Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  They imagined that her only interest was in this chance-met Novikov, but her thoughts were with someone else.

  For Zhenya, Krymov had once had a romantic aura, an air of wisdom about him. His eccentricities, his past, his friends—everything had excited her. He had been working back then for journals devoted to the international workers’ movement. He often took part in congresses and wrote a great deal about the revolutionary movement in Europe.

  Foreign comrades, delegates to these congresses, would come and visit him. They would try to speak to Zhenya in Russian and—without fail—mangle the Russian words.

  Krymov’s conversations with these foreign comrades were long and animated, often going on until two or three in the morning. Sometimes they were conducted in French, which Zhenya had known since childhood. She would listen intently but, after a while, their stories and arguments began to bore her. She hadn’t heard of the people they talked about, nor read the books they argued about.

  Once she said to Krymov, “You know, when I talk to them, I feel as if I’m accompanying people who have no musical ear. They can distinguish tones, but not semitones or quartertones. I don’t think it’s a matter of language. We’re probably just too different.”

  This made Krymov angry. “That’s your fault, not theirs. You’re narrow-minded. Maybe you’re the one with no musical ear.”

  She replied, quietly and simply, “You and I have little in common.”

  Once they had a large party of guests—“a whole band,” as Krymov liked to say. Two short, stout women with round faces from the Institute of World Economics; an Indian whom they called Nikolay Ivanovich; a Spaniard, a German, an Englishman and a Frenchman.

  Everyone was in a good mood. They asked Nikolay Ivanovich to sing for them. His voice turned out to be rather strange—high and sharp, with a certain melancholy.

  This Indian in gold spectacles, with a cool, polite smile, had degrees from two universities. He was a regular speaker at European congresses and was the author of a large book that Krymov kept on his desk. Now, as he sang, he was transformed.

  Zhenya listened to the unfamiliar sounds and looked at him out of the corner of her eye. His legs tucked in beneath him, he was sitting in a pose she had previously seen only in geography textbooks.

  As he took off his glasses and wiped them with a white handkerchief, she saw that his thin, bony fingers were trembling. There were tears in his short-sighted eyes, which now seemed kind and sweet.

  It was agreed that everyone should sing in his or her own language.

  •

  The next person to sing was Charles, a journalist friend of Henri Barbusse.137 He was wearing a crumpled jacket and he looked dishevelled, with a tangle of hair hanging down over his forehead. In a thin, trembling voice, he sang a song once sung by women factory workers; its sad, naive words were a moving expression of these women’s bewilderment.

  Next was Fritz Hakken, a tall, long-faced professor of economics who had spent half his life in prison. Clenched fists resting on the table, he sang “The Peat Bog Soldiers,” a song they all knew from the recording by Ernst Busch.138 A song without hope, sung by those who had been condemned to death. The longer Fritz sang, the grimmer he looked. He clearly felt he was singing about himself, about his own life.

  Henry, a handsome young merchant sailors’ delegate invited by the Central Trade Union Council, rose to his feet to sing, keeping his hands in his pockets. He sang a song that at first sounded jolly and lively, but the words were full of anxiety: a sailor was wondering what the future held in store for him, and what would happen to those he had left behind.

  When the Spaniard was invited to sing, he coughed a little, then stood, as if to attention, and sang the Internationale.

  The others rose to their feet and joined in. Everyone was singing their own words but, since the words were hard to make out, it sounded as if they were all singing in the same language. They were all standing tall and it was clear that they were deeply moved. The two women had fine voices. Nevertheless, there was something a little comic about the look on their faces and the way they thrust out their imposing busts. One was tapping her stout leg and shaking her curls; the other was waving a short, plump arm about, as if conducting a choir. Zhenya had been caught up by the atmosphere of intense solemnity, but all of a sudden she wanted to laugh; she had to pretend to clear her throat to disguise this. When she saw two little tears run down Krymov’s cheeks, she felt awkward and embarrassed, though without quite knowing why—whether on her account or on his.

