Leningrad полностью

I was pleased with my work, never thinking about what it was for. . It was just very strange seeing this white figure under the sheet. Why, who is this? I took a look and it wasn’t Mama, it was Death herself — a skull covered in skin, bones, hands that looked like chicken’s claws. (I couldn’t gut a chicken again for twenty-five years, I was so haunted by this memory.) Since it isn’t her, I need to get rid of it as quickly as possible, then things will be all right again. With a sort of happy energy I began to organise. I arranged a grave, called our relatives. .

The gathering was spoiled by her uncle Serezha, who arrived oddly dressed and whined like a child, endlessly repeating that he wanted soup (he died a few weeks later). With the help of the yardman’s son, they dragged the coffin on a sled from Mayakovsky Street to Suvorovsky Prospekt, past the Smolniy and over the Bolsheokhtinsky Bridge to the Bolsheokhtinskoye cemetery. As they approached the cemetery gates, they more and more often passed ‘mummies’, wrapped in bedlinen or old curtains, left at the side of the road. One coffin had been improvised out of a sofa, and decorated with a wreath made from curly ink-dyed woodshavings; a child lay in the case of an old-fashioned clock. Olga’s mother got a ‘real grave, dug to order but not very deep’, and a cross made from planks, her name and dates inscribed in indelible crayon.11

Survivors of the siege have an irresistible urge to find a pattern to the deaths, a rationale behind who lived and who died. In one version the best — the ‘noble, restrained, scrupulous’ true Petersburgers — died first, elbowed aside in a Darwinian free-for-all. In the other (commoner) analysis restraint and scrupulosity were lifesavers: to survive it was vital to stay active, and to maintain certain standards — to wash one’s hair, shave, sweep the room, lay the table for ‘meals’, brush one’s teeth with charcoal, not eat the cat, not lick one’s plate and not let the slop bucket overflow or throw faeces out of the window. As one blokadnik puts it, ‘When someone gave up washing his neck and ears, stopped going to work, ate his bread ration all in one go and then lay down and covered himself with a blanket, he wasn’t long for this world.’12

These disciplines also applied to children. Yelena Kochina and her husband moved in with a colleague’s extremely well-regulated family at the end of January, in (immediately disappointed) hope of a warmer room. His children, ‘pale as potato shoots’, spent the days sitting motionless side by side,

as saturated with obedience as a sponge with water. N.A.’s wife Galya and her nanny work as if they were wind-up clocks. N.A. sets them going every morning, giving them their assignments for the day. . He listens keenly to the work of his domestic machine, strengthening or weakening the load, increasing or decreasing the ration at just the right moment. He keeps the bread in his desk, weighing it out three times a day and handing to each their corresponding portion.13

Likhachev and his wife made their four-year-old daughters memorise poetry. They learned by heart excerpts from Yevgeny Onegin — the ball scene and Tatiana’s dream — and Akhmatova’s poem ‘My Tartar Grandmother Gave Me’, about a girl who pretends that she has lost a ring of black jet, which in fact she has given to a lover who sails away, never to return. The little girls behaved ‘like heroes. We introduced a rule: no talking about food, and they obeyed! At table they never asked for food, were never naughty, but were terribly adult, slow-moving, serious. [All day] they sat close to the burzhuika, warming their hands.’14 It was another household rule to wash daily, if only face and hands, and to excrete, once the lavatory had frozen, in the loft, to which, since they lived on the fifth floor, they had easy access. (‘Fortunately’, Likhachev notes, ‘we had to go only once a week or even only once every ten days. . When the weather grew warmer in the spring brown stains appeared on the ceiling in the corridor: we had been going in defined places.’)

Crowded into a communal apartment on the Petrograd Side, Dmitri Lazarev’s extended family was equally mutually supportive. Though two members of the household — a family friend and his father-in-law — died over the winter, the flat became (like Marina Yerukhmanova’s room in the Yevropa) an ‘ark’. He and his wife distracted the children — a six-year-old daughter and nine-year-old niece — by reading aloud pre-revolutionary detective stories and by playing charades. The one their daughter remembered was the word blokada — ‘blockade’. For the syllable blok they acted out a scene from a poem by Aleksandr Blok; for ad — ‘hell’ in Russian — a devil sizzling a soul in a frying pan. For the whole word they pretended stumblingly to pull a sled across the room.15