Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

More important, however, than such small paradoxes was the determination with which Moscow’s defenders—strong, self-sacrificing working people—continued to work. They dug trenches, built barricades and then returned to their factories.

  The evacuees imagined that they had taken away with them all Moscow’s life and warmth. They imagined factory workshops now covered in snow, cold boilers, empty bays with no lathes or machine tools, buildings that had died, that had become mere slabs of stone. They thought that all the energy of life had left Moscow and reappeared far away, in the new construction sites of Bashkiriya, Uzbekistan, Siberia and the Urals. But the life force of the great Soviet city was stronger than these people realized. Moscow’s strength proved inexhaustible; her shop floors returned to life and her factory chimneys began to smoke once again. Her citizens’ capacity for work appeared to have doubled; Moscow’s industrial life was strong enough both to put down new roots in the harsh ground of the new construction sites to the east, and to spring up anew from the roots left behind.

  And this engendered yet another paradox.

  Those who had left began to feel unhappy and anxious. Even without them Moscow was still well and strong, and this made them want to return. They petitioned to be allowed back. Forgetting how only the previous autumn they had struggled to obtain permission to leave, they talked of the wisdom of those who had stayed behind. And those who had moved to Saratov and Astrakhan said, “Yes, it’s a lot quieter now in Moscow than it is on the Volga!” They seemed not to understand that the fate of Moscow and the fate of the Volga were one and the same.

  Moscow—city of makeshift iron chimneys installed in air vents and ventilation panes, city of hastily built barricades and daytime air raids, city whose leaden sky was lit by blazing buildings and the flashes of exploding bombs, city where the bodies of women and children killed during air raids could be buried only at night—in the summer of 1942 this city became elegant and beautiful. Even shortly before the curfew couples would be sitting on the benches of Tverskoy Boulevard, and after warm summer showers the linden blossom seemed to smell sweeter and more splendid than ever it had smelled in peacetime.

  41

  ON HIS second morning in Moscow Viktor packed his belongings and left the hotel, where there was hot water in the bathroom and where both wine and vodka were available every day.

  Back in his apartment, he opened the windows and went into the kitchen to add some water to the dried-up ink in the inkwell. A rust-coloured fluid flowed lazily from the tap and he waited a long time for it to run clear.

  He sat down to write a postcard to Ludmila and then began a letter to Sokolov—a detailed account of his conversation with Pimenov. He thought it would now take him about ten days to get through the various formalities required for the official approval of the institute’s work plan.

  Viktor addressed the envelope and fell into thought. It was all very strange. He had set off for Moscow, expecting to have to fight his corner, to have to argue passionately about his project’s importance—but he had not had to argue at all. Every last one of his proposals had been accepted.

  He sealed the envelope and began walking about the room. “It’s good to be back home,” he thought. “I’ve done the right thing.”

  After a while he sat down at his desk and turned to his work. Now and again he looked up and listened: the silence seemed extraordinary. And then he realized that he wasn’t listening to the silence so much as wondering if there would be a ring at the door. And it might, perhaps, be that young woman from Omsk—and he would say, “Come and sit down. Being on one’s own can be terribly sad.”

  But then he got carried away by his work and forgot about the young woman for several hours. And he was leaning over his desk, writing fast, when he really did hear a knock. It was her. She wanted to borrow two matches to light the gas: one for now, and one for the morning.

  “Lending you matches is out of the question,” Viktor replied, “but I’ll gladly give you a box. But why are you standing out there in the corridor? Come in!”

  “You’re very kind,” she said with a laugh. “Matches are hard to come by.” And she came in. Seeing a crumpled collar on the floor, she picked it up, put it on the table and said, “There’s dust everywhere. The place is a mess.”

  Her face looked especially pretty when she was bending down, glancing up at Viktor.

  “Goodness,” she said. “You’ve got a piano. Do you know how to play?” Wanting to appear light-hearted, she answered on his behalf, “A few simple pieces, maybe, like ‘Where have you been, little finch?’”86

  Viktor couldn’t think what to say.

