The 900 Days

by Harrison Salisbury

  On a Sunday, walking from the gate of the Erisman Hospital to Leo Tolstoy Square, Vera Inber counted eight big and little sleds, each with a corpse, each wrapped in a different kind of shroud.

  The very smell of the city was changing. No longer did you smell gasoline, tobacco, horses, dogs or cats. The healthy smell of people had vanished. Now the city smelled of raw snow and wet stone. White frost painted entry halls and staircases. And on the street one smelled the harsh and bitter odor of turpentine. This meant that a truck with bodies, bound for the cemetery, had just passed. Or one which had been to the cemetery coming back. The turpentine was used to drench the trucks and the corpses. The harsh smell lingered in the frosty air like the very scent of death.

  In the charnel house that Leningrad was becoming the hospitals were worst of all. Yelena Skryabina, almost frantic with fear for her son Dima, who day by day was sinking into torpor, managed to get a job for him as a messenger in a hospital on the Petrograd side. For this he would receive one meal a day —a meat soup. This might save the youngster’s life. The boy was so weak that he could hardly walk, and he returned from the hospital near collapse. It was jammed with bodies. There were bodies in the corridors, on the staircases, in the entryway. He could hardly get in and out of the building.

  The streets were becoming places of inconceivable terror. Madame Skry-abina’s friend, Lyudmila, was hurrying home from work one night. A woman clutched at her arm, crying that she was too weak to take another step, she must have help. But Lyudmila herself could hardly stand. The woman’s clutch was like iron. The two women slowly struggled Until Lyudmila wrenched herself free, throwing the woman into a snowdrift, and ran down the street. She arrived home face white, eyes filled with terror, breath coming in gasps, saying again and again, “She is dying, she will die today.”

  Dmitri Moldavsky each day followed the same route. He went down Ulitsa Marat (more and more difficult to get through as bodies piled up at the morgue), down the Nevsky, across the bridge to the university. It took him three hours to walk this route with one halt. This was at a trolley-bus frozen in the ice at the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Griboyedov Canal, the very heart of the city. In this he stopped, unwound his scarf and rested while he counted to seventy-five. Then, difficult as it was to get up, he rose and continued his walk. He was never alone in the bus. There were always other passengers, the same passengers—three corpses. Who they were he did not know. Possibly others like himself who had paused a moment to rest and never got up again.

  Once Moldavsky saw a woman fall in front of him on the Nevsky. She tried to rise but could not. She struggled and finally became still. He came up to her. Her face was black, her lips shriveled, her eyes open. Beside her lay a pair of red mittens, and he saw her fingers, white and thin as macaroni. Moldavsky and a woman passer-by tried vainly to put her on her feet. The victim opened her lips, muttering something that sounded like “soup.” A Red Army man came along and the three of them got the woman up, but she fell again, dead.

  “Well, we tried,” the woman said.

  “That’s it!” said the soldier. “Let’s go!”

  Another time Moldavsky saw a man ahead of him, tottering down the Nevsky and nibbling at a crust of bread. A second man watched the man stagger along, bread in hand. “That’s very good,” said the second man. “A breakfast roll . . .”

  He stood watching. Perhaps, thought Moldavsky, he is watching in case the man falls in hopes of getting the crust of bread.

  People would do anything for food, for bread. In early December cemetery workers would provide a coffin and a grave for 300 rubles’ worth of bread. Yevgeniya Vasyutina bought a little tin stove on December 10. She paid three days’ bread ration for it—and the stove pipe was extra.

  One day the wife of a friend came to Admiral Panteleyev. She and her family were starving. Panteleyev confessed he could do nothing to help. As she rose to go, she noticed his worn leather portfolio.

  “Will you give me that?” she asked in despair.

  He gave her the briefcase in puzzlement. A few days later he got a present from the woman. A dish of meat jelly and the nickel fittings for the portfolio. A note said she hadn’t been able to make anything out of the nickel, but the jelly was the product of his briefcase.

