Read Online Hunger by Elise Blackwell - Free Book Online

reed, asphalt, tile, and metal — were used in the foundation cellars of the hanging gardens. The mud brick that constructed most of the rainless city would have eroded away under the gardens’ impressive irrigation and flowing channels.
    There exists more than one theory about which ruler should be credited with the gardens, and when they were built and why. Some believe they were built by the Assyrian queen Semiramis centuries before Nebuchadrezzar.For some time it was thought that Sennacherib was the mind behind them. And many historians, noting that the gardens are mentioned only by later Greeks and appear nowhere in the Babylonian record, have argued that they never existed.
    But the most widely accepted version has it that they were conceived by Nebuchadrezzar as a gift to his homesick queen, Amyitis. Originally from Media’s lush green mountains, Amyitis found the brown baked flatness of Babylon depressing and pined for home.
    What can be sure about the hanging gardens is that — whoever ruled at the time, whichever brilliant mind conceived of their unexpected lushness — the stone slabs that form their base were laid by slaves, also homesick, pining for wives they either would or would not see again.
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    I remember Alena’s last meal: a roll made from rye flour and a bowl of broth made by boilinggarlic, carrot peelings, and one fat, perfect potato in salted water. She trembled when I set the hot bowl before her, steadied her hand by resting it on the roll, laughed in a laugh I had never before heard as she breathed in the soup’s steam. “It will be funny if I wait,” she said.
    It was the most frightening thing I have ever heard.
    â€œI will wait for half an hour,” she said. She waited, but only for a few minutes, before drinking the bowl dry and eating the roll gone.
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    During the hunger winter, I was justified to take what I needed, and I barely took more. I had to discipline myself to remember this truth only a few months later, after my Alena and the others died, making way for those remaining, now all reasonably well fed.
    Survival did strange things to people — I knew this. Viktor from the cytology laboratory, who had always been generous, always quick togive away even something he needed, to accept blame but not credit, suggested that we deserved our lives for some reason, obvious or occluded.
    Lidia, who had always been generous only to herself and seemed well on her way to madness said that was not so, but that we must behave as though what Viktor said was true.
    I held neither position, believing only in meaningless fortune most of the time, or acknowledging simply that I had been willing to do more to save my life than some of those who had died — a trait that made me neither better nor worse than any other man or woman.
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    I can admit that the deprivation was even harder for Lidia than for me. For me, the pain was fear of slow death. For Lidia, I believe it was sheer physical and emotional torment.
    At first she just went sour, but then came meanness, followed by the madness. I thoughtshe would warm with the weather when the first winter finally, finally broke, and sun melted the snow, and there was a little more food — some grown in Leningrad, some lorried across Lake Ladoga in the last weeks it was frozen. Bread came out of the Kirov bakery. Rations were strict, but enough to keep those still healthy alive.
    But Lidia did not return to herself. She got more and more desperate even as things improved. The extra food she had managed to get — and I continued to have my suspicions about how — had kept her weight on, even added a few pounds back, but did not stop the scurvy sores from appearing on her arms.
    By the second winter, when my Alena was many months gone and I might have yielded to Lidia’s comfort, she