Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman

  ‘There is one possibility, however, though it will attract criticism. We can give Loshakova the position of junior assistant. And she can keep her card for the special store. Yes – that I can promise you.’

  ‘No,’ said Viktor. ‘That would be insulting.’

  ‘Viktor Pavlovich, are you saying that the Soviet State should be governed by one set of laws and Shtrum’s laboratory by another?’

  ‘No, I’m simply asking for Soviet law to be applied. According to Soviet law, Loshakova cannot be dismissed. And while we’re on the subject of law, Kasyan Terentyevich,’ Viktor went on, ‘why did you refuse to confirm the appointment of young Landesman? He’s extremely talented.’

  Kovchenko bit his lip.

  ‘Viktor Pavlovich, he may have the abilities you require, but you must understand that there are other circumstances to be considered by the Institute.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Viktor. ‘I see.’

  Then he asked in a whisper:

  ‘The questionnaire, I suppose? Has he got relatives abroad?’

  Kovchenko shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Kasyan Terentyevich,’ said Viktor, ‘let me continue this very pleasant conversation. Why are you delaying the return from Kazan of my colleague Anna Naumovna Weisspapier? She has, incidentally, completed a thesis. What contradiction are you going to find now between my laboratory and the State?’

  A martyred expression appeared on Kovchenko’s face.

  ‘Viktor Pavlovich, why this interrogation? Please understand that choice of personnel is my responsibility.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Viktor. ‘I see.’

  He knew he was about to get extremely rude.

  ‘With all due respect, Kasyan Terentyevich,’ he went on, ‘I just can’t go on like this. Science isn’t at Dubyonkov’s beck and call – or yours. And I’m here for my work, not just to serve the obscure interests of the personnel department. I shall write to Aleksey Alekseyevich Shishakov – he can put Dubyonkov in charge of the nuclear laboratory.’

  ‘Calm down, Viktor Pavlovich. Please calm down.’

  ‘No, I can’t go on like this.’

  ‘Viktor Pavlovich, you’ve no idea how much the Institute values your work. And no one values it more than I do.’

  ‘What do I care how much you value my work?’ Viktor looked at Kovchenko’s face. Rather than humiliation, however, he saw on it an expression of eager pleasure.

  ‘Viktor Pavlovich, there is no question of your being allowed to leave the Institute,’ Kovchenko said sternly. ‘And that’s not because you’re indispensable. Do you really think that no one can replace Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum?’

  His final words were spoken almost tenderly.

  ‘You can’t do without Landesman and Weisspapier – and you think there’s no one in all Russia who can replace you?’

  He looked at Viktor. Viktor felt that at any moment Kovchenko might come out with the words that had been hovering between them all along, brushing against his eyes, hands and brain like an invisible mist.

  He bowed his head. He was no longer a professor, a doctor of science, a famous scientist who had made a remarkable discovery, a man who could be forthright and independent, arrogant and condescending. He was just a man with curly hair and a hooked nose, with a stooped back and narrow shoulders, screwing up his eyes as though he was expecting a blow on the cheek. He looked at the man in the embroidered Ukrainian shirt, and waited.

  Very quietly, Kovchenko said:

  ‘Calm down, Viktor Pavlovich, calm down. You really must calm down. Heavens, what a fuss over such a trifle!’

  Footnotes

  fn1 A Tsarist political prison.

  53

  That night, after Lyudmila and Nadya had gone to bed, Viktor began filling in the questionnaire. Nearly all the questions were the same as before the war. Their very familiarity, however, somehow renewed Viktor’s anxiety.

  The State was not concerned about the adequacy of Viktor’s mathematical equipment or the appropriateness of the laboratory apparatus for the complex experiments he was conducting; the State didn’t want to know whether the staff were properly protected from neutron radiation, whether Sokolov and Shtrum had a good working relationship, whether the junior researchers had received adequate training for their exhausting calculations, whether they realized how much depended on their constant patience, alertness and concentration.

