Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  Alexandra always felt uncharacteristically unsure of herself in Mostovskoy’s presence. Now too, thinking he was criticizing her, she blushed—the sad, touching blush of an old person.

  “I yielded to the demands of my daughters and grandsons,” she said. “After a winter in Leningrad, I fear all this must seem strange and excessive.”

  “Far from it, far from it,” Mostovskoy replied. He sat down at the table, began filling his pipe and then held out his tobacco pouch, saying, “You enjoy a smoke too. See what you think of this!” He looked at her tobacco-stained fingers and added, “But you really should use a cigarette holder.”

  “It’s better without,” she replied. Once again, she felt the need to justify herself. “I started when we were in exile, in Siberia. Goodness knows how many times Nikolay and I argued about it. But I’m hardly likely to stop now.”

  Mostovskoy took a flint from his pocket, along with a piece of thick white string and a steel file. “I’m having trouble with my Katyusha,”18 he said. He and Alexandra smiled at each other. His Katyusha truly was refusing to light.

  “Let me get some matches,” said Alexandra.

  “No,” said Mostovskoy, with a dismissive wave. “Why waste precious matches?”

  “Yes, nowadays people like to hang on to their matches. I’ve got a tiny night light in my kitchen and my neighbours are always coming round ‘to borrow a light.’”

  “It’s the same everywhere. People tend their little flames like cave dwellers thousands of years ago. And the old like to keep two or three matches in reserve. They’re afraid the war may bring them some night-time surprise.”

  She went to the cupboard, came back to the table and said with mock solemnity, “Allow me, from the bottom of my heart . . .” And she held out an unopened box of matches.

  Mostovskoy accepted her gift. They both lit up, drew on their pipes and exhaled at the same time. The two curls of smoke met and drifted lazily towards the window.

  “Are you thinking about leaving?” asked Mostovskoy.

  “Yes, of course. Who isn’t? But we haven’t yet talked about it at all seriously.”

  “And where might you go, if it’s not a military secret?”

  “To Kazan. Part of the Academy of Sciences has been evacuated there. And Ludmila’s husband’s a professor, or rather, he’s a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences,19 and so they’ve been given an apartment. Well, two rooms, anyway—and he’s asking us to go and join them. But don’t worry—you’ll be all right. I’m sure the authorities will take proper care of you.”

  Mostovskoy looked at her and nodded.

  “Are they really so unstoppable?” asked Alexandra. There was a note of despair in her voice that somehow didn’t fit with the confident, even haughty expression of her handsome face. Slowly, with effort, she began again, “Is fascism really so very powerful? I don’t believe it. For the love of God, tell me what’s happening! This map on the wall—sometimes I just want to take it down and hide it. Day after day Seryozha keeps moving the little flags. Day after day—the same as last summer—we hear about some new German offensive. Towards Kharkov. Then, all of a sudden, Kursk. Then Volchansk and Belgorod. Sevastopol has fallen. I keep asking, ‘What’s happening?’ None of our soldiers can tell me.”

  She fell silent for a moment and then, moving one hand as if to push away some frightening thought, she went on, “I go over to the bookshelves you were just talking about. I say to Lenin, Chernyshevsky, and Herzen,20 ‘Can we really not defend you? Is this really going to be the end of you?’ And then I say, ‘Defend us! Help us! Some kind of darkness has fallen on us.’”

  “What do our soldiers tell you?” said Mostovskoy.

  Just then, from behind the kitchen door, came the sound of a young woman’s voice—half amused, half angry: “Mama! Marusya! Where are you? The pie’s burning.”

  “A pie!” said Mostovskoy, clearly glad to evade Alexandra’s questions. “Seems this is going to be quite a dinner!”

  “A feast in time of plague,”21 Alexandra replied. Pointing towards the door, she went on, “Zhenya, my youngest . . . you’ve met her. Really all this was her idea. She arrived just a week ago, unexpectedly. Everyone else is parting from their nearest and dearest—while here we have this surprise reunion. And there’s another of my grandchildren, Ludmila’s son, Tolya. He’s on his way to the front, he’s just passing through. So we decided to celebrate both meetings and partings.”

