Читаем Leningrad полностью

Sadder, perhaps, even than physical breakdown, was the way in which hunger destroyed personalities and relationships. Increasingly preoccupied with food, individuals gradually lost interest in the world around them, and at the extremity, with anything except finding something to eat. ‘Before the war’, wrote Yelena Kochina as early as 3 October, ‘people adorned themselves with bravery, fidelity to principles, honesty — whatever they liked. The hurricane of war has torn off those rags: now everyone has become what he was in fact, and not what he wanted to seem.’

Her diary — written in the margins of old newspapers, on scraps of wallpaper and on the backs of printed forms — charts, with searing honesty, the gradual breakdown of her marriage. Immediately pre-war her mood is joyous, delighting in her new baby and doting husband. ‘Dima is on holiday’, she writes on 16 June, while watching him change a nappy. ‘All day he’s busy with our daughter: bathing her, dressing her, feeding her. His well-kept, sensitive designer’s hands manage all this with amazing skill. His hair blazes in the sun, lighting up his happy face.’ Six days later the young family was hit, like millions of others, with the announcement of invasion: ‘I carried Lena out into the garden with her coloured rattles. The sun already ruled the sky. A cry, the sound of broken dishes. The woman who owns our dacha ran past the house. “Yelena Iosifovna! War with the Germans! They just announced it on the radio!”’ Two weeks into the war the couple had their first serious quarrel, over whether or not Yelena should leave for Saratov with her institute. Yelena decided not to evacuate, and the closure of the siege ring trapped the whole family in Leningrad. Through September, Dima had hardly any sleep, firewatching with the local civil defence team at night and digging potatoes in an abandoned vegetable patch after work. Every morning, Yelena walked along the Neva embankment to the paediatric hospital which distributed the infant ration of soya milk:

The maples burn a feverish red, like dying embers. The leaves fall slowly, dropping straight into my hands. I take them home and put them on the windowsill, new ones every morning. These may be the last leaves of my life. A downpour of artillery shells whips along the embankment, landing on the Academy of Arts and the University. Sometimes shells land quite close and we see people fall.

At the hospital, Lena immediately drinks up her milk. When it is finished she cries bitterly, stretching out her little hands towards the white baby bottles. . But they don’t give her any more: three and a half ounces is the ration.

Dima, having been transferred to a defence factory where he worked as a lathe operator, received the manual worker’s ration. ‘During the midday break,’ wrote Yelena,

he brings me his lunch: a small meat patty and two spoons of mashed potato. Despite my protests he forces me to eat it all — ‘Eat, please, you have to feed Lena. Don’t worry about me, I’m full.’ But I can see that this isn’t true; all he’s eating is soup. He can’t keep going like this for long, and anyway I have less milk every day.

In early October, though the couple had already broken into their emergency reserves of potatoes and sukhari, Yelena’s milk dried up. ‘At night I drink a whole pot of water but it doesn’t help. Lena screams and tears at my breast like a small wild animal (poor thing!). Now we give her all the butter and sugar we get on our ration cards.’ On the 10th Yelena first recorded her suspicion that Dima was secretly eating sukhari in her absence. The rusks ran out four weeks later, leaving only fourteen ounces of millet with which to feed the baby (‘Now I curse myself for buying only four and a half pounds at the commercial store. What a fool I was!’). No longer trusting her husband, Yelena started hiding the millet every time she left the apartment — ‘up the chimney, under the bed, under the mattress. But he finds it everywhere.’ On 26 November, returning home unexpectedly, she caught him in the act:

‘Don’t you dare!’ I yelled, losing control of myself.

‘Shut up, I can’t help myself.’

He looked at me despairingly. He didn’t even avoid my eyes as he’s been doing these last few days. I shut up and my anger passed. . After all, by giving me his lunches, he started going hungry before I did.

The millet ran out on 2 December. Two days later, the kindness of a stranger allowed Yelena to exchange coupons for macaroni. Roaming the streets in search of food for sale, she had spotted a horse-drawn cart laden with boxes: