Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman

  Potato peelings, dogs, young frogs, snails, rotten cabbage leaves, stale beet, decayed horse-meat, cat-meat, the flesh of crows and jackdaws, damp rotting grain, leather from belts and shoes, glue, earth impregnated with slops from the officers’ kitchen – all this is food. This is what trickles through the dam. People struggle to obtain all this; they then divide it up, exchange it and steal it from one another.

  On the eleventh day of the journey, at Khutor Mikhailovsky, the guards dragged the now unconscious Semyonov out of the wagon and handed him over to the station authorities. The commandant, a middle-aged German, glanced at the half-dead soldier lying by the wall and turned to his interpreter.

  ‘Let him crawl to the village. He’ll be dead by tomorrow. There’s no need to shoot him.’

  Semyonov dragged himself to the village. At the first hut he was refused entrance.

  ‘There’s nothing here for you. Go away!’ said an old woman’s voice from behind the door.

  No one answered when he knocked at the second hut. Either it was empty or the door was bolted on the inside.

  The door of the third hut was half-open. He walked into the porch; no one challenged him. He went inside.

  He could smell the warmth. He felt dizzy and lay down on the bench by the door. Breathing heavily, he looked round at the white walls, the icons, the table and the stove. After the cattle-pen of the camp, all this seemed very strange.

  A shadow passed by the window. A woman walked in, caught sight of Semyonov and screamed.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Semyonov didn’t say anything. The answer was obvious enough.

  That day his life and fate was decided not by the merciless forces of warring States, but by a human being – old Khristya Chunyak.

  She gave him a mug of milk. He drank, swallowing it greedily but with difficulty. After he finished the mug, he felt sick. He vomited over and over again; he felt he was being torn apart. He wept, sucking in each breath as though it were his last.

  He tried to control himself. There was only one thought in his mind. He was unclean, foul – the woman would throw him out.

  Through his swollen eyes he saw her fetch a rag and start to wipe the floor. He wanted to say that he’d clear it up himself, that he’d do anything she wanted – if only she didn’t throw him out! But he could only mutter incoherently and point with his trembling fingers. Time passed; the old woman went in and out of the hut several times. She still hadn’t tried to throw him out. Perhaps she was asking a neighbour to call a German patrol or the Ukrainian police?

  She put an iron pot on the stove. The room grew hotter. Clouds of steam began to appear. The old woman’s face looked hard, hostile.

  ‘She’s going to throw me out and then disinfect the place,’ he thought to himself.

  She took some trousers and some underwear out of a trunk. She helped Semyonov undress and made his clothes into a bundle. He could smell his filthy body and the stench of his pants; they were soaked with urine and bloody excrement.

  She helped him into a bathtub. He felt the strong, rough touch of her palms on his louse-eaten body. Warm, soapy water ran over his chest and shoulders. He suddenly began to choke and tremble. He felt dizzy. Whining, swallowing down snot, he howled: ‘Máma . . . ! Mámanka . . . ! Mámanka . . . !’

  She wiped the tears from his eyes with a thick grey towel and dried his hair and shoulders. She put her hands under his armpits and lifted him onto a bench. She bent down to dry his thin, stick-like legs, slipped a shirt and some drawers over him and did up the white cloth-covered buttons.

  She poured the filthy black water into a bucket and carried it away. She spread a sheepskin jacket over the stove, covered it with a piece of striped cloth, and put a large pillow at one end. Then she lifted Semyonov into the air, as easily as if he were a chicken, and laid him out on the stove.

  He lay there in semi-delirium. His body knew that an unimaginable change had taken place: the merciless world was no longer trying to destroy a tormented beast. But he had never experienced such pain, neither in the camp nor on the journey . . . His legs ached, his fingers ached, his bones ached. His head kept filling with some damp, black sludge, then suddenly emptying and starting to spin. There were moments when he felt a twinge of pain in his heart, when it seemed to stop beating, when his insides filled with smoke and he thought Death had come for him.