  By New Year’s Day bread was selling at 600 rubles a kilogram in the black market. That was black bread, of course. There were half a dozen markets where packets of cigarettes, hunks of ersatz bread, jars of sour cabbage, dirty bits of rye bread, could be bought or traded for clothing, watches, jewelry or objects of art. But bread was so expensive that few Leningraders could dream of buying it. Vera Inber heard of one market where a friend had traded twenty-seven packets of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C) for a live dog. Her friend Marietta said judiciously, “That’s a good trade—if it’s a big dog.”

  Her friend Irina had an airdale terrier named Karma; she loved her dog like a human being. On December 1 the ration for service dogs ended. People began to eat their dogs. Vera Inber met Irina with the dog. “I’m taking him to the toxicologist to be put to sleep,” she said. “But first I’ll give him one last good meal. I have a crust of bread left. And what happens after that I don’t want to know. But, of course, he’ll be eaten. I know my co-workers have been waiting a long time for this.”

  Unfortunately, the toxicologist was so weak he bungled the injection. The poor dog cried like a human being before dying.

  It was difficult even for the eternal optimist Vishnevsky to find reasons for meeting the New Year with hope. He was in the hospital recovering very slowly from a collapse. He had found himself there December 1, hardly knowing what had happened. By the end of December he was making fatuous diary entries: (“Today the temperature is 23 degrees below zero. In the country it is lower. Marvelous!”) He had heard there was going to be an issue of cereals and macaroni for New Year’s Day and that there would be special dining rooms for scientific workers. (“We are saving the intelligentsia!” he commented. The exclamation mark is Vishnevsky’s.)

  The Germans shelled Leningrad on the evening of December 31. At midnight Vishnevsky listened to the radio transmission of the Kremlin chimes. Then the naval guns of the ships on the Neva delivered a New Year’s salvo to the German positions. The radio brought the Spassky chimes in Moscow, playing the Internationale. Two friends had come to be with him. They had a small glass of Malaga, recited some verses of Mayakovsky and Yesenin, and went to sleep.

  Vera Inber had two celebrations. First at the Writers’ House at 5 P.M., where an “Oral Almanac"—readings by writers and poets—was presented. Vera Inber walked from Aptekarsky Island all the way to the Writers’ House on Ulitsa Voinova. The temperature was well below zero. The streets were empty and ice-covered. She passed the trolley barn, from which cars no longer issued; the bakery, from which so little bread now came; shell-torn, snowdrifted autobuses; the Neva embankment, where stood two unfinished ships.

  It was incredibly cold at the Writers’ House. A few candles on the table gave light as Vera Inber read some stanzas from her new poem. This was “Pulkovo Meridian” (still untitled), her great war poem. When she got to the lines where she cursed Hitler and his Germany, she drew in her breath. Three times she started to speak. Each time she could not continue, gripped by emotion.

  It was dark when she started home. Her husband had gone to get the day’s bread ration and been caught by an air raid. Vera Inber was sick with worry before he returned.

  At midnight they joined some doctors and drank their last bottle of sour Riesling. The party broke up when the receiving doctor telephoned. He reported that forty corpses were lying in the corridors and the long-unused baths. What should he do?

  At midnight Luknitsky awakened his friend Lyudmila Fedorovna. They sat down to a New Year’s feast—a bottle of champagne he had saved from before the war, 200 grams of almonds he had gotten at the Writers’ Union and three pieces of dog meat which he had saved especially for the occasion.

  This kind o
f scene was enacted all over Leningrad on New Year’s eve. Yelizaveta Sharypina, a schoolteacher turned Party worker, lay in her frigid apartment. She had been lying there since the middle of December, all day in the dark, looking at the illuminated hands of her watch, and then, an hour before she expected her husband, she would light the tiny “bat.” She didn’t want him to think she lay all day in total darkness. Her children had been sent out of Leningrad, to somewhere in the Urals. She wanted to send them a New Year’s card. But she was too weak to write. She lay in bed, thinking about caviar. She tried to stop, but she could not get the thought of caviar out of her mind. She even found herself running her tongue over her dry shriveled lips. Just a tiny, tiny piece of good Russian black bread and just two little drops of beluga caviar.

  She lighted the little light, and presently Pavel came. “How are you, my little quarter?” he asked. He had called her his “better half.” Now that she was so thin he called her his “quarter.”

