from Leningrad, and it seemed so fantastic that we had to leave this
cottage in the country, where we had been so happy, where Nanny and I
had planted flowers—stocks and marigolds—and the first tender shoots
were coming up, that we had to take little Pyotr in a crowded, dirty
railway carriage, in this heat—all through June the weather had been
cold, and now it had started getting hot and stuffy—take him not only to
Leningrad, but farther to some other strange town!
Pyotr said that the Artists' Union was sending members' children to
Yaroslavl Region. He had already signed on little Pyotr and Nina
Kapitonovna. With Nanny, it was more difficult, but he would have to
try again.
The train with the children was due to leave at four o'clock and it did
so punctually on time. Pyotr came running up at the last moment. His
son was handed to him through the window, and he took him in his
arms and pressed his dark little head to his face. Grandma began to get
nervous, so he kissed him hastily and handed him back.
To this day I cannot recall without distress that scene of the children
going away, a distress that was all the more poignant because I feel so
powerless to describe it adequately. Although I had lived through so
much during those two months of war, and such strange, powerful
impressions had stamped themselves for ever in my heart and mind,
that day stands before me quite apart, all on its own.
September 7, 1941. Rosalia set up a first-aid station in the office of the
former Elite Cinema and the local Defence Committee invited me to
work there as a nurse, Rosalia having told them that I had some
experience in nursing sick people.
'Bear in mind, my dear,' the genial old doctor, a member of the
Defence Committee, said to me in confidence, 'if you refuse we shall
immediately assign you to fortification work.'
Work on fortifications, or 'trenching', as people in Leningrad called
it, was of course harder than nursing. Nevertheless, I said thank you and
declined.
We went out late in the afternoon and dug anti-tank ditches all night.
The ground was hard and clayey and had to be broken up first with a
pick before a spade could be used. I found myself working with a team
from one of Leningrad's publishing houses, which had already shown a
high standard of performance in the 'digging of Hitler's grave', as it was
jokingly called. The team was made up almost entirely of women—
typists, proof-readers, editors, many of them surprisingly well-dressed. I
asked one pretty brunette, an editor, why she had turned up to dig
trenches in such a smart dress, and she laughed and said that she simply
hadn't any other.
The grey, spectral light that hung motionless between earth and sky
was suddenly shot through with something fresh and morning-like, and
even the faint breeze which stole through the field and stirred the
bushes that masked the anti-aircraft guns seemed to generate a
different, dawning light. Far out over the city the barrage balloons,
silvered by the still invisible shafts of the sun, resembled huge amiable
fishes.
257
Everyone looked rather wan by morning, and one girl felt faint, 4 but
still, our team finished their stint ahead of the others. We were very
thirsty, and the brunette with whom I had made friends overnight
dragged me off to where people were queuing up for kvass. Tents had
been pitched near an old, tumbledown church, and we queued up there.
My editor friend on a sudden impulse suggested that we climb up the
belfry. It was silly, because my back ached and I was dead tired, but to
my own surprise I found myself consenting.
I recognised our section from above by the hand-barrow stuck into the
ground with a wall newspaper fixed to it. New people were coming up to
it. Had we done so little, I wondered? But our section merged into
another, and that into another, on and on. As far as the eye could see,
women were breaking the clay in ten-foot deep ditches, throwing it out
with shovels and carrying it away in wheel-barrows. There was not one
amongst them who would not have laughed heartily had anyone told her
two months before that she would drop her home and her work and go
outside town at night into an empty field to dig up the earth and build
ditches, earthworks and trenches. But they had gone out and now had
nearly completed these gigantic belts which girdled the city and broke
off only at the roadblocks.
I got home the next day at noon. Dog-tired, I lay down and closed my
eyes. The moment I did so my head began to swim with whirling visions
of girls lifting barrows loaded with hard, heavy clay, wheelbarrows
slowly sliding along planks, and the sun gleaming on the dark-red walls
of the trenches.
Then daylight broke through, faint and lingering after the bright
night, and the paling world slipped away from me as I began to drop off.
I felt so good, so wonderfully good, but for that dreary long-drawn
moan-or was it a song?-which came from behind the partition. How I
wished it would stop...
'Katya, the alert!'
Rosalia was shaking me by the shoulder.
'Get up, it's the alert!'
September 16, 1941. A few days ago I met Varya Trofimova in Nevsky.
She was the wife of an aviator. Hero of the Soviet Union, with whom
Sanya had served in the S.P.A. Varya and I had travelled together to
Saratov once to visit our husbands, and I remember having been
surprised to learn that she was a dentist.
She was a tall, ruddy-cheeked, robust woman, who walked with a
purposeful stride. She reminded me somehow of Kiren, especially when
she laughed loudly, showing her long beautiful teeth.
'And my Grisha,' she said with a sigh, 'would you believe it, he's
bombing Berlin. Did you read about it?'
We fell into conversation and she suggested that I come and work at
the Stomatological Clinic of the Military Medical Academy.
While I was turning this over in my mind Varya added quickly that I
had better come and see what it was like first, because one young lady
