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

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