  Everyone said goodbye to the two women, who didn’t want to go out to eat, and then went together to a Georgian restaurant. After they had eaten, they set off down Tverskoy Boulevard.

  Krymov suggested going down Malaya Nikitskaya to the new part of the Moscow zoo. Henry, who was following a carefully organized sightseeing plan, enthusiastically agreed.

  Among the other visitors was one couple they all took a liking to: a forty-year-old man and an elderly woman in a brown peasant jacket, with a smart white kerchief over her grey hair. The man had a calm though tired-looking face and large, dark hands—he was probably a factory worker. He was walking with one hand under the old woman’s elbow. Probably he was her son, and she had come to Moscow to stay with him.

  But for the bright sparkle in her eyes, the old woman’s wrinkled face would have seemed lifeless. Looking at a large elk, she said, “What a clown—and he certainly looks well fed. He’d make a fine tractor!”

  She took an interest in everything, and she kept looking round at people, clearly proud to be seen with her son.

  For some time Krymov’s “band” walked behind this couple, watching them and not noticing that they were themselves being watched by dozens of people. A crowd of spellbound young boys were following them from one enclosure to another, clearly more interested in Nikolay Ivanovich than in the elk, or in a reindeer licking a lump of salt.

  The band turned off towards the pen for the young animals,139 but the sky suddenly went dark and it began to rain. Henry took off his jacket and held it over Zhenya’s head. Turbid water streamed noisily along the ditch beside the path. Everyone now had wet feet. There was a particular charm about these small discomforts; they all felt happy and carefree, as if they were children.

  The sun came out again. The water in the puddles now sparkled, and the trees looked brighter and greener than ever. In the cubs’ pen they could see daisies, with trembling droplets of water on each little flower.

  “Paradise,” said the German.

  A bear cub began awkwardly climbing a tree; drops of water fell from the branches. Meanwhile, a game started up in the grass below—some sinewy red dingo pups, their tails curled, were teasing a second bear cub. Some wolf cubs joined in, their shoulder blades rotating almost like wheels. The bear cub, who was standing on his hind legs, tried to slap one of them on the snout with a plump, childish paw. The first bear cub fell from the tree—and the animals all merged into a single merry, motley ball of fur rolling about on the grass.

  Just then a fox cub emerged from the bushes. He looked anxious and troubled; his face looked baleful and his tail was sweeping from side to side. His eyes shone, and his thin, moulting flanks were rising and falling very rapidly. He was longing to take part in the game; he would steal forward a few steps and then, overcome by fear, flatten himself against the ground and freeze. All of a sudden he leaped forward and threw himself into the fray with an odd little squeal, playful yet somehow pitiful. The dingo pups knocked him off his feet, and he lay there on one side. His eyes still shone and he was trustfully exposing his belly. Then he let out a piercing cry of reproach—one of the dingo pups must have bitten him too hard. This was the end of him: the dingo pups went for his throat, and the game on the grass turned into a murder. A keeper ran up, plucked the dead creature out of the melee and carried it away; hanging down from the keeper’s hand were a skinny dead tail and a dead snout, with one open eye. The red dingo pups responsible for this mur
der followed the keeper, their curled tails quivering with intense excitement.

  The Spaniard’s black eyes filled with fury. Fists clenched, he yelled, “Hitler Youth!”

  Then everyone began talking at once. Zhenya heard Nikolay Ivanovich pronounce very clearly, with a look of distaste, “Es ist eine alte Geschichte, doch bleibt sie immer neu.”140

  In Russian, in a voice that allowed no argument, Krymov said, “All right, brothers! That’s enough! There is no such thing as an instinct to kill—and there never has been!”

  In many respects, this had been one of the most pleasant of the days Zhenya had spent in Krymov’s company: moving songs, a cheery meal, the scent of lindens, a brief shower, and the mother and son they had found so touching . . . But what she recalled most vividly was that last poignant scene: the pitiful fox cub and the suffering and rage in the eyes of the Spaniard.

