Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (13 page)

Comrade Semyonov paused for a moment and there was a frown on his face. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘to this day I cannot quite understand it. I don’t quite understand yet how it was possible to have that will-power, that strength of mind. Many of them, hardly able to walk with hunger, would drag themselves to the factory every day, eight, ten and even twelve kilometres. For there were no tramcars. We used all sorts of, you would think, childish expedients to keep the work going. When there were no batteries, we used pedals from a bicycle to keep the lathes turning. Somehow, people knew when they were going to die. It was uncanny and hard to understand. People always thought of their families in such cases, and tried to spare them unnecessary worry. I remember one of our older workmen staggering into this office one day and saying to me, ‘Comrade Chief, I have a request to make. I am one of your old workers and you have always been a good friend to me, and I know you will not refuse. I am not going to bother you again. I know that today or tomorrow I shall die. My family are in a very poor way – very weak. They won’t have the strength to manage the funeral. Will you be a friend and have a coffin made for me, and have it sent to my family, so they don’t have the extra worry of trying to get a coffin? You know how difficult it is to get one.’ That happened during the blackest days in December or January. And such things happened day after day. How many workers came into this office saying, ‘Chief, I shall be dead today or tomorrow!’ We would send them to the factory hospital, but they always died. All that was possible and impossible to eat, people ate. They ate cattle-cake, and mineral oils – we used to boil them first – and carpenter’s glue. People tried to sustain themselves on hot water and yeast. Out of the 5,000 people we had here, several hundred died. And a very large number of them died right here. The factory was the thing that mattered most to them. It looked as if they wanted to die here rather than at home. Many a man would drag himself to the factory, stagger in and die. It was like a call of duty to come here. Everywhere there were corpses. But some died at home, and died together with the rest of their family, and in the circumstances it was difficult to find out anything definite. The bodies were taken away, and there was really nobody who could report the man’s death to us. And since there was no transport, we weren’t usually able to send people round to inquire. This went on till about the 15th of February. After that rations were increased, and the death-rate dropped sharply. Today it hurts me to talk about these things.’

Comrade Semyonov sighed, then slapped the table and smiled. ‘But now,’ he said, ‘it’s almost like a birthday party. Our only real trouble comes from the shelling. It’s a big nuisance. We’ve had many direct hits, and quite a number of casualties. Six were killed a fortnight ago, it went straight through the roof into one of the workshops. But we don’t take shelter until a shell drops within less than 500 metres of the factory. The really big danger comes from the first shell for it comes quite unexpectedly. And the Germans have now also started shelling the town indiscriminately, and no longer by districts as they used to, and that makes it more difficult to follow any precise rules.’

We went through various workshops, all of them dark and dingy because there was no glass in the windows, and some of the premises were lit only by faint electric bulbs. Along long rows of lathes women and girls, some fresh but others with tired faces, were toning out little gadgets which were detonators for anti-tank mines. In another brighter and whiter workshop, together with many other girls, Lucia Kozlova, aged fifteen, young and cocky, rosy-cheeked and fair-haired, wearing a blue overall and talking in a baby voice, was polishing lenses. ‘I’ve worked here for six weeks now,’ she said, ‘and am already exceeding my norm – did 110 per cent yesterday.’ She was pleased with herself. ‘Where is your father, Lucia?’ ‘At the front,’ she said. ‘He was wounded in May, but now he’s back again.’ ‘And your mother?’ ‘She works here, in the other building, where they had a shell last month. ‘Aren’t you frightened of shells?’ ‘
Niet, ne strashno
 – no I’m not frightened,’ she squeaked in her baby voice, and went back to polishing the lenses. In another large workshop, obviously stripped of its usual machinery, expert male workers were repairing sights and periscopes with large gashes made either in the metal or the glass by shell splinters.

We walked through the factory grounds with their wide-open spaces, partly covered with vegetable plots and partly with heaps of rubble. ‘All this is badly smashed up,’ said Comrade Semyonov. ‘Before the war there was a lawn here with a fountain in the middle, and over there is what’s left of the open-air stadium’ – and pointing to a badly shattered building – ‘and this used to be our concert hall. We used to have real symphony concerts here. Our workers are very keen on music. In 1937, we had the Leningrad Philharmonic playing to us, with Albert Coates conducting. He was in the Soviet Union on a tour then. Very, very good concert. I remember they played Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony.’

