Adrift

Harry clings to his mother, his chubby arms wrapped tightly around her leg. He tugs her dress and looks up, still excited about the pony he got to ride at his third birthday party last week, but his mother doesn't look down. She's busy surveying pale Belgian endive in the greenhouse on Foxboro Road, sweating in the heat beneath glass ceiling panels caked with grease and grime. An open skylight lets little drifts of cooling wind fall onto Harry's upturned face, and through it he sees fat, white clouds, tinged with pink, tumble across the blue Suffolk sky.

Harry twists the folds of his mother's skirt, frowning at the tiers of boxed fruits and vegetables that soften and spoil in the heat of this light-filled house. He takes a deep breath, then wrinkles his nose at the scent of pungent tomatoes and freshly dug earth.

His mother wears a new linen dress, a dress Harry's never seen before. It's painted with yellow and blue images of boats and sand, and Harry smiles as his fat, little finger traces their outline. He dips his head, squats, then stands up beneath the dress' billowy skirt, looking down at his mother's sandaled feet, her bare skin intricately netted with pale blue veins. He puts his foot on hers, and his small toes claw down as he listens to her asking about the pears, her voice full of familiar laughter. He hears the man call his mother Mary Louise, as strangers always do. Harry remains hidden, pressed against his mother, and bathed in the blue and yellow light. His golden curls brush against her legs. Through bunched fabric, her hand cradles his head.

Once, the greenhouse served the kitchen of a cliff-top hotel. Now, Edwardian holidays are to be found only in books or films. Now, the hotel's high rooms have become unsuitable offices for a company that deals in pesticides. Unsuitable because they're small and stuffy, and the building is isolated and difficult to reach for most of the company's clientele.

Harry's father works in one of the offices, one on the top floor. When evening arrives, Harry runs out to his front steps to sit and wait for his father to begin his short walk home. His father is thin and small, but his feet are noisy, and as he walks closer and closer, Harry recognizes the crack of his steel-tipped shoes on the pavement. As soon as the great oak clock in the front hall strikes five, Harry will run to the red-painted door with its brightly-colored inlaid glass of a ship in sail, loosen the latch, and wait, a bundle of quivering anticipation.

Now, as he squats beside his mother, Harry picks bits of pale green lettuce from the floor and surveys the crowded, dusty greenhouse. The people here are not fun, and they don't know how to play. Life is better outdoors, in the sunshine, beneath an open sky. Harry thinks about the sea and remembers the treasures he knows are hidden in the sand.

His mother talks with an old man, whose face is wrinkled and dry like a raisin, in the voice she keeps for people who don't know her well. She sweeps her pale wheat hair out of her eyes as she searches for pumpkin and quince, pomegranates and figs. She sniffs some pieces of fruit, squeezes others.

Harry gasps when a stack of parsnips and rutabagas overturns, and the vegetables tumble off the table and onto the floor. He backs away, his new red shoes raising tiny clouds of black dust, until he reaches the greenhouse door. Behind him, on the wall, jute sacking hangs beside worn-handled garden implements, rusted sieves, and faded packets of shriveled seeds that will never come to flower.

The child watches as his mother stretches up for a string of onions she can't quite reach. The man with the raisin face unhooks them for her, and she gives him a smile of thanks. When he smiles in return, Harry can see the man has no teeth.

Harry opens the door, wanders outside to the garden, and turns his face up, squinting into the noonday sun. The garden is huge, but Harry can see how light glances off distressed frames that shade butternut squash and delicate Swiss chard from sea breezes. In the distance, an espaliered pear, burdened with cankered fruit, battens a high wall. A slight shift of wind promises the sea. The boy can smell its sharp tang of algae in the salt air. It is cooler in the garden, and Harry puts on his windbreaker, the red one, with the green lining in the hood. He begins to run through the garden as he thinks of the beach, as he remembers pastel-colored pebbles and smooth white sticks of sea-bleached flotsam washed in from a distant shore.

Every weekend, Harry's father takes him to the beach. Harry rides his blue tricycle down the gravel lane outside his front gate to the promenade at the road's end, while Sasha, his golden Lab, runs alongside him. Far along, away from traffic and the beach huts of vacationers, his father and Sasha leap from the promenade down to the shingle. The little boy bounds off his tricycle and dives into his father's arms, both of them laughing, and together they walk to the sea. There, on the tideline, concealed beneath blistered bladder wrack and slimy skeins of slippery laminaria, Harry finds hidden coins, some of them, his father tells him, dating back to ancient Rome. All of them go straight into the pocket of Harry's shorts.

Only his father knows where to find the treasure. When his father has to work, and his mother gossips in the sun by the breakwater, Harry finds nothing. But when he and his father tramp the beach together, the child yelps with joy, loosens his grip on his father's hand, and runs beside Sasha to pocket the glint beneath the weeds before the curdling surf can suck it from his grasp.

