The 900 Days (75 page)

“That’s a one-sided view,” Sayanov replied. “The personality of the artist is not to be separated from his creations.”

Pakulin sighed. “It seems to me that I will never succeed in doing anything important in art. It is very hard.”

A woman came by. She looked at the canvas, then at Pakulin and said, “I am also one of your admirers.”

“Do you like this?” Pakulin said to Sayanov. “It seems to me that I have put my soul into this picture.”

Sayanov looked again—the strange white sky, the soft violet clouds, the people walking on the Prospekt, the Anichkov Bridge without the Klodt horses.

“You understand,” Pakulin said. “It is all strange. It is all alarming. But the sky is quiet as always.”

“I understand,” Sayanov said. He looked back at Pakulin as he went on his way. He would not live till spring. It was not possible. But Sayanov was mistaken. Pakulin lived for several years after the war, and when Sayanov went to the studio for the funeral, he saw many good pictures. But none of those painted during the war. For the official guardians of Soviet culture would not let the strange and terrible works of Pakulin in the time of the Leningrad blockade be shown publicly. Not for many years. They were too terrible, too alarming.

A film project to make a picture of Leningrad in battle fared no better than those for books and magazines. Vsevolod Vishnevsky was engaged to write the scenario in March of 1942. Several Soviet cameramen had shot thousands of feet of action, among them Yefim Uchitel, Andrei Pogorely and Yevgeny Shapiro. Directors Roman Karmen and Nikolai Komarovtsev were enlisted.

Vishnevsky was so moved by the sequences—the ruined observatory at Pulkovo; Academician Nikolsky sketching in the cellars of the Hermitage; an old woman falling, dropping a bowl of soup from her trembling hands; a winter scene at the Summer Gardens; a pair of hands grasping the great iron gates and gradually slipping until the body fell into a snowdrift; the sign on the courtyard gates: “Point for collecting bodies"; the composer, Boris Asafyev, sitting at a grand piano and playing with cold-stiffened fingers; the body of the elephant, Betty, lying in a pool of blood at the Zoo—that he cried like a child. He wrote seven different scripts for the film. None was ever published. Finally, on July 9, 1942, the picture,
Leningrad in Battle
, appeared. It won a Stalin Prize. But thousands upon thousands of feet of the best sequences were not included. Nor have they been shown to this day. They remain in an archive of several hundred thousand feet of Soviet film which someday may show to the world the full measure of suffering which the war brought to Russia. A sequel to
Leningrad in Battle
, covering the events from May, 1942, to the liberation of the city in January, 1944, was also planned. Nikolai Tikhonov, the Leningrad poet and writer, was commissioned by the Leningrad Military Council to write the script. “It is a great pity,” Tikhonov later commented, “that this picture, very strong in its contents, never saw the light. If it had been released for the screen, millions of spectators would have seen much that was unexpected, tragic and heroic.”

Vera Ketlinskaya was one of Olga Berggolts’ best friends. She had known “Olenka” for twenty years before the war—in fact, Ketlinskaya had first met her when Olenka’s head was shaved like a young boy’s, her hair cut off because of a children’s disease. The two women were opposites in many ways. Olga Berggolts was certain that every bomb was aimed directly at her. She felt every blow which struck her friends and neighbors, often more deeply than they did. Vera Ketlinskaya walked about Leningrad, even during air raids and long-range shelling, confident that no bomb or shell would hit her. As the blockade went on, Olga and Vera drew closer and closer. Almost every night Olga telephoned from Radio House to the Writers’ House: “Vera, you’re alive?” Or if shelling was going on: “Is it in your neighborhood?” Sometimes, Vera would reply, “Not so far,” and suddenly a terrific crash would come. Once as they were talking a shell hit the next apartment and Vera could not speak. She heard Olga on the telephone saying, “Vera, Vera—what’s happened? Vera! Vera!”

Sometimes one or the other would get a present—a piece of frozen horse meat from the front, a packet of real coffee, or a pot of library paste from which they could make a wonderful jelly. They would invite each other to share such feasts.

One night Ketlinskaya telephoned Olga and told her that she had got a bottle of cod-liver oil and that she was going to make some “fantastic pancakes” out of dough, the basic ingredient of which was coffee grounds.

“I’ll be right over,” Olga Berggolts said.

It was two blocks from Radio House to Vera Ketlinskaya’s flat. Ketlinskaya waited and waited. Olga did not appear. Finally, she arrived so shaken she could hardly talk. She had started out in the arctic night in streets that were completely dark. She felt her way along a path between high drifts, and as she passed Philharmonic Hall she slipped and fell heavily on something. The “something” was a corpse, half covered with snow. She lay stunned, weak, terrified, unable to rise. Suddenly, she heard her own voice, reading poetry. The voice came from the ether. It spoke quietly and simply. Olga Betggolts lay in terror. Was she resting on a frozen corpse or was it her own frozen body which she felt? She must be dead. Or perhaps she had lost her mind. She was gripped by such terror as never before had possessed her. On the periphery of consciousness she heard her voice halt and another begin to speak. It was the announcer for Radio Leningrad. What she was listening to was the radio loudspeaker at the corner before the Hotel Europa, transmitting a program she had recorded earlier in the day.

Gradually, Olga Berggolts regained control of herself. She sat beside Ketlinskaya and, feeding pages from old books into the
burzhuika
, they ate the “fantastic pancakes,” wondering why in the past they had not liked fish oil.

Later in the siege an English correspondent, Alexander Werth, came to Leningrad. He asked Vera Ketlinskaya and some of her friends to tell him not
what
enabled them to survive but
hoiv
they survived. This was the great question, and as years went by it became more and more difficult to answer.

In retrospect it seemed unbelievable to Vera Ketlinskaya that she had sat in her apartment in Leningrad in January, 1942, with the temperature so low that the ink froze in the inkwell and she had to tap out her thoughts on an unfamiliar typewriter. She was working on the first pages of her book
The Blockade
, writing of the death, in the novel, of Anna Konstantinova. Her own year-and-a-half-old son, Serezha, slept beside her under a pile of clothing, and in the next room lay her mother, dead of starvation, placed there on the floor three days ago, with no immediate prospect of getting her body buried. Vera Ketlinskaya did not cry as she wrote. She simply tried to make her fingers hit the strange typewriter. Pavel Luknitsky spent the evening of January 31 with her. The body of her mother still lay frozen and unburied in the next room. But such was the temper of the times that he recalled the evening with warmth. They talked “from the soul,” in the Russian phrase, of the war, of the city, of the suffering, of the beauty and bravery of the epoch. They warmed themselves at the little iron stove, and Ketlinskaya read some lines from her new book.

Nikolai Chukovsky returned to Leningrad in late January from a brief visit to one of the airfields. He was walking along the Neva embankment when he saw a terrible sight. A dozen holes had been broken in the Neva ice, and hundreds of women, pails in hand, were moving toward the holes. Around each water hole he saw dozens of corpses, half covered with ice and snow. The women, making their way toward the water, had to wind around the bodies of the frozen dead. The granite steps leading down to the Neva were sheathed in ice, so thick it was almost impossible to climb up or down. The women slipped and fell, some never to rise again. Along the Palace Square, along the Nevsky, along Gorokhovaya, the line of women, pails in hand, stretched and stretched. On Gorokhovaya, icy with spilled water from hundreds of pails, Chukovsky became fearful lest he meet someone he knew, fearful lest the fright which he could not keep his face from displaying would show. At that moment he encountered Olga Berggolts, head and shoulders wrapped in a heavy shawl and face almost black with frost. Taken aback, Chukovsky sought for something innocuous to say. “Ah,” he remarked, “how well you look, Olechka.”

Olga Berggolts was pulling an empty child’s sled.

“I’ve just come from the cemetery,” she said. “I’ve taken my husband there.”

Years passed and Chukovsky was certain that Olga Berggolts would never forgive him the stupidity of his remark.

Olga Berggolts’ husband, Nikolai Molchanov, died January 29, 1942. His death was not a surprise. Olga’s father, the doctor, Fedor Berggolts, had warned his daughter that her husband was doomed if they did not leave the city. Nikolai was a scholar, a specialist in literature and poetry. He had been exempted from military service because of his poor health and continued his literary work. He was planning after the war to publish a comparative examination of five poets—Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Blok and Maya-kovsky.

