Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944 (46 page)

Six weeks later Makogonenko temporarily lost his job at the Radio House, for inadvertently allowing the broadcast of a banned poem, Zinaida Shishova’s Sassoonesque
Road of Life
. With its reference to a corpse stored on a balcony, and deliberately trite, heavily sarcastic final couplet – ‘Rest, son, you did all you had to/You were at the defence of Leningrad’ – it had been deemed ‘odd’ and ‘almost mocking’ by the censors, and was taken off air mid-verse by a telephone call direct from the city Party Committee.
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Berggolts’s own
February Diary
was published but bowdlerised, a thrice-repeated line – ‘In this dirt, darkness, hunger, sorrow’ – made bland by the replacement of the words ‘hunger’ and ‘dirt’ with the safely abstract ‘bondage’ and ‘suffering’.
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Consolation came from ordinary members of the public, who wrote to Berggolts in their hundreds. Some of the letters were semi-official group efforts, from Red Army units or collective farms, but others were from private individuals, thanking her for putting their experiences and feelings into words. One woman described how Berggolts’s broadcasts had helped her bear news of a son’s death at the front, another how they calmed her as she tried to feed her dying husband in the darkness, the spoon often hitting his nose instead of his mouth. ‘This is something truly splendid’, wrote Berggolts:

The people of Leningrad, masses of them, lay in their dark, damp corners, their beds shaking . . . (God, I know myself how I lay there without any will, any desire, just in empty space). And their only connection with the outside world was the radio . . . If I brought them a moment’s happiness – even just the passing illusion of it – then my existence is justified.

Like others, she also found symbolism-freighted comfort in the coming of spring, in the greening of the city square limes (their buds stripped to the height of an upstretched hand), and in the sprouting of coltsfoot and camomile amid bomb-site rubble. One of her very few truly joyful diary entries was written on a warm June night while Makogonenko stood outside on the roof watching for incendiaries:

Yesterday we had an amazing evening. At great expense Yurka bought a huge bundle of birch branches. We brought them indoors and put them in a vase. The window was wide open and you could see the great calm sky. A cool breeze wafted in, the city was very quiet and the scent of birch so sweet that my whole life, my best days, seemed reborn in me. Feeling poured through my soul – happiness, desire, content. Damp, fragrant childhood evenings in Glushina. My first evening with Kolya on the Island, when, young and handsome, he kissed me for the first time. I was wearing an embroidered smock and it smelled of birch then too . . . And now I have yesterday evening, when I lay next to a handsome, loving, present husband, and felt with my entire being that this is happiness – that he is here now, lying next to me, loving me, and that it’s quiet and smells, smells of fresh birch. All this merged into one, painlessly – or to be more exact, with a pleasurable pain. Everything was wonderful, eternal, whole.
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The postal service started to work again towards the end of March, giving Leningraders what was often their first news for months of friends and relatives in evacuation. Since evacuees usually had only a vaguest idea of what those left behind had been through, the resumption of communication was often awkward. The classicist Olga Fridenberg, ridden with scurvy and walking with a stick, was insulted by a rather breezy letter from her cousin Boris Pasternak, describing life in the Urals town of Chistopol, where mud oozed from between the cobblestones and housewives collected water from the fire hydrant outside his window in buckets slung from wooden yokes. ‘For some reason’, he wrote apprehensively, ‘I feel this letter is not turning out right, and I sense . . . that you are reading it with coldness and alienation.’ He was right: Fridenberg expected more. ‘No, I couldn’t expect help from anywhere or anyone. The letter spoke of water buckets, and of a spirit worn smooth, like an old coin.’
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In February, the young curator Anna Zelenova had written to a colleague in Novosibirsk, candidly describing the tensions between museum staff cooped up together in St Isaac’s. Now she backtracked. Her first letter, she feared, might have given the wrong impression; though nobody was without his Achilles heel the trials of the winter had in fact bound the museum
kollektiv
more tightly together.
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Bogdanov-Berezovsky, head of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, started receiving requests from evacuated members that he check on their flats, an arduous task entailing bureaucratic battles with dishonest building managers as well as exhausting walks across the city. Anna Akhmatova, sick with typhus in intelligentsia-packed Tashkent, heard that a former neighbour, a small boy nicknamed Shakalik or ‘Little Jackal’, had been killed in an air raid. Once she had read him Lewis Carroll; now she wrote her own poem for him:

Knock with your little fist – I will open.

I always opened the door to you.

I am beyond the high mountain now,

Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,

But I will never abandon you . . .

I didn’t hear your groans

You never asked me for bread.

Bring me a twig from the maple tree

Or simply a little green grass

As you did last spring.

Bring me in your cupped palms

Some of our cool, pure Neva water

And I will wash the bloody traces

From your golden hair.
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The ‘bloody traces’, she later discovered, were misplaced, for it was Shakalik’s older brother who had died, and not in an air raid but of starvation.

For Vera Inber a bundle of date-disordered letters from her daughter – in evacuation, like Pasternak, in Chistopol – brought news of the death from meningitis of her baby grandson. ‘I read this letter to the end. Then I put it aside . . . then very quickly picked it up and read it again, vaguely hopeful that I had imagined it. No, it is all true . . . Our Mishenka is dead.’ To mark his first birthday she had made him a rattle out of a pink celluloid cylinder, a dried pea and a piece of ribbon, and hung it at the end of her bed. By then, she now discovered, he had already been dead a month, and she hid the rattle away in a drawer.
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At the front, Vasili Churkin received two letters. The first, from his father, told him that his older son, Zhenya, had been killed in battle three and a half months earlier. The second, from his younger son Tolya, described the death from starvation of his wife: ‘They loaded her body, together with others, into a lorry in the courtyard of our building, just like firewood. She was taken away to the Piskarevskoye cemetery, to a communal grave . . . You and I, Papa, are all that’s left of our family now. Take revenge on the two-legged beasts, Papa, for Mama and Zhenya!’
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Tolya himself, just turned seventeen, looked forward to being called up, and hoped to join his father’s unit.

For Vladimir Garshin – cultivated, fifty-four-year-old chief pathologist at the Erisman Hospital and a conquest of Anna Akhmatova’s – the way back to some sort of normality was work. In March he got undressed for the first time in three months: ‘They put this strange bony body into the water and lifted it out again. The body couldn’t get out of the heavenly water by itself. Warm! . . . It’s somebody else’s body, not mine. I don’t know it; it works differently from how it did before. It produces different excreta; everything about it is new and unfamiliar.’ His personality was new, too. By good luck he had not lapsed into indifference during the mass death, nor into hatred and rage. (This was true – a bag of oats he gave the family with whom Akhmatova stayed before evacuation saved their lives.
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) Yet things were altered, he was ‘not quite right’. He had to search inside himself, ‘study this new body and this new soul, explore their hidden corners, as though I had moved into a new, unfamiliar flat’. He also literally dissected bodies in the Erisman’s mortuary. As was to be expected, they carried no fat, but the most astonishing thing about them was their organs:

Here’s a liver – it has lost almost two-thirds of its weight. Here’s a heart – it has lost more than a third, sometimes nearly half. The spleen has shrunk to a fraction of its normal size. We looked at the medical histories of these people. Some had been eating quite adequately for a while before they died, but they still didn’t recover – they had already been damaged beyond repair. This is ghastly Stage 3 dystrophy, which is irreversible . . . Having used up its supplies of fat the body starts to destroy its own cells, like a ship which, having run out of fuel, is broken up to feed its own boilers. We knew all this in theory, but now we could see it with our own eyes, touch it with our hands, put it under the microscope.

