Read Online The Siege by Helen Dunmore - Free Book Online

into their ant-heap. Why the stick’s been poked, we don’t know, but our lives and houses are upside-down just the same. That’s what war means: blunders and muddle, and doing things without understanding why you’re doing them. A long time later, if you’re lucky, someone comes along and writes things down so that they make sense, and calls his story history.
This I should not be writing down. How can a man with children be so criminally irresponsible? But there’s something deep within me that says: Write, whatever happens.
So I keep on writing. I have a little place under the floorboards, big enough to hold a couple of these notebooks. There’s a rug over the floorboards, and a table covered with work planted on top of it. Anna would never dream of disturbing my work.
We’ve had a few siren alerts, but no bombing so far. Everyone’s talking about London, and the aerial bombardment there. Are we going to get the same? The barrage balloons are up, there are fire-fighting units being trained everywhere, and every apartment block has a kid perched on the roof with a bucket of sand to throw on to incendiary devices. Anna is on the fire-watch rota for our building. Nothing stops her. When she gets back from scouring the city for food, she starts pasting paper strips crisscross over all the windows, according to instructions. The rooms aren’t exactly gloomy, but it’s nothing like the light of a June day.
Anna and Kolya sleep in their clothes, in case of a raid, but I still get undressed. I sleep badly anyway – why make things worse? If there’s an air-raid, who’s going to care about Mikhail Ilyich’s patched vest? We’ll be too busy ‘making our way to shelter in an orderly fashion’. There aren’t enough places in the air-raid shelters, though, so I doubt if I’ll bother to go.
And yet nothing happens. We’re all waiting. Was it like this in London? Leningrad still floats in its usual sea of summer calm. Any minute now the bands will strike up in the parks, the ice-cream girls will come out, and everyone will start talking about swimming and rowing and berry-picking in the forest. That still seems like reality. War is the dream from which we could wake, if we made enough effort.
This morning I went out at five o’clock and walked along the embankment, then down the Nevsky. I walked for hours, it seemed, but I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t grow tired. I couldn’t have swallowed anything, not even a sip of tea. I must write this down, although it’s almost impossible to put into words. These heightened states all sound banal once you write them down. For instance, there’s nothing more tedious than lovers writing about being in love. You need to be outside the experience, not caught inside it. And for once it seems I’m caught inside.
But this is what happened as I walked. The last years fell away. I saw only our city, as it always was and always will be. It was as beautiful as before, but it wasn’t fierce any longer, or proud. Rather than crushing us down, it seemed to be asking for our protection. Everything looked newborn, as if the city had dipped itself into the waters of the Neva overnight and then risen again, naked and vulnerable, with water streaming from it. As if to say, You know that all my masterpieces are built on bones, but I am human, too. Even the columns of the Kazan cathedral no longer looked like elephants’ feet ready to crush the human ants that run this way and that way, trying to escape.
I stood there for a long time, looking at Kutuzov’s statue. There he was, with his sword still pointing at Napoleon’s army, ready to drive it back. And he drove it back. He played his part. He saved Russia, there’s no arguing with that. Kutuzov, along with General Hunger and General Winter.
There were just the two of us, me and Kutuzov. It’s all very well for you, I thought. I may even have said something aloud. You are stone. You are safe inside history. But we are still flesh,