The streets were almost empty. What had once been busy and bustling was silent and dead. People hurried by, looking careworn and ragged, keeping their eyes on the ground. Sophie walked slowly down the street, with Bertha, her daughter, beside her, and Bertha’s little one, Erika. Erika’s small smooth hand clutched in Sophie’s weathered one. Sophie listened to her daughter speaking in a low voice as they walked side by side down the street, Sophie holding a basket clutched under her arm. In Sophie’s basket was a small red ration card, worth two loaves of bread. Sophie could see the stiff little card sitting at the bottom of her otherwise empty basket. Every few steps she glanced down at it to ensure that it was still there. At least two weeks, Sophie thought, this bread will feed the family for at least two weeks.

“Everything looks so different,” Bertha said, looking up and down the streets. “The city is so silent and tired. I feel as if I had been gone a hundred years. Look, there is the old factory where Robert used to work. It’s all closed down now, so quiet and empty. And there! That is the bench where we used to meet to walk home together in the evenings.” She paused her walking and looked up at the old, silent building. “To think, it was only four years ago that we last walked by this way. It all seems so different.”

Sophie looked at her daughter without answering. Yes, she thought, it is all very different. Four years ago, before the war, and the revolution and the famine, Bertha had walked those streets, little more than a child then. When Sophie looked at her now, she saw someone else entirely, grown and confident.

Erika tugged at her grandmother’s hand. “Omi,” she said. “Omi, let’s go get the bread. I am hungry, Omi.”

Bertha moved away from the old factory and the lonely bench and they continued on.

“Erika, why don’t you go and hold your mother’s hand now,” Sophie said, urging the small child forward. “I have this basket to carry, and she does not.”

Erika stepped forward and, looking back at her grandmother for encouragement, she tentatively took her mother’s hand.

The market was only a short walk from Sophie’s house. She had walked that way so many times that she could have done it blindfolded. Bertha did not find the way familiar though; Sophie could see that. These had been the streets that she had grown up in, but in the last four years they had changed so much that Sophie could feel her daughter’s quiet sadness at the change.

Sophie remembered the night they had come to take Bertha away, four years earlier. Bertha had been so still and solemn, she had hushed the whining of her children, and given Sophie one last long hug.

“Is that one of yours?” they had asked, pointing at Erika, who was just a baby then, nestled into her grandmother’s arms.

“No,” Bertha had lied. “She is not my child. She is Russian.”

And she had left St. Petersburg, leaving her youngest child behind. “She is too small,” she had said to Sophie. “She would not survive in Siberia.”

And three weeks earlier, she had returned. She had grown strong and robust in the interval, and her face had been reddened and chapped by the Siberian winds. The famine that Sophie had worried would follow her daughter to Siberia, had come to St. Petersburg instead. Where her daughter had grown strong and hardy on the rustic simple food of the frozen steppe, Sophie had grown weak and frail, as she tried to stretch their meager rations thinner and thinner.

Bertha’s youngest daughter, Erika, had grown into a pretty little child while her mother was exiled. She didn’t remember Bertha, and became shy and withdrawn around her, hiding herself behind Sophie, who had taken care of her for most of her life. That had saddened Bertha.

The three of them, child, mother, and grandmother, rounded the last corner and came to a stop in front of the market. A line of women, holding baskets and clutching ration cards just like them, stretched out of the door.

“How long must we wait, Omi?” little Erika asked. She spoke in Russian, just as Sophie had told her always to do in public. She had started to speak it at home too, though Sophie knew she understood German. Erika’s older brother, Walter, who had gone with his parents to Siberia, only spoke German now, refusing to communicate with his little sister in Russian.

“It won’t be long,” Sophie said, swinging her basket farther up onto her hip to keep it from slipping to the muddy ground.

“This store used to have such wonderful breads,” Bertha said. “I remember, they would have those lovely wheat loaves, all light and bubbly, and the crusty, rich nutty rye loaves. I missed that bread, in Siberia. Their peasant loaves were hearty and filling, but they didn’t have the fragrance of these loaves.”

She will be disappointed by these loaves, Sophie thought. The bread distributed at the market now was soggy and tough.

“Robert received a letter yesterday,” Bertha said, changing the subject. “From his family in Hamburg. They say that there is a job for him there, if we come quickly.”

