Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (8 page)

It was odd to be here again. When I rationalised it, it was the same place. And yet, apart from the actual walls of the houses – and even they were grubby and shell-marked – everything was completely changed. The front door, with its brightly polished glass panes and brass handles, had gone. Efim, the middle-aged porter – the
schveitzar
 – with his little goatee beard, red tubercular cheekbones and kindly smile and his little colloquialisms – he died of tuberculosis early on in the Revolution, leaving behind two small orphan boys – Efim, with his gold-braided cap and blue uniform with brass buttons, was now an infinitely distant memory. The heavy brass handles had disappeared heaven knows when, and the carefully polished little glass panes had been blasted away. The door was covered with plywood and on it a notice said ‘A.R.P. Post. No access to the attic from here.’

We knocked on the door and rang probably a dead bell, but nothing happened. An elderly man going past said we should try to get in through number twenty-seven. We went past the yard with the iron railings. These also were closed. The little garden had been turned into a vegetable plot, and although the iron skeleton of the clock was still standing, the clock itself had been blown out by blast. At length we penetrated through a passage in number twenty-seven into this yard, and here a middle-aged woman, looking us up and down with great suspicion, came up. She wore a reddish-brown woollen coat and had a muffler round her head. ‘I’m a member of the house committee,’ she said, addressing herself to the three officers, ‘and I can’t allow strangers to walk round like this without asking what they want.’ It was a slightly awkward moment. ‘I’m a representative of the Leningrad Command,’ said Major Lozak, ‘and these people here are with me. You see – ’ he seemed slightly embarrassed, ‘here is a British correspondent. Used to live here some years ago. He’d like to have a look at the house where he lived.’ ‘Which flat?’ said the house committee woman. ‘That one, up there,’ I said, pointing at the study and the dining-room windows, ‘number twenty-six.’ She seemed slightly reassured at my knowledge of the correct number. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well, the front door is locked, but you can go up the back stair.’ We penetrated into the dark courtyard and the back of number twenty-nine. Everything looked very deserted. There were no people about except for the house-committee woman and she was not very communicative. ‘Who’s living there now?’ I asked, but she ignored my question. I remembered that back stair. At the bottom of it was the dark little lodge where old Efim and his two little boys and the deceased wife’s sister, a little monkey of a woman, a terribly humble little thing who always showed infinite gratitude for ten- or twenty-kopek tips, used to live. Efim used to complain of his lodge, and would say it was damp, and was making his tuberculosis worse. He used to feed the little monkey woman and pay her four roubles a month and she looked after the children and the miserable little house on the dark ground floor. I also remembered the back stair because it used to have a pungent smell of cats. I missed this smell of cats now. It merely smelt dead and musty – faintly reminiscent of the graves of Orel.

Taking the porter’s route, we emerged from the first floor landing of the back stair into the ‘hall’ of the front stair, just outside the Baltic baron’s door. Then we climbed up two more flights. It was exciting and yet very odd. It was all different. The white imitation marble walls were covered with dark, dirty-brown paint and there was no sign of the well-scrubbed wooden steps with the red carpet and the carefully polished brass carpet rails. And then we reached the top landing. This was ‘home.’ The oval window above the door was broken. The door was covered with the same dirty-brown paint, but the place where the old brass plate had once been could still be seen with the four screw holes still showing. The door was half open. To the left was the long corridor leading to the kitchen. At right angles on the right was the narrow passage leading to my own room. The hall was dark and empty. No mirror, no coat-hangers – nothing. Strange. I was going to open the door into the dining-room but found it locked. We knocked. There was no response. With five or six people marching up and down the hall and knocking at doors, we must have made quite a lot of noise. But nothing stirred. I went right and knocked on the drawing-room door. Then left and knocked on the door of my father’s bedroom. Then further still I knocked on the door of the billiard room. ‘Still nothing. Let’s try my own room,’ I said to the officers. We groped our way along the dark narrow passage. We stumbled over a hole in the floor. ‘Be careful,’ said the major. Here, in front, used to be the bathroom and next to it a little lavatory, and to the left of it, my own bedroom with the bay-windows. It was very dark, but I found the door and knocked on it. No response. I struck a match. The door was padlocked. Pasted on the door was a piece of paper with ‘Ira, I’ll be back next week,’ and a scrawl at the foot of it, and it seemed as if the paper had been there for a long time. It seemed that I was not destined to enter a single room of my old home. However, the door of the little lavatory was ajar. It also smelt musty and abandoned. I struck another light. Sure enough, there it was: ‘The Tornado – Made in England.’

