Leningrad полностью

Inside the city, the mood of 1943 became one of strained, wrung-out waiting — for a second front, for shelling and air raids to stop, for the war to end and normal life to resume. Everyone still suffered nagging hunger. The librarian Mariya Mashkova was overwhelmed by waves of depression, unable to take an interest in anything and exhausted by unshakeable thoughts of bread and kasha. Though her flat was now clean and warm, with working electricity, lavatory, telephone and radio, she felt constant exhaustion and irritation. At work tasks ‘slipped through her hands’, at home she felt guilty at her inability to take pleasure in her children. Her emaciated, rheumatic husband had closed in on himself, speaking little and sleeping ‘like a marmot’ in the evenings, while she resentfully darned socks or read The Brothers Karamazov. Her friend Olga Berggolts’s gossip about flirtations and jealousies at the Radio House she found incomprehensible, and the sight of a woman breast-feeding in a doctor’s waiting room almost repulsive. The baby would have been conceived, she calculated, in February or March of the previous year — ‘the months when people were collapsing in hundreds of thousands, dying of hunger, the morgues full, bodies everywhere, black wrinkled faces. And together with that, the start of a new life! Where did they find the strength, the desire?’

Shades of the mass death were still everywhere, most of all in the wrecked and filthy ‘dead’ flats from which it was Mashkova’s job to rescue books for the Public Library. Each had its tale of death, looting, suicide; of children arrested, gone to orphanages or simply missing. On 7 April 1943 she visited three such, one in particular ‘typical for Leningrad’:

Once there was a family of six. The father and eldest daughter leave for the Red Army and no more is heard of them. Nobody knows if they are alive or dead. The mother stays on in Leningrad with three children — mentally handicapped Boris, aged eight, Lida, aged thirteen, and Lyusya, fifteen. Bravely she tries to save them from death’s clutches, but can’t do it. In December Boris dies, in January Lida, and then, of hunger diarrhoea, the mother herself. The only one left is Lyusya — on a dependant’s card in a dark, cold, wrecked flat, covered in muck and soot. She drags herself to the market, sells things, then as a last resort, starts stealing from the neighbours. She was caught with stolen food cards and arrested; there’s been no news of her since March of last year. Perhaps she’s dead too. And what remains is a frightening, dystrophic room, full of filth and rubbish. No family — just two empty beds amid the chaos — all that’s left of a once-cosy home. Oh how familiar this is!

There were shades, too, of terror: Mashkova was summoned to the Big House four times, always late at night, in February and March. One meeting lasted an exhausting nine hours. Though she refers to the encounters only briefly and vaguely in her diary (‘I came home angry; I’m sick of complicated relationships’) she was almost certainly being asked to inform on friends and colleagues.

As winter turned to spring her life became superficially more cheerful. On Easter Sunday she and her husband got tipsy on five litres of beer and went shopping for clothes; on May Day they spring-cleaned their flat, had friends round to eat pirozhki and watched the children perform in a school concert. But her depression and self-disgust failed to lift.

Where can we find the strength to live happily, joyously, without endless worry? Why can’t the children be the basis for happiness? They are good children after all, and we should be living just for them. Why can’t we suppress the fear that the rest of our lives will be nothing but strain and effort?. . Is it really just the lack of a piece of bread and a bowl of soup? Are our inner resources really so meagre that this defines everything around us?12