Leningrad had no underground system, and the government never provided equivalents of the mass-produced, do-it-yourself Morrison and Anderson shelters with which Londoners reinforced their homes during the Blitz. Instead, Leningraders took to the boiler rooms and stairwells of their apartment buildings, or to trench-like shelters dug in public parks and squares. They became accustomed to endlessly interrupted nights and days, to leaving cups of tea half drunk, pulling on coats and galoshes, dozing on benches and mattresses in dark, crowded basements (‘rats ran along the pipes like tightrope-walkers’) and to climbing back upstairs to a cold stove. In the deeper basements, the aeroplanes and anti-aircraft guns were hardly audible (such was the case in the Hermitage, though there were doubts whether Rastrelli’s arches would hold), but in most, Leningraders braced themselves to the rising whistle of each approaching bomb (‘one wanted to squeeze oneself into the ground’), to the thud and thunderclap of impact and explosion, followed by the drawn-out roar of collapsing buildings, tinkling glass, brick dust, screams. ‘Everyone thinks “This one’s for me”’, wrote Berggolts, ‘and dies in advance. You die, and it passes, but a minute later it comes again, whistles again, and you die, are resurrected, sigh with relief, only to die again over and over. How long will this last?. . Kill me all at once, not bit by bit, several times a day!’9
Morning journeys to work, for those who had not decamped permanently to their factories or offices, turned into tallies of familiar landmarks damaged or destroyed. Bomb-sliced apartment buildings resembled stage sets or doll’s houses, their banal domestic innards — sofa, cornflower-patterned wallpaper, coat hanging on a peg — brutally exposed. ‘The cross-sections’, wrote ever-analytical Lidiya Ginzburg,
illustrated the storeys, the thin strata of floor and ceiling. With astonishment you begin to realise that as you sit at home in your room you are suspended in space, with other people similarly suspended over your head and beneath your feet. You know this of course — you have heard furniture being moved about upstairs, even wood being chopped. But that’s all in the abstract. . Now the truth is demonstrated in dizzying, graphic fashion. There are skeleton buildings which have kept their façades. . the sky shows through the empty window-sockets of the upper storeys. And there are buildings, especially small ones, whose beams and floors have collapsed under their crumbling roofs. They hang at an angle and look as if they are still sliding downwards, perpetually descending, like a waterfall.10
Vera Inber and her husband moved into the Erisman, allotting themselves a small room with two iron bedsteads, a cylindrical stove, a desk, a bookcase and an engraving of Jenner giving the first inoculation for smallpox. The ancient poplars in front of the windows, they tried to persuade themselves, would help protect them from blasts. Previously somewhat detached from events in Leningrad — her thoughts more with friends and relatives left behind in Moscow — the move put Inber at the centre of the hospital’s life, which she was faithfully to record throughout the siege.
On 19 September, the day of one of the worst daylight raids (280 planes dropped 528 high-explosive bombs and about 2,000 incendiaries) she went to visit an old friend from Odessa, who she found sweeping her floor of fallen plaster while dead and wounded were carried out from the building next door. It was a long way from their shared pre-revolutionary childhood. ‘I remember her’, Inber wrote the next day, ‘in the autumn of 1913, in Paris. She was so young, so gay, so attractive. A whole crowd of us went off to some fair. We ate chestnuts, rode on a carousel, looking out at Paris through falling leaves.’ That day bombs hit the Gostiniy Dvor (an eighteenth-century shopping arcade on the Nevsky) killing ninety-eight, as well as four hospitals and a market in Novaya Derevnya (‘New Village’), an old-fashioned working-class district of timber yards and nursery gardens on the north bank of the Neva estuary. Inber saw fifty wounded brought in, ‘one a child of about seven years old. She kept complaining that the rubber tourniquet on her leg hurt. People comforted her, telling her that the pain would soon ease. Then she was anaesthetised, and the leg amputated. She came round and said, “Wonderful. It doesn’t hurt any more.” She had no idea that she had lost her leg.’
Four days later, at half past ten on a golden autumn morning, a huge bomb landed, but mercifully failed to explode, in the grounds of the Erisman, burying itself next to the fountain in the hospital’s central courtyard. ‘The strange thing’, wrote Inber, ‘is that I hardly felt the impact. My first thought was that a heavy door had banged.’ She spent the tense ten days it took sappers to defuse it reading to wounded soldiers:
