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

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
      V’boi za ródinu, v’boi za Stálina,
  Boyeváya chest nam dorogà …
[Into battle for the country, into battle for Stalin, Our soldiers’ honour is dear to us. …]
    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.

4
The Observation Tower
    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