This afternoon, alone in the large garden, wandering farther and farther away from the greenhouse, Harry finds the garden gate. He pushes, and it gouges into dust and weeds. Then, all at once, he's on the street. He walks by hedges of hawthorn, entangled with ivy and black current, fragrant in the warmth of this early autumn afternoon.

Sometimes Harry toddles, sometimes he stoops from the waist to pick up matchsticks, bits of silver paper, or pebbles, treasures all. When the road curves downward, the sea becomes visible through a thin hedge of gold-green boxwood. Its turquoise mass merges seamlessly with the vast bowl of sky, its broad gleam disturbed only by jagged, wind-driven whitecaps. In the distance, Harry sees the mast of a lightship spiking the horizon. Closer, below him, are the red and yellow and blue tiled roofs of vacationers' beach huts, and beyond them, the fleshy oval leaves and creeping stems of the sea rocket, and finally, the sandy shore.

A teenager with hair bleached white by the sun is walking across the sand by the boathouses, carrying a fishing rod. He turns and snickers, then calls to the boy, "Hey, mate. Shouldn't you be home with your mum?" Harry knows not to talk to strangers, even strangers with hair so fair it gleams in the sun, so the teenager shrugs his shoulders and walks on.

The child crosses the road, unstopped by passers-by. He squats in the lee of an upturned dinghy, turning over and over in his palm the riches he finds there: a crab shell, a shard of frosted glass, a rusted bottle top, dried cuttlefish. Hours pass, and the sun rides lower in the sky, tingeing the rippling water with bands of orange and pink. Still, Harry plays on. He is happy here, surrounded by his treasures, thinking of his father and Sasha.

Harry smiles when he sees the tiny, dark figure approaching in the distance, walking along the beach. But his father doesn't have Sasha with him, and Harry wonders where he is. He shades his eyes, but the orange sun flames low behind the distant figure, and Harry cannot see his father's face.

The figure moves closer, and Harry's smile fades. This man is not his father. This man is taller, and his hair is longer and darker. The child moves closer to the boat, retreating a little around the stern. His cheek rests against frayed, salty ropes that scratch him as he holds his breath and watches.

The man follows the tideline, sometimes reaching down to examine a bit of broken glass or a fragment of seashell before standing up straight again. When he glances toward the beached dinghies and doesn't look away, Harry knows he's been spotted.

The child turns and sits down, his legs stretched out in front of him as he leans against the dinghy. He piles his gathered stones on his lap till they tumble down the hill he's created. He picks them up and piles them on his lap again. Now he can hear the crunch and grind of the man's footsteps on the pebbles along with the sound of the sea as it laps at the shore.

Harry picks up a bit of dried seaweed and pushes his finger into a puffy black blister that crumbles into dust. He watches as the man vaults over the wall and onto the low promenade, then turns and gazes out to sea, shading his eyes with his hand. He glances over his shoulder, then jumps back down to the beach and begins walking toward the child.

The man's steps are noisy. Harry watches his approach with hooded eyes. The man wears faded brown corduroy trousers that are nothing like the pressed khaki slacks his father wears. And he wears boots, boots that are dusty. Harry's father's shoes are always clean. The man is close enough now for Harry to notice his hands, hanging loose-fingered and dirty by his side. The skin around his nails is bloody. When the man squats down in front of him, Harry spreads his own chubby hands over his eyes, splaying his fingers wide.

"You okay, mate?"

The man's voice is soft, like his father's when he sings him a lullaby, but Harry knows he shouldn't talk to strangers, even those with soft voices, and he doesn't look up. He doesn't answer the man. Overhead, a white cloud of gulls rise and sheer, their swift, graceful dives grazing the water into sprays of white. Sometimes their wings catch a wayward breeze that carries them off-course till they overcome the wind and return, wheeling above the boy in a clamor of cries.

The boy thinks of his mother, in the overheated greenhouse, and he feels the sharp sting of tears in the back of his eyes. He leaps to his feet, turns and runs, but he falls, over and over, into big gaps between the pebbles, where sea-pinks grow in clumps. His legs twist and wobble, slowing him down. He knows the man is close, right behind. The child feels his windbreaker being tugged and realizes the man has hold of his hood. He stops, looks down at the pebbles, and remembers how safe he felt hidden under his mother's skirt.

"Where you going, mate?"

Harry doesn't want the man's dirty hands on his bright red windbreaker. He thinks of his mother, taking it from the washing line where it dried in yesterday's sunshine. Now this man is making it dirty, and his mother will be cross. But you don't tell grown-ups what to touch, so Harry looks down at his new red shoes, instead, reaching down to touch them without bending his knees.

"New shoes, mate?"

Harry's shoes come from the shop next to the café, the one that has the giant stuffed brown bear at the top of the stairs and sugar in pink and yellow cut-glass bowls that sparkle in the dancing light. The café sells decorated chocolates in glass-topped cabinets, and the scent of coffee spills out into the street. The boy and his mother had tea and raspberry scones spread with orange marmalade at the bear café the day he got his new shoes. Clean shoes, grown-up shoes, his mother called them. That made Harry sit up straight and tall. It made him smile when people looked at his new shoes. Now, the beach has made them dirty, and Harry doesn't feel they're grown-up anymore. They look small beside the man's big boots.