  Four days passed. Semyonov climbed down from the stove and began to walk about the room. He was amazed how much food there was in the world. In the camp there had been nothing but rotten beet. He had forgotten that there were other foods than that thin, cloudy, putrid-smelling soup. And now he could see millet, potatoes, cabbage, lard . . . He could hear a cock crow.

  He was like a child who thought that the world was ruled by two magicians – one good and the other evil. He couldn’t rid himself of the fear that the evil magician might once again overpower the good magician, that the kind, warm world would vanish with all its food, that he would again be left to chew at his leather belt.

  He busied himself with trying to repair the small hand-mill; it was appallingly inefficient. His forehead would be dripping with sweat after he had ground a mere handful of damp grey flour.

  He cleaned the drive with a file and some sandpaper and then tightened the bolt between the mechanism and the grindstones. He did everything that could be expected of an intelligent mechanic from Moscow; at the end of his labours the mill worked worse than ever.

  He lay down on the stove, trying to work out how best to grind wheat. In the morning he took the mill to pieces again and rebuilt it using some cogs from an old grandfather clock.

  ‘Look, Aunt Khristya!’ he boasted, showing her the double train of gears he had contrived.

  They spoke to each other very little. She never mentioned her husband who had died in 1930, her sons who had disappeared without trace, or her daughter who had moved to Priluki and quite forgotten her. Nor did she ask him how he had been taken prisoner or where he was from – the city or the country.

  He didn’t dare go out onto the street. He would always look long and carefully through the window before going out into the yard – and then hurry back inside. If the door slammed or a mug fell to the floor, he took fright; it seemed as though everything good would come to an end, as though the magic of old Khristya Chunyak would lose its power.

  Whenever a neighbour came in, he climbed up onto the stove and tried not to breathe too loudly or sneeze. But the neighbours very seldom called round. As for the Germans – they never stayed long in the village; their billets were in the settlement by the station.

  Semyonov didn’t feel any guilt at the thought that he was enjoying warmth and peace while the war raged on around him. What he did feel was fear – fear that he might be dragged back into the world of the camps, the world of hunger

  He always hesitated before opening his eyes in the morning. The magic might have run out during the night. He might see camp guards and barbed wire; he might hear the clang of empty tins. He would listen for a while with his eyes closed, checking that Khristya was still there.

  He seldom thought about the recent past – about Commissar Krymov, Stalingrad, the camp or the train journey. But every night he cried out and shouted in his sleep. Once he even climbed down from the stove, crawled along the floor, squeezed under the bench and slept there till morning. He was unable to remember what it was he had dreamed.

  Sometimes he saw trucks drive down the village street with potatoes and sacks of grain; once he saw a car, an Opel Kapitan. It had a powerful engine and the wheels didn’t skid in the mud. His heart missed a beat as he imagined guttural voices in the porch and a German patrol bursting into the hut.

  When he asked Aunt Khristya about the Germans, she answered:

  ‘Some of them aren’t bad at all. When the front came this way, I had two of them in here. One was a student and the other an artist. They used to play with the children. Then there was a driver. He had a cat with him. When he
came back, she would run out to meet him. She must have come all the way from the frontier with him. He would sit at the table nursing her and giving her lumps of butter and bacon-fat . . . He was very good to me. He brought me firewood. Once he got me a sack of flour. But there are other Germans who kill children. They killed the old man next door. They don’t treat us like human beings – they make a filthy mess in the house and they walk around naked in front of women. And some of our own police from the village are just as bad.’

  ‘There are no beasts like German beasts,’ said Semyonov. ‘But aren’t you afraid to keep me here, Aunt Khristya?’

  She shook her head and said there were lots of freed prisoners in the countryside – though of course they were mostly Ukrainians who’d come back to their own homes. But she could say Semyonov was her nephew, the son of her sister who’d gone to Moscow with her husband.

  Semyonov knew the neighbours’ faces by now; he even knew the old woman who’d refused to let him in on the first day. He knew that in the evening the girls went to the cinema at the station, that every Saturday there was a dance. He wanted to know what films the Germans showed, but only the old people called round and none of them ever went there.

