Another job, arranged by Skryabina’s husband, did not help. Attached as a messenger boy to a hospital, Dima was sent to and fro across the city in what was by now biting cold, often only to be cheated of the agreed-upon evening meal in exchange. The hospital’s kitchen manager, Skryabina raged, was a thief: ‘Only when Dima shows up with the director’s son does he get everything—even meat patties. No wonder that boy is so well-nourished and rosy-cheeked.’ On 15 December, having collapsed in the street, Dima took permanently to his bed—or in siege shorthand, ‘lay down’. ‘He lies quietly and won’t talk at all, burying his face in his pillow. He no longer gets up to search for food in the cupboards and the sideboard… He’s so tall and thin, and unbelievably pitiful… I look at him in horror. I’m afraid he will die.’{6} In a little over four months, Skryabina had gone from playing with her boys in the Catherine Palace park, to watching the elder of them waste away from simple want of enough to eat.
Olga Grechina lived with her mother and younger brother Volodya (Vova for short) in a grey-painted, ponderously ornate mansion block halfway down Mayakovsky Street, one of the shabby-grand boulevards leading off the Nevsky. Her father, a doctor, had died a few years earlier, and her older brother Leonid had been called up into the army. In October, having been released from trench-digging, she was able to visit Leonid at the village near Shlisselburg where he was stationed with his mortar battery. There he introduced her to his new medical orderly fiancée—an unsuitable girl, Olga couldn’t help thinking, who insisted that they be photographed ‘heads together, smiling, in the best village tradition’, and seemed able to talk about nothing but curtains. Leonid and his fellow soldiers were cheerful—happy to have got out of the Kingisepp encirclements alive. But they had no bread or sugar and their horses were emaciated, tearing at the wooden porch to which they were tethered with huge yellow teeth. Nor did the unit have enough ammunition: ‘Each battery gets five shells. When you let them off the Germans retaliate, and keep going for twenty-four hours, but there’s nothing for us to fire back with.’
Soon after Olga returned to Leningrad her mother was hit by a car during the blackout. Though only slightly injured, she rapidly weakened and had to be helped down to the basement during raids. She also insisted on sharing her ration with the family dog, a beloved ‘ball of fluff’ called Kashtanka, so that Olga was half relieved when the animal was stolen—if the rumours were right, for food. The informal system of mutual favours whereby Russians got round shortages and bureaucracy—blat in Soviet slang—was now, Olga discovered, beginning to break down. To get medicine for her mother, she appealed to a former colleague of her father’s, a Dr Mikhailov. The favour he owed the Grechin family dated back to 1916, when he had been caught saving ‘self-shooters’—soldiers who had shot themselves in the left hand so as to be invalided out of the army—from execution by sending them to the rear. Instead of denouncing him, Olga’s father had restitched the soldiers’ hands so as to disguise the bullet wounds, and transferred him to another hospital. Mikhailov now worked in a clinic round the corner from the Grechins on Pestelya, a gracious, Italianate street book-ended by two perfectly proportioned churches. Olga found him
besieged by old women—or that’s how they looked then. He seemed to have sunk into old age himself as well. I asked him to come and see Mama, but he refused, saying ‘You know we only make house calls in exceptional circumstances now, and she’s already had diagnosis and treatment.’ I was indignant, I remember, and berated him—He, having been educated in the humanitarian tradition, having taken the Hippocratic oath, refused to visit a sick person. He sadly heard me out, then said, ‘If I come to you, I won’t be able to get home. For me everything is measured out: once a day I can get from Tchaikovsky Street to Pestelya. I haven’t got the strength to do more. And if I don’t get to work, what will happen to all these people?’ And he pointed to the door, behind which waited all his patients.
Another doctor, whom Olga paid in advance for a house call, first advised, cruelly, that her mother be fed chicken soup and milk, then left the bedroom to write out a prescription for sedatives. After he had gone, Olga noticed that some sweets that had been sitting in a tin on the kitchen table had disappeared.
In November Olga and Vova both found jobs, Vova as a boilerman, which meant chopping and loading wood but provided a meal and warmth, and Olga in a polygraph machine-turned-ammunition factory, checking half-made shell casings and carrying them from workbench to workbench. Though the casings were heavy and greasy, and covered with steel shavings which cut her hands, the work earned her 230 roubles a week and as much soup (‘really only hot water’) as she could drink, plus some to take home to her mother. At the end of the month the family received news of its first death—Leonid’s, killed in fighting near where Olga had visited him a few weeks before.
In early December swollen legs and infected sores on her hands stopped Olga from working, and she began to hear of the deaths of neighbours in her apartment block. The first to go (as was typical throughout the city) were low-status ancillary workers: the building’s porter—‘a very neat, respectable man’—and his wife, then the yardman, then a ‘small, mustachioed and gloomy plumber, who lived on the first floor and spent his time chasing the boys for hooliganism’. Next came the turn of the building’s ordinary residents, starting with the husband of a singer, who lived with their mentally handicapped son on the floor above:
One December night at about 11 p.m. someone knocked on the door. I opened up, and there was our neighbour N with a small glass in her hand. She said, ‘My son is dying—I beg you, give me a spoonful of sunflower oil. If I pour it into his mouth I might be able to save him.’
‘But I don’t have any oil!’
‘Yes you do, you must have! You have to save my son!’
No, I insisted—but in fact I did have a hundred grams of oil, which by chance I had managed to get on my card somewhere or other. But I couldn’t spare any for N—I was feeding Mama with it. If I gave it to N’s son—who I had always found deeply unpleasant—then what would I give her? I got angry with N—saying no to her was excruciatingly shameful—and she left. In the morning her boy died. I felt like a murderer.{7}
As Leningraders’ bodies began to fail, so did the arteries of the city itself. In October the power stations began to run out of fuel, reducing the electricity supply to a trickle. The trolley buses had long since been commandeered for use as ambulances; now the trams ground to a halt at random points on their routes, and began to gather frost and icicles. Their failure, as Ginzburg put it, ‘restored the reality of city distances’, lengthening streets and especially the windswept, shelterless Neva bridges. Snow went uncleared, so that all but major thoroughfares became impassable save for trodden-down, single-file paths, which traced new short cuts through bomb sites and the remains of fuel-scavenged fences. The patchworks of newsprint, wrapping paper, planks and plywood covering apartment-building windows lost the odd gaiety they had had at the start of the war. Now the boards had a ‘funeral symbolism’, they marked ‘people jammed together, perishing, buried alive’.{8}