Читаем Leningrad полностью

Leningrad had also turned into a city of women, who now made up three-quarters of the population and the majority of workers in every manufacturing sector except weapons production and shipbuilding.43 (The laying of a fuel pipe under Lake Ladoga, completed in June, allowed power stations and factories to resume limited production.) The Hermitage’s head of security complained that whereas before the war he had had 650 guards, he now had 64, ‘a mighty troop composed mostly of elderly ladies of fifty-five or more, plus some in their seventies. Many are cripples who used to serve as room attendants. . at any one time at least a third of them are in hospital.’44 Chekrizov unwillingly took on a batch of eighteen women, formerly clerks and bookkeepers, at his Sudomekh shipyard — they would be of no use, he grumbled, except to tidy up. A couple of months later he was eating his words, having successfully trained more than a hundred housewives as lathe operators, metalworkers and welders. They not only worked, he admitted, but ‘worked well’.45 The yard also employed over two hundred children under the age of eighteen, all either orphaned or without a parent in the city.

With more food available and fewer mouths to feed, most Leningraders now ate, by Soviet standards, almost normally (‘A fairly well-organised system of under-nourishment’, as Ginzburg sardonically put it). In addition to bread, meat, fats and sugar, coupons became exchangeable for tiny amounts of salt, wine, dried onion, dried mushrooms, cranberries, salted fish, coffee and matches. In works canteens, people no longer licked their plates, though they still ran a finger round the edge of the bowl and followed the waitresses with hungry eyes. The death rate, though still several times higher than before the war, fell steadily, and heart failure (an after-effect of severe malnutrition) took over from ‘dystrophy’ as the single biggest killer.46

The mental adjustment took longer. It was a continual surprise to encounter no queues at food shops — ‘like a man who braces himself to pick up a heavy suitcase’, wrote Ginzburg, ‘and finds it empty’. The words ‘I’m hungry’, recently so charged with desperation and despair, only slowly reverted to their old function of expressing an ordinary desire for lunch. Most Leningraders were still extremely weak — their recovery as fragile, as Boldyrev put it of his family, as a spider’s web that might at any moment be ripped apart by a passing tractor. When Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva’s surviving fifteen-year-old nephew came to visit her at the end of May she was shocked to see him ‘corpse-pale, dragging his feet, unbelievably thin, using a walking stick, hair fallen out and head covered in a white fuzz’. (True to form, she set him to painting, and he completed ‘a good study of trees, sky, and parts of the Anatomy Department’.)47 The genuinely healthy still stood out, especially in the newly reopened public bathhouses. Berggolts saw a smooth-skinned, full-breasted young woman mobbed by blotched and bony fellow bathers, who slapped her bottom, hissing that she must be a canteen manager’s mistress or thieving orphanage worker, until the girl dropped her water basin and fled.48

In the midst of recovery, also, a minority of people continued to die of starvation, either because their bodies had been pushed beyond recovery or because they fell outside the rationing system. From the spring, although ration levels gradually increased, getting a card was made harder. Another general re-registration in April reduced the number of cards in circulation, rules excluding those without residence permits were more harshly enforced and cards were withdrawn from the unemployed so as to push them into evacuation.49 ‘It’s not medieval, like it was in the winter’, wrote Berggolts in July,

but almost every day you see someone lying propped up against a wall — either exhausted or already dying. Yesterday on the Nevsky, on the steps of the Gosbank, a woman lay in a puddle of her own urine. A pair of policemen were hauling her up by the armpits, and her legs, wet and reeking, dragged on the asphalt behind her.

And the children, the children in the bakeries! Oh this pair — a mother and three-year-old daughter, with the brown motionless face of a monkey. Huge transparent blue eyes, frozen, staring straight ahead with accusation and contempt. Her taut little face was turned slightly upwards and to the side, her dirty, inhuman brown paw held out motionless in a begging gesture. . What an accusation of us all — of our culture, our life! What a judgement — nothing could be more merciless.50

Lazarev was haunted by a starving teenage girl who approached him outside a food shop, begging for a piece of bread to go with a herring head and telling him that she ‘lived without cards’. He gave her the makeweight from his family’s ration and looked out for her the next day, but never saw her again. The editor of a factory newspaper picked up a starving child in the street: