthroats of Leningrad plied their business. He was afraid, that was certain. He was, after all, still a boy and at that time rumours of cannibalism were rife. Everyone would claim that they knew someone who had a friend who had had one of their children abducted by the cannibals. Everything at that time was believable. Was there cannibalism in Leningrad during the nine hundred days siege? One does not ask questions to which one already knows the answer. And the stories insisted that the cannibals prized child-meat above all other. It was dangerous to wander around at night. But guided by the inner flame, he was drawn to the worst areas of the city.
Perhaps the ghouls left him alone because they thought he was mad. A filthy thirteen-year-old boy, shuffling along in Yevgeny's over-sized greatcoat, decorated with pre-revolutionary honours. And he argued with himself as he went about his way. Impassioned debates ostensibly to keep himself awake or to prevent himself from drifting into the gold and sewer-brown narcotic mist of the alternative Leningrad. Sometimes it happened that his tiring spirit would lose an argument with himself, and the humble spirit within him would shelter under a broken stairwell, to sleep, to dream, while the  proud  and  angry  spirit would  split  away,   racing contemptuously from one phantom staircase to another in the massive over-arching gallery of the transparent city.
But while the humble spirit dozed, the split would not endure for long and the haughty spirit would return, apologetic, having found from somewhere a meaty, savoury stew, hot and steaming, with which to revive his brother. And the humble spirit, not knowing if this was real or an apparition of the fuel of Good Work, would accept it anyway. 'What is it? Is it rat?'
'Best steak,' the haughty spirit would reply without a wink. 'We can do nothing if you die on me.'
So perhaps the ghouls left this mad boy alone as he
made his way through the corrupting shadows of the
Haymarket. Maybe some race-memory of the deranged
antics of the shaman  scared them  off.  For whatever
reason the scum and the spivs, the pimps and the detritus
of the worst of all wars in the coldest of ail cities eyed
him suspiciously and with polluted eyes, but allowed him
to pass unmolested.
Then, in one apartment, lying on a bed of filthy rags,
he found a young woman, skinny and dystrophic, but
pregnant and very close to her time. She couldn't even
move from her bed for sickness and cold and hunger.
Another twenty-four hours, Leo figured (and how he'd
become expert in making these assessments as he moved
among the sick and the dying), and she would have
joined the one and a half million.
What was miraculous was that the baby was still alive inside her. He placed his hand on the woman's distended belly and felt it move. This he took as a special sign: this one was for him. The woman's eyes failed to register him as he kneeled by the bedside. Her spirit had already died and only her feeble body anchored  it to  this world. Exactly what he  was  looking  for.  He,  Leo  Shapoval, thirteen-and-a-half years old, would take it upon himself to bring both her and her baby back from the dead.
He   took   her   hand.   She   was  grey   with   cold.   She couldn't  have  been  much   older than   eighteen  or so herself. He tore down some old curtains and piled them on the bed. Then he went out to pillage neighbouring houses for anything that would burn. While levering a door from its frame he was spotted by a looter patrol,  and fired upon. They gave chase but he escaped. After an hour he returned with several strips of broken lath, made a fire and boiled up some water.
His first act was to trickle some drops of opium tea into her mouth, before taking a sip himself. Then he set about changing the bedding. It was soiled and filthy, so he burned all that and put down fresh bedding for her. Her clothes stuck to her body. He undressed her completely, took a rag soaked in the boiling water and washed her like a baby from head to foot, hoping that some feeling might be restored to her limbs, or that some lustre would return to her eye. There was not a flicker of hope.
He rushed out into the street again- He desperately needed to make her a thin broth, something that would revive her. He was confident that of all of the people he had helped, someone would now come to his aid. But he found no one who would part with so much as a grain
They had nothing; or they pretended to have nothing, and they turned their shamed faces away from him. Now they could no longer look him in the eye, those who had once laughed at him. He was frantic. He went about for three hours. Then he found a man baking bread. Bread! He watched the man bake his 'bread' from sawdust and glue. Sawdust and glue and a fingerful of flour. The man promised Leo a slice - and one slice only - when it was baked. After a fight someone gave him a potato.
He made a soup of the potato. Then he went back to collect his promised slice of sawdust loaf and crumbled that into the soup. He dipped his finger and let the soup trickle into the girl's mouth. She coughed, but eventually she swallowed it, and then she took some more. What was left he set aside for later, but he knew it was hopelessly inadequate. Her Needed meat. Just a little. Just enough to give her and her baby some strength.   
Ground meat was available at the Haymarket, at fantastic prices. Three or four hundred rubles for a few patties. It was always patties, for who knows what goes into a patty? The people who sold the patties were always big men with heavy boots. And they were invariably fat, with soft, pink cheeks, while everyone else around them was a floating wraith. Something about the soft, pink and yet leathery texture of their skin gave rise to speculation. But it made no difference. The price was utterly beyond his reach. He despaired.
'It's no good,' he said aloud. 'She's too far gone.'
The proud boy sniffed from across the room and tossed another stick of wood on the fire. 'Not this one. This one is mine.'
'I'm sick of it,' said the humble boy. 'I'm too tired. I can't do this any more.'
'And I'm sick of your constant whining. Why don't you stay here. I'm going out.'
'Don't!' The humble boy's head was nodding. 'I know what you do.'
'Stay here. Look at her. Write a poem. Get some sleep.' And with that the proud boy ran up a flight of tea-and-gold coloured stairs, and was gone.


'What do you know about pregnant women. Uncle? What can you tell me about childbirth?'
The late winter sunlight lanced off the golden dome of the Museum of Atheism and reflected from the icy crystals of Uncle Yevgeny's eyes. The effect was one of the remarkable iridescence. 'I don't care about pregnant women,' Yevgeny wept. 'Look what they did to my leg.'
Leo glanced down and winced. Someone had amputated Yevgeny's left leg at the knee. Neither was the amputation a surgical operation. The job had been performed frantically, perhaps with an axe.
'You won't be needing it. Uncle. You're not going anywhere.'
'It's not right.'
'I've got more important things to worry about. What can you tell me of childbirth?'
'What do I know? Have your boot laces ready.'
'My boot laces? What for?'
'You'll figure it out.'
'You're an old shit, Uncle. You know that? A frozen turd.' Leo stood behind the corpse of his uncle and sniffed. Still no signs of decomposition. He aligned himself with Yevgeny's view of the Museum of Atheism. 'What do you see there? Tell me what you sec every day.'
'I see Isaac'
'Who?'
'You're an ignorant little communist-reared brat. That is the cathedral of St Isaac. I see the saint rising out of the dome, an inch at a time. One day it will be a cathedral again. Oh, my leg! My leg!'
