Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (6 page)

’It wasn’t that I couldn’t have lived a lot better than other people if I had wanted to,’ she went on, ‘but I had six people on my hands. Yes, three old women living in the same house, and a young woman with two children – her husband was at the Front. He has since been killed. And the woman herself died of pneumonia, there was nothing that could save her, because when you’re run down, and there’s no heating, and you worry a lot, you just die. Now one of the old women, who’s her mother, has charge of the children, and the kids are fine, and we all live together.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t have fed them out of your ration, could you? What were you getting during the worst period – 125 grammes of bread?’ ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said, ‘and even our Lord Jesus Christ couldn’t have fed seven people on that! No,’ she said, not without a touch of pride, ‘since the Finnish war in which my dear son was killed, I had a feeling that we were in for more trouble before long. Oh, I
knew
it was coming. The fall of Paris, and then all that terrible bombing of London. That winter I bought a few sacks of flour, and a few other odds and ends. And wasn’t I glad I had done it! I was so proud every night when I could give a little extra food to the three old women, and the two little children, and their poor dear mother, God bless her soul. You don’t know what it was like. You just stepped over corpses in the street, and on stairs! You simply stopped taking any notice. It was no use worrying. Terrible things used to happen. Some people went quite insane with hunger. And the practice of simply hiding the dead somewhere in the house, and using their ration cards was very common indeed. There were so many people dying all over the place, the authorities couldn’t keep track of all the deaths. Besides, if a death wasn’t declared, how were they to know?’ She looked at the packet of Luckys. ‘May I have another of your English cigarettes? Just can’t resist it! So like the dear old Egyptian Tanagras!’ She puffed at it with relish. ‘Oh, it’s all right now,’ she said.

‘Now I am as strong as a horse again. Tomorrow there’ll be a military banquet for 250 people downstairs; I’ll have to be up all night checking the crockery and the tablelinen. I don’t need any sleep – couple of hours and I’m as fit as a fiddle. But you should have seen me in February 1942. Oh, Lord, I looked funny! My weight had dropped from seventy kilos to forty-eight. Dropped thirty kilos, in four months! Now I am back to sixty-two – feel quite plump! Now that the worst is over, I’m sure I’m good for another twenty years. I hope I may go abroad yet. I’d like to see Paris again, and Rome. Walk down that nice street – what was its name again? – yes, the Corso Umberto. Yes, I like Rome, like it better than Leningrad.’ She dropped her voice. ‘Just getting a little tired of Leningrad, between you and me.’ Then, after pressing us to eat more, and offering to make us some hot tea – ‘Oh, no trouble at all, or perhaps some nice black coffee’ – for all of which we thanked her but said no. She bade us good-night, and departed balancing on one hand over her shoulder the enormous tray with the spoons and forks and bottles and dishes. A remarkable old woman, I thought. So absurdly genteel, and yet with so much character and courage. I could just see her with her pince-nez on her plump little nose, crawling through the snow along the Voznesensky, resting on her little walking-stick, and then finally reaching home, and feeding those children and old women out of her precious hoard of flour. She must have got mighty near the end of her hoard in those four months. She and her dependants were lucky to have had that hoard, luckier than thousands of others. But even
she
had lost four stone in weight. And maybe she
was
getting ‘a little tired’ of Leningrad now; but she had stayed on during the worst time and ever since. Because of a sense of duty? Or because of those two children and three helpless old women? Or simply because she ‘belonged’ to the place, as thousands of others had stayed on for precisely the same reason? And at heart she certainly liked the Nevsky far better than the Corso Umberto.

The next day was that in which I fully realised that the shell was still the same, but that this was a very different city from what I had known it to be. St. Petersburg, Petrograd had gone for ever. This was Leningrad. It had inherited many things from the other two, but it had its own substance, its own personality. Leningrad was not just a new name for St. Petersburg; it was a name that meant a hundred things that the other did not. Similarly, there were hundreds of things that belonged to St. Petersburg which could not be found in Leningrad. Perhaps this distinction was not so sharp three years ago, but today Leningrad had acquired the same distinctive personality as Stalingrad. One no more felt like calling Leningrad ‘St. Petersburg’ or ‘Petrograd’ than one felt like calling Stalingrad ‘Tsaritsyn.’ Perhaps, in the course of years, when thoughts of the siege and the blockade fade in people’s memories, they may again colloquially refer to the city by its own name; but it was significant that throughout my stay not one person should have called the city Petrograd or St. Petersburg, though everybody without exception continued to call the principal streets and most of the others by their old names. It was always the Liteiny, and the Nevsky, and the Morskaya – never the Volodarsky Avenue, or the October Twenty-fifth Avenue, or Herzen Street.
¹
People had not accepted these artificial innovations; they had, however, accepted the city’s new name – a name full of new associations. St. Petersburg now belonged to literature, and to history, but no longer to real life. And nothing convinced me more of this than the curious personal experience I had that day of revisiting the house where I had spent the first sixteen years of my life, and which I had not seen for more than a quarter of a century.

Dangulov wakened me and pulled aside the blackout curtains. There was a drizzle outside. I could see through the window, on the other side of the street, a beautiful classical baroque building, with long tall windows, rounded on top, and walls of salmon-pink stucco, and flat white semi-pillars. Funny; looking out of a window in Rome one might have seen something very similar. Europe, Europe! it occurred to me. Great French and Italian architects (who were paid fabulous sums by the Tsars and Empresses) and their Russian pupils had really given the city its essential character – this city which had grown and perhaps still remained the western half of Russia’s soul.
²
Would I find any traces of ‘westernism’ in Leningrad today, I wondered. In the days that followed I was to find them, unmistakably.

