Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege (5 page)

The sun had nearly set as we took off for the third time – this time for our non-stop flight to Leningrad. Again we flew over miles of dark-brown bogs and forests that now looked black in the last rays of the setting sun, and when they had faded to a faint glimmer on the horizon in front of us, everything turned dark grey, the land and the sky. We were flying very low now. Since our last landing a machine-gunner was stationed in the centre of the plane and was now looking round into the grey sky in all directions. The earth was black now, and the sky dark-grey; down below there were a few lights, and outside one house a bonfire was burning. ‘We sometimes fly this stretch with fighter escort, but no fighters were available tonight,’ said one of the crew. ‘It’s all right, though. When we fly so low, it’s very difficult for them to spot us in the twilight.’ The lights down below suddenly became more numerous, and we flew over a winding canal, running parallel to a coastline. ‘Ladoga,’ somebody said. Now, above and below, everything merged into one – a dark pearly-grey. We were almost skimming the smooth surface of the water. We could see a faint coastline before us – behind that coastline was Leningrad – and a thin line of fir forests in the south. In the distance, the red beacon of a lighthouse was signalling – was it signalling to us? And down below, in the water, were tiny little islands at regular intervals with anti-aircraft guns pointing upwards. This seemed a whole chain of little artificial islands built in the shallow bottom of the lake. Or were they floats? It was hard to make out; but one realised that here was one of those little things in the organisation of Leningrad’s defence which had made the city impregnable.

And then, suddenly, the machine-gunner in the turret became very fidgety. He grabbed the machine-gun and began to twist it about, as though taking aim. There was a moment of suspense. Then he relaxed. What had happened? In the darkness he had spotted a plane flying straight at us. Later he explained what had happened. It had turned out to be another Douglas, coming the opposite way. But for a couple of seconds in the almost complete darkness, he wasn’t sure.

And then we reached the opposite coast – the Leningrad coast. For several miles we flew over what looked like more forests; I strained my eyes to see the outline of the city somewhere to the left, but all was dark. Then suddenly several patches of ground were lit up, and a green flare shot up into the air – yes, a flare just like those they fire in Moscow on victory nights. The zoom of the engines began to soften, the propellers turned more slowly, and with a slight bump we landed on the patch of light. Then the lights went out again.
‘Priyekhali,’
somebody remarked. ‘We’ve arrived.’

It was very dark outside, except for several cars and a bus, with their headlights half on. ‘How far are we from Leningrad?’ I asked. ‘Not very far,’ one of the crew said evasively. ‘Smart work,’ somebody said, ‘bringing the plane in like this, through the dark. Wonderful fellows, these civilian airmen of ours. They’re as nearly infallible as a man can be. Millions of miles some of them have flown, and never a hitch.’ We followed a black shadow with a torch, and were taken to one of the cars. An officer with a hard face asked to see our documents. He argued with our colonel, and slowly took down all particulars in the light of his torch. Our colonel showed no impatience, and when at last we were allowed to drive off he said, ‘This is Leningrad. This is the Front. They’re bound to be sticky.’

At first we drove through the dark along bumpy country roads; then we reached some main road. A good deal of traffic was coming the other way, with dim headlights on. Then we came to the first houses. It was hard to distinguish them, but no sky was showing through the windows – they had not been burned out. And behind some windows there were faint streaks of light. ‘It’s hard to drive in the dark,’ said the driver, an elderly man judging by the sound of his voice. ‘It’s, my fourth blackout winter.’ ‘Third,’ I thought, and then it occurred to me that Leningrad had been in the war-zone during the Finnish war too – 1939–40 – the winter of 1940–1 alone had been completely peaceful here. The winter of the London blitz.

We drove on in silence, but everybody was straining his eyes to
see
Leningrad. There wasn’t much to see. More houses, all seemingly intact, then one or two that were burned out. We were now on the outskirts of the town. Every few minutes an empty or nearly empty tramcar would come in the opposite direction. These places were still unfamiliar to me. ‘Okhta,’ said the driver, laconically. So that’s where we were, on the eastern outskirts of the town, beyond the river. The back of beyond – the subject of an allegedly true funny story I had heard years ago about a drunk who, sticking his head from under the cover of a horse-sledge says in bewildered drunken tones to the driver: ‘Driver, where have you brought me?’ ‘Where you told me to go – to the Vasili Island.’ ‘You ass,’ says the drunk, ‘if I had told you to drive me to Okhta, you would have driven me to Okhta, eh? I live in the Nevsky Prospect, near the Admiralty, you ass.’ (If it isn’t funny, try to imagine the same scene in a London taxi, and replace the place-names by say, Golders Green, Tooting and ‘off Trafalgar Square’ respectively.) But now Okhta had a modern unfamiliar outline – with blocks of flats and large five- and six-storey buildings. We turned right and crossed the Neva. To the right, against the dark sky, was a cluster of large buildings, with a church dome. ‘There’s the Smolny,’ somebody said. The Young Ladies’ Academy, where the Revolution was born; Lenin’s headquarters in October. The seat of the first Soviet Government. Then we drove down a long avenue. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Soviet Avenue,’ said the driver. For the first time I asked my ever-recurring, irritating question: ‘What was it called before?’ ‘Suvorov Avenue,’ he said. ‘With the Suvorov Museum?’ I asked. ‘Yes, there it is,’ he replied, pointing to a large unmistakably bombed-out house. ‘Destroyed in ’41. Pity. I remembered the large mural painting of Russian troops crossing the Devil’s Bridge on the Saint Gothard Pass during Suvorov’s last Italian campaign. Funny though, to have changed ‘Suvorov Avenue’ to ‘Soviet Avenue’ – it was done during the days when Suvorov wasn’t a suitable name to give a street. There were few people in the streets, but some traffic, and the trams with the dim little blue lights were still running. It was about ten o’clock. The curfew wasn’t till eleven.

Kirochnaya Street, then the Liteiny Avenue – all familiar places. In the Liteiny I distinguished the tall outline of what was once the Army and Navy Club. In 1916, I had come here to hear Skriabin’s
Extase
conducted by Kussevitzky. We all went frantic over it then. Tastes change. Recently in Moscow, with the
Poème de l’Extase
in the second part of the programme, I had heard an old lady say in the interval to another old lady, ‘My dear, let’s get away from the
Extase!’

We turned into the Nevsky. The dim outline of the Alexandrinka was on the left, and of the Public Library, and the Gostiny Dvor, and then of the Kazan Cathedral, with its colonnade modelled after St. Peter’s in Rome. And in front of us was the tall needle spire of the Admiralty.

Just before reaching the Admiralty the car stopped and our colonel stepped out and asked us to wait. He disappeared into a dimly lit doorway, with two soldiers with bayonets outside. Dangulov and I stepped out of the car and walked up and down the smooth clean pavement. We were right in the heart of Leningrad. Before us were trees, and above them, the graceful shape of the Admiralty with its needle spire. All was quiet except for an occasional tramcar that rattled past, usually quite empty, with two dim coloured lights in front, and for the sound of an occasional motor horn. Then, through the stillness of the Leningrad night a loud-speaker began to talk along the Nevsky Prospect: ‘This is tonight’s communiqué. …’ More successes in all directions. The houses on either side of the Nevsky looked dark and enormously strange, it felt like being in a great European city.

