Looking for Wind in the Fields

By Tim Dayman

Looking for Wind in the Fields unfolds an epic tale of resilience and the stark injustice of war, tracing the harrowing journey from the besieged city of Leningrad, through the unforgiving expanses of Siberia, to the serene yet foreign landscapes of Tasmania.

Amidst the backdrop of the siege of Leningrad, two young children, orphaned and vulnerable, find their fates intertwined with a valiant friend whose boundless courage and sacrifice guide them through the darkest chapters of human cruelty.

Their odyssey of survival takes them from the brutal labour camps of Siberia, across the devastated post-war Eastern Europe, and finally, as displaced refugees, to an unexpected sanctuary on the other side of the world.

This narrative is not only a testament to the indomitable spirit of those who face the unimaginable but also a profound reflection on the themes of loss, displacement, and the quest for renewal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: May 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9781035838974

Tim Dayman

Born in Adelaide in 1961 into a family of actors, Tim had an early introduction to the power of words via the stage and the literature that lined the bookshelves of the living room. The uniquely progressive government of the 1970s encouraged creative expression which Tim explored through drawing and reading the giants of Russian and French literature and working backwards to the classical masters of Homer and Herodotus then the works of Virgil and Dante, firing his imagination as the impressionable teenager he was. Having left Adelaide in 1984 to settle in Sydney he worked at the Sydney Opera House for 25 years in live theatre, toying with poetry and novelistic scenarios all the while. Moving to Tasmania in 2014 he was convinced plunged him into a melancholia which conversely inspired him to pen, over five years the novel we have before us today.

Book preview

About the Author

Born in Adelaide in 1961 into a family of actors, Tim had an early introduction to the power of words via the stage and the literature that lined the bookshelves of the living room. The uniquely progressive government of the 1970s encouraged creative expression which Tim explored through drawing and reading the giants of Russian and French literature and working backwards to the classical masters of Homer and Herodotus then the works of Virgil and Dante, firing his imagination as the impressionable teenager he was. Having left Adelaide in 1984 to settle in Sydney he worked at the Sydney Opera House for 25 years in live theatre, toying with poetry and novelistic scenarios all the while. Moving to Tasmania in 2014 he was convinced plunged him into a melancholia which conversely inspired him to pen, over five years the novel we have before us today.

Dedication

Eternal thanks and heartfelt gratitude to my beloved wife Cherie for her stoic support, unwavering loyalty, and sublime patience during the five-year long genesis of the book. Your quiet encouragement and unique solicitations never ceased to energise me at times where both inspiration and stamina were flagging. I owe you more than you could possibly know. love ad infinitum.

Copyright Information ©

Tim Dayman 2024

The right of Tim Dayman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035838967 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035838974 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2024

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Heartfelt thanks to Aurora Paulina Kay for her consummate artistry on the cover design… with love.

Part 1

The Whisperer in the Dark

(1)

Leningrad. Late January 1942

The sound of a piano upstairs at 22 Vyborgskaya Ulitsa greeted the dawn and a surprisingly well-tempered piano at that, given how bitterly cold it had been. A piano reduction of Tchaikovsky’s serenade in C, and one with which the pianist was extending no few liberties to with tempo and dynamics. But it mattered not, as it lifted the morning gloom, the notes flooding the building and breaking through the grey and dismal late January morning sky.

The barrage the night before had been both relentless and devastating in equal measure. For eight hours the city of Leningrad had been subjected to a merciless assault from a fatigued, yet resolute German artillery division supported by a three-hour bombardment from the sky. The city had nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide and cowering but not surrendering in the face of the onslaught, it simply absorbed it like it had on countless nights previously.

But given the city’s gas supply had been recently cut due to the Nazi’s supply blockade, the great fires that had swept through whole blocks after air raids were now conspicuously absent, the only flames that now burnt were mere flickers of orange from the countless bonfires across the city dotted throughout the battered metropolis.

Nevsky Prospekt, once so fine a promenade, now a spectral landscape of smoking, crumbling ruins and hunched skeletons. Sidewalks were littered with snow, frozen clumps of filth and broken people, exhausted, grimy people in rags, only the white snow under the jaundiced winter morning sun, lifting the overall misery a little. This was the scene, like on so many other mornings, that greeted Galina Mikhailovna Plisetskaya as she peered through the shredded curtains that forlornly graced a shattered window pane in what was her family second storey apartment bedroom. The young girl quickly pulled her head back into the room, recoiling from the morning chill.

For a moment, she thought about whether the trains would be running today as she desperately needed to get to the food station, the Statsionari, but had heard that due to recent heavy snowfalls, the trains had been taken out of service. In fact, as bad as the weather had been, the main reason they were not running had more to do with the fact that they represented major targets for the German bombers, not so much for the fact that they connected the city’s people from all districts and that any disruption would be another dagger to the heart of the city, but more from the position of what the trains destruction represented to the people of Leningrad from the perspective of morale.

The train network was like the lifeblood that flowed through the veins of the city, and great pride, history and even a form of civic affection verging on love was afforded it. Thus, the city’s authorities deemed it prudent to restrict their operation to the most pressing of civic need in order to maintain their symbolic defiance to the Nazis, menacingly dug in just beyond the outskirts of the city. But there was no escaping the fact that it had been a bitterly cold winter. The mean monthly temperature for January was -18.7 degrees Celsius, where for many years before it had rarely fallen below -7.6 degrees, which delivered to the Leningraders who lived by the twin principles of fate and destiny, further reason to despair.

