Authors: Vasily Grossman
Back at
the railway station, Ivan Grigoryevich began to feel that there was no point in wandering about Leningrad any longer. He stood inside the cold, high building and pondered. And it is possible that one or two of the people who passed by the gloomy old man looking up at the black departures board may have thought, “There—a Russian from the camps, a man at a crossroads, contemplating, choosing which path to follow.”
But he was not choosing a path; he was thinking.
During the course of his life, dozens of interrogators had understood that he was neither a monarchist, nor a Socialist Revolutionary, nor a Social Democrat; that he had never been part of either the Trotskyist or the Bukharinist opposition. He had never been an Orthodox Christian or an Old Believer; nor was he a Seventh-Day Adventist.
There in the station, thinking about the painful days he had just spent in Moscow and Leningrad, he remembered a conversation with a tsarist artillery general who had at one time slept next to him on the bedboards of a camp barrack. The old man had said, “I’m not leaving the camp to go anywhere else. It’s warm in here. There are people I know. Now and again someone gives me a lump of sugar, or a bit of pie from a food parcel.”
He had met such old men more than once. They had lost all desire to leave the camp. It was their home. They were fed at regular hours. Kind comrades sometimes gave them little scraps. There was the warmth of the stove.
Where indeed were they to go? In the calcified depths of their hearts some of them stored memories of the brilliance of the chandeliers in the palaces of
Tsarskoye Selo
, or of the winter sun in Nice. Others remembered their neighbor, Mendeleyev, coming around to drink tea with them; or they remembered Scriabin, Repin, or the young Blok. Others preserved, beneath ash that was still warm, the memories of Plekhanov, Gershuni, and Trigoni, of friends of the great Zhelyabov. There were occasions when old men released from a camp had asked to be readmitted. The whirl of life outside had knocked them off their feet. Their legs were weak and trembling, and they had been terrified by the cold and the solitude of the vast cities.
Ivan Grigoryevich now felt like going back again behind the barbed wire himself. He wanted to seek out those who had got to feel so accustomed to their barrack stoves, so at home with their warm rags and their bowls of thin gruel. He wanted to say to them, “Yes, freedom really is terrifying.”
And he would have told these frail old men how he had visited a close relative, how he had stood outside the home of the woman he loved, how he had bumped into a comrade from his student days who had offered to help him. And then he would have gone on to say to these old men of the camps that there is no higher happiness than to leave the camp, even blind and legless, to creep out of the camp on one’s stomach and die—even only ten yards from that accursed barbed wire.
When he
at last succeeded, after some difficulty, in finding himself a job and somewhere to live, Ivan Grigoryevich felt a sense of peace and sadness. He had been taken on as a metalworker in a small workshop that employed the disabled. The sacred stamp, that of a residence permit, appeared in his passport, and he began living in a small room that he rented for just forty old rubles a month from the widow of one Sergeant Mikhalyov, who had died in the war.
Anna Sergeyevna was thin and, although her hair was going gray, she was still young. With her lived her twelve-year-old nephew, the son of a sister who had died. He had a pale face and he went around in a jacket that had been much patched and darned. He was the kind of astonishingly quiet, timid, and inquisitive boy that you find only in an extremely poor family.
On the wall there was a photograph of Sergeant Mikhalyov, looking rather gloomy, as if he already foresaw his fate. Anna Sergeyevna’s son was doing his military service—as a guard in a labor camp. A photograph of him, with fat cheeks and short, close-clipped hair, hung beside that of his father.
Sergeant Mikhalyov had gone missing during the first days of the war. His unit had been annihilated, not far from the frontier, by German tanks, and there had been no one to give evidence as to whether Mikhalyov had been left on the battlefield, killed by submachine-gun fire, or whether he had surrendered to the Germans. And so the authorities had refused Anna Sergeyevna’s
application for a pension
.
Anna Sergeyevna worked as a cook, in a canteen. Nevertheless, she did not live well. Her elder sister, who worked on a collective farm, once sent her a food parcel for their orphaned nephew: round loaves made from rye flour and bran, and a jar of cloudy honey with bits of wax in it.
And if ever the chance arose, Anna Sergeyevna used, for her part, to send food parcels to her sister on the collective farm: flour, sunflower oil, and, sometimes, white bread and sugar.
Ivan Grigoryevich could not understand how, working in a kitchen, Anna Sergeyevna could be so pale and thin. Among a crowd of prisoners, it had always been easy to recognize the fat face of a cook.
Anna Sergeyevna did not ask Ivan Grigoryevich about his past in the camps. (He had been questioned in great detail by the workshop personnel officer.) But she was a woman of understanding—and she understood a great deal simply from observing Ivan Grigoryevich.