  During Zhenya’s last months with Krymov the good days had been few and far between. She noticed that she was starting to feel pleased whenever she heard something bad about his friends. Hakken had haggled unpleasantly over his pay for an article in the journal World Economics. Henry had had an affair with an interpreter, then treacherously abandoned her. Charles had travelled to the Black Sea to write a book, but not written a single word. Instead, he had just lazed about, drinking and swimming. She considered Krymov to blame for all these men’s failings. “See what your friends are really like!” she once said.

  Sometimes he went out every evening, returning only late at night. Sometimes he didn’t want to see anyone at all; he came home from work and either switched off the phone or said, “If Pavel calls, tell him I’m out.” Sometimes he was sullen and taciturn; sometimes chatty and light-hearted, reminiscing, laughing and playing the fool.

  But what mattered was not Krymov’s bad moods or his late nights with friends. What troubled Zhenya more was that she did not feel lonely when Krymov went out, nor did she feel any particular joy when he was being cheerful, chatting away and telling her stories from his past. It was possible that, when she thought she was feeling cross with Krymov’s friends, she was really feeling cross with Krymov himself.

  What had once seemed romantic now seemed simply unnatural; everything once most appealing about him had somehow lost its appeal. His thoughts about painting, his comments on her own work, had of course always been infuriatingly vapid . . . How hard it can be to answer the simplest questions. Why had she stopped loving him? Was it he who had changed, or her? Had she come to understand him better, or was it that she no longer understood him?

  Once used to you, I’ll cease to love

  The one I could not love enough.141

  No, it was more than that. There had been a time when she thought Krymov knew everything; now she found herself saying again and again, “No, you don’t understand!”

  When he made predictions about revolutions in other countries, she mockingly repeated, “Dreams, dreams, where is your sweetness?” Once she had thought him truly progressive, but now he seemed naive and behind the times, like some pious old woman in a bonnet.

  His success or failure in the public world was neither here nor there. Zhenya was, of course, aware that people who had once phoned him often, and without ceremony, now phoned only occasionally—and that when he phoned them himself, their secretaries often refused to put him through. She knew that he no longer received invitations to premieres at the Maly and Moscow Art theatres. Not long ago, when he called the Conservatory’s administrative director, to ask for tickets to hear a famous pianist, the secretary had replied, “I’m sorry, which Krymov is this?”—and then, a minute later, “I regret to say there are no tickets left.” She knew that he was no longer able to obtain medicines for Alexandra Vladimirovna from the Kremlin pharmacy and that he was now taken to work not in a Mercedes but in an Emka that spent ten days each month in the repair workshop. But none of this mattered to her, just as it didn’t matter whether she wore clothes specially made for her by the best-known dressmakers in Moscow or purchased by coupon from the Moscow Tailoring Combine.142 She knew that, after giving a talk at one very important meeting, he had been harshly criticized. He was, apparently, “failing to develop”; he was “stuck in his ways.” But these things were not important: she no longer loved him, and that was all there was to it. Everything else was secondary. Any other way of understanding what had happened was inconceivable.

  And then Krymov had been transferred. Instead of working for the Party, he was to work in publishing. In a buoyant tone, he had said, “Now I’ll have more free time. I’ll be able to get down to my book at last. In all this whirlwind of meetings I’ve hardly been able to snatch a minute for it.”

  He must have sensed that something had changed between them. “One day,” he had joked, “I’ll come round in my ragged clothes, in a leather jacket with holes in it. Your husband, a famous academician or perhaps a people’s commissar, will ask, ‘Who is that, ma chère?’ And you’ll say with a sigh, ‘It’s not important. A mistake from my youth. Tell him I’m busy today—he can come round on Monday.’”

  Zhenya could still remember the sadness in Krymov’s eyes as he said this. And she wanted to see him and explain one more time that it was all the fault of her heart. Her stupid heart was to blame for everything. She had simply stopped loving him, it wasn’t for any particular reason, and he must never, for even a second, think anything bad about her.

  All this troubled her deeply; even during these most desperate days of the war, she was unable to stop thinking about Krymov.

