Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman

  There was, however, one glimmer of brightness at the bottom of his despair – he and Marya Ivanovna had behaved honourably. They had suffered themselves, but they hadn’t tormented anyone else. But Viktor knew very well that these thoughts – whether resentful, resigned or philosophical – had very little to do with his deepest feelings. His anger with Marya Ivanovna, his self-mockery, his sorrowful acceptance of the inevitable, his thoughts about his conscience and his duty to Lyudmila – all these were simply a way of combating despair. When he remembered her eyes and her voice, he was overwhelmed by longing for her. Would he never see her again?

  When he could no longer bear his sense of loss, his sense of the finality of their separation, he turned to Lyudmila, feeling quite ashamed of himself as he did so, and said: ‘You know, I keep worrying about Madyarov. Do you think he’s all right? Does anyone know what’s happened to him? Maybe you ought to phone Marya Ivanovna after all. What do you think?’

  What was most surprising of all was that Viktor went on working. This didn’t, however, diminish his anxiety, his grief, or his longing for Marya Ivanovna. His work didn’t help him combat grief and terror; he didn’t turn to it for relief from his gloom and despair. His work was more to him than just a psychological prop: he worked simply because he was unable not to.

  41

  Lyudmila told Viktor that she had met the house-manager; he wanted Viktor to call on him in his office.

  They tried to guess what he might want. Was it about their excess living space? Viktor’s out-of-date passport? Or was it a check-up by the Military Commissariat? Or perhaps some informer had told them that Yevgenia had been living there without being registered?

  ‘You should have asked,’ said Viktor. ‘Then we wouldn’t be sitting here racking our brains like this.’

  ‘Of course I should,’ agreed Lyudmila. ‘But I was quite taken aback. All he said was: “Ask your husband to come round. He can come in the morning now he no longer goes to work.”’

  ‘Heavens! They already know everything.’

  ‘Of course they do. They’re all spying on us – the janitors, the lift attendants, the neighbours’ daily helps . . . What’s there to be surprised about?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. Do you remember the young man with a Party membership card who came round before the war? The one who asked you to keep an eye open and tell him who visited the neighbours?’

  ‘I certainly do! I gave him such a dressing-down that he was already out in the passage before he had time to say, “But I thought you were socially conscious.”’

  Lyudmila had told this story hundreds of times. In the past Viktor had always tried to hurry her on; now, though, he kept asking her to tell him more details.

  ‘You know what?’ said Lyudmila. ‘It might be something to do with the two tablecloths I sold in the market.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Viktor. ‘Then it would be you they wanted to see.’

  ‘Maybe there’s something they want you to sign,’ said Lyudmila uncertainly.

  Viktor sank into the depths of depression. He kept remembering everything he had come out with during his conversations with Shishakov and Kovchenko. Then he thought back to his student days. How he had talked! He had argued with Dmitry. He had argued – though he had also sometimes agreed – with Krymov. But he had never, for even one minute, been an enemy of the Party, an enemy of Soviet power. Suddenly he remembered some particularly outspoken remark he had once made; he went quite cold at the mere thought of it. And then what about Krymov? He was as pure and dedicated a Communist as anyone. He certainly hadn’t had any doubts – he was a fanatic. Yet even he had been arrested. And then there had been those terrible evenings with Karimov and Madyarov.

  How strange everything was! Usually, as twilight set in, Viktor was haunted by the thought that he was about to be arrested. His feeling of terror grew more and more oppressive. But when at last the end seemed quite inevitable, he would feel a sense of joy and relief. No, he couldn’t make head or tail of it.

  And sometimes, thinking about the unjust reception his work had met with, he felt as though he were about to go out of his mind. But when the thought that he himself was stupid and talentless and that his work was nothing more than an obtuse, colourless mockery of reality – when this thought ceased to be a mere thought and became instead a fact of life, then he would all of a sudden feel happy.

  He no longer even played with the idea of confessing his faults in public. He was a pitiful ignoramus and, even if he did repent, it wouldn’t change anything. He was of no use to anyone. Whether he repented or not, he was of equally little significance to the furious State.