‘Well,’ I thought to myself, mildly amused, ‘at least I can say I’ve revisited the Family Seat!’ Then we walked to the other end of the house and tried the kitchen door but it also was locked. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. As we went down the grubby stairs I had a moment of irrational annoyance. ‘Why has my home become such a slum?’ I thought to myself. ‘What was wrong with the red carpet on the stairs and the polished carpet rails?’ It was really absurd. What claim had I on the house? And then I began to wonder whether anybody was living there. ‘Perhaps soldiers’ wives who are out at work all day,’ one of the officers suggested. Perhaps. But why this deadly stillness, this absence of any signs of life? Why all these padlocked and locked doors? Had all the people who lived there been evacuated? Or had they died of hunger? And I tried to imagine the people living there; Ira, for instance, who was Ira? and who was the man who was to come back ‘next week’? and how did all these people live through the famine and through the terrible bombing of this district, when houses were crumbling all down the Mokhovaya, and the blast was shattering my bay-windows as the bomb fell upon the house of Dargomyzhsky and Rau Relieur? How many dark tragedies had occurred here during the blockade? Damn the red carpet on the stair and the polished brass carpet rails! There was a smell of death about the house.

And then we returned to the yard with the cabbage plot and the skeleton of the broken clock; and here was life. Outside the house where Durnovo lived were a large crowd of children, and with them a teacher, a fat little woman with a pugdog face. She talked to us cheerfully and asked if we’d like to come another time and see the children’s home in what used to be Durnovo’s house. The children were lively and healthy and rosy-cheeked, and the little boys crowded round the officers and insisted that they bend down to let them play with their medals, while the little pugdog woman talked about life being ‘quite easy’ now compared with what Leningrad had gone through, and said that these children were mostly soldiers’ children, while some had no mothers, and others had mothers who were out at work. The children were all from this part of Leningrad. One lively little red-cheeked boy cried, ‘My daddy’s at the front,’ and another little boy cried, ‘And so is mine, and he’s got the Order of the Red Star.’ ‘Do the children sing?’ one of the officers asked. ‘Of course, of course,’ said the pugdog. ‘Come on, boys, what’ll you sing?’ In their high shrill voices, joyfully, without a trace of solemnity, they broke into

It was the song the Russian troops used to sing in the dark days of 1941 as they went to their death in the battle of Moscow. Here was the real thing. It was strangely thrilling to think that some of these children were now perhaps living in the communal ‘slum’ which had once been my home. This was Leningrad. And it was alive, as alive as the shrill joyful voices of these children. Petrograd was dead and gone – as dead and gone as the red carpet on the stair, as dead as old Efim with the porter’s cap and the brass buttons. But his two little boys? Perhaps, for all one knew, they were the fathers of these children who were now singing,
‘V’boi za rôdinu, v’boi za Stálina.’
The visit to Mokhovaya number twenty-nine cured me of much of the old nostalgic nonsense. Leningrad had become the only reality. St. Petersburg, Petrograd – that was now history and literature, and not much more.

Along familiar streets we drove to the Narva suburb, down in the south-west. And here was real Leningrad, Leningrad in its most tangible reality. Leningrad of the front line. If the Mokhovaya was looking grubby and shabby now and had, to all appearances, greatly deteriorated even before the war, the opposite was true of the Narva Suburb, the Narvskaya Zastava, or the Lenin District as it was now called. Here was a new Leningrad I had never yet seen. The old Triumphal Arch with the horses and chariot on top of it, built to commemorate the return of the Russian troops from France in 1815, was still the same, but the whole environment was different. Instead of the wretched wooden hovels and miserable one-storey houses that constituted this working-class suburb around the Putilov works, a new city had sprung up – avenues with enormous blocks of six-, seven-, eight-storey flats, very much better and more harmoniously designed than similar new buildings in Moscow. Nearly all the windows were broken and replaced by plywood; some buildings had been shattered by shells, and all were pockmarked with shell-splinters. But in the main there was less damage here than in the old Mokhovaya. Not far south of the Narva Gate stood the large new steel and concrete building of the Regional Soviet with a well-designed rectangular tower about 250 feet high.