Peering down through the lens at his specimens – ‘the thinnest possible slices of human tissue – neat, colourful, prettily dyed’ – he discovered within himself two contradictory emotions – the first that of greedy scientific enquiry, the second a burning desire to blame: ‘These beautiful specimens scream of tragedy, of the fight the body puts up. They tell of destruction, of the crushing of the fundamental structures of living things . . . Because this “experiment” wasn’t staged by life, not by life. Hatred for those who did stage it, that’s what I feel.’ Exactly who he thought those people were he did not specify.
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The government’s first priority, when winter began to turn into spring, was to prevent outbreaks of disease. One urgent task was to collect the thousands of unburied corpses emerging from the snow or thawing out in basements and storage rooms; another to clear away the five months’ worth of human waste – genteelly referred to as ‘dirt’ – clogging side streets and courtyards. While Garshin struggled to maintain detachment at his lab bench, outside his window pale, puffy-faced orderlies, their layers of coats bound tight with string, cleared the hospital grounds with picks and shovels. ‘They can’t work’, Garshin wrote; ‘All they’re able to do is sit by a stove and drink tea. Yet they do work . . . It’s a sort of survival instinct.’ In mid-April 52 corpses were collected from the Erisman, 730 from the Kuibyshev Hospital, 114 from a children’s hospital, 378 from a psychiatric hospital, 204 from Finland Station, 70 from the People’s House and 103 from a cellar-turned-mortuary underneath the library at the Millionnaya Street end of the Hermitage. In the cemeteries, the winter’s mass graves sank and stank, and had to be reworked.
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Efforts to stop people disposing of faeces outdoors, or relieving themselves in the common parts of their apartment blocks, had begun back in January, and got nowhere. ‘At the entrance of no. 47 Sovetsky Prospekt’, a policeman reported, ‘a notice has been posted saying that anyone found disposing of human waste outside the building will be prosecuted. But in the courtyard there’s not a single drain or cesspit into which waste could be poured away, and a latrine that was set up is so soiled that you can’t get near it.’ A woman who he caught emptying a slop bucket riposted: ‘Prosecute away! Where else can I pour it? Over my head?’ It was the yardman and building manager, she added, who ought to be prosecuted – thanks to them the pipes had frozen and she had to haul water from half a kilometre away. After several false starts, the clean-up campaign finally got going on 28 March. The first day was disappointing – people turned up late or not at all, transport was inadequate, there were not enough crowbars and 450 of the shovels distributed lacked handles. Though many labour-exempt – old people, war-wounded and children – voluntarily reported for duty, others tried to evade it. A housewife was heard to mutter, ‘Let them feed us first, and then we’ll work’; a female factory worker flatly declared, ‘We don’t want to, that’s all’. A man who snapped ‘I don’t intend to work for the Soviet government’ had his details passed to the NKVD.
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Two days later, nonetheless, turnout had risen to 290,000. ‘The entire population of the city’, wrote Vera Inber,

is out cleaning the streets. It’s like putting a soiled North Pole in order. Everything’s a mess – blocks of ice, frozen hills of dirt, stalactites of sewage . . . When we see a stretch of clean pavement we are moved. To us, it’s as beautiful as a flower-strewn glade. A yellow-faced, bloated woman, wearing a soot-blackened fur coat – she can’t have taken it off all winter – leant on a crowbar, gazing at a scrap of asphalt she had just cleared. Then she started digging again.
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To Olga Grechina, sent with her civil defence team to clear Lev Tolstoy Square, the scene resembled the ‘excavation of some ancient city’:

In some places the snow had been cleared away down to the ground, in others work hadn’t begun. There were crowds of people – more than we had seen together in one place for a long time. Those who couldn’t work simply sat on stools, having been helped outdoors to enjoy the sun. Everyone worked happily and eagerly. Groups of the weakest dragged great boulders of snow and ice off to the Karpovka on huge sheets of plywood with ropes attached. All the dirt and snow was being dumped into the river.
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Aleksandr Boldyrev, still indefatigably doing the round of institutes in search of lunch passes and back pay, heard about the campaign two days in advance. It was sure, he thought, to finish off many, but officialdom’s reasoning was ‘better a few hundred housewives and dependants dead now, than several thousand in an epidemic in a month’s time’. Summoned to help clear the grounds of the Hermitage, he put in two hours’ work on the 28th (‘slave-owner shouting from Ada and others’) and another hour on the 29th before crying off with the excuse that he had hurt his knee (‘The stench from the half-melted chocolate snow is disgusting. When you crack it with a pick thousands of droplets splash on to your clothes and face’). The next day he really did injure himself, slicing off the top of his thumb while chopping wood. A chit from a sympathetic doctor (thanked with a gift of art books) got him off further labour duty, but others were not so fortunate. ‘Prushevskaya’, he wrote on Easter Saturday, ‘died in the Hermitage’s recuperation clinic today. Though an extreme, text-book dystrophic, the day before yesterday she was still working clearing snow. Now Ada Vasilyevna comforts herself with the idea that [Prushevskaya] “was already mentally ill when she entered the clinic”.’
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Altogether, Hermitage staff cleared the complex of thirty-six tonnes of snow, ice, splintered wood, fallen plaster and broken glass.
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