  He was awkward and shy with women.

  Like many shy men, he saw himself as cool and experienced, imagining that this young woman had no idea that her neighbour with the matches fancied her, that he was admiring her slender fingers, her tanned feet in sandals with red heels, her shoulders, her small nose, her breasts and her hair.

  He had still not managed to ask her name.

  Then she asked him to play something. He began with pieces he thought she might know: a Chopin waltz, a Wieniawski mazurka. Then he gave a little snort, shook his head and began some Scriabin, glancing at her now and again out of the corner of his eye. She listened intently, slightly wrinkling her brow.

  “Where did you learn to play?” she asked, after he’d closed the piano lid and wiped his palms and his forehead.

  Instead of answering, he asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Nina,” she answered, “and you’re Viktor.” And she pointed to a large picture, lying flat on his desk, with the inscription “Viktor Pavlovich Shtrum—from the postgraduate students of the Institute of Mechanics and Physics.”

  “And your patronymic?” he asked.

  “Just call me Nina.”

  Viktor offered her some tea and invited her to stay and eat with him. Nina agreed and then laughed, amused by how awkwardly he began preparing the meal.

  “What a strange way to cut bread!” she said. “Let me do it. And you don’t need to open any tins—there’s more than enough on the table as it is! Wait, wait—first you have to shake the dust from the tablecloth!”

  There was a touching charm in the way this pretty young woman took charge of the large empty apartment.

  While they were eating, Nina told Viktor that she lived in Omsk, where her husband worked in the district consumers’ union. She had come to deliver a consignment of linen from Omsk to some of the Moscow hospitals, but she had been held up by administrative problems. In a few days she’d be going to Kalinin—materials intended for Omsk had been sent there by mistake. “And then I’ll have to go home,” she added.

  “Why I’ll have to?” asked Viktor.

  “Why?” she repeated. With a sigh, she added, “Because . . .”

  Viktor offered her some wine.

  Nina drank half a glass of Madeira—the Madeira that Ludmila had told Viktor to bring back to Kazan with him.87 Above her upper lip there were now shiny little beads of sweat, and she began to fan her neck and cheeks with her handkerchief.

  “You don’t mind the window being open?” asked Viktor. “But tell me what made you say ‘I’ll have to go home’? Usually it’s the opposite—people complain about having to leave home.”

  She laughed and gently shook her head.

  “What’s that on your little chain?” he asked.

  “A locket. A photograph of my late mother.” She took the chain from her neck and held it out to him. “Have a look.”

  Viktor looked at the small yellowing photograph of an elderly woman with a white peasant kerchief tied round her head. Then he carefully handed the locket back to his guest.

  Nina walked around the room and said, “Heavens—what a huge space—you could get lost in it!”

  “I’d love you to get lost here,” he said—and at once felt embarrassed by his own boldness. But she seemed not to have understood.

  “You know what?” she said. “Let me help you
dust the room and wash the dishes.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” said Viktor, somewhat alarmed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Nina wiped the oilskin tablecloth and then, as she went on to wash the glasses, began to say a little more about herself.

  Viktor stood at the window and listened.

  How strange she was—quite different from any other woman he knew! And so beautiful! And how, without hesitation and with such heart-rending frankness, could she talk like this about such personal matters—about her late mother, about her unkind husband and the wrongs he had done her?

  Her stories were a strange mixture of childishness and worldly wisdom.

  She told him about a “wonderful man”—an electrician—who had been in love with her. Back then she’d been working as a fitter. Now she couldn’t understand why she’d refused to marry him. Instead, just before the war, she had married a handsome neighbour with an important job in the food industry. He was now “clinging”—as she herself put it—to the exemption from military service to which this entitled him.

  Nina looked at her watch. “Well, it’s time I left. Thank you for the meal.”

  “Thank you. I really can’t thank you enough.”

  “It’s wartime,” she said. “We all need to help one another.”