  How Lyudmila had changed over these last weeks. She no longer phoned up the house-manager to say: ‘I need a locksmith at once.’ She no longer initiated a public inquiry on the staircase, demanding: ‘Who’s emptied their rubbish on the floor again?’ Even the way she dressed was somehow nervous. One day she put on an expensive fur coat just to go and buy some oil; another day she wrapped herself up in an old grey dress and put on a coat she had meant to give to the lift attendant long before the war had even begun.

  Viktor looked at his wife, wondering what the two of them would be like in ten or fifteen years.

  ‘Do you remember Chekhov’s story “The Bishop”? The mother used to take her cow out to graze and tell the other women how her son had once been a bishop. No one believed her.’

  ‘No, I don’t remember’, said Lyudmila. ‘I read it when I was a little girl.’

  ‘Well, read it again,’ said Viktor irritably. He had always resented Lyudmila’s indifference towards Chekhov; he suspected she hadn’t even read most of his stories.

  How very strange! The weaker and more helpless he became, the nearer he seemed to a state of complete entropy, the more of a nonentity he felt he had become in the eyes of the caretaker and the girls in the rations office, in the eyes of passport inspectors, personnel managers, laboratory assistants, scientists and friends, even in the eyes of his family, perhaps even in the eyes of Chepyzhin and Lyudmila – then the more certain he felt that Masha loved and treasured him. They didn’t see one another, but he knew this for sure. After each new humiliation, after each new blow of fate, he would say, ‘Can you see me, Masha?’

  And so there he was, sitting next to his wife, talking to her, and all the time thinking his own secret thoughts.

  The telephone rang. Its ringing now made Viktor as anxious as if it were the middle of the night and a telegram had arrived with news of some tragedy.

  ‘I know what it is,’ said Lyudmila. ‘Someone promised to phone me about a job in a co-operative.’

  She picked up the receiver. Raising her eyebrows, she said: ‘He’s just coming.’

  ‘It’s for you,’ she said to Viktor.

  Viktor looked at her questioningly.

  She covered the receiver with the palm of her hand and said: ‘It’s a voice I don’t know. I can’t think . . .’

  He took the receiver from her.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘I’ll hold on.’

  Now it was Lyudmila’s turn to look questioningly at him. He groped on the table for a pencil and scrawled a few letters on a scrap of paper. Very slowly, not knowing what she was doing, Lyudmila made the sign of the cross first over herself and then over Viktor. Neither of them said a word.

  ‘This is a bulletin from all the radio services of the Soviet Union.’

  A voice unbelievably similar to the voice that had addressed the nation, the army, the entire world on 3 July, 1941, now addressed a solitary individual holding a telephone receiver.

  ‘Good day, comrade Shtrum.’

  At that moment everything came together in a jumble of half-formed thoughts and feelings – triumph, a sense of weakness, fear that all this might just be some maniac playing a trick on him, pages of closely written manuscript, that endless questionnaire, the Lubyanka . . .

  Viktor knew that his fate was now being settled. He also ha
d a vague sense of loss, as though he had lost something peculiarly dear to him, something good and touching.

  ‘Good day, Iosif Vissarionovich,’ he said, astonished to hear himself pronouncing such unimaginable words on the telephone.

  The conversation lasted two or three minutes.

  ‘I think you’re working in a very interesting field,’ said Stalin.

  His voice was slow and guttural and he placed a particularly heavy stress on certain syllables; it was so similar to the voice Viktor had heard on the radio that it sounded almost like an impersonation. It was like Viktor’s imitation of Stalin when he was playing the fool at home. It was just as everyone who had ever heard Stalin speak – at a conference or during a private interview – had always described it.

  Perhaps it really was a hoax after all?

  ‘I believe in my work,’ said Viktor.

  Stalin was silent for a moment. He seemed to be thinking over what Viktor had said.

  ‘Has the war made it difficult for you to obtain foreign research reports?’ asked Stalin. ‘And do you have all the necessary laboratory equipment?’