The city’s dying, clenching its teeth… it’s a dog’s life, some were heard to lament. But Galina Mikhailovna Plisetskaya was numb in the face of their sense of hopelessness, their fear and, in the end, their resignation. Indeed, for months now, conditions had been dire for her, her eight-year-old brother Yuri Mikhailovitch and her defiant baboushka, Biyana Nikolaevna who at any cost had endeavoured to maintain a semblance of domestic dignity and routine albeit with no running water, they had been melting snow, no electricity, and a food rationing decree that barely approximated the meanest level of subsistence.

Galina, please take your little brother to the toilet! Please go with him down to the first-floor landing…he needs to go…now! entreated her baboushka with uncharacteristic impatience.

Galina was flaxen haired with soft curls tied into ponytails and held by two small blue ribbons. Her eyes were pale blue with the transparency of cut glass set into an ever-greying complexion and hollowed face. Her petite features had aged to make her appearance prematurely adult due to the extended deprivation she had been subjected to for many months now.

A peculiar pallor common to the malnourished in the form of a green tinge to her complexion, that had become a permanent rouge, and as hungry as she was, she never talked about it or mentioned it fearing what this might stir in her. Faces growing old and wizened before their time, the features reduced to bird like sharpness were common place on the streets. But she had to ignore such thoughts and, turning the door handle, took the first step of thirty down to the landing which had become a makeshift lavatory.

This floor had recently become almost completely unoccupied due to, both, the selective evacuation of some of the buildings residents or death, be it due to any one of the triumvirate woes of air raids, disease or starvation. Death in all its guises was accepted quite differently in war than in normal times of peace. Death was so fruitful, so every day, so common place a thing. It looked you straight in the eyes staring long and penetratingly without faltering.

But in the urgency of the moment and with her brother’s eyes wide and beckoning she had to block such thoughts, snapping herself out of it with a gentle and reassuring whisper of encouragement into Yuri’s ear and, squeezing his left hand as much to calm herself as it was to settle him, with well measured steps, made their way down.

As they reached the landing, they were engulfed by an acrid stench of urine that cloyed the air, wafting up on a gently eddying draught carrying with it, a swirling plume of fine dust out of which emerged a dishevelled figure, the gender of which was not immediately clear. It was in fact a woman having emerged out of her apartment, and it was apparent the smell emanated from her, a stench, the rankness of which was redolent of disease and mental torment.

She stood before the two children, her rancid breath nauseating, the dirt, pestilence like on her, almost an entity in itself. But her hair, that was the thing that most horrified them. Knotted and writhing, Gorgon like, with the movement of lice, a fearsome, awful sight as she stood arms akimbo unfurling a deranged torrent of profanities, a haradin with the grace and vocabulary of a sailor’s tavern as she ranted uncontrollably.

They throw sewage out of the window, she protested. They defecate on the staircase and have turned the first-floor landing into a sewer, she railed. Galina and Yuri stood rooted to the spot not three paces from this demented Harpie who, it became apparent, was not alone in her apartment because through the open front door peeked a small impish gnome of a child hovering listlessly in the doorway. The chit had a head of long, stringy hair similarly sporting a nest of lice. A thin child with huge black eyes wrapped in a filthy shredded sheet with the most piteous of expressions on its wretched face.

So… she continued, just like those street hooligans who come in off the street criminally befouling the premises, not even a bucket of sand to cover their mess, she trailed off seemingly losing interest in her own tirade.

It became clear to Galina that this wretch of a woman, for all her ranting and raving wasn’t directing it at them but as a more general broadcast for anyone who was caught within earshot. She was directing her excoriating tirade to the whole world and to no one in particular.

The two children shuffled past her without taking their eyes of her for a moment. It was clear to Galina that this woman had lost her mind and was in her own private hell of a world and was oblivious to them completely as they took the remaining steps until they reached the large vestibule under the huge staircase that had degenerated into the befouled cesspool of a public latrine.

Yuri was beside himself with need to pee and with his sister handing him a wad of old newspaper disappeared into the shadows turning her back to him while remaining ever vigilant to interlopers. With her back turned to her brother her eyes fell upon the small dark-haired child who was leaning lethargically over the upstairs balustrading looking down at her with huge sad, empty eyes, still wrapped, toga like and coiled up in the ragged sheet, muttering to himself in between ponderous chews of a mouldy piece of bread crust as hard and tasteless as old rope. As their eyes met, he slunk off from her line of vision and was no more.

As Yuri continued his toilet, Galina noticed an official town hall council notice on a nearby wall, stamped by the Town Council leaders stating that there would be an officially sanctioned clean up to rid the city of the indignity of human effluent. It read that not just all courtyards, cellars and stairwells of some 16,000 buildings were to be cleared and cleaned but whole alleys and streets too…and not just of effluent but snow, debris and anything else that shouldn’t be there.

Even more boldly in big red lettering was the incentive reward offered to anyone fulfilling their clean up quota, of a sanctioned visit to the public baths, having been hastily put back into service, an offer both surprising and unexpected given it was assumed that the baths were no more, having been buried under tons of rubble and debris, and previously having only been made available to the, medically certified, as dangerously dirty.

As Galina finished perusing the poster, she realised Yuri was at her side having silently joined her tugging at her sleeve, wanting to get out on to the street. She reached for him, and holding her young sibling’s hand, strode out onto the frigid morning. As cold as it was, she felt it important, regardless of the weather, to get Yuri’s little lungs as much air as possible, even if it be air infused with that peculiar sweetness of decaying vegetable matter and the distinctive smell of gunpowder. Far from the air being entirely salutary, it at least provided in its sharp, sobering astringency, a brief respite for his blocked nostrils and clogged lungs.

The hanging smoke had cleared, the sun finally asserting itself if only fleetingly. As they walked, slowly and silently, she gazed down at Yuri’s grey face and saw something new and quite unsettling in his appearance. The sulphurous morning light, revealed to Galina something she knew had been shaped by and grown in him since the sudden, overnight disappearance of their parents some six months earlier.

He had become despondently silent, his sad little face under a shock of dead straight, matted blonde hair on an oversized head, balancing precariously on a tiny body, his features having taken on a fixed lack of expression. Downcast and taciturn the life and joy of this little boy had been stolen. The ongoing deprivations of war was bad enough but coupled with the trauma of his parents’ continuing absence had broken his small soul and his health was reflecting this terrible loss. Wracking coughs and nervous tics besieged him, which reminded Galina of some of the hundreds of orphans they had seen, scores of whom had been relocated and rehoused nearby in a makeshift home, formerly a worker’s hostel, its huge windows filled with their big, sad eyes looking out listlessly.

Dreadful stories and terrible tales of the fates of some of these orphans were common on the streets where a particular story was doing the rounds of a notorious room within the place, a cold, icy filthy sunless room in the basement, full of piles of little frozen corpses. In fact, for many of the children the orphanage served more as a hospice and then morgue with many of the children arriving in such an enfeebled condition they died within days, wordless and nameless.

Pale and exhausted, when food touched their lips, they swallowed with a struggle. It had become practise for the doctors to check if they were in fact dead by holding up a small mirror to their noses and if it didn’t fog up, they were considered to be dead. Some of the children knew what the room was used for, what it contained, but the presence of these little corpses never seemed to scare them as so many of them had long before surrendered to a mute, protest-less acceptance of this end as an inevitability.

Galina instinctively moved Yuri to her right away from the kerb as they made their way along the potholed pavement, as the streets slowly stirred into activity. People emerging out of shadows limping down narrow service lanes and debris littered doorways and stairwells, people with empty eyes, hunched over in total submission, slow and deliberate in their movements wrapped in rags, death following them everywhere.

Before the war these streets were a hive of pre-dawn activity with morning citizens busying themselves. Bakers would have been up for hours, the glorious aromas of their labours wafting along the streets, cutting through the chill…a warm and delicious treat to the nostrils. Farmers with horse drawn carts full of local produce grown in the fields ringing the outskirts of town and market stall vendors and early opportunistic shoppers heading towards the Haymarket.

Soldiers from the local garrison drinking steaming black coffee or scalding tea in thermoses filled up at cafes and coffee stands heading out of town on manoeuvres or work details. Sanitation workers collecting rubbish, noisy in their work they may have been but famously thorough, while legions of civil servants streamed to their offices in dutiful multitudes…now all a sad, faded memory and in its place now a miserable gaggle of souls reduced to foraging and scavenging.

As the two children finally reached the Statsionari, in what was formerly a huge butchery, Galina reached into her pockets to reassure herself that the food coupons were still there. To her shock they were soggy, having turned to pulp as a small lump of snow in her pocket had melted over the morning. They mushed through her fingers and pulling the remains of one out, held it up to the light… utterly illegible, the stamped due date gone, voiding the coupon.

Come Yuri, there is nothing here for us today, she said disconsolately. The purposeless walk had brought the children close to the banks of the Neva near a footbridge, the Sampsonievsky Most, which swept you across the river and into the huge acreage of Alexandrovskey Park. Galina paused, looking across the shimmering river having to shield her eyes as she scanned the opposite south bank, her eyes falling upon a huge daunting edifice brooding menacingly and dominating the landscape, paired next to the crumbling, sepulchral red-bricked prison building.

She felt a sense of deep unease looking at the twin buildings that she couldn’t explain and Yuri, feeling restless squeezed her hand all the tighter. Although only eleven and not out and about on the streets within easy earshot of the day-to-day street gossip and passing conversations that did the rounds, she had heard mention of this place in hushed tones but couldn’t work out why a place with the name Bolshoi in it, which she associated with the ballet, should have been spoken of in furtive refrains, sotte voce.

In fact, this edifice was the Bolshoi Dom, the NKVD Big House, a building notorious for having swallowed up many Leningraders at the urgings and paranoid insistence of Stalin and his henchman, under the sweeping auspices of the sweeping Article 58 and she couldn’t shake off the nagging feeling that this formidable place had something to do with her parents’ disappearance.

Galina, I want to go home! whimpered Yuri.

Now listen Yuri, she began. We just need to quickly stop in near Sampsonievsky Most to see if any of the remaining market stalls are open. She well knew that at these stalls they would only take cash, a small amount of which she had from her baboushka Biyana, which the stall holders would use on the black market where both the hard to get, along with luxury items could be found. For weeks now all that they had on offer was mouldy potatoes, weevil infested flour and some sorry looking pies of dubious ingredients but rumoured to contain cat, dog or horse, with pastry made primarily from sawdust leavened with a dram of caustic, bitter yeast providing the most pitiful nutrition.

