In the cold basement, Wei Ran stuffed the red piece of chalk into the crack in the wall again, and then looked up at the sky where snowflakes had been falling.
After a while, he slowly exited the basement, sat on his sledge, wrapped himself in a blanket, slowly shook the power-generating rocker on the chair, and at the same time slowly adjusted the thick wire that served as the antenna.
From the simple loudspeaker, after bursts of tingling noise, the same radio content as that from the far away broadcast loudspeaker finally came out.
Stopping what he was doing again, Wei Ran looked carefully at the "magically modified" chair.
He didn't know where the radio system fixed on the chair was removed from, but the hand-cranked power generation system was definitely cut off from the rear half of a children's bicycle and fixed on the back of the chair.
In particular, the crank handle is just a pedal with only one side left. Even the generator, which is only the size of the smallest Coke bottle in later generations, can vaguely see the copper name brand label of "Moscow Bicycle Factory". And here.
There is also a bicycle light fixed on the seat of half the bicycle.
Gently flipping a switch connected to the bicycle light, and as he shook the pedals again, the light also turned on with a fairly dazzling light.
After flipping the switch to turn off the car lights, the wasteland-style radio immediately transmitted the passionate and powerful broadcast of Leningrad Radio.
"boom!"
Just when he stopped turning his pedals, German artillery shells once again crossed the Neva River and hit the city that had been reduced to ruins. A moment later, accompanied by the shrill sound of air defense sirens,
There was also the roar of engines overhead, as well as the distinctive terrifying bagpipe sound of Stuka dive bombers.
Inexplicably, he remembered the people he met in Stalingrad when he was sent to the battlefield by the metal book for the first time.
I am reminded of Konon, the Pravda reporter from Leningrad in the Soviet Union on the battlefield in Finland.
He must be suffering from hunger somewhere in this city right now...
Wei Ran, who was completely powerless against those bombings and shellings, muttered something, and then thought of the dental clinic next to the Moltke Bridge in Berlin.
"Compared to what you did in Stalingrad and Leningrad, what the Soviet Red Army did in Berlin is truly angelic..."
Wei Ran stood up, looked at the artillery shells passing through the sky, looked at the aerial bombs that fell to the ground freely with whistle sounds, and murmured to himself, and watched the smoke columns rising in the distance and near.
The shells fired from the anti-aircraft guns firing from everywhere exploded into black clouds of smoke near the bombers.
A moment later, the Stuka bombers that had completed their bombing mission either took off and flew away, or fell with black smoke, or exploded in the sky and turned into the last dirty aerial bomb.
After a while, the air defense siren, which was masked by the continuous sound of artillery fire, finally fell silent, and even the German artillery also died down soon after.
But in less than 10 minutes, black smoke and fire were already emitting from many places in the city in the field of vision. On the snow-covered streets outside, vehicles hurriedly passed by.
A fire truck that is a drop in the bucket.
After an unknown amount of time, Lydia, wrapped in a blanket, stumbled into the ruins.
"Are you injured?" The moment Wei Ran saw the other party, he noticed the gauze wrapped on her forehead.
"Nothing serious"
Lidya waved her hand, "A shell just landed near our office. I was scratched by the shattered glass. What about you? You weren't hurt, were you?"
"No." Wei Ran stood up as he spoke, pulling the sledge and walking out while asking, "Today...didn't you get any coal?"
"No"
Lidia sighed, "And there's even no milk. Galina can only drink honey water today. Is there any honey left?"
"Yes, there are many more," Wei Ran said, "enough for Galina to drink as milk."
Lydia responded with a bitter smile, "This is probably the only good news."
"I also caught three mice." Wei Ran gestured to the other party to sit on the sledge and said while walking back against the wind, "They are all fat."
"How long will we have enough food?" Lydia asked worriedly.
"The internal organs of those military horses are enough to last three or four days without any problem." Wei Ran paused and said tentatively, "Lydia, I plan to go outside the city to get some more horse meat in the near future."
"You want to ask if you should take Alexander and Alyosha with you?"
"right"
"There are already warriors as big as them in this city." Lydia sighed, "Victor, take them with you and give them a sledge."
"Are you going?" Wei Ran asked again.
"Of course I want to go," Lydia replied without thinking. "If you go alone, you can bring more things back, especially..."
"Especially firewood, right?"
Weiran increased the speed slightly, and after a moment's hesitation, he replied, "Comrade Matvey came to the basement at noon today. He wrote a message on the wall. We are going to meet tomorrow. Maybe we will go out of the city the day after tomorrow.
.”
Hearing this, Lidya's eyes immediately lit up, "In this case, I will ask for leave in advance tomorrow!"
This time, Wei Ran didn't say anything else, he just hunched over and hurried on with the wind on his head.
Before it got dark, the two finally returned to the concrete house next to the playground.
They hadn't seen each other for a day, but the children who were already waiting for them to take a group photo were obviously much cleaner. Even the hair of several little boys had been cut shorter.
Of course, compared to the surprises brought by these children who seemed to have been scrubbed, the gauze on Lydia's head caused them more shock.
After some explanation, Lidya hugged a little girl who had obviously washed her hair and asked, "Have you taken a shower?"
"Sister Ke Na organized us to wash it, but we just wiped our bodies and washed our hair."
The girl nestled in Lydia's arms explained with a happy smile, "During the day today, we found a lot of bath towels and soaps in a collapsed bathroom in a school, and also found a lot of unworn socks and underwear.
.”
"No wonder your hair smells so good," Lydia said with a smile, "Let's take a group photo together. After the photo is taken, I want to wash it too."
"Where are we filming?" Kona, who had obviously also washed her hair, asked immediately.
Seeing everyone looking at him, Wei Ran pointed to the door, "Just outside!"
Before he finished speaking, the two kings of children, Alexander and Alyosha, called on their classmates and moved a bench converted from a shelf to the outside of the small house.
Without any instructions at all, the little children sat in a row on the bench as if they had rehearsed it in advance. Following that, the older children also stood behind the bench, and in the middle, they were free.
There was enough room for Wei Ran, Ke Na and Lidya to stand.
Seeing this, Wei Ran pretended to take off his sack bag, and after rummaging around inside, he took out the Rolleiflex double-lens reflex camera from the metal book and started debugging it.
Soon, he pulled the sledge truck over and placed the camera on it to adjust the angle.
"Get ready!"
Wei Ran said, pressed the delayed shutter, and ran to the back of the bench as quickly as possible, standing in the gap specially left for him between Kena and Lidya.
Before he could stand completely, the children, led by Kona, shouted "Ula!" loudly and over and over again.
"Ula!"
Wei Ran also shouted along with the children, and the double-lens reflex camera mounted on the sledge also drove the shutter to open and close once after the delay ended.
"Victor, what good things did you find today?" As Alexander spoke, he had already moved to the edge of the sledge.
"You will definitely like what I found today," Wei Ran said, having already taken out three disemboweled rats from the sack.
"What about that one?"
Alexander took the mouse and looked at the chair on the sledge that was tightly wrapped in blankets, "What other good things are there?"
"Send the mouse to Kena first, and then remember to block the windows."
Wei Ran deliberately let it slip, "Also, Alyosha, take your brothers and sisters back to the basement, and remember to clear the space closest to the ventilation vent."
"Come back to the basement with me! Also, carry the bench back." Alyosha immediately greeted the younger children and carried the bench back to the warm basement.
"Aren't you installing chairs here?"
Lydia, who was holding the baby in her arms, asked curiously. Although she came back on a sledge, she didn't notice anything special about this chair that was wrapped tightly in a blanket.
"You'll find out later." As Wei Ran spoke, he had already taken out a wine bottle filled with honey and handed it to Delia.
Seeing this, Lydia smiled, took the wine bottle, and followed Kona and the children into the cement house and into the basement.
Seeing that he was the only one left outside, Wei Ran pulled the sledge into the room, locked the door, untied the chair wrapped in a blanket and walked into the basement.
"That's a chair!"
