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The postal service started to work again towards the end of March, giving Leningraders what was often their first news for months of friends and relatives in evacuation. Since evacuees usually had only a vaguest idea of what those left behind had been through, the resumption of communication was often awkward. The classicist Olga Fridenberg, ridden with scurvy and walking with a stick, was insulted by a rather breezy letter from her cousin Boris Pasternak, describing life in the Urals town of Chistopol, where mud oozed from between the cobblestones and housewives collected water from the fire hydrant outside his window in buckets slung from wooden yokes. ‘For some reason’, he wrote apprehensively, ‘I feel this letter is not turning out right, and I sense. . that you are reading it with coldness and alienation.’ He was right: Fridenberg expected more. ‘No, I couldn’t expect help from anywhere or anyone. The letter spoke of water buckets, and of a spirit worn smooth, like an old coin.’16

In February, the young curator Anna Zelenova had written to a colleague in Novosibirsk, candidly describing the tensions between museum staff cooped up together in St Isaac’s. Now she backtracked. Her first letter, she feared, might have given the wrong impression; though nobody was without his Achilles heel the trials of the winter had in fact bound the museum kollektiv more tightly together.17 Bogdanov-Berezovsky, head of the Leningrad branch of the Composers’ Union, started receiving requests from evacuated members that he check on their flats, an arduous task entailing bureaucratic battles with dishonest building managers as well as exhausting walks across the city. Anna Akhmatova, sick with typhus in intelligentsia-packed Tashkent, heard that a former neighbour, a small boy nicknamed Shakalik or ‘Little Jackal’, had been killed in an air raid. Once she had read him Lewis Carroll; now she wrote her own poem for him:

Knock with your little fist — I will open.

I always opened the door to you.

I am beyond the high mountain now,

Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,

But I will never abandon you. .

I didn’t hear your groans

You never asked me for bread.

Bring me a twig from the maple tree

Or simply a little green grass

As you did last spring.

Bring me in your cupped palms

Some of our cool, pure Neva water

And I will wash the bloody traces

From your golden hair.18

The ‘bloody traces’, she later discovered, were misplaced, for it was Shakalik’s older brother who had died, and not in an air raid but of starvation.

For Vera Inber a bundle of date-disordered letters from her daughter — in evacuation, like Pasternak, in Chistopol — brought news of the death from meningitis of her baby grandson. ‘I read this letter to the end. Then I put it aside. . then very quickly picked it up and read it again, vaguely hopeful that I had imagined it. No, it is all true. . Our Mishenka is dead.’ To mark his first birthday she had made him a rattle out of a pink celluloid cylinder, a dried pea and a piece of ribbon, and hung it at the end of her bed. By then, she now discovered, he had already been dead a month, and she hid the rattle away in a drawer.19 At the front, Vasili Churkin received two letters. The first, from his father, told him that his older son, Zhenya, had been killed in battle three and a half months earlier. The second, from his younger son Tolya, described the death from starvation of his wife: ‘They loaded her body, together with others, into a lorry in the courtyard of our building, just like firewood. She was taken away to the Piskarevskoye cemetery, to a communal grave. . You and I, Papa, are all that’s left of our family now. Take revenge on the two-legged beasts, Papa, for Mama and Zhenya!’20 Tolya himself, just turned seventeen, looked forward to being called up, and hoped to join his father’s unit.