The 900 Days (69 page)

There was rumor in the city of some move by the English or the Americans to save the city—a drive from Murmansk perhaps. But could it come in time, could it save Leningrad from starvation if Leningrad in the very next few days did not break the blockade?

He was not certain. His doubt was shared by his fellow citizens. And was Leningrad really doing all that could be done? He did not believe so. The battle to recapture Mga (he believed) was raging violently at that very moment. But not all of Leningrad’s forces had been thrown into it. Everything should be committed to the battle—while Leningrad still had the strength to fight. At any price, at any sacrifice, the ring must be broken. Perhaps the cost would be tens of thousands of lives. But only thus could three million lives be saved.

Within ten days Mishka had been slaughtered by Luknitsky’s brother with the aid of the porter. The first meal had been eaten—dog-leg stew. The intestines and one leg had gone to the porter as his share. Luknitsky had been at the front, but owing to bureaucratic red tape his ration was only two spoons of soup. He could hardly wait to partake of the tasty dog stew.

Luknitsky, a correspondent for Tass, a good Party man, kept his public front.of confidence. Privately, his thoughts were pessimistic. He was not alone. In those days Aleksandr Dymshits, a writer serving on the Karelian front, occasionally came into Leningrad. He had a double task. In Leningrad he recorded broadcasts, telling of the bravery, fighting spirit and confidence of the men at the front. Once as he was going back to the front he heard his own voice on the loudspeaker. He was pleased how confident, how bold he sounded. Actually, like the others he was weak and worn. When he got to the front, he wrote stories for the army paper, telling the troops how strongly and well the people in Leningrad were fighting. Alas, he admitted to himself, the real situation bore little resemblance to the brave broadcasts. He spent his time in Leningrad exchanging news with his friends, learning who was dead, who had starved, who had been wounded. The Leningraders were like gray shadows, thin, tired and hungry. He was the same. They could hardly stand on their feet. A nightmare.

A nightmare, indeed. On the twenty-first of June Academician Orbeli had been concerned about the Hermitage expedition to Samarkand, preparing for the five hundredth anniversary of the Timurid poet, Alisher Navoi. Now the day of the anniversary, December 10, was at hand. On the ninth the last streetcars in Leningrad stopped. On December 10
Leningradskaya Pravda
was published for the first time on a single sheet, two pages, instead of the usual four.

Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, the poet who had entered the People’s Volunteers in July, was still with his unit near the Obvodny Canal within the city. Rozhdestvensky had been on duty all night. He was sleeping heavily in a dugout when a sentry summoned him to the political officer, who handed him a pass. “You’re wanted at the Hermitage. Be back by midnight.” Rozhdestvensky was instructed to appear at the five hundredth anniversary celebration. Leningrad was starving, the city was near death, but Orbeli was going to hold the ceremony.

Rozhdestvensky walked all the way, past shattered apartment buildings and stores whose windows were boarded with plywood. He could hear from the direction of Pulkovo Heights the heavy thud of cannon, the thin whistle of shells, and the explosions in the city itself. The Germans were engaged in their daily bombardment.

He found the Nevsky virtually deserted. There were hummocks of snow in the street. Here and there a trolleycar stood frozen and battered. He walked past the Sadovaya, past the great Engineers Castle, past the Champs de Mars, studded with antiaircraft emplacements, to Palace Square and across the Winter Canal to the service entrance of the Hermitage, the very entrance where on the morning of June 22 employees had gathered for the “air-raid drill.”

Now Orbeli stood here again, welcoming guests to the Navoi festival. The meeting was held in the State Council room of the former Czar, a great room with high ceiling and long windows giving onto the frozen Neva. It was cold, very cold, and Rozhdestvensky had difficulty in recognizing anyone among the bundled figures, their faces ravaged by cold, thin as hawks. But Orbeli was as always energetic, his long beard, now gray, flowing over his cotton-padded jacket. As he began to talk, his big dark eyes grew animated. He spoke of Leningrad’s brave spirit, its unquenchable will, the humanism of Soviet science, the city’s suffering, and the fact that Germany thought it a city of death.

At that moment there came a tremendous explosion. A shell had landed nearby.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Orbeli said, without change of voice. “Shall we remove the meeting to the shelter?” No one rose. “Very well,” he said, “the meeting will go on.”

