This new note in his speeches was a clear pointer to the true course of the historical forces that in time led to the death of almost everyone who took part in this fateful Salzburg meeting.
3
PYOTR Semyonovich Vavilov’s call-up papers arrived at the worst possible moment. Had the commissariat given him another six weeks, or a couple of months, he would have been able to leave his family with enough wheat and firewood to see them through the coming year.
When he looked out and saw Masha Balashova crossing the street with a slip of white paper, walking straight towards his house, he felt something go tight inside him. Without even pausing, she went past the window. For a second Vavilov thought she must be going somewhere else, but then he remembered that there were no young men left in any of the neighbouring houses and that old men do not receive call-up papers. And he was right—the next thing he heard was a loud crash in the entrance room.5 Masha had stumbled in the half-dark. She had knocked against the yoke—and it had fallen onto the bucket.
Masha sometimes came round in the evenings. It wasn’t long since she’d finished school; she’d been in the same class as his daughter, Nastya, and the two girls often went around together. Usually she addressed Vavilov as Uncle Pyotr, but this morning she merely said, “Please sign in receipt of this letter.” And she did not ask to speak to Nastya.
Vavilov sat down and signed his name.
“So that’s that,” he said, as he got to his feet.
These three syllables related not only to his signature in Masha’s delivery book. Vavilov was thinking of his whole life here in this hut, his life with his family—a life now suddenly ended. The home he now had to leave seemed good and kind. The stove—which had let out a lot of smoke in the raw days of March, with one side now convex, swollen from old age, with bare bricks that had lost their whitewash—seemed splendid and glorious, a living being who had spent her whole life beside him.6 Entering the house in winter, he had often stood in front of the stove, breathing in her warmth as he stretched out his numb fingers, and at night, spreading his sheepskin coat across her, he had lain on her warm bricks, knowing where would be hotter and where cooler. Getting up early to go out to work, he had gone up to the stove in the dark and felt, with practised hands, for his match-box and his foot cloths, which he had left there to dry overnight.7 And everything—the white curtains on the windows, the table with its black half-moons left by hot pans, the little bench by the door where his wife sat to peel potatoes, the chinks between floorboards through which the children spied on the lives of the mice and cockroaches below, the flatiron, so black from soot that in the morning you couldn’t make it out at all inside the warm dark of the stove, the windowsill, where there was a towel on a nail and a little red house-plant in a pot—everything was now dearer than ever to him, dear and precious in a way that only living beings can be dear and precious.
Vavilov had three children. Alyosha, the eldest, had already left for the war. Still living at home were his daughter Nastya and little four-year-old Vanya, who was both very wise and very silly and whom Vavilov called Mister Samovar. Puffing and snuffling as he went about the house, with red cheeks, a pot belly and a little spigot often visible through unbuttoned trousers, he really did resemble a samovar.
Sixteen-year-old Nastya was now working for the kolkhoz.8 With her own money she had bought a dress, a pair of shoes and a little red cloth beret that she thought very smart. She would put on this beret and look at herself in a hand mirror. This mirror had lost half its silver, and Nastya saw not only her beret but also her fingers holding the mirror—her face and her beret in reflection, her fingers as if through a window. She’d have gladly slept in this beret, only she was afraid of crushing it; instead, she put it beside her and stroked it when she woke up. When he saw his daughter walking down the street with her girlfriends, looking merry and excited and wearing her beloved beret, Vavilov would think sadly about how, when the war was over, there were sure to be many more young women than young men.
Yes, much had happened in this house. Alyosha had sat at this table at night with his friends, going through algebra, geometry and physics problems with them as they all prepared for the entrance exams to the agronomy institute. Nastya had sat at this same table with her girlfriends and studied the textbook Literature of the Motherland. His neighbours’ sons, visiting from new homes in Moscow and Gorky, had sat here and talked about their new lives and work. Vavilov’s wife, Marya, had responded, “Well, our children will soon be studying in the city too. Soon it will be their turn to become technical experts and engineers.”
Vavilov took from a chest the red scarf that he used as a wrapper for important documents and found his military service