“I’m afraid I won’t be able to endure the torture during the interrogation.”
“What do you mean, little fool, what interrogation? Our soldiers won’t let the Germans through.”
She caressed my head and kissed me.
The train rode under bombs all the time. Whenever they began bombing, mama lay on top of us: “If they kill us, we’ll die together. Or else just me…” The first dead person I saw was a little boy. He was lying there looking up, and I tried to waken him. To waken him…I couldn’t understand that he wasn’t alive. I had a piece of sugar, I offered him that piece of sugar, hoping he would get up. But he didn’t…
They were bombing, and my sister whispered to me, “When they stop bombing, I’ll obey mama, I’ll always obey mama.” And indeed, after the war, Toma was very obedient. Mama remembered that before the war, she used to call her a scamp. And our little Tolik…Before the war he could already walk well and talk well. And now he stopped talking, he clutched his head all the time.
I saw my sister’s hair turn white. She had very long black hair, and it turned white. In one night…
The train started. Where is Tamara? She’s not in the car. We look. Tamara is running behind the car with a bouquet of cornflowers. There was a big field, the wheat was taller than us, and there were cornflowers. Her face…To this day her face is before my eyes. Her black eyes wide open, she runs, silent. She doesn’t even shout “mama.” She runs, silent.
Mama went mad…She rushed to jump out of the moving train…I was holding Tolik, and we both shouted. Then a soldier appeared…He pushed mama away from the door, jumped out, caught hold of Tomka, and threw her into the car with all his might. In the morning, we saw she was white. For several days we didn’t tell her, we hid our mirror, but then she accidentally looked into someone else’s and burst into tears: “Mama, am I already a grandmother?”
Mama comforted her. “We’ll cut your hair, and it will grow back dark.”
After this incident mama said, “That’s it. Don’t leave the car. If they kill us, they kill us. If we stay alive, then it’s our destiny!”
When they shouted “Airplanes! Everybody off the train!” she stuffed us under the mattresses, and to those who tried to get her off the train, she said, “The children ran, but I can’t go.”
I have to say that mama often used that mysterious word destiny. I kept asking her, “What is destiny? Is it God?”
“No, not God. I don’t believe in God. Destiny is the line of life,” mama answered. “I have always believed in your destiny, children.”
The bombings frightened me…Terribly. Later on, in Siberia, I hated myself for my cowardice. By chance, out of the corner of my eye, I read mama’s letter…She was writing to papa. We, too, wrote our first letters ever, and I decided to take a peek at what mama was writing. And mama was precisely writing that Tamara is quiet during the bombings, and Valya cries and is frightened. That was too much for me. When papa came to us in the spring of 1944, I couldn’t raise my eyes to him—I was ashamed. Terrible! But I’ll tell about the reunion with papa later. It’s a long way till then…
I remember a night air raid…Usually there were no raids at night, and the train drove fast. But now there was a raid. A heavy one…Bullets drummed on the roof of the car. Roaring planes. Glowing streaks from flying bullets…From bombshells…Next to me, a woman was killed. I understood only later that she was dead…But she didn’t fall. There was nowhere to fall, because the car was packed with people. The woman stood among us gasping, her blood flooding my face, warm, viscous. My shirt and pants were already wet with blood. When mama cried, touching me with her hand: “Valya, have they killed you?” I couldn’t answer.
That was a turning point for me. I know that after that…Yes…After that I stopped trembling. I didn’t care anymore…No fear, no pain, no sorrow. Some kind of stupor, indifference.
I remember that we didn’t reach the Urals right away. For some time we stayed in the village of Balanda, in the Saratov region. We were brought there in the evening, and we fell asleep. In the morning, at six o’clock, a herdsman cracked his whip, and all the women jumped up, grabbed their children, and ran outside screaming “Air raid!” They screamed until the kolkhoz chairman came and said that it was a herdsman driving cows. Then they came to their senses…
When the grain elevator hummed, our Tolik got scared and trembled. He didn’t let anyone go away from him for a second. Only when he fell asleep could we go outside without him. Mama went with us to the military commissariat to find out about father and ask for help. The commissar said, “Show me the documents stating that your husband is a commander in the Red Army.”
We didn’t have any documents, we only had a photograph of papa, in which he was wearing his uniform. He took it suspiciously.
“Maybe this isn’t your husband. How can you prove it?”
Tolik saw that he was holding the photo and not giving it back. “Give papa back…”
The commissar laughed. “Well, that’s a ‘document’ I can’t help believing.”
My sister went around “piebald,” so mama cut her hair. We checked every morning whether the new hair would be black or white. Our little brother reassured her, “Don’t cwy, Toma…Don’t cwy…” The hair that grew back was white. The boys teased her. Teased her unmercifully. She never took her kerchief off, even in class.
We came back from school. Tolik wasn’t at home.
We ran to mama’s work: “Where’s Tolik?”
“Tolik is in the hospital.”
My sister and I are carrying a blue wreath down the street…Of snowdrops…And our brother’s sailor suit. Mama is with us. She said that Tolik had died. Mama stopped outside the mortuary and couldn’t go in. Couldn’t bring herself to. I went in and recognized little Tolik at once—he lay there naked. I didn’t shed a single tear, I turned to wood.
Papa’s letter caught up with us in Siberia. Mama cried all night, unable to write to papa that their son was dead. In the morning the three of us took a telegram to the post office: “Girls alive. Toma gray-haired.” And papa figured out that Tolik was no more. I had a friend whose father had been killed, and I always wrote at the end of my letters to papa, because she asked me to: “Greetings to you, papa, from me and from my friend Lera.” Everybody wanted to have a papa.
Soon we received a letter from papa. He wrote that he had spent a long time in the rear on a special assignment and had fallen ill. They told him in the hospital that he could be cured only by being with his family: once he saw his dear ones, he’d feel better.
We waited several weeks for papa. Mama got her cherished crepe de chine dress and her shoes from the suitcase. We had made a decision not to sell that dress or the pair of shoes, no matter how hard the times would be. It was out of superstition. We were afraid that if we sold them, papa wouldn’t come back.
I heard papa’s voice outside the window and couldn’t believe that it was my papa. We were so used to waiting for him that I couldn’t believe I could see him. For us papa was someone you had to wait for and only wait for. That day classes were interrupted—the whole school gathered around our house. They waited for papa to come out. He was the first papa to come back from the war. My sister and I were unable to study for another two days, everybody kept coming to us, asking questions, writing notes: “What is your papa like?” And our papa was special: Anton Petrovich Brinsky, Hero of the Soviet Union…
Like our Tolik before, papa didn’t want to be alone. He couldn’t be. It made him feel bad. He always dragged me with him. Once I heard…He told someone about some partisans coming to a village and seeing a lot of freshly dug earth. They stopped and stood on it…A boy came running across the field shouting that his whole village had been shot and buried there. All the people.
Papa turned and saw that I had fainted. Never again did he
tell about the war in front of us…
We talked little about the war. Papa and mama were sure that there would never again be such a terrible war. They believed it for a long time. The only thing the war left in my sister and me was that we kept buying dolls. I don’t know why. Probably because we hadn’t had enough childhood. Not enough childhood joy. I was already studying at the university, but my sister knew that the best present for me was a doll. My sister gave birth to a daughter. I went to visit.
“What present can I bring you?”
“A doll…”
“I’m asking what to give you, not your girl.”
“And my answer is—give me a doll.”
Our children were growing up, and we kept giving them dolls. We gave dolls to all our acquaintances.
Our marvelous mama was the first to go; then papa followed her. We sensed, we felt at once that we were the last ones. At that limit…that brink…We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending. We must speak…
Our words will be the last…
1978–2004
* Arkady Gaidar (1904–1941) was a Soviet writer. The short novel Timur and His Gang (1940), his most famous work, was based partly on the life of his own son, Timur Gaidar (1926–1999), who served in the navy, became a rear admiral, and was also a writer and journalist.
BY SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
Secondhand Time
Voices from Chernobyl
Zinky Boys
Last Witnesses
The Unwomanly Face of War
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH was born in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Together, RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have translated works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Leskov, Bulgakov, and Pasternak. They have twice received the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (in 1991 for The Brothers Karamazov and in 2002 for Anna Karenina). In 2006 they were awarded the first Efim Etkind International Translation Prize by the European University of St. Petersburg. Most recently they have been collaborating with the playwright Richard Nelson on plays by Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov.
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