Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

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.

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.