"How old are you?"

The man has asked him a question it's okay to answer, a question that people ask him all the time. It's a question that makes his mother happy when he answers it.

"I'm three." For the first time, Harry raises his eyes to look at the man's face. It looks like an old map, stained nut-brown and covered with lines and creases. "I'm a big boy now."

"Right. Sure you are, mate. What you up to?"

Harry doesn't answer the man, and the man doesn't ask him again. The only sounds are the sounds of the waves breaking on the shore and the gulls screaming overhead.

After a long pause, the man smiles and says, "Come with me."

And Harry does.

* * *

When Mary Louise realizes her child is gone, she tosses down her raffia bag full of sweet potatoes and carrots, apples and pears, and runs out into the garden, leaving the bag behind. As she runs, her skirt catches on boxes, capsizing green beans and plump blackberries bursting with juice, bruising their delicate skin.

Outside, in the garden, the early afternoon wind rattles the tied aluminum scarers and makes a noise almost loud enough to drown out her calls for her son. She runs back through the greenhouse, onto the street, then rushes up the steps to the office building that was once an Edwardian hotel, screaming her husband's name.

Together, Mary Louise and George spend the afternoon searching the busy shops and crowded streets of the popular seaside town, frantically calling their son's name over and over. Mary Louise inquires at the café, but no one there has seen her son. Not since the day she and Harry had tea and raspberry scones, the day Harry got his new red shoes.

They search the beach, but it's now early evening and time for dinner. The beach is almost empty, and Mary Louise and George do not believe Harry would come to the beach alone. Two grey-haired pensioners sit side-by-side on a wooden bench holding hands, watching a young girl in a pink swimsuit playing in the sand.

"Have you seen a little boy?" Mary Louise asks, approaching the girl.

"When?"

"This afternoon."

"Yes. Some."

"Did you see a three-year-old?" Mary Louise hesitates, then adds, "By himself."

The girl looks up, unable to hide her surprise. "By himself?" She cocks her head to one side, thinking, her dark ponytail flowing over her shoulder. "No."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. I would have remembered a boy that young on his own." The girl shovels into the shingle, where frothy water seeps and floods as she tries in vain to beat the tide. "I only saw one boy and he was with his dad."

Mary Louise chews her lower lip and begins to whimper. George beings to breathe more rapidly, glancing back in the direction of the town. The girl adds, "He had curly yellow hair, the boy with his dad."

"What else do you remember?" George asks, crouching down, so his face is level with the girl's. Soon, she's remembered the bright red windbreaker with the green lining inside its hood and the newly scuffed red shoes.

Mary Louise begins to shake, unable now to hold back her tears. George's face is white, his features immobile as he leads his wife to a bench near the promenade.

It's dark by the time the police search begins. Beams of light crisscross the beach, over and over as people hunt and call. In the bright-windowed town, uniformed officers ask questions at quiet front doors flanked by pots of brilliant red geraniums, all bearing huge, top-heavy blooms. Men and women, a few pulled from the depths of dreams, a few protectively hugging their own children close, stand on lighted porches, anxious to close their doors once again.

The girl who saw the child sits with her parents in an office in the converted hotel, her pink swimsuit covered by a dark rose sweater. She tells a policeman about the boy with the yellow curls and the man who was not his father.

* * *

Harry stands close to the beach, beside an old brown van he's never seen before. It's different from most of the vans at the beach. It has worn tires and wired-up windows, and Harry thinks it must be very old. The man has let him use the public toilet near the sand, but he did not manage well, not without his mother, and he has made a mess of himself. His cheeks are red and raw from his long afternoon in the sun and the salt air. His lower lip juts out, full and rosy, and without his mother to wipe it away, a few large drops of dribble hang from his mouth.

Now the man lifts Harry into the van, points to a small black-and-white television in the corner and says, "Look. Cartoons. You watch that. I'll make us some cocoa."

He walks over to a little sink where unwashed pots and pans and cracked dishes, all mismatched, are stacked high. He reaches into the back pocket of his corduroy trousers and pulls out a pack of Marlboros, lights one, and lets it hang loosely from his lips, while he watches a runnel of water trickle over a chipped green cup.

Harry watches closely, and when he sees his chance, he runs to the door. But the door squeaks when he pushes against it, and the man is there in a second, stepping in front of him, blocking the only exit.

"You can't go out. It's dark, mate."

His voice is loud now, and Harry begins to tremble. He jumps when the man slams the door. Then he begins to whimper. The man picks him up, his thick hands under Harry's arms, and the child again looks into his face. It's caked brown with dirt, and his watery-blue eyes have streaks of red across the white. The smell of his breath makes Harry feel sick, and he looks away.