I still couldn’t make out the driver’s face, but his voice sounded younger than I had thought at first. ‘Bad business, driving at night,’ he said. ‘I stick strictly to the regulations, but the militia still make a row about the headlights every time they have a chance. Them militia girls are very funny.’ ‘Have you been in Leningrad these last two years?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘since the start. It’s good to be heroes, but we could all do with a spot of ordinary quiet living. Yes, I’ve been through it all, me and the wife and the kid. Nearly died of hunger myself in ’41. It’s a lot better now; I get 600 grammes of bread. Not enough, really, considering what we Leningrad people have gone through.’ ‘Have you had much shelling lately?’ ‘Yesterday we had twenty minutes of it – the Moscow district got it. Nothing much today, though. But, my God, it used to be bad – especially a few weeks ago. They kept at it for ten days – non-stop; the damn thing went on from dawn till dusk. They’re slick sons of bitches – hit the bloody tramcar stop right at the corner of the Nevsky and the Sadovaya – busiest damned street corner in the whole of Leningrad. Everybody was killed or wounded – real nightmare when you see what it looks like. Another day they hit a crowded tramcar. But it’s better now than it used to be. They say it’s the air force that’s keeping them under control. It’s easy now, and after what we have stuck, we can manage to stick the rest. It mayn’t be long now.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if Smolensk and Vitebsk are taken by the Red Army, they may soon have to pull out.’ ‘If it happened tomorrow it would suit me all right,’ he said. ‘From what I’ve seen of Leningrad – and it isn’t much – ‘ I said, ‘there isn’t as much damage as I thought. Kharkov certainly looks ten times worse.’ ‘Oh!’ he said, sounding very sceptical, ‘you’ll see plenty of damage tomorrow.’

At last the dark door between the two sentries opened, letting out a faint ray of light and Colonel Studyonov came out, together with another officer. With a salute, and in very good English, he introduced himself formally, in Red Army style: ‘Major Lozak, representative of the Command of the Leningrad Front.’ And, turning to the driver, he said: ‘To the Astoria.’ We drove up the Nevsky and took the first turning to the right. ‘Ah,’ I said, ‘Gogol Street.’ ‘Quite correct,’ said the major. ‘Wonderful,’ said little Dangulov, with the tone of an impresario showing off an infant prodigy. Of course I remembered Gogol Street; it had a wonderful shop for sweets and chocolates which belonged to a Frenchman or a Swiss called Berrin. The sweets were wrapped in paper with
Berrin, Confiseur, rue Gogol, Saint-Pétersbourg
printed on them. On Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve there used to be crowds of cars and smart horse sleighs outside Berrin’s, and luscious displays of sweets and
fruits confits
and chocolates in his brightly lit-up windows. Now Gogol Street was completely dark. Then the car turned a corner and we got out. We were at the Astoria. Turning round, I could see the enormous black outline of the dome of St. Isaac’s. The weather had improved; there were a few stars in the sky. Major Lozak said something to a shadowy shape in the doorway and we entered the large marble-lined hall of the hotel. Oh, irony! The first thing I saw was a large notice-board: ‘Ausflúge: Leningrad und seine Umgebung,’ with a whole long list of excursions to Pushkin, with ‘Tsarskoie Selo’ added in brackets, Peterhof, Pavlovsk, etc. On the other side of the square marble pillar was a similar notice-board in English: ‘Leningrad – this week’s entertainments.’ But opposite the names of the theatres there were now only blanks. In the far end of the hall, half-lit by green-shaded lamps, came the friendly click of billiard balls. There were some officers there, playing and commenting loudly on the shots. We were escorted by a woman up the stairs to the third floor. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but we haven’t got the lift working yet.’ The corridors were white and beautifully clean. It was a thoroughly modern hotel, built around 1912 by Lidvall, I think, the most fashionable architect of his day, whom the Petersburg of the ‘capitalist’ period had to thank for many useful, well-proportioned and never displeasing innovations. To build a modern hotel in one of St. Petersburg’s most famous squares, almost beside St. Isaac’s Cathedral, required great tact, and Lidvall had it – infinitely more than the Hun who built opposite it the factory-like red sandstone building of the German Embassy – that very German Embassy from whose roof in August 1914 an angry Russian crowd hurled the aggressively virile bronze Teutons and their horses into the street below. Later the crowd dragged the naked Huns across the square to the nearby Moika River, and threw them plunk into the water. At school, we liked to recall that incident in which one or two of us claimed to have taken part. But that is by the way.

