Life and Fate

by Vasily Grossman

  Vityenka, I’ve seen many bad people here, people who are greedy, dishonest, capable even of betrayal. We’ve got one terrible man, Epstein, who came here from some little town in Poland – he wears a band round his sleeve and helps the Germans with their interrogations and searches; he gets drunk with the Ukrainian policemen and they send him round to people’s homes to extort vodka, money and food. I’ve seen him twice, a tall handsome man in a smart cream-coloured suit – even the yellow star sewn on his jacket looks like a chrysanthemum.

  But what I really want to talk to you about is something quite different. I never used to feel I was a Jew: as a child my circle of friends were all Russian; my favourite poets were Pushkin and Nekrasov; the one play which reduced me to tears, together with the whole audience – a congress of village doctors – was Stanislavsky’s production of Uncle Vanya. And once, Vityenka, when I was fourteen, our family was about to emigrate to South America and I said to my father: ‘I’ll never leave Russia – I’d rather drown myself.’ And I didn’t go.

  But now, during these terrible days, my heart has become filled with a maternal tenderness towards the Jewish people. I never knew this love before. It reminds me of my love for you, my dearest son.

  I visit the sick in their houses. Dozens of people are crowded into minute little rooms – half-blind old men, unweaned babies, pregnant women. I’m used to looking into people’s eyes for symptoms of diseases – glaucoma, cataract. Now I can no longer look at people’s eyes like that; what I see now is the reflection of the soul. A good soul, Vityenka! A sad, good-natured soul, defeated by violence, but at the same time triumphant over violence. A strong soul, Vitya!

  If you could only see with what concern the old men and women keep asking after you. How sincerely people try to console me, people I’ve never complained to and whose situation is far more terrible than my own.

  Sometimes I think that it’s not so much me visiting the sick, as the other way round – that the people are a kind doctor who is healing my soul. And how touching it is when people hand me an onion, a slice of bread, or a handful of beans.

  And believe me, Vityenka, that’s not a matter of payment for my visit. Tears come to my eyes when some middle-aged workman shakes me by the hand, puts two or three potatoes in a little bag and says, ‘There, Doctor, I beg you.’ There’s something about it which is pure, kind, fatherly – but I can’t find the right words.

  I don’t want to console you by saying that things have been easy for me – no, it’s surprising that my heart hasn’t broken from grief. But please don’t worry that I’m going hungry – I haven’t once felt hungry. Nor have I felt lonely.

  What can I say about people? They amaze me as much by their good qualities as by their bad qualities. They are all so different, even though they must undergo the same fate. But then if there’s a downpour and most people try to hide, that doesn’t mean that they’re all the same. People even have their own particular ways of sheltering from rain.

  Doctor Sperling is certain that the persecution of the Jews will only last as long as the war. There aren’t many people like him, and I’ve noticed that the more optimistic people are, the more petty and egotistic they tend to be. If someone comes in when we’re eating, Alya and Fanny Borisovna hide away the food as quick as they can.

  The Sperlings treat me well – especially as I eat little and provide more than I consume. But I’ve decided to leave. I don’t like them. I’m trying to find some little corner for myself. The more sorrow there is in a man, the less hope he has of survival – the better, the kinder, the more generous he becomes.

  The poorest people, the tailors and tinsmiths, the ones without hope, are so much nobler, more generous and more intelligent than the people who’ve somehow managed to lay by a few provisions. The young schoolmistresses; Spilberg, the eccentric old teacher and chess-player; the timid women who work in the library; Reyvich, the engineer, who’s more helpless than a child, yet dreams of arming the ghetto with hand-made grenades – what wonderful, impractical, dear, sad, good people they all are!

  I’ve realized now that hope almost never goes together with reason. It’s something quite irrational and instinctive.

  People carry on, Vitya, as though their whole life lies ahead of them. It’s impossible to say whether that’s wise or foolish – it’s just the way people are. I do the same myself. There are two women here from a shtetl and they tell the same story as my friend did. The Germans are killing all the Jews in the district, children and old men included. The Germans and Ukrainian police drive up and recruit a few dozen men for field-work. These men are set to dig ditches and two or three days later the Jewish population is marched to these ditches and shot. Jewish burial mounds are rising up in all the villages round about.

  There’s a girl from Poland next door. She says that there the killing goes on continually. The Jews are being massacred; there are only a few ghettoes – Warsaw, Lodz and Radom – where there are any left alive. When I thought about all this it seemed quite clear that we’ve been gathered here not to be preserved – like the bison in the Bialowiezska forest – but to be slaughtered. Our turn will come in a week or two, according to plan. But just imagine – I still go on seeing patients and saying, ‘Now bathe your eye regularly with the lotion and it will be better in two or three weeks.’ I’m taking care of one old man whose cataract it will be possible to remove in six months or a year.

  I give Yura French lessons and get quite upset at his bad pronunciation.

  Meanwhile the Germans burst into people’s houses and steal; sentries amuse themselves by shooting children from behind the barbed wire; and more and more people confirm that any day now our fate will be decided.