"Listen, mate. You stay here. Okay?"

* * *

Mary Louise ignores the policeman, shakes herself free of George's arms. Home is not the place she wants to be. Not without Harry. She must hunt for her son until she finds him. If she stops, he will be lost forever. He will never be found. So Mary Louise walks.

She walks across the town once, twice, three times. She walks up and down the same streets, calling in parks and on playgrounds. She runs down to the beach for the fifth time. Above her, stars glitter and wink, but they don't tell her what they've seen or where she can find her son. Cold moonlight shimmers silver on the inky sea, but the sea keeps its secrets. Someone has her child. Her little boy. Someone can touch his small body. Someone who shouldn't.

Her breath comes hard and fast now, and Mary Louise barely notices when the cold seawater slithers around her ankles. She turns round and round, until she's dizzy, a small torch in her hand, searching for a red windbreaker, a small child with new red shoes and golden curls. Small footprints in the sand. She listens for the sound of Harry's cries, but the only thing she hears is the sea pounding against the shore and the slamming of her own heart against her ribs.

Mary Louise doubles over, howls herself breathless.

* * *

The van is parked between the cliffs and the sea. In the corner, two green parakeets chatter in a brass cage that's suspended from the ceiling. Their squawks pierce the fetid air. Books lie in a jumble on the floor. They smell old and musty, and their covers depict huge flowers, trees twisted into grotesque shapes, boats cutting through far-off tropical seas with sails unfurled. Sequined hanks of fabric cover crates and boxes.

Everything is dust-covered. Dirt cakes the floor. Thin, grey blankets lie twisted on the bed. The exposed mattress exudes a musky odor. A fat chunk of amber is crammed onto a tiny shelf beside the sink along with a mottled bird's feather, a fistful of jarred campion, two blown quail's eggs, and a spiral-twisted shell from the beach.

The man goes to the overburdened table and in one movement sweeps books, papers, and bags onto the floor with the flat of his arm. He pulls a wooden crate from beneath the bed and places it by the door. Harry looks at the top of the man's head as he bends down, sees his untidy hair, the thin shoulders clad in dirty denim. The man picks the boy up and sets him down on one of the seats by the window, and the boy starts to cry. As he watches, the man's fingers remove the top of the crate, then pull out, amid a cascade of scrunched newspaper, reels of cotton, a bottle, some string, and a pocketknife.

* * *

The next morning, the sun lights the pale, cloudless sky, fading out the stars and the black inkiness of night. There will be no mist this morning. The day will be clear and bright. The night, however, has hidden its secrets where the day can't find them.

The search for the child has continued without a break. The parents huddle together, holding Styrofoam cups of strong, hot coffee, on a bench near the promenade, the same bench on which the grey-haired pensioners sat last night. A few boats drift across the water, their sails unfurled. The azure stillness of the morning sea is spotted with puffs of foam that reflect the fresh, new light. A small group has gathered around a police van, anxiously waiting for news.

"I cannot live without him," George says, resting his chin on Mary Louise's fair hair.

"I know."

"You didn't watch him?"

Mary Louise throws her coffee down, tears herself away, and marches up the beach, her coat wrapped across her tightly, arms folded, fists clenched. "Give him back!" she screams, dropping to her knees in the sand.

* * *

The teenage boy with the fair hair is walking across the beach by the boathouses toward the jetty when he sees the police van, the worried father, the sobbing mother. Overheard scraps of conversation tell him all he needs to know. The image of a child crosses his mind like a shadow crossing water. A small boy, alone, a red windbreaker with a green-lined hood, bright red shoes, golden curls. The teenager turns toward the police van. Already dreaming of being famous, he shoulders his fishing rod and breaks into a shambling run, willing the child to be found, safe and alive.

* * *

Soon, the police are crowding inside the old, brown-painted van, and everyone is talking at once. Harry watches the man run a dirty hand through his hair the way his father does on a hot summer day, sees him shrug on a jacket that seems to weigh his thin frame down. The man doesn't look at the child until handcuffed, he stumbles between two policemen down the broken steps of his van. Then he turns to look back in, at the face of the boy who struggles in the arms of an overweight police officer.

"Come back," Harry cries, one chubby arm stretched toward the man, trying to touch him. "Boat."

"Yours, mate."

For a long time, Harry will think about the bottle that stayed behind in the crate. Earlier, during the long night, he watched the man tie a thin stretch of cotton to fragile, collapsed sticks flat on the boat's deck. When the man lifted him onto his lap, Harry helped to pull the string, saw the mainsail and jib rise inside the bottle, felt the boat become real inside a shut-glass world where it will sail forever across a static sea. Before he slept, the man put the bottle in Harry's arms. Clutching it tightly, for the first time that night, Harry smiled.

* * *

Harry wonders why his mother's crying when the policeman lifts him into her arms. He wonders why his father hurts him when he holds him, why he doesn't want to let him go. Held between his parents, Harry points to the old van over and over again, asking about the man.