  One neighbour showed him a letter from her daughter who’d been deported to Germany. There were several passages he had to have explained to him. In one paragraph the girl had written: ‘Vanka and Grishka flew in; they mended the windows.’ Vanya and Grisha were in the air force: there must have been Soviet air-raids. Later in the same letter she wrote: ‘It rained just like in Bakhmach.’ That was another way of saying the same thing – at the beginning of the war the railway station at Bakhmach had been bombed.

  That evening a tall, thin old man came to see Khristya. He looked Semyonov up and down and said, with no trace of a Ukrainian accent:

  ‘Where are you from, young man?’

  ‘I was a prisoner.’

  ‘We’re all of us prisoners now.’

  The old man had served in the artillery under Tsar Nikolay and he could recall the commands with astonishing accuracy. He began to rehearse them in front of Semyonov, giving the commands in Russian, in a hoarse voice, and then reporting their execution in a young, ringing voice with a Ukrainian accent. He had obviously remembered his own voice and that of his commanding officer as they had sounded years ago.

  Then he began abusing the Germans. He told Semyonov that people had hoped they would do away with the kolkhozes – but they must have realized that the system had its advantages for them too. They had set up five-hut and ten-hut co-operatives, the same old ‘sections’ and ‘brigades’ under another name.

  ‘Kolkhozes, kolkhozes,’ Aunt Khristya repeated mournfully.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ asked Semyonov. ‘Of course there are kolkhozes. What do you expect?’

  ‘You be quiet!’ said the old woman. ‘Remember what you were like when you first arrived? Well, in 1930 the whole of the Ukraine was like that. When there were no more nettles, we ate earth . . . Every last grain of corn was taken away. My man died. As for me – I couldn’t walk, my whole body swelled up, I lost my voice . . .’

  Semyonov was astonished that old Khristya could once have starved just like he had. He had imagined hunger and death to be powerless before the mistress of the good hut.

  ‘Were you kulaks?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean? Everyone was dying. It was worse than the war.’

  ‘Are you from the country?’ asked the old man.

  ‘No, I was born in Moscow and so was my father.’

  ‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘if you’d been here during collectivization, you’d have kicked the bucket in no time. You know why I stayed alive? Because I know plants. And I’m not talking about things like acorns, linden leaves, goosefoot and nettles. They all went in no time. I know fifty-six plants a man can eat. That’s how I stayed alive. It was barely spring, there wasn’t a leaf on the trees – and there was I digging up roots. I know everything, brother – every root, every grass, every flower, every kind of bark. Cows, sheep and horses can die of hunger – but not me. I’m more herbivorous than any of them.’

  ‘You’re from Moscow?’ said Khristya very slowly. ‘I hadn’t realized you were from Moscow.’

  The old man left and Semyonov went to bed. Khristya sat there, her head in her hands, gazing into the black night sky.

  There had been a fine harvest in 1930. The wheat stood like a tall, thick wall. It was taller than she was. It came right up to the shoulders of her Vasily . . .

  A low wailing hung over the village; the little children kept up a constant, barely audible whine as they crawled about like living skeletons. The men wandered aimlessly around the yards, exhausted by hunger, barely able to breathe, their feet swollen. The women went on searching for something to eat, but everything had already gone – nettles, acorns and linden leaves, uncured sheepskins, old bones, hooves and horns that had been lying around on the ground . . . Meanwhile the young men from the city went from house to house, hardly glancing at the dead and the dying, searching cellars, digging holes in barns, prodding the ground with iron bars . . . They were searching for the grain hidden away by the kulaks.

  One sultry day Vasily Chunyak had breathed his last breath. Just then the young men from the city had come back to the hut. One of them, a man with blue eyes and an accent just like Semyonov’s, had walked up to the corpse and said:

  ‘They’re an obstinate lot, these kulaks. They’d rather die than give in.’

  Khristya gave a sigh, crossed herself and laid out her bedding.

