The 900 Days Read Online Free Page A

to bed. The city was quiet in the hours before morning—quiet but lighted by a refracted luminosity which flattened the colors, melted out the shadows and washed the great stone buildings with eggshell tints. From a distance came the sound of young voices. They were singing a popular Soviet song: “ Daleko . . . daleko . . . Far away ... far away,” a plaintive song of a lover far from his sweetheart and home. The chant rose clear and fresh, and down the street appeared a band of students, the girls’ dresses white against the darkness of the pavement, the boys in light shirts and navy-blue trousers. Their arms were linked and they slowly walked, singing with a beauty that was rare and unearthly.
    For the most part Leningrad now slept, except for wandering youngsters. Over on the Petrograd side the writer Vera Ketlinskaya, walking home along the Kirov Prospekt, watched a slim young boy pause and lift a girl to his shoulders so she could pick a spray of jasmine from an overhanging limb. The boy and girl came up to the Kamenny Ostrov Bridge over the Malaya Neva River. The draw was raised and they waited at the embankment, the girl shivering in the coolness of the night. When the boy tried to put his arm around her, she pulled away willfully and said: “One thing I would never be so stupid as to do is to marry you!”
    “Why not?” the boy asked in despair. “Why not?”
    “That’s what I’m trying to understand myself,” the girl said.
    Finally, the drawbridge was let down. The boy and girl silently crossed over, the girl still holding the sprig of jasmine. They parted at the corner; then the girl called back: “Fedya!”
    “What?” the boy replied.
    “Nothing. Come by day after tomorrow. I’ll give you back your books.”
    “All right,” the boy said. “Leave them with your mother if you’re not home. I’ll drop in during the afternoon.”
    The young couple vanished. Now the avenue stretched empty and quiet. Leningrad was sleeping through the night that was no night . . . the longest of the white nights.

2 ♦ Not All Slept
    NOT EVERYONE SLEPT THAT NIGHT.
    Not Army General Kirill A. Meretskov, Deputy Commissar of Defense, who boarded the Red Arrow express in Moscow at midnight, June 21, on an urgent mission to Leningrad. Hour after hour he stood looking out the window of his polished-mahogany compartment with its heavy brass fittings, its Brussels carpet, its French plumbing. He was riding in an old International car of the French Wagon-Lits Company, a heritage of the imperial past. North of Moscow the searchlight of the Red Arrow’s locomotive cut through the dusk and, then, as the train hurtled down the straight course laid out by the engineers of Czar Nicholas I, the horizon slowly lightened. Meretskov knew this country well. During the years 1939–40 he had headed the Leningrad Military District. It was he who commanded the Soviet troops in the winter war on Finland. He had known Leningrad since the days of the Revolution. Almost every mile of broken birch and fir forest between Moscow and Leningrad was familiar to him.
    As the landscape spread out in the cool light, he stared from the window, watching the sun rise in a pale-blue sky. The train plunged through the deep green of the forest and then out across watery marshes. Suddenly he heard the wheels echo hollowly on a bridge, and before him appeared the quiet waters of the Volkhov River. Then again swamps, more fir forests, more swamps.
    General Meretskov felt a sense of mounting excitement as he saw the Leningrad land again, excitement and a sense of concern, a sense of pride and a sense of history. Pushkin’s line ran through his mind:
    Show your colors, City of Peter,
And stand steadfast like Russia. . . .
    He watched silently at the window, his face tense and thoughtful as the train sped on toward Peter’s capital. There was much to be done as soon as he arrived.
    In the barnlike Leningrad offices of the Baltic Merchant Fleet beside the