illustrated the storeys, the thin strata of floor and ceiling. With astonishment you begin to realise that as you sit at home in your room you are suspended in space, with other people similarly suspended over your head and beneath your feet. You know this of course — you have heard furniture being moved about upstairs, even wood being chopped. But that’s all in the abstract. . Now the truth is demonstrated in dizzying, graphic fashion. There are skeleton buildings which have kept their facades. . the sky shows through the empty window-sockets of the upper storeys. And there are buildings, especially small ones, whose beams and floors have collapsed under their crumbling roofs. They hang at an angle and look as if they are still sliding downwards, perpetually descending, like a waterfall.10
Vera Inber and her husband moved into the Erisman, allotting themselves a small room with two iron bedsteads, a cylindrical stove, a desk, a bookcase and an engraving of Jenner giving the first inoculation for smallpox. The ancient poplars in front of the windows, they tried to persuade themselves, would help protect them from blasts. Previously somewhat detached from events in Leningrad — her thoughts more with friends and relatives left behind in Moscow — the move put Inber at the centre of the hospital’s life, which she was faithfully to record throughout the siege.
On 19 September, the day of one of the worst daylight raids (280 planes dropped 528 high-explosive bombs and about 2,000 incendiaries) she went to visit an old friend from Odessa, who she found sweeping her floor of fallen plaster while dead and wounded were carried out from the building next door. It was a long way from their shared pre-revolutionary childhood. ‘I remember her’, Inber wrote the next day, ‘in the autumn of 1913, in Paris. She was so young, so gay, so attractive. A whole crowd of us went off to some fair. We ate chestnuts, rode on a carousel, looking out at Paris through falling leaves.’ That day bombs hit the Gostiniy Dvor (an eighteenth-century shopping arcade on the Nevsky) killing ninety-eight, as well as four hospitals and a market in Novaya Derevnya (‘New Village’), an old-fashioned working-class district of timber yards and nursery gardens on the north bank of the Neva estuary. Inber saw fifty wounded brought in, ‘one a child of about seven years old. She kept complaining that the rubber tourniquet on her leg hurt. People comforted her, telling her that the pain would soon ease. Then she was anaesthetised, and the leg amputated. She came round and said, “Wonderful. It doesn’t hurt any more.” She had no idea that she had lost her leg.’
Four days later, at half past ten on a golden autumn morning, a huge bomb landed, but mercifully failed to explode, in the grounds of the Erisman, burying itself next to the fountain in the hospital’s central courtyard. ‘The strange thing’, wrote Inber, ‘is that I hardly felt the impact. My first thought was that a heavy door had banged.’ She spent the tense ten days it took sappers to defuse it reading to wounded soldiers:
I was sitting on a stool in the middle of the ward, reading aloud a story by Gorky. Suddenly the sirens began to wail; the sound of anti-aircraft fire seemed to fill the entire sky, a bomb crashed, the windows rattled.
I sat on my stool, unable to lean back, as there was nothing to lean back against. . surrounded by windows, and by the wounded — helpless people, all looking at me, who alone was healthy and mobile. I summoned up all my will-power. I let the drone of the aeroplanes go past, and read on, anxious that my voice might shake with fear. When I got home I felt so weak that I had to go and lie down.11
Shelling, many felt, was actually worse than bombing, since bombardments were not preceded by an alarm. From 4 September to the end of the year the Wehrmacht’s heavy artillery pounded Leningrad 272 times, for up to eighteen hours at a stretch, with a total of over 13,000 shells. Worst affected were the factories to the south of the city, including the massive Kirov defence works and Elektrosila power plant, both situated just behind the front at the end of tramline no. 9. To the end of November the Elektrosila’s buildings were hit seventy-three times. Fifty-four thousand residents and the whole or part of twenty-eight factories were moved northwards out of immediate firing range, into buildings emptied by evacuation. The rumour that some shells were filled only with granulated sugar, or held supportive notes from sympathetic German workers, was a soothing invention.
The danger from overhead was not all that occupied Leningraders, of course, for mid-September was also when the city seemed likeliest to fall. Though people could now hear the thump of artillery fire for themselves, most still did not know exactly where the fighting was going on. Sovinform’s reports were as vague as ever: more reliable, the joke went, were the news agencies OBS — ‘
One source of news was the thousands of civilian volunteers still building defence works in the outskirts of the city, among them seventeen-year-old Olga Grechina. After an unhappy stint bookkeeping in a munitions factory, where she had been bullied for her gentility and innocence (‘You’re like something out of a museum’, her boss told her), she went back to trench-digging, this time in the north-eastern suburbs, near the present-day Piskarevskoye siege memorial. Conditions were much harder than in July, and the mood more sombre:
It quickly began to get cold, and though it was only the beginning of September we woke up to frosts. The food was poor — one bucketful of soup, mostly lentils, to feed everyone. . Our women got no letters from their children in evacuation, nor from their husbands at the front.
One evening we were sitting in our landlady’s room, listening to her only record, ‘Little Blue Scarf’. Everyone started weeping inconsolably. This banal song, popular before the war, brought back so many memories. For each of the women its subject — separation from loved ones — had suddenly become very real.
Twice we were allowed to go home to wash, since many of us were infested with lice from the dirt and cold. It was the first time this had happened to me and I was alarmed and disgusted. I borrowed half a litre of kerosene from a neighbour (it was already unobtainable in the shops), and rubbed it into my hair, then spent until almost 2 a.m. trying to wash it out again with barely warm water. .
After visits home people returned to the trenches in a sullen mood. It was getting even colder and we were digging horribly heavy blue clay. Lifting just one shovelful was hard. And even when stupid Tanka started modelling penises from this clay, it wasn’t funny any more, and people began to get annoyed with her.
Stupid Tanka, though, gave sheltered, slightly snobbish Grechina what was to be the first of many lessons on the virtues of the Socialist Republic’s working class. On Tanka’s initiative the two girls dodged guards to steal two sackfuls of potatoes from an abandoned field. Together they lugged their booty to the nearest tramstop and caught a ride into the city. Chatting to Tanka on the way, Grechina was amazed to discover that she supported a widowed mother and crippled sister. A burning factory brought the tram to a halt, and they had to get out and walk. ‘I was exhausted’, Grechina remembered, ‘and about to drop my sack, but Tanka said, “Have you gone mad?” and hoisted it on to her back. . And then I began to understand how crude my judgement of other people had been before.’
On 14 September the brigade was ordered to stop digging and return to Leningrad. Grechina visited the university’s languages faculty, where she had been due to start a degree. But academia now felt self-indulgent and naive. ‘How on earth can you discuss abstract concepts with fires and bombing all around? I felt like a working person who suddenly finds herself in the company of the leisured.’ Slipping out of a lecture early, she went to the faculty canteen and swapped ration coupons for horsemeat and
Even official news sources now acknowledged that the city was in peril. On 16 September, a day of horizontal rain and the day on which Pushkin was abandoned,