Alexander, who had always been aroused by curiosity, immediately made his judgment, but his tone was inevitably a little disappointed. Such a chair was not enough for the stove to burn for one night.
"Sh-!"
Wei Ran made a silent gesture, and then personally covered the firelight from the stove with an enamel kettle filled with snow.
It wasn't until the basement fell into darkness that he groped in the dark to untie the blanket on the chair, groped for the switch, and shook the pedals vigorously.
Driven by the crankset and chain, the remaining rear wheels of the children's bicycle tied to the back of the chair immediately began to rotate. The bulging tires also drove the generator to start humming.
"Wow--!"
Amidst the exclamations of the children, the lamp that was also removed from the bicycle emitted a dazzling beam of light, easily lighting up the basement!
"How long has it been since we last seen the light?" Lydia couldn't help but asked in a low voice.
"It's been about half a year since the power supply stopped in September," Kena next to her sniffed.
"Alexander, Alyosha, you two come over and take turns helping me generate electricity."
Wei Ran, who was still shaking his pedals, said hello, and after the two idiots came over to help, he immediately stretched out the wire that served as an antenna through the gap in the vent.
"Crack!"
As he flipped the switch, the car lights also went out amidst the exclamations of disappointment and dissatisfaction from the children. But soon, they fell into the darkness of the basement again, and the radio station's blah blah blah came.
noise.
Without moving the simple antenna, Wei Ran groped on the chair surface and found the knob for switching channels and slowly turned it. The noise coming from the simple speaker was louder and quieter, and occasionally there was short music or just a few words.
Remaining sentences.
"Zi la la...this is the Quansu...zi la la...broadcast station"
"All-Soviet Radio Station!" The children, including Lydia and Kona, all shouted the name of the channel.
"I come!"
While Kena was speaking, she had already moved the kettle on the stove. She used the light to get close to Wei Ran and took away the job of adjusting the channel. At that moment, Wei Ran even thought of spending the summer vacation at her grandma's house when she was a child.
, a money obsessed girl who competed with him for the TV remote control.
After coming back to his senses, Wei Ran gave up the job to Kona, Lydia and the other children who followed him around, but he quietly took over the job of cooking dinner.
Amid the laughter brought by the children who took turns rocking the pedals and clearly regarded the power generation job as a game, the rudimentary radio also played various news intermittently.
This chapter is not finished yet, please click on the next page to continue reading the exciting content! Some of the news comes from Moscow, some from distant Stalingrad and even more distant Kazan, and even the factories of Yebao and Irkutsk
The lumberyards, some of them, come from the city where they live.
But those news brought great encouragement and confidence to survive to the children and women in this basement who were completely powerless against the war.
At the same time, Wei Ran also secretly added some energy-rich meat oil to the broth at night.
This night, for the first time, the children turned their attention from dinner to the various sounds coming from the broken speaker tied to the leg of the chair, so much so that they did not notice at all. The honey water after the meal seemed to be better than
It was a bit thicker in the past.
These children, including Lidya and Kena, did not even notice that Weiran emptied all the large glass jars containing chemicals on the first floor shelves under the pretext of peeing and escaped, and filled them with the last time.
The fuel taken from the fuel tank of the crashed plane when we went to the front line.
Almost as soon as he emptied the oil barrels and placed the glass jars filled with fuel in the corner of the shelf, Lydia came up with a bucket of hot water, a piece of soap and a towel.
Seeing this, Wei Ran immediately gave up the first floor to Lidya, who obviously wanted to wash her body, and returned to the basement where the broadcast was still playing.
That night, before going to bed, many children urged Wei Ran on the excuse of "stinky feet". He took a bucket of hot water, towels and soap prepared for himself in advance, and went upstairs to scrub his body.
By the way, I also put on new socks and underwear that the children found in the ruins of the school.
Although he was "disliked" by the children, he knew that this just proved that these suffering children were developing for the better little by little.
What about tomorrow?
Wei Ran, who was lying on the sponge cushion, couldn't help but start to look forward to what kind of good news Matvey would bring after meeting him tomorrow.