  That night, when she thought everyone had gone to sleep, she began to cry, overwhelmed with pity for a life now irrevocably lost. Thoughts, feelings and conversations from that time all seemed splendid and lofty. Krymov’s friends now seemed kind and sweet. And he himself evoked in her the same piercing sense of love and pity as the fox cub she had heard give a trusting little squeal as it entered that cruel, merry fray. Why was love so bound up with pity? Her pity was so intense that pity and love seemed one and the same thing.

  As she wept, she held her hands close to her face. In the blacked-out room, she could barely see the hands that Krymov had once kissed—and everything about her life seemed as incomprehensible as the stifling darkness around her.

  “Don’t cry,” her mother said in a quiet voice. “Your knight will come soon. He’ll dry your tears.”

  “Heavens!” Zhenya exclaimed, throwing up her hands in despair. Forgetting that she might wake the others, she went on, “No, it’s not that, it’s really not that at all. Why doesn’t anyone understand? Not even you, Mama, not even you!”

  Her mother replied quietly, “Zhenya, Zhenya, believe me, I wasn’t born yesterday. I think I understand you better, right now, than you understand yourself.”

  55

  VERA CAME back home from work, said she didn’t want anything to eat and began to wind up the gramophone. This surprised Zhenya. Usually Vera called out, “Will we be eating soon?” before she had even closed the door behind her.

  Vera was sitting with her elbows on the table and her fists against her cheekbones, watching the spinning record with obstinate concentration—the way a depressed person stares at some random object while their mind is elsewhere.

  “Everyone’s going to be late back tonight. Wash your hands and sit down to dinner with me.”

  Vera merely stared at Zhenya, not saying a word.

  Zhenya looked round as she went out. She saw that Vera was listening to the record with her hands over her ears.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Kindly leave me alone!”

  “Stop it, Vera, it doesn’t help.”

  “Please leave me alone. All dolled up, are you, waiting for your brave paper pusher?”

  “What’s got into you? Talking to me like that—you should be ashamed of yourself!” said Zhenya, astonished by the pain and hate in her niece’s eyes.

  Vera had taken a dislike to Novikov. In his presence, she either kept s
ilent or asked barbed questions.

  “Have you been wounded many times?” she once asked. After receiving the answer she expected, she put on a look of surprise and exclaimed, “What? Not even once? I can’t believe it!” Novikov ignored her gibes, which made her still more angry.

  “Ashamed?” said Vera. “Me feel ashamed? It’s you who should be ashamed of yourself! Don’t you speak like that to me!” She seized the record, hurled it against the floor, rushed to the door, then turned round and shouted, “I won’t be coming back home, I’m going to Zina Melnikova’s for the night.”

  Vera somehow looked both vicious and pathetic. Zhenya had no idea what was troubling her.

  Zhenya had meant to work all day long and through into the evening. Now, though, she no longer felt like working.

  Vera’s rudeness and bad temper came not from her paternal grandfather, as Marusya liked to make out, but from Marusya herself. Marusya was sometimes very stupid indeed. She would go up to an unfinished painting and, in a condescending tone, pronounce judgement: “Ah, I see.” It was as though she were a tank man and Zhenya a child, playing some little childish game. But it was, surely, generally accepted by now that mankind needed more than just bread and boots—did Marusya really not understand that people need paintings too? Yesterday Marusya had said, “Next thing, you’ll be painting pretty little views of the city: views of the Volga, little squares, children with their nannies. There you’ll be with your easel. Soldiers and workers will go marching past. They’ll laugh at you!” This was all very stupid indeed—all the more so because views of the wartime city might in fact be very interesting. The sun, the glitter of the Volga, the huge leaves of the canna lilies, children playing in the sand, the white buildings—and through all this, above all this, within all this, the war, the war . . . Stern faces, camouflaged ships, dark smoke over factories, tanks moving up to the front, the glow of fires. All fused together, not just a matter of contrasts, but also a unity—the sweetness of life and its bitterness, the looming darkness and immortal light triumphing over this darkness.