Hunger (9 page)

I knew that this would not have pleased Alena, who would have valued the lost tropical and subtropical collections so much more than she could value revenge. She would have felt relief that at least the building that housed the
herbarium and library was not hit, sparing the books. She was a woman who cared more about what she was right about than about being right. That I knew about her, though I could not claim to understand her. Even now, I cannot claim to have understood her.

•   •   •

Though early in the hunger winter thieves had dug up their flower bulbs to boil into soup, the Botanical Gardens had fared much better than the Komarov Institute.

Later in the war, tanks pursued by German aircraft tried to hide under the Gardens' fine trees. But when it was explained to the commander that he would bring destruction in moments to what had been cultivated for two hundred years, he ordered his men to keep moving.

How they fared depends on who is telling the story, but the most reliable sources say they escaped Hitlerite air fire on that day. I do not
know which ending makes the better story, which makes the commander the more heroic figure.

The Gardens held their jubilee in February on an evening following one of our rare cloudless days, a day glorious and glinting with hard edges.

I slipped away from watercress tidbits, sliced cheeses, smoked fish, and pickled miniature beets, away from the people, wearing their new shirts and viewing books of flowers that were pressed into thick blue paper by queens two generations and millions of births and deaths earlier.

Almost alone in the fecund greenhouse, greenhouse number twenty-two, alone except for one other man, tall like me, alone like me, eluding greeting like me.

Banana trees pushed at the glass ceiling, fronds of palm and fern brushed my face, and I breathed in the smell of damp soil and violets. I avoided the other man, who stood before
the date palms in some possible tribute to nourishment.

I bypassed the whites and pinks and fabulous reds of flowers, the benevolent ignorance of green foliage, and found myself before the cacti, identifying the exact specimens, grown somewhat larger now, that Alena had wiped with her nimble hands, risking her delicate skin to their spines.

I imagined her fingers on the last day I could remember her wiping the cacti. Not the last day that she had done so, but the last time I could remember in its particulars and certainly one of her last days.

And I remembered her hands, stained pink with beet juice, on the afternoon she was taken from our flat, and conjured them preparing glass slides for the microscope in the neat movements of well-known but loved work.

And finally I invoked them as I most wanted them to be, soft and held between my own hands, large and undeserving.

In each memory, her hands were small and pretty-boned, the fine pink nails groomed very short and yet still more elegant than the nails that Lidia had always grown long and shaped with pumice — nails that had left scratches on my back to hide from my wife, who either never saw them or never asked.

•   •   •

The week following the jubilee, I came across the book that Lidia had handed to me before she left the institute, and at last looked at it. Written by Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon, it had been published in Moscow back in 1917. The red cloth cover was dirty and badly frayed, but inside, the pages had stayed remarkably close to white.

A passage had been underlined, perhaps by Lidia, perhaps by an earlier hand. It clung to me: “Centuries will pass; faith will again be made simple and personal. Work will be joyful, personal creativity; ownership, an intimate contact
with a thing. But faith, work, and ownership will be immutable and holy in the person, enormously enriched inside, like an ear of corn grown out of a seed.”

The next day, I wrote to Albertine's guardians, asking them to hold a letter for her until she was mature. In that letter, on one of the crisp sheets of paper now available throughout the city, I told her about her father's sense of humor and fondness for dogs, about her mother's facile mind and elegant posture. I told her that I had loved Alena and that Alena had loved her and that Alena had died. You were right, I told her, when you said that we would never again see them here. I signed my name in a large, clear script.

For years I did not know if my letter had passed through censors and through Europe's ruins. Then one day, at the beginning of late life, shortly after the infernal Lysenko was deemed irrelevant and the great director's name was declared rehabilitated as arbitrarily as he
had been named a traitor, I received a letter of thanks from the woman I had known briefly as a small girl. She thanked me for the details about her parents, whom she missed but remembered only as dreamed. She thanked me for arranging her life in France. She said it was an ordinary life raising plump children. She said it was a good life.

•   •   •

It was shortly after I wrote my letter to Albertine that I went back to work with purpose, instead of merely inhabiting my small laboratory.

Departing from my earlier studies, I investigated the properties of a fungus that can produce protein from pulp. Through long hours of work I discovered that, if the competitors of this fungus are destroyed with heat, it yields a protein-rich mass.

This dense protein is the sepia color of old photographs, the very color of nostalgia. A kilogram of it can replace three kilograms of meat in a human diet.

These not insignificant findings would save, quite directly, lives at the end of at least two famines.

Even now, on cold days when my stomach growls, I tell myself that I have earned my survival. But on hot nights, when I awake in sweat, I know that redemption, if possible, is irrelevant. A man is ruled by appetite and remorse, and I swallowed what I could.

•   •   •

My pantry is full. There are jars filled with different shapes and colors of pasta, with red and brown lentils, with long- and short-grained rice. There are cans of peas, corn, artichokes, mushrooms, white asparagus, and pickled beets. There are cans of pineapple rings and crushed pineapple, cans of peaches, apricots, mandarin oranges, and blackberries. I have, together in a single can, kinds of tropical fruit that are not even grown on the same continent. There are also cans of tuna, salmon, clams, and processed meat. There are boxes of cereal and bouillon
cubes. There are packages of raisins and walnuts and almonds and filberts and chocolate candies. I am never without at least several months of provisions.

I reach behind all of this abundance, all of this safety, to a canning jar with a wooden lid. In the jar, I have reproduced each mouthful of food I stole during the winter of hunger. I could not obtain the exact varieties of each kind of seed, of course, but I have put in two tablespoons of a type of teff to represent the teff I ate so secretly in the hallways outside the collection that I was trusted to guard. I have added small handfuls of white Asian rice and nutscented brown rice from Louisiana, some yellow split peas, seven melon seeds, a few sunflower seeds, a quarter cup of amaranth, three tablespoons of millet, and one mango pit.

