feared, might have given the wrong impression; though nobody was without his Achilles heel the trials of the winter had in fact bound the museum
Knock with your little fist — I will open.
I always opened the door to you.
I am beyond the high mountain now,
Beyond the desert, beyond the wind and heat,
But I will never abandon you. .
I didn’t hear your groans
You never asked me for bread.
Bring me a twig from the maple tree
Or simply a little green grass
As you did last spring.
Bring me in your cupped palms
Some of our cool, pure Neva water
And I will wash the bloody traces
From your golden hair.18
The ‘bloody traces’, she later discovered, were misplaced, for it was Shakalik’s older brother who had died, and not in an air raid but of starvation.
For Vera Inber a bundle of date-disordered letters from her daughter — in evacuation, like Pasternak, in Chistopol — brought news of the death from meningitis of her baby grandson. ‘I read this letter to the end. Then I put it aside. . then very quickly picked it up and read it again, vaguely hopeful that I had imagined it. No, it is all true. . Our Mishenka is dead.’ To mark his first birthday she had made him a rattle out of a pink celluloid cylinder, a dried pea and a piece of ribbon, and hung it at the end of her bed. By then, she now discovered, he had already been dead a month, and she hid the rattle away in a drawer.19 At the front, Vasili Churkin received two letters. The first, from his father, told him that his older son, Zhenya, had been killed in battle three and a half months earlier. The second, from his younger son Tolya, described the death from starvation of his wife: ‘They loaded her body, together with others, into a lorry in the courtyard of our building, just like firewood. She was taken away to the Piskarevskoye cemetery, to a communal grave. . You and I, Papa, are all that’s left of our family now. Take revenge on the two-legged beasts, Papa, for Mama and Zhenya!’20 Tolya himself, just turned seventeen, looked forward to being called up, and hoped to join his father’s unit.
For Vladimir Garshin — cultivated, fifty-four-year-old chief pathologist at the Erisman Hospital and a conquest of Anna Akhmatova’s — the way back to some sort of normality was work. In March he got undressed for the first time in three months: ‘They put this strange bony body into the water and lifted it out again. The body couldn’t get out of the heavenly water by itself. Warm!. . It’s somebody else’s body, not mine. I don’t know it; it works differently from how it did before. It produces different excreta; everything about it is new and unfamiliar.’ His personality was new, too. By good luck he had not lapsed into indifference during the mass death, nor into hatred and rage. (This was true — a bag of oats he gave the family with whom Akhmatova stayed before evacuation saved their lives.21) Yet things were altered, he was ‘not quite right’. He had to search inside himself, ‘study this new body and this new soul, explore their hidden corners, as though I had moved into a new, unfamiliar flat’. He also literally dissected bodies in the Erisman’s mortuary. As was to be expected, they carried no fat, but the most astonishing thing about them was their organs:
Here’s a liver — it has lost almost two-thirds of its weight. Here’s a heart — it has lost more than a third, sometimes nearly half. The spleen has shrunk to a fraction of its normal size. We looked at the medical histories of these people. Some had been eating quite adequately for a while before they died, but they still didn’t recover — they had already been damaged beyond repair. This is ghastly Stage 3 dystrophy, which is irreversible. . Having used up its supplies of fat the body starts to destroy its own cells, like a ship which, having run out of fuel, is broken up to feed its own boilers. We knew all this in theory, but now we could see it with our own eyes, touch it with our hands, put it under the microscope.
Peering down through the lens at his specimens — ‘the thinnest possible slices of human tissue — neat, colourful, prettily dyed’ — he discovered within himself two contradictory emotions — the first that of greedy scientific enquiry, the second a burning desire to blame: ‘These beautiful specimens scream of tragedy, of the fight the body puts up. They tell of destruction, of the crushing of the fundamental structures of living things. . Because this “experiment” wasn’t staged by life, not by life. Hatred for those who did stage it, that’s what I feel.’ Exactly who he thought those people were he did not specify.22
The government’s first priority, when winter began to turn into spring, was to prevent outbreaks of disease. One urgent task was to collect the thousands of unburied corpses emerging from the snow or thawing out in basements and storage rooms; another to clear away the five months’ worth of human waste — genteelly referred to as ‘dirt’ — clogging side streets and courtyards. While Garshin struggled to maintain detachment at his lab bench, outside his window pale, puffy-faced orderlies, their layers of coats bound tight with string, cleared the hospital grounds with picks and shovels. ‘They can’t work’, Garshin wrote; ‘All they’re able to do is sit by a stove and drink tea. Yet they do work. . It’s a sort of survival instinct.’ In mid-April 52 corpses were collected from the Erisman, 730 from the Kuibyshev Hospital, 114 from a children’s hospital, 378 from a psychiatric hospital, 204 from Finland Station, 70 from the People’s House and 103 from a cellar-turned-mortuary underneath the library at the Millionnaya Street end of the Hermitage. In the cemeteries, the winter’s mass graves sank and stank, and had to be reworked.23
Efforts to stop people disposing of faeces outdoors, or relieving themselves in the common parts of their apartment blocks, had begun back in January, and got nowhere. ‘At the entrance of no. 47 Sovetsky Prospekt’, a policeman reported, ‘a notice has been posted saying that anyone found disposing of human waste outside the building will be prosecuted. But in the courtyard there’s not a single drain or cesspit into which waste could be poured away, and a latrine that was set up is so soiled that you can’t get near it.’ A woman who he caught emptying a slop bucket riposted: ‘Prosecute away! Where else can I pour it? Over my head?’ It was the yardman and building manager, she added, who ought to be prosecuted — thanks to them the pipes had frozen and she had to haul water from half a kilometre away. After several false starts, the clean-up campaign finally got going on 28 March. The first day was disappointing — people turned up late or not at all, transport was inadequate, there were not enough crowbars and 450 of the shovels distributed lacked handles. Though many labour-exempt — old people, war-wounded and children — voluntarily reported for duty, others tried to evade it. A housewife was heard to mutter, ‘Let them feed us first, and then we’ll work’; a female factory worker flatly declared, ‘We don’t want to, that’s all’. A man who snapped ‘I don’t intend to work for the Soviet government’ had his details passed to the NKVD.24 Two days later, nonetheless, turnout had risen to 290,000. ‘The entire population of the city’, wrote Vera Inber,
is out cleaning the streets. It’s like putting a soiled North Pole in order. Everything’s a mess — blocks of ice, frozen hills of dirt, stalactites of sewage. . When we see a stretch of clean pavement we are moved. To us, it’s as beautiful as a flower-strewn glade. A yellow-faced, bloated woman, wearing a soot-blackened fur coat — she can’t have taken it off all winter — leant on a crowbar, gazing at a scrap of asphalt she had just cleared. Then she started digging again.25
To Olga Grechina, sent with her civil defence team to clear Lev Tolstoy Square, the scene resembled the ‘excavation of some ancient city’:
