Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  When she wasn’t on night shift, another old friend, Sofya Osipovna Levinton, would sleep at the Shaposhnikovs. She had first got to know Alexandra long ago, in Paris and Bern. She now worked as a surgeon in one of the city hospitals.

  And only the previous day, Tolya had arrived unexpectedly. He was another of Alexandra Vladimirovna’s grandchildren, the son of her eldest daughter, Ludmila, and he was on his way from military school to his new unit. He had come to the apartment with his travelling companion, a lieutenant on his way back to the front after a spell in hospital. When they first appeared, his grandmother had failed to recognize Tolya in his army uniform and had asked rather severely, “Who is it you’re looking for, comrades?” And then she had yelled, “Tolya!”

  Zhenya had said that they absolutely must celebrate this family reunion.

  The pie dough had already been mixed. Spiridonov had come in his car, bringing a large bag of white flour and a yellow briefcase full of butter, sturgeon and caviar. Zhenya had got hold of three bottles of sweet wine through her artistic contacts. Marusya had sacrificed part of her inviolable fund of emergency bartering currency—two half-litre bottles of vodka.

  It was usual in those days for guests to bring supplies of their own when they came round; it was difficult for anyone to lay their hands on enough food for a large group.

  Zhenya’s cheeks and temples were moist from the heat. In a dressing gown thrown over a smart summer dress, her dark curls peeking out from under a headscarf, she stood in the middle of the kitchen, holding a knife in one hand and a kitchen towel in the other.

  “Heavens, is Mama still not back?” she asked Marusya. “Should I be turning the pie round by now? I don’t know the oven and I’m afraid of it burning.”

  At this moment she had no thought for anything except the pie she was baking. Amused by her younger sister’s zeal, Marusya said, “I don’t know this oven any better than you do, but there’s no need to get so worked up. Mama’s already here, and so are one or two of the guests.”

  “Marusya, why are you wearing that hideous brown jacket?” asked Zhenya. “You’re beginning to stoop anyway—and that jacket makes you look a real hunchback. And your dark scarf makes your hair look even greyer. Someone as thin as you needs to wear something brighter.”

  “Who cares?” replied Marusya. “It won’t be long before I’m a granny. Vera’s already eighteen now—would you believe it?”

  Someone had started to play the piano. Marusya frowned. Staring angrily at Zhenya with her large dark eyes, she said, “Trust you! Who else could have dreamed up something like this? What will the neighbours think? It’s embarrassing. This really isn’t the time for music and feasting!”

  Zhenya often took decisions on the spur of the moment, and some of these decisions ended up causing her and her family a great deal of grief. While still at school, she had neglected her studies because of her passion for dance—and then she had taken it into her head that she was an artist. In friendship she was inconstant. One day she would be telling everyone that some friend or other was truly noble and extraordinary; the next day she would be bitterly denouncing this same friend. She had studied at the Moscow Arts Institute, graduating from the Faculty of Painting. Sometimes she felt she was an accomplished master and was full of enthusiasm both for her finished works and for her future projects; but then she would remember some indifferent look or mocking remark and tell herself she was a useless old cow without the least hint of talent. And she would wish she had studied some applied art, like painting on fabric. At the age of twenty-two, still in her last year at the Arts Institute, she had married a Comintern official,13 Nikolay Krymov. He was thirteen years older than her and she was drawn to almost everything about him: his contempt for bourgeois comfort, his romantic past in the battles of the Civil War, his work in China and his Comintern friends. Nevertheless, in spite of Zhenya’s admiration for him, and in spite of his apparently deep and sincere love for her, their marriage did not last. One day in December 1940 Zhenya had packed her belongings into a suitcase and gone back to live with her mother.

  Zhenya’s explanations to her family had been so confusing that no one understood anything at all. Marusya called her a neurasthenic. Her mother kept asking if she had fallen in love with someone else. Vera had argued with the fifteen-year-old Seryozha, who believed that Zhenya had done the right thing.

