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

verses, most of which, I was ashamed to say, I hadn’t read. However, Comrade Likharev said that since the beginning of the war he had been engaged in war work and a large variety of ‘organisational’ jobs, and that he had in effect abandoned literature for the duration, apart from what he wrote for the soldiers’ papers of the Leningrad front.
    We had supper and then the officers went off somewhere, to discuss with some military authority the next day’s arrangements. I stayed behind with Dangulov and the old dame whose name was Anna Andreievna. It was a pleasant room, with conventional but good-quality hotel furniture, a desk with the inevitable alabaster inkstand and a rack with ‘Intourist’ notepaper and envelopes, and on the wall a very oily oil painting of a Ukrainian village, with white thatched-roofed cottages and in front of them two girls and a cow with an abnormally large udder – no doubt a symbol of Ukrainian prosperity. Anna Andreievna was an entertaining old dame. She had lived through the whole blockade and seemed none the worse for it. I don’t know why, but her conversation was slightly reminiscent of that of la vieille, the unforgettable Pope’s daughter in Candide. ‘I am 67 now,’ she said, ‘but in 1905 I was camerista to Prince Muraviav, the Russian Ambassador in Rome. In 1906 he died – very dramatic it was, too. He died of heart failure at the party given – that’ll interest you – by the British Chargé d’Affaires. After that I became camerista to the Princess Borghese in Rome. Yes, sir, we used to go to Paris every year, to buy linen and lingerie at the Maison de Blanc, and toilettes at Worth’s and Paquin’s. Just the Princess and I. Stayed in the best hotel, of course, the Hotel Vendôme, do you know it? I’ve been here for four years now. And now that there are no waiters, I do everything.’ ‘Will you have a little wine, Anna Andreievna?’ ‘Thanks,’ she said. She sipped the Russian madeira. ‘It isn’t quite what one was used to abroad, when I travelled about with the Princess Borghese,’ she said, ‘but we can’t be too particular these days, can we? ‘Why, you’re going to make me quite tipsy,’ she added with a girlish giggle. ‘I’m not used to drink these days, you know.’ ‘Have a chocolate?’ ‘Thanks, if you don’t mind I’ll take it home.’ ‘Cigarette?’ She liked the Lucky Strike. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I love foreign cigarettes. When I lived abroad, I used to smoke Egyptian Tanagras.’ I couldn’t quite figure out what she had done after parting from the Princess Borghese, but for four years now she had worked at the Astoria, and for four years before that at the Hôtel d’Europe. ‘I’m an old woman,’ she said, ‘but I’m as strong as a horse. I carried up all these dishes from the ground floor – all at one go. Didn’t turn a hair.’ She pointed at the huge waiter’s tray on the sidetable. ‘I had a son of forty-eight. I was married very young, you see. He was killed in the war – the Finnish war. Yes, sir, forty-eight; great big husky fellow he was, and very fond of his old mamma!’ I asked if she’d had a very difficult time during the famine. ‘Awful,’ she said, ‘quite awful. The Astoria looks like a hotel now – but you should have seen it then! It was turned into a hospital. Just hell. They used to bring here all sorts of people, mostly intellectuals, who were dying of hunger. Gave them vitamin tablets, tried to pep them up a bit. However, a lot of them were too far gone, and died almost the moment they got here. I know what it is to be hungry. Just awful. I was so weak I could hardly walk. I had to use a walking-stick to support me. I’d walk down the Vosnesensky to go home. My home is only about a mile away, in the Sadovaya. I’d have to stop to sit down every hundred yards; my legs just wouldn’t carry me. Took me sometimes over an hour to get home.’
    ’It wasn’t that I couldn’t have