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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