Everyone thought of food and hatched schemes to get it. Ration cards—one for bread, one for meat, and one for fats—held the key to life in Leningrad, even though "meat" often meant meat jelly, vegetable-and-blood sausage, or powdered eggs, and "fats" might mean candy or even sugar-soaked earth from beneath the Badaev warehouses. Pavlov's agents issued new cards every month, and demanded that each holder present clear proof of his or her identity. Since extra ration cards were worth many times their weight in gold, forgers did a flourishing trade in counterfeit cards, and there was fear that the Germans might drop counterfeit ration cards into Leningrad to disrupt its food supply even more. Pavlov used the sternest measures to halt forgeries and card theft. For counterfeiting a card, the penalty was death by shooting, and for selling blank cards it was the same. When people started filing claims for new cards because their old ones had been lost in bombardments or stolen, Pavlov instituted an iron-clad policy that allowed almost no replacements, even though that condemned hundreds of unfortunates whose cards had been legitimately lost to starvation.
      To stay alive, Leningraders melted lipsticks to fry bread, tried to use face powder for flour, and boiled down the rawhide belts that ran machines in factories to make something resembling "meat" aspic. They used linseed oil for frying pancakes, and toothpowder added to a little potato flour or starch to make "pudding." One woman knowingly consumed seventy laxative tablets in an afternoon because the saccharin they contained gave her the impression she was eating something good. Many Leningraders ate peat from nearby bogs since it was thought to have food value, but nearly everyone at one time or another had to buy food on the black market, which survived throughout the siege in the narrow streets around the Haymarket, for more than 150 years the center of Leningrad's underworld. Even in the darkest days of December 1941, bread could still be bought at astronomical prices—a gold coin, a rare antique vase, a snuffbox given to someone by the emperor might net a pound. A diamond ring might bring a little more.
      In those days, Leningrad was rife with tales of cannibalism, and few dared to inquire too closely into the origins of the meat patties that hard-eyed, well-fed men and women began to sell soon after the winter frost set in. No one ever admitted to actually seeing human flesh being consumed, but many claimed to have come upon corpses with thighs and arms cut away and other evidence that the scant remains of famine victims were being eaten by the living. "God alone knows what terrible scenes went on behind the walls of apartments," one survivor later remarked. Had husbands eaten dead wives? Wives their dead husbands? Had parents consumed their dead children? No one ever said so for certain. But many people thought that had happened during the terrible days of December 1941 and January 1942.
      Death came to Leningraders at work, at home, and in the street, mostly from hunger and cold. After the warm, sunny fall, the first snow came on October 14, and it continued after that with little respite. Heat came from whatever one's own ingenuity could supply, usually a tiny sheet metal stove called a burzhuika, into which tiny slivers of wood were fed to create a small, hot flame for short periods of time. Bit by bit, sliver by sliver, rolled-up page by rolled-up page, Leningraders fed their furniture, books, and whatever scraps they could find into these stoves, but they never generated enough heat to lift the temperature above freezing. Even in the city's hospitals, the temperature in the wards hovered between thirty and thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit, with patients being covered by coats, blankets, and extra pallets. Excrement froze in bed pans, and doctors and nurses worked in gloves, fur hats, and overcoats. "The cold never let up," the writer Lidia Ginzburg remembered, "not during sleep, not at mealtimes, not at work." People began to crowd together, several families to a room to share the warmth their bodies produced. Some people moved into the hallways of their buildings, where there were no windows. That way, less heat could escape and there was less danger of being hit by flying shrapnel.
      By November, Leningraders' appearance began to change. Friends and neighbors spoke about it, and people noticed it themselves whenever they looked in a mirror. Shoulder blades began to protrude, arms and legs turned to toothpicks, cheekbones stood out. Then people began to swell, first in the feet and hands, then in the face and neck. "People are all bloated, frightful-looking, black dirty, and emaciated," one diarist wrote. "We've all aged," she added. "Young people have become so ghastly-looking, like old people, that it's simply awful to look at them." Starved for fat, people even ate the grease used to lubricate tanks and trucks. "How we enjoyed it!" one man remembered. "What a miraculous thing!" Thanks to the indigestible things they ate to make their stomachs feel full, most Leningraders had diarrhea. When the water towers were destroyed and the water pipes froze, people began to take their water from holes cut in the ice on the Neva, and that made the diarrhea worse. People were dying in very large numbers—fifty-three thousand in December 1941 alone—which was as many as had died in the city during all of the previous year. But those numbers were guesses at best, and many thought they were much too low. "Ten days ago," the young writer Pavel Luknitskii recorded in his diary on December 29, "I heard that six thousand people a day were dying of hunger. Now, of course," he added, "it's more."