His mother squeezes him so tightly that Harry begins to cry. Reaching out, over her shoulder, he shouts for his left-behind boat. One day he will learn to make a similar boat, but better, for a little boy of his own, and on that day the house will sing with the sound of their laughter. But on this bright morning, only the pulse of the sea and the call of the gulls fill the air as he is carried away, becalmed.

Leningrad 1941

June 1941. Spring is late in coming this year, but the ice is finally breaking loose from the Strelka. Today, the sun that weaves its rays through the pale green leaves of the lindens warms and comforts your face. You lean against a parapet on the Dvortsovy Bridge and watch the seagulls as they rise and sheer, their swift, graceful dives churning the water below them into sprays of silvery white.

The news is not good. The Fuehrer wants to take Moscow, and in order to help accomplish that, he wants Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth.

You should be worried, but worry is difficult on a day like this. The shrieks and shouts of children at play still fill the parks, and at night, the scent of coffee and oranges, mixed with marigolds and sweat, and mingled with raucous laughter, spills from the open doors of cafés and out into the streets. Others may be at war, you tell yourself, as you curl your fingers around your glass of steaming tea and open your battered volume of Pushkin, but we're at peace.

July eighteenth, and the first ration cards are issued. "It's just a precaution," you tell your family, as you watch their worried faces relax. "Leningrad has plenty of food in the Badayev warehouses. Enough to last all winter. You'll survive."

Today, when you reach the Nevsky Prospekt, you find it filled with buses and trams, all of them carrying a load of bewildered children. Children, bundled up for the coming winter in the heat of this balmy summer afternoon, are being wrenched from their mothers' protective arms and ferried to trains that will carry them to safety in the outlying villages, then later, beyond the Urals.

These are children who should be playing in the soft summer grass, sharing sweets and laughing at games, while their nannies gossip in the dappled shade of the lime trees or eat freshly picked raspberries that stain their lips and teeth dark purple.

You watch as the children are taken from the buses and packed into railroad cars like cattle, some clinging to khaki backpacks, some holding bags containing bread spread with honey for them to eat on the long trip east. Their hands and faces press against the grimy windows, their fingers spread wide, like the points of a star. Some are crying openly. Others attempt to be brave. All of them watch as their mothers struggle to hold back their tears. You understand a mother's pain, but at least their little ones will be safe. And they'll be back in a week or two.

Then comes the news that the Germans have bombed the railway lines.

August, and the good weather holds. You've never seen a summer such as this. The sun, ripe and yellow as a pear, glances off the lindens that line the wide avenues, gilding their dark leaves bright. A profusion of mushrooms - golden chanterelles - lies hidden in the tall grass. Their smell is strong and fruity, and it reminds you of apricots. A bad omen, your babushka tells you, her old forehead wrinkling in genuine concern. Too many mushrooms mean too many deaths to come. But you're not superstitious.

Still, Leningrad is changing. The Klodt stallions are gone from the Anichkov Bridge. They lie buried in the palace gardens. Other statues that can't be moved, like the great statue of Peter in the Decembrists' Square, are swaddled in sandbags. There have been siren alerts but no actual shelling. But people talk, and they scour the city for food like ants at a country picnic. All over Leningrad, residents paste strips cut from newspaper in a crisscross fashion over their windows, slamming the door against the summer light. Like almost everyone else, you've started sleeping in your clothes.

Colonel Bychevsky has issued a call. Now, instead of strolling in the parks searching for the ice-cream girls or enjoying a picnic under the trees, the people of Leningrad leave the city carrying pickaxes, spades, trowels, anything with which to dig. Any person able to work, and even some who can't, has volunteered for duty on the Luga line, with the People's Volunteers. You dig tank traps on the outskirts of the city. "We held back Napoleon," you remind an old woman who's digging next to you. "We'll hold back Hitler as well."

On the Luga line, you work from sun up to sun down. You boil water for tea over a fire of twigs, then sleep for a few hours on a bed of yellow straw. The scent of pine resin burns your nostrils and makes you sneeze. Although you're faint with exhaustion, and your hands are blistered and bleeding, you force yourself to work harder, faster.

The Germans are close, but no one knows how close.

You position your spade, thrust deep, turn the earth, then thrust again. Before you, fields of rye shimmer golden and rustle in the warm wind. In the distance, the line of pines indicating the forest's edge looms dark as ripe damsons. Occasionally, you're greeted by a stray sunflower, its yellow-fringed face turned toward the light. You ignore the twitter of wood pigeons, the smell of honeysuckle, the blue glazed porcelain of the summer sky. If you don't, you'll be fooled into thinking everything's all right.

When you're tired, you take a swig of tea, then continue on. Better to do too much today, than not enough tomorrow. If your attention starts to drift, if your work slows down, the drone of an airplane, or the hot, sudden flash of artillery and the trembling of the earth remind you why you're here. If you're lucky, the bread ration will have made it through, and if not, at least you can count on cabbage soup. There is no news about your loved ones in the Red Army.

