[烛光生存狂]-【翻译】从列宁格勒到匈牙利

THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR

(Nachalo voiny)

The Vyritsa railroad station was located on the Vitebsk railroad line about 50 kilometers from Leningrad. That’s where the biological station of the Leningrad A.I. Gertsen [Herzen] Pedagogical Institute was located. Professor V.I. Arnold-Aliabiev was managing summer practice for the students of the Geography Department. I worked as a laboratory assistant for him – ensuring the equipment was ready for the classes, helping him conduct practical training, and managing the students’ shifts at the meteorological station.

No less than half of the students in the group were men – not boys –grown men from various trades. One of them, a worker from a lumber company near Arkhangel’sk talked of his work with surprising interest and love: how to tie rafts, how to sort logs, what signals masters on a powersaw used to communicate.

The students, especially the women, couldn’t understand how I was finding fake entries in the book of meteorological observations for the night shifts. They were convinced that I was secretly watching those on duty, but in reality the insufficient knowledge of the subject did not allow them, after missing a night shift, to put down at least a plausible fabrication. And so they would write “fog and 50 percent humidity” at the same time in the book!

It was the third week of the practice. In the afternoon on June 22 rumors of war came from somewhere. Vyritsa was not that far from Leningrad, but neither the bio-station nor the surrounding houses had a radio, a broadcast-listening [-monitoring] station, or a telephone. It was only late in the night that the idea dawned on me to find something to listen to out in a resort several kilometers from our base.

A group of students went to the resort. I went with them. The gates of the resort were locked, and the annoyed guard announced categorically:“What war – everyone’s asleep already!” The guys climbed over the fence. After some time, sleep was interrupted, a radio was turned on, people assembled around the loudspeaker. It was war!

Several days passed. Our group decreased by more than half. Students were vanishing one after another: some at the summons of a military commissariat, and others volunteered, without waiting for the summons. The Arkhangel’sk lumberjack was one of the first, but soon only girls remained.

We set up 24-hour duty shifts at the bio-station, near the phone, which was connected to a temporary line that had been laid there. I was put on the duty roster because I was considered to be one of the station’s staff. Rather than attending classes, during the day-time we dug holes for protection against possible bombings. Then we received an order to halt the practice and close the base. The students left. I had to make several trips in the commuter train to evacuate all of the instruments. There weren’t a lot of them, but they were fragile and required cautious handling.

Everything seemed familiar to the 1939–1940 period, the last time that war fever gripped the city [ed., The Soviet–Finnish War]. Strips of paper were glued crosswise to all of the windows of the city’s buildings. People with gas masks were on duty at every building entrance. There was no question of blackouts yet – even without lights, you could see everything during the summer’s white night. Otherwise, the city was calm. Although many walked along the streets with their gas masks in their hands, public

transportation was working efficiently, the stores were full of merchandise, and a brisk trade went on at every street corner, where vendors sold carbonated water flavored with various kinds of fruity syrups. A heat wave began on June 22 – it was the first really hot day in Leningrad during that summer.

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