  With a sincerity that he himself found astonishing, Viktor said: ‘Thank you very much, Iosif Vissarionovich. My working conditions are perfectly satisfactory.’

  Lyudmila was still standing up, as though Stalin could see her. Viktor motioned to her to sit down. Stalin was silent again, thinking over what Viktor had said.

  ‘Goodbye, comrade Shtrum, I wish you success in your work.’

  ‘Goodbye, comrade Stalin.’

  He put down the phone.

  There they both were, still sitting opposite each other – just as when they had been talking, a few minutes before, about the tablecloths Lyudmila had sold at the Tishinsky market.

  ‘I wish you success in your work,’ said Viktor with a strong Georgian accent.

  There was something extraordinary about the way nothing in the room had changed. The sideboard, the piano, the chairs, the two unwashed plates on the table, were exactly the same as when Viktor and Lyudmila had been talking about the house-manager. It was enough to drive one insane. Hadn’t their whole lives been turned upside down? Wasn’t a new destiny now awaiting them?

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘Nothing special. He just asked if I was having difficulty in obtaining foreign research literature,’ said Viktor, trying to sound calm and unconcerned.

  For a moment he felt almost embarrassed at his sudden feeling of happiness.

  ‘Lyuda, Lyuda,’ he said. ‘Just think! I didn’t repent. I didn’t bow down. I didn’t write to him. He phoned me himself.’

  The impossible had happened. Its significance was incalculable. Was this really the same Viktor Pavlovich who had tossed about in bed and been unable to sleep, who had lost his head over some questionnaire, who had scratched himself as he wondered anxiously what had been said about him at the Scientific Council, who had gone over his sins one by one, who had repented – at least in thought – and begged for forgiveness, who had expected to be arrested or to live the rest of his life in poverty, who had trembled at the thought of talking to a girl at the passport office or the rations desk?

  ‘My God, my God!’ said Lyudmila. ‘And to think that Tolya will never know!’ She went to Tolya’s room and opened the door.

  Viktor picked up the telephone receiver and put it down again.

  ‘But what if the whole thing was a hoax?’ he said, going over to the window.

  The street was deserted. A woman went by, dressed in a quilted coat.

  He returned to the telephone and drummed on the receiver with his finger. ‘How did my voice sound?’

  ‘You spoke very slowly. You know, I’ve no idea what made me suddenly stand up like that.’

  ‘Stalin himself!’

  ‘Perhaps it really was just a hoax?’

  ‘No one would dare. You’d get ten years for a joke like that.’

  It was only an hour since Viktor had been pacing up and down the room, humming the old romance by Golenishchev-Kutuzov:

  ‘ . . . he lies forgotten, quite alone . . .’

  Stalin and his telephone calls! Rumours would go round Moscow once or twice every year: ‘Stalin’s phoned Dovzhenko, the film director! Stalin’s phoned Ilya Ehrenburg!’

  There was no need for Stalin to give direct orders – to ask that a prize be awarded to X, a flat be allocated to Y, or an Institute be set up for Z. Stalin was above such matters; they were dealt with by subordinates who divined Stalin’s will through his tone of voice and the look in his eyes. If Stalin gave a man a quick smile, his life would be transformed overnight; he would suddenly rise up out of the outer darkness to be greeted with power, fame and showers of honours. Dozens of notables would bow down before him – Stalin had smiled at him, Stalin had joked with him on the phone.

  People repeated these conversations to one another in detail; every word of Stalin’s seemed astonishing. And the more banal his words, the more astonishing they seemed. It was as if Stalin was incapable of saying anything ordinary.

  Apparently he had phoned a famous sculptor and said, laughing:

  ‘Hello, you old drunkard!’

  He had rung a famous writer, a very decent man, and asked about a comrade of his who had been arrested. Taken aback, the writer had mumbled something quite inaudible in reply. Stalin had then said: ‘You don’t know how to defend your friends.’fn1

  He had phoned up a newspaper for the young. The deputy editor had said: ‘Bubyekin speaking.’

  ‘And who is Bubyekin?’ Stalin had asked.

  ‘You should know,’ Bubyekin had answered. He had then slammed down the receiver.

