In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  I’m writing this letter from Auntie Lizochka’s house. I was close to Leningrad and thought I’d take the opportunity to go into the town. When I got to Auntie’s house I found Auntie Soka and Lyusya at home. You can’t imagine just how happy and pleased I was to see them!

  They looked after me as if I’d been their own son. I was embarrassed. Lyusya sewed me a padded jacket I can wear under my coat.

  Auntie Liza gave me some warm socks, gaiters, and handkerchiefs. All these things will come in so handy, I am very grateful to them. They put some good cigarettes in my pocket, so I’m a “rich man” now! But sadly this evening I have to leave them. I can’t do anything about it, it’s just how things are.

  I received some postcards from you on the way and a few letters from Yalutorovsk. The last letter I received from you was written on September 25. I was very glad to hear you are doing well. I’m glad you’ve found work. It isn’t so much the money, it’s just you won’t be at home with nothing to do anymore. It’s wonderful news that Auntie Betya is staying.

  I had a letter from Father, sent on September 27 from Moscow. He wrote that he would be called up soon. I have had nothing else from him. Has the new baby come yet? And if so, is it a boy or a girl? I wish you health and happiness. I send you all my love. Auntie Lizochka will write to you today.

  Love from your

  Lyodik

  At the very same time Lyubov Shaporina was writing in her diary that the stewed cabbage cores she’d found outside the city were very good, and it would be worth stocking up on them. It was evening. Lyodik had already left his aunts and he was walking down the unlit streets, returning to his unit. By nightfall the clouds had parted and the stars were bright. Shaporina was waiting for “surprises” — her euphemism for air raids. “Marina Kharms came to see me. Daniil Ivanovich [Daniil Kharms] was arrested six weeks ago, the building next to theirs has been destroyed and their house has a crack running through it. All the windows have been blown out,” she wrote. “Marina has nothing to live on, and her anguish over Daniil is killing her.”

  On the same day German intelligence reported back to the High Command for the 18th Army on morale in the besieged city, and recommended broadening the approach to propaganda: “It is essential to use leaflets as a medium which is both unexpected and can bring about confusion among the enemy, by suggesting that Soviet measures are in the German interest. For example: workers should not refuse to take up arms, as at the necessary moment they can turn these against their red masters.” This is a strange echo of the words quoted in the case against Kharms. If we are to believe the unnamed secret police informant, Kharms once said: “If they force me to man a machine gun from the rooftops during street battles with Germans, then I will fire, not at the Germans, but at them.”

  Secret Police reports, quoted in a book about the Siege of Leningrad by historian Nikita Lomagin, kept a precise record of defeatist attitudes in the besieged city. In October there were 200–250 manifestations of “anti-Soviet sentiment” a day. By November it was 350. In the shops where bread lines began forming at 2:00–3:00 a.m., and flocks of teenagers came begging for crusts, conversations were all about how “the Germans would come and restore order.” Shaporina wrote, and not unsympathetically, about a circulating myth: that special bombs would fall and cover the city with smoke, and when the smoke dispersed there would be a German policeman standing on every street corner.

  I remember how in the first weeks of war Lev Rakov, the former lover of the poet Mikhail Kuzmin and a handsome scholar and Russian dandy, said reassuringly to a friend in a Leningrad café, still with all its windows sparkling and intact: “You worry too much. What if the Germans do invade. They won’t stay for long. And then the English will come in their stead, and we’ll all be reading Dickens. And anyone who doesn’t want to won’t have to.”

  For many, Dickens was a savior in the besieged city, he was medicine for the soul, and a source of warmth. People read and reread his novels, and read them aloud to children, particularly Great Expectations with its ice-cold house and its wedding cake overhung with cobwebs; in sixteen-year-old Misha Tikhomirov’s diary he writes that he has kept for the evening’s reading (for added sweetness) “three scraps of dried bread (very small), a piece of rusk, half a spoon of caramelized sugar.”