When he returned to the house his small fire was winking out in the grate. He fed it the last of his fuel and tossed whatever he'd found into the pot. He was shivering with exhaustion, and knew that he had to find a way to keep both of them warm. Stripping off his own damp clothes he climbed into bed beside the skinny woman. She was the first woman he'd ever seen naked, and she was not a pretty sight. Undernourished, feeble, sickly, skin hanging on bone and an ugly swollen belly like a pig's bladder. It was not an erotic experience for young Leo.
Finally he fell asleep, cradling her to him, trying to think warmth into her. He refused to let her die. He knew that if she died, then it would also be over for him. Once in the night he woke up and thought she had finally let her spirit go, but no, she breathed again. The wind outside moaned and complained at a soul dropped in transit, a spirit fumbled, but the woman had chosen to come back to him. All through the night he rocked her, holding life into her, keeping her just centimetres from the dark precipice.
The next day the same. He washed her with hot water and trickled some of the meat broth - yes it was meat -into her mouth, and he fancied that he could see some colour coming back into her sore limbs. The second night he embraced her to him. This time he woke in the freezing night to find her arm locked tightly around him. Her clinch was unbreakable, but he knew that the impossible had been enacted: he had loved her back to life.
That next day something sparked in her eye, a brief flare, tiny, but in the cosmos of her iris a comet travelling across the loneliness of space. She took in his presence and looked about the room. She placed her hand on her belly to feel if the baby was still there, and seemed dismayed to find that it was. He gave her a little more broth, perhaps too much, or maybe it was too strong for her, because she vomited it up again.
'Come on,' he said, 'that's my best steak.' But she was too weak to smile, let alone answer. Her rejection of the food notwithstanding, after a week of tender nursing she was coming back to life.
Later he gave her more of the broth and this time she kept it down. Leo looked out of the window with satisfaction.   Down   in   the   smoky,    tea-coloured,    snow-shrouded street stood a boy in an army greatcoat bedecked with campaign medals. The boy waved back at him.
He had other things to worry about. The baby was about to arrive.
The girl shuddered and wept and uttered the name of some saint he'd never heard of. Then she spoke her first words to him. 'Go and get someone who knows what to do.'
'I'm your only hope,' he told her.
She cursed him. Her second words to him were a volley of filth. He'd never heard anyone speak quite that way. alternating between appeals to saints and demons. He didn't mind in the least: wasn't he her saviour? She groaned as a contraction came and he tried to comfort her with lines from one of his poems,
'Believe in the future, because the future for us is the present.'
She stopped groaning when she heard that, squeezing her eyelids together as if trying to focus on him. Then she threw back her head and cackled maniacally. Her laughter unnerved him. There came a scratching at the window, and there, outside in the dark, floated the doppelganger-boy in his army greatcoat, shaking his head in dismay.
He ignored the apparition suspended at the window. 'Tell me what to do,' he said, 'because there's no one else.' In truth he could have gone to find some old woman to come and boil water and administer to the whole messy business, but he was committed. She was his, and the baby was his.
Yet he knew nothing of life other than what the siege had taught him. He knew how babies got to be where this one was, and he wouldn't have minded the opportunity to practice with someone to make another. But the business of how they emerged, or how to get them out ... He was utterly ignorant.
But he had with him the blessed elixir, the divine poppy juice. Already schooled in its best effects, he let her sip tea from his flask in judicious doses, and though she still moaned with pain she was able to ride her contractions like a small boat on the barrel of a wave. A gelatine-like fluid formed over her eyes and her manner softened. 'What's in that tea?' 'Never mind that.'
She reached out a hand and tousled his hair. 'Whatever it is, you little runt, you're a fucking saint.'
He took a pull on the tea himself, and the first ten hours was easy enough. He swabbed her and held her hand. He recited lines which he told her soared from the pen of the boy-poet. She tolerated this for a while until she exploded from within her opium cocoon to protest, 'Give it a rest, will you?'
I thought the   words  of the boy-poet would be  a
comfort to you.'
'That radio-fuck? I hate the whining little milksop. I always have hated him - him and his piss-quick doggerel. I can't believe you remembered his words just to bring them to my maternal bed! What fucking abominable luck! In the name of Judas give it a rest!'
'Don't you like poetry?'
'Fuck! Jesus and Judas! Mary's milk! Not another line, please!'
Tine. I won't say any more.'
She was the first person he'd met ever to claim open hostility to his free verse. It was a salutary lesson in literary criticism. But he had little time for authorial sulking, because her contractions increased and her waters broke.
'More tea, little brother, more tea!'
Like a tempted saint, he had so far managed to keep his eyes averted from her vagina. Now as she drew up her knees and opened it to him, he was terrified. It was as if he'd secretly hoped that the baby might be spewed up from her mouth, but as he squinted in horror at her distended labia he felt he was peering at the Gales of Life: smooth, living and pulsating pillars of pink, mottled porphyry, veined with marble and grown around with a rampant ivy. It was the notion of what lay within or behind these gates that intimidated him, for he knew that they gave passage into a shadowy damp cavern glistening with the mercurial rivulet, the herald trickle, and that the cavern itself gave way to a roaring cosmos in which solar blizzards buffeted and shrieked with cold hard energy and blinding starlight. He backed away.
But the baby was coming, and he was gripped with an irrational terror that when it arrived it would be demonic, but resembling him exactly, fully formed at his
present age and that there would be an exchange of souls where he would have to take the baby's place sheltering in that solar blizzard of energy, waiting for the  next opportunity to be born.
He saw a purple bulge appear, and there and then he made a prayer and a poem and a dedication and a promise on that baby's head and on the safety of his own soul that he would spend the rest of his life devoted to doing good. How was he to know it wasn't the baby's head he was looking at, but the distended tissues of vagina and anus. He'd sworn his most profound and dizzying oath on the spare flesh of an arse and a cunt.
But the baby did come, and when it did it shot out of her and right into his hands, milky with vernix. It was so slippery he almost dropped it. The energy blizzard, the shrieking of the raw cosmos behind the Gates of Life. got louder in his ears. He hadn't been prepared for the baby's colour,  which  matched  the  tone   of  Uncle   Yevgeny's cadaver; or for the slightly conical head, which, even as he stared at it, seemed to be resetting in orthodox fashion; or for the small black lakes of its eyes which fixed on him and blinked with unconvincing cinematic animation. Moreover there was a membrane on the baby's face, a caul. It didn't seem right and, instincts taking over, he stripped the caul away with his fingers.
The woman lay groaning on the bed. He knew that the umbilical   cord  couldn't  stay  there  holding  the  two together so he plunged his knife in some water he had boiling and made to chop it. 'Not yet!' she panted.
He waited. The afterbirth eventually slithered out like a sack of blood and tripe. The shrieking and roaring from the aperture of life went on unabated, louder even.
'Tie the cord in two places,' she said above the noise he was hearing. 'Where is your string?'
String was the last thing he'd thought of. String was for preparing parcels for the post office, not for equipping babies for life. Then he remembered something Uncle Yevgeny said, and he unlaced his boots.
'Tight,' she said, 'tie it really tight.'
He tied one of his laces near the baby's abdomen and the other further down the umbilical cord. She motioned that he should cut. He cut, and the shrieking stopped. But for the breathing of the new mother, and the soft leathering of snow at the window, there was no sound. He held the baby in his arms and it blinked at him with an expression of perplexed relief.
'What is it?' the woman wanted to know.
He looked at its blue-grey skin, its bruised head, and said, 'What do you mean?'
'Is there anything between its legs, you fool?'
He peered hard, and for a long time. 'Only the usual.'
She laughed hard, and sat up. 'Give me the baby. Here. It's a boy.' She fell back laughing, holding the baby to her breast. 'Only the usual.'
Leo was shocked by the sound of laughter. He couldn't remember when last he'd heard it. He laughed, and he ran to the window, opening it to the soft billows of snow. 'May I, Leo Shapoval,' he shouted joyfully to the dark street, 'announce Only The Usual.' Then he dosed the window again.
But the laughter stopped for both of them, because there was more to do. 'I must get clean,' she said.
The maternal bed was a hideous mess. Leo stared at the sack of afterbirth, almost as big as the baby itself. Perhaps it was because she was starving, or maybe she knew it was good for her. whatever, she stuck her hand into the afterbirth and stuffed some of it into her mouth, gagging on it at first, but then swallowing. It made Leo want to vomit, but she didn't even seem to think about it as she wolfed down another handful of the stuff.       
After she'd told him to dispose of the rest of the placenta, he cleaned them both. First the baby, which he wrapped in one of his mother's traditional babushka scarves he'd brought from the house. Then he cleaned up the mother. She'd had a bowel movement during the delivery and the blankets were soaked with blood and shit. 'Pretty messy,' he said. 'You try it sometime.'
'I'm not criticising. I was just thinking: it's a pity everyone can't be a mature witness to their own birth. After all the shit and blood, everything from this moment on is progress.'
She looked at him hard, and stroked his cheek. 'You're all right, kid. I don't know who the hell you are, but you're my guardian angel. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for sending him! What did you say your name was?'
'I'm Leo. Are you of a religious bent?'
'I'm Natasha. I think we should call this baby after you.'
He looked at the babushka-wrapped miracle of warmth and breath. He was beautiful. 'Can we call him Isaac?'
'Sure we can. Isaac. What day is it? Do you know? Does anyone still know?'
He had to thumb through his notebook to work it out. 'It is December 21 st.'
'Longest night. Now the days will get longer and the nights will get shorter. Leo. I feel our luck is changing.'
She made him keep the caul.
Leo could see that Natasha was a very rough kind of woman, hard-bitten and coarse-mouthed, even at her young age. But all that counted for nothing. Natasha was his sleeping princess. She was the property of fable.
'Who are you, Leo?' she asked him repeatedly.
'Can't you see it doesn't matter who I am? I've brought both you and the child back from the brink. Together we have cheated death!'
'Listen, Leo. I'm going to have to disappoint you now. I'm afraid you've saved a whore and a whore's brat. Do you know what a whore is? It means you've saved less than nothing.'
'Nonsense!' he cried. 'It doesn't matter what you were before the war. The past is all aflame. The march of future will be our present - '
'Fuck the saints! Will you please stop speaking to me in poetry! I can't stand it!'
'What I mean is. things can be different now.' 
'You're young. Very young.' The baby started to cry. 'Look,  Isaac  can't  get  enough  milk.  I'm  not  strong enough to be a mother to him.'
Leo looked across the room. There his doppelganger waited, nodding his head. 'I'm going out to get something to eat. You'll be all right.'
'Promise you'll come hack, Leo? Promise?'
'I promise.'
Leo went directly from there to the Haymarket vendors. Patties were still on sale at mythical prices. Natasha had told him to take the caul with him. 'What on earth for?'
'If you put it about that you have a baby's caul, someone might give you something for it. It's considered good luck, especially to the sailors. They believe it's a charm to prevent them from drowning.'
But no one was much interested in a caul. The fat, soft-skinned spivs looked at him with contempt, wrinkling their noses. One bald-headed trader of expensive furs and shrunken beetroots leered at him. He had the eyes of a dead fish. 'But a good-looking boy like you can always earn himself a patty in five minutes.'
'How?'
The spiv stuck out a blue slug of a tongue, waggling it
lasciviously.
'Fuck your mother on a dark grave,' shouted Leo's doppelganger from over his shoulder. The fat spiv only shrugged and stamped his feet against the cold.
Leo made his way to Uncle Yevgeny's. Someone had made a fire in the downstairs doorway. He had to step over the wet ashes. 'Ho, Uncle,' he cried, when he got upstairs. 'You don't look too good.'
'My arm is gone,' Yevgeny protested. 'And how am I suppose to balance if f lose my other leg?'
'Hey, that reminds me. Your advice about boot laces. Came in very handy. Got any more tips about child-raising?'
'Drown them at birth. They'll never do you any good-One day they'll break your heart.'
Leo put his nose close to Yevgeny's neck. 'Oh! I do believe you are finally on the turn, Uncle. You'll be no good to anyone. Still, it was good while it lasted. wonder what changed.'
'They burned the door, downstairs. It affected the through-draft.'
'Why are you talking to a stiff?' asked the doppelganger.
'He's a better conversationalist now than ho ever used to be,' Leo protested.
'Hey! Less of the abuse!' growled Yevgeny.
'It makes me sick to hear you chattering away to a decomposing corpse.'
'I agree he's on the turn,' Leo said, 'but just occasionally he has a useful contribution to make.'
'Get what you came for and let's go.'
'Owl My last leg!' Yevgeny shouted.
'Damn it, I cut myself,' Leo said.
'Get out of here,' said the doppelganger. 'I'm going to torch the place.'
'Is that necessary?'
'Of course it is. With that front door burned off you don't know who's going to walk in and find this old bugger. There will be questions asked.'
'Before you go,' Yevgeny groaned, 'look in the drawer. Something for Natasha. Not that it will do you any good, for you're beyond all redemption.'
Leo opened the top drawer of the writing table. There-were two books. One was a prc-revolutionary army-issue Bible. The other was the Comrade's Guide to Civic Duty, Leo took both. The doppelganger was tearing up floorboards and stacking them under Yevgeny's chair. Leo got out. He was two hundred metres away before he turned and saw flames flickering in Yevgeny's apartment.


