eight to ten bodies are brought in on sleds. And they just lie there on the snow. Fewer and fewer coffins are available, so too the materials to make them. The bodies are wrapped in sheets, blankets, tablecloths—sometimes even in curtains. Once I saw a small bundle wrapped in paper and tied with string. It was very small—the body of a child.
How macabre they look on the snow! Occasionally an arm or leg protrudes from the crude wrappings… It reminds me of a battlefield and of a doss-house, both at the same time.{16}
Dmitri Lazarev, who visited the Erisman to take leave of a friend, described overflowing slop buckets—‘honey-buckets’—and the only nursing as being done by visitors.{17} On 15 January its mortuary went up in flames, the origin of the fire the still-smouldering quilted jackets, lined with raw cotton wadding, of workers killed in a factory blaze. Overall, according to the city health department, 40 per cent of those admitted to its seventy-three hospitals in the first quarter of 1942 died in them. Wide discrepancies between different institutions—the Karl Marx Hospital reported 84 per cent mortality among patients admitted in January, the October District Second Children’s Hospital only 12 per cent—suggest the figure may be less than complete.{18}
Marina Yerukhmanova witnessed the rapid deterioration of conditions in the hotel-turned-hospital Yevropa. On 16 November a bomb had landed just outside the main entrance, knocking out its electricity supply, and with it heating, lighting, stoves and lifts. Remaining peacetime trappings—starched tablecloths, white-jacketed waiters—quickly fell away, but the hospital managed to keep on operating fairly normally until New Year, when its running water failed and its lavatories froze. Thereafter it quickly descended into squalor and disorder. Patients relieved themselves on the marble main staircase, turning it into a ‘yellow ice mountain’. They set up a black market in the second-floor restaurant, and mugged the orderlies—many, like Marina and her sister, gently reared ‘Turgenev girls’—carrying food along the dark corridors. Shtrafniki—dark-skinned, glittering-eyed soldiers from the 16th Punishment Battalion, mostly former convicts—took over the grandest bedrooms, pinning rugs over their shoulders and twisting velvet curtains into turbans ‘like the crew of a pirate ship’. A grand piano was gradually stripped of its mahogany casing, which went into stoves for fuel, and the ‘Eastern’ dining room with its stained-glass longboats was turned into a mortuary.
On 4 January, having been working fifteen-hour days carrying buckets of hot water up four flights of ice-covered stairs, Marina collapsed with stomach pains. A kind nurse put the girls and their mother into what had been one of the hotel’s cheaper bedrooms, on the top floor. Its grey-painted walls were covered with fernlike swirls of hoarfrost, the indoor temperature being eleven degrees below freezing. What allowed them to make the room habitable was Marina’s mother’s discovery of a half-litre bottle of alcohol in the hotel’s former pharmacy. With one half of it she bought sukhari, and with the other paid a man to make a burzhuika out of a bucket. Stoked with broken-up furniture and the hotel’s old personnel files—Marina and her sister leafed through application letters from long-gone wine waiters and pastry chefs before feeding them to the flames—the stove turned the room into the Yerukhmanovas’ ‘ark’. Two nurses moved in, one with her elderly mother; no gloomy talk was allowed and everyone got fully undressed daily, so that they could check each other’s clothes for lice. The ‘ark’ could not, however, carry all. A first cousin, twelve-year-old Lesha, came to visit early in the New Year:
The little boy had reached the last stage of starvation. He was all oedema—the liquid had swelled his body so much that it seemed as if his skin wouldn’t hold… We somehow pulled him together, gave him something to eat. Like a stuck record, he kept repeating and repeating that he would die within a week, his mother maybe sooner, and so on and so on. And we sat and listened, but our feelings were so blunted… We lived only in order to live. Thought and emotion somehow came to a standstill.
All over the city, public institutions—schools, factories, banks, post offices, police stations, university departments—similarly ground to a halt, though employees with strength enough continued to turn up for warmth, companionship and the chance of obtaining a plate of watery soup in the canteen. ‘In the mornings’, Lazarev wrote of his Optical Institute, ‘we sat round the stove in silence, heads bowed. We sat for hours, not moving, not talking. When there was no more firewood the stove went out. Though there was a big pile of wood in the courtyard nobody had the strength to chop it and carry it up the stairs. Instead, we sat out the wait until lunch in the cold. After lunch we went home.’ The first to die (as in Georgi Knyazev’s Academicians’ Building and Olga Grechina’s apartment block) were the Institute’s ancillary staff. ‘The old cleaning lady has just died of hunger’, he wrote on 25 December. ‘Only the day before yesterday she was dusting my desk. I’m told that she went home, lay down on her bed, stretched out her arms, sighed and died. Today, entering the lab, I saw the corpse of our recently deceased security guard in the next room.’
Unlike the cleaning lady, Lazarev had access to the Scholars’ Building, a clubhouse for academics splendidly housed a few doors down from the Hermitage on the Neva. Through September pirozhki, coffee and potatoes had been available there off-ration, though by New Year this had been cut to soup and sweet tea. ‘In the freezing hall’, wrote Lazarev
a long queue winds up the marble staircase. People stand and wait in silence. Almost everyone carries a document case over their shoulder, with hidden inside it a container for carrying food back home to the family. The wait feels endless. It’s especially cold standing next to the massive marble banisters—a perceptible wave of cold streams off them. At last our turn comes, and we enter the canteen. Frozen, in fur coats and hats, we sit down at the free tables. After some time a desultory conversation begins. A zoologist—tall and formerly overweight—complains that people of different sizes are all given the same food. ‘Mark my words, bigger men…’ But nobody listens to him, since Katyusha is approaching our table with her scissors and the matchbox for coupons. She is our favourite waitress—it seems to us that she serves up faster, and that her portions are a little bigger. People come to the canteen with their own plates and spoons. The respectable grey-haired professor licks his plate clean before hiding it in his gas-mask bag.{19}
Lazarev himself fell gravely ill in the spring, and was reprieved only by a providential secondment to a minelayer, which as well as providing him with proper meals allowed him to pass his ration cards to his wife and daughter.
The Leningrad Party Committee officially closed 270 factories over the winter, but most of the rest hardly functioned and even what remained of the defence plants managed only a little erratic repair work.{20} Olga Grechina, orphaned by her mother’s death in January, stood guard duty at night in her semi-shut missile factory. Alone in the empty workshops she kept fear at bay by reading H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds by the light of a ‘bat’—the person on duty got the best book, as a distraction from the rats that scuttered ‘loathsomely and incessantly’ across the concrete floors. Off-duty she sat in the warmth of the janitor’s room, stripping pine branches of their needles for processing into a vitamin C drink—another food supplement devised by the Forestry Academy. The job paid her a single meal at 2 a.m. each day, of soup and kasha.