The Road

by Vasily Grossman

  [...]

  So here we are—a mound of earth over a grave, and a woman planting forget-me-nots. No, her husband won’t be seeing any more of his other woman now. Everything is so peaceful. Her only anxiety now is whether or not she should have planted pansies instead. She has forgiven him, and this forgiveness ennobles her.

  Nearby is a young couple, lovingly painting some railings. They talk to the widow, who has already learned that the old woman buried inside these railings loved cats and rubber plants and that there was nothing she would not do for her son and his sweet wife. Peace, simplicity, a blue sky and—chirping over the grave—a young sparrow whose clear voice has yet to be roughened by cold January air. Gone are the old woman’s mad, grieving eyes.

  And the tear-filled eyes of the paralyzed old man are gone too.

  And the little mound over the poor insane boy also looks peaceful. There is an end now to the agonizing confusion felt by his parents, an end to their terror. Pansies, daisies, forget-me-nots.

  “What torments the poor girl suffered!” the elderly woman says of her sister.

  She has a good look at the grave. The sun shines through the new leaves; it lies bright on the ground. Everything is so quiet now, and relations with the dead are so easy, so peaceful.

  “Soon I’ll plant some nasturtiums. They’ll do well here.”

  And there is no longer a wall between the loving husband and wife. Their love is no longer poisoned by jealousy and fear, by his hostility toward her daughter by that first husband of hers and the little grandson whom she loves with such passion. “Sleep in peace, dear friend whom we shall always remember.”

  It feels good in the cemetery. Everything confused and painful has become easy.

  A loved one leads a particular kind of life here—a good, clear life—and there is real tenderness in your relationship with them.

  A husband who used to come home from work feeling bored and depressed has now learned to enjoy the company of his wife; going to the cemetery on a day off has become his greatest joy. The trees and the grass and the flowers are so very beautiful. There are so many nice people who come regularly to the neighboring graves. He talks about his wife; he thinks about his wife. Remembering her, thinking about her, now feels anything but boring and depressing. Their relationship has been renewed.

  Who told people that there is nothing more splendid than life? Who told them that death is terrible?

  Here they come with their hammers and paintbrushes, with their spades and their saws—crowds of people ready to construct a new and better life. Their eyes are looking straight ahead. How difficult and painful it is in the city! How bright in the cemetery!

  Had there ever been a way of bridging that gulf—the gulf between the father and his contemptible but ever-so-successful children? Now, anyway, there is no such gulf. “Sleep in peace, dear teacher, father, and friend.”

  While they work on the grave, the children talk about their lives, their travels, their friends. He, their father, is there beside them. Everything feels so peaceful, so good. Never again will they see that anguished, pitying look on his face. Never again will he look as if he were ashamed of them.

  These crowds of the living enter the cemetery, as if the city is pushing them through the gates. And when these exhausted, despairing people see the peaceful green of the graves that have become the sleeping places of husbands, mothers, fathers, wives, and children—at that moment they start to feel hope. Now they are constructing a new life, a better life than the life that had formerly been lacerating their hearts.

  2.

  Many gravestones bear information about the deceased—about his academic titles or military rank, about his work or number of years as a Party member.

  Until 1917 it might have been stated that the deceased was a merchant of the First or Second Guild, or a Full State Councillor.

  There is another category of inscription—inscriptions that speak of the feelings of those who were close to the deceased. These inscriptions, in verse or prose, are sometimes very prolix. They are often monstrously ungrammatical or unbelievably absurd, stupid, or vulgar, but this is of no importance to our discussion.

  What is important is that both categories of inscriptions—those that speak of the status of the deceased and those that speak of how much he is loved by those near and dear to him—have only one purpose: to inform outsiders. They have nothing to do with the feelings that live in the depths of people’s hearts.

  Both categories of inscription serve a practical purpose. They are like the statements people make when they apply for a new job, when they propose marriage, when they put someone forward for some prize or medal.

  These inscriptions never mention menial or everyday occupations. You never read, “Here lies a barber, a carpenter, a cleaner, a bus conductor...”

  If a career is mentioned, it is usually that of professor, actor, writer, fighter pilot, doctor, or artist...

  If a rank or position is mentioned, then it is usually an important one: a colonel, an admiral, a senior judge. It is seldom mentioned that someone was a lieutenant or a laboratory assistant.

  What matters to the State or to society pursues us as far as the cemetery. Here too everyday human feelings do not dare to speak up.

  Inscriptions of the second category—about love, eternal sorrow, tears of grief—serve the same external and self-regarding aims. Whether an inscription is touching or vulgar, whether it is a splendid poem or absurd and ungrammatical doggerel, is irrelevant.

  The inscription is not really addressed to the deceased; the deceased, obviously, is unable to read it. Nor is it there for the sake of the bereft; they know what is going on in their hearts even without an inscription.

  The inscription is there in order to be read. It is addressed to those who pass by.

