Free Hunger by Elise Blackwell

melody. They were joined by clarinets, one shy, and then brass, not quite strong enough but brave indeed, and the flutes.
    No one spoke, and it seemed that no one breathed. The Hitlerite shells did not fall. At the end, applause, sobbing, Eliasberg’s wild grin.
    I might have succumbed to Klavdiya, but she chose the wrong time and place: that night of homage to Leningrad’s weakness and strength, in the flat that I could think of only as Alena’s, on the sofa that had been for so few nights little Albertine’s bed.
    I accepted Klavdiya’s full-lipped kiss, her cool hand inside my shirt, her breath in my ear, the knowing tip of her hips into my leg. But when she paused to say that we should be together because we were so much alike, I pulled away.
    â€œNo,” I said. “For that very same reason, weshould never pair. If we are alike, we should stay far apart.”
    I had never refused an even mildly tempting offer of indulgence, so I was unsure what would follow. I expected anger but instead saw resignation. Perhaps even understanding. For the many years I would know Klavdiya, the night of the symphony would always be between us, as though everything had happened and nothing had happened. As though both versions were true at the same time.
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    During the summer of 1943, kittens were bought and sold through the posting board near my flat for as much as two thousand rubles. They were no longer eaten, but in demand to kill the rats, themselves once scarce protein, now a nuisance. No one in Leningrad would now eat a rat or admit to ever having done so.
    The Botanical Gardens’ famous palms were dead, but its lime trees bloomed in June. I finally returned the cacti that my Alena hadsaved with her own saliva and touch and that somehow survived first my inattention and then my attention. I was thanked profusely by her friends there. A brave woman, a remarkable scientist, a pure mind. Yes, I nodded, all of that.
    By July we had strawberries, red currants, raspberries, veal, dill, baby turnips, marrow. Mussolini resigned, and Italy capitulated. Roses could be had.
    August brought late lilacs and rains fine as hair. But the shellings turned more deadly as the Germans, sensing a turn and knowing that the first shell is always the most dangerous, tried to kill more of us by exchanging long, almost boring shelling sessions for many short ones. I would hear the whistle, then the burst, and scan the white sky for the pillar of smoke, colored by whatever was hit. Sometimes the smoke would be the gray of stone, the red of brick. Sometimes it was the precise, unlikely hue of human flesh.
    On my way to the institute, after a series of shellings occurred not so very far from our flat,I saw an arm, separated from an unseen woman, holding a still-burning cigarette. The availability of tobacco signaled better times to come, I thought, and then castigated my mind for the direction it had traveled.
    A block farther along, I saw a man on a stretcher, the left half of his head gone and stuffed with cotton wool, as though the fabric could sort numbers, direct his limbs, feel pain, remember a beloved.
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    Two millennia before Christian-measured time commenced, the Babylonians began to celebrate their New Year every spring. The eleven-day festival of gloom and purification and finally joy came to be known in later Babylonia as Akitu. It was believed that the gods ended each festival by setting human fortunes for the coming year.
    I always liked the idea of the Festival, or Mardi Gras, celebrated in Catholic countries,with full debauchery preceding the purification of self-denial and with people in at least tenuous control of their own fate.
    One of Leningrad’s most important celebrations came not in spring but on the anniversary of the October revolution.
    And of course our gods, if we had any — and no one could claim that we did