  “No, not just for that. For such a wonderful, remarkable evening. And for your trust in me. Believe me, I’m moved by the way you’ve spoken to me.” Viktor put his hand to his heart.

  “You’re very strange,” she said, and looked at him with curiosity.

  “Unfortunately,” he replied, “I’m not strange at all. I’m as ordinary as can be. You’re the unusual one. Will you allow me to go with you to your door?” And he bowed respectfully.

  For several seconds she looked him straight in the eye. There was not one blink of her lashes. Her eyes were wide open, intent, surprised.

  “You’re very. . .” she said—and sighed, as if about to cry.

  He would never have guessed that this beautiful young woman had lived through so much. “Yet she’s so pure and trusting,” he thought.

  •

  In the morning, as he went past the old lift attendant, sitting in her wicker armchair, Viktor asked, “How are you doing, Alexandra Petrovna?”

  “The same as every one else,” she replied. “My daughter’s ill. We wanted to send her children away, to stay with my son—but on Thursday I got a letter from her. My son’s been called up. What can we do with the children now? My daughter-in-law’s got her hands full already—one girl and a very young boy.”

  42

  LATER that day, at the committee, Viktor heard that Chepyzhin was already in Moscow. Pimenov’s secretary, a stout old matron in her sixties who seemed to look equally critically at every man from first-year student to grey-haired professor, said, “Viktor Pavlovich, Academician Chepyzhin asked you to wait for him. He’ll be here by six.”

  She looked at Viktor and said severely, “You absolutely must wait. Tomorrow he’s leaving for Sverdlovsk.” After a little laugh she added quietly, “And you’ll have to wait a long time, since he’s sure to be late.”

  This was her way of saying that not even a famous academician is exempt from the usual male weaknesses, since the male sex is flighty and hard to educate.

  But she turned out to be right. Chepyzhin arrived only after seven o’clock, when the offices and other rooms were already empty and the night watchman was keeping a stern eye on Viktor as he strode anxiously up and down the corridor. One of the other secretaries, also on night duty, was arranging his armchair beside his boss’s desk, making his preparations for a peaceful night.

  When Viktor heard Chepyzhin’s footsteps, when he looked round and glimpsed his familiar, stocky figure at the end of the corridor, he felt a surge of excitement and joy.

  Chepyzhin immediately held out his hand and hurried towards Viktor, saying in a loud voice, “Viktor Pavlovich! At last! And in Moscow!”

  His questions were quick and abrupt: “How are things in Kazan? Difficult? Do you think of me now and again? What exactly have you and Pimenov agreed on? Do the air raids scare you? Is it true that Ludmila Nikolaevna worked on a kolkhoz during the summer?”

  Listening to Viktor’s replies, he cocked his head to one side. His eyes were serious yet cheerful, shining from underneath his broad forehead.

  “I’ve read your work plan,” he said. “I think you’re making the right choices.” He thought then quietly went on, “My sons are in the army. Vanya’s been wounded. You’ve got a son in the army too, haven’t you? What do you think? Should we forget about science and volunteer for the front ourselves?” He looked around the room and said, “It’s stifling in here—dusty and smoky. Look—let’s go for a walk. You can come back home with me. It’s not far. Only four kilometres. There’ll be a car to take you back afterwards. All right?”

  “Of course,” Viktor replied.

  In the still twilight Chepyzhin’s tanned, weather-beaten face was a dark brown and his large, bright eyes seemed keen and alert. This was probably how he had looked during his long summer hikes, as the path began to disappear in the twilight and he walked swiftly towards the spot where he planned to stop for the night.

  As they crossed Trubnaya Square, Chepyzhin paused and took a long hard look at the grey-blue evening sky. His gaze was not like that of other people. There it was—the sky of his childhood dreams, a sky that prompted sad contemplation, or irrational sorrow . . . But no, that was not what Chepyzhin saw. The sky Chepyzhin saw was a universal laboratory, a place where his mind could settle down to serious labour; Chepyzhin the scientist was looking at the sky the way a peasant inspects a field where he has worked and sweated.