  There was a surprise for New Year’s: an hour or two of electric light. And another surprise: she had traded two dresses for a pound or two of sausage (better not to ask what kind) and a pound of horse meat. She and Pavel had saved their bread ration till evening, and she had put away five pieces of soya candy. They had a real New Year’s feast.

  Ilya Glazunov, the little boy who had been playing White and Red Russians in the country courtyard on June 22, was now in Leningrad, living in the gloomy big flat on Bolshoi Prospekt on the Petrograd side.

  It was dark in the apartment, dark as a cave, Ilya thought. Outside there was a frosty sun. But within they no longer removed the curtains. Sometimes they heated up the little burzhuika—it had been in the flat since the days of the Civil War. There was no water. The plumbing had frozen. They drank melted snow.

  Ilya would bring the snow from the courtyard in a saucepan. Once he returned to find his mother staring at the ceiling motionless. Ilya was terrified. He looked at her unseeing eyes and asked, “Are you sleeping?” “Don’t worry,” she replied softly. “I am not dead. I am just thinking about you and what you will do without me, being only eleven years old.”

  Ilya noticed that hunger made his head clearer. But he was weak. Sometimes there was a ringing in the ears. He moved from one mood to another with surprising lightness.

  Bad as things were, his mother was determined that Ilya would have a New Year’s tree. From somewhere came a fir branch. She put it in an old milk bottle and decorated it with little toys from past holidays. One candle was found. It was cut into four pieces. The grownups of the family made a grand entrance from the next room, dressed in shawls and scarfs, masks on their faces. The candles were lighted. There was a moment of silence. The candles flickered. Then all burst into tears. It was the last time Ilya and his family were together.

  Death lay around the corner, and each death seemed more terrible to the little boy. The first to die was his father. He lay face up on his bed, wearing his coat, his fur cap pulled down on his forehead, and cried a high, piercing cry: “A-a-a-a-a.” A note that never stopped, that froze the blood and made the hair rise on Ilya’s head. His father lay and cried the strange high cry as Ilya’s mother sat beside him, the little lamp in her hand, trembling and casting dark shadows on the wall, and the cries going on without end, his father rigid and staring without seeing at the ceiling. Fifteen minutes before he died Ilya’s father fell silent. For nights thereafter Ilya awakened in terror of the cry and stifled his fears by burying his face in the woolen scarf which his mother wrapped about his head before he went to sleep.

  “Hunger psychosis” was what the doctor called it. The doctor could hardly stand on his own feet. It was his last visit to the flat. He himself died a few days later.

  Next came his grandmother. Ilya awoke one night, calling for her. She did not answer. He tried to look at her in the flickering light of the little lamp. She seemed to be staring at him, but her forehead was cold as granite. He tumbled into the bed where his mother lay, covered with blankets and her old winter coat.

  “She’s dead,” he cried.

  “Ah,” said his mother, “it’s easier for her than for us, my child. There’s no escape from death. We’ll all die. Don’t be afraid.”

  In the stillness the boy heard the beat of the radio metronome, the distant crash of the German shells. All of Ilya’s family died as the days went by. There were four rooms in the big old flat. In each lay a corpse. It was as cold in the apartment as on the street. Just one big icebox, the boy thought. And a good thing, for then the corpses did not smell. Once he went into the back room but fled in terror. A fat rat jumped toward him from the body of his Aunt Vera, dead these two weeks. The rat had been gnawing on her face.

  His mother and his Aunt Asya decided to have his grandmother buried. They bargained with Shura, the portress. Once Shura had been round as jelly. Now she was a skeleton like everyone else. They wanted Shura to take 250 grams of bread and 100 rubles instead of the 350 grams of bread she asked. Eventually Shura agreed. Grandmother was carefully wrapped in a sheet, and in one corner was worked in thread her initials, “E. F.” Shura put the mummy-like figure on Ilya’s sled and started off for the Serafimov Cemetery.