Rozhdestvensky read his translations of Navoi. Another speaker was a young scholar, Nikolai Lebedev, specialist in Eastern literature. He was suffering from acute dystrophy. He knew what this meant. Already he was too ill to walk. His comrades had carried him to the hall. When his turn came, Orbeli asked him to remain seated while he read. His voice was so thin it hardly carried to the next row. Two days later a second Navoi session was held. Academician B. B. Piotrovsky read a paper on “Motifs of Ancient Eastern Myths in the Works of Alisher Navoi.” Then Lebedev read excerpts from the poem “Seven Planets.”

The effort exhausted him. He was carried down to his cot in the icy chambers under the Hermitage. There he collapsed and in his final weakness kept whispering verses from Navoi.

“When he lay already dead, covered with a flowered Turkmenian shawl, it seemed that he was still whispering his verses,” a friend recalled.

The day after the Navoi festival Academician Sergei Zhebelev, seventy-four years old, slowly made his way through a new fall of heavy snow to the Hermitage. His great overshoes left enormous holes in the drifts at the door. He had come to thank Orbeli for the “holiday of science.” Zhebelev was the last survivor among Orbeli’s academic teachers.

“I am so glad,” he told his onetime pupil, “that science continues to develop with us even under such difficult conditions. This is the way we scholars fight Fascism.”

Zhebelev asked about his old friends at the Hermitage. They were working, Orbeli said. Natalia Flittner, a shawl around her shoulders, walked to all ends of the city to give lectures in hospitals, to military units. “They are all cold,” Orbeli said, “all hungry, but they write and they work.” Zhebelev asked about a friend, Valter, a librarian, and his wife, an antiquarian. Orbeli did not reply. He did not want to tell the old man that both had died in the underground vault only a few days earlier. Zhebelev began to talk of Yakov Smirnov, his close friend of university days, a man who had done much to save the Hermitage in the troubled times of Civil War. Smirnov had died at the age of eighty, in 1918, having continued his lectures up to three days before his death.

Finally, the two men embraced. Orbeli helped Zhebelev down the steps and through the heavy drifts around the entrance. He watched the old man as he slowly made his way along the embankment, wondering whether he would ever see him again.

That was December 13. December 29 was a terrible day at the Hermitage. There was heavy German shelling and one shell hit the wing of the Winter Palace near the kitchen courtyard. A second smashed the façade of the palace on the Admiralty side. A third crumpled the stone canopy over the granite Atlantae at the entrance to the Hermitage. That was the day Orbeli heard of the death of Zhebelev.

Some years after the war Orbeli wrote a brief essay which he called “About What I Thought During the Days and Nights of the Leningrad Blockade.”

His thoughts were down-to-earth: of the thousands of treasures of the Hermitage which lay still in the chambers and cellars, subject to damage from German bombs and shells; of the safety of the priceless works of art sent to the Urals; of his native Armenia and the lands of the Caucasus where he spent his youth, and of the scholars of Leningrad and their dedication to science; of his last conversation with Zhebelev, “of his words, of all the thoughts which he then shared with me, of the great strength of the human spirit, the spirit of a man who in the course of his whole life fulfilled his duty unswervingly—the duty of a scholar, a teacher, a citizen.”

The life of the Hermitage now descended to the subterranean chambers. Bomb Shelter No. 3, one of twelve in the great vaults under the palace, was the center of activity. Here people lived, worked, studied and died in darkness under the low ceilings. Here were their cots, row after row; here the plank tables where they huddled, swathed in greatcoats, a tiny “bat” light or candle stub flickering over the books of the scholars, the thin scratch of pens on yellow paper, the ink so close to freezing it had to be warmed by their breath. These were the catacombs—the center, such as it could be, of Leningrad’s scholarly life. Here people worked until they died. Each day a few more were dead. With the civilian ration down to 125 grams a day (all the Hermitage was on this minimum ration), Orbeli had found one unexpected resource—the by-product of the interminable delay of the painters, the fierce wrangling in which he had been engaged at the time war broke out.

In preparation for the redecorating a quantity of linseed oil had been purchased for the Hermitage stores. There was also a large supply of paste. These products were edible. The linseed oil was used to fry bits of frozen potatoes, dug out of garden patches on the edge of the city. The paste was used to make a kind of “meat” jelly which became the stand-by of the Hermitage diet.

