By popular demand, a few Orthodox priests came out of hiding and began to conduct church services. Maria went to St. Vladimir’s Cathedral every Sunday and prayed for her own family, for her baby Pavel, for Peter—always for Peter—and for all the souls whose bodies she had found in the streets that week. She no longer visited the cemetery where Peter lay. As her strength ebbed, the walk was too much, and she could not bear to see the piles of corpses waiting for burial. The temperature had dropped to minus thirty and the earth was too hard to dig graves anymore.

All her children were thinner, but Mikhail’s pallor had improved since she started finding ways to slip him a little extra food.

“More supplies will be on the way soon,” her friend at the factory told her. “The Ice Road has opened at last.”

Maria wanted to jump for joy. For some weeks they had been waiting for the ice on Lake Ladoga to freeze to a depth of eight inches, because then it could take the weight of a truck driving over it and their city would once more be connected to the rest of the Soviet Union. She felt proud of her nation’s engineers. Germans would never manage such a feat. Only Russians with their long, cold winters knew how to use the elements to their advantage. She remembered the French Emperor Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812 because his troops did not know how to survive the cold, and felt a glimmer of confidence that the war would soon be over.

“What food do you think they will bring first?” she asked, and they began to salivate as they talked of succulent beef cooked in a cream sauce, of rich cakes laced with honey, of potatoes baked on the fire and slathered in butter.

She went home that evening to a watery soup made of dandelions and nettles, and half a slice of crumbly, sour-tasting ration bread.

* * *

Toward the end of January, a neighbor’s boy caught whooping cough. The residents of the block sat in the air-raid shelter listening to his painful bouts of coughing followed by the distinctive whooping sound.

“Have you taken him to hospital?” Maria asked his mother. “That sounds nasty.”

“They say most children recover in time,” she replied, fear in her eyes.

Raisa leaned across to whisper to Maria. “I think we should tell her not to bring him to the shelter anymore in case he infects the rest of us.”

Maria ignored her, but huddled her children close. When they got back upstairs, she gave them a double dose of vitamin powder, just in case.