  “It’s very simple,” he’d insisted. “She’s fallen out of love—and that’s all there is to it. How can you not understand?”

  “Quite the little philosopher! Into love, out of love . . . What do you know about love, you little brat?” Vera had replied. Then in her ninth year at school, she considered herself experienced in matters of the heart.

  The neighbours and some of Zhenya’s acquaintances had their own rather straightforward explanations. Some thought that Zhenya had been very sensible. Things were not going well for her husband. Several of his friends were in trouble; some had been dismissed from their positions; a few had been arrested. Zhenya had decided to leave before it was too late, so as not to be dragged down by her husband. Others, who preferred more romantic gossip, affirmed that Zhenya had a lover. Her husband had set out on a trip to the Urals but had been called back by a telegram and had found Zhenya in her lover’s arms.

  There are people who like to ascribe only the basest of motives to the actions of others. This is not always because they act basely themselves; often they would not dream of acting as they suspect others of doing. They talk like this because they think that cynical explanations testify to their knowledge of life. A readiness to believe that others are acting honourably, so they imagine, is a sign of naiveté.

  Zhenya had been appalled when she heard what was being said about her divorce.

  But that had been before the war. None of these things troubled her now.

  7

  THE YOUNGER generation had gathered in Seryozha’s little room, where Spiridonov had somehow managed to squeeze in his piano.

  They were joking about who did, and who didn’t, look like who else in the family. With his dark eyes and slender build, Seryozha looked like his mother, the wife of Alexandra’s son, Dmitry. He had her dark hair, her olive skin and her nervy movements. He also had the same quick look in his eyes, a look that could be both timid and bold. Tolya was tall and broad-shouldered. He had a broad face and a broad nose, and he was constantly looking in the mirror and smoothing his straw-blond hair. When he took from his tunic pocket a photograph of himself next to his half-sister Nadya, a small thin girl with long fine plaits, everyone burst out laughing—so little did the two resemble each other. Nadya was now with her parents in Kazan; they had been evacuated from Moscow. As for Vera—tall, rosy-cheeked and with a short, straight nose—she had nothing in common with any of her three cousins; she did, however, have the quick, fiery brown eyes of her young aunt Zhenya.

  Such a lack of external resemblance between members of a single family was especially common in the generation born just after the Revolution, a time when marriages were entered into simply for love, regardless of differences of blood, nationality, language and social class. The inner, psychological differences between family members were equally great; the products of these unions were endowed with rich and complex characters.

  That morning Tolya and his travelling companion, Lieutenant Kovalyov, had gone to the Military District HQ. Kovalyov had learned that his division was still being held in reserve, somewhere between Kamyshin and Saratov. Tolya had also received instructions to join one of the reserve divisions. The two lieutenants had resolved to stay an extra day in Stalingrad. “We’ll be seeing more than enough of the war,” Kovalyov had said sensibly. “It won’t run away from us.” But they had decided not to wander about the streets, in case they were picked up by a patrol.

  Throughout the difficult journey to Stalingrad, Kovalyov had helped Tolya in all kinds of ways. Kovalyov had a mess tin, while Tolya’s had been stolen the day he graduated from military scho
ol. Kovalyov always knew at which stations they would be able to find boiled water, and which of the army canteens would provide them with smoked fish and mutton sausage and where they would only get pea and millet concentrate.14

  At Batraki he had managed to get hold of a bottle of moonshine, and he and Tolya had drunk it together. Kovalyov had told Tolya how he loved a girl from his village and would marry her as soon as the war was over. This had not prevented him from talking about his front-line liaisons with a frankness that took Tolya’s breath away and made his ears burn.

  Kovalyov also told Tolya many things about war that you can never learn from books or service regulations and that are important only to those who are actually fighting, with their backs against the wall—not to those trying to imagine the reality of the war many years later.

  This good-natured friendship, on the part of a lieutenant who had seen his share of action, was flattering to Tolya. He had pretended to be older than his years, to be a young man who knew the ways of the world. “That’s women for you,” he had said when the conversation turned to girls. “Best just to love ’em and leave ’em.”

  Now, though, Tolya wanted more than ever to talk freely to his cousins, but, without understanding why, he felt embarrassed. If it weren’t for Kovalyov, he’d have talked about all the things he usually talked about with them. There were moments when he felt burdened by Kovalyov’s presence, and this made him feel ashamed: Kovalyov had, after all, been a loyal travelling companion.

  He had lived his whole life in a world he shared with Seryozha, Vera and his grandmother, but this family reunion now seemed like something chance and ephemeral. He was now fated to live in a different world, in a world of lieutenants, political instructors,15 sergeants and corporals, of triangles, diamonds and other badges of rank, of travel warrants and military ration cards. In this world he had met new people; he had made new friends and new enemies. Everything was different.

  Tolya had not told Kovalyov that he wanted to enter the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics and that his ambition was to bring about a scientific revolution that would eclipse both Newton and Einstein. He had not told him that he had already made a short-wave radio receiver and that, shortly before the war, he had begun building a television. Nor did he say that he used to go to his father’s institute after school and help the laboratory assistants assemble complex apparatus or that his mother used to joke, “How the boy’s managed to inherit Viktor’s scientific gifts I really can’t understand!”

  Tolya was tall and robust-looking. His family liked to call him a “heavyweight,” but at heart he was timid and sensitive.

  The conversation was not flowing. Kovalyov was at the piano, playing “The town I love can sleep peacefully” with one finger.16

  “And who’s that?” he asked with a yawn, pointing to a portrait hanging above the piano.

  “That’s me,” said Vera. “It was painted by Auntie Zhenya.”

  “It’s not like you at all,” said Kovalyov.

  The worst embarrassment of all was Seryozha. Any normal boy would have been full of admiration for two young lieutenants—especially for Kovalyov, with his scar and his two medals “For Bravery”—but Seryozha was just supercilious and mocking. He didn’t ask even a single question about military school. This was particularly upsetting; Tolya was longing to talk about their sergeant, about the shooting range, and about the cinema he and his mates had managed to visit without authorization.

  Everyone knew Vera’s habit of bursting into laughter for no apparent reason, simply because laughter was always there within her. Now, though, she was sullen and silent. And she kept staring at Kovalyov, as if sizing him up. As for Seryozha, anyone would have thought he was taking a malicious pleasure in being unfailingly tactless.

  “Vera, why are you being so silent?” Tolya asked crossly.

  “I’m not being silent.”

  “The wounds of love,” said Seryozha.

  “Imbecile!” said Vera.

  “She blushed—and that’s a fact!” said Kovalyov, giving Vera a roguish wink. “No doubt about it, she’s in love. With a major, yes? Every young woman today complains about lieutenants and says they get on her nerves.”

  “Lieutenants do not get on my nerves,” said Vera, looking Kovalyov straight in the eye.

  “So it’s a lieutenant, is it?” said Kovalyov. He was a little upset, since no lieutenant likes a young woman to fall for another lieutenant. “Well then,” he went on after a pause, “I think we should drink to the two of them. I’ve got the necessary here in my water bottle.”

  “Yes!” said Seryozha with sudden animation. “Let’s drink to them!”

  Vera demurred, but ended up downing her vodka in one. And then, just as if she were a soldier too, she took a hunk of dried bread from a green bag.

  “You’re the kind of companion a soldier needs,” said Kovalyov.

  And Vera began laughing like a little girl, wrinkling her nose, tapping her foot and tossing her mane of fair hair.

  Seryozha became tipsy straightaway. First, he launched into a critique of Soviet military operations; then he began reciting poems. Tolya kept glancing at Kovalyov, afraid he would be laughing at Seryozha, that he would think it ridiculous for a young man to be waving his arms about and reciting Yesenin, but Kovalyov was listening attentively. Now less like a lieutenant and more like an ordinary young man from a village, he opened his knapsack and said, “Stop. Let me write it down!”