  “It’s all right,” said Mostovskoy. “No need for explanations. Life goes on.”

  “It’s harder when you’re old,” Alexandra said quietly. “I feel the country’s tragedy differently from the young. Forgive me weeping, but who else can I say these things to? Nikolay so loved and respected you. And then we’re all . . .” Looking straight at Mostovskoy, she went on, “Sometimes I just want to die. And then I think not—that I’ve still got the strength to move mountains.”

  Mostovskoy stroked her hand and said, “Quick—or the pie really will burn.”

  •

  “And now—the moment of truth,” said Zhenya, bending down towards the half-open oven door. Glancing at Alexandra and then putting her lips to her ear, she said very quickly, “I got a letter this morning . . . Long ago, before the war . . . Remember, I told you about him . . . A commander I once met, Novikov. . . We met again on a train. Such a strange coincidence. And then today . . . Just imagine, I was thinking about him as I woke up. He’s probably no longer alive, I said to myself. And an hour later there was a letter from him. And our meeting in the train, when I was on my way here from Moscow, that was extraordinary too.”

  Zhenya put her arms around Alexandra’s neck and began kissing her—first on the cheek and then on the white hair falling over her temples.

  When Zhenya was studying at the Art Institute, she had been invited to some gala at the Military Academy. There she met a tall, slow, heavy-footed man, the “elder” for his year. He had escorted her to her tram and then called on her several times. He graduated from the academy in the spring and then left Moscow. He wrote to her two or three times, asking her to send him a photograph but not saying anything about his feelings. She sent a very small photo she had had taken for her passport. And then, around the time she finished at the Art Institute and got married, he stopped writing.

  But when she left Krymov and was on her way to her mother’s, the train had stopped in Voronezh and a tall, fair-haired commander had entered her compartment.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked, holding out a large, pale hand.

  “Comrade Novikov,” she replied, “of course I remember you. Why did you stop writing?”

  He smiled, silently took a small photograph out of an envelope and showed it to her.

  It was the photograph she had sent him long ago.

  “The train was just coming to a stop,” he said, “and I saw your face in the window.”

  The two elderly women doctors sitting in the compartment with them listened avidly to every word she and Novikov said. For them, this meeting was an unexpected diversion; after a while, they joined in the conversation. One of them, with a spectacle case sticking out of her jacket pocket, talked almost without stopping, recalling all the unexpected meetings she could think of—in her own life and in the lives of her friends and family. Zhenya felt grateful to her; Novikov—evidently seeing this meeting as deeply significant—seemed to be wanting a heart-to-heart conversation, whereas she just wanted to be quiet. Novikov got out at Liski, promising to write, but he never did. And now she had suddenly received a letter from him, which had reawoken thoughts and feelings from a time she had thought gone forever.

  As Alexandra watched Zhenya working away in the kitchen, she admired her fine gold chain, thinking how it looked just right against her pale neck. She noticed how her perfectly chosen comb brought out faint gleams of gold in her dark hair. But had they not been touched by the living beauty of a young woman, the comb and the gold chain would have been nothing. T
here was a sense of warmth, she thought, that emanated not from her daughter’s flushed cheeks or half-parted lips but from somewhere deep in her clear brown eyes—eyes that had seen so much, that were now so much older and wiser, yet still as immutably childlike as two decades earlier.

  9

  TOWARDS five o’clock they sat down at table. Alexandra Vladimirovna offered the wicker armchair to Mostovskoy, the guest of honour, but he chose instead to sit down beside Vera on a little stool. To his left was a young lieutenant with bright, clear eyes. He had two cherry-coloured diamonds on his collar tabs.

  Alexandra then turned towards Spiridonov. “As our chief supplies officer,” she said, gesturing towards the armchair, “you, Stepan, must sit here.”

  “Papa is the source of all light, warmth and pickled tomatoes,” said Vera.

  “My uncle,” said Seryozha, “is the boss of the home repairs company.”

