Others became seized by ‘bread mania’, imagining themselves dipping slice after slice in sunflower oil, or nibbling an endless supply of buttered rolls. (Varlam Shalamov, starving in the Kolyma goldmines at the same time, wrote that ‘we all had the same dreams of loaves of ryebread, flying past like meteors or angels’.) New etiquettes grew up around food. Some families ate everything they had obtained for the day in one go; others spread it out into three ‘meals’. Food could be pooled and divided equally or according to need, or each family member could eat ‘according to his ration’. Food preparation was spun out into elaborate rituals. The Zhilinskys, having reused their tea leaves several times, mixed them with salt and ate them with a spoon. Boldyrev’s four-year-old daughter threw tantrums unless the table was laid to an exact plan, and ‘meals’ accompanied with a set form of words: ‘The tea is so cold that flies and mosquitoes skate and sled on it, and you can drink without a cup, without a spoon, straight from the saucer.’ (‘This’, wrote her father, ‘is said about five times with every cup, in a weird, almost sickly tongue-twister. . A childish reaction to the surrounding chaos.’)6 Traditions of hospitality, inevitably, evaporated. ‘I know she’s hungry’, wrote Klara Rakhman of a schoolfriend’s just widowed, lice-ridden mother who came to beg for
At this period, too, Leningraders resorted to their most desperate food substitutes, scraping dried glue from the underside of wallpaper and boiling up shoes and belts. (Tannery processes had changed, they discovered, since the days of Amundsen and Nansen, and the leather remained tough and inedible.) On sale in the street markets was ‘Badayev earth’, dug from underneath the remains of the burned Badayev warehouses and supposedly impregnated with charred sugar. Together with another little boy, Igor Kruglyakov slipped past guards to dig some up:
I found what I thought was a piece of sugar, and put it in my mouth. I sucked it all the while we were walking home. It didn’t dissolve but it tasted sweet. When we got home I spat it out into my hand, and it was just an ordinary stone. . Mama scolded us of course, but not wanting to hurt my feelings, pretended there was some sugar there. She mixed it with water and it was as though we drank sweet tea.8
Denying oneself food so as to give it to others — as hundreds of thousands of Leningraders managed to do — became an act of supreme self-control and shining charity.
In January Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with friends. Revisiting her own flat on 1 February, Kochina found the door open and the furniture in pieces. ‘“Why are you chopping up our furniture?” I asked the woman next door. “We’re cold,” she answered laconically. What could I say to that? She has two children. They really are cold.’ Returning four days later she found a corpse on her bed, ‘so flat that the bedspread was slightly raised only by its head and feet. After chopping the leg off a chair I left, without inquiring whose body it was.’ Two days later it had been joined by two more. ‘Evidently the neighbours have set up a morgue in my room. Let them — dead bodies don’t bother me.’9
The point at which Leningraders most often broke out of their ‘caves’ and realised the scale of the tragedy overwhelming their city was when they had to arrange the burial of a relative. When his crabby, wood-chopping father died in March, Dmitri Likhachev washed him with toilet water, covered his eyes with eighteenth-century rouble coins, sewed him into a sheet and tied him to a wide double sled, fashioned from two smaller ones joined by a piece of plywood. First he and his wife dragged the corpse to the Vladimir Cathedral, where a priest said the burial service and sprinkled it with earth, adding a second handful on behalf of a woman whose son had gone missing at the front. Next they took it to a newly opened ‘mortuary’ in the grounds of a concert hall, where thousands of bodies lay piled in the open. When a lorry arrived to remove bodies for burial, Likhachev tried to persuade the driver to include his father in his first load. Otherwise, he feared, his shroud would be torn open and his gold teeth pulled. The driver refused.10
Olga Grechina’s mother died at home on 24 January. Determined to give her the best possible funeral, Olga and her younger brother Vovka bought a coffin, for bread and two hundred roubles, from their building’s yardman. Though it was slightly too short for lack of wood, they did their best to make it presentable, lining it with a sheet and edging it with lace unpicked from one of their mother’s shawls. Olga was even able to buy a bunch of decorative maidenhair fern, from an otherwise empty florist on the Nevsky. ‘The coffin looked good’, she remembered:
