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He has lost interest in everything. He won’t read or talk. . he’s even indifferent to bombing. The only thing that rouses him is food. He’s hungry all day long and rattles through the cupboards, looking for something to eat. When he can’t find anything he chews on coffee grounds or those abominable oil cakes which used to be fed only to cattle. . Even in September he used to walk around the city looking for things to buy, took an interest in the military communiqués, met friends. Now he’s like an old man, constantly freezing. He spends whole days standing next to the stove in his winter jacket, pale, with deep blue circles under his eyes. If he goes on like this he will die.5

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.