'Leo, you work wonders. You really are a saint. Where do you get all this? I've never eaten so well in months. Where do you get it from?'
'I made lots of contacts. People know me.' Leo had moved Natasha and her baby out of the unsavoury Haymarket hovel and into the family home. In turn she cleaned the place thoroughly, made it more like the dwelling house it used to be. It was superior to anywhere she'd ever experienced, and she said so. He showed her his mother's best linen, and the silverware, and the samovar. 'You're too trusting,' she told him. 'Most whores would steal everything you've got.'
'So? Steal it. I've learned that I don't need any of it. Anyway, you're not like most whores.' 'What do you know, you little runt? Don't look at me that way! When I call you names it's a joke. Try to see it as a sign of affection. What exactly is in this broth we're eating?'
'Best steak.'
'So you keep telling me. Far be it from me to complain, Leo, you work miracles, but I think this time it's on the turn.'
'Shall I pour it away?'
'Are you crazy? We might not see the like for another six months. I only make the observation. And now my milk has come in properly Isaac is thriving. It's just that I can't help being curious about where you go.'
'All right. There are rumours around that the ice road is proving more successful every week. The occasional truck gets through. I think I've noticed an improvement, but it's more than I dare to speak about.'
'The ice-road!'
The ice-road was almost mythical. A perilous fogbound sheet of glass, forming, breaking, re-forming to allow the sporadic relief convoy to squeeze between the blockade, a finger of relief prised between the windpipe and the frigid Nazi death grip. Some doubted its existence; most believed, and in their minds the ice-road was supernatural in its manifestations, a plumed serpent dipping from between the stars of the galaxy, or an iridescent leviathan sinking beneath the ice and rising again. The need to believe in the supernatural was strong, a survival reflex deep in the group mind. Useless rationality itself was rotting, ready to fall away like the spare inch of umbilical cord days after a delivery.
'The ice-road!' Natasha whispered to suckling Isaac. Leo shivered. If he was going to give her hope like this he   was   going   to   have   to   make   the   ice-road   more successful.
Natasha turned to him. 'Do you know what day it is
tomorrow?'
He shrugged. 'Wednesday maybe. Or Saturday.' 'I'm going to show you something. We'll go out.' 
'You're not well enough to go out!' 
'Yes I am. My strength is returning.' 
The following evening Natasha wrapped Isaac against the cold. She insisted they go out during a bombardment. 'No one must see us. Let's go now the shelling is at its heaviest.' The guns pounded from the lines and the shells whistled softly as they pummelled the town. Natasha led Leo to a place near the Summer Palace.
She led him to a library he recognised, though without her revealing a downward flight of steps, he would never have known of the cellar beneath. She pushed open a door to reveal an untidy circle of people, each of whom held a lighted candle against the dank and dark of the cellar. They looked up instantly,  and with  frightened
eyes.
'Natasha,' one of them breathed. 'It is Natasha! We
thought you were dead!'
The group instantly relaxed, embracing Natasha in turn. There were four elderly men and seven or eight women of different ages. 'So few of us now!' Natasha
said. One of the elderly men spoke up. 'We don't know who is dead, or in whom the spirit has died,' he said, hugging her fondly, 'but it warms my heart to see you tonight.'
Leo hung back, holding little Isaac, until Natasha beckoned him forward to be introduced. They shook his hand or kissed him and fussed the baby as if it were the last infant on earth. 'He's one of us,' Natasha said of Leo proudly. 'He doesn't know it yet, but he's one of us.'
'What's that?' Leo wanted to know.
The oldest man, a patriarch called Nikoli with a forked, iron-grey beard said, 'I'm sorry but we don't have a lot of time. We would like to be through before the bombardment ends.' A lighted candle was thrust into Leo's hand and he found himself drawn into the circle. 'On this special night,' Nikoli intoned, 'we thank you for bringing your daughter Natasha back to us, for her son Isaac, and for our new brother Leo. Each new or refound soul is a grain of light in this dark place, added to the general store. We ask for strength in the coming trials.'
The group murmured an answer to this appeal and began to sing. For fear of being discovered they sang in very soft, muted tones, and words that Leo had never heard before, but which Natasha knew by heart. Then Leo noticed something strange happening. During the singing, one of the group put down her candle, leaving it to burn on the floor, and she left without a word. A few moments later another member of the group did the same, then another. Soon there was only Nikoli and Natasha   singing,   with  Leo  gazing  dumbly  on.  When they'd finished, Nikoli said. 'You go now and I'll follow in a few minutes.' He began to extinguish the flickering candles with his thumb and forefinger. 'Tomorrow?' Natasha said.
'But of course tomorrow!' Nikoli answered with a grin, but in the orange candlelight Leo could see that his leathery face was lined beyond all care. Then Natasha was tugging his sleeve. They left silently and were halfway home before the bombardment ended.
'Fuck the saints, I'm freezing!' said Natasha when they got home, 'but wasn't it worth it?'
'What   are  they?'  Leo  asked.   'Some  kind   of  devil-worshippers?'
Natasha's face fell. 'Are you joking?'
'Of course I'm joking. They're Christians, aren't they?
As you are. I knew. Even though you said you were a
whore.' A light died in her eye when he said that, so
rather quickly he asked, 'How did yon know they were
going to be there?'
She smiled again. 'It's Christmas Eve, of course! You didn't know that. Why should you? It's a special day for
us.' 'Bui I did know, in a way. Here, I brought something
for you.'
Leo had wrapped Yevgeny's army-issue Bible in a silk scarf of his mother's. Natasha accepted the gift, but before unwrapping it she stared hard at Leo and then flung her arms around him, smothering him in kisses. 'Stop it! Stop it! You haven't opened it yet!'
'But it's Christmas, Leo; it's what people used to do at Christmas. They gave each other gifts, and I have nothing for you!'
'You already gave me Isaac! Open it!'
She unwrapped the silk and her jaw dropped. She stroked the cheap binding, turned the Bible over and over, as if it were hot to hold. 'You know the trouble you could get into for having this?'
'I can't see why. I had a quick look at it, and it didn't seem to make much sense.'
'Where did you get it?'
Leo didn't have time to answer because there came a hammering on the door. Leo was paralysed. It had been so long since anyone had knocked upon his door that he didn't know what to do. Then Natasha lifted up her skirts and, almost by sleight of hand, spirited the small Bible away.
Leo moved to answer the door, opening it just a crack. Outside was a military man in a greatcoat. He wore a seaman's cap. 'Are you Leo Shapoval?'
'Yes.'
'I heard you've got a caul.'