We went up this tower, climbing its long winding stair. Here, on the top platform which was one of the main observation posts of the Leningrad front were rangefinders, telescopes and other optical instruments. Here were a major and several soldiers, and a captain with half his head bandaged and a large black patch over one eye. From the top of this tower one saw a vast panorama of not only Leningrad on one side but also of the front on the other. Almost below us, in the south-west, was the massive black shape of the main building of the Putilov works, around which were large blocks of houses, some still seemingly intact, others badly shattered, which gave this part of Leningrad the appearance of the outskirts of Madrid in December 1937. It was, on the whole, less bad though than the University City of Madrid where the shelling had given the buildings the weird shapes of prehistoric animals. Here the massive blocks of flats had more or less kept their original shape, though much of the ground between them had been ploughed up by shells. Even so, there were fragments of vegetable plots everywhere around the shell-holes. Along the main road, past the Putilov works, there was a constant though not very thick stream of traffic running to and from the front. It was a cool autumn morning with a haze in the air and broken clouds in the sky. Beyond the Putilov works were the pale waters of the Gulf of Finland with the dark outline of the cranes of Leningrad Harbour only about a mile away, and – on the other side of this inlet of the Gulf of Finland, an inlet scarcely more than a mile wide – were the Germans.

‘That’s Uritsk,’ said the captain with the black patch, ‘it used to be called Ligovo.’ Ligovo – I remembered it very well – was a nondescript little
datcha
place, almost a village then, and was the first stop on the railway to Peterhof and Oranienbaum. The country house where I spent so many summers and so many weekends in winter was on the hill, three miles beyond Oranienbaum and had a superb view of Kronstadt with its forts and its cathedral only a few miles across the water. And now Uritsk – or Ligovo – was in German hands. One could see from here that it was no longer a village but had really become part of industrial Leningrad in the last twenty-five years. A large white building close to the sea stood out very clearly. ‘That’s the Pishmash (short for
pishuschie mashiny
) over there,’ the captain with the patch explained. ‘The big Leningrad typewriter factory. It’s one of the German strongholds on this front. They hold about twelve miles of coast here; they hold Uritsk, and Strelna, and part of Peterhof – the so-called New Peterhof – and the front runs between New and Old Peterhof.’ So there was a Russian ‘bridgehead’ beyond that – the bridgehead just opposite Kronstadt, and running from Old Peterhof to some point twenty or twenty-five miles west, beyond Krasnaya Gorka. I felt some satisfaction at the thought that the old country house – if still extant – and at any rate its park with the old oak trees, and the forest beyond, where I had learned to love the Russian countryside – had remained in Russian hands.

It was misty and from the watchtower that morning one could see only the faintest outline of Kronstadt, or rather of the dome of Kronstadt Cathedral. I looked at that dark green coastline, stretching to the west. ‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing to a large dome-like shape rising from the crest of the hill, a long way down the coast. ‘That’s the church of Peterhof – or rather what’s left of it,’ the captain said. ‘It’s about all that’s left of Peterhof,’ he said bitterly. ‘The palace is burned; the park destroyed, the fountains either sent as scrap to Germany, or mixed up with the earth. I was there not long ago. It’s a horrible sight. And how our young people liked to go out to Peterhof on holidays, and spend the day in the glorious park among the fountains. Do you remember Samson? These swine sawed Samson in half and sent the bits away as scrap.’ Of course I remembered Samson, the greatest of the Peterhof fountains, finer than anything I had seen in Versailles. And I remembered the puddles on the gravel path around Samson, and the strange, intriguing, slightly slimy smell of the Peterhof ponds and its fountains: a damp, fresh, bright-green smell among the dark-green old lime trees of the park; and the beautiful, baroque palace in white and blood-red stucco. ‘You cannot imagine with what reverence our young people tip-toed along the parquet floors of the palace,’ said the captain. ‘There was no reverence for the wicked old Tsars in this tip-toeing. But there was reverence for this great piece of our national heritage. It belonged to us, to our culture, don’t you see, and now, now there’s nothing but rubble; and it’s the same everywhere,’ he added angrily, pointing along the horizon to the left. ‘There are the heights of Pulkovo right in front of you. We are holding
them!
But there’s nothing left of the Observatory, nothing. Smashed to smithereens. And further to the left are the heights of Duderhof; that’s where the front goes further inland. But Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), with the great Catherine Palace, and beyond it, Pavlovsk, with the most beautiful park in the world, are still on the other side of the front. The Catherine Palace has been more or less destroyed; certainly everything inside the palace, the famous amber room and all – has been carried away, and the beautiful old park at Pavlovsk has simply been cut down by these swine.’ It had indeed been an exquisite eighteenth-century park, with lakes, singularly like that of the Bois de Vincennes, with all sorts of little Temples of Love and Grecian pavilions. One could feel how bitterly all these Russian soldiers of Leningrad felt about this destruction. ‘
Svolochi
 – the filthy scum!’ the captain concluded.