  That’s how it is – life goes on. Not long ago we even had a wedding . . . And there are always dozens of rumours. First a neighbour declares that our troops have taken the offensive and the Germans are fleeing. Then there is a rumour that the Soviet government and Churchill have presented the Germans with an ultimatum – and that Hitler’s ordered that no more Jews are to be killed. Then we are informed that Jews are to be exchanged for German prisoners-of-war.

  It seems that nowhere is there so much hope as in the ghetto. The world is full of events and all these events have the same meaning and the same purpose – the salvation of the Jews. What a wealth of hope!

  And the source of all these hopes is one and the same – the life-instinct itself, blindly rebelling against the terrible fact that we must all perish without trace. I look round myself and simply can’t believe it: can we really, all of us, already be condemned, about to be executed? The hairdressers, the cobblers, the tailors, the doctors, the stove-repairers are still working. A little maternity home has even been opened – or rather, the semblance of one. People do their washing, linen dries on the line, meals are prepared, the children have been going to school since the first of September, the mothers question the teachers about their children’s marks.

  Old Spilberg is having some books bound. Alya Sperling does physical training every morning, puts her hair in paper-curlers every evening and quarrels with her father about two lengths of material that she wants for summer dresses.

  And I’m busy myself from morning till night – visiting my patients, giving lessons, darning my clothes, doing my washing, preparing for winter, sewing a lining into my winter coat. I hear stories about the terrible punishments Jews have suffered: one woman I know, a lawyer’s wife, bought a duck egg for her child and was beaten till she lost consciousness; a boy, the son of Sirota the chemist, was shot in the shoulder for crawling beneath the wire after a ball that had rolled away. And then rumours, rumours, rumours . . .

  What I say now isn’t a rumour, however. Today the Germans came and took eighty young men to work in the fields, supposedly to dig potatoes. Some people were glad, imagining the men would be able to bring a few potatoes home for their relatives. But I knew all too well what the Germans meant by potatoes.

  Night is a special tim
e in the ghetto, Vitya. You know, my dearest, how I always taught you to tell the truth – a son must always tell the truth to his mother. But then so must a mother tell the truth to her son. Don’t imagine, Vityenka, that your mother’s a strong woman. I’m weak. I’m afraid of pain and I’m terrified to sit down in the dentist’s chair. As a child I was afraid of darkness and thunder. As an old woman I’ve been afraid of illness and loneliness; I’ve been afraid that if I fall ill, I won’t be able to go back to work again; that I’ll become a burden to you and that you’ll make me feel it. I’ve been afraid of the war. Now, Vitya, I’m seized at night by a horror that makes my heart grow numb. I’m about to die. I want to call out to you for help.

  When you were a child, you used to run to me for protection. Now, in moments of weakness, I want to hide my head on your knees; I want you to be strong and wise; I want you to protect and defend me. I’m not always strong in spirit, Vitya – I can be weak too. I often think about suicide, but something holds me back – some weakness, or strength, or irrational hope.

  But enough of that. I have dreams every night. I often see my mother and talk to her. Last night I dreamed of Sasha Shaposhnikov during our years in Paris. But I haven’t once dreamed of you – though I think of you often, even at moments of the most terrible distress. In the morning I wake up and look at the ceiling, then I remember that the Germans are on our land and that I’m a leper – and it’s as though I haven’t woken up at all, but have just fallen asleep and begun to dream.

  A few minutes go by and I hear Alya quarrelling with Lyuba over whose turn it is to go to the well. Then I hear people talking about how, during the night, the Germans smashed in the skull of some old man on the next street.

  A girl I knew came round, a student at the teachers’ training college for technical subjects, and called me out on a visit. She turned out to be hiding a lieutenant who’d been wounded in the shoulder and burnt in one eye. A sweet, haggard, young man with a thick Volga accent. He’d slipped through the wire at night and found shelter in the ghetto. His eye wasn’t seriously injured at all and I was able to check the suppuration. He talked a lot about different battles and how our army had been put to flight. He quite depressed me. He wants to recuperate and then slip through the German front line. Several young men intend to go with him, one of them an ex-student of mine. Oh Vityenka, if only I could go with them too. It was such a joy to me to be able to help that young man – I felt as though I too were taking part in the war against Fascism.

  People had brought him some bread, beans and potatoes, and one old woman had knitted him a pair of woollen socks.

  The whole day has been full of drama. Yesterday Alya managed, through a Russian friend of hers, to get hold of the passport of a young Russian girl who’d died in hospital. Tonight she’s going to leave. And we heard today, from a peasant we know who was driving past the ghetto fence, that the Jews who were sent to dig potatoes are digging deep ditches four versts from the town, near the airfield, on the road to Romanovka. Remember that name, Vitya – that’s where you’ll find the mass grave where your mother is buried.

  Even Sperling understood. He’s been pale all day, his lips are trembling and he keeps asking confusedly: ‘Is there any hope that specialists will be spared?’ In fact I have heard that in some places the best tailors, cobblers and doctors have been left alive.