  Stalin had called back and said: ‘Comrade Bubyekin, this is Stalin speaking. Please explain who you are.’

  After this, Bubyekin had apparently spent two weeks in hospital recovering from shock.

  One word of his could annihilate thousands, tens of thousands, of people. A Marshal, a People’s Commissar, a member of the Central Committee, a secretary of an obkom – people who had been in command of armies and fronts, who had held sway over vast factories, entire regions, whole Republics – could be reduced to nothing by one angry word. They would become labour-camp dust, rattling their tin bowls as they waited outside the kitchen for their ration of gruel.

  One night Stalin and Beria had visited an Old Bolshevik from Georgia who had recently been released from the Lubyanka; they had stayed till morning. The other tenants hadn’t dared use the toilet and hadn’t even gone out to work in the morning. The door had been opened by a midwife, the senior tenant. She was wearing a nightdress and holding a pug-dog in her arms; she was very angry that the visitors hadn’t rung the bell the correct number of times. As she put it herself: ‘I opened the door and saw a portrait. Then the portrait started walking towards me.’ Apparently Stalin had gone out into the corridor and looked for a long time at the sheet of paper by the phone where the tenants noted how many calls they had made.

  It was the very banality of all these incidents that people found so amusing – and so unbelievable. Just imagine! Stalin himself had walked down the corridor of a communal flat.

  It was unbelievable. It needed only one word from Stalin for vast buildings to rise up, for columns of people to march out into the taiga and fell trees, for hundreds of thousands of men and women to dig canals, build towns and lay down roads in a land of permafrost and polar darkness. He was the embodiment of a great State. The Sun of the Stalinist Constitution . . . The Party of Stalin . . . Stalin’s five-year plans . . . Stalin’s construction works . . . Stalin’s strategy . . . Stalin’s aviation . . . A great State was embodied in him, in his character, in his mannerisms.

  ‘I wish you success in your work . . . ,’ Viktor kept repeating. ‘You’re working in a very interesting field . . .’

  One thing was quite clear: Stalin knew about the importance attributed to nuclear physics in other countries.

  Viktor was aware of the strange t
ension that was beginning to surround this area of research. He could sense this tension between the lines of articles by English and American physicists; he could sense it in the odd hiatuses that sometimes interrupted their chains of reasoning. He had noticed that the names of certain frequently-published researchers had disappeared from the pages of physics journals. Everyone studying the fission of heavy nuclei seemed to have vanished into thin air; no one even cited their work any longer. This silence, this tension, grew still more palpable when it came to anything relating to the fission of uranium nuclei.

  Chepyzhin, Sokolov and Markov had discussed this more than once. Only the other day Chepyzhin had talked about the short-sightedness of people who couldn’t see the practical application of the reactions of heavy nuclei to bombardment by neutrons. He himself had chosen not to work in this field . . .

  The air was still full of the fire and smoke of battle, the rumble of tanks and the tramping of boots, but a new, still silent tension had appeared in the world. The most powerful of all hands had picked up a telephone receiver; a theoretical physicist had heard a slow voice say: ‘I wish you success in your work.’

  A new shadow, still faint and mute, barely perceptible, now hung over the ravaged earth, over the heads of children and old men. No one knew of it yet, no one was aware of the birth of a power that belonged to the future.

  It was a long way from the desks of a few dozen physicists, from sheets of paper covered with alphas, betas, gammas, ksis and sigmas, from laboratories and library shelves to the cosmic and satanic force that was to become the sceptre of State power. Nevertheless, the journey had been begun; the mute shadow was thickening, slowly turning into a darkness that could envelop both Moscow and New York.

  Viktor didn’t think at this moment about the success of his work – work that had seemed abandoned for ever in the drawer of his writing-desk, but which would now once again see the light and be incorporated into lectures and scientific papers. Nor did he think about the triumph of scientific truth; nor about how he could once again help the progress of science, have his own students, be mentioned in the pages of textbooks and journals, wait anxiously to see whether his theory corresponded to the truth revealed by calculating machines and photographic emulsions.