  These first flickering stars were perhaps giving birth in his mind to thoughts of proton explosions, of developmental phases and cycles, of super-dense matter, of cosmic showers and storms of varitrons,88 of different theories of cosmogony, including his own, of instruments for recording invisible streams of stellar energy . . .

  Or perhaps these first stars had made him think of something entirely different.

  Of a bonfire, of crackling twigs, of a blackened pan in which millet porridge was quietly steaming, of dark leaves up above him, silhouetted against the night sky?

  Or of a quiet evening when he was little, when he had sat on his mother’s lap and, sensing her warm breath and her warm hands stroking his head, had gazed up at the stars, sleepy yet full of wonder?

  Amid the few stars and the fragile little tin clouds Viktor could see barrage balloons and the broad, sweeping beams of searchlights. The war had burst into Russian cities and the fields of Russian farmers—and it was no less present in the Russian sky.

  They walked slowly and in silence. There were many questions Viktor wanted to ask, but he did not ask anything about the war, nor about Chepyzhin’s own work, nor about the discoveries of Professor Stepanov, who had recently gone to consult Chepyzhin. Nor did Viktor ask Chepyzhin what he thought about the work he was doing himself, nor about the conversation between Chepyzhin and Pimenov that Pimenov had mentioned to him a few hours earlier.

  He knew there was some other, more important question to discuss, something that related at one and the same time to the war, to their work, and to the anguish deep in their hearts.

  Chepyzhin looked at Viktor and said, “Fascism! What’s happened? What has become of the Germans? Reading about the fascists’ medieval brutality makes your blood run cold. They burn villages, they build death camps, they organize mass executions of prisoners of war, massacres of peaceful civilians we haven’t seen since the dawn of history. Everything good seems to have disappeared. Are there no longer any good, noble or honest Germans? How can that be? You and I know Germans. We know their science, their literature, their music, their philosophy! And their working classes? And their progressive movement—what’s happened to that? Where have so many evil people sprung from? People tell us the Germans have changed—or,
rather, degenerated. People say Hitler and his Nazis have transformed them.”

  “Maybe,” Viktor replied, “but Nazism didn’t appear out of nowhere. Muhammad went to the mountain—and the mountain went to Muhammad. ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ was sung long before Hitler. Not long ago I was rereading the letters of Heinrich Heine. A hundred years ago he wrote Lutezia—about what he called the ghastly falsity of German nationalism, about the idiotic German hostility towards their neighbours, towards other nations.89 And then, fifty years later, Nietzsche started preaching his superman—a blond beast to whom everything is permitted. And in 1914 the flower of German science welcomed the kaiser’s invasion of Belgium; Ostwald was one such scientist, but there were others even more important.90 As for Hitler himself, he has always known very well that there’s no lack of demand for the goods he sells; he has friends among the captains of industry and among the Prussian nobility, among army officers and among the petty bourgeoisie. Yes, there’s been no shortage of takers! Who do you think mans the regiments of the SS? Who has turned the whole of Europe into a huge concentration camp? Who has forced tens of thousands of people into mobile gas chambers?91 Fascism comes out of the whole of Germany’s reactionary past, even if it has its own particular features and is more terrible than anything before it.”

  “All very well,” said Chepyzhin, with a dismissive wave of the hand. “Fascism may be strong, but we mustn’t forget that its power over people is not unlimited. All Hitler has really changed is the pecking order—who occupies what position in German society. The relative proportions of the various elements remain the same—but fascism has brought to the surface all the sediment, all the inevitable dregs of capitalist life, all the filth that had previously lain hidden. Fascism has brought all this into the light of day, while everything good and wise, everything most truly of the people has been forced underground. Nevertheless, what is good and wise is still alive. This bread of life still exists. Many souls, it goes without saying, have been distorted and perverted by fascism, but the German people remain. And the German people always will remain.”