Unlike the rainbows of seeds and grains I have seen photographed in catalogs, these look more bland than tempting. Together, they do not fill half the jar.

I wonder if such a meager portion could have kept my Alena alive and what it would be like to know her into old age. It is an unbearably sweet thought for an old man who shares his flat with only nonperishable food.

Still, shaking these seeds that mean my life, I see that they are beautiful.

This novel was not written without help. I drew historical fact and color from the following excellent books:
The 900 Days
by Harrison Evans Salisbury;
Everyday Stalinism
by Sheila Fitzpatrick;
The Vavilov Affair
by Mark Popovsky;
The Lysenko Affair
by David Joravsky;
The Komarov Institute
by Stanwyn Shetler;
Babylon
by Joan Oates;
The Ancient Near East
, edited by James B. Pritchard;
Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
by Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat;
Everyday Life in Babylon and Assyria
by Georges Contenau; and
Leningrad Diary
by Vera Inber, translated by Serge M. Wolff and Rachel Grieve. I also gained information from Web-published material by Barry Mendel Cohen and photographer Ilya Narovlyansky. I got an idea and a reading of Voltaire from Susan Neiman's terrific book
Evil in Modern Thought
. The epigraph from Paul Valéry is from
The Outlook for Intelligence
,
translated by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews. Throughout the writing, I drew inspiration and information from the publications and important work of the Seed Savers Exchange.

•   •   •

I am grateful to everyone at Little, Brown and Company, especially Michael Pietsch and Asya Muchnick. Thanks to John Ware, friend and fabulous agent. I also thank for their crucial support Meredith Blackwell, other members of my family (including Blackwells, Mays, and Bajos), and my friends. I am indebted to the writing program of the University of California, Irvine, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and Princeton University Press. For recognizing in me abilities not necessarily apparent to others, Dan Howell, Patricia Geary, Louis Owens, Paul Majkut, Mary Reardon, and Adam Fortgang deserve special thanks.

Any appreciation I could extend to David Bajo or to Esme Claire Bajo would fall absurdly short. I dedicate this book to them.

ELISE BLACKWELL
holds an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and has worked as an instructor, journalist, freelance writer, and translator. Originally from southern Louisiana, she now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Hunger

A novel by

ELISE BLACKWELL

A R
EADING
G
ROUP
G
UIDE

The author of
Hunger
talks with Matt Borondy, editor of
IdentityTheory.com

Hunger,
which takes place during World War II, was released as a war was taking place in Iraq. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
called the book “an inadvertent link to Babylon's miseries of the moment.” What are the parallels between 1941 Leningrad and 2003 Baghdad, and what can one infer about the struggles of the Iraqi people from reading your book?

The dissimilarities are probably more definitive than any similarities, but there are important parallels. The residents of both cities suffered first from brutal dictatorship and political purges and then from war with an invading army. People in both cities endured the breakdown of order and often decency without accurate information or certainty of outcome. Both had to fear their own leaders and the incoming bombs.
Hunger
includes several sections about ancient Iraq and the siege
of Babylon, in part to comment on what does and does not change about human life with changing leaders and gods — and on the tragedies of mighty civilizations.

What was your reaction to the looting of ancient Mesopotamian artifacts during the Iraq invasion (and the calculated neglect by the armed forces in protecting them), considering that the botanists in your book chose to sacrifice their lives to preserve vital treasures from that same region?

Even beautiful, rare, and ancient things are things, and I would not condemn anyone for pilfering artifacts as a flat matter of survival. But it is a tragedy when human gifts that have survived across generations are disrespected for any reason short of basic survival. To loot artifacts for spending money — or to allow that to happen — is a violation of history.

Had you been in the shoes of the botanists at the institute, would you have eaten from the collection to save your life?

I would like to believe that I could be as brave as the scientists during the siege, but I cannot imagine starving to death without eating anything I could get my hands on. One of the ideas I explore in
Hunger
, though, is that we don't know who will turn out to be brave under
extreme pressure. Timid and annoying people can act with grace, strength, and bravery, while people noted for their courage can prove themselves cowards. Ultimately, we can't imagine wearing such different shoes; I can't say what I would have done.

What sort of influence did your parents — both botanists — have on the shaping of this novel?

My childhood exposure to botany primed me to be interested in the story. I first learned of Vavilov's story in a publication of the Seed Savers Exchange. There was a photo of the herbarium at the Vavilov Institute, with wooden cabinets with narrow rows of drawers. It evoked rooms in which I spent a lot of time as a child, even brought back the smells. My mom did run down some information for me during the writing of
Hunger
, but I certainly can't blame my parents for the shape of the novel.

A reviewer claimed that the narrator of
Hunger
has “no redeeming qualities” as a person. Do you agree with this assessment?

My assessment of him is more generous. I set out to write him as a rather nasty piece of work, but my compassion grew. First and easiest, he has the redeeming
quality of being human. People are capable of insight and change; that potential is always there. Though not a majority view, a few people have suggested to me that my narrator was right to pilfer seeds and survive. And he does, in one sense, earn his survival by developing a technique that saves lives in future famine situations. His arranging to have Albertine deported, while not selflessly motivated, gives her a better life. And while the narrator tries to pass himself as better than he is, he's not quite so horrible as he deeply believes. Along with the selfishness and gluttony, he possesses the admirable qualities of intelligence and reflectiveness. But what redeems him most in my eyes is his passion for life and will to experience. These may not make him a good guy, but they make him hard to simply dismiss.