On the eighth day, digging an anti-tank ramp, the shelling is closer than ever before. Little Anya, two rows behind you, is hit. Blood, black and shiny and slick as wet walnuts, oozes from her head, staining her cornsilk hair. Little Anya should be practicing Chopin or reciting her French lesson. You don't stop to bury her. You can't afford that luxury. So you grab a blanket and wrap her in it, all the while promising you'll come back and give her a proper burial some day. You truly want to, but your words are a lie.

August seventh and eighth. The Germans begin to crush the Luga line. Von Leeb and his Panzers soon make contact with the Finnish army on the Karelian peninsula. Once the line starts to crumble, it crumbles everywhere.

Back in Leningrad, you join others who stand in bread lines for hours at a time. You begin to ration what food you've managed to squirrel away. A few potatoes here, a few onions or turnips there, tea bags you've used four times already. And what about that jar of dried cherries you brought with you from the country?

The golds of August darken and bleed into the russets of September. And still it's warm.

You're not naïve, so you sew a special lining into your coat for your ration card. As you stand in the daily bread line, you're thankful you have onions. Onions keep well, and they make a nourishing soup. You try to keep your household alive, but the young ones never seem to have enough, while the older ones, sensing they won't make it through the coming winter, barely eat at all. You scrape your food onto the plates of those in your family, lying to them, telling them you're not hungry. If only you had more sugar, but the rations have been cut again.

September eighth becomes September ninth. The Germans have bombed the Badayev. The old wood burns rapidly. Two and one-half tons of flour, sugar, meat - gone. Flames stain the night sky with vivid streaks of orange and red. The acrid stench of carbonized sugar burns your eyes and makes them tear. All you can do now is dream of food, but you try not to dream of that which you cannot have.

Now, Leningrad is surrounded. Mga has fallen, and there are no road or railway links to or from the city. Leningrad, built on many islands, has become an island itself. Once it freezes, Lake Lagoda will provide the only way in - or out. But amazingly, the air is still warm, and the leaves of the lindens, though beginning to fade from purple to pale lemon yellow, still rustle on the trees.

September tenth. The Red Star Creamery is bombed. Tons of butter - lost. Enough fat to get Leningrad through the winter.

The Zhdanov Shipworks has been hit. Seven hundred Leningraders killed or wounded. More than eighty fires set.

The Kirov Metallurgical Works is burning. Black smoke belches into the sky, but lower, down at street level, yellow dust fills your lungs, and the searing pain causes you to cough.

Dmitri Shostakovich, who until now has refused evacuation, is heard on the radio, "An hour ago, I finished the score of two movements of a large symphonic composition. If I succeed in carrying it off, if I manage to complete the third and fourth movements, then perhaps I'll be able to call it my Seventh Symphony. Why am I telling you this? So that the radio listeners who are listening to me now will know that life in our city is proceeding normally."

But nothing is normal any more. Or rather, what was normal, no longer is.

On the morning of October fourteenth, you awaken to the first snowfall of the season. Outside, you can see the crystalline frost flowers that bloom on all the windows. All around you, the frigid air howls. It stings your cheeks like the slap of a hand. You look up, searching for a patch of blue, but all you see is a sky filled with snow.

Snow. Snow crunches and grinds under your boots as you walk to the bakery for the morning's ration, but you know there will be no children on skis and sledges this winter. No shrieks and howls followed by delighted laughter. You have no fuel and no electricity, but still, you're better off than most. At least you still have running water. Your neighbor, Tatiana Dmitrievna, who lives three doors down the hall, tries to stop you, but you hurry on, sensing she wants to ask a favor. The cold has penetrated even your heart.

You wear your coat and fur cap in the apartment, with the flaps pulled down tight, over your ears. You need a stove, but can you afford the price? "Four days' bread ration and two kilos of sugar," you announce to your family. "That's the price of a burzhuika today. Tomorrow, it could double. And the pipe is extra."

You allow a few onions to sprout. Your family needs the nutrients in the dark, green shoots. If only you could find nettles, you could brew a bitter tea. But nettles were gone long ago. Nettles, so rich in vitamins, especially iron. It's true, what your grandmother always says, "The sting of the nettle is but nothing compared to the pains that it heals." Well, if you can't have nettles, then pine needles will have to do. Pine needle tea is even more bitter than tea brewed from nettles, and it's hard to keep down, but it's better than nothing at all.

All the animals are gone now. All the dogs, all the cats, all the horses. Even the guinea pigs from the hospital. The rumors begin. You hear them in the streets, in the hallways, but you don't want to believe them. Still, you know the city's no longer safe for children.