Anna Andreievna, as bright and chatty as on the previous night, produced a sumptuous breakfast, with a lot of
zakuski,
including pickled
minogi,
a Leningrad speciality, a tough little eel-like fish which you were supposed to eat complete with its spine. The
zakuski
were followed by fried eggs and piping-hot black coffee. At the mention of
minogi
our colonel laughed heartily, and digging Dangulov in the ribs, produced a ‘real Caucasian charade’ which was even more untranslatable than unrepeatable. ‘Didn’t they teach you that one at school in Tiflis?’ he laughed. Dangulov said he didn’t come from Tiflis but from Armavir. To the Russian the Caucasian is what the Scot is to an Englishman, an object for friendly leg-pulling.

Then the two majors arrived, accompanied by a man called Baranov, wearing a semi-military tunic. He was the chief architect of the city of Leningrad, and was going to take us round the city and escort us to some of the places I had asked to be shown. ‘It may be a good thing it’s raining a bit,’ said Baranov. ‘They haven’t started shelling us yet. They prefer clear days. But it’s clearing up, so we may have some yet.’ We went downstairs. Already some people, in the far end of the hall, were playing billiards. As we went out into the square in front of the Astoria, here on the right was St. Isaac’s Cathedral, with its lofty granite pillars, and its St. Paul-like dome. It was the only thing that looked different – the gilt dome which one could see forty miles away from any height in Finland or from well beyond Oranienbaum, on the southern side of the Gulf, had been dimmed with dark-grey camouflage paint. And in the garden, in front of the cathedral, cabbages were now growing, and among them was an anti-aircraft gun. Opposite us was the absurd former building of the German Embassy, minus the bronze horses and the naked Huns on its roof. To the left was Klodt’s equestrian statue of the wicked Tsar, Nicholas the First, he and part of his horse protruding from the tall structure of sandbags and scaffolding. The architect explained that the top part of this scaffolding was just now being renewed. And beyond, at the far end of the square, was the large Mariimsky Palace, where the ‘pre-Parliament’ used to meet during the last stormy weeks of the Kerensky regime. And to the side of it, straight as an arrow, the narrow Vosnesensky Prospect ran south, a street full of Gogol and Dostoievsky associations. In this street was the barber’s shop in which Gogol’s Major Kovalev lost his surrealist nose – that nose which he then observed on the following day, driving down the street in a coach and wearing the uniform and the cocked hat of a state councillor. How many other weird visions had risen out of the mist of St. Petersburg, out of the grey cold vapours of the Neva?

We walked round St. Isaac’s Cathedral. A few of the granite pillars had been chipped by shell splinters, and the glass was broken in all the windows which were now more or less boarded up. Inside it was no longer a church but a ‘museum of religion.’ Would it ever be opened as a church again, I wondered, or would the museum – no longer quite conforming with the ‘general line’ – be put to other uses? St. Isaac’s is not ‘typically’ Leningrad. If anything, it is in contrast with the ‘native’ architecture, the classical stucco buildings. Here, beyond St. Isaac’s, was the real thing: to the left, the magnificent yellow stucco building of the former Imperial Senate, to the right, also in bright-yellow stucco, the massive building of the Admiralty with its wonderful single tower and its needle spire, that tall needle spire which Pushkin watched from his window on those brief summer nights, those ‘white’ northern nights of St. Petersburg. Even during the brief hour of darkness the point of the spire, still lit up by the last traces of the sunset and the first traces of dawn, continued to shine. In front of us was the wide breezy expanse of the grey Neva, with the Vasili Island opposite, with the University and Academy of Sciences on its Embankment, and the beautiful classical pillared building of the former Bourse, now the naval museum, on its eastern tip. And further to the right rose high into the sky the other needle spire of St. Petersburg, the spire of the Fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul which Peter the Great had built. The spire was no longer glittering, and seemed a little thicker than it should have been, ‘There’s quite a story attached to that,’ said Baranov, the architect. ‘We had to camouflage the gilt when the Germans started shelling us in a big way. And it was infernally difficult. We were passing through the worst period of the famine. When a man is hungry he turns giddy much more easily than usual, and to ask anyone to climb up the needle spire of the Fortress was to ask him to take on the giddiest job in the world. To paint the spire would have been too complicated. What we decided to do was to cover it with a long canvas case painted grey. Only who would climb up that spire? We found plenty of volunteers – here in Leningrad you can find a volunteer for anything – but we realised that the fellows were much too weak and would just kill themselves. So we picked on a few who looked less exhausted than the others, and we fed them well for three or four days – and, by heaven, they did the job.’

Somewhere in the distance the shelling had begun. We were standing in the middle of the Senate Square. To the right, where there had once been lawns, more vegetables were growing, and among these cabbage-beds were the elevated openings of dug-outs, and from among them rose a large sandbagged structure. Inside it was the greatest equestrian statue of modern times, Falconet’s Peter the Great, the Bronze Horseman. It still stood there, surrounded by sandbags, on its gigantic granite rock which had been hauled with infinite labour from Lakhta, from across the Gulf of Finland, at the behest of Catherine the Great. And when, after nine years of delays, failures and quarrels, the great statue was at last completed, she ordered that the rock be simply inscribed: ‘P
ETRO
P
RIMO
C
ATHERINA
S
ECUNDA
.’ Now, around the sandbagged structure, cabbages were untidily growing.

The Alexandrinka Square.

Baltic Fleet sentries outside the Admiralty.