      For many, death came easily. "It is so simple to die," one woman wrote. "You just begin to lose interest, you lie on the bed, and you never again get up." Men died before women, teenagers before invalids. People got so weak that any disease could finish them off—flu, grippe, an ulcer—almost anything was enough to kill a person in Leningrad during the winter of 1941-1942. People sometimes just sat down and died, or never got up in the morning. Sometimes they died while they were walking to work, while dragging the body of a loved one to the cemetery, or while standing in line to get their ration of bread. "There are a lot of corpses," Kochina noted at the end of December. "Death is . . . constantly hanging around among the living. People die easily, simply, without tears. The dead," she went on, "are wrapped up in sheets, tied up with a rope, and carried off to the cemetery, where they are stacked up in piles . . . [and] buried in common graves." Wrapped and tied, the corpses looked like Egyptian mummies being dragged across the snow and ice on sleds.
      Everything moved on sleds that winter. Their tracks buried under snow and ice, all the trams had stopped running by the end of 1941, and buses had stopped long before that. "The only transportation now is children's sleds," Kochina wrote. "They move along the streets in an endless stream." Sleds—not the large kind on which dogs pulled heavy loads in the Arctic, but small children's sleds, the type on which millions of children have zipped down icy hills in northern countries all over the globe— filled the streets of the city, each moving slowly toward a destination known only to the exhausted human who dragged it. Some carried a relative or friend too weak to walk, others held precariously balanced loads of wood or pails of water. Many bore a mummy-like corpse, wrapped and tied in whatever scraps could be spared, making a final journey to the cemetery. All the while it was quiet, the sleds and the people pulling them being the only source of movement. Beautiful Leningrad, the imperial city of Elizabeth and Catherine the Great, of the emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I—Leningrad of the magical White Nights and gay winter days—had become a ghastly tomb of cold, gray granite, ruled by the wind, the weather, and people's desperate desire to eat. Even the Nevskii Prospekt, the nerve center of the city for more than two hundred years, had now fallen into ruin. "It was almost deserted and lay under a thick blanket of snow," a woman wrote just after the New Year. "Many houses were half ruins," she went on. "Most windows were boarded up . . . [and] the Merchants' Arcade department store was charred and black." A huge bomb had fallen there on the nineteenth of September and the arcade had burned for days. Nothing had been done to fix it. For the time being, there seemed to be no reason to.
      People retreated into themselves. "We've never been as remote from one another as now," Kochina wrote of herself and her husband not long after the first week of the New Year had passed. "There's no way we can help one another," she continued. "After all, it's my heart (only I hear its irregular beat), my stomach (only I feel its aching emptiness), and my brain (only I feel the whole weight of unexpressed thoughts).. . . We realize now that a person must be able to struggle alone with life and death." Everything seemed tainted with death, as if the cold had frozen it into everything one touched, drank, or ate. Frozen corpses lay stacked up like cordwood in front of almost every building. After the temperature reached forty below zero on January 24, the plumbing broke down everywhere. Then people simply threw their sewage out the window or dumped it in the courtyard of the building in which they "lived."
      One of Leningrad's writers decided to celebrate the New Year by visiting his old apartment in the hope of salvaging some unpublished manuscripts he had left behind when a German bomb had landed early in the siege, but he didn't get around to doing it until January 17th. Pulling a small sled behind him, he plodded through the frozen city, its streets and sidewalks clogged with ice and frozen human waste. Everywhere he saw dead bodies, sprawled on the snow, partly buried with arms and legs sticking out of drifts, or stacked up on sledges and sleds. All seemed the same—pitifully thin, the red and purple marks of death spotting whatever skin was exposed. From time to time he had to turn aside to avoid getting tangled in the long hair that dragged from a corpse on a passing sled, or to avoid behind run into by someone too weak to turn aside. What separated the dead from the living? Was it pure chance or a different kind of will? Only one man he met seemed different—well-fed looking, with greedy eyes. Was he a speculator, the writer wondered? An apartment house manager who collected the rations of his dead and dying tenants and traded them for treasures in the Haymarket? People like that, he thought, "they all need to be shot!"