  Today I am rereading Lyodik’s letter from that October, with the padded jacket and the handkerchiefs. I want this blissful scene from Dickens to go on forever: the aunts giving warmth and succor to the freezing, half-animal soldier, fussing around him, dressing him in anything they can find, happy that he is alive and they are alive, and feeding him with their very last (or nearly last) provisions. And all this in the worst hours of war, in a city that has gone black from the inside out, where soon no one will be able to help anyone; all this in an apartment with taped-up windows, shining on the inside like an amber lamp.

  The letter was passed between relatives and not subject to the censor so Lyodik could have written as he pleased, but he didn’t and wouldn’t have written freely. On the Leningrad Front in Autumn 1941, letters were increasingly being stopped by the censor. In the city alone the censored letters numbered in the thousands. Even those that reached their destination were different from Lyodik’s letters: most of all in their desire to share their experience of what was happening around them. Some ask for items of equipment or clothing or cigarettes; others describe the workings of gun batteries, or explain what a political officer’s job is. Some promise to beat the enemy to the last, and describe how it is to be done (“Dear Manya, dear sister, I’m on sentry duty a lot and it’s unbearable”). Leonid Gimmelfarb, Lyodik, is, as usual, very well, and the whole thing begins to seem more and more peculiar, especially after a month with no letters and then a new letter in which he mentions both his laziness and tonsillitis.

  November 27, 1941

  Dear Mother,

  I just can’t seem to get around to writing to you. The main reason has been my terrible laziness with regard to letters. I went back to Leningrad, and saw Auntie Liza, Soka and Lyusya again. They are all well and healthy. I was in Leningrad because I was back down with my old problem — tonsillitis — and I ended up in hospital, where they visited me. How are you though, Mother? How have you been? I beg you not to worry about me, there’s nothing I need and I am doing well. I feel completely healthy.

  I am very sorry that the things you sent didn’t reach me, I’ve been away from my unit for over a month now. But I think you’ll get them all back again. It really isn’t worth sending me things, because I have everything I need.

  I don’t have any news. I don’t have an address here yet. I’ll write and tell you when I do. I wish you good health and happiness. All my love to Auntie Beti, Lyonya, Lyolya, Uncle Syoma, Rosalia Lvovna, and Sarra Abramovna.

  Love from your

  Lyodik

  Impossible to verify this, but I can’t dispel the thought that in those terrible weeks tonsillitis was hardly reason enough to leave the front line for a hospital, especially a hospital in Leningrad, which, to compound matters, would have been hard to reach. My immediate thought was that Lyodik had been injured and didn’t want to tell his mother, and this seems both likely and unknowable. In Nikolai Nikulin’s notes he says that no one got sick at the front: there was nowhere to be sick. They slept in the snow, and if anyone had a fever they simply walked it off. Nikulin remembers how the nails came away from his frostbitten fingers, and recalls a radio operator who spent a night on all fours because he was in constant pain from a stomach ulcer. Another witness wrote about the permanent hunger:

  Many of the soldiers made their perilous way across no-man’s-land and then lost their instinct for self-preservation and started looking for something to eat in the German lines. The Germans began shelling us straightaway and throwing grenades, so that anyone who survived had to make their way back to the Russian lines.

  On November 16, the 994th
Regiment held their position under artillery fire. A cold day, around minus twenty degrees. It was impossible to build any kind of concrete defense on the marshland, so the soldiers dug in as best they could. The Germans advanced to occupy a part of the Russian front line, but constant gunfire gave the Germans no opportunity to advance farther. On the following day the attack faltered, the Germans fell back. The ground was frozen, so they found pits that had been dug earlier in the autumn and threw four hundred bodies in them. The remaining dead, both German and Russian, were left lying in the battlefield. Soon the snow fell and covered their bodies as best it could.