Sophie sighed internally. “So you must leave again?” she asked.

“Yes, we will not be left alone for long, and it is better to leave now, while we can.” “You have only been back less than a month, couldn’t you stay a little longer?” “You could come with us,” Bertha said. “Come with us to Hamburg.”

Sophie did not respond.

“Mother, you are German, like me. Come with us to Germany. Don’t you want to live in a place 

where you can speak your own language outside of your house? And wouldn’t you like to have more than just bread to eat? And more work to be found? In Germany we can have all of that. We can have a new start, a new life!”

A new life, she thought. In Germany.

“Hush child,” Sophie said. “Don’t talk so loud, others will hear you!” And indeed, the women standing behind them in line, which now stretched out behind them, were giving Bertha looks, suspicious of her excited talk.

“Omi, it is our turn!” Erika said, tugging on Sophie’s hand. The line before them had gone and they found themselves standing at the counter. Sophie placed her ration card on the counter

“Two loaves of bread.” She said to the man standing behind the counter. Erika put her little hands on the counter and jumped up and down, trying to see over onto the other side.

“Erikalein, don’t be disruptive,” Bertha said, placing her hand on her daughter’s head to still her fidgeting. The man behind the counter looked up at her when he heard the distinctly German nickname.

“You Germans?” he asked, fiddling with the ration card and eyeing Bertha suspiciously.

Bertha, taken by surprise, didn’t answer.

“Two loaves of bread.” Sophie repeated. The man slowly reached behind him into his shelves and produced one loaf of black rye bread.

“This ration card is good for two loaves of bread.” Sophie said, when he didn’t seem inclined to produce another. “Two loaves of bread,” she repeated.

“We’re all out, this is the last of the bread today.” the man answered, his eyes still fixed on Bertha. “I can return your card to you, if you like, I’m sure there are many others who would be perfectly content to take just this loaf.”

Sophie relented, and tucked the loaf into her basket.

“We don’t want that type over here,” the man said, nodding to Bertha. “Germans and the like. It’s alright over in the borderlands, but not here in Petrograd. We don’t want any Germans here.”

Sophie and Bertha didn’t respond. They left the shop silently, closing the door just as the woman behind them in line placed her ration card down on the counter. Sophie could feel a number of eyes burning into the back of her head as she left the shop.

“Come on,” she muttered to Bertha. She took Erika by the hand and hurried down the street, back the way that they had come.

I can make this bread last at least two weeks, Sophie thought. At least two, maybe two and a half.

They walked in silence for a couple of minutes, until they had left the market far enough behind that the angry looks of the hungry women in line seemed far enough away to breathe a sigh of relief.

Erika was breathing heavily. Her little legs struggled to keep up with the quick stride of her mother and grandmother. Finally, she stopped and sat down on the ground, in front of the old factory where her mother had paused only a few minutes before.

“I’m tired,” she pouted. “I don’t want to walk any more.”

“Don’t sit on the road, little one, you’ll muddy your clothes” Sophie said, pulling Erika to her feet. “There is a bench, we can sit there for a moment, until we catch our breaths.”

The bench in question was only a few more paces down the road, so Erika consented to walk to it.

It was a weather-beaten wooden seat, nothing noteworthy. Seated on it, Sophie could see the spire of a church. Her church. The evening sunlight glinted off of the spire, dazzling Sophie with brilliant light. How many times had she sat in that church, sung or prayed in that church? And how often had she admired that tall, graceful spire, glinting in the setting sun? Bertha had been baptized there, as had Erika. It had always been her church, every great occasion in her life had happened within those walls. The churches in Germany would not glint like that in the sunlight, Sophie was sure of it.

Erika had caught her breath, so the three of them rose and continued on their way home. It 

was not far now.

“Bertha,” Sophie said, taking her daughter by the arm. “I am not coming with you to Germany. I am too old to start a new life, too old to change my ways. The truth is, I am Russian. I may have German blood and German ancestors and German customs, but I am Russian. I was born here and will die here. You and Robert and the children can make a new life in Germany, I am sure of it, but I cannot. This is my life, and I will not leave it. I belong in St. Petersburg. In Petrograd.”

Bertha nodded, sadly. “I know,” she said, and they walked on.

Three weeks, Sophie thought. I can make the bread last for three weeks.