And sure enough, there's Elizaveta Antonovna, face to face with a sweating, half-demented mother who has run all the way from the Lepny machine-tool factory at the end of a 12-hour shift, on hearing the latest bombing rumours. Elizaveta Antonovna is wagging her lists at the mother. "You're simply making things more difficu1t for everybody. I shall have to put in a report - "
"Elizaveta Antonovna, allow me to inform you that you are urgently required by a Party official in Hall Three," breaks in Anna, shoving between them. Thank God, Elizaveta Antonovna spins round, a tiny spot of crimson on each cheek, and marches from the room.
"Please, come and sit down, forgive us, she doesn't know what she's saying. In this little room here."
"I suppose you're another of them who doesn't know anything about anything," shouts the woman, but she allows Anna to lead her into the cleaner's cupboard. In the stuffy darkness, her shoulders bow. She breaks into heavy sobs.
"I only sent her away for the best, I didn't want her to go."
Anna does not attempt to comfort her. If only Elizaveta Antonovna keeps out of the way. If only they can have a few minutes' peace in this cupboard that smells of damp mops.
"I didn't even say goodbye properly, in case it started her off crying."
"Listen, you stay here as long as you like. I've got to go and sort out the children. But I promise you, as soon as we hear anything - "
"You won't hear anything. The ones like you never do. It's the ones like her that they tell everything to."
Parents bring their children to the evacuation centre, change their minds, take them home again. And the system is completely overloaded now. There aren't enough trains, and no matter how many children are processed, most never leave. Suddenly six busloads of children reappear, whom Anna had thought must be well on their way to the Urals by now. An exhausted mother explains, "The line was torn up by a bomb five kilometres ahead. They kept waiting and waiting to see if they could get us through, but then we ran out of food so they had to send us back."
News comes of the bombed train. Not the train near Mga: that was just a rumour, although it's true that the Germans are still trying to cut the railway line there. But a train was bombed, with nearly 200 children on it, and 40 adults. There are 32 survivors. Perhaps the children on that train were among those whom Anna squeezed on to the benches, and told to line up for transport. Children who were too hot in their winter hats with flaps that tied over their ears, and who started eating the sausage and apples in their knapsacks as soon as they were out of their mothers' sight.
That night Anna lies awake, listening to Kolya's breathing. Leningrad still bulges with children. For every evacuee sent away to the east, it seems that another arrives from the south and west, fleeing the German advance. And Kolya remains here. The room smells of his sleep. Has she made the right decision? If Marina Petrovna wasn't here, she would have had to send him. Anna's working 16 hours a day, and with her father coming out of hospital as well in a couple of days, it would have been impossible to keep Kolya. How strange to think that it was only by chance that Marina had come here at all. Yes, she's beginning to think of her like that, dropping the patronymic even from her mind: Marina.
She would never have thought she could be grateful to Marina. But day by day, steadily, Marina has earned her right to a place in their lives. She queues, she makes meals, and she even manages to keep Kolya happy too, with stories, pretend games, and drawing, while the queues slowly move forward.
Marina is obsessed with food, even more so than Anna herself. She will walk halfway across the city on the chance of a bag of sugar for their store-cupboard. The sun is still shining, there is still food in the shops, and the rations aren't too bad. Prices have shot sky-high, though, and if it weren't for Marina, Anna would no longer be able to buy sugar or fats off the ration. Eighteen roubles for a bag of sugar, can you imagine? But Marina pays it. She has money.
"You mustn't spend so much, Marina. I'll never be able to pay you back."
"We are not going to be able to eat money," is all Marina will reply.
She gets Kolya walking too. They set off, the pair of them, Kolya bouncing along, his black eyes glistening with excitement as Marina breaks off her story just at its most exciting point.
"I'll tell you the rest when we've walked as far as that building down there - look, the one with the brown doors." She points away into the distance and Kolya, instead of grizzling and dragging at her hand, as he might do with Anna, bounds forward with a squeak of pleasure.
Anna crushes the stir of jealousy she feels. But how quickly Kolya has transferred his attention. Not his love, no, she doesn't believe that. But every morning he rushes to Marina as soon as Anna has finished helping him to dress. Their laughter spills out as he helps Marina to fold her blankets, push back the sofa and make the room ready for the day. There's something magnetic about Marina. Anna has to remind herself that her mother didn't feel it. Vera wasn't attracted, she was repelled. And she must have had her reasons. What were they?
