The High Costs of Living
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
On Fiction The High Costs of Living By Lynne Sharon Schwartz "The Fuehrer has decided to have Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth.... The problem of the survival of the population...
...I'm not going to die," Eugenia declares, even if that means becoming a prostitute to keep her old mother alive...
...unlike Dirk, he is no sadist, but lives with sullen righteousness, caring for his farm and his ailing wife...
...Don't think I don't know...
...Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, Slovo's 1997 memoir, examines the strain of growing up with parents committed far more to revolution than to family life...
...Slovo intends the confrontation of Alex and Dirk to reveal the intimate understanding, even complicity, that arises between torturer and victim...
...While digging trenches on the outskirts of the city, Mikhail is wounded in the shoulder by a German shell...
...Red Dust (Norton, 340 pp., $25.95) reads like a first-rate courtroom drama, with lively, unexpected twists and turns, an exhumed corpse, and plenty of suspense...
...The ominous words serve as preamble to The Siege (Grove, 294 pp., $24.00), British novelist Helen Dunmore's account of a city fighting for its life...
...Everyone knows the worst is yet to come, as "Night steps out, lengthening its stride," and "The rim of cold slowly rises...
...The river ran full and fast, with a fresh wind tossing up waves so bright they stung your eyes...
...Fountains of greasy, black and orange fire...
...It is brilliantly and plangently rendered as it languishes, month by month, assailed by what Mikhail, in his grim children's war fable, calls General Hunger and General Winter...
...At that moment Alex would have done anything for Dirk Hendricks...
...without a degree, she cannot advance beyond her job as assistant teacher in a children's nursery, where she works under a compulsively exacting devotee of Stalin's regime...
...With that September 1941 directive, the German Army began its 18-month blockade and bombardment of Leningrad...
...No one can see us anymore...
...The summer light will flood every grain of Leningrad stone...
...Dirk, for his part, is unwilling to betray his own friend and fellow officer, Pieter Müller...
...To complicate matters, vandalism breaks out in Smitsrivier during the hearing, evidently "a way of warning the white community not to shield Pieter Müller.' Slovo maneuvers the pieces of this intricate design with the skill of a chess master...
...We first encounter the city in the spring of 1941...
...His list of possible sources of nourishment includes laboratory animals, domestic pets, wallpaper paste, and leather belts...
...His will to live is broken and he succumbs to his alltoo-natural apathy...
...Moreover, he fears Dirk's testimony will confirm that he cracked under torture and betrayed Steve...
...Red Dust, involving a very different and fictional case, unearths the "real" truth beneath the apparent truths too readily accepted by the court...
...Ben himself has reluctantly come out of retirement at the urging of James Sizela, the local schoolmaster, whose son Steve disappeared after his brutal arrest 13 years ago...
...she seems to have come away disillusioned about the Commission's ability to uncover facts or foster reconciliation...
...The effete and absurd restaurant reviews of our day cannot compare with Dunmore's paean to a jar of jam stashed in a boot...
...The plot unfolds in short, swift chapters, with the point of view shifting from one to the other of the six characters, who are recognizable types...
...The way Dirk Hendricks' expression had changed —from elation to a visible sense of relief—Alex had known was mirrored in his own face...
...the result is a peculiar disparity between form and content...
...By September, road and railway connections are down, and the enemy has burned the city's warehouses of sugar, meat and flour...
...Rarely, though, is this complicity probed beneath its surface...
...James is the noble black African who holds up Nelson Mandela as a model for his errant students...
...Instead the German strategy is to blockade the city to prevent supplies from reaching it...
...To be lost from people's thoughts is like a second death...
...The daughter of the noted antiapartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First, Gillian Slovo has an insider's knowledge of her subject as well as her craft...
...But more important, Dunmore uses these five ordinary characters trapped by extraordinary events to illuminate the tribulations of the city at large...
...The problem of the survival of the population and of supplying it with food is one which cannot and should not be solved by us...
...She goes half-heartedly, and soon finds herself embroiled in the recollected atrocities and tangled equivocations she had hoped to leave behind forever...
...Fittingly, it is Eugenia who articulates the inevitable moral transformation that endurance entails: "'You know you're changing, but you still think you can find the way back to what you used to be...
...In a memorable moment, his mother, Zina, brings the dead baby to Anna and asks her to draw him...
...The vicissitudes of this makeshift group shape the foreground of the larger story...
...Broken by Dirk's most flagrant abuse, Alex "had wanted to please his torturer...