      Like Dostoevskii's long-suffering heroines, women held Leningrad together at the end of 1941. At the beginning of the fighting, it had become their duty to replace the city's men in its factories and to carry on the heavy digging involved in strengthening its fortifications once the men had gone to the Front. Women did the housework, brought in the wood, carried the water, took care of the children, washed and ironed clothes, tried to prepare meals from bits of bread, wallpaper paste, and all the inedible things people ate in those terrible times. And they stood in lines, the endless lines that ruled life in besieged Leningrad. Men avoided standing in lines and expected women to do it. "Men cope particularly badly with queues," Lidia Ginzburg once pointed out, "since they are used to the idea that their time is valuable." Patience was not a part of their character, nor was the ability to consign themselves to the compulsory idleness that the city's lines demanded. "A man considers that after work he is entitled to rest or amuse himself," Ginzburg explained, "[but] when a working woman comes home, she works at home."
      "Hunger," Chief of Food Supply Pavlov remembered in looking back on the terrible months of 1941-1942, "revealed character [and] it laid bare hitherto undiscovered feelings and traits." That was especially true of the city's women, for it was they who maintained the will to survive, and supplied the inner strength that kept not only them but their children, fathers, and husbands alive as well. But could even the stout-hearted women of Leningrad go on if there was no hope at all? When the Germans seized the key rail junction at Mga Station at the end of August they had severed Leningrad's rail connection to the rest of Russia. Then on November 8, their advance on the Tikhvin railhead cut off the flow of supplies by rail and road from the Russian interior to Novaia Ladoga on Lake Ladoga's southeastern shore. Desperate to restore the flow of goods, the Russians built 215 miles of road through the wilderness in barely a month to take advantage of the small break that Lake Ladoga's shoreline created by projecting into the Nazi's line of siege. On December 6, a trickle of supplies began to flow along the Novaia Ladoga road, but it was not until the middle of the month that the ice became hard and thick enough to support trucks with a full two-and-a-quarter-ton load. By that time, the Russians had driven the Germans out ofTikhvin, and that cut the length of the land route from the railhead to Novaia Ladoga down to 128 miles. At that moment, Leningrad had only enough grain left for nine or ten days. Oilcake, bran, mill dust, and all other "reserves" had been completely used up.
      By the middle of December, Pavlov later said, Tikhvin became a "gigantic ant hill," with workers and soldiers working around the clock to unload trains that arrived from the interior and load a never-ending line of trucks ready to carry supplies through the wilderness and across the lake. Once on the lake, their route was carefully plotted to avoid soft spots in the ice, but constant attacks by German planes and long-range artillery forced the drivers to do much of their traveling at night. It required twenty thousand men and women to keep the line going, but by late December the shipments to Leningrad had risen to more than six hundred tons a day, not even a third of what was needed to supply the city but more than enough to make the difference between gnawing hunger and certain starvation. On Christmas Day, Pavlov increased Leningraders' bread ration for the first time since the war began. Workers had their ration raised by a half. For the rest it was nearly two-thirds.
      Thanks to more Russian victories at the end of December, the men in charge of the winter road celebrated New Year's Day, 1942, by opening through-train service from Tikhvin to Voibokalo Station, a scant thirty-seven miles by road from Lednevo and Kabanova, which stood much closer to Leningrad than to Novaia Ladoga. Then the lifeline began to grow stronger and its flow of supplies increased to nearly two thousand tons a day. By February, the daily shipments had risen to over three thousand tons, and in March and April they exceeded thirty-six hundred. Pavlov now raised Leningraders' rations again on January 24, and yet again on February 11. The problem now was to move the supplies from Lake Ladoga's western bank into Leningrad itself. That continued to pose difficulties into the spring, when the melting ice temporarily brought all shipments across the lake to a halt.
