struck her head hard against the wall several times.
'It was the first time in my life that I saw anyone actually beating his
head against a wall. She was striking the wall not with her forehead, but
sort of sideways, probably so that it should hurt more. And she did not
cry. Her face was expressionless, as though she were engaged in some
routine procedure. Then suddenly she pressed her face to the wall and
flung her arms wide.
She knew. All that hard, wearisome day, when non-urgent operations
had had to be put off because there were not enough hands to deal with
new arrivals, when there was nowhere to put the patients and everyone
was fretting and upset, she alone had worked as though nothing had
happened. In Ward No. 1 she had been teaching one poor lad with a
lolling tongue to speak-and she had known. She had told the cook off in
a dull voice because the potatoes had not been properly mashed and got
stuck in the patients' tubes-and she had known. Her brusque, firm voice
could be heard now in one ward, now in another, and nobody in the
world would have guessed that she knew.
December 8, 1941. As clearly as I used to remember the days when
Sanya and I met, I now remember the days when I got letters from him.
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The letter I received from him on September 23rd, in which he wrote of
Grisha Trofimov's death, was the third and the last. I have received
nothing since.
I am writing this in the light of an oil 'blinker', wrapped up in a
winter coat. There is a terrible draught from the window, which has
been smashed in by an air blast and covered up with pillows, and every
other minute I have to take a tin with hot water in my hands to warm
them. But I must write this, even though my fingers are freezing and my
head is reeling from hunger.
There have been no letters. I don't think I had ever worked so hard in
my life as I did that autumn. I attended the Red Cross courses, went to
the front and was even mentioned in despatches for bringing back
wounded men under heavy fire. But still no letters. In vain I searched
for Sanya's name among the airmen who had been decorated for raids
on Berlin, Konigsberg and Ploesti.
But I worked like mad, gathering up speed like a runaway train that
tears ahead, ignoring signals, sounding its whistle as it plunges into the
autumn night.
Then came a day when the train rushed past me, leaving me lying
under the embankment, lonely, broken, steeped in misery.
Varya was with me that evening. The sirens started off, as usual, at
seven thirty. We sat through the first alert, though Rosalia phoned and
in the name of the Self-Defence Group ordered us to go down. We sat
through the second alert too. The bomb-shelters always depressed me,
and I had long decided that if I was to be one of the 'unlucky' ones I'd
rather it was out in the open, under Leningrad's skies. Besides, we were
roasting coffee—an important job, seeing that this was not only coffee,
but flatcakes too, if you added a little flour to the grounds. Leningrad
was beginning to starve.
But a third alert came on, bombs fell nearby and the house rocked, as
though it had taken a step forward then back. The saucepans came
tumbling down in the kitchen. Varya took my arm and marched me
downstairs, ignoring my protests. Women were standing in the dark
entrance hall, talking in quick anxious tones. I recognised the voice of
the yardkeeper, a Tatar woman named Gul Ijberdeyeva, whom
everybody in the building called Masha.
'Number Nine's hit,' she was saying. 'Hit hard. House manager-he
give order-take spades, go, dig him up.'
'Number Nine' was the building which housed Delicatessen Shop No.
9.'
'Take spade, come along. All come! Who has no spade will get spade
there. Come on, missus! When you get hit, they'll dig you out.'
'Number Nine' had been cleft into two. The bomb had gone through
all five floors. Through the black jagged gap you could see a narrow
Leningrad courtyard with fantastic broken shadows. The facade of the
building had collapsed, blocking the roadway with its debris. Sticking
out of the tangled mass of rubble, furniture and steel girders was the
black wing of a grand piano. A sideboard hung suspended from the
fourth floor, and a coat and a lady's hat could distinctly be seen on the
wall.
It was quiet all round. People approached the building at a leisurely
pace, oddly calm, and their voices, too, were slow and guarded. A
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woman started to scream, then threw herself on the ground. She was
raised and carried aside and all grew quiet again. A dead old man in a
coat white with plaster and rubble lay on the pavement. People stopped
short, peered into his face and slowly walked round him. The basement
was flooded. Something had to be done first about the water. A slim,
agile sergeant, who was in charge of the rescue work, set me to man the
pump.
Flushed and beautiful, Varya wrenched mattresses, blankets and
pillows out of the heap of wrecked furniture, laid out the injured on
them, applied artificial respiration, shouted at the stretcher-bearers,
and kept the two ambulance doctors on the run, obedient to her every
word.
Hitching up her skirt, she went down into the basement and came out
carrying a wet man across her shoulder. The sergeant ran up to help,
followed by the stretcher-bearers.
'Sit him up!' she commanded.
It was a soldier or an officer. He had no cap and his army coat was
sodden and black from the water. They sat him up. His head dropped on
his chest. Varya took him by the chin, and his head lolled back like a
doll's. There was something familiar about that pale face with the dark-
yellow matted hair clinging to his forehead, and I worked for several
minutes, trying to recollect where I had seen him.