He was able to sleep on bare boards; he drank plain hot water with neither tea nor sugar; he ate stale bread; he wore
footcloths
rather than socks
. He had no bed linen, but she noticed that his shirt collar was always clean, even though the shirt had been washed so many times that it had gone yellow. And in the mornings he always took out a chipped, battered little box that had once contained fruit drops and that now contained his washing things; he would brush his teeth and carefully soap his face, his neck, and his arms up to his elbows.
He found it hard to get used to the silence at night. For decades he had been accustomed to the polyphony of snores; to all the snuffling, muttering, and groaning of the hundreds of men asleep in the barrack; to the knocking of the night watchman’s rattle; or to the grinding of wheels of a prisoner transport train. He had been alone only in the punishment cell and during one period of the initial investigation, when he had been kept in solitary confinement for three and a half months. But the silence at night now was not the tense silence of solitary confinement.
He had been lucky to find the job in the workshop. In the town park he had got to talking to a consumptive man whose back was so bent that it looked like a sledge runner standing on end, and this man had told him that he was giving up his job as a bookkeeper in a cooperative for the disabled and was going to leave the town. He was leaving, he explained, because he did not want to be buried in a town where the cemetery was located in a swamp and the coffins were all floating in water. He wanted to lie in comfort after his death. He had saved up for an oak coffin; he had bought some good-quality red cloth to line it; and he had also stocked up on brass-headed nails—the kind you see on the leather-upholstered benches in the railway station. He had no wish at all to be soaking in water along with all these treasures.
He spoke about all this in the voice of a man about to move to a new, more comfortable apartment.
It was on the recommendation of “the man with the new apartment,” as he privately christened him, that Ivan Grigoryevich managed to get himself taken on at the cooperative, which produced locks and keys, as well as tinning and soldering kitchen utensils. Ivan Grigoryevich’s past experience came in useful—at one time he had been a metalworker in a camp repair shop.
The other workers included injured veterans from the Great Patriotic War, as well as men who had been crippled in accidents in factories or on the roads and railways; there were even three old men who had been crippled as long ago as the First World War. There was also Mordan, another old-timer from the camps; he had formerly lived in Leningrad and worked in the
Putilov Factory
. He had been
sentenced under Article 58
in 1936 and had been freed after the end of the war. Mordan did not want to return to Leningrad, where his wife and daughter had died during the Siege, and he had moved to this southern town to live with his sister.
The other workers were, for the main part, good-humored people who preferred to look on the bright side of things. Now and again, however, one of them would have a fit, and his screams as he began to writhe on the floor would mingle with the banging of hammers and the squeal of files.
Ptashkovsky, a tinsmith with a gray mustache, had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War (people said he was Austrian, just pretending to be a Pole). Suddenly his arms would go completely numb and he would freeze there on his little stool, his hammer raised in the air, his face immobile and haughty. Someone would have to shake him by the shoulder to bring him out of this paralysis. There had been an occasion when one man had a fit, and this proved catching; in different corners of the workshop young and old alike had writhed on the floor and screamed.
There was one thing very new for Ivan Grigoryevich: he was working as a free laborer, with no guards escorting him to his workplace, with no sentries looking down from their watchtowers. This felt astonishingly good. It was also strange: the work was much the same, the tools were familiar, but no one called you a shit and neither
thieves
nor
bitche
s
threatened you or shook their bludgeons at you.
Ivan Grigoryevich quickly found out what people did to increase their meager earnings. Some people made teapots and saucepans out of materials they had bought themselves, selling them through the cooperative at the official price but keeping the money. Others made private agreements to do repair jobs for customers, not writing out any bills or receipts. Once again, they charged the official price, neither more nor less.
Mordan, a man whose hands looked big enough to be used for shoveling winter snow off the sidewalks, talked during one of their lunch breaks about an incident the previous day in the apartment next to his own. Five people lived in this apartment: a lathe operator, a tailor, an electrician who worked in a small factory, and two widows. One of these widows worked in a sewing workshop, the other as a cleaner in the building of the town soviet. And then on one of their days off the two widows met unexpectedly in the police station; officers from the Department for the Struggle Against Speculation and the Theft of Socialist Property had picked them up on the street for selling the string shopping bags that they wove at night in their rooms, neither of them saying a word to the other about what she was doing. The police then searched the apartment and discovered that the tailor was making boys’ and women’s coats at night. The electrician, for his part, had installed a small electric stove under the floorboards; on it he baked wafers that his wife sold in the market. As for the lathe operator from the Red Torch factory, he turned out to be a nighttime cobbler; his specialty was smart ladies’ shoes. And the widows were not only weaving string bags but also knitting ladies’ cardigans.