Nothing open… nothing there.

They retreated and headed back to the apartment stopping in at a lane only a block short of Vyborkskaya Ulitsa. The lane, more a dingy alley, was littered with fallen masonry and bisected by a trickling rivulet of grey melting snow, which, as the eye followed the filthy slurry’s point of origin, revealed two small makeshift stalls not appearing to offer anything edible.

One of the stalls was nothing more than a splintered door balanced upon a pair of barrels groaning under its weight, while the other was s a pock marked sheet of armour plating, perched precariously on two stacks of bricks.

Previous to the war this quiet tree lined lane bathed in afternoon sunlight, would make a pleasant back route to the apartment, but now was a bleak and uninviting place. The trees that had formerly lined it had long since been plundered for firewood and the sap harvested to bolster soups and stews in a desperate attempt to add nutritional content in the absence of meat and any fresh vegetables.

Two bedraggled looking middle-aged women wrapped in layers of grimy clothes manned the stalls, their eyes glassy and looking straight through the two children as if they were not even there, utterly disinterested in spruiking, what appeared to be pies…pies laid out in three neat little rows of six, the tops of which were glistening in the morning sunshine like fungal spores or misshapen mushrooms having popped up at first light. A sweet, sickly smell rose up from the suspect looking pies, Galina now close enough to take in the odour as they appeared to be melting before her very eyes, a thick red trickle coursing out from underneath several of them.

All at once, it dawned upon her that these were no ordinary pies and one of the stall holders, noticing her sudden reluctance to come any closer suddenly stirred from her stupor beckoning them forward, producing a small piece of newspaper in readiness to wrap one of the pies. She opened her toothless, black mouth asking how she wished to pay for the iniquitous pastry, her line of enquiry becoming more insistent, seeing she was about to lose her. The woman suddenly raised her head, looking beyond Galina at the sound of approaching footsteps, as she and Yuri both spun around as one.

Galina, Yuri! What are you doing here? And all alone!

It was Andrei from the Hermitage. He was a great and loyal friend of the family and had visited their apartment only a week prior to check on the children and drop some supplies off to Biyana Nikolaevna, a little butter, sugar and some bags of dried pulses.

Come now you two, he said as he wrapped his arms around them, engulfing them in his overcoat. We must away from this place!

As they strode off together, he looked over his shoulder at the pie seller, exchanging a glance of familiarity. They were known to one another as Andrei had himself ventured down this infernal lane in a last act of desperation in the weeks previous, similarly never having considered their wares for a moment. This was a trade in human flesh and far from the only one in the many back streets and laneways of Leningrad. To speculate as to how they acquired the meat was too awful to even contemplate, but the answer could be found by looking at the frozen corpses on the streets, stairwells and sidewalks.

Over the course of days these bodies would have their boots removed, then their clothing until, progressively, the corpse was naked. Chunks of flesh would then be removed under cover of darkness and even whole limbs. It was clear that this was not the work of dogs. There were no dogs, or cats…they had all been eaten. Cannibalised body parts were being sold in meat pies not only around the Haymarket but also in small street pop-up stalls, completely unregulated and randomly dispersed.

The hub of the city’s black market may have been in and around Sennaya Ploschad, but even the most ubiquitous and innocuous streets could harbour stalls such as these where a depth of depravity spawn by the naked pain of hunger at its most ferocious had expelled the final vestiges of human decency. Bones and marrow were also extracted to sell for soup in the more prestigious market precincts, a dish given more of a culinary imprimatur due to the fact that the grisly contents were so well disguised.

There was even street talk of drunken soldiers having strayed into some of the more notorious districts refusing to trouble their war weary and vodka addled brains with details such as staying in groups. Finding themselves isolated and in a part of town unfamiliar to them, they were targeted and killed, given they were the best fed and with no local family and friends to notify of their disappearance were ideal candidates for abduction.

But in more recent times it had become common place for soldiers to be moving around in groups, weapons in hands so seriously were these rumours taken. But right now, it was all about spiriting these two young children away, Andrei feeling disgusted that they should have been exposed to such shameful depravity. Muttering under his breath and throwing the pernicious stall holders one final dark look Galina called out baboushka’s name as Andrei turned away from the two pie selling wretches only to see Biyana limping towards them swaying unsteadily from side to side.

Galina, Yuri, where have you been? s\he cried out as she met them.

Before either of them could answer Andrei, avuncular like, placed his reassuring hand on each of their shoulders, not only to comfort them and reassure the fretting Biyana but to also indicate he would speak on their behalf.

Biyana Nikolaevna, I was on my way to see Alexis Mikhailovitch Andropov, the eminent instrument repairer, with my good friend Oleg’s oboe, when I passed this lane and saw your two sweet grandchildren, to my mind, appearing to have lost their way. I assumed, given your absence, they were out and about with your approval as always Biyana Nikolaevna… Anyway, we are, all three of us, a little tired and I’m sure these two are hungry, he trailed off.