      No one was willing to let the trucks that delivered food and fuel across Lake Ladoga return to the "mainland" empty. On January 22, 1942, the same State Defense Committee that had appointed Pavlov decided to evacuate half a million Leningraders, starting with children, old people, and women. Just more than half a million left the city between January and April, and another 448,010 between late May and November. By then, deaths and evacuations had cut Leningrad's population to about a million, less than a third of what it had been in the summer of 1941.
      Tens of thousands more left Leningrad who were not a part of the official count. Pavel Luknitskii, who had spent the winter of 1941-1942 trying to save his fellow writers and was finally sent out of the city early in February, remembered that every vehicle he saw along the way was crammed with passengers, many of whom had bribed the drivers with cigarettes, vodka, bread, or gold. Luknitskii noted that no one did anything for nothing. Even starving people near death had to pay their fare in bread. To describe the rigors of the journey from Leningrad to the eastern side of the lake demanded all of Luknitskii's talents as a writer. Trucks, buses, and cars crawled, halted, broke down, and were abandoned, leaving the route littered with disabled machines around which vehicles further back in line had to pick their way. There was no food, no shelter, no provisions for dealing with the thousands who made the journey on their own each day, and even after they had crossed the lake many of the evacuees could not find food or a place to get warm. With temperatures at thirty and forty below zero centigrade, people died at every step of the way, their bodies being pushed to the side of the road to be dealt with when the spring thaw came. Desperation drove them on. No one knew where their journey would end.
      The winter road brought Leningrad's black market back to life. Many of the drivers, dispatchers, and people who loaded and unloaded trucks found the chance to buy and sell food at a profit too tempting to pass up. The official who accompanied Luknitskii across the lake took all of his relatives, too, and he had every intention of returning to the city with goods for the black market. On such journeys, starving refugees met the people who had flourished at their expense during the siege—a hospital manager and his family all dressed in their expensive best, who stuffed themselves with fried chicken, chocolate, and powdered milk along the way, for example, and the son of a high-ranking supply official, who traveled in the same car as Elena Kochina and her family. "During the blockade we ate better than before the war," he bragged to Kochina's husband. "We ate whole boxes of butter and chocolate," his girlfriend added. "I didn't see that before." Many of these people had connections with Leningrad's Haymarket, where they could sell flour, for which they had paid 25,000 rubles a case, and other goods at a huge profit. The fact that the punishment continued to be death by shooting deterred them not at all. Most people assumed that they paid "protection" to the very officials who were supposed to punish them.
      By the time the thawing ice interrupted the flow of goods along the winter road in April 1942, everyone knew that Leningrad had survived the worst torments the Germans could inflict. With the Russians firmly in control of a rail link from Tikhvin to the eastern shore of Lake Ladoga, the shipments across the lake were resumed by boat as soon as the ice cleared away. The railroad line was improved, and so were the warehouses and dock facilities. That summer, the Russians laid an oil pipeline beneath the lake, despite repeated air attacks by the Germans. That way the city would not have to live through a second winter without fuel if the siege continued.
      While they waited for food and fuel during the winter of 1941-1942, Leningraders read. Many read Dostoevskii, Turgenev, and Chekhov, and thousands more read Tolstoi. "Whoever had energy enough to read," Lidia Ginzburg remembered, used to read War and Peace in besieged Leningrad. "Tolstoi had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people's war," she went on. "No one doubted the adequacy of Tolstoi's response to life. The reader would say to himself: Right, I've got the proper feeling about this. So then, this is how it should be." People without the strength to read listened to the radio, on which some of Leningrad's writers and poets read their works to break the monotony of the siege. Many of their writings gave people heart, for they told of the resilience of the human spirit, the power of memory, and the duty they had never to forget. That winter, people planned books about the siege, kept diaries, and wrote poems and novels about it. They needed to be needed—and to have a point in the future toward which they could direct their lives. When there was no one to read on the radio, the sound of a metronome could be heard, always ticking, never stopping, the ceaseless heartbeat of a city that was too strong to die. Never once in the entire course of the siege did it stop. It was always there, the sound of life even when it seemed that life could not go on.
