Burying the Sun Read Online Free PDF

Yelena’s hand and, taking off my shoes, began to slide about over a polished floor. At first Yelena was shocked, but after a moment she slipped out of her shoes, and the two of us glided back and forth, trying to see who could slide the longest distance. When we heard one of the guards coming, we hurriedly got into our shoes and, laughing, raced up the stairway.
    At each roof station there were pails of water and sand as well as a wicked-looking ax. I tried to imagine Yelena flailing about with the ax.
    â€œI’ve tried it, Georgi. It’s heavy, but if I had to, I know I could do it.”
    Yelena’s section looked northwest across the Neva to Vasilevsky Island. We settled comfortably against one of the chimneys. Though it was night, a pale sun gilded the Neva. In the sky there was nothing moredangerous than a few pink clouds. The palace was only four stories high, yet we looked down on the green roofs of Leningrad, with their hundreds of chimneys, like so many mushrooms springing up from a forest floor. More than two hundred years ago Peter the Great had built a city where there had been nothing but marshes and sea. When it was finished, he ruled that no building could be taller than his palace.
    â€œUp here on the roof we are like kings and queens,” Yelena said, “looking out over our kingdom.”
    Across the Neva was the camouflaged spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, and on Vasilevsky Island the university buildings.
    Yelena said, “With the war it looks like we will never be students at the university, Georgi. Still, it’s nice to think about, like keeping yourself from freezing in the cold by imagining what it would be like to walk into a warm room.”
    â€œWhat would you study at the university?” I asked.
    â€œRussian literature,” she said. “I want to read Pushkin and Lermontov and every Russian poem that has ever been written.”
    I looked around nervously. I didn’t want anyone to overhear Yelena if she was going to recite Lermontov, since she always recited his love poetry.
    But she only asked, “Georgi, what will you study if the war ends?”
    â€œI want to go back to Siberia,” I said. Quickly I added, “Not to Dudinka and the cold and the exile, but to the Siberia Marya and I saw in the summer, the birch trees and the great river and the reindeer and, most of all, the Samoyed people who were so good to us. The Communist Party has shut them and their reindeer up in farms. The Samoyeds must hate it. I want to study the native peoples of Russia—I want to become an expert and convince the Party to let the Samoyeds and their reindeer roam free. We still have the boots and parka they made for my father. I’ll show them to you sometime.”
    Across from Vasilevsky Island were Petrograd Island and the Lenfilm movie studio where all the famous movies were made.
    â€œMaybe I’ll write a great film,” Yelena said, “like Ivan the Terrible .”
    â€œAnd I’ll play Ivan.”
    So we sat talking for three hours in the twilight of the white night. At midnight the next shift arrived, and we made our way back down the stairs and through the empty palace rooms with their ghosts of the dead tsar and empress and their poor dead son and daughters.
    Because of staying up so late, I was half asleep the next morning when I reached the Hermitage. Marya was already there. Although some of the museum employees had left for the army and some had been sent off, like Viktor, to the Luga River to build fortifications against the Germans, Comrade Orbeli had managed to recruit new workers. One trainload of the museum’s treasures had already left with hundreds ofcrates. As I had loaded them onto the railroad cars I couldn’t help but notice the antiaircraft guns mounted on the cars like giant nursemaids to watch over their charges.
    Now the second shipment was nearly ready. There was little left in the museum, only the