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

lived a lot better than other people if I had wanted to,’ she went on, ‘but I had six people on my hands. Yes, three old women living in the same house, and a young woman with two children – her husband was at the Front. He has since been killed. And the woman herself died of pneumonia, there was nothing that could save her, because when you’re run down, and there’s no heating, and you worry a lot, you just die. Now one of the old women, who’s her mother, has charge of the children, and the kids are fine, and we all live together.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you couldn’t have fed them out of your ration, could you? What were you getting during the worst period – 125 grammes of bread?’ ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said, ‘and even our Lord Jesus Christ couldn’t have fed seven people on that! No,’ she said, not without a touch of pride, ‘since the Finnish war in which my dear son was killed, I had a feeling that we were in for more trouble before long. Oh, I knew it was coming. The fall of Paris, and then all that terrible bombing of London. That winter I bought a few sacks of flour, and a few other odds and ends. And wasn’t I glad I had done it! I was so proud every night when I could give a little extra food to the three old women, and the two little children, and their poor dear mother, God bless her soul. You don’t know what it was like. You just stepped over corpses in the street, and on stairs! You simply stopped taking any notice. It was no use worrying. Terrible things used to happen. Some people went quite insane with hunger. And the practice of simply hiding the dead somewhere in the house, and using their ration cards was very common indeed. There were so many people dying all over the place, the authorities couldn’t keep track of all the deaths. Besides, if a death wasn’t declared, how were they to know?’ She looked at the packet of Luckys. ‘May I have another of your English cigarettes? Just can’t resist it! So like the dear old Egyptian Tanagras!’ She puffed at it with relish. ‘Oh, it’s all right now,’ she said.
    ‘Now I am as strong as a horse again. Tomorrow there’ll be a military banquet for 250 people downstairs; I’ll have to be up all night checking the crockery and the tablelinen. I don’t need any sleep – couple of hours and I’m as fit as a fiddle. But you should have seen me in February 1942. Oh, Lord, I looked funny! My weight had dropped from seventy kilos to forty-eight. Dropped thirty kilos, in four months! Now I am back to sixty-two – feel quite plump! Now that the worst is over, I’m sure I’m good for another twenty years. I hope I may go abroad yet. I’d like to see Paris again, and Rome. Walk down that nice street – what was its name again? – yes, the Corso Umberto. Yes, I like Rome, like it better than Leningrad.’ She dropped her voice. ‘Just getting a little tired of Leningrad, between you and me.’ Then, after pressing us to eat more, and offering to make us some hot tea – ‘Oh, no trouble at all, or perhaps some nice black coffee’ – for all of which we thanked her but said no. She bade us good-night, and departed balancing on one hand over her shoulder the enormous tray with the spoons and forks and bottles and dishes. A remarkable old woman, I thought. So absurdly genteel, and yet with so much character and courage. I could just see her with her pince-nez on her plump little nose, crawling through the snow along the Voznesensky, resting on her little walking-stick, and then finally reaching home, and feeding those children and old women out of her precious hoard of flour. She must have got mighty near the end of her hoard in those four months. She and her dependants were lucky to have had that hoard, luckier than thousands of others. But even she had lost four stone in weight. And maybe she was getting ‘a little tired’ of Leningrad now; but she had stayed on during the worst time and ever since. Because