Read Hunger for Free Online

would be put to labor on a collective.
    I tried again, quietly, to dissuade her. Hecannot be saved, I told her, not by you. You flatter yourself to think so. Those who have tried have succeeded only in joining him, I reminded her, and for all we know made his treatment worse.
    Alena, even more quietly, completely without words in fact, resisted my wishes. And in the end, my fear of having her think me a coward overcame my other fears. I did not insist, for which I should be given some due. The letter was delivered.
    She was taken from our apartment many weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon as we prepared a meal together. Her fingers were bright pink with the juice of a beetroot when she held her hand in farewell, my quiet wife again wordless and ever so brave.
    I finished the cooking alone, basting the meat as it baked with sugar dissolved in vinegar, pounding the grated horseradish into a paste, slicing the beets my wife had boiled and peeled so that they stained my fingers the exactcolor of hers. I cooked the beet greens in fat until they fell apart. I cooled the food and wrapped it, though I could not be certain that I would ever see Alena again.
    But on Tuesday, she returned on foot, exhausted and filthy but seemingly unharmed, her fingers still pink under the dirt. I warmed the food and set the table while she washed and put on a clean skirt and shirt.
    Then we sat down to our belated Sunday dinner. The meat was sour from its extended contact with the cider vinegar, and I had overcooked the greens like I always did. But the meal was good nonetheless, and I was not alone.
    The following day, Alena’s salary was removed, and she was dismissed from the institute. She was lucky, everyone said.
    In the coming year, Hitlerite Germany would put its iron kerchief around Leningrad’s neck, and the definition of luck would fall even lower.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    The first time I cheated on my Alena, it was brief, nameless, and far away from home. It was out of time, underground, undiscoverable, unrecognizable. It did not count, or it would not have counted except that I remembered it not only in my mind but with my fingers and nostrils and ears. I could not forget the texture of the skin, the up-close smell, the quality of voice — none of these better than my Alena’s, but so certainly different.
    I could never again tell myself that I had always been faithful, could never again take my wife’s lovely hands, look into her eyes, and say, “I have been true to you, my wife.”
    And so, of course, others came, some at a great expense of conscience, some quite easily.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Cold in the skin. Cold in the bones of the arm. Cold in the eyes. Cold in the ribs. Feet gone from feeling, from knowledge. There was pain only in odd places, centered in a heavy, achinggroin but otherwise intense in its asymmetricality, the finger of one hand, two knuckles on the other, a nostril’s interior, a shrapnel-sized piece of jawbone, a small concentration in the kidney.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    The hanging gardens of Babylon are believed to have been a magnificent and enormous quadrangle of lush foliage and flora, suspended atop stone columns, with trees rooted above the heads of men.
    An homage to fecundity and water in an arid land, they were built in staggered terraces, arched vaults, and stairways. Their invisible irrigation system — an elaborate feat of human engineering hidden behind or under stone — revealed itself only in beautiful streams, water cascades and falls, permanently green grass, and the perfect smell of damp soil.
    Sometimes we joked that our institute was the hanged garden of Leningrad. Unlike thefamed gardens of Babylon, ours was not planted. We were mere and wonderful potential.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Eleven thousand starved in November. More than fifty thousand died in December, when wood