  51

  Viktor had expected his work to be appreciated by only a narrow circle of theoretical physicists. In fact, people were constantly telephoning him – and not only physicists, but also mathematicians and chemists whom he hadn’t even met. Often they asked him to clarify certain points; his equations were of some complexity.

  Delegates from one of the student societies came to the Institute to ask him to give a lecture to final-year students of physics and mathematics; he gave two lectures at the Academy itself. Markov and Savostyanov said that his work was being discussed in most of the Institute’s laboratories. In the special store, Lyudmila overheard an exchange between the wives of two scientists: ‘Where are you in the queue?’ ‘Behind Shtrum’s wife.’ ‘The Shtrum?’

  Viktor was by no means indifferent to this sudden fame – though he tried not to show it. The Scientific Council of the Institute decided to nominate his work for a Stalin Prize. Viktor didn’t attend the meeting himself, but that evening he couldn’t take his eyes off the phone; he was waiting for Sokolov to say what had happened. The first person to speak to him, however, was Savostyanov.

  With not even a trace of his usual mockery or cynicism, Savostyanov repeated: ‘It’s a triumph, a real triumph!’

  Academician Prasolov had said that the walls of the Institute had seen no work of such importance since the research of his late friend Lebedev on the pressure of light. Professor Svechin had talked about Viktor’s mathematics, showing that there was an innovative element even in his methods. He had said that it was only the Soviet people who were capable of devoting their energy so selflessly to the service of the people at a time of war. Several other men, Markov among them, had spoken, but the most striking and forceful words of all had been Gurevich’s.

  ‘He’s a good man,’ said Savostyanov. ‘He didn’t hold back – he said what needed to be said. He called your work a classic, of the same importance as that of the founders of atomic physics, Planck, Bohr and Fermi.’

  ‘That is saying something,’ thought Viktor.

  Sokolov phoned immediately afterwards.

  ‘It’s impossible to get through to you today. The line’s been engaged for the last twenty minutes.’

  He too was excited and enthusiastic.

  ‘I forgot to ask Savostyanov how the voting went,’ said Viktor.

  Sokolov explained that Professor Gavronov, a specialist in the history o
f physics, had voted against Viktor; in his view Viktor’s work lacked a true scientific foundation, was influenced by the idealist views of Western physicists and held out no possibilities of practical application.

  ‘It might even help to have Gavronov against it,’ said Viktor.

  ‘Maybe,’ agreed Sokolov.

  Gavronov was a strange man. He was referred to in jest as ‘The Slav Brotherhood’, on account of the fanatical obstinacy with which he tried to link all the great achievements of physics to the work of Russian scientists. He ranked such little-known figures as Petrov, Umov and Yakovlev higher than Faraday, Maxwell and Planck.

  Finally, Sokolov said jokingly:

  ‘You see, Viktor Pavlovich, Moscow’s recognized the importance of your work. Soon we’ll be banqueting in your house.’

  Marya Ivanovna then took the receiver from Sokolov and said:

  ‘Congratulations to both you and Lyudmila Nikolaevna. I’m so happy for you.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Viktor, ‘vanity of vanities.’

  Nevertheless, that vanity both excited and moved him.

  Later, when Lyudmila Nikolaevna was about to go to bed, Markov rang. He was always very au fait with the ins and outs of the official world and he talked about the Council in a different way from Sokolov and Savostyanov. Apparently, after Gurevich’s speech, Kovchenko had made everyone laugh by saying:

  ‘They’re ringing the bells in the Institute of Mathematics to celebrate Viktor Pavlovich’s work. The procession round the church hasn’t yet begun, but the banner’s been raised.’

  The ever-suspicious Markov had sensed a certain hostility behind this joke. As for Shishakov, he hadn’t said what he thought of Viktor’s work. He had merely nodded his head as he listened to the speakers – perhaps in approval, perhaps as if to say, ‘Hm, so it’s your turn now, is it?’ Indeed, he even appeared to favour the work of young Professor Molokanov on the radiographic analysis of steel. If nothing else, his research had immediate practical applications in the few factories producing high-quality metals. After the meeting, Shishakov had gone up to Gavronov and had a word with him.