He led the sailor inside and introduced him to Natasha. Leo spotted a movement in Natasha's eyes when she saw the man but though little of it. The sailor had overheard that a young boy had been trying to sell a caul in the Haymarket. He'd traced Leo here.
'We never see sailors these days,' Leo said.
'I got sick leave. Got a ride in a truck that came through the ice-road,' said the sailor.
'The ice-road.' Natasha murmured to Isaac. 'So it is true.' She seemed to bury her head in her baby's clothes. 'It's getting easier to break through,' said the sailor. 'Look, I don't have much money, but I can offer a few things.' He produced from his duffle-bag two apples, a tin of corned beet, a packet of dried figs and a bar of chocolate. What do you say?'
'Wow!' said Leo. 'I'd say we accept. Natasha?' Natasha turned her face to the sailor for the first time. 'Of course we accept,' she said boldly.
Leo got the caul and gave it to the sailor, who held it in his hand as if it were a crystal in which he could see a dry future. Then he prepared to go, but before doing so he turned to Natasha. 'Have we met before?'
'No,' said Natasha, too firmly. 'We have never met
before.'
The sailor coloured. 'My mistake. I'll be on my way. Thank you for the caul. May you all survive.'
Leo saw the sailor to the door. When he returned Natasha was strangely quiet. Her eyes carried the inward stare. 'God bless all the sailors,' she said. 'God bless the ships at sea. God bless all the men who have sailed in me.' Then she wept.
Leo, understanding none of this, said, 'Hey, sister! No need to cry! We've got all these good things the sailor brought. We've got each other. We've got Isaac!'
But that only caused great shuddering sobs to wrack her body. 'Are we in hell, Leo? Have we done bad things? [ have been so wicked in my life.'
'We're all of us selfish, Natasha. All of us.'
Natasha sobs became hideously mixed up with laughter. 'You! You're a saint, Leo! A fucking angel! That's what upsets me so. 1 don't deserve you. If God has chosen to send me an angel then I must be so deep in hell that He is afraid I will never get out.'
'But I'm not an angel. And I don't believe in God.'
'But you're more of a Christian than any of them! if you have a coat, you give it away. You feed others before you feed yourself. You wander the scorched earth looking to do good. You go out of your way to help vile rubbish like myself.'
'Don't say that! I won't hear it!' Leo was on his feet. Now it was his eyes that were wet.
'I'm sorry. Come here, let me hold you.' Leo submitted his head to be cradled by her free arm. Isaac seemed to Mare at him wide-eyed from his position at the other breast, 'Shall I tell you why I believe? The communists hate a whore. They said I was the worst kind, the original capitalist parasite. We won't mention that Lenin was a frequent punter at the Leningrad brothels; and I could tell you things I've heard about Uncle Joe Stalin that would make your skin crawl. And I spent two years in a re-education camp, with my head shaved, where my communist mentors called for my services in the night. One of my educators lectured us about the fetish-value of gold in a capitalist society during the day. At night he would make me wear a pair of golden high-heeled sandals. He always asked me how much I used to charge men in my old life. Then the pig would bend me over the table. Yes, it was quite a re-education. My arse would be so sore and he had me repeat over and over, "M-C-M" and "C+V+S" and all those things. Do you know what it means?'
'Not really.' Leo had become subdued. She stroked his hair.
'Something about surplus value and commodities. I never understood why they wanted us to know all that. But anyway it was at the camp that I met a woman, there to be re-educated because she was a Christian. She told me that Jesus loved whores and had a special place in his heart for a slut in the Bible called Mary Magdalene.
'She told me many things. She didn't need a Bible, it was all engraved word for word in her heart. We used to say "JC+MM=L". Love. We had private communion where she showed me how to eat the body and the blood of Jesus.'
Leo's ears pricked up. 'You did what?'
'We ate the body of Jesus. It's called Holy Communion. Tomorrow I will take you back to that place and we will all take the communion together. What's the matter, Leo, you look strange.'
Leo got up and filled the samovar with water. He had a hundred questions, but he couldn't ask any of them. 'Nothing. My stomach hurts. I'm going to make some special tea.'
'I thought you never would.'

The next day, being Christmas Day, there was no shelling. The haphazard deity of The Whistling Shell gave way to the discriminating God of The Middle-Eastern Shepherd Cult, but it gave the citizens of Leningrad no peace, because all day long they assumed it was a German trick, a ruse, a feint. The Hun. they were certain, would be sure to punish the communists for their atheism by slipping in a few mortars at the exact moment of the putative saviour's birth. Though even this was problematic since the despised and deposed Eastern Orthodoxy decreed that the saviour had sprung from his mother's virgin loins at precisely twenty minutes before six in the morning, whereas the Catholic or Calvinist Germans were rather more vague about the exact moment in which an unending ray of light entered this world.
They didn't seem to think it might have been twenty to six, Leo considered, since he was awake at that hour, and all was quiet. He'd been unable to sleep since Natasha had told him that they were to spend the day gorging on the cadaver of the saviour, if he had understood things right. But Natasha had also told him that the Germans, being not of Eastern Orthodox persuasion in these matters, had a looser idea about the exact moment of the nativity. That, it seemed, was more in line with his notion of the random dispensations of The Whistling   Shell.   Lying  awake   in   bed   that   Christmas morning, his mind was already turning on a synthesis of the two creeds, one in which The Whistling Shell was
sucked into the bosom of the suffering servant in an act of supreme sacrifice.                                                              As he understood things from Natasha, there was the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The first of these two were pretty damned clear, but the last figure in the trinity was a much more shadowy identity. Could this have been another name for the Kruppsteel God of The Whistling Shell? The point about the indiscriminate proclivities of The Whistling Shell was that in its dispensations it also triggered the random acts of kindness which motivated Leo in his wanderings throughout the city. Perhaps this could be rendered as a Marxist-style formula: F+S+WS. He was unsure. He would have to ask Natasha, who knew more about these things.
He became aware that Natasha, lying next to him, was awake and looking at him. Isaac, snug and warm between the two of them, slept on. 'What are you thinking?' Natasha asked. 'You are always thinking!'
Leo was about to answer, but she placed a finger on his lips. 'Never mind. I want to say something. In the night I woke and I cried because I had no gift to give you on Christmas Day. You, who have given me life, and my son's life, and your constant care and love. Why, you even troubled in all of this to find me a precious Bible. And I have nothing to return.'
'It doesn't matter.'
'Shhh! Let me speak. It was then, in the night, that I remembered I do have something very special to give you after all.'
She lifted Isaac, still sleeping, from between their bodies and laid him at the foot of the bed. Then she turned to him, her grey eyes like woodsmoke.
'What?' Leo said. 'Why are you looking at me like that?'