  This was the questionnaire royal, the questionnaire of questionnaires. It wanted to know everything about Lyudmila’s father and mother and about Viktor’s grandfather and grandmother – where they had been born, where they had died, where they had been buried. In what connection had Viktor Pavlovich’s father, Pavel Iosifovich, travelled to Berlin in 1910? There was something sinister about the State’s anxious concern. Reading the questionnaire, Viktor began to doubt himself: was he really someone reliable?

  1. Surname, name and patronymic . . . Who was he, who was this man filling in a questionnaire at the dead of night? Shtrum, Viktor Pavlovich? His mother and father had never been properly married, they had separated when Viktor was only two; and on his father’s papers he had seen the name Pinkhus – not Pavel. So why was he Viktor Pavlovich? Did he know himself? Perhaps he was someone quite different – Goldman . . . or Sagaydachny? Or was he the Frenchman Desforges, alias Dubrovsky?

  Filled with doubt, he turned to the second question.

  2. Date of birth . . . year . . . month . . . day . . . (to be given according to both old and new styles). What did he know about that dark December day? Could he really claim with any confidence to have been born at that precise moment? To disclaim responsibility, should he not add the words, ‘according to’?

  3. Sex . . . Viktor boldly wrote, ‘Male’. Then he thought, ‘But what kind of man am I? A real man would never have kept silent after the dismissal of Chepyzhin.’

  4. Place of birth . . . (according to both old and new systems of administration – province, county, district, village and oblast, region, rural or urban district). Viktor wrote, ‘Kharkov’. His mother had told him he had been born in Bakhmut, but she had filled in his birth certificate two months later, after moving to Kharkov. Should he be more precise?

  5. Nationality . . . Point five. This had been so simple and insignificant before the war; now, however, it was acquiring a particular resonance.

  Pressing heavily on his pen, Viktor wrote boldly and distinctly, ‘Jew’. He wasn’t to know what price hundreds of thousands of people would soon have to pay for answering Kalmyk, Balkar, Chechen, Crimean Tartar or Jew. He wasn’t to know what dark passions would gather year by year around this point. He couldn’t foresee what fear, anger, despair and blood would spill over from the neighbouring sixth point: ‘Social origin’. He couldn’t foresee how in a few years’ time many people would answer this fifth point with a sense of fatedness – the same sense of fatedness with which the children of Cossack officers, priests, landlords and industrial magnates had once answered the sixth point.

  Nevertheless, Viktor could already sense how the lines of force were shifting, how they were now gathering around this point. The previous evening, Landesman had phoned; Viktor had told him of his failure to secure his nomination. ‘Just as I expected!’ Landesman had said angrily and reproachfully. ‘Is there something awkward in your background?’ Viktor had asked. Landesman had snorted and said, ‘There’s something awkward in my surname.’

  And while they were drinking tea that evening, Nadya had said:

  ‘Do you know, Papa, Mayka’s father said that next year they’re not going to accept a single Jew in the Institute of International Relations.’

  ‘Well,’ thought Viktor, ‘if one’s a Jew, then one’s a Jew – and one must say so.’

  6. Social origin . . . This was the trunk of a mighty tree; its roots went deep into the earth while its branches spread freely over the spacious pages of the questionnaire: social origin of mother and father, of mother’s and father’s parents . . . social orig
in of wife and wife’s parents . . . if divorced, social origin of former wife together with her parents’ occupation before the Revolution.

  The Great Revolution had been a social revolution, a revolution of the poor. Viktor had always felt that this sixth point was a legitimate expression of the mistrust of the poor for the rich, a mistrust that had arisen over thousands of years of oppression.

  Viktor wrote, ‘Petit bourgeois’. Petit bourgeois! What kind of petit bourgeois was he? Suddenly, probably because of the war, he began to doubt whether there really was such a gulf between the legitimate Soviet question about social origin and the bloody, fateful question of nationality as posed by the Germans. He remembered their evening discussions in Kazan and Madyarov’s speech about Chekhov’s attitude towards humanity.