We drove back to the Astoria along the Liteiny Prospect and turned into the Nevsky. I noticed that the old eighteenth-century guns – relics of the wars of Peter and Catherine – which lined what I think was the old Liteiny foundry, had disappeared. ‘They haven’t been used up as scrap, have they?’ I asked. ‘Good God, no,’ said Major Lozak, scandalised at the suggestion. ‘They are historically very valuable, those guns. They’ve been taken away to a safe place.’ How typical of Leningrad to have gone to all the trouble of moving those big bronze and iron monsters. They were not outstandingly valuable, except as something to which everybody in Leningrad had become accustomed, still less were they vulnerable; but they were ‘part of Leningrad,’ one of those things that everybody in Leningrad knew and remembered.

It was Sunday afternoon. The Liteiny, so famous in the past for its numerous secondhand bookshops – there did not seem to be many there now – looked rather deserted except for the regular traffic of half-empty tramcars and occasional army lorries. We drove past a big block of flats where an aunt of mine had once lived, and as we crossed the Basseinaya I looked down that street, and remembered that in number seven, I think, there once lived a girl called Gasya, with whom, at the age of fifteen, I was violently in love – until the day when she discarded my unrealistic calf-love, with its literary talks and its evenings of Chopin, in favour of some elderly bloke’s substantial offer of marriage. Of course he was elderly – he was twenty-four and she was sixteen. To add insult to injury I was made to be a
shafer
 – one of the best men – at the wedding, and had to take my turn in holding the golden crown over the bride’s head while the priest was doing his stuff. Where was Gasya now?

But no sooner had we reached the corner of the Nevsky and the Liteiny than the scene changed. In spite of sporadic shelling, the Nevsky, and especially the famous crossroads, were crowded as they had always been. Thousands of people – workpeople, soldiers and girls – were walking up and down the Nevsky on that Sunday afternoon. What was the eternal attraction of that corner? In the past it used to be one of the main centres of prostitution in Petrograd. There was no suggestion of anything like that now, nor were there any cheap eating places, frequented by students, such as the famous Dominique with its billiard rooms, open in the neighbourhood. But the corner still had a sort of magnetic attraction. At this corner I had for the first time in my life talked to a prostitute. She had accosted me and asked me for a cigarette. I was fourteen, and said I hadn’t any, at which point the silly, giggly, clumsy, pale-faced girl said, ‘A great big boy like you ought to learn to smoke, and to make love to the girls’; I was seized with panic and saying I was in a great hurry, I ran away.

At the Astoria, ‘Mamasha’ (as we had all come to call her by now) had prepared the usual dinner, and after that we drove to the Alexandrinka to see
The Princess of the Circus.
Though played inside the august walls of the Alexandrinka – more august than anything outside the Comédie Française – this was the most frivolous show I had seen ever since I arrived in the Soviet Union in July 1941. In this sense it was a typically Leningrad-in-wartime show. Leningrad was obviously needing the lightest and brightest recreation available, and it had been so ever since the beginning of the blockade.

Throughout the blockade the operetta had gone on functioning. According to one story I heard (which I mentioned before) it was so cold in the theatre that the dancers appeared on stage wearing their fur coats; according to another version they appeared in tights in spite of the frost and danced with their faces all blue and their teeth chattering. It seems that both things happened; perhaps the alternative costumes were determined by the mercury being above or below a certain point.

