The Final Fabergé Read Free Page A

first day of the siege by the German North Army, which included the 56th Motorized Corps of the 4th Panzer Group, as August 10. After 128 days, Petersburg, as the stalwarts called it, had all but run out of food, fuel, and most other basic necessities, and was encountering one of the cruelest winters in memory. Cold and death; no conversation went without mention of either word, no radio broadcast—erratic as they were—failed to pile horrifying statistic upon chilling detail, and no one escaped the miserable piles of bodies that could not be buried in the frozen, concrete-hard earth. Rations were officially posted but meant nothing when there was no power to heat the ovens to bake a bread made from rye, flax, wood cellulose, and skimpy portions of wheat flour. Many citizens would argue over when the siege actually began, but the hard fact was the city was strangling and upward of ten thousand men, women, and children died every day from the appalling conditions, an unalterable fact no matter how much quibbling over when the siege began.
    Nikolai Karsalov hugged his son tightly and inched forward in the line before the bread shop, his mittened hand cradling the small head, pressing his cheek against the boy’s cheek to keep him warm. Two weeks earlier Marie Karsalov had stood in the same line with her nine-year-old daughter, Nina, who had been giddy with delight that on the very next day she would become ten. It had been a rare, sunny day before the dreaded cold had come when mother and daughter had gone happily to collect bread and a meat ration and a birthday gift Nina would select from one of the few shops that somehow had remained open and sold recycled household items and a paltry selection of books.
Darkness had come as it would in winter—in mid-afternoon—and as they returned home, a roving pair of young thugs waited, demanding food, and when they were denied, surrounded Marie and drove a knife deep into her chest. She was stabbed again and thrown to the snow, the bag of food and the ration cards in her pocket taken. Nina had tried to help her mother but had been severely beaten and left lying limp across her mother’s body, a pink-covered package beside her. An hour later Karsalov had gone to find them and it was he who discovered his dead wife and desperately injured daughter. That Nina was alive was a miracle; she was one of the fortunate who had received hospital treatment and though she had lost toes on both feet from the cold, she was making a determined recovery.
    Finally, Karsalov jostled his way into the bread shop, gave two coupons, then grasped whatever it was that was pushed out of a dark opening in the wall onto the grimy counter. Each piece was the size of a fist and no longer resembled bread, but was nearly black, without aroma, and hard like dried wood. He dropped the black lumps into a sack, looked about for someone to complain to, but a voice said, “Keep moving . . . move ahead . . . keep moving.” A woman standing between two uniformed militia repeated the instructions in a bored, dull voice. Clearly, complaints would be ignored.
    It was shortly after eight in the morning, the time when Karsalov took his son, Vasily, to fetch bread and go on to the edges of Gorodskoy Park, where he was usually able to buy several logs and kindling. On this day he was followed and when he had collected the wood and had put it into a sling to carry home, he was greeted by a gruff, yet pleasant voice: “You are comrade Karsalov?”
    Karsalov was a reluctant comrade, and played the part grudgingly. “Yes, and you?”
    â€œPavlenko. I have done plaster work in the galleries. Remember?”
    Karsalov studied the man, seeing an unusually healthy specimen, ruddy and full-faced, with particularly uncommonly clear, wide-open eyes. He shook his head. “No. When would this have been?”
    â€œBefore all this. Two years, a little less perhaps. In a gallery of Chinese