  He thought to himself: ‘To me, a distinction based on social origin seems legitimate and moral. But the Germans obviously consider a distinction based on nationality to be equally moral. One thing I am certain of: it’s terrible to kill someone simply because he’s a Jew. They’re people like any others – good, bad, gifted, stupid, stolid, cheerful, kind, sensitive, greedy . . . Hitler says none of that matters – all that matters is that they’re Jewish. And I protest with my whole being. But then we have the same principle: what matters is whether or not you’re the son of an aristocrat, the son of a merchant, the son of a kulak; and whether you’re good-natured, wicked, gifted, kind, stupid, happy, is neither here nor there. And we’re not talking about the merchants, priests and aristocrats themselves – but about their children and grandchildren. Does noble blood run in one’s veins like Jewishness? Is one a priest or a merchant by heredity? Nonsense! Sofya Perovskaya was the daughter of a general, the daughter of a provincial governor. Have her banished! And Komissarov, the Tsarist police stooge who grabbed Karakozov, would have answered the sixth point: “petit bourgeois”. He would have been accepted by the University. Stalin said: “The son isn’t responsible for the father.” But he also said: “An apple never falls far from the tree . . .” Well, petit bourgeois it is.’

  7. Social position . . . White-collar worker? But clerks and civil servants are white-collar workers. A white-collar worker called Shtrum had elaborated the mathematics of the disintegration of atomic nuclei. Another white-collar worker called Markov hoped, with the aid of their new apparatus, to confirm the theories of the white-collar worker called Shtrum.

  ‘That’s it,’ he thought. ‘White-collar worker.’

  Viktor shrugged his shoulders and got up. Making a gesture as if to brush someone off, he paced around the room. Then he sat down and went on with the questionnaire.

  29. Have you or your closest relative ever been the subject of a judicial inquiry or trial? Have you been arrested? Have you been given a judicial or administrative sentence? When? Where? Precisely what for? If you were reprieved, when?

  Then the same question regarding Viktor’s wife. Viktor felt his heart miss a beat. They showed no mercy. Different names flashed through his mind. I’m certain he’s innocent . . . he’s simply not of this world . . . she was arrested for not denouncing her husband, I think she got eight years, I’m not sure, I don’t write to her, I think she was sent to Temniki, I found out by chance, I met her daughter on the street . . . I don’t remember exactly, I think he was arrested in early 1938, yes, ten years without right of correspondence . . .’

  My wife’s brother was a Party member, I met him only occasionally . . . my wife and I don’t write to him . . . I think my wife’s mother visited him, yes, long before the war . . . his second wife was exiled for failing to denounce her husband, she died during the war, her son volunteered for the front, for the defence of Stalingrad . . . my wife separated from her first husband . . . her son by that marriage – my own stepson – died during the defence of Stalingrad . . . her first husband was arrested, my wife has heard nothing of him from the moment of his arrest, I don’t know the reason for his arrest, I’ve heard vague talk of his belonging to the Trotskyist opposition, but I’m not sure, I wasn’t in the least interested . . .

  He was seized by a feeling of irreparable guilt and impurity. He remembered a meeting at which a Party member, confessing his faults, had said: ‘Comrades, I’m not one of us.’

  Suddenly Viktor rebelled. No, I’m not one of the obedient and submissive. I’m all on my own, my wife is no longer interested in me, but so what . . . ? I won’t renounce those unfortunates who died for no reason.

  You should be ashamed of yourselves, comrades! How can you bring up such things? These people are innocent – what can their wives and children be guilty of? It’s you who should repent, you who should be begging forgiveness. And you want to prove my inferiority, to destroy my good name – simply because I’m related to these innocent victims? All I’m guilty of is failing to help them.

  At the same time, another, quite opposite train of thought was running through Viktor’s mind . . . I didn’t keep in touch with them, I never corresponded with enemies of the Party, I never received letters from camps, I never gave them material help, I met them only infrequently and by chance . . .

  30. Do any of your relatives live abroad? (Where? Since when? Their reasons for emigrating?) Do you remain in touch with them?

  This question increased Viktor’s depression.

  Comrades, surely you understand that emigration was the only possible choice under the Tsarist regime? It was the poor, the lovers of freedom, who emigrated. Lenin himself lived in London, Zurich and Paris. Why are you exchanging winks as you read the list of my uncles and aunts living, together with their sons and daughters, in New York, Paris and Buenos Aires? A friend of mine once joked: ‘I’ve got an aunt in New York. I always knew that hunger’s no friendly aunt; now I know that aunts mean hunger.’