Marina bends over her shopping-bag, and pulls out a jar.
"Two hundred grammes of lump-fish roe!"
"Marina! What did it cost?"
"I keep telling you, money's not going to mean anything soon."
Kolya and Marina crouch over their pot of wallpaper paste, dipping in strips of newspapers and layering them on to the wire bones of Kolya's fort.
"Am I doing it really well, Marina?"
"Really well. Look how smooth you've made that wall."
"The walls have to be high, don't they, so the enemies can't climb over them."
"That's right. One more layer should do it, Kolya, then we'll leave it to dry. We can start the painting tomorrow."
Marina sits back on her heels, and wipes paste and newsprint off her hands. What if I drew her like this? Anna thinks. In her mind the old pose Marina took at the dacha still hangs. That's the portrait she'll finish one day, when all this is over.
But perhaps it isn't. Everything's changed, so why shouldn't her work change too? Perhaps it's better to find a different way of working. Break up the portrait. Turn it into dozens of sketches, quick and fluid, charcoal on sugar paper. Instead of one definition, go for her now, frowning over the wads of dirt packed under her nails. Or now, twisting to warn Kolya not to try and lift the fort yet, let the papier-machΘ harden. Or now, noticing Anna's stare and offering back the candour of a face which knows how to change itself into anything it wants.
Anna lies awake. The night is taut, tensed, watchful. All over Leningrad people are awake, as she is. She thinks herself through the walls, into apartment after apartment after apartment. All of them waiting, counting the hours. Up on the roofs, fire-watchers keep themselves awake, too, gripping the metal rims of their sandbuckets, waiting for the noise of aeroplane engines. No one knows what's going to happen next. Even the Germans may not know. We think they know everything, but maybe they're waiting, just like us, for orders that haven't been written yet, and thoughts that haven't even come into anyone's head.
They're waiting out in our woods, smelling the mushrooms that are ready for picking. But they won't know where to find the best ones. They'll trample them underfoot, and the bruised chanterelles will give off their scent of apricots.
And then there's Andrei. He never came back, and she'd been so sure that he would that she hadn't even warned herself not to trust him.
How horrible it is that you can be completely wrong about things like that. You can trust yourself, believe in your own instincts, and then they turn out to be wrong. The other person wasn't even thinking about you. As soon as he got outside the apartment, he'd forgotten her. He'd taken his message to her, and he hadn't thought of her again. Finish. But how humiliating it is, to reach out towards someone who hasn't reached out to you, like running towards a face in the distance, your arms held out, calling, "How wonderful to see you! I didn't know you were back!" and then getting close and seeing that the face was a stranger's, stiff with embarrassment.
But Andrei doesn't know. He doesn't know that she closed her eyes and danced with him in the dark. He doesn't know that she asked him: Do you want it, too?
She twists on her bed. Should Kolya be here at all? If the bombs come - if the bombers come over in wave after wave, as they did over London, and set the city blazing - if the German army advances - if they get here -
German aeroplanes are dropping leaflets, not bombs. Anna does not dare to pick them up. You don't know who might be watching you. But she has listened to the whispers in the evacuation queues, and she knows what those leaflets say.
Leningrad is already defeated. Our victory is inevitable, and resistance will only make things worse for you. Your armies are withdrawing to Moscow, abandoning you. The defeat of Leningrad is inevitable ...
She turns over again, and buries her face in her pillow. The nights are growing cool, but each time she thinks of Andrei a wave of heat washes over her skin. She forces her mind back to Kolya. And the other children, those children in the lorries. Nyusha, Olenka and all the others. She can't shake off the feeling of guilt, the uneasy, ominous sense that every action now has a consequence out of all proportion to the action itself. She read a child's name off a list. The child went, or stayed in Leningrad. The train was bombed, or the bomb missed it. Leningrad will be bombed, or not bombed. But whether she feels guilt over the children who were sent away, or over those who stay, she can't decide.
The nights are still warm. These are the last nights of summer, being wasted and thrown away. Anna twists in her bed. She will not think of him.
Helen Dunmore 2001