“He died in December,” Galina stuttered, and Maria felt ashamed she hadn’t noticed. She’d been too busy caring for her own family.

“What will I do?” Galina cried, hysteria in her voice. “I can’t look after myself.”

She was sixteen years old, like Katya. Too young to manage on her own. But why should Maria take on someone else’s child, a child who had caused her husband to be executed? She overruled the bitterness in her heart. “You must come and live with us,” she said. “Do you have any food here?”

Galina shook her head.

“I will teach you to forage. If you are to share our food, you must help to find it. Agreed?”

“Of course.” Galina was close to tears. “What shall we do with Mother?”

Maria knew that no ambulances were sent to collect bodies anymore, and that they would never find a coffin in which to bury her. The temperature was twenty degrees below freezing, so they had time. “Let’s leave her in her bed for now. I’ll speak to someone.”

Stepan, Irina, and Yelena accepted Galina’s presence without question, and Maria was proud of them. Stepan showed the girl where he had set traps to catch birds and rats and asked her to check them regularly; Maria taught her the type of plants to hunt for and where they might be found; and every day Galina accompanied Irina to collect their rations, because individuals carrying a brown paper bag of bread were liable to be mugged before they reached home.

At the factory, the women shared tips on feeding their families.

“You can scrape the wallpaper paste off the walls and eat it,” one said. “It’s flour and water, after all.”

“There’s some goodness in leather if you boil it long enough then drink the water,” another volunteered.

“I heard some people have turned to cannibalism,” an older woman told them, “even murdering their victims in order to eat them.”

“Russians would not do such a thing,” Maria insisted. But then she remembered that the men who had butchered her family were Russians. If they could do that, perhaps some would consume human flesh.

The bread ration dropped to just one small slice per person per day, and that was bulked out with sawdust so did little to relieve the pain that twisted their guts. The food at the factory canteen was watered down and there was less of it, so it became harder to bring jugs home. Still Maria tried to make the evening meal look appetizing: a taste of green soup, the occasional mushroom or two, a tiny portion of rat, bird, or fish, when available, and the crumbly, bitter-tasting slice of bread. If she ate slowly, and chewed each bite thirty times, she could almost convince herself it was a meal.

* * *