      Hungry, weak, sometimes on the verge of death, Leningrad's musicians did their part that winter by giving concerts that were broadcast through-out the city. The most magical moment of all came in the spring, when Leningraders heard Dmitrii Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, dedicated to their city. Shostakovich had begun his Seventh Symphony just before the war. On the night of September 19, when a German bomb destroyed the Merchants' Arcade, he invited some of his closest friends to his apartment, where they found him surrounded by sheets on which he had scored the symphony's first three movements. As they heard him play it they were stunned. When the air-raid sirens sounded, Shostakovich sent his wife and children to the bomb shelter and continued to play. Amidst the thunder of bombs, the screech of sirens, and the thump-thump of anti-aircraft guns, his music reached what one critic later called "a powerful, screaming climax with a level of sound that is unbearable physically and mentally." His friends knew they had witnessed a rare moment in the culture of Russia and the world. Shostakovich and some higher force seemed joined, able to reach above and beyond the time and place in which they lived.
      Soon afterward, Shostakovich was evacuated by plane to Kuibyshev, a city on the Volga River to which a number of artists, writers, and composers were evacuated that fall. There, he finished the symphony and wrote on the title page "dedicated to Leningrad." In later years he would insist, quietly and only to his closest friends, that the agony and anger of his symphony's music were directed as much against Stalin as Hitler. "This is music about terror, slavery, and oppression of the spirit," one friend remembered him saying. "[It is] not only about fascism but about our country and generally about all tyranny and totalitarianism."
      In the middle of March 1942, the Leningrad poet Olga Berggolts was flown out of the city to Moscow, and she was in the Soviet capital for the premiere of Shostakovich's new symphony. Afterward, she saw the composer rise to take a bow. "I looked at him," she remembered, "a small, frail man with big glasses, and I thought: 'This man is more powerful than Hider'." And so it seemed to other Leningraders, when they heard the Leningrad Symphony broadcast on the radio for the first time. "The very performance of the Seventh Symphony in besieged Leningrad," the radio announcer stated before the music was broadcast, "is evidence of the inextinguishable patriotic spirit of the Leningraders, their stalwartness, faith in victory, [and] readiness to fight to the last drop of blood." From Shostakovich's music, Leningraders took heart, for like Akhmatova's poetry, it spoke for them and to them of the terrible burdens they had been called upon to bear. Even by the middle of April 1942, when the siege was already 248 days old, the dimensions of that burden remained still unknown and not fully measured.
      Although no one knows for certain even now, those first 248 days of siege probably had claimed the lives of more than a million Leningraders, at least twelve times as many people as would perish at Hiroshima in 1945. There simply was no way of comparing the siege of Leningrad with those endured by any other modern cities. The siege of Vicksburg in the American Civil War had lasted only forty-eight days, from May 18 to July 4, 1863. No one had starved to death, and barely more than a hundred women and children had died. Vicksburgers had eaten mules, horses, dogs, and cats during those days, but even though Confederate soldiers outnumbered civilians by more than seven to one, fewer than one person in fourteen had perished. On a single day during January, February, March, or April 1942, more people died in Leningrad than in the entire siege of Vicksburg. Even the siege of Paris from September 19,1870 until January 27,1871 paled in comparison. By the middle of April 1942, the siege of Leningrad had lasted more than twice as long as that of Paris. Like Vicksburgers, Parisians had eaten domestic animals, and they had even killed and eaten a rhinoceros at the Paris zoo. But they had eaten the kinds of things on which Leningraders had survived that first terrible winter. Too, they had plenty of wine, and the weather was far less cold.
      Melting snow in the spring of 1942 revealed the full extent of Leningrad's devastation. Aside from thousands of shattered buildings, and thousands more craters in streets and sidewalks, the city's water and sewage systems had been severely damaged. Mountains of snow, debris, and human filth lay piled in some twelve thousand city courtyards. More than two hundred million square feet of street surface lay buried under waste, snow, and dead bodies, and the frozen crust of snow and ice that overlay every street was close to three feet deep. Leningrad needed to be cleaned up, and soon, before the human wastes and refuse exploded into an epidemic of unimaginable proportions. But to do so, the poet Vera In-ber wrote, was going to be like "trying to clean up the North Pole if it were covered with refuse."
