Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (27 page)

How sad it all was, and yet how beautiful. There are only two other great masterpieces of urban scenery I know which, like this Embankment of the Neva near the Winter Palace, are equally impressive and moving, equally harmonious, and make you feel that you are in the presence of a great work which was somehow built by ‘accident,’ but at the same time seems to crystallise the genius of the nation that made it. I mean the view of Paris from the Pont des Arts, and the view of London from Westminster Bridge. Just as, during the blitz winter, the sight of London from Westminster Bridge made me clench my fists with rage and fury at the thought of what
they
were doing to London, and made me feel thankful that they had not yet succeeded in destroying St. Paul’s; so in Leningrad that morning I was filled with the same feelings of rage and gratitude. What did all this mean to them, to these people who had made Berlin their capital, the most soulless and most meaningless capital in the world – ‘with human slaughter as its only
raison d’être
?’

‘A bit skinny,’ said Major Lozak as we walked past the Winter Palace, with its blind, plywood-covered windows and its chipped grey stucco walls. ‘Leningrad is like a person who is run down and has lost a lot of weight. It needs fattening up, with a lot of paint and glass and plaster. But the body is sound. Shells are not like bombs. They are much smaller, and whereas a bomb hits a building when coming down with its maximum speed, a shell usually lands with most of its impetus already exhausted.’

Then we came to the Winter Canal, with its little humped granite bridge on the Neva Embankment, and its Venice-like bridge, like the Bridge of Sighs, a little lower down, joining the Ermitage with the building opposite. Call it imitative, which it originally was; and yet this canal with its bridge like the original Bridge of Sighs, built in this northern setting, had in the course of time acquired a character entirely its own, and had become part of Russia. Pushkin – or was it only Tchaikovsky’s librettist? – had made this canal the nocturnal scene of Herman’s last tragic meeting with Liza; here Liza threw herself into the canal while Herman in his frenzy was flying to the gambling den to use the secret he had wrenched from the old Countess. In any case the Winter Canal has, in people’s minds, become associated with Pushkin; and with Herman, that strange hero to whom a dreamlike St. Petersburg alone could have given birth – a St. Petersburg different from the completely real and harmonious city of the prologue to the
Bronze Horseman.
It is associated with the old Countess, that
Vénus Moscovite
who had known Cagliostro in the Versailles of Louis XV, and who died, her senile mind still filled with nostalgic dreams of the splendour and
volupté
of that eighteenth-century France she had known in her radiant, adventurous youth. And it was also associated with Tchaikovsky who, in the
Queen of Spades,
based on the same Pushkin story, wrote one of his greatest and most inexorably tragic pages, with the Winter Canal in moonlight as its setting. Russia’s most national poet and most national composer – for he is accepted as such whatever the Mussorgsky worshippers may say – had combined to make the Winter Canal, with its Venice-like bridge, a deeply Russian reality.

We walked down the narrow granite embankment of the Winter Canal, to the point where it runs into the winding Moika River; we crossed the bridge, and stopped before number twelve, that beautiful little late-eighteenth-century house, where Pushkin had lived, and where he died in terrible pain, three days after the fateful duel. It is a long and disgraceful story which I need not recall here – a story of court intrigue against the poet, in which his beautiful and frivolous wife, and the Tsar Nicholas, and the head of the police were all involved. From his windows on the first floor, Pushkin could look across the wide square at the Winter Palace. The quays of the Moika, with the old eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century houses on either side – it was strange to see among them, on the other side, a beautiful Italian-like mansion, of apple-green stucco, with large rounded windows, a white lion over the door, and dancing marble figures in the niches – the quays of the Moika were as deserted as the Neva Embankment. There wasn’t a soul around Pushkin’s house. All the doors were closed. On the level of the first floor was a memorial marble plate saying the Pushkin had lived and died there. The large porch was also closed, but on its door was nailed a notice: ‘A.R.P. The nearest Water Points are on the Moika Embankment. Opposite Houses Nos. 8, 12, 18 and 20.’

We walked on to the point where the Moika and the Catherine Canal join. It was a place of contrasts. On the left a large building had been completely destroyed by a direct hit; instead of a house there was a mountain of rubble, with iron bedsteads emerging from the brick and plaster. In how many countries have I seen these bedsteads, always the same, always the sole survivors protruding from the rubble that was once somebody’s home!