The Princess of the Circus
is by the same man as
Sylva
which has been the popular favourite in Moscow for years; Kalmann, I think, is the composer’s name; clearly something central-European, probably Viennese, and full of trivial but pleasantly catchy tunes. But, as performed by the Russians, it was extra-ordinarily like an English musical comedy, with its glamorous and sentimental princess, and fatuously beautiful tenor of a hero, and above all, the whole collection of various ‘silly asses’ and terrifying old dames and comic slapstick waiters. The main ‘silly ass,’ played by that admirable comedian, Kedrov, was ‘Count Frederix,’ the name of the last Grand Chamberlain of Nicholas II. But the Frederix of the Alexandrinka was not as gaga as his namesake; he was, as he himself said, ‘the Silenus of the stalls, gallery and other places,’ and looked, in his Ruritanian uniform, and with his handlebar moustache, extraordinarily like the late Marshal Pilsudski. The hero with the domino and the top hat was ‘Mr. X,’ the celebrated acrobat and in reality ‘Prince Clery,’ but the heroine did not know this, and swooned at the discovery that she was in love with an acrobat. It doesn’t matter about the plot – it consisted of the usual musical comedy rubbish and ended as happily as all these things do. Where the action was supposed to take place is equally unimportant – actually it shifted quite irrationally from the entrance to the celebrated Ciniselli Circus in St. Petersburg to Count Frederix’s sumptuous mansion on the Neva – with the windows naturally looking on to the fortress – and ended up in the Erzherzog Karl restaurant in Vienna. ‘You will be my guest to-night,’ said ‘Pilsudski.’ ‘Lend me a hundred roubles.’ And at the great fête in the second act there was a dance of vamps with yellow shawls and in golden snakescaled frocks. Frederix incidentally spoke with a comic German accent, no doubt like his namesake, the gaga Grand Chamberlain of the last Tsar. But the really uproarious stuff came in the last act, which was pure slapstick. And the simple, if still very funny jokes – so like English silly-ass jokes – kept the Leningrad audience rocking with laughter. This sort of thing: the terrifying old lady in the Erzherzog Karl restaurant: ‘Speaking of rubbish –
WHERE
is my husband?’ And then there was Pelican, the comic senile waiter who kept dropping from the dish a cardboard duck and kicking it around the place. It was curious to think of even a cardboard duck being kicked about the stage during the Leningrad blockade. But now the audience roared with laughter at the cardboard duck till the tears ran down their faces. And Pelican’s jokes were on these lines: ‘Madam, the lobster is boiling, I just poked it with a fork and it’s still hard,’ or, ‘I had to sack the other waiter because he poured all the sauce down Countess Metternich’s bosom,’ or, when Herr Schrank, a very nondescript customer, asked Pelican why the latter always addressed him as ‘Herr von Schrank,’ Pelican replies, ‘Because, in our establishment we always call a baron a prince; an ordinary person a baron, and the scum of the earth we call “von.”’ And then, licking his chops, Pelican said to a new arrival, ‘Ah, the pheasant is lovely and tender – but there’s none left’ (which, I bet, is a Russian addendum). And finally – this was very English-musical-comedy: ‘Baron, why is your hair white and your moustache black?’ ‘It’s because my moustache is twenty years younger than my hair.’ It was all very unworthy of the stage of the Alexandrinka where Gogol’s
Revizor
and so many other famous plays were performed for the first time, and which for nearly a hundred years had been trod by the most famous tragedians and especially comedians of Russia. But there it was – Leningrad was needing complete comic relief, and nothing was as good as this slapstick. In fact, the people were about as much ‘front’ as Leningrad – with the vast majority of the audience, including the women, in uniform.

In one of the intervals we were invited into a large dressing-room, where we met ‘Pilsudski,’ and the beautiful hero, and the Princess of the Circus, and Pelican the waiter. The talked about the bad old days of the blockade when they lived on 125 grammes a day. ‘God, they were skinny in their tights,’ said ‘Pilsudski,’ pointing at the ladies. ‘Regular scarecrows! But now you’re quite nice and plump again, girls, aren’t you,’ he added, pointing at the Princess and the other actresses. ‘Oh, we’re all right now,’ said the Princess; and then they told how they had travelled almost daily to the front during the darkest days, how they had nearly died of exhaustion, but had tried to keep the soldiers in good humour. ‘And, except for a very short time, we did get a few little extras to eat – the Leningrad Soviet certainly did their best to keep us alive – and there was nothing to equal the generosity of the soldiers; they would press food on us, though heaven knows they were on iron rations themselves – worse than iron rations. But we certainly cheered them up a lot, at a time when they needed cheering up!’ … There were still old photographs on the wall, pictures of Savina and Varlamov and Davidov, and other great Alexandrinka stars of the distant past. Whose dressing-room, I wondered, had ‘this been? But what did it matter? For here, today, one had another little glimpse into that immense human drama through which every man, woman and child of Leningrad had lived. …‘God, weren’t they skinny in their tights!’