      Leningraders—sometimes as many as 300,000 at one time—dedicated themselves to cleaning up the city during the last week of March and the first two weeks of April. "Everybody turned out, just like a single person," a visiting journalist from Moscow reported. "There were housewives and school children and educated folk—professors, doctors, musicians, old men and old women. One turned out with a crowbar, another with a shovel, another with a pick-axe. Someone had a broom, somebody else had a wheelbarrow, some other person came with a child's sled. Some of them hardly had the strength to drag their legs. Five people would harness themselves to a child's sledge and pull and pull until they had no strength left." By the middle of the month, Leningraders had cleaned a million tons of debris and human refuse from streets and courtyards of their city. "The Augean Stables were child's play compared with this stupendous feat done by people worn down by a terrible winter," the elderly poet Nikolai Tikhonov wrote in May. "Anyone who had seen Leningrad in January or February," he added, "would fail to recognize the city today."
      Spring came, the street cars started to run, the White Nights returned, and the siege continued. During the long summer days, the Germans intensified their aerial and artillery bombardments, bringing as many as eight hundred heavy guns to bear on the city. By now people had gotten used to them. "People heard the whistle of shells over their heads with indifference," Lidia Ginzburg remembered. "Waiting for a shell you know is coming is considerably harder," she went on, "but everyone knew that if you heard it, it wasn't going to land on you this time." Only a few let their fear show. A certain artist, Ginzburg recalled, "differed from the majority of Leningraders in his fear of the bombing." This artist would move in with friends who lived on lower floors than he, and during bombardments he could never keep still. "Come and have some tea," his friends would say. "They'll soon be finished." To that he would invariably reply: "You have no imagination, that's why you're not afraid. You have to be really clever, you know, to be afraid properly."
      On the Field of Mars and in the Summer Garden, people planted cabbages and potatoes, already planning for the winter ahead. There were "gardens" everywhere, wherever there had once been lawns or parks. While they waited for the vegetables to grow, people ate weeds and wild grasses to satisfy their hunger for something green. "When grasses and herbs appeared, people seemed to be transformed into animals," one survivor remembered. "They tore up any kind of grass and ate it. Not a blade of grass remained to be seen anywhere." Weeds of all sorts made their way onto people's tables and into the canteens of factories and office buildings, too. "Plantain soup, nettle and sorrel puree, beet-top rissoles, goose-foot rissoles, and cabbage-leaf schnitzel," all appeared that spring to supplement "liver made from oilcake, oilcake pastries, fishmeal sauce, casein pancakes, and yeast soup." One woman remembered visiting the Botanical Gardens with a colleague after being assigned to test various local grasses and herbs to determine if any were poisonous. While they waited to see the person in charge, they began to eat the chervil that grew nearby. "May we pick some chervil?" they asked. "It's a weed," the researcher assigned to work with them replied. "I said that it was all the same to us," she recalled. "So we stuffed two bags with it, and brought it back to the laboratory. We ate it all up, and were content. What enjoyment it gave us to eat that weed. We'd eaten our fill of chervil!"
      That summer, Leningraders picked daisies, chamomile, mignonettes, and field roses, and brought them home, trying in every way they could to make life seem "normal" again. In some ways, life was becoming normal. Civility was returning, and kindness, too. People were still weak, but they helped each other over the rough spots. Aleksandr Fadeev saw a Red Army soldier, a peasant lad from the country, lift an old woman into a streetcar when she couldn't climb the steps herself. "Thank you, little son," the old lady replied. "Because of that, you'll come through alive. Mark my words—a bullet won't get you!" But "normality" was only a veneer, as on the Nevskii Prospekt, where false fronts were set up to conceal the bomb damage from the street. Everyone knew that hardly a building remained unscathed after almost a year of German bombing and shelling. It was that way with people, too.
      People recovered slowly, for the strains of hunger and months of seeing loved ones killed had taken a heavy toll. Unlike people who had known no such disasters, Leningraders now understood what really counted and what did not, but the marks of the siege remained—in their strangely dark skin, their gaunt looks, and most of all their eyes. "Those faces and eyes told me more than could be gathered from all the stories of the horrors of famine," Fadeev wrote after seeing Leningrad's children for the first time. The children he saw had forgotten how to play and kept to themselves. Often they were silent for hours on end. "I'm thinking all the time about mama," one small orphan said. "I remember how mama died at home," another added. "When she came in [from standing in line for bread] she fell down on the floor. ... I put her on the bed, she was very heavy, and then the neighbors said she was dead."