Standing in the bread line, you begin to hallucinate. It's the lack of food, the lack of vitamins and essential nutrients. Everything begins to swim before your eyes. You see people's mouths move, but you can't make out the words they say. As the wind picks up, snow devils begin to dance before you, rotating furiously, some of them taking on old, familiar shapes of loved ones long dead. You pray you do not faint. If you faint, you'll wake up - if you wake up - and find that your coat and hat and, most importantly, your ration card have all been stolen.

You count your footsteps just to remain sane, to provide you with a link, however tenuous, to the here and now. Staying alive sometimes becomes nothing more than a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, of forcing wakefulness in the icy morning air. When you turn down Stremyannaya Ulitsa, you want to sit on old Natalya's steps and rest - just for a minute or two - but you know you can't. Rest would mean oblivion.

Trudging past the Summer Gardens, you notice the snow has wiped away every scar of raw earth. It clings in heavy folds to everything in Leningrad.

You get used to the explosions. You learn to gauge how close the planes are by the sound of their engines. Fires rage everywhere. Some smell of wood smoke. Others leave a sharp, metallic taste in your mouth and nose that lingers for hours. The clouds that hang above Leningrad are as red as blood.

Wednesday, and you climb onto the roof of your apartment building. It's your turn to stand sentry and stamp out any fires caused by incendiaries before those fires burn out of control. As you sit on the roof, cradling your jar of hot tea, you gaze up at the cold night sky, searching for God among the twinkling stars. But God, you decide, will not be found. He has hidden His face and turned His back on Leningrad.

In your burzhuika, you burn everything that can be burned - packing crates, wood from shelled apartment buildings, furniture, books. Yesterday's pages of the Leningradskaya Pravda. But not your volume of Pushkin. Not yet. Surely, that can wait.

There's no running water now, so you use the blue-speckled chamber pot that once sat in the largest bedroom in your grandmother's dacha. When you're finished, like everyone else, you set it in the hall and cover it with a large china plate. Soon, the rank smell of cabbage and piss hangs heavy in the air.

You barely speak to those in your family, let alone the persons you used to call friend. Speaking takes energy. And when you speak, tension arcs and fills the air. It's better to remain silent. The number of pregnancies in the city has dropped to nearly zero. Love has been forgotten in this Leningrad winter.

It is November, and the deaths begin. The official cause is grippe, consumption, ulcers, and infection. By the end of the month, 11,085 Leningraders are dead. Call it what you will - scurvy, dystrophy, dysentery - it all boils down to one thing, and you know it - starvation.

The December death toll reaches more than 40,000, and that doesn't take into account the people lying in alleyways, piled outside cemeteries, one on top of the other like firewood, or frozen in frigid apartment buildings, their loved ones waiting till the spring thaw to put them in their graves.

It's minus twenty today. Leningrad is swaddled in blanket upon blanket of freshly fallen snow. It's ringed by garlands of ice and glitters like an elaborately frosted wedding cake. Fraud, theft, and the black market run rampant. With no electricity and no running water, you want to sleep late, but you can't. Hunger twists your stomach into a knot it pulls tight and wakes you early. Weak winter light glances off the Neva, then slices through the morning mist. The high-pitched whine of shells pierces the air.

Leningrad is under siege. The ice road over Lake Lagoda is your only hope. Already it's being called the "Road of Life." It's still unstable, but it's getting thicker every day, and now that Tikhvin's been recaptured, the crossing will be easier and faster. Pavlov's men will bring in flour, sugar, salt, meat, butter, tinned fish, cereal, and milk.

Your ration card becomes more precious than gold. It's your only connection to life. You make the morning trek to the bakery to collect your ration of bread, but bread is no longer bread. It's mostly cellulose and warehouse sweepings. It fills your belly, but it makes you sick. You remember the bread you ate last summer at the dacha - black and rich, and you sliced it into thick, heavy chunks that you spread with freshly made cloudberry jam or soaked in hot, sweet tea. Then, as your stomach twists again, you remember to forget.

Little children have the faces of old men. Their yellow skin stretched tightly over protruding bones. Their eyes sunken. Their lips cracked and blistered. Their gums bleeding. Their teeth loose in their sockets.

Pasha Antipov, two floors down, passes you on the snow-covered street, pulling a sledge bearing a frozen corpse wrapped in a curtain of rose-scattered chintz. One small, blue fist has managed to escape. It bobs up and down as Pasha pulls the sledge over the frozen snow. You know the body is that of his two-year-old son, Arkady. Your heart contracts in pain, then you close your eyes and hurry on. It's better not to care. You have only one responsibility now, and that's to stay alive. Still, you cross yourself and lace your gloved fingers tightly as you begin to recite a prayer no one will ever hear.

Rations are cut again. You can't blame Pavlov. It's his job to see that all of Leningrad is fed. They say on the radio that there are nutrients in leather. So you boil your father's briefcase, strain the broth, then float your family's cubes of bread on the top. Sometimes you make a jellied pâté from an old belt or two, or you thicken your soup with filthy cellulose you sweep from a factory floor. If you're lucky, you still have wallpaper paste or face powder to mix in.

