Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  The incident had stayed in her mind over the years. And her husband was still the same as ever. The other day a neighbour had called round and said, “Has your old man brought you some flour? Mine’s brought me two kilos. It was being given out at the steelworks.”

  “Why didn’t you bring us our flour ration?” she had asked. “It was the same last week—you didn’t bring us any sunflower oil.”

  “I meant just to wait till the queue had disappeared,” he replied casually. “But then it turned out there wasn’t any flour left.”

  •

  That night, as so often, Varvara lay awake for a long time, thinking and listening. Then she got out of bed and walked silently from room to room in her bare feet. She stopped by a window, raised the blackout curtain and gazed into the clear, enigmatic sky. Next, she went over to little Volodya and looked for a long time at his prominent dark forehead and his half-parted lips. He looked like his grandfather: stocky, far from handsome, with coarse, wiry hair. She pulled up his underpants, which had slid down to his hips, kissed his warm, thin shoulder, made the sign of the cross over him and went back to bed.

  During these long sleepless nights she had thought about many things.

  She had lived many years with Andreyev. It was no longer a matter of years—it was her life. Whether for better or worse, she was unable to say. Varvara had never admitted this—not even to the very closest of her friends and family—but during the first years of her marriage she had been deeply unhappy. It was not the marriage she had dreamed of in her girlhood. Her friends had said, “You’ll be the wife of a ship’s captain, you’ll be a real lady.” She had dreamed of living in Saratov or Samara,8 being driven in a cab to the theatre, going with her husband to dances in the Assembly of the Nobility. Instead, she had married Andreyev. He had said more than once that he would throw himself into the Volga if she refused him. She had just laughed, and then all of a sudden she had agreed. “All right, Pavel,” she had said, “I’ll marry you.”

  A few short words—and an entire life.

  Pavel Andreyev was a good man, but he was very unsociable. Difficult, taciturn people like him are often very concerned with their homes; they want to save up money and acquire possessions; they busy themselves with every detail of the housekeeping. But Andreyev wasn’t interested in possessions. Once he had said to her, “What I’d really like to do, Varya, is take a boat and sail to the Caspian Sea, and then go further and further, to distant lands. Otherwise I’ll die, and I’ll hardly have seen the world at all.”

  Varvara was not like her husband. Doing well in the world, being able to show off to others, mattered a great deal to her. And she had much to show off. Not one of her neighbours had such fine furniture. Not one had such a lovely summerhouse in their garden, such splendid fruit trees, such pretty flowers in their window boxes.

  Nevertheless, she was the daughter of an engineer and she had lived all her adult life in the workers’ settlement around an important factory. She understood that her husband was unusually gifted and she was ready to say this to anyone, to proclaim that there was no better and more intelligent worker in any of the three giant Stalingrad factories—or even, for that matter, in the Donbass, the Urals, or Moscow. By now Varvara understood very well that to be considered the number-one worker in a huge workers’ city was an incomparably greater honour than being the owner of a port café.

  She took pride in his friendship with the Shaposhnikov family and she liked to talk about how warmly and respectfully they all treated him. She liked to show her neighbours the greetings letters she and her husband received every New Year from Alexandra Vladimirovna.

  One year the director and the chief engineer had come round on the First of May. Seeing their two cars stop by the main entrance, the neighbours had been consumed by curiosity; they were all peeping through their garden gates or pressing their faces to the windows. Varvara’s heart had burned with pride, though her hands somehow turned icy cold. As for Andreyev, he had welcomed his exalted guests as calmly and straightforwardly as he always greeted old Polyakov on their days off, when he called in for some vodka on his way back from the bathhouse.

  And so their lives had gone by—but had anyone asked Varvara whether she loved her husband, she would merely have shrugged. It was a long time since she had given any thought to the question.

  •

  It was the same almost every night. First, she would think about her husband. Next, she would feel tormented by longing for her son; she could almost hear his quiet voice, almost see his childlike eyes. And then she would think cross, spiteful thoughts about her daughter-in-law, Natalya.

  Natalya was loud, wilful and quick to take offence. Varvara was convinced that Natalya must have somehow tricked Anatoly into marrying her; she was not his equal in any way—neither in intelligence, nor in looks, nor as regards her family, who, until the Revolution, had been small businessmen. Varvara’s thinking followed a logic all of its own; she considered Natalya to have been responsible both for Anatoly’s attack of dysentery in 1934 and for the severe reprimand he had once received for absenteeism, after a May Day holiday that had coincided one year with Easter Day. When Natalya went with Anatoly to the cinema or the football stadium, Varvara would accuse her of forgetting about Volodya. If Natalya made Volodya a new outfit, Varvara felt no less cross: Why should poor Anatoly have to go about in torn underwear and a jacket with holes at the elbows while his wife thought only about their little boy?

  But Natalya was anything but meek, and Varvara certainly did not always come out on top in their battles. Varvara may have been overly critical of Natalya, but Natalya was no less quick to find fault with her mother-in-law.