Mordan made his listeners laugh as he acted out, first, how the electrician had shouted that the wafers were for his family, and then, how the theft and speculation inspector had asked him how long his family would take to get through seventy pounds of dough. In the end, each speculator had been fined three hundred rubles. Each had been reported to his or her workplace—and each had been threatened with deportation, “in order to purge Soviet life of parasites and unproductive elements.”
Mordan liked to use elevated words. Examining a damaged lock, he would say gravely, “Yes, the key doesn’t react at all on the lock.”
Once, as they were going down the street together after finishing work, Mordan suddenly said to Ivan Grigoryevich, “It’s not only because of my wife and daughter that I didn’t go back to Leningrad. It’s the Putilov proletariat...As a worker myself, I can’t bear to see what’s happened to them. They can’t even go out on strike. How can we call ourselves workers if we don’t have the right to strike?”
In the evenings Anna Sergeyevna would bring some food back for her nephew: some soup in a little tin can, a main course in a clay pot.
“Maybe you’d like something to eat?” she would say quietly to Ivan Grigoryevich. “We’ve got plenty.”
“But you don’t eat yourself,” Ivan Grigoryevich would reply. “I’ve noticed.”
“I eat all day—because of my work,” she said once. Guessing what he was thinking, she went on, “But I do get very tired.”
At first Ivan Grigoryevich had thought that there was something unkind about his landlady’s face. Then he realized he had been wrong: she was a kind woman.
Sometimes she talked about life on the collective farm. She had been a brigade leader; for a while she had even been the farm chairman. She explained to him that the collective farms often failed to fulfill the plan. Too little land had been sown; or there would be a severe drought; or the land had been squeezed dry and it no longer yielded anything; or everyone except the old women and children had managed to get away to the city...And if a collective farm failed to deliver its quota of produce, then its members would receive only six or seven kopeks per
labor day
, plus a hundred grams of grain. And there were years when they did not receive even a single gram. And people don’t like working for nothing...The collective farmers went about in rags. Clean black bread, without the addition of potatoes and acorns, was—like cake—something they ate only on special occasions. Once Anna Sergeyevna had brought her older sister some white bread, and her sister’s children had been afraid to eat it; they had never seen white bread before. As for the peasants’ huts, they were all falling apart—for lack of new timber.
Ivan Grigoryevich listened to Anna Sergeyevna and watched her. She gave off a soft light of kindness and femininity. For decades he had hardly seen any women, but what endless stories he had heard about them in the barracks. Sad stories, filthy stories, bloody stories. And the women in these stories were either so degraded as to be worse than animals or else so pure and sublime as to stand above the saints. But the prisoners had been no more able to do without their thoughts of women than they had been able to do without their ration of bread. Women had been with them all the time—in their talk, in the purest and in the dirtiest of their dreams and reveries.
Since his release Ivan Grigoryevich had seen beautiful, elegant women on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad, and he had sat at a table with the gray-haired, still-beautiful Maria Pavlovna. But nothing—neither his grief on learning that the love of his youth had betrayed him, nor the charm of elegant female beauty, nor the sense of comfort and well-being in the home of Maria Pavlovna—nothing had made him feel what he felt as he listened to Anna Sergeyevna, as he looked at her sad eyes, at a face that might be faded but that was still sweet, still young.
But then this was not really so very strange. How could it be? It was simply what had always happened, what had happened for millennia, between a man and a woman.
Anna Sergeyevna went on talking about the collective farm: “Forcing hungry people to go out and work in the fields became more than my soul could bear. Lenin may have been right to say that
a cook can govern the State
, but that certainly isn’t true of me
. Women working on the threshing machine used to make themselves special stockings and sew them into the insides of their skirts. They used to fill these stockings with grain. It was my job to search them and start criminal proceedings against them. But the minimum sentence for theft of collective-farm property is seven years. And the women had children. I used to lie awake at night and think it all through: the State was taking grain from the collective farm for six kopeks per kilo and selling a loaf of bread for a ruble. And in
our
collective farm we hadn’t been given so much as a gram of grain for four years. And if someone steals a fistful of grain—of the grain that they have, like it or not, sown themselves, they get seven years...No, I just couldn’t go along with it. And so some fellow villagers got me a job here in a canteen, feeding people. Here I hear workers say, ‘In spite of everything, life’s better here in the town.’ A construction worker gets two and a half rubles for hanging a door and putting in a lock. If he does the same job privately, on his day off, he gets paid fifty rubles. So he gets twenty-five times less from the State. All the same, the workers are right—the State really does take still more than that from the peasants. The way I see it, the State takes too much from everyone, both in towns and in villages. I know it has to pay for houses of recreation so that people can go on holiday, and for schools and tractors, and for defense...I do understand all that, but I still think it takes too much from all of us. It should take less.”