Andrei’s eyes darted nervously from side to side his restless gaze covering every inch of Biyana Nikolaevna’s furrowed face in an instant, the sign of a man talking himself needlessly into a corner, trying to think on his feet, in an attempt to mask his sense of guilt that he should somehow of protected the children from the dreadful scene just witnessed, a guilt, the magnitude of which increased in his own mind with every blustering word of this unnecessarily protracted subterfuge.

Biyana embraced her grandchildren while shooting a glance across at Andrei who stood looking at the ground between his feet. Her composure had returned and it mattered not whether she believed Andrei’s story or not given she saw no oboe in his hands. Their eyes met, her fixed gaze one of gratitude and affection.

Andrei, thank you for just being there. You are the only person I can really rely upon to be their guardian angel. Please come back with us now for tea. I am sure I can find something for us to have.

She was not, in fact, sure that she could make good that offer but the invitation stood.

The four of them moved slowly as one, Biyana’s incipient infirmity dictating the pace, watching were they stepped, avoiding the melting snow that criss-crossed the footpath in ever-deepening, dirty rivulets. The road was a minefield of obstacles, smashed masonry, abandoned carts, wrecked vehicles beyond which a short block ahead of them, arose an almighty commotion, the origin of which was still invisible. Shouts, screams and hysterical blaspheming rang out. But the most chilling and unsettling sound was the blood curdling neighing of a terrified horse.

Andrei stepped between the trio and the approaching mayhem which was rolling like a wave in their direction, breaking into a scene of horror. A horse, an unfortunate equine in the care of an army sergeant, had just been killed by a mob. What this officer was doing on his own in an unfamiliar part of town separated from the security of his regiment was not clear as he was staggering with a bewilderment borne of a blow to the head.

A wild group of men, numbering half a dozen and, to the banshee like shrieking and urging of as many wretched women, having attacked him, forcibly restrained him with threat of harm should he resist, while ransacking his few meagre bags of dry rations, slashing one of his hands with a carving knife. Once dragged from the doomed beast the mob set about butchering the poor animal with great blows, hacking at it with axes, mattocks and any other improvised weapon they could lay their hands on, driven by a deranged hunger.

This carnage was unavoidably witnessed by the four of them from across the street, Andrei hurriedly shuffling them past while keeping an eye on the hideous melee, fearing it could spill over in their direction blocking their way. But as is the nature of a child’s curiosity, Yuri tried to steal a glance, to put a face to these terrible exhortations. He had the misfortune of seeing the horse reduced to a mutilated head, its great black mane engorged with dark blood as thick as treacle, its bulging eyes locked and frozen in the final throes of terror, spilt entrails pooling moat like around what was left of its torso and hind legs.

The quartermaster sergeant, who had been charged with protecting the few bags of dry rations, half of which had been plundered in the mob’s initial assault, was gesticulating wildly in the direction of a couple of armed soldiers having just appeared at the end of the lane, but to no avail as they had already decided not to get involved and continued on their way without looking back.

These rations had been, only hours earlier, dropped by aircraft, earmarked for troops in a local garrison, desperately famished, their numbers now depleted due to massive casualties on the war front. This was only a tiny representation of the total airdrop and its precise location was kept secret, a secret everyone was eager to find out. Thus, the poor horse was regarded as fair game for anyone foolish enough not to have the means to safeguard it from plunder. This was far from an isolated incident. Stories abounded of artillery drawing horses killed and eaten on the street and that even army food carriers who had to traverse dark, tense streets and alleys at night, were reported to be failing to get through to their units.

Initially, it had been assumed that these carriers of supplies to the starving troops on the front-line had been taken by German snipers, which of course was impossible given the nearest sighting of any Nazi troops was still many miles from the outskirts of the capital and that no official sighting of snipers had ever been officially confirmed, or that these unfortunate emissaries of supplies had perished in one of the many airstrikes, when in fact they had been ambushed by their own citizens in streets such as this one, in peacetime, a tree lined splendour, one of a network of lanes and alleys branching out like spokes on a wheel radiating out from the central hub, the air in days past, infused with the smell of roasted chestnuts and the exotic aroma of fragrantly smoky teas wafting enticingly.

The wails and whoops followed them through the front door of the apartment as they rushed past the stinking ground floor latrine, Andrei and Galina assisting Biyana up the two flights of stairs with Yuri clutching his big sister’s other hand. Andrei turned the key to the front door and they tumbled inside Galina slamming the door shut behind them. Biyana collapsed into her easy chair in front of the still glowing barzurka. The flickering yellow glow revealed an exhausted face drawn, her skin like melting wax, as if carrying the pain of the whole city on her face.

Yuri broke the stunned silence by politely beckoning Andrei to come and join him in some reading, which he did without hesitation sitting on the floor to Biyana’s right where the young boy had begun thumbing through a colourful book of wild animals, an activity encouraged by Andrei as much as anything as a distraction and affording him the chance to offer him an impromptu lesson on the lives of these carefree and noble beasts, Andrei was a seasoned and sensitive educator borne of his stint as a school teacher back in Armenia as one of his first jobs after he had graduated.

As a young man he had sailed with ease and great promise through his formal education, very much a product of the educated middle-class, but just as his family had expected him to seamlessly segue, naturally and inevitably, into the family jewellery business he had other plans which he made no secret of. He deferred from the expectation of his continuing of this family vocation, and his parents, recognising his free spirit and with the acquiescence that comes with a deep and abiding love of one’s own, tempered also by his persuasive insistence, granted him this request without objection or regret.