She kissed him. 'You're so sweet, Leo. You don't even know what it's for.' She reached down under the blankets and gently closed her fingers around his cock. He flinched immediately, but she held on to him. His breath came short as his cock started to fatten in her hand. 'See, Leo? You only need a little help.'
He was speechless as she teased him to full erection. 'I'm too sore and damaged from giving birth to Isaac,' she whispered, 'but there is some other thing I can do for you.'
Natasha planted a row of kisses down his chest. There-was a cloying perfume that made him think, inexplicably, of dark orchids in the glasshouses of the State Horticultural Institute. He yelped when she slipped his cock into her mouth, thinking she must surely be planning to bite it off; perhaps as part of her perverse communions and body-eating rituals. But she stopped what she was doing, reassured him, stroked his cheek tenderly before resuming- It was while he shuddered, wide-eyed with pleasure and terror, that across the room he saw the doppelganger, a shivering, ice-clung, boar-crusted boy gazing back at him, astonished, incredulous.
Ignoring the doppelganger he closed his eyes, abandoning himself to her. She was like an orange flame burning on a landscape of snow as she worked away; her mouth like a hot wind around an ice-fountain. And then he heard it. Or perhaps he only thought he heard it. One solitary whistling shell, falling softly from the sky, slow and drawn-out as it tumbled from the vortex of heaven, trilling and piping in the cold air until, in a sudden, tumultuous acceleration, it exploded in the street outside. Leo opened his eyes momentarily, to see the blast suck the doppelganger clean out of the window.


The congregation had one or two less for the Christmas Day service than had been present for the previous evening's ceremony. The sense of disappointment was palpable. The patriarchal Nikoli referred to it in his informal talk. 'What can we do? They're starving, they're sick. Just to find the energy to move around consumes all their reserves. We'll pray for them.'
And after a prayer Nikoli said, 'Perhaps we are, all of us, being tested. Perhaps all of our suffering is a test, just as our Saviour was tested with suffering. Perhaps God wants to know how many of us will fall when so tested. And how tempting it is, under the burden of our suffering, to take the easy way, to want to steal, to cheat, to lie if it advantages us in some small way. Perhaps God needs to know what we are made of, deep down; to see who can still walk in the narrow beam of light our Saviour introduced into this dark world.
'But only think of this, brothers and sisters! How God will remember; and how we will remember for all our lives, the ones who, having so little, give freely of what little they have. Because he who can come through this test without falling, he will banquet for ever at the table of the Lord.'
Then Nikoli produced a silver chalice in which there was a spot of sour cloudberry wine, and a silver salver bearing few crumbs of bread. 'The body and the blood,' said Nikoli. 'Come forward those of you who will take communion.'
On their way home Leo had to point out that it wasn't really the blood and body of Christ which they had consumed.
'But it was!' Natasha explained. That is the miracle of communion. That horrible old cloudberry vinegar, and those stale scraps of bread, Leo, they were transformed into the real thing by our faith and by our love. The miracle is called transubstantiation.'
'It certainly didn't taste like the real thing.'
'What?'
'And tell me something else, Natasha,' Leo said quite seriously. 'What you did to me this morning. Was that transubstantiation?'
Natasha shrieked. 'That was s Natasha special. And it was our secret, okay? I don't think you should mention it to Nikoli and the others.'
Leo looked baffled. 'If you insist.'
I do. I do insist. If you want me to do it to you again.'
'I do. I do quite want you to do it again.'
And that evening, that Christmas evening after she had indeed done it to him again, she stroked his hair and said, 'It upset me today, to see so few people gathered together to celebrate the birth of our saviour. I know I shouldn't ask you, Leo. I've noticed that food has been a little scarcer these last few days, and it seems to me you already perform miracles. But those people stayed away today only because they are suffering so badly. I just wondered if there was any way we could help them.'
Leo lay with his eyes closed, glistening with sweat, recovering, considering Natasha's request. Truth was he had already decided upon a course of action. 'Tomorrow,' he said decisively, 'I will go out, and I will see what I can get.'
Natasha kissed him.


Fortified by some of Yevgeny's tea he went out the next day, to the Haymarket. The same unsavoury tangle of spivs were gathered there, dealing in patties and onions and wizened beetroots. Leo walked past the sparse stalls a few times. The fat spivs eyed him sourly, stamping their feet against the cold, snuggling into their furs.
Leo retreated from the scene, finding a bombed-out shell of a bakery where he could sit and gather his thoughts. An open oven gaped, as if in surprise and dismay at its sudden superannuation. The opium was strong and the umber-coloured Leningrad of mid-morning was filling up with antic staircases, along which dead boys ran and flitted from stairway to stairway like small birds in a gigantic aviary. Then the doppelganger came clambering down one of the ghost staircases, wielding a spade.
'Where have you been? Haven't seen you in a while.' The doppelganger wasn't looking too good. He was suffering from scurvy, and his mouth was pustuled with a fresh outbreak of cold sores. His coat hung from his limbs in rags, and he had about him a gamy odour. 'What do you care? Are you going to wait about here all day or are you going to earn us a patty or two?'
Leo didn't answer. He felt nauseous.
'Well?'
'Don't rush me. I'll go in my own time.'
'Don't wait too long,' said the doppelganger, disappearing further into the bombed-out building with his spade. I'll get started.'
Dispirited, Leo returned to the small circle of stallholders. He sought out the furs-and-beetroot trader, who seemed to recognise him, and who thrust out that fat blue slug of a tongue. 'Looking for a sweet pattie, pretty rose?'
'No. I just want a few beetroots. And an onion if you've got any,'
The trader levitated his eyebrows in surprise, waggling them suggestively before nodding in the direction of a dark alley a few metres away.
'No,' Leo said. 'I don't want these others to see me go off with you. Sec that bombed-out bakery? Meet me up there in a few minutes.'
'If you insist, pretty rose.'
'And please bring my onion.'
Leo dragged himself to the appointed place. It was a long walk, and the dirty compacted snow squeaked under his feet. He had to pass a burned-out tram car, its twisted, rusting frame like the skeleton of some fantastic beast. He took up position in the shadows of the bakery. Hiding in the oven, the doppelganger flashed a shard of mirror at him in signal of readiness.
'It's not that they're not grateful,' Natasha cooed in his ear. 'It's just that they keep asking me how you do it. None of them have seen a beetroot or an onion in months, let alone all this. And such a wonderful stew! They keep asking me and what should I tell them?'
Leo had instructed Nikoli to gather together the underground faithful, particularly those who were hungry and suffering. He'd specified that they should bring a vessel, and that he would feed them. A congregation larger than usual turned out and Nikoii had conducted his candlelit service, after which Leo produced a vat of stew, dispensing equal and generous measures to everyone. He was disappointed that Nikoli hadn't incorporated this apportionment into the service, but he said nothing.