Corpses pile up by the Karpovka canal and outside cemetery gates. Now, even the dead have to wait. Sometimes you have to step over a corpse on your daily trek to the bakery. You don't mind any more if you have to walk past them. Being dead is normal now, just like being filthy. It's waking up each morning that's the surprise.

Dysentery grips the city. You boil your water, but there's too much excrement in the streets and in the hallways. You gag on the smell of steaming shit.

People collapse and die of hunger before your very eyes. The young more often than the old. Their ration is only half that of a worker's, but a growing child needs as many calories to stay alive as a man. But Pavlov is Pavlov. He's not God. And the fewer there are to feed, the greater your chances of getting the food you need.

Christmas Day, 1941. The daily bread ration is increased, but only for today. You finally decide to bring out that jar of dried cherries you'd hidden in the hole in the wall. When you open it, you notice your father has tears in his eyes.

The new year comes, and still the snow falls silently, filtering through the bare branches of the birches, carpeting the frozen blue of the Neva, burying the rubble and filth and corpses that have accumulated over all of Leningrad. But on the ice road, the trucks finally begin to roll - slowly - from one post to another, bringing supplies into the city. The "Road of Life" is beginning to live up to its name.

May 1942. The morning is warm and lilac-scented. Spring has come early to Leningrad. The vast bowl of sky is clear. There's not even a wisp of cloud floating dreamily off toward the Gulf of Finland. The lindens are beginning to bud, their leaves a light, translucent green, and so new, they're still damp and crumpled. Orioles and corncrakes fill the air with the first sweet notes of their summer songs.

A white cloud of gulls swoops low, then dives into the bright blue waters of the Neva. Their pale eyes reflect the fresh, new light. Others gulls preen on ice floes that are breaking up and floating away. Soft tendrils of weeping birch skim the surface of the river.

Leningrad is still under siege, but the ice road has fulfilled its promise. There is food, and fewer are dying. Trams are running, and electricity has been restored. Despite the shelling, Leningraders, whose numbers have been reduced by at least a third, are out for a walk on this beautiful spring day. They are weak and dazed, but they shuffle along, some leaning on others, some leaning on cherry walking sticks. Like many other women, you tuck a small bunch of violets into your hair.

The dead have all been buried, even little Anya. They are already talking about a monument in Piskarevsky Cemetery. One to honor those who did what they could but still perished during the days of the Leningrad Blockade.

Those who are still alive and can find a bit of ground, plant cabbages and potatoes, turnips and onions. Maybe a few radishes. The siege isn't over yet, and you must prepare for the coming winter. But surely things can be resolved before then. Govorov will see to that.

You walk to the Nevsky Prospekt and lean over the parapet on the Anichkov Bridge. Below you, swans glide majestically down the Fontanka River. On the grassy bank, a few elderly fishermen are trying their luck. Your heart lightens, and you feel something swelling inside you that you haven't felt in a very long time. You realize with a start that it's happiness. Happiness at being alive.

You pick the dandelions that have sprung up wherever they can. You have a bit of oil, and the dandelions will make a fine salad for your family. A large patch of nettles is growing in the Catherine Gardens. Already, someone has made soup. Soon, you'll all be gaining strength.

People don't speak. You don't speak. It's not because you don't want to speak, but because you no longer recognize even those you once knew so well. But at last, you think you see a familiar face. "Yelena! Yelena Mikhailova! Is that you?" you ask an elderly woman, after you realize that in truth, she's really only twenty-four. You speak in hushed tones for a little while, assuring each other that the vegetables you plant this spring will see you through next winter. Or better yet, that Govorov will end the siege before the leaves drop from the lindens once again.

When you part, you walk to the Summer Gardens and sink down on a bench. The breeze that kisses your cheek carries the fresh, clean scent of the sea. Your father leans heavily on your shoulder, but when he turns his wrinkled face toward the sun, you're rewarded with one of his rare, sweet smiles. You watch as a butterfly, with wings so pale and white they're almost transparent, hovers over a bed of trumpeting daffodils, then flutters away in the wind. You sigh with contentment on this beautiful, flower-scented morning in May. You open your volume of Pushkin, and your gaze falls on the words, "No, I shall not wholly die...."

And just for today, you let yourself believe it's true.

Overheard French at the Fifth Wheel Café, Des Moines, Iowa

I have
no idea
what they're
talking about.

I just know
it's sweeter

than honey and
it has a
mellifluous cadence

like the waves
that break on the beach
in Torremolinos.

I wish I could
spend the rest of my life
slung low
in a Parisian café,
smoking opium-laced
Gauloises,

listening to this language.

But the clock says
10:43,

and my alimony's
due by noon
tomorrow.

Old men
don't have time
to dream.

I touch the gun
at my hip,
pick up my hat.

My shift guarding
the murderers
and rapists
and other failed
hustlers of Iowa

begins in exactly
17 minutes.