He worked, initially as a primary school teacher and private tutor to finance his career direction of choice and left for Paris, where he studied art history, very quickly becoming adept at recognising forgeries for one of the great auction houses and having the uncanny ability to identify and authenticate, one way or the other, works attributed to the Masters. Given his thorough knowledge of art history coupled with expert and encyclopaedic understanding of techniques and materials, he specialised in restoration where he was sought out, so renowned was his reputation becoming, and was cherry picked by the Louvre and on a salary the equal of what the family jewellery business back home would have brought him. Eventually word made its way to the Hermitage that he had a unique talent and, seeing this as a chance of a lifetime, departed Paris for St. Petersburg.

On arrival, he was greeted warmly by staff from all over Europe who had similarly gravitated towards this great museum. In the very heart of this great Imperial Russian collection of a past empire, one of the great jewels in the Russian crown, he was embraced as a citizen of the world amongst fellows of such kinship, he felt it his destiny.

As Andrei busied himself entertaining Yuri, and the children’s grandmother having edged her way out of her near state of collapse slowly but purposefully readied the table for the frugal repast, Galina had fallen into some distracted reading herself feeling numb and disconnected as the afternoon shadows were descending upon the apartment along with the distant boom-boom of shellfire. In this strangely suspended atmosphere, she found herself trying to escape a silent, wordless fear that had been creeping up on her.

There was an early moon and her disconnectedness was seated in the book, on the pages in front of her, and in the unbelievable story line she couldn’t follow or retain. It was a French novel that was all too unreal, annoyingly so, proving to do anything but calm her. This foreign life on the pages, this counterfeit existence, those loves somewhere in the backstreets and boulevards of nineteenth century Paris, were like a nagging dream and a perverse one within a big untruth…and it left her feeling utterly hopeless. Here, in Leningrad, in this building, in this room was a terrible life getting worse and aspiring to a fictional character embedded in a ludicrously simpering, romantic fantasy, left her feeling like crying out.

Andrei had been watching Galina for some minutes and, as if reading her mind, moved over to her leaving Yuri pulling faces in a mirror, growling and snorting in imitation of some of the animals Andrei had just been mimicking with him. Andrei Kavorkian was a diminutive man in his early fifties but with a boundless, boyish enthusiasm for everything he set himself to, an enthusiasm that dictated the set and animation of his features at all times.

With a great shock of wavy, black hair, dark brown but sparkling eyes with a broad, slightly hooked nose and brilliant white teeth, his features were arranged in a perfect symmetry with a gaze that was penetrating but never intimidating. Under his silk lined overcoat was only a thin cardigan and under vest singlet. His trousers were always miraculously pressed and his shoes were of good quality leather. He had almost bottomless pockets out of which would emerge handfuls of an assortment of objects including cheese, cured meats, cakes, dried fruit, chestnuts and even tobacco. In fact, he always had tobacco, not because he smoked but because he knew that tobacco could buy one’s way out of most bad situations and into more than a few favourable ones, particularly with front-line troops or soldiers on leave and even NKVD operatives. Alcohol, tobacco and women in that order for most and he could even be counted on to help out with the first as well.

Andrei was a good friend of a chef, a cook from the Hermitage in a kitchen which also doubled up as a party kitchen more recently and was thus, always well-stocked, the supplies not always reliably or accurately accounted for, a situation they both exploited to their mutual advantage. He had helped this man, get the job years before and was therefore in subsequent and extended receipt of some food favours. Naturally, Andrei shared this largess and being without a wife or offspring, and having developed an affection for the two children and their baboushka, they all benefited.

Having sidled up to Galina without saying a word just sharing her space in a mutually comfortable proximity, he leant forward ever so slightly to signal he was to speak but looking up at him with a soft smile, she began herself.

Andrei… I have always known that all three of us would never be allowed on the evacuation train given baboushka’s difficulty with movement which, we cannot disguise, she said, no niceties, no formality, straight to the point very much in typical Galina fashion.

She continued, I know baboushka is trying to shield Yuri and I from the truth about our parents, especially for Yuri’s sake, but I feel that they are gone and even if they do return it will not be soon and we, this apartment, may not even be here.

Andrei did not shake his head in disagreement and allowed her to continue without interruption.

As much as it tears at me, my greatest responsibility lies in the safety and protection of Yuri and my beloved baboushka knows this and I know has prepared to sacrifice herself by remaining here. Andrei…I am old enough to see what is going on very well and I know too that you can see the logic.

Andrei was silent, stunned by her clarity, insight and most tellingly her pragmatism, devoid of any sentimentality, her words filling him with wonder and warmth for this extraordinary girl.

Yes, my sweet Galina, he said finding it difficult to say anything meaningful in the light of her revelations.

You are wise beyond your years, a real little Vasalisa the wise and you, much like your father can see straight through to the truth…So, in keeping with this atmosphere of openness, he took a breath, I believe I can tell you what happened to your parents.

Galina looked up at Andrei with a look of quiet, calm expectation, as if this was a conversation she had been expectantly waiting for and knew was always coming, and now had at last arrived, and she greeted it with total equanimity.