  In the cemetery a widow is mourning her husband; her lamentations can be heard a long way away. Why must she howl so loudly? The deceased, after all, cannot hear her. And the soul’s anguish does not need to be howled out with such power, as if the widow were on the stage of an opera house. But the widow knows very well why she howls. She needs to be heard by the passersby. She too is making a statement; she too is providing information.

  Those who repeatedly come to the cemetery in mourning clothes and sit with pious faces on the little benches by the graves are doing the same thing; they too are making statements, they too are providing information.

  They are very different from those who come to construct a new life, to refashion a relationship and make it happier and wiser.

  Those who go to the cemetery to make statements believe that the most important thing in life is to prove their own superiority, the superiority of their feelings, the unusual depth of their hearts. Yes, there are many reasons, many reasons indeed, why people go to a cemetery.

  An NKVD official, a man who lost his mind during the terrible year 1937, is walking among the graves, shouting and waving his fist in the air. The graves remain silent, and this fills the mad investigator with despair. Nothing he can do will make the deceased speak, and he has still not concluded his investigations. There are many reasons, many reasons indeed, why people go to a cemetery.

  Lovers arrange trysts in cemeteries. And people go for walks in cemeteries; they go there to get some fresh air.

  3.

  The cemetery lives an intense, passion-filled life.

  Stonemasons, painters, gravediggers, handymen, women whose job it is to keep the cemetery tidy and clean, truck drivers delivering turf and sand, sellers of flowers and seedlings, workers in the store where you rent spades and watering cans—these are the people who determine the material aspects of life in the cemetery.

  Nearly all of these jobs have their counterpart in the clandestine world of the black economy. As in the world of contemporary physics, a person or object can, it seems, exist in two different spaces at once.

  The black economy has its unwritten price lists and work norms. Workers in this economy charg
e more than the State does, but they offer more choice and provide materials of better quality.

  The cemetery is a part of the State, and it is administered according to the same hierarchical fashion as all other parts of the State.

  The administration of the cemetery is centralized; power is concentrated in the hands of the director. And like most centralized systems, this system oppresses even its most senior officials. Even the director does not draw up directives himself; his task is merely to execute directives that come from above.

  The Church is separate from the State.

  The Church has cadres of its own. It has senior cadres, and it has subordinate cadres: those who sing in its choirs, those who sell candles or communion bread.

  It is not only when someone elderly is being buried that people require the help of the Church; even deceased members of the Party are sometimes installed in the cemetery in the presence of a priest. No matter how young a man may be, no matter how contemporary his profession, no matter if he is a nuclear physicist, a designer of rockets, or a worker in a television-repair shop—if he goes and dies, it is possible that the Church will play a role in his funeral.

  Here too there is a duplication or split. As well as the official patriarchy, there are dozens of “private” priests, equally separate from the State and from the Church itself. These men wear ordinary clothing, but their long hair, their good-natured puffy faces, and their magnificent red noses make it easy to recognize them as “private” priests.

  The official Church has no love at all for these men. The carelessness with which they perform Church rites is positively sacrilegious, and then they are only too ready to accept the most token of payments, to carry out these rites for no more than the price of a glass of vodka—or, perhaps, of a few glasses.

  Once, to the great satisfaction of the Vagankovo archpriest, the police organized a raid on the cemetery, a roundup of these “private” priests. From a distance it seemed quite funny to see these long-haired figures leaping over the boundary fence, creeping along the ground like soldiers on a reconnaissance mission, or rushing about between the graves to the accompaniment of police whistles.

  If you had a closer view, however, none of this was in the least funny. There was nothing funny about the tears in their eyes, about their heavy, tormented breathing, about the look of shame and terror on their elderly faces.

  4.

  The cemetery shares the life of the country as a whole, of the people, of the State.

  In the summer of 1941 the tracks leading to the Belorussian Station suffered particularly severe bombing. Many heavy bombs fell on the Vagankovo, which adjoins the tracks. These bombs destroyed trees and scattered clods of earth, fragments of granite, and splinters of crosses. There were times when coffins and dead bodies, torn from the ground by the force of an explosion, flew into the air.

  During the hungry years of the civil war people came to the cemetery to gather sorrel and the leaves of linden trees. They broke off small branches to feed to their goats.

  Even the crimes committed in a cemetery are determined by the conditions of people’s lives at a given time.

  During the first years after the Revolution there were stories about a cemetery watchman who sold pork: he used to fatten his pigs with human flesh, which he dug up at night from the graves. The police who discovered this were shocked by the look of the pigs; they were huge, wild, and aggressive.

  During the years of the New Economic Policy there were stories of a cooperative supplying small food kiosks with spicy, garlic- flavored sausages. It was discovered that these sausages contained meat from human corpses.

  During the years when Stalin declared that “life has become better, life has become merrier,” grave robbers turned their attention to valuables, to gold teeth, to the suits worn by the deceased.

  After the Great Patriotic War there was an influx of items from abroad. Grave robbers were now on the lookout for foreign suits, foreign shoes, anything foreign...

  A colonel who had served in the Soviet Occupation Forces in Germany had brought back a talking doll for his little daughter. Soon afterward this the girl died. Since she adored this doll, her parents placed it in the coffin with her. Some time later the mother saw a woman trying to sell this doll. The mother fainted.

  But these crimes are atypical, out of the ordinary.

  Cemetery crime today is something altogether more petty. Today’s thieves steal flowers, portrait frames, vases, iron railings.

  5.

  One could say, following von Clausewitz, that the cemetery is a continuation of life by other means. The graves express both the characters of individuals and the character of a particular time.

  There are, of course, plenty of dull, featureless graves. But then there are plenty of dull, colorless people.

  There is a great difference between the graves of important people from recent years and the graves of merchants and privy councillors from before the Revolution.

  But no less instructive than this difference is a similarity—the remarkable similarity between the simple, ordinary graves of the past and the simple, ordinary graves of our century of rockets and nuclear reactors.

  What staying power! A wooden cross, a mound of earth, a paper wreath...And if you go and look at the graves in an ordinary village cemetery, this staying power becomes still more evident.

  “Everything flows, everything changes,” said the Greek.

  But this is not evident from the little mounds with their gray crosses. If everything changes, then it changes in a manner that is barely perceptible.

  And it is not simply a matter of the tenacity of burial traditions. What we see here is the tenacity of the spirit of life, of the very core of life.

  What stubbornness! As if in a fairy tale, all has changed. The new order—electricity, the application of chemical and nuclear power—has brought about countless changes, and we hear about these changes every day.

  But this little gray cross, so similar to the gray cross put there one hundred and fifty years ago, seems to symbolize the futility of great revolutions, of great scientific and technical changes that have proved unable to change the deeper aspects of life. The more immutable life’s depths, the sharper, the more abrupt are the changes on the ocean’s surface.

  Storms come and go, but the ocean depths remain.

  The Revolution and its storms have left traces. Amid the grass of the Vagankovo Cemetery can be found strange gravestones, bizarre monuments. A black slab of stone with an anvil on top. A cast-iron mast crowned by a hammer and sickle. A heavy ingot of cast steel. A terrestrial globe made from rough, unpolished granite, with a five-pointed star resting atop oceans and continents. New indeed!

  The half-effaced revolutionary inscriptions are already harder to read than those on the polished granite gravestones of merchants, princes and factory owners.

  But what incandescent passion breathes from each half-effaced word written by the hand of the Revolution! What faith, what a flame, what impassioned power!

  And how few—how very few the gravestones and monuments of those who believed in a world commune! To find these monuments you need to search a long time among a dense forest of crosses and slabs of granite, among cast-iron railings and slabs of marble, among tall, wild grass:

  To a mad thought you sacrificed

  Yourselves. It seems you hoped

  Your own thin blood might melt the ice

  That blankets the eternal Pole.

  Against the glacial mass, your spilled

  Blood shone in the darkness like a flame.

  Then winter breathed her iron breath—

  And nothing of that hope remains.

  Stalin once said that Soviet culture was Socialist in content and national in form. It proved, however, to be the other way around.

  The Vagankovo Cemetery, the Armenian Cemetery, and the German Cemetery always continued to reflect the depths of life, but they do not reflect the surface of Soviet life between 1917
and the assassination of Kirov in 1934. During this period the national element had not yet emerged from the realm of mere form to become the content of Soviet life, and the Socialist element had yet to be limited once and for all to the realm of external form. This, of course, was a period when the Party was dominated by the revolutionary intelligentsia, by workers with experience in the revolutionary underground.

  This period of Soviet life is reflected in the cemetery beside the Moscow crematorium. What a huge number of mixed marriages there were in those years! What wonderful equality between different nationalities! What a plethora of German, Italian, French, and English surnames! Some of the gravestones bear inscriptions in foreign languages. What a lot of Latvians, Jews, and Armenians! What militant slogans on the gravestones!

  Here, in this cemetery surrounded by a red wall, it still seems possible to glimpse the flame of young Bolshevism—of a Bolshevism not yet nationalized and taken over by the State: a Bolshevism still imbued with the lyrical passions of youth, with the spirit of the “Internationale,” with the sweet delirium of the Paris Commune, with the intoxicating songs of the Revolution.

  6.

  The living human heart is the most splendid thing in the world. There is true splendor in its ability to love and to have faith, to pardon and to sacrifice everything in the name of love. But in the earth of the cemetery even a living heart must sleep an eternal sleep.

  Grand tombs, memorial inscriptions, and the flowers that grow on a grave are all equally unable to show us the soul of someone who has died; they cannot show us their love or grief. Stone, music, prayer, and the lamentations of mourners are all equally powerless to convey the mystery of a human soul.

  The sanctity of the soul’s holy mystery makes everything else seem contemptible. The drums and brass trumpets of the State, the wisdom of history, the stone of monuments, howls of loss, prayers of remembrance—all these seem as nothing in the presence of this mystery.