      At lunch one little girl Fadeev visited at an orphans' kindergarten kept putting bits of her bread aside. "I wanted to remember mummy," she explained when questioned. "We always used to eat bread together late at night in bed . . . and I wanted to do the same as mummy. I love my mummy," she concluded, "and I want to remember her." Adults masked their feelings more easily, but the strain of life still showed. "I had known her as a handsome woman," Fadeev wrote in April of a cousin he had not seen since the beginning of the siege. "[Now she] was almost an old woman, withered, with puffy eyelids, darkened face, and swollen legs. Her dark, smoothly combed hair was heavily streaked with gray. Her delicate hands had coarsened and had become the rough, knotted hands of a manual laborer."
      People whose thoughts had been turned inward for so long began to reach outward through books. "I see people reading books everywhere," Pavel Luknitskii wrote in his diary on July 15. "They sit on benches in the squares, in gardens, in parks, and on the boulevards. [Others sit] on chairs and even in armchairs they've brought out on the pavement near the shell-shattered buildings in which they still live." That summer Leningrad's book trade really came to life. The city had been a haven for bibliophiles since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, and the treasures that had been handed down from great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents simply could not be imagined. During the winter, starving people had sold their books to buy bread, people who had been evacuated had sold their books, and so had the heirs of those who had died or been killed. Thieves had looted thousands of apartments from which people had fled to escape the bombing and shelling, often taking any valuable books. Now these reappeared for sale in used bookstores, in kiosks, and in the Haymarket. Rare first editions that had not been seen in Leningrad's bookstores for decades, books with precious original illustrations tipped in by hand by pre-revolutionary printers, books in fine leather bindings, some of them true monuments to the bookbinder's art— these and tens of thousands more all appeared for sale that summer.
      On August 9, 1942, the Philharmonic played Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony in war-torn Leningrad. The score had been flown in by special military plane from Kuibyshev in June, and rehearsals had gone on for more than a month. The performance took place in the Philharmonic Hall, its great auditorium still a brilliant blend of white, gilt, and raspberry velvet. "No one will ever forget this concert," one observer wrote. "The motley orchestra, dressed in sweaters and vests, jackets and collar-less shirts, played with inspiration and agitation. . . . When they played the finale, everyone in the audience stood up. It was impossible to listen to it sitting down. Impossible." Throughout the concert, heavy artillery fire punctuated Shostakovich's music, but this time the guns were Russian. Lieutenant General Leonid Govorov, an artillery specialist who had commanded the Leningrad Front since April, had brought up three thousand heavy guns to prevent the Nazi artillery from attacking the Philharmonic Hall during the performance. As the gunfire and the power of Shostakovich's music blended with the strength of Leningrad's spirit, people wept, remembering those who had died. Others remembered those far away, who they hoped still lived.
      The guns of the Red Artillery signaled the beginning of another attempt to break the Germans' grip. On September 8, General Govorov's commanders hurled three rifle divisions across the Neva near Schlussel-berg, only to have them driven back. A few weeks later, he tried a second time and failed again. The Red Army did not yet have the strength to break the Germans' siege, but the sixty thousand losses it inflicted on the units that occupied the Nazis' forward positions freed Leningrad from the danger of another direct assault. A second siege winter was approaching, and Leningraders knew it would bring more hardships. But they also knew that the worst was past. The city had laid in large reserves of food, and the evacuations and deaths of the previous eight months meant that many fewer needed to be fed. With the Germans pushed back from Tikhvin, the winter road could be opened as soon as the ice froze on the lake. Starvation rations now were a thing of the past.
      Repairs had been made all through the summer and fall. Roofs had been fixed, water and sewer lines reconnected, electric wires restrung. Windows had been replaced or covered with plywood. Stoves had been installed in some apartments and fixed in others. Tramlines had been repaired and shell holes in the pavement filled. Much damage still remained, but Leningraders' mood had changed. Now they spoke of when the blockade would be broken, not if it would be. To many it seemed only a matter of time, and they had learned how to wait.