  Natalya got a job in a children’s home and was there from early morning until evening. After work, she often visited friends. No detail of her behaviour escaped Varvara’s scrutiny: evenings she didn’t want anything to eat when she got home; evenings when there was vodka on her breath; what dress she put on to go where; when she had her hair permed; words she mumbled in her sleep; when she came back with a packet of cigarettes instead of the usual home-grown tobacco; the distant, rather guilty tenderness with which she sometimes addressed little Volodya. There was nothing that did not provide grounds for suspicion.

  Andreyev tried once to make the two women see sense, to get them to understand the importance of treating each other gently and fairly. Once he called them both Hitlers. On another occasion he lost his temper, raised his fist and smashed the pink teacup and saucer he had drunk from for the last eighteen years. He threatened either to throw them both out of the house or to walk out and leave the two of them on their own. But he must have realized that he was exhausting himself to no purpose; neither reason nor violence was going to bring about any change.

  At first Varvara used to tell him that women’s quarrels were none of his business. When he learned to keep his distance, however, she felt still more unhappy. “What’s the matter with you?” she would ask. “Why on earth don’t you say anything to the girl?”

  She and Natalya would soon be setting out on a long and difficult journey together. But it was not easy to think about the future—it looked very bleak indeed.

  7

  EACH SHIFT worked eighteen hours. The tall iron box of the open-hearth shop shook from the constant din—from the rumble and thunder of the work in the neighbouring shops and the factory yard. There was the noise of the rolling mill, where the steel rang out and clattered, suddenly discovering its bright young voice as it cooled from a mute liquid into shimmering grey-blue sheets. There was the crash of the pneumatic hammers pounding red-hot ingots and sending out showers of sparks. There was the loud ring of the ingots falling onto loading platforms where thick metal rails had been laid out to protect the wood from the still-hot steel. As well as the constant thunder of metal, there was the roar of motors and fans, and the grinding of the chains and belts dragging the steel along on its journey.

  The atmosphere in the steelworks was
hot and dry, without even a molecule of moisture. A dry white powder, like the finest snow, flickered silently in the dim light around the row of stone furnaces. Now and again a sudden gust from the Volga flung rough, prickly dust into the workers’ faces. When the molten liquid was poured into moulds, the half-dark of the shop floor would fill with swift sparks; during the brief second of their beautiful and useless life these sparks looked like a swarm of crazed white gnats, or petals of cherry blossom being swept away by the wind. Some would land on the workers—and then it seemed as if, rather than fading to nothing, these sparks were being born there, on the shoulders and arms of these flushed, over-heated figures.

  Workers due for a rest would put their cloth caps beneath their heads and spread their wadded jackets over some bricks or cooled ingots: there was no earth or soft wood inside this iron box—only stone, steel and cast iron.

  The incessant din was soporific. A sudden silence, on the other hand, would have alarmed these men. Silence here could only mean death, a storm or trouble of some other kind. Noise, in this factory, meant peace.

  The workers had reached the limits of human endurance. Their faces had no colour; their eyes were inflamed and their cheeks hollow and sunken. Nevertheless, many of them felt happy—these long hours of heavy labour, day and night, gave them a sense of freedom and the inspiration that comes from struggle.

  In the office they were burning the archives—outlines of future plans and reports on past achievements. Just as a soldier engaged in mortal combat ceases to think about past dramas or about what awaits him next year, so the huge steelworks now existed only in the present day.

  The sheets of steel smelted by the Red October workers were immediately being transformed—in the nearby Tractor and Barricades Factories—into the armour plating of tanks and the barrels of guns and heavy mortars.9 Day and night, tanks were leaving the Tractor Factory and going straight to the front; day and night, trucks and road tractors sent up clouds of dust as they transported more ordnance towards the Don. There was a close bond, a clear unity, between the gunners and tank men fighting off the still-advancing enemy, and the thousands of workers—men and women, young and old—labouring in factories now only thirty or forty kilometres from the front line. This was a true defence in depth.

  Early in the morning the director appeared in the shop. He was a stout man in a blue tunic and supple kid boots.

  The workers had used to make jokes about him, saying that he shaved twice a day and polished his boots before each shift, three times every twenty-four hours. Now, though, his cheeks were covered with dark stubble and he was certainly not polishing his boots any more.

  Until recently, the director had been expected to know what the steelworks would be doing in five years’ time. He had been expected to know the quality of the raw materials they would receive in the autumn and in the following spring. He had been expected to know about their future electricity supply, about impending deliveries of scrap iron, and about the food, clothes and other products expected in the special stores for his workers. He travelled regularly to Moscow. He received telephone calls from Moscow and met regularly with the first secretary of the obkom. He was responsible for everything, both good and bad: apartments, promotions, financial rewards for achievements at work, and official reprimands and dismissals.

  The engineers, the chief accountant, the technical manager, the directors of the individual shops all used to say, “I promise to ask the director”; “I’ll pass on your request to the director”; “I expect the director will help.” Or, in the case of some misdemeanour: “I shall ask the director to consider your dismissal.”

  The director walked across the shop floor. When he came to Andreyev, he stopped.