  Spiridonov had indeed provided Alexandra not only with a good supply of firewood but also with enough potatoes and pickled tomatoes to last the winter. He knew how to mend everything: from kettles and electric irons to taps and chair legs. And he had even handled the negotiations with a furrier over repairs to her squirrel-fur coat.

  After sitting down, Spiridonov glanced now and again at Vera. Tall, fair-haired and rosy-cheeked, she looked very like him. Sometimes he expressed regret that she did not look more like Marusya. But deep down he was happy to recognize in his daughter some of the physical traits of his brothers and sisters.

  Like more than a few of his contemporaries, Stepan Fyodorovich Spiridonov had followed a path that only a few decades earlier would have seemed astonishing.

  Chief engineer—and then director—of the Stalgres power station, Spiridonov had, thirty years ago, been grazing goats on the outskirts of a small factory settlement near Naro-Fominsk. Today, with the Germans now moving south from Kharkov towards the Volga, he had been thinking about the course of his life, who he had been and who he had become. He had a reputation for coming up with bold ideas. He had several new inventions and innovations to his credit, and his name had even been mentioned in an important electrical engineering manual. He was in charge of a major power station. Some said he was a poor administrator—and there had indeed been times when he’d spent all day on the shop floor, leaving his secretary to deal with the endless telephone calls. Once he had even made a formal request to be transferred from administrative work, but he had felt relieved when the people’s commissar refused this request; there was much that he found interesting and enjoyable even in administrative work. He was not afraid of responsibility; he enjoyed the tension that went with being in charge of things. The workers admired him, though he was sometimes severe and quick-tempered. He liked to eat and drink well. He liked going to restaurants and he kept a large secret cache of two- and three-rouble notes—his “subcutaneous store,” as he called it. He let himself go if he had a free evening during one of his trips to Moscow—and some of what he got up to also had to be kept secret from his family. Nevertheless, he loved his wife and took pride in her being so well educated—and there was nothing he would not have done for her, for his daughter and for all his extended family.

  Sitting beside Spiridonov was Sofya Osipovna, the head of a hospital surgery department. She was middle-aged and she had broad shoulders, red fleshy cheeks and the two bars of a major on her collar tabs. She frowned a lot and had an abrupt manner of speech. According to Vera, who worked in the same hospital, the other members of staff were afraid of her—not only the nurses and orderlies but even the other doctors. She had been a surgeon since before the war. Her character may have influenced her choice of profession, but her profession had, in turn, left a certain imprint on her character.

  She had taken part, as a doctor, in expeditions organized by the Academy of Sciences; she had been to Kamchatka and Kirghizia and had spent two whole years in the Pamir Mountains. Occasional words of Kazakh and Kirghiz had become a part of her everyday speech. After a while, Vera and Seryozha came to adopt one or two of these words. Instead of “good,” they would say jakhshi; instead of “all right”—hop.

  She loved music and poetry. Returning from a twenty-four-hour shift, she would lie down on the sofa and tell Seryozha to recite Pushkin and Mayakovsky. Sometimes she would quietly sing Gilda’s aria from Rigoletto, half closing her eyes and gesturing with one hand as if she were a conductor. Her face would take on such a strange look that Vera would have to run out into the kitchen, her cheeks swollen with laughter.

  She also loved card games. She would play a couple of rounds of blackjack with Spiridonov, but really she preferred to play something simpler, “just for fun,” with Vera and Seryozha. Sometimes, though, she would feel suddenly agitated; she would throw down her cards and say, “No, I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight. I’d do better to go back to the hospital.”

  On the other side of Sofya Osipovna was Tamara Berozkina. Her husband was a Red Army commander, but she had heard nothing from or about him since the war began. She dressed with the particular care of someone ashamed of her poverty. She was thin; she had sad, beautiful eyes and her delicate face looked pale and exhausted. She seemed the kind of person simply unable to cope with life’s cruelties.

  She and her husband had lived close to the frontier. On the first day of the war their house had caught fire; she had rushed outside in her dressing gown and slippers, holding in her arms her little daughter, Luba, who had measles. Her son, Slava, had run along beside her, clutching her gown.