  The list of his relatives abroad turned out to be almost as long as the list of his scientific works. And if one added the list of those who had been arrested . . .

  This was how to flatten a man. He’s an alien! Throw him out! But it was all a lie. Science needed him – not Gavronov or Dubyonkov. And he was ready to give his life for his country. And were people with spotless questionnaires incapable of deception or betrayal? And were there no people who had written, ‘Father – swindler’ or ‘Father – landowner’ – and then given their own lives in battle, joined the partisans, been executed?

  What was all this? He knew only too well. The statistical method! Probability theory! There was a greater probability of finding enemies among people of a non-proletarian background. And it was on these same grounds – probability theory – that the German Fascists had destroyed whole peoples and nations. The principle was inhuman, blind and inhuman. There was only one acceptable way of relating to people – a human way.

  If he were choosing staff for his laboratory, he would draw up a very different questionnaire – a human questionnaire.

  It was all the same to him whether his future colleague was a Russian, a Jew, a Ukrainian or an Armenian, whether his grandfather had been a worker, a factory-owner or a kulak; his relationship with him would not depend on whether or not his brother had been arrested by the organs of the NKVD; it didn’t matter to him whether his future colleague’s sister lived in Geneva or Kostroma.

  He would ask at what age someone had first become interested in theoretical physics, what he thought of the criticisms Einstein had made of Planck when the latter was an old man, whether he was interested only in mathematical theory or whether he also enjoyed experimental work, what he thought of Heisenberg, did he believe in the possibility of a unified field theory? What mattered was talent, fire, the divine spark . . .

  He would like to know – but only if his future colleague were happy to say – whether he enjoyed long walks, whether he drank wine, whether he went to orchestral concerts, whether he liked Seton Thompson’s children’s books, whether he felt more drawn to Tolstoy or to Dostoyevsky, whether he enjoyed gardening, whether he went fishing, what he thought of Picasso, which was his favourite stor
y of Chekhov’s.

  He would also like to know whether this future colleague was taciturn or talkative, whether he was good-natured, witty, resentful, irritable, ambitious, whether he was likely to start an affair with the pretty young Verochka Ponamariova . . .

  Madyarov had spoken extraordinarily well about all this – perhaps he really was a provocateur . . . Oh my God . . . !

  Viktor took his pen and wrote: ‘Esther Semyonovna Dashevskaya, my aunt on my mother’s side, has lived since 1909 in Buenos Aires, working as a teacher of music.’

  54

  Viktor entered Shishakov’s office determined to remain calm and composed, not to utter a single aggressive word. He knew very well how stupid it was to take offence simply because he and his work were held in such low esteem by a mere bureaucrat.

  As soon as he saw Shishakov’s face, however, he felt a sense of uncontrollable irritation.

  ‘Aleksey Alekseyevich,’ he began, ‘one can’t of course go against one’s own nature, but you haven’t once shown the least interest in the assembly of our new apparatus.’

  In a conciliatory tone Shishakov answered: ‘I shall certainly visit you in the immediate future.’

  The boss had graciously promised to honour Viktor with a visit.

  ‘I think that in general the administration has been sufficiently attentive to your needs,’ Shishakov added.

  ‘Especially the personnel department.’

  ‘What difficulty has been occasioned you by the personnel department?’ asked Shishakov in the same conciliatory tone. ‘You’re the first head of a laboratory to make any complaint.’

  ‘Aleksey Alekseyevich, I’ve been trying in vain to have Weisspapier recalled from Kazan – in the field of nuclear photography she’s quite irreplaceable. I protest categorically against the dismissal of Loshakova: she’s an exceptional worker and an exceptional human being. I can’t imagine how you can dismiss Loshakova – it’s inhuman. And finally, I wish to have my nomination of Landesman confirmed; he’s a very talented young man. You underestimate the importance of our laboratory. Otherwise I wouldn’t be wasting my time on conversations of this nature.’