“You must get out. Absolutely. By any means,” her father said. “In an ancient book it is written, ‘Woe to those trapped in a city under siege.’ “

That was in October. Olga had managed to get to her father’s house a few hours before her grandmother died. The moment never left Olga’s memory, the moment when her grandmother turned to her as explosions rocked the old wooden house (an air raid was in progress) and said, “Lyalechka, my first grandchild . . . you’re a godless one, a Young Communist. But I am going to bless you just the same. You’re not angry?”

“No, Grandma,” Olga Berggolts replied.

The old lady gave her blessing and Olga kissed her hand, already growing cold. Then the grandmother asked about a second granddaughter, Maria, who was in Moscow.

“Which way is Moscow?” the grandmother asked. “On which side?”

They pointed to the wall. The old lady turned and with great effort raised her hand and made a small cross.

“Please, God,” she said, “save your servant, Maria, and your beautiful capital, Moscow.”

Then she sank back dying.

Now the prediction of Olga’s father that Nikolai Molchanov could not survive the blockade had come true. Olga Berggolts wept for the death of her husband. It was the only time she wept during the blockade, for as she wrote in one of her verses, “The tears of the Leningraders are frozen.” She wept when she took Nikolai’s body on the child’s sled and left it with the mountain of others at Piskarevsky Cemetery, and she wrote, in lines dedicated to Nikolai: “Really will there be a victory for me? What comfort will I find in it? Let me be. Let me be forgotten. I will live alone. . . .”

All during the days of the blockade Olga Berggolts carried in her pocket a piece of cardboard, slightly smaller than a postcard. It bore the words: “Propusk No. 23637. Permit to walk and drive in the city of Leningrad.” This was her pass. It took her to every end of the city, by night and by day.

Now in these first days of February she started on a long walk, the longest she was ever to make. She was going to her father at the factory where he worked as resident physician, a distance of ten or twelve miles from Radio House in the center of the city to the Neva Gates and beyond. Olga Berggolts’ comrades at Radio House had given her such supplies as they could spare—a child’s milk bottle filled with a liquid resembling sweetened tea, and two cigarettes. She had her own day’s ration of bread, 250 grams— all of this in a gas-mask bag.

She decided to eat bits of the bread as she went along in order to bolster her strength. She started out, walking slowly. The day was overcast and cold. The people whom she passed wore masks over their faces to protect against the wind—red, black, green or blue masks with peepholes cut out for their eyes.

Olga Berggolts had to walk all the way to the Lenin factory and then out the Shlisselburg highway. She even had to cross the Neva. Whether she would make it was not certain. She decided she would think only of the segments of her walk. First, to get to the Moscow Station. First, to walk down the Nevsky, counting one light pole after the other . . . one by one . . . one pole and then another—the stanchions where weakened victims of dystrophy held themselves up, then slowly sank for the last time to the ice and snow. One pole, then another. Now she had gotten to the Moscow Station. Now she could halt for a moment. Then, again out Staro Nevsky. From post to post. To the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. Here the bodies lay thick in the street. Here the trolley-buses stood, dead, empty. It seemed to her that they had come from a different life, a different century. The path here was in the center of the boulevard, a wide path, and Olga Berggolts heard behind her the squeak, squeak of a child’s sled, a woman pulling a man wrapped in a blanket. The man was alive. Where could the woman be taking him? Olga Berggolts began to pass big barns, grain storage depots. She remembered the last time she had come this way, the day her grandmother died. Then the barns had been filled with grain, and even on the ground outside there had been mounds of rye and wheat. She could not stop thinking of grain, of the handfuls she had held in her hands in the threshing days as a child, of the smell of the rye fields. She had an overwhelming desire just to put a single grain into her mouth and taste its nutty flavor. Hunger overwhelmed her, and she almost reached into the gas mask and drew out her bread. But she said quietly to herself, “No. Only when I get to the Lenin factory. Then I’ll sit down and swallow a little tea and eat some bread.”