As you have been told by your loving baboushka, your father Mikhail was drafted to the front as a translator given his fluency in Polish and German as a non-combatant, meaning he was not expected to fight, and your sweet mother Maya, with her nursing background was recruited too, spending her time moving around with a mobile medical corp between front-line infantry divisions cut off and isolated from established triages…A noble and virtuous scenario but, sadly far from the truth.

He took a breath and continued, Some six months ago, your parents were unjustly and jealously informed upon by a former friend and colleague under interrogation.

The hair on the back of Galina’s neck stood up. Andrei paused reading her reaction in her eyes and took this as an opportunity to gather himself for what he was about to tell her next, moving a little closer in a gesture of reassurance.

As she waited for Andrei to continue, she had a flash of memory. A passing reference a neighbour had made to Biyana some months ago about the Black Crow, two words she couldn’t help but connect in some way with their sudden disappearance.

Your wonderful parents were arrested under false suspicion that they were in some way not only unsympathetic to the Russian war effort but against the whole momentum of the Peoples Revolution, your father of having White sympathies, your mother for the crime of being his wife. In these times, Galina my dear, I have come to realise that guilt and innocence are meaningless concepts and even interchangeable when the State decides the nature of reality.

Andrei’s brain was swimming at the sound of his own words echoing in his head, aware that he was becoming increasingly wound up. He had to keep reminding himself that he was addressing an unworldly, albeit perceptive eleven-year-old girl like an adult.

Andrei himself had had his fair share of attention from the ‘NKVD.’ In fact, Leningrad and the ‘Hermitage’ in particular had long been regarded as a hot bed of sedition and unpatriotic sentiment all emanating from Stalin’s official position founded on his own sweeping, paranoid suspicion which had grown over time into an unbridled and undisguised hatred for the city. He had developed and cultivated an inveterate disdain for the elegance of its buildings that rose faultlessly in lines of green and blue stucco over and above the Neva… for its independence of thinking, married to a European focused artistic sophistication, not to mention for the links with Trotsky."

Andrei forged on; his absorbed listener silent. "Your dear father, Mikhail, and I met at the little bookshop, only a small one at the time unlike the one he came to run, a shopfront really but with floor to ceiling shelves packed with a diverse collection straddling Politics, History, Art and an extraordinary collection of works by Latin writers. These volumes were his treasures more so than anything else. Rare leather covered editions of the ancient Greeks back to Homer and extending well into Roman philosophy and literature of the fifteenth century. Some of these had been hand written in the most exquisite curlicued script.

"A cornucopia of ancient writers, some famous, some notorious but many almost entirely unheard of, whose works were copied under candlelight by medieval scribes in the employ of the Church and given refuge and accommodation by the monks, who turned their deft hands to the art of copying in an atmosphere of undisturbed and rarefied artistic sanctuary. Many collectors and enthusiasts, who could match their love for these tomes with money, became some of your father’s most dedicated customers.

"At this time, your father was not especially political but did keep many titles which were deemed ‘inappropriate’ and not in keeping with the required Bolshevik norms of patriotism and Motherland. These were the type of books were categorised as having leanings in the direction of Bourgeois European taste, not merely frivolous but inflammatory and challenging the conventional status quo, something that left him under a dark cloud of suspicion, which followed him everywhere.

Rumours, that were easily verified, abounded about the flourishing Black market in rare and antiquarian books and that he was involved in to some level, as may I say was everyone, a practise brought to the attention of the NKVD cultural arm which deemed Mikhail as a likely distributor of banned books which unleashed repeated threats of bookshop closure and mass seizures of his titles. There were no few visits from these self-styled arbiters of cultural taste who would stake out the shop and record the comings and goings of his clientele with a focus on the many foreigners that frequented the premises.

Andrei had to pull himself up, losing himself in the effervescence of memory, unloading on the young girl, even as bright and keenly attentive as she was.

But Galina… I do go on into such detail. Please forgive me, he said with a smile.

No, please continue, Andrei, she refrained.

His smile eased and without a moment’s rest, continued, Needless to say, your sweet mother, Maya, who had met and fallen in love with your father as an educated woman and passionate reader, was so often in the shop and where he so encouraged her presence, that he would permit her, in their early courting days, to sit in the back room using the bookshop as a library. So, in fact, your parents love was forged in the great learning crucible of literature.

Galina was intrigued. As much as she knew her parents to be very loving to one another they were, by no means, demonstrative to the point of public expressions of affection, and to hear of these early years and the shared a journey into and through the lives of great minds across the ages left her feeling, inversely, all the sadder at the thought that her baboushka had had to resort to burning books, regardless of their literary worth, to keep them from freezing.

As time progressed, your father’s latitude became increasingly intolerable as they saw it…this was around 1937/38 when you would have been a girl of six and Yuri a babe in arms. In the end, Mikhail was ordered to shut the bookshop and to cease trading other than at the market stall he had out in the open under the watchful scrutiny of the authorities.

Biyana shuffled over to Yuri who had finally tired of reading, sitting down at right angles to Andrei. She had heard much of the conversation and was, in a sense, relieved at Andrei’s telling of a story she had been actively avoided pursuing with her grandchildren herself, consumed with heartache as she was with her parents’ disappearance.

Yuri, hands folded in his lap, looked up at Andrei, then his sister and then his baboushka, who gazed down at him lovingly, and spoke. I miss my parents and I think I could find them! If I was big enough and strong enough, I would go out and find them right now! He said defiantly.

