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lights went out again. ‘Priyekhali,’ somebody remarked. ‘We’ve arrived.’

2
First Contact
    It was very dark outside, except for several cars and a bus, with their headlights half on. ‘How far are we from Leningrad?’ I asked. ‘Not very far,’ one of the crew said evasively. ‘Smart work,’ somebody said, ‘bringing the plane in like this, through the dark. Wonderful fellows, these civilian airmen of ours. They’re as nearly infallible as a man can be. Millions of miles some of them have flown, and never a hitch.’ We followed a black shadow with a torch, and were taken to one of the cars. An officer with a hard face asked to see our documents. He argued with our colonel, and slowly took down all particulars in the light of his torch. Our colonel showed no impatience, and when at last we were allowed to drive off he said, ‘This is Leningrad. This is the Front. They’re bound to be sticky.’
    At first we drove through the dark along bumpy country roads; then we reached some main road. A good deal of traffic was coming the other way, with dim headlights on. Then we came to the first houses. It was hard to distinguish them, but no sky was showing through the windows – they had not been burned out. And behind some windows there were faint streaks of light. ‘It’s hard to drive in the dark,’ said the driver, an elderly man judging by the sound of his voice. ‘It’s, my fourth blackout winter.’ ‘Third,’ I thought, and then it occurred to me that Leningrad had been in the war-zone during the Finnish war too – 1939–40 – the winter of 1940–1 alone had been completely peaceful here. The winter of the London blitz.
    We drove on in silence, but everybody was straining his eyes to see Leningrad. There wasn’t much to see. More houses, all seemingly intact, then one or two that were burned out. We were now on the outskirts of the town. Every few minutes an empty or nearly empty tramcar would come in the opposite direction. These places were still unfamiliar to me. ‘Okhta,’ said the driver, laconically. So that’s where we were, on the eastern outskirts of the town, beyond the river. The back of beyond – the subject of an allegedly true funny story I had heard years ago about a drunk who, sticking his head from under the cover of a horse-sledge says in bewildered drunken tones to the driver: ‘Driver, where have you brought me?’ ‘Where you told me to go – to the Vasili Island.’ ‘You ass,’ says the drunk, ‘if I had told you to drive me to Okhta, you would have driven me to Okhta, eh? I live in the Nevsky Prospect, near the Admiralty, you ass.’ (If it isn’t funny, try to imagine the same scene in a London taxi, and replace the place-names by say, Golders Green, Tooting and ‘off Trafalgar Square’ respectively.) But now Okhta had a modern unfamiliar outline – with blocks of flats and large five- and six-storey buildings. We turned right and crossed the Neva. To the right, against the dark sky, was a cluster of large buildings, with a church dome. ‘There’s the Smolny,’ somebody said. The Young Ladies’ Academy, where the Revolution was born; Lenin’s headquarters in October. The seat of the first Soviet Government. Then we drove down a long avenue. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Soviet Avenue,’ said the driver. For the first time I asked my ever-recurring, irritating question: ‘What was it called before?’ ‘Suvorov Avenue,’ he said. ‘With the Suvorov Museum?’ I asked. ‘Yes, there it is,’ he replied, pointing to a large unmistakably bombed-out house. ‘Destroyed in ’41. Pity. I remembered the large mural painting of Russian troops crossing the Devil’s Bridge on the Saint Gothard Pass during Suvorov’s last Italian campaign. Funny though, to have changed ‘Suvorov Avenue’ to ‘Soviet Avenue’ – it was done during the days when Suvorov wasn’t a suitable name to give a street. There were few people in the streets, but some traffic,