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was not lucid. She rarely left the institute, and she would not take off her once glorious but now filthy sable coat. Like all of us, she carried a rod to beat off the rats, but unlike the rest of us, she looked equally willing to strike human beings.
    And of course she had refused to speak to me since she discovered me with grain in my mouth.
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    Lidia was not the only one to have found me out during the hunger winter.
    One evening, as I began my watch, the wife of Ivanovich was concluding hers. “Perhaps I should stay and guard you,” Klavdiya said, smiling, solicitous.
    My heart seemed to beat sideways. Brief images of a dozen places I had been in my life tumbled through my mind: the second row of a streetcar in New Orleans as it passed a certain blue house, a particular crook in the port at Fez, a small store on the other side of Leningrad, a hallway in Moscow. Each vividly specific, felt in the body.
    â€œI’m quite sure I don’t take your meaning” is what I replied through the corporal memories, now all Leningrad. That charming spot by the River Moyka, the European height ofLomonosov Square, the spreading, clean, red-and-green angles of Pushkin Square.
    â€œNone of that. No pretense between scientists.” She smiled and added, “But you have no need to deny anything. I will not tell anyone what you are doing, why you weigh more than your wife. I merely wanted you to know that I know. And understand.”
    I wanted to ask what she meant by
understand
. How did she know? Was she guessing, or could she tell because she was doing the same thing? A sneak spots a sneak.
    â€œNot me,” she said, “not the same. But I do understand. We all have our ways. Now I know yours and you do not know mine.”
    I paced for hours, too frightened to touch a single grain of anything until the first hint of morning, when I was unable to stand the proximity of food any longer. I chewed a few, just a few, seeds of sunflower and melon.
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    More than twenty of us died, the majority during or at least from the winter of hunger, but a few later from Hitlerite shells.
    I am not counting those who died or rotted slowly in prison — not counting the great director, not counting Sergei or Vanessa, not counting so many who, of course, count and should be accounted for on some other register.
    But they are another list, a different group. They belong to the life before. The siege destroyed continuity as much as it destroyed all of the other ideas it ruined. There would always be before, during, and after. And nothing would ever bridge the three.
    Among those who began the siege but did not come out the other side of that concrete space were friends and enemies, my beloved wife, and men and women I barely knew outside of their research results. Some were perfect to work with. I think now of Ilya, one of our bureaucrats, a man with a gentle nature and a wide and dry humor. He poked fun at everyoneequally, and treated everyone with true respect. I think also of kind and earnest Natalia, who was beautiful into early old age.
    Some of those who died were annoying, such as fastidious Anton, always more concerned with the inventory and cleaning of equipment — and with not being exposed as a second-rate mind — than with getting any real work done. Some, such as stern but brilliant Efrosinia, I had never given much thought to. But I would come to honor all of them as they shrank and grew ill before me.
    And I miss each of them, even Anton, with his round-eyed defensiveness and ridiculous little beard. More than many of the things I might want, I would like to run into Anton in the street, buy him a drink, and talk about old times and new. Perhaps now, both smoothed by long years of living, we could be great friends.
    But of course Anton turned out to be brave and strong, and so he died while he was still