  A few days later Ilya was in the courtyard, gathering snow for the teakettle. Next door a truck had stopped and men were filling it with corpses, most of them just bones, covered with greenish-bluish skin. Some were clothed, some were in white underclothes, some in overcoats with their gas masks still over their shoulders (they had fallen dead, obviously, on the street). There were many bodies under the staircase. Ilya watched, shivering in the cold, and was about to leave when they lifted out another corpse, this one wrapped in a white sheet and resting on a child’s sled. Ilya ran to get a closer glimpse. Yes. In the corner of the sheet were his grandmother’s initials, UE. F.”

  Now there were only the two of them left—Ilya and his mother. One day a car arrived, sent by Ilya’s uncle, to take the family to the military hospital. The uncle had no notion that his brother was already dead.

  Ilya’s mother was too weak to rise. Her eyes followed the men who stood with Ilya. “I’ll soon be well,” she said. “Then I’ll join you.”

  Ilya could not understand why her eyes filled with tears.

  “I’m crying,” she whispered, “because we will be separated for a month. Not more, though. Only a month.”

  The strange man took Ilya by the hand. His mother gave him a little copper icon, one which had saved his grandfather’s life from a Turkish bullet at the Battle of Shipka. “Take it for luck,” his mother said. “Soon we’ll be together.”

  In Leningrad now, as Zinaida Shishova wrote of a mother and her starving baby boy, they lived without radio, without light, warmed only by their own human breath:

  In our six-room apartment

  There live only the three of us—you and I

  And the wind blowing from the darkness. . . .

  No, excuse me. I am mistaken.

  There is a fourth lying out on the balcony,

  Waiting a week for the funeral.2

  Real funerals were rare. Aleksandr Kron never forgot the burial of the father of Grisha Miroshnichenko. From somewhere a coffin was found and a small bus. Kron and two other Baltic Fleet correspondents, Anatoly Tara-senkov and Vasily Smirnov, had to carry the coffin from the fifth floor. But the body was so light that, weak as they were, it was no burden. The widow wanted her husband buried at the Okhta Cemetery. They drove past Smolny, across the bridge, and approached the cemetery over a road that was unbelievably torn up. A sharp wind drove in their faces, and they encountered a long line of people slowly dragging little sleds and corpses toward the cemetery. There were dozens of them, covered with rugs, curtains, towels. The gravediggers wanted to be paid in bread but were persuaded to take 250 rubles. Then the hole was too short for the coffin. It took an hour of hard work to make it long enough. Somewhere they found a little fir tree to put on the grave. The widow decided against a cross. So they took the handle
of a shovel and set it at the head of the grave. They got back to their quarters, half frozen, started a small fire with some old newspapers and drank a little home-brew “Port wine-type.”

  Fewer and fewer people bothered to bury their dead. They did not have the means, nor the strength. If they did manage to get the body to the cemetery and return home, they often collapsed never to rise again. More and more often they took the body from the warmer room to a colder one and laid it on the floor. Little by little the houses of Leningrad filled up with dead. People no longer bothered to lock their doors. It took too much energy to get up if someone knocked. You could enter almost any house and any apartment, walk through the frozen rooms and see the dead, lying on the floor, lying on the beds, or in chairs around the stove where the fire had long since died away.

  Sometimes the survivors took bodies to the street and laid them there for someone, they hoped, to bury. But the bodies were not necessarily buried. Passers-by might lift their hats slightly and go on past. Nikolai Chukovsky walked one day from Vasilevsky Island to the Petrograd side and back again. On the way he passed six bodies; on the way back, seven.

  His offices were in a large building on Vasilevsky Island. Someone dropped from an upper window the body of a young woman. It fell in the snow outside the archway leading to Chukovsky’s office. Coming out of the courtyard, Chukovsky and his companions carefully made a new path that skirted the young woman’s body as it lay sprawled in the snow. After four days the body disappeared and Chukovsky thought it had been picked up by a passing patrol. No longer did Chukovsky and his fellow workers gingerly skirt the spot. They walked straight ahead. Weeks passed. Slowly winter turned to spring. One warm sunny day Chukovsky came through the arch. The dirty snow was running off in rivulets and he saw to his horror a woman’s hand emerging from the ice. No one had taken the body away. It had simply vanished under the snow. All winter long Chukovsky and his fellow editors had walked again and again over the frozen body.