...Marina, whom Anna at first cannot welcome wholeheartedly out of loyalty to her dead mother, becomes the mainstay of the family, caring for Kolya, urging Mikhail to rally, and freeing Anna to scavenge for food and supplies...
...Dimitri Pavlov arrives, a statistician in charge of food distribution, who formulates an inhuman calculus of empty stomachs and dwindling stores...
...None of these has the sheer force and range of The Siege...
...His wife, profoundly disillusioned by what she learns of his past, sees Pieter as a good man misguided by the imperatives of the times...
...Then one day you know you can't...
...Such a late spring, murky and doubtful, clinging to winter's skirts...
...She quickly finds that many of the trainloads she sends off are being bombed by German forces stationed just outside Leningrad, and that others, only slightly more fortunate, will be sent back because the tracks have been destroyed...
...Ever since, he's been tormented by having been brought so low as to name Steve as a fellow activist...
...Gillian Slovo's new novel is also about a major passage of recent history: the hearings of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the demise of apartheid...
...Like many retired policemen, Pieter runs a private security business...
...That moment, that feeling was burned into his heart...
...Petersburg is devoted to its artifacts, but I doubt it has ever been so grippingly imagined in fiction...
...James and his wife want only to recover Steve's body for proper burial...
...The figure who most keenly embodies the city's spirit of endurance is Eugenia, a tough, rawboned woman whom Anna meets early on while digging trenches...
...The wounds are too deep, the ideologies too polarized, and the resentments too tenacious to be resolved in any courtroom...
...Anna's mother, Vera, a radiologist, died giving birth to Kolya, forcing Anna to cut short her education...
...Her own direct experience with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission occurred during the hearings of her mother's murderers...
...For Alex, the daily spectacle of his torturer lying so convincingly on the witness stand is sickening and intolerable...
...But Slovo's treatment of the painful aftermath of apartheid relies more on deftness than on penetration...
...And not cared if he froze to death...
...Once the siege is under way and hardship engulfs the city, the family is joined by two desperate strays: Mikhail's former lover, Marina, an aging actress whose career has also been ruined by the Soviets, and Andrei, a Siberian medical student who falls in love with Anna...
...It's just I don't want to talk about it.'" Beyond the vividness and pathos of the individual characters, the real protagonist of this epic novel is Leningrad itself...
...The central character is Anna, a plucky 22-year-old who longs to develop her talent for drawing, but must care for her five-year-old brother Kolya, and her dreamy, passive father Mikhail, a writer blacklisted by the Soviet authorities for his excessive "gloom and doom...
...The attempt to undo more than a century of racism and injustice is a dauntingly complex theme, emotionally as well as politically...
...Everything that was rigid was crumbling, breaking away, floating...
...Weeks and weeks of food...
...You've gone through a drunk's pockets and stolen his stuff, and then tipped him out of the door into the snow...
...The story begins with Sarah Barcant's successful and comfortable life as a New York City prosecutor being interrupted by a phone call from home: It's Ben Hoffman, an old progressive lawyer and mentor of Sarah's youth, summoning her back to her small town of Smitsrivier, South Africa, to assist on a case...
...Now is their chance, they think, with the Truth Commission holding hearings in Smitsrivier...
...And then, just when it seemed as if summer would forget about Leningrad this year, everything changed...
...These are the nights that seal each generation of Leningraders to their city...
...Andrei and Anna struggle to take pleasure in their love, yet grow more hungry, exhausted and fearful each day...
...By August food rations are short, but no bombs have fallen...
...The same is true of cold: Dizzy and hallucinating, Anna risks her life for a few sticks of wood for her hard-won black-market stove, only to have them stolen by a soldier...
...Ice broke loose from the compacted mass around the Strelka...
...Courtroom drama can be commandeered for the most serious of subjects, as Dostoyevsky has shown...
...The only one of Helen Dunmore's eight earlier novels to become widely known here thus far is Talking to the Dead, an eerie tale of two sisters hiding a dreadful childhood secret that haunts their adult lives...
...Sarah, having turned her back on her past, is the tough-minded lawyer who needs to learn patience and compassion...
...Too proud to face criminal charges, Pieter goads the upright James Sizela into killing him (suicide would deprive his wife of his life insurance), but the plan backfires, and the tortuous denouement leaves all parties balked and disappointed...
...It recalls not only the acute physical sensations of his ordeal, but his psychological and moral degradation...
...Rarely has hunger been described with such appalling lucidity, or food with such lyrical longing...
...She was born in South Africa, then spent her adolescent years in London, where she and her sisters were sent for safekeeping while her parents carried on their work...