On the other side stood resplendent in all its colours the Church of the Resurrection – that modern St. Basil of St. Petersburg, built on the spot where the Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. The pale-blue and red-and-gold of its onion domes and its mosaics were dazzlingly bright in the sun, and except for a small hole in the entirely golden dome – all the rest of the domes were coloured – it was completely undamaged. This great church, with all its colours reflected in the waters of the narrow canal, was the brightest patch of colour in the whole of Leningrad – unnaturally bright perhaps, yet it had become in the course of years a familiar part of the urban landscape.

Behind us, on the left, was the vast Champ de Mars, with the low granite monument to the people killed in the February Revolution, in the middle. It had been a dusty parade ground in the past; then after the Revolution it was turned into a garden, but although twenty-five years had elapsed the trees had not developed in this wind-swept spot, and it had remained the same open space as before, but covered with lawns and flowerbeds and gravel paths. The idea of making the Champ de Mars a continuation of the Summer Garden had not materialised. Now it was like one vast cabbage field, nearly half a mile long and quarter of a mile wide, right in the centre of Leningrad. But several parts were separated from the rest by barbed wire, and soldiers could be seen somewhere around the mass grave of the people killed in the Revolution. Probably they were in charge of anti-aircraft guns.

Everywhere, there were only a very few people about – outside the Summer Garden, and in the blitzed drabness of the Panteleimon Street. Some canine instinct had taken me back to the old Mokhovaya, and my companions had followed; they were mildly amused to find themselves again on this ‘pilgrimage.’ Now I realised more fully than the first time how serious the damage was in this blitzed area; an enormous bomb must have fallen on the six-storey building on the corner of the Panteleimon Street and the Mokhovaya – at this corner there had once been one of the finest flower shops in town. Now there was nothing but one wall dangerously standing on its edge, and high up, on the fifth floor, inside the wall, was still a wardrobe, with two overcoats and a woman’s garment suspended on coat-hangers above the void. In the house opposite had been a big fruiterer’s shop; the house was badly blasted, and the windows of the former fruiterer’s shop were boarded up; but above them one could still faintly read the owner’s name, written in the old spelling. Who, I wondered, had occupied these premises for the last twenty-five years without properly erasing the old owner’s name – Sherepennikov, Fruiterer? He used to have a grand display of oranges and tangerines and pears and apples, and even pineapples and bananas. I remember once going in with my father, and the man at the cash-desk said, ‘Would you like the change of your hundred roubles in notes or gold, sir?’ And I was impressed by the little stream of golden five- and ten-rouble pieces that flowed on to the counter. It remained one of those more trivial childhood memories which we all have.

Except for a crowd of soldiers who were going somewhere, and a morose-looking old woman standing outside a gate, there was nobody in the Mokhovaya. We passed the old house and looked into the yard, but the children were not there. A few houses down was the former Tenishev School with its small but famous concert hall. It used to be Rachmaninov’s favourite concert hall, and I remember the mad scramble for tickets there used to be whenever a Rachmaninov recital was announced. I had gone there to dozens of piano recitals, good, bad and indifferent, in those middle teens when I almost seriously thought of taking up music as a profession. The Revolution, thank heaven, killed that ambition.

What was happening in the Tenishev Hall now? It had been turned into a children’s theatre, and behind the glass of the locked front door was the latest theatre bill:

The plays performed on alternate days were
Puss in Boots
and Gogol’s
Revisor.
And then, after November 30th, 1941, at the height of the famine, there was nothing more. The theatre closed down. Only the old theatre bill remained to show at which point everything had stopped. But before that the shows must have gone on even after a large part of the Mokhovaya had been destroyed.

Further down the street, several more buildings had been completely destroyed by direct hits from large H.E.s; but hardly anywhere did I see any destructions caused by fire. The fire-watching in Leningrad had been almost foolproof. Only at the end of the Mokhovaya, outside the old Simeon Church built in the reign of the Empress Anna Ioannovna, and now looking in a miserably dilapidated condition – it had clearly not served as a church for many years (there were now, as somebody told me, only ten or twelve churches open in Leningrad) – did we see a crowd of people. On the steps of the church a crowd of young girls and lads, most of them wearing red ties, were doing first aid and stretcher practice.

We turned right, crossed the bridge on the Fontanka, with the great Ciniselli Circus on the right – it was now called ‘Goscirque’ – or State Circus – then turned into the narrow Karavannya Street and reached the Nevsky. Suddenly the whole scene changed. The great avenue was alive – as no other street of Leningrad was. There were crowds on both sides of the street and a great deal of traffic. There was no shelling that morning, and everybody was quite at ease; one just had to take a chance with the ‘first one.’ There were crowds of people outside several large cinemas, and crowds inside the great Eliseyev foodshop with the enormous plate-glass windows. On their ration cards they were receiving meat and tinned food, and sausage and butter and even caviare; and the cheeses and barrels of caviare and the tins – some of them American – were impressively piled up, several feet high. There was even a counter with blocks of chocolate and chocolate boxes. And people received their provisions without much waiting, and almost no queueing.

It is hard to describe the Leningrad crowd in the Nevsky that morning. As in Moscow, so in Leningrad, the crowd looks non-committal. About half the people were soldiers; but there were also many young girls, some in military uniform, others smartly dressed, with rouge and lipstick carefully applied; here and there one also came across an old lady, but most of the old ladies looked rather down-at-heel. Everybody seemed to have a quiet, business like air; there was no laughter, little loud talking or gesticulation; one felt a kind of inner solemnity in all these people – even when they were standing outside a cinema, or buying patriotic postcards and postage stamps at the two or three little open-air stalls in the Nevsky. Physically, most of the people looked fairly well and some looked very well, and I did not see any faces that looked positively ill or undernourished. But one could see a certain strain in their eyes. As distinct from Moscow, I did not see a single beggar anywhere, or even anyone looking obviously down and out.

It all made me wonder whether there wasn’t some truth in the theory that hunger worked on the ‘kill or cure’ principle. Unfortunately, it had killed far more people than it had cured, but I had heard several people tell me that some sick people had definitely been cured of almost incurable diseases by going through the famine – particularly people with duodenal ulcers.

There were not many shops open in the Nevsky, and those that were open were not very exciting, except the little scent shop near the old Catholic church. Two girls behind the glass counter, below which was a good display of their various wares, were selling to an eager crowd of customers boxes of face-powder, eau-de-cologne, little lipsticks and bottles of scent, all made in Leningrad. ‘You’re from Moscow, I suppose,’ said one of the girls, ‘no wonder you’ve come here. Everybody coming from Moscow comes here first thing!’

It was an amusing moment. It was like the old capital speaking a trifle condescendingly to provincial Moscow! Leningrad had something that Moscow didn’t have – a shop where scent was freely sold to anyone. The scent was in dainty little bottles with golden labels, and was called ‘Boyevyie Podrugi’ – a difficult phrase to translate. It does not mean ‘Soldier’s Sweetheart’ – though that is, perhaps, the person for whom it is primarily intended; it means literally ‘Women Comrades in Battle,’ or perhaps ‘Girlfriend in Arms’ – though that sounds a little ambiguous. Anyway, it was a pleasant enough smell, though not quite on a level with Guerlain or even Coty. A small bottle cost 150 roubles, or over
£
3, but the Russian customers, who have little to spend their money on anyway these days, all seemed to think it very good value.

So we wandered about the Nevsky, and walked down the Catherine Canal where we crossed the beautiful little foot-bridge with its large golden-winged dragons, and down various other streets, till it was time to go back to the Astoria for dinner. After dinner the car came for us, and we drove to the now celebrated Writers’ Bookshop in the Nevsky, near the Anichkov Bridge. It was enough to drive any booklover crazy with joy. Mr. Rachlin, the manager, might well, like the girl in the scent shop, have laughed at us Muscovites, but he didn’t. He must have had a fairly long experience by now of people from Moscow walking away with enormous parcels and with happy grins on their faces. For two years Moscow has been very short of books, both new and second-hand, and what second-hand books do appear in the shops for a brief moment are – if of any interest – extremely expensive. Sets of the Russian classics are almost unobtainable in Moscow. Here, in the Writers’ Bookshop in Leningrad, there was everything – many old books about St. Petersburg, several of which I greedily snatched up; sets of Gorki and Chekhov and Dostoievsky, and anyone one could think of; not just one set of each, but several; flimsy and rare little volumes of poetry printed in the last forty years; whole sets of historical works, and several sets of Shakespeare in Russian, and what not. Also an impressive display of new books of prose and verse newly published in Leningrad, though few of the most famous ones, such as Inber’s
Pulkovo
Meridian
which, as I wrote before, had sold out in two days. And the second-hand books which Dangulov and Studyonov and I bought – by the time we were finished we had five enormous parcels – were of a kind you could not buy in Moscow at all, or for which, with luck, you would have to pay three or four times as much. The manager, a lively little man who was quite a Leningrad character and a great pal of all the literary celebrities of the town, offered to show me the section of second-hand foreign books which, he said, was very remarkable, but I refused to be led into temptation, especially as the colonel kept reminding us that there was a limit to the luggage we could take on the plane. I rather regret it now.