  With her sick little Luba and her barefoot boy, she had been put on a truck—and so her long months of sorrows and homelessness had begun. She had ended up in Stalingrad, where she at last managed to find some kind of shelter for herself and her two children. The military recruitment office had helped, allocating her a dress and each of her children a pair of shoes. She had sewed and darned for the wives of important officials. In the offices of the city soviet, she got to know Marusya, who was a senior inspector for the education section—and through her she met Alexandra Vladimirovna.

  Alexandra had given Tamara her own coat and boots and insisted that Marusya find little Slava a place in a children’s home, where he would be sure to receive regular meals.

  To the other side of Tamara was Andreyev. He was sixty-five, but there was barely a hint of grey in his thick black hair. His long thin face looked somehow sullen and surly.

  Putting her hand on Tamara’s shoulder, Alexandra said thoughtfully, “It seems we too may soon be forced out of our homes, made to drink from the same bitter cup as you. Who’d have thought it—as far east as this!” Then she thumped her hand on the table and went on, “And if that’s how things turn out, then you must come with us. We can all go to Ludmila’s, in Kazan. Our fate will be your fate.”

  “Thank you,” said Tamara, “but that will be a terrible burden for you.”

  “Nonsense,” Alexandra replied firmly. “Now is no time to be thinking of comfort.”

  Marusya whispered to her husband, “May God forgive me, but Mama truly does live in a world beyond time and space. Ludmila only has two tiny rooms in Kazan.”

  “What do you expect?” Spiridonov replied genially. “Look at the way we’ve all invaded her own apartment and made ourselves at home in it. She’s even given you her own bed—and I haven’t heard you voice any objection to that.”

  Spiridonov admired his mother-in-law for her total lack of pragmatic self-interest. For the main part she spent her free time with people she liked but who were unlikely ever to be of any help to her; more often it was they who needed her help. This impressed Spiridonov; it was not that he made a habit of seeking out people in high places, but he understood that friends could be of practical value and he was not above, at least now and again, cultivating someone likely to be of use to him. Alexandra, on the other hand, was blind to such considerations.

  Spiridonov had more than once visited Alexandra in her workplace. He enjoyed watching her sure, confiden
t movements and the deftness with which she managed complex chemical apparatus for the volumetric analysis of gases and liquids. Having a natural gift for anything practical, he would get angry when Seryozha appeared unable to change a burnt-out fuse or Vera was slow and clumsy with her sewing and darning. Not only was he a good carpenter and metalworker, not only did he know how to build a Russian stove—but he also liked to invent more unusual things. Once he dreamed up a little gadget that allowed him, without getting up from his armchair, to light and extinguish the candles on their New Year tree. He also installed such an unusual and interesting doorbell that an engineer from the Tractor Factory came round specially to examine the mechanism and replicate it. But Spiridonov had never been handed anything on a plate. He had had to work hard to reach his present position, and he had no time for bunglers and idlers.

  “Well, comrade Lieutenant,” he asked the bright-eyed young man to his left, “will you keep Stalingrad safe from the Germans?”

  As a young commander, Kovalyov was contemptuous of civilians. “Our task is very simple,” he replied condescendingly. “When we receive the order to fight, we will fight.”

  “You received that order on the very first day of the war,” said Spiridonov, with amusement.

  Kovalyov took this personally. “It’s easy enough to talk when you’re safe in the rear,” he said. “But on the front line, with mortar bombs exploding all around you and Stukas up above, you think differently. Isn’t that so, Tolya?”

  “Precisely,” said Tolya, with little conviction.

  “Well, let me say one thing,” said Spiridonov, raising his voice. “The Germans will never get past the Don. Our defences there are impregnable.”

  “You seem to be forgetting a great deal,” Seryozha exclaimed in a thin, squeaky voice. “Don’t you remember a year ago? How everyone kept saying, ‘The Germans will stop when they reach the old border. They won’t get any further than that!’”

  “Attention! Attention!” shouted Vera. “Air-raid alert!” And she gestured towards the kitchen door.