Natasha was insistent. 'They're all saying you work miracles, Leo.'
'It's not miracles.'
'But what shall I say to them when they ask what it is they're eating?'
'Say, "Best steak!" and don't wink.'
'I can't keep doing that! It's wearing thin.'
Leo dragged her aside and whispered harshly, 'What do you want to tell them? That what they're stuffing into their mouths is a putrid and decomposing rat chopped up with one of last year's beetroots? Tell them. Go on. See how that salts it for them.'
But Natasha had savoured rattus norvegicus more than once in the days before Leo stumbled into her life. She knew all its culinary limitations. 'Don't be angry, Leo. You work wonders. Everybody says so.'
But Natasha couldn't let the matter drop. The problem was that she was a true economist. It wasn't the Communist Party re-education camps who had imparted to her the universal laws governing the distribution, exchange and consumption of goods or the principles of surplus value; it was her career as a prostitute. Whoredom was a schooling based not on the classical laws of Diminishing Returns, but on the neoclassical tradition of Marginal Utility. Put another way, she knew the price of a fuck, and from that principle, asserted the neoclassical school of Whoring Economics, it was possible to calculate the price of everything.
Watching Leo dose himself with the dwindling resource of Uncle Yevgeny's tea made her think of her sisters of commerce fortifying themselves with vodka before an evening's work. It had crossed her mind several times that Leo was going out and whoring himself, but she knew that even the Tsar's courtesans couldn't have done this well in such conditions. So, swathing Isaac in blankets, she resolved one day to follow Leo.
The uncertain hour of The Whistling Shell was always Leo's favourite time for a foray, and at whatever time it came. Just like the underground Christian circle, his activities were protected by enemy fire. The sound of the first soft hooting of shells was to him like a peal of bells or the call of the adhan, and on this day the German bombardiers wound their timepieces for a noon invocation of the Kruppsteel God. With shells detonating about the city he went out, evidently without fear. She followed his slightly unsteady gait as he trudged the blackened snow along the street in the direction of the Haymarket.
He had ho idea she was following him. He never looked back. Indeed, he seemed oblivious even to the bombardment going on, and instead of turning his head in the direction of this or that explosion, his eyes seemed to move up and down the vertical structures of the tallest Leningrad buildings, as if tracking someone moving among the parapets and the rooftops. Natasha's heart squeezed for him, this tender, distracted boy. At that point she almost went home, knowing from experience and intuition that she might find something here that would destroy their precarious and singular time together. He'd already delivered her from a world where no one asked another's business, where one learned to look the other way, where one remembered to forget instantly; and not because the truth couldn't be guessed at, but because it could. But she didn't turn back. He was too much of an enigma, this Leo, and she had to find out where he went.
Squeezing Isaac tight to her chest, Natasha followed him across the city for half an hour, until he reached the Haymarket. She had to duck into a doorway when, for the first time, he glanced around furtively. He didn't see her, she was certain, and she was more careful when she followed him into the charred wood and twisted steel wreckage of an old bakery.
Loitering behind a blackened pillar she watched him uncover a spade. He began scraping at the snow, but what puzzled Natasha was the argument he conducted with some unseen person. The dispute was acrimonious, and Natasha peered round her charred pillar to look for Leo's adversary, but she could see no one. Her heart quickened when she realised Leo was in dispute with none other than himself.
Leo remonstrated bitterly, working all the while, chipping with his spade at the hard-packed ice. After a while he tossed away the spade and produced a small hacksaw from his pocket, applying it energetically to some object buried in the ground. Leo cut a leathery slice free of the packed snow and rammed it into his coat pocket before returning to his hacksawing with renewed frenzy. Natasha crept up slowly behind him.
At first Natasha couldn't identify the object in the ground. Even when it became plain that it was a man, buried on his side in the snow, she wasn't able to reconcile the evidence of her eyes. The hacksaw was digging into the cadaver for a choice cut of rump. Natasha could see that the partially uncovered head wore, at the throat, a frayed ruff of dark and dirty ice.
At that moment Isaac chose to sneeze, and to let out a bleat of protest. Leo stopped sawing, and turned slowly. He tried to smile at Natasha, looking like a guilty child, wanting but failing to ingratiate.
Natasha sank to her knees. 'Is this how you saved us? Isaac and me? Is this how?'
Leo flicked his fringe from his eye. Natasha fell forward, her elbows in the snow, gagging without vomiting.
She let Isaac slip from her grasp, as if he was befouled. Leo went to collect him up.
'Don't touch him!' Natasha screamed. 'Don't you lay a finger on him!' She gathered up her child and staggered away, slipping on the ice, falling on one knee, scrambling to put a distance between herself and the abominable Leo. 'Don't come near us again! Don't you ever!'


The shellburst had ended. Leo slumped in the burned-out bakery, staring into the black maw of the brick oven. A slack line of dead electric cable hung over his head, suspended between the broken walls, and the doppelganger lay stretched comfortably along its length, hands clasped lightly behind his head. 'That's torn it,' said the doppelganger.
'She hates me now.'
'You can do no good,' the doppelganger said in Uncle Yevgeny's voice. 'Don't try to do good.'
'What will I do?'
'Survive. You must survive.'
'Go to hell,' Leo said, and the doppelganger faded very slowly in the freezing air.
Leo stayed for a long time in the bombed-out bakery, amidst the charred wood and twisted metal, trying to puzzle things out. Perhaps Uncle Yevgeny and the doppelganger were right, perhaps he should never have tried to do good. In doing good on a purely random basis, with no expectation of returned favour, he had attempted to act as an antidote to the random dispensations of The Whistling Shell. And for a while that had worked, and he was happy. But then selfishness had crept in, along with vanity and pride. When he had saved Natasha and Isaac from certain extinction, he had been too quick to gather up the rewards available in Natasha's love and respect, and within the boundless joys nesting in the cries and the gurgles of baby Isaac. From those two, and in the potential happiness of those two, he had taken his own happiness, and that, he knew, was where he had made his mistake.
For he had stolen Natasha and Isaac from the hungry God of The Whistling Shell. He had saved souls he had no right to save. The Kruppsteel God of The Whistling Shell was an indifferent God, and had forgiven him once, for the soul of Natasha, and twice, for the soul of Isaac. And The Whistling Shell had even fed him and those around him, had it not? But what The Whistling Shell could not forgive was desertion into the arms of another God. the jealous and cannibalistic God of the Christians. The feeding of the followers of this other God had made the God of The Whistling Shell angry. How could Leo ever make things right again? How could he ever restore faith?
