Free Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege by Alexander Werth

next house was another shop with, similarly in French, ‘Fleurs de Nice’ above it. The mysterious ‘Rau Relieur’ was actually an old Jew who looked like Socrates; he never managed to fill his orders in time, and, wringing his hands, he always blamed his dark, sulky daughter for what he called the ‘chaos’ in his bookbindery.
    Number twenty-nine was part of what was known as the ‘House of Russia,’ ‘Russia’ being the name of the insurance company which owned it, and had built it in 1899. The date was still marked on the little weathercock on the roof. Number twenty-nine was composed of three large flats, each with very high ceilings which accounted for this three-storey house being as high as most other four-storey houses. On the ground floor lived some Baltic baron called Osten Sacken, and on the first floor an extremely senile former Tsarist Minister of Finance, called Timiriazev. He lived there, seemingly in great seclusion, with an old spinster of a daughter to keep him company and to play the piano to him. The top floor had been my home. Number twenty-nine was separated from number twenty-seven – which was also part of the ‘House of Russia’ – by a large courtyard with a garden and a big clock in the middle and separated from the street by tall iron railings and a gate. In the block at the back of the courtyard there used to live the notoriously reactionary former Minister of the Interior of the name of Durnovo. I remembered the servants referring to this wicked pillar of Tsarism with anger and derision. In number twenty-seven there used to be the Tagentsev Gymnasium, the once well-known girls’ high school. My cousin, Olga, used to go to it. After the Revolution she became a doctor and a whole-hearted supporter of the new régime, and the last I heard was that she was working on the Volga during the famine of 1921. I never learned what happened to her afterwards. Rumour had it that she died of tuberculosis a year or two later at the age of twenty-four, but where or in what circumstances I was never able to discover.
    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