The chronicler of the catacombs was Aleksandr Nikolsky, chief architect of the Hermitage. Day by day Nikolsky kept a diary of Hermitage life. He and his wife Vera had moved to Bomb Shelter No. 3, having undergone a month and a day of continuous German air attack. On their first night, he noted, “we slept like stones under its uncrushable walls.”

At first each morning the occupants of Bomb Shelter No. 3 would emerge —some to work in the Academy of Science, some in the Academy of Art, some in the Hermitage rooms. The older men and women, if they had nothing else to do (and there was no air raid), would go to the school cabinet and sit looking out the tall windows at the frozen Neva, across the river to the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress.

There were two thousand people living in the cellars of the Hermitage.

To go from Bomb Shelter No. 2 to Bomb Shelter No. 3 one had to cross the vast Hall of Twenty Columns, emerging through the emergency door under an arched roof.

At night this route through the corridors and halls of the Hermitage was fantastic to the point of terror. There were no blackout curtains in the museum windows and lights were forbidden. On the floor of the great Hall of Twenty Columns there was a tiny light, but all around it was dark as a prison.

From the Hall of Twenty Columns you went into a smaller room that led to a chamber in which stood a vase of incredible size (the Kolyvan vase, eight feet tall and fifteen feet in diameter, weighing nineteen tons).

The darkness occasionally was lightened by a door opening; then all would again be black and you could see neither the floor, the ceiling, the columns nor even the vase.

Bomb Shelter No. 3 was located under the Italian Hall of the Hermitage. Nikolsky’s cot and that of his wife were on the left side in the corner. Nearby lived the artist G. S. Vereisky. The Nikolskys shared their table with the Buts family. Buts was a bookkeeper at the Hermitage.

Nikolsky was an indefatigable artist. In late October he began sketching from life. Then as cold and darkness set in, he sketched the scenes of life in Bomb Shelter No. 3, Bomb Shelter No. 2, Bomb Shelter No. 5, from memory. There was no longer light to do so otherwise.

In late December Bomb Shelter No. 3 had its first
vernissage
. Nikolsky invited his friends to the corner where he lived. Here he spread his sketches on the bed and on the table. Crowding about in felt boots, cotton-padded jackets, so thin they could hardly stand, his comrades examined the sketches by the light of three altar candles. Here was the domed roof of Bomb Shelter No. 2 under the Hall of Twenty Columns, here Bomb Shelter No. 5 under the Egyptian Hall, here the Neva as seen from a Hermitage window, here the smashed interior of a Hermitage hall.

“To yield our city is impossible,” Nikolsky noted in his diary. “Better die than give up. I am confident that soon the siege will be lifted, and I have already begun to think about a project for an arch of triumph with which to welcome the heroic troops who liberate Leningrad.”

Nikolsky drafted plans for the Arch of Triumph and a Park of Victory, and after the war these were incorporated in a Victory Stadium and Park along the Baltic embankment.

During the Navoi festival Orbeli had not made his customary daily inspection of the Hermitage. Actually, his rheumatism was so bad, the pain so severe in the eternal cold, that it was almost impossible for him to get about. The pain lightened a bit during the Navoi meetings. Now it was back, stronger than ever.

Nonetheless, he determined to make his tour. He began on the second floor, walking from hall to hall. The palace mirrors reflected his stooped figure, his peasant’s jacket, his fur hat. Here the windows were broken. Orbeli felt the walls—over them a coating of ice. The ceremonial rooms of the Winter Palace were even colder than those of the New Hermitage. One bomb had exploded in the courtyard of the theater across the Winter Canal from the Hermitage and the Winter Palace. There was plywood over some windows. Over some there was nothing. Orbeli went below to the halls of antique art. He walked through the Hall of Athens, the Hall of Hercules. These halls were not empty. Here there were many objects of art, removed from the more exposed upper chambers. He could hardly get through the Hall of Jupiter it was so crammed with packing cases. At the staircase he saw snow on the steps, knapsacks and packages—some Hermitage workers were still bringing objects of art from the Stieglitz Museum on the other side of the Champs de Mars for safekeeping in the Hermitage vaults.