  Lyodik’s letter was sent on November 27. It isn’t clear where he was writing from, or what had happened to him. Why didn’t the Leningrad relatives ever write to our side of the family to say that he had been ill? How did they make it to the hospital at a time when some people no longer had the energy to climb stairs? How did they get home afterward? On November 25, the bread rations were reduced again. Workers, children, and dependents now received 125 grams of bread a day. Hospital workers and the injured had it a little easier. Doctor Klavdiya Naumovna — I don’t know her surname — (her diary notes are addressed to her evacuated son, “my golden boy Lesik,” and the diary breaks off in 1942) writes,

  My darling boy, we eat in the hospital and we have the following rations: in the morning I get gray macaroni, a piece of sugar and 50 grams of bread. For lunch we have soup (often very bad) and then either some more gray macaroni or buckwheat porridge, sometimes a piece of smoked sausage or meat, and 100 grams of bread. At dinner macaroni or porridge again, and 100 grams of bread. There is tea, but no sugar. It’s a modest amount, as you’ll see, but compared to how they eat in town, it’s a banquet . . .

  At the beginning of December Shaporina noticed that people’s bodies were beginning to bloat with starvation. Their faces had the yellow tinge of scurvy, “there were many like them in 1918 as well.” She recalled someone saying they had seen two frozen corpses on the streets. During these weeks the presence of death swelled to occupy more and more space in the texts about the Siege. The authors described the lines for burial spaces, the sleighs and carts loaded with the newly dead, corpses lying on the streets, corpses scattering from the back of trucks. Toward the end of January this horror had become the ordinary state of things, along with the daily coexistence with death, taken for granted, barely worth mentioning. On the morning of January 1, 1942, the seventy-year-old artist Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva noted down, not without pride, that she had eaten wood glue: “Never mind. A shudder of disgust ran through me from time to time, but I am sure that was simply just an excess of imagination. The jelly of it wasn’t revolting, if you added cinnamon or a laurel leaf.”

  *

  It was too easy to fall into thoughts about food, dangerous and inescapable thoughts, and then lose the will to keep moving — these thoughts made up the secret heart of life under siege. It was frighteningly tempting to talk about food, and people tried to avoid it, especially in company, or at work, or in places of public assembly. At home in the evenings, food was the only channel of conversation, spreading into the warm shallow waters of collective reminiscing: of dinners, of breakfasts, restaurant napkins, and little pools of yolk. Dreams about food to be enjoyed once the war was over were fantasies with a particular poisonous joy: they warmed the mother and daughter falling into sleep with visions — bread that didn’t need to be measured out but could be ripped into hunks, sprinkled with sugar and doused in oil, blushing potatoes fried to perfection. The city’s inhabitants considered it best to fend these mirages off, as they soon became the beginning of the end. In the same way they advised people not to stuff their bread ration in their mouth as they left the shop. Food had to be discussed carefully and selectively because any mistake could end in scenes of wild ferocity, terrible accusations. In the letters and diaries the least mention of food gave rise to a whole list of accounts of food, which few could refrain from: Let me tell you all about the food we used to eat at a party!

  In Lyodik’s letters no mention was ever made of food.

  November 28, 1941

  Dear Mother,

  I’ve been writing all the while unable to send you a return address. Now I have that address, so you can send a letter back. A few days ago I was called in to our unit’s HQ and they told me I was going to be sent for training. I had no say in the matter and I was put straight on a training course the next day. It’s an officer training course. Because we are on active wartime service the course is much shorter, about two months. I want to know what you think about this. Will you write and tell me?

  I haven’t had a letter from you for a while, so I don’t know any of your news or the family news. Please write and tell me all the news you know I’ll be interested in. How are you? How’s your work? What did Lyolya and Lyonya call their child? Auntie Beti is a grandmother now! She must be happy. Is it very cold with you there in Siberia? How upsetting that the things you send never reached me. I am sure you will get them back. I am dressed for winter now and keeping warm. You wrote that it’s hard to get hold of cigarettes: is that still the case? Have you had any news from Father? I saw Yury Apelkhot and Aunts Lyusya, Soka and Lizochka a month ago. They all look fairly well. Yura is quite grown up now, he was in uniform. He’s a military doctor. Well I think that’s everything. Love to Aunt Beti, Lyonya, Lyolya, and the baby, Sarra Abramovna, Uncle, Syoma. Write back soon.

  Love from your

  Lyodik

  My address: PPC 591, Officer Training, 2 Company.