  As for Vera, she frowned, fell into thought and then turned to Tolya. Stroking him on the cheek, she said, “Oh Tolya, dear Tolya, what do you know about anything?”

  She sounded more like a sixty-year-old than an eighteen-year-old.

  8

  MANY YEARS before the Revolution, Alexandra Vladimirovna Shaposhnikova—now a tall, imposing old woman—had studied natural sciences at a women’s college. After her husband’s death, she had worked first as a teacher and then as a chemist in a bacteriological institute. For the last few years she had been head of a small laboratory that monitored working conditions in factories. She had never had many members of staff and now, with the war, she had still fewer; she herself had to visit factories, railway depots, grain silos, shoe factories and clothes factories in order to collect dust samples and check the quality of the air. She loved her work and in her small laboratory she had constructed her own apparatus for the quantitative analysis of air pollution in industrial enterprises. She could analyze metallic dust, drinking water, water for industrial use and a variety of lead compounds and alloys. She could detect the presence of mercury and arsenic vapours, carbon bisulphite, nitric oxides and harmful levels of carbon monoxide. And she loved people no less than her work; during her visits she made friends with lathe operators, seam-stresses, millers, blacksmiths, electricians, stokers, tram conductors and engine drivers.

  A year before the war she had begun working during the evenings in a library for the applied sciences, doing translations for herself and for engineers in various Stalingrad factories. She had learnt English and French as a child, and German when she and her husband were political exiles, living in Bern and Zurich.

  When she got home on the day of the family party, she spent a long time in front of the mirror, arranging her white hair and pinning a small brooch—two enamel violets—to the collar of her blouse. She looked once again in the mirror, thought for a moment, unpinned her brooch with an air of decision and placed it on the bedside table. The door half opened and Vera announced in a loud whisper, “Hurry up, Granny! That scary old man’s here—Mostovskoy!”

  After another moment of uncertainty, Alexandra put her brooch back on again and walked quickly towards the door.

  She found Mostovskoy in the tiny hall, which was piled high with baskets, old suitcases and sacks of potatoes.

  Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy was a man of inexhaustible vitality—the kind of man of whom others say, “He’s a breed apart.”

  Before the war, he had lived in Leningrad. A
fter surviving four months of the Blockade, he had been flown out in February 1942. He was still light on his feet. He had good sight and good hearing. His memory and mental faculties were intact and he retained a genuine, lively interest in life, the sciences and people. All this in spite of the fact that the experiences he had been through were enough for several more ordinary lives: forced labour and exile, persecution, disillusion, bitterness, joys and sorrows, deprivations of every kind, and endless nights of unceasing work. Alexandra had first met Mostovskoy before the Revolution, when her late husband was working in Nizhny Novgorod. Mostovskoy, who had gone there to help organize clandestine political activities, had stayed in their apartment for a month.

  Mostovskoy stepped into the main room and looked around: at the wicker armchairs and stools by the table, at the white tablecloth spread out in anticipation of guests, at the wall clock, the wardrobe and the folding Chinese screen on which an embroidered silk tiger was moving stealthily through yellow-green bamboo.

  “If your room were to be dug up in a thousand years,” he said, “an archaeologist could learn a great deal about the juxtaposition of different social strata in our time.” There was a hint of laughter in his eyes; the little wrinkles around them appeared, disappeared and reappeared. Pointing to the plain wooden shelves, he went on, “Look. Here we have Das Kapital and Hegel in German. And on the wall—portraits of Nekrasov and Dobrolyubov.17 That’s your revolutionary past. But the silk tiger must be from your merchant father. And the huge wall clock too. And then there’s a cupboard, a vase as big as a cupboard and a huge dining table—they’re all symbols of our new prosperity, the prosperity of the present day. They must have been brought here by your chief engineer son-in-law.” Then he raised an admonitory finger. “Oh! Judging by the number of place settings, this is going to be a real banquet. Why didn’t you say? I’d have got out my best tie!”