As Leo brooded in that dark and icy place, the German
gunners slipped in one of their random bursts of fire. Leo
heard the single shell whistling softly, so softly it seemed
to describe an illumined arc on its long trajectory through
the freezing sky. Leo heard the whistle falter, waiting for
the crump of explosion. But the shell, having landed,
had failed to detonate. Instead it left an eerie silence.
almost a  vacuum,   which   was   filled   with   whispered
words. 'Give me Isaac,' it said. 'Your only son.'
Leo returned to his house. Natasha and Isaac were not there. The house echoed in their absence. Natasha had taken nothing which did not belong to her. All of the gifts of his mother's clothes and jewellery which Leo had made to her remained in the house. So too did Yevgeny's army-issue Bible, bookmarked by Natasha no deeper than a page of Genesis.
Leo waited three days for Natasha to come home. On the third night, dithering until the hour before dawn, he went back to look in the hideous apartment where he'd first found her. Silently he ascended the broken stairway, creeping into the room. She was there, lying on the bed under rank, coarse blankets, sleeping heavily. A muscular figure lay next to her, snoring. A sailor's cap hung on a nail on the wall. In a crib made in a chest of drawers, Isaac was awake. The baby seemed content, kicking his arms and legs. He gurgled happily as Leo lifted him out of the improvised crib.
Careful not to disturb the sleepers, Leo crossed the room without a sound, taking the baby with him.
Dawn was breaking, pearly-grey and tea-brown, as he walked through the streets clutching Isaac to his chest. Before he'd walked a quarter mile, he heard the first salvo of a German wake-up call. The shell was still whistling, this morning with a slight trill as its fins baffled the air currents, as Leo looked up saying, 'O thank you. I knew you would come.'
The first shell exploded somewhere near the Admiralty tower, followed by a series of muffled reports in the same vicinity. Leo made his way to Uprising Square and along Nevsky Prospect, hurrying towards the thick of the bombardment. A pale winter sun was climbing to the east of the Admiralty tower, flaring on the debris kicked up by the shell blasts, making dust fountains and ragged sculptures of floating ash. One building that had already taken a hit in a previous bombardment was on fire. Shells rained down ahead, some exploding, others failing to detonate in the deserted street. It seemed to him that more and more of the German shells were failing the longer the campaign went on. Leo saw another three shells blast the front house of the old cinema. That being the place where the shells rained thickest, he crossed the street and carefully placed Isaac on the icy pavement outside the burning cinema. He himself sat cross-legged on the dirty ice, and waited.
The barrage abated for a while, before resuming with increased ferocity, raining shells around them. Two buildings took direct hits; shards of scorching shrapnel went smoking and skidding across the icy road, but the main bombardment moved across Nevsky Prospect and settled at a distance of forty or fifty metres removed. Leo swept up Isaac and scurried towards the new target of the shells. One round came whistling in, thumping the elevation ten feet above his head, embedding itself in the concrete without detonating, the fins of the shell protruding from the wall like a cathedral gargoyle.
Neither he nor Isaac received so much as a scratch.
Again the locus of the barrage shifted, moving back across the road and up Nevsky Prospect towards the tower. Leo was furious. With buildings burning around him he ran into the smoke and dust fountains, his face blackened with soot, screaming at the metal storm, 'Here we are! Take him back! You can take him back!' His tears smudged on the soot of his face. 'Why don't you take the both of us?' he raged. 'Why won't you take us?'
But the bombardment shifted several degrees west of their position, and then the volleys ceased, quite suddenly. The only sound was of fires crackling and smouldering about him, and of dust and ash resettling on the ice pavements. He stood in the middle of Nevsky Prospect, hanging his head, and he knew it was over.
He knew it was over for everything: for God; for Communism; and for the smooth deity of The Whistling Shell, He knew now that The Whistling Shell in all its savage indifference didn't want Isaac back. Neither Isaac, nor Natasha, nor him in place of any of them. The Whistling Shell wasn't counting the corpses. It wasn't in the business of claiming souls, or balancing endless figures in infinite ledgers. The truth in this was quite horrendous. It meant that you could do good, and you could do bad, and even that you could try to do good by doing bad; but that nothing and no one could praise you or forgive you, but yourself.
It meant only this: that the purpose of a good life was a good life, and nothing more, nor less.
And as the smoke of bombardment cleared he looked about him and the innumerable staircases and ladders and flights of steps and platforms were diminishing, fading, closing down. The old Leningrad, the one from which he'd emerged, was reasserting itself. It was a long walk back. People emerged from their houses to survey the latest damage. Men and women who would not be surprised by anything to be witnessed in the streets of Leningrad stopped to look at the ragged boy, tears streaming along his blackened cheeks, bearing in his arms a small baby.
He found Natasha in the streets near her hovel, who with Nikoli and some of the underground worshippers had come out to look for Leo. Natasha ran up and snatched Isaac from his arms, breathing a prayer of thanks that the child was unharmed. Nikoli stretched out a hand and touched Leo on the shoulder. The boy seemed not to see the old man.
'Does anyone know,' Leo said, 'the way to the front line?'
Natasha stepped forward, more than a little afraid of him. He didn't seem to recognise her. 'Leo, come back to us. I forgive you.'
'But can I forgive myself?'
'Whatever you   have  done,'   said  Nikoli,   'it  can be addressed in Heaven.' 'You're wrong,' Leo said.
'Where are you going?' Natasha asked. 'What will you do?'
'It's time I got myself a gun. It's time I did the manly thing, and killed some Germans.'
They merely stared after Leo as he made his way out of the city, a small huddle of them watching in silence, with the sun turning a pallid yellow in the winter sky over Leningrad. The fate of Leo Shapoval from that moment on is uncertain, though three stories circulate. One claims that he fought heroically in the lines, quickly becoming a young captain and from there, after changing his name, developed a career in the Communist Party. Another version suggested that he lasted mere days on the lines, and it was while recklessly leading a charge on the German lines that he was cut into a million pieces by the enemy machine guns. A third version insists that he survived the campaign and left the country in the confusion of the immediate post-war years, returning as a dissident, and that he was one of the architects of the overthrow of the Iron Curtain regime, dedicated to the renaming of his old city under a new administration.
I like to think the last version is true. Perhaps I want to think well of him, because, not knowing who my real father was, I think of him, Leo Shapoval, as my true father. He did after all give me life. And I only have the version of him told to me by my mother, his lover, Natasha. That and a photograph of Leo, taken before he-had even met my mother, in which a young boy, perhaps a little too fat for his own good, smiles shyly into the camera, with no knowledge of the horrors foreshadowing him; and in which a strange and somewhat poetic curl of the lip seems to say to me across the years, 'What must you do? You must survive.'

The End