  The other workers gathered around.

  And then Andreyev asked, “How’s the work going? What’s the situation now?”—questions asked more often by a director than by a worker.

  “More difficult with every hour,” replied the director.

  He said that the steel from Red October, turned into the bodies of tanks, was now confronting the Germans only fourteen or fifteen hours after leaving Stalingrad, that an important army unit with a crucial mission had lost vehicles and other equipment during an air raid, and that a great deal now depended on Red October overfulfilling its plan—the soldiers needed its steel. He added that it was impossible to find more workers—everyone suitable had already joined up.

  “Are you tired, comrade?” he asked, looking Andreyev straight in the eye.

  “Is anyone resting today?” asked Andreyev. And then, “Should we be staying on for the second shift?”

  “Yes,” said the director.

  He was not giving an order; at that moment he was something other than a director. His strength was not a matter of his being in a position to fine or reward, to demote or to recommend for a medal. These things didn’t mean anything any longer—as he well understood.

  He could tell this from the faces of the people standing around him. He also knew that not all of them were ideal workers, in love with their work. There were people who worked simply because they had to, without enthusiasm. Some were apathetic and indifferent; some had already decided that the steelworks had no future; and there were some whose only concern was not to get into trouble with their superiors.

  The director looked at Andreyev.

  Andreyev’s face had the same gleam as the soot-covered girders supporting the ceiling. His furrowed brow was illuminated by a white flame.

  It was as if Andreyev embodied everything that mattered most both in work and in life as a whole. All personal concerns and anxieties had now yielded to something much deeper.

  “If you need us to stay,” Andreyev replied, “then we stay.”

  An elderly woman in a tarpaulin jacket, with gleaming white teeth and a greasy red scarf wound round her head, said, “Don’t worry, my boy, if you want us to work two shifts, then that’s what we’ll do.”

  They all stayed on.

  Everyone worked in silence. No one was yelling out orders; there were none of the usual bad-tempered explanations being given to men who didn’t know what they were doing.

  There were moments when Andreyev had the impression that people were speaking to one another without words. There was a young lad called Slesarev; he had narrow shoulders and was wearing a stripy vest. When Andreyev turned to look at him, he glanced round and hurried towards the entrance, pushing some trolleys with empty moulds. This was exactly what Andreyev had been about to ask him to do.

  Somehow total exhaustion went hand in hand with an unusual ease of movement.

  Everyone in the shop—not only the Party and Komsomol members and the other most selfless workers, but also the sullen evacuees with no understanding of work, the mischievous young girls with plucked eyebrows who were always peering into little round mirrors, the mothers of families who were constantly checking if anything new had appeared in the store—everyone was now gripped by the same passion.

  During the lunch break a thin-faced man in a green soldier’s tunic came up to Andreyev. Andreyev glanced at him blankly but then realized that this was the secretary of the Red October Party committee.

  “Pavel Andreyevich, you’re to come to the director’s office at four.”

  “Why?” Andreyev asked angrily, thinking that the director was going to try to persuade him to leave Stalingrad.

  After looking at him for a moment in silence, the secretary said, “We received orders this morning to prepare to blow up the steelworks. I’ve been asked to choose the right men.” Clearly deeply upset, he reached into a trouser pocket for his tobacco pouch.

  “You’re joking,” said Andreyev.

  8

  MOSTOVSKOY phoned Zhuravlyov, an obkom worker he knew, and said he wanted to go to Red October: Could Zhuravlyov help?

  “Good!” Zhuravlyov replied. “You’ll find comrades of yours there, Leningrad workers evacuated from the Obukhov factory.”

  Zhuravlyov phone
d both Red October and the Tractor Factory to say that Mostovskoy would be coming. Then he sent his driver to collect Mostovskoy and ordered him to wait, once they’d got to the steelworks, for as long as Mostovskoy wished. Only an hour and a half later, however, the driver reappeared. Mostovskoy had said he no longer needed him: after the meeting he wanted to visit a worker he knew, and then he would walk back home.

  Before the evening meeting, while they were waiting for the first secretary, an instructor from the Tractor Factory committee told the others about Mostovskoy’s visit.

  “You were right,” he said. “A meeting with an old revolutionary was just what our workers needed. It couldn’t have gone better. People were weeping when he talked about his last meeting with Lenin, when Lenin was already ill.”

  “And there’s no one with a sounder grasp of theoretical matters,” said Zhuravlyov, who had a penchant for theory.

  “Yes, he couldn’t have spoken more simply. Even the young apprentices were listening open-mouthed—everything he said was so clear and straightforward. I was there when he arrived, just as the first shift was coming to an end. The Party organizers announced that anyone who wished could go and join him in the club. Almost everyone did. Hardly anyone went home—only those who are well and truly politically backward. It was a splendid meeting. Then everyone went into the main hall. Mostovskoy didn’t speak long. He began with the words, ‘You’re all feeling tired by now,’ but his own voice was clear and strong. There was something unusual about the way he spoke.” The instructor thought for a moment, then added, “He made everyone’s heart beat faster. Mine certainly did.”