Read Online Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege by Alexander Werth - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Alexander Werth
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people – half a dozen cheerful and healthy-looking little children from a children’s home, accompanied by a young woman teacher, and two elderly women digging cabbages. The children joyfully surrounded our majors and insisted on playing with their medals and decorations. The shelling had by now become louder – the shells were exploding in a part of the town much nearer the centre, but nobody seemed to worry. We were now on the Moika River at the south end of the garden. On the other side of the granite-lined river rose from among the autumn trees the majestic red stucco building of the Mikhailovsky or Engineers’ Castle – more a castle indeed than a palace – once the residence of Catherine’s heir, the ‘mad Tsar,’ Paul the First. It looked all right from here, except for broken windows, but Comrade Baranov remarked that the building had been very badly damaged by a ton bomb on the other side, and that it had suffered greater damage than any other historic building in Leningrad.
We had told the driver to meet us at this end of the Summer Garden, and we then drove from here to the house where I had once lived. This was a very badly bombed area – no one could quite say why. And it all looked wretchedly shabby and deserted – the narrow Panteleimon Street running east from the Summer Garden, a street – as l knew it before – of elderly and rather nondescript large houses and smallish shops, mostly grocers’ shops, bakeries, and small haberdashery and iron-mongers’ establishments, and at right angles to it, the sedate and wealthy Mokhovaya. Now it all looked deserted and pitiful. Not only had all the shops disappeared – both streets, formerly so different in character, being united in the same drabness – but this was the nearest I saw in the centre of Leningrad to a blitzed area. Half a dozen houses in the Panteleimonskaya had been wrecked by large bombs and in the Mokhovaya eleven houses – all four- or five-storey buildings – had been destroyed. When we turned into the Mokhovaya, I saw the tall bay-windows of number twenty-nine, a hundred yards down the street, and the top one of these bay-windows had been my own room. It came back very vividly – the nickel bed in the corner nearest the door, and the open fireplace with a framed photogravure of the Bay of Naples above the mantelpiece, and the two large cupboards full of Russian, English, French and German books, and the desk inside the bay-window and on it a large, bronze electric lamp with its large orange shade with silk tassels. The best things in the room were a big Persian rug my father had brought back from the Caucasus, and the all-round view from the three windows round the desk – I watched from here the rioting and shooting going on during the February Revolution with excited crowds running this way and that, and one day smashing up a police station just a little down the street. The worst things in the room were the above-mentioned photogravure of the Bay of Naples, a pair of stuffed squirrels I had shot myself, and two monstrosities somebody had brought from Egypt – a stuffed baby crocodile which stank, and some sort of unusable Oriental smoking contraption made of ivory and an ostrich egg. How different from the charming collection of Japanese ivories and embroideries and Chinese paintings and wood carvings my father had bought during his five years in the Far East many years before, and which were assembled in the little yellow ‘boudoir’ (as it was called) next to my room. The house opposite, a plain square box of a house with dirty-yellow stucco walls, was now partly smashed by a bomb. It was notable only for the marble memorial plate outside it – Dargomyzhsky, the composer who wrote Rusalka , had lived here in the fifties or sixties of last century. From my window I could also see on its second floor the large shop sign, ‘Rau Relieur,’ French, like so many other shop signs in St. Petersburg. In the
We had told the driver to meet us at this end of the Summer Garden, and we then drove from here to the house where I had once lived. This was a very badly bombed area – no one could quite say why. And it all looked wretchedly shabby and deserted – the narrow Panteleimon Street running east from the Summer Garden, a street – as l knew it before – of elderly and rather nondescript large houses and smallish shops, mostly grocers’ shops, bakeries, and small haberdashery and iron-mongers’ establishments, and at right angles to it, the sedate and wealthy Mokhovaya. Now it all looked deserted and pitiful. Not only had all the shops disappeared – both streets, formerly so different in character, being united in the same drabness – but this was the nearest I saw in the centre of Leningrad to a blitzed area. Half a dozen houses in the Panteleimonskaya had been wrecked by large bombs and in the Mokhovaya eleven houses – all four- or five-storey buildings – had been destroyed. When we turned into the Mokhovaya, I saw the tall bay-windows of number twenty-nine, a hundred yards down the street, and the top one of these bay-windows had been my own room. It came back very vividly – the nickel bed in the corner nearest the door, and the open fireplace with a framed photogravure of the Bay of Naples above the mantelpiece, and the two large cupboards full of Russian, English, French and German books, and the desk inside the bay-window and on it a large, bronze electric lamp with its large orange shade with silk tassels. The best things in the room were a big Persian rug my father had brought back from the Caucasus, and the all-round view from the three windows round the desk – I watched from here the rioting and shooting going on during the February Revolution with excited crowds running this way and that, and one day smashing up a police station just a little down the street. The worst things in the room were the above-mentioned photogravure of the Bay of Naples, a pair of stuffed squirrels I had shot myself, and two monstrosities somebody had brought from Egypt – a stuffed baby crocodile which stank, and some sort of unusable Oriental smoking contraption made of ivory and an ostrich egg. How different from the charming collection of Japanese ivories and embroideries and Chinese paintings and wood carvings my father had bought during his five years in the Far East many years before, and which were assembled in the little yellow ‘boudoir’ (as it was called) next to my room. The house opposite, a plain square box of a house with dirty-yellow stucco walls, was now partly smashed by a bomb. It was notable only for the marble memorial plate outside it – Dargomyzhsky, the composer who wrote Rusalka , had lived here in the fifties or sixties of last century. From my window I could also see on its second floor the large shop sign, ‘Rau Relieur,’ French, like so many other shop signs in St. Petersburg. In the
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