  This letter seems particular and strange, at a slant to the rest. The other letters always begin with a fountain of questions and end with a symmetrical collection of answers (the Aunts, baby, etc., etc., the order is pretty much the same always: from close family outward). The questions would seem formal if they weren’t underpinned by melancholy. This melancholy is not in the words themselves but in the space behind them, and in the number of letters — have they reached their destination? — and in the insistence of the repeated phrasing. It’s as if a person wanted desperately to send news, but was instead obliged to simply cover the whole surface of a piece of paper with one and the same question. The correspondence is the only way to reach out and touch his beloved family, but at the same time he can’t let them know what is actually happening to him. Only very occasionally the seams come apart and you can see the padding inside. The summer before, Lyodik wrote to his aunt, my great-grandmother: “I am glad you’ve settled so well and you have your own smallholding and even chickens. You made me laugh when you said you’d be very glad to leave it all and go home. However good it is, home is better always. We don’t need to hide this fact, right?”

  The excerpt about training is one of the only places where the anxiety eating away at him is visible. The whole matter is squeezed into a few unsure sentences, and the “choice” made (“I had no say in the matter”) seems not entirely fixed — it could possibly be undone. He wants to hear what his mother makes of it: “Will you write to me and tell me?”

  There was a desperate shortage of officers of all ranks on the frontline. By January 1, the commanding officers on the Volkhovsky Front had been almost entirely replaced. On October 4, 1941, Order 85 was implemented to deal with this shortage, “On the Creation of Training Courses for Junior and Mid-ranking Officers in Every HQ and Division.” Stalin himself amended the order, decreasing training times to match the situation: a month for those on frontline duties, two months for those stationed at bases. The latter applied directly to Lyodik, with his recently acquired military experience:

  2. To create training courses for Junior Lieutenants to prepare them for the command of a platoon. Courses for up to 200 men. The combined courses to be attended by sergeants and the best lance corporals who have distinguished themselves in combat, including the lightly wounded after their rehabilitation. Course length: two months.

  3. Trainers to be picked for th
e courses from the ranks of educated officers from unit HQs and other parts of the army.

  There was an amendment in the third paragraph as well: Stalin changed the phrase “best officers” to the more realistic “educated” officers. There were extremely low demands placed on trainers, and the training itself was incredibly short. Officers were supposed to lead their soldiers into attack and so they fell first, dying in their thousands. The country needed ever more officers — it was hungry for them. They stood out more than the men they led, and could be blamed when the platoon retreated under heavy fire, or when a sentry left his post to warm up.

  Daily food allowances for hungry frontline soldiers were far more generous than they were for recruits in the besieged city. Rations were constantly being reassessed and reduced in 1941, but all the same rations for soldiers on the frontline were unbelievably luxurious compared to allowances in the city just ten kilometers north. There was tobacco and 900 grams of bread, meat and cereal, onion and potato. Anyone with scurvy was given vitamin C tablets. The rations for the wounded in hospital were fairly generous, too. They got 600 grams of bread a day, meat, fish, but also milk and butter, juice or fruit extract. For those in recovery the bread ration rose to 800 grams. In comparison with this the life of a recruit was pared back to the minimum, and rumors about how bad life was reached the frontline.

  Even if Lyodik hadn’t been afraid of facing hunger on his training course, or if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes what was going on in Leningrad, he still would’ve had grounds for anxiety. The conscription act had included those of “doubtful lineage” but only up to a limit: the children and grandchildren of priests, aristocrats, and merchants were fine for basic military service but they were not eligible for officer ranking. Lyodik (Leonid Gimmelfarb) had a complicated backstory: relatives abroad, whose new colored photographs were in the old albums, and grandfathers whose lineage and position were best left unmentioned on forms. Rising through the ranks made all that a little more visible as the forms were more scrutinized, one’s position less secure. And perhaps there was also his shame at leaving his comrades on the frontline. Besides, Lyodik, with his dislike of melodrama, must have found the position of an officer repellent: controlling the circumstances of others, always in the wrong, dragged into the limelight against his will.