...The siege of Leningrad has been documented in history and memoir, and a museum in the once and again St...
...Soon the city's isolation feels sinister and overwhelming...
...He learns his profession in a crash course, in the most demoralizing circumstances, becoming expert at gauging the symptoms and etiology of starvation...
...He's so beautiful, isn't he...
...Months of it, maybe, for all Leningrad's millions of mouths...
...The sole hope of survival rests with the anticipated ice road over adjacent Lake Ladoga...
...Dirk is the unreconstructed sadist whose mask of cooperation conceals lies and self-interest...
...What would offer him relief is knowing that this forced admission was not the cause of Steve's death—but Dirk will never grant him that relief...
...And Kolya represents all the children who suffer and age prematurely, who stop wailing for food because they've learned there is no food to be had...
...Slovo's handling of it is earnest and informed, but finally simplistic...
...When the ice is hard enough, food can be brought in across the lake...
...More than a compelling family drama, The Siege is a clarifying vision of history, infusing every aspect of its huge and tragic subject with intelligence and artistry...
...Not surprisingly, this early form of cultural exchange led a number of British novelists, notably Penelope Fitzgerald and William Gerhardie, to attempt what we think of as the "Russian novel"—that is, one not merely set in Russia but typified by volatile characters, turbulent emotion and fierce weather...
...It too has ample intelligence, but less art...
...A forest of ice is growing around us...
...Kept alive by Anna and Marina's will, Kolya is luckier than the starved infant in the neighboring apartment...
...The climax is fiendishly clever...
...The victim in the proceedings at hand was not Steve, however, but his good friend Alex Mpondo, once an activist, now a respected member of Parliament...
...Motivations are made jarringly explicit, while the deeper issues elude the crime-novel formula...
...The language is serviceable throughout, but evocative only in the descriptions of the landscape surrounding Smitsrivier: Over "the petrified sea of mountains, dawn swept across the land like a wall of flame, shadows of magenta and crimson flaring up before gradually flaming away...
...Through her work in the nursery, Anna helps in the evacuation of children by train...
...For all its cunning, the plan does not go smoothly...
...Andrei's hospital duties put him in daily contact with mounting numbers of the wounded and the malnourished...
...everyone rightly suspects Pieter, but only Dirk can attest to his guilt...
...With rations down to two slices of bread a day in December, need elicits a Darwinian competition, turning neighbors into suspicious, savage antagonists...
...Only Muller, the murderer, and Alex are drawn with the chiaroscuro of developed characters...
...In the midst of this renewal, people's greatest fear is not the Germans but the dark vans cruising the streets, hunting alleged dissidents...
...And we haven't even got a photograph of him...
...The Truth Commission, the author clearly believes, has served to obfuscate truth...
...Now he has the rigidity of a man whose best energies are spent damming up a secret...
...Now it's June, and night is brief as the brush of a wing, only an hour of yellow stars in a sky that never darkens beyond deep, tender blue...
...His adversaries, especially the grieving Sizelas, cannot judge him quite so generously...
...The War is on, but Leningrad and its people are relatively unharmed as yet...
...Ben and Sarah's legal strategy is to use one criminal to snare another: they will pressure Alex' torturer, former police officer Dirk Hendricks, into naming Steve's killer, by threatening to thwart Dirk's amnesty appeal...
...Along the way, Alex and Sarah have a brief love affair, which does no harm to the novel's overall structure yet is entirely gratuitous...
...Proud and reserved, Alex prefers to suppress the bitter past and not challenge Dirk's appeal...
...It is accomplished, even intriguingly perverse, but gives no hint of the passion and immense skill invested in her newest novel...
...What Slovo does excel at is plotting and pacing— as one might expect, since she is the author of a half-dozen detective novels...
...During the period of violent racial strife, he probably considered himself a patriotic keeper of the peace, and so managed to justify his awful deeds...
...I know he isn't—' she swallows, 'looking his best just now.'" When Anna tries to persuade her of the truth, Zina says, " ? know...
...Mikhail and Marina are emblems of the middle-aged intellectuals and artists deprived of their raison d'être, who must survive by determination alone or die for the lack of it...
...British business interests were active in Russia before the 1917 Revolution...
...Crude, canny and indomitable, Eugenia turns up periodically to spur Anna on in her weakest moments, helping with black-market deals and rescuing her from the freezing night...
...But will the family, and by extension will Leningrad, manage to hang on until General Winter turns ally rather than enemy...
Vol. 85 • January 2002 • No. 1