It all seemed unreal. We were shown to our rooms. A supper with wine and vodka bottles had been spread out in the sitting-room. In the double bedroom I shared with Dangulov there was very good bedlinen, and a bathroom and lavatory attached, though with cold water only. The colonel took the room next to ours. An amiable old dame, wearing pince-nez and a little purple tartar cap, took charge of us. ‘Let’s have supper,’ said Major Lozak. I could now see him clearly at last. He was young and pale, and very slim, with a regular Roman nose, his fair hair brushed back, and very pale greenish-grey eyes like the Baltic on a rainy day. He had gone right through the Leningrad blockade, and wore on his tunic the order of the Red Star and the Leningrad Defence medal with its pale-green ribbon. Later he told me a lot about himself. We started supper, and were soon joined by a new arrival, Major Likharev, with a pale, rough-hewn face and a heavy jaw. He turned out to be the president of the Leningrad Writers’ Union, and had written ten books of verses, most of which, I was ashamed to say, I hadn’t read. However, Comrade Likharev said that since the beginning of the war he had been engaged in war work and a large variety of ‘organisational’ jobs, and that he had in effect abandoned literature for the duration, apart from what he wrote for the soldiers’ papers of the Leningrad front.

We had supper and then the officers went off somewhere, to discuss with some military authority the next day’s arrangements. I stayed behind with Dangulov and the old dame whose name was Anna Andreievna. It was a pleasant room, with conventional but good-quality hotel furniture, a desk with the inevitable alabaster inkstand and a rack with ‘Intourist’ notepaper and envelopes, and on the wall a very oily oil painting of a Ukrainian village, with white thatched-roofed cottages and in front of them two girls and a cow with an abnormally large udder – no doubt a symbol of Ukrainian prosperity. Anna Andreievna was an entertaining old dame. She had lived through the whole blockade and seemed none the worse for it. I don’t know why, but her conversation was slightly reminiscent of that of
la vieille,
the unforgettable Pope’s daughter in
Candide.
‘I am 67 now,’ she said, ‘but in 1905 I was
camerista
to Prince Muraviav, the Russian Ambassador in Rome. In 1906 he died – very dramatic it was, too. He died of heart failure at the party given – that’ll interest you – by the British Chargé d’Affaires. After that I became
camerista
to the Princess Borghese in Rome. Yes, sir, we used to go to Paris every year, to buy linen and lingerie at the Maison de Blanc, and
toilettes
at Worth’s and Paquin’s. Just the Princess and I. Stayed in the best hotel, of course, the Hotel Vendôme, do you know it? I’ve been here for four years now. And now that there are no waiters, I do everything.’ ‘Will you have a little wine, Anna Andreievna?’ ‘Thanks,’ she said. She sipped the Russian madeira. ‘It isn’t quite what one was used to abroad, when I travelled about with the Princess Borghese,’ she said, ‘but we can’t be too particular these days, can we? ‘Why, you’re going to make me quite tipsy,’ she added with a girlish giggle. ‘I’m not used to drink these days, you know.’ ‘Have a chocolate?’ ‘Thanks, if you don’t mind I’ll take it home.’ ‘Cigarette?’ She liked the Lucky Strike. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I love foreign cigarettes. When I lived abroad, I used to smoke Egyptian Tanagras.’ I couldn’t quite figure out what she had done after parting from the Princess Borghese, but for four years now she had worked at the Astoria, and for four years before that at the Hôtel d’Europe. ‘I’m an old woman,’ she said, ‘but I’m as strong as a horse. I carried up all these dishes from the ground floor – all at one go. Didn’t turn a hair.’ She pointed at the huge waiter’s tray on the sidetable. ‘I had a son of forty-eight. I was married very young, you see. He was killed in the war – the Finnish war. Yes, sir, forty-eight; great big husky fellow he was, and very fond of his old mamma!’ I asked if she’d had a very difficult time during the famine. ‘Awful,’ she said, ‘quite awful. The Astoria looks like a hotel now – but you should have seen it then! It was turned into a hospital. Just hell. They used to bring here all sorts of people, mostly intellectuals, who were dying of hunger. Gave them vitamin tablets, tried to pep them up a bit. However, a lot of them were too far gone, and died almost the moment they got here. I know what it is to be hungry. Just awful. I was so weak I could hardly walk. I had to use a walking-stick to support me. I’d walk down the Vosnesensky to go home. My home is only about a mile away, in the Sadovaya. I’d have to stop to sit down every hundred yards; my legs just wouldn’t carry me. Took me sometimes over an hour to get home.’