Well Yuri, if you were a little bit older, we could go out together and look, Andrei offered unconvincingly.

Biyana smiled at her grandson’s innocent boast as Galina leant forward off the pillows that were stacked up under her and kissed her younger sibling on the forehead.

The reflective silence that had filled the room was quickly ruptured by the sound of a distant air raid siren becoming more insistent by the second. It began to fill the room increasing in volume as if in competition to be heard above the cacophony of voices, shrieks and bellows from outside the door. Within seconds it had risen to a crescendo filling every crack in the walls, every pore of the apartment, the sound of the siren generating more of a sense of panic and fear than even the rumble of the German bombers overhead themselves.

Biyana sprung to her feet belying her infirmity, grabbing Yuri, with Galina and Andrei in tow, turned around in one swift, clean movement grabbing the bomb shelter supply bag, trailing and twisting over her shoulder as she abruptly sashed it across her breast, doused the stoves naked flame with sand and dashed towards the front door.

She still had the presence of mind to lock the door behind her even in the knowledge that there may not even be a house left let alone a front door on their return. Once on the street they were joined by dozens of neighbours and as many complete strangers all heading up Vyborgskaya Ulitsa in the direction of Finland station and the nearest bomb shelter.

Many were trudging wearily devoid of any urgency whatsoever and complaining loudly about the recent spate of false alarms, made all the more irksome given the miserably cold weather that made for uncomfortable nocturnal evictions. The targeted bombings were bad enough but the deep, visceral fear came with the terror of indiscriminate raids that Leningraders had come to truly fear, particularly as nights of heavy cloud, fog or rain meant the German Heinkel bombers were less able to pinpoint, precision bomb, leaving more bombs to reign upon residential districts.

But the poor weather could, equally usher in reprieves for the citizens on the ground because many a raid was aborted before too much damage was inflicted upon the city.

Suddenly, the siren was drowned out by the roar of a convoy of vehicles, a retinue lead by four American studebakers with Katyushas, the Russian rocket launchers fired from frames mounted on the back of them. They were in turn followed by a dozen or more jeeps, trucks and troop carriers rattling, shaking and blasting their horns in competition to the whining of the sirens, the troops’ faces expressionless, their numbers drawn out of the shrinking ranks of local recruits and packed in like cattle, speeding to positions on the outskirts of town where the launchers could be more effectively positioned and aimed, clear of buildings and urban obstructions.

The convoy took and eternity to pass, clear now to Andrei that this was a people’s militia, a garrison of non-conscripts with not a professional soldier amongst them being mostly volunteers, factory workers and labourers from the Neva and Kubyshev sectors of the city.

There were also a number of musicians and artists amongst them who played at soldiers at the weekends and the odd afternoon in the days before the war. Now they were nothing more than cannon fodder against hardened German divisions. Due to the appalling Russian losses these instant draftees had been pulled, at a moment’s notice, off ditch digging and barbed wire laying details on the fringe of the city.

Thousands of these men and women had dug hundreds of miles of open trenches and anti-aircraft ditches, barbed wire entanglements and hauled timber and concrete for countless gun pits and bunkers. They were half-starved and exhausted with none of them having experienced front-line action and given the officers in command remained tight lipped as to where the weapons were going to, they all expected the worst.

Such was the urgency of their recruitment, many were not even permitted to go home to change, the few that were, found their kin looking at them with a wordless animal like dread filling their blank eyes… the look of someone gazing upon the condemned.

Finally, the convoy passed as the four of them entered the double door entrance of the former workers’ hostel dormitory, now makeshift bomb shelter. A simmering impatience was turning into a mob panic as a great crush of citizens tried to squeeze in the through the groaning doors. Then, against the tide of momentum, a man, a single figure fighting his way back out desperately grappling his way through the surging mass was yelling to anyone that could hear him that the two main rooms in the basement were full of the dead, the hostel having become yet another makeshift morgue.

So… the dead are now given sanctuary over the living, cried out one man.

Biyana looked at Andrei and grabbing the children slipped around a corner, into a narrow service lane. As Biyana tended to the children the siren having now stopped completely, Andrei’s attention was drawn to a truck idling outside with two men in the rear of the vehicle doing something he couldn’t quite make out. He had unconsciously separated from the three others in his curiosity, Galina following him with her eyes, Andrei now a good twenty paces away from them.

Andrei moves within a dozen steps of two very red-faced men in heavy wind breaker jumpers and thick trousers tossing naked, frozen corpses into the back of the truck and then stacking them one by one on top of one another like so many logs. He leant on a lamppost for support and peering beyond the entrance was able to see other workers of this abominable conveyor belt passing the icy, skinny corpses down the line. Snow began to fall in a light icing like dusting over the dirty canvas sheeting they draped over the bodies, in the rear of the body collecting truck.

There was a break in activity so the two men on the back of the vehicle got down and lit up some very cheap, foul smelling local cigarettes. They were on a break and treating the infernal toil just like any other day’s work.

A loud, abrupt voice snapped and barked some indistinct orders to them, the men throwing the cigarettes to the ground and, redoubling their efforts, were back into it, one of them dropping down the trucks side gate on the five-tonne vehicle full of bodies precariously stacked six high. The soldier barking the orders, joined them gesturing to them to pick up the bodies