  All the same, this very evening, Sperling summoned the old man who repairs stoves and had a secret cupboard built into the wall for flour and salt. And Yura and I have been reading Lettres de mon moulin. Do you remember how we used to read out loud my favourite story, ‘Les Vieux’, how we’d look at each other and burst out laughing, how each of us would have tears in our eyes? And after that I set Yura his lessons for the day after tomorrow. But what an ache I felt as I looked at my student’s sad little face, as I watched his fingers note down in his exercise-book the numbers of the paragraphs of grammar I had just set.

  And what a lot of children like that there are! Children with wonderful eyes and dark curly hair – probably future scientists, physicists, professors of medicine, musicians, even poets . . .

  I watch them running to school in the morning, with a quite unchildlike seriousness, and wide, tragic eyes. Though sometimes they do begin laughing and fighting and romping about; then, rather than feeling happier, I am seized with horror.

  They say that children are our own future, but how can one say that of these children? They aren’t going to become musicians, cobblers or tailors. Last night I saw very clearly how this whole noisy world of bearded, anxious fathers and querulous grandmothers who bake honey-cakes and goose-necks – this whole world of marriage customs, proverbial sayings and Sabbaths will disappear for ever under the earth. After the war life will begin to stir once again, but we won’t be here, we will have vanished – just as the Aztecs once vanished.

  The peasant who brought us the news about the mass graves said that his wife had been crying at night. She’d been lamenting: ‘They sew, and they make shoes, and they curry leather, and they mend watches, and they sell medicines in the chemist’s. What will we do when they’ve all been killed?’

  And how clearly I saw someone walk past our ruined houses and say: ‘Once some Jews used to live here. Do you remember? An old stove-repairer called Borukh. On Saturday evenings his old wife sat on the bench and the children played round about.’ And someone else said: ‘And there was a doctor who used to sit there, beneath that old pear-tree – I can’t remember her surname but I once went to her to have my eyes treated. After she’d finished work she used to bring out a wickerwork chair and sit there with a book.’ Yes, Vitya, that’s how it will be.

  As though some terrible breath has passed over people’s faces and everyone knows that the end is approaching.

  Vityenka, I want to tell you . . . no, it’s not that.

  Vityenka, I’m finishing this letter and taking it to the ghetto fence to hand to my friend. It’s not easy to break off. It’s my last conversation with you. Once I send it off, I will have left you for ever and you will never know of my last hours. This is our final parting. What can I say to you in farewell, in eternal farewell? These last days, as during my whole life, you have been my joy. I’ve remembered you at night, the clothes you wore as a boy, your first books. I’ve remembered your first letter, your first day at school. I’ve remembered everything, everything from the first days of your life to the last news that I heard from you, the telegram I received on the 30th of June. I’ve closed my eyes and imagined that you were shielding me, my dearest, from the horror that is approaching. And then I’ve remembered what is happening here and felt glad that you were apart from me – and that this terrible fate will pass you by!

  Vitya, I’ve always been lonely. I’ve wept in anguish through lonely nights. My consolation was the thought of how I would tell you one day about my life. Tell you why your father and I separated, why I have lived on my own for so many years. And I’ve often thought how surprised my Vitya would be to learn how his mother made mistakes, raved, grew jealous, made others jealous, was just what young people always are. But my fate is to end my life alone, never having shared it with you. Sometimes I’ve thought that I ought not to live far away from you, that I love you too much, that love gives me the right to be with you in my old age. And at other times I’ve thought that I ought not to live together with you, that I love you too much.

  Well, enfin . . . Always be happy with those you love, those around you, those who have become closer to you than your mother. Forgive me.

  I can hear women weeping on the street, and policemen swearing; as I look at these pages, they seem to protect me from a terrible world that is filled with suffering.

  How can I finish this letter? Where can I find the strength, my son? Are there words capable of expressing my love for you? I kiss you, your eyes, your forehead, your hair.

  Remember that your mother’s love is always with you, in grief and in happiness, no one has the strength to destroy
it.

  Vityenka . . . This is the last line of your mother’s last letter to you. Live, live, live for ever . . . Mama.

  19

  Never, before the war, had Viktor thought about the fact that he was a Jew, that his mother was a Jew. Never had his mother spoken to him about it – neither during his childhood, nor during his years as a student. Never while he was at Moscow University had one student, professor or seminar-leader ever mentioned it.

  Never before the war, either at the Institute or at the Academy of Sciences had he ever heard conversations about it.

  Never had he felt a desire to speak about it to Nadya, to explain to her that her mother was Russian and her father Jewish.

  The century of Einstein and Planck was also the century of Hitler. The Gestapo and the scientific renaissance were children of the same age. How humane the nineteenth century seemed, that century of naïve physics, when compared with the twentieth century, the century that had killed his mother. There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics.

  Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of ‘a man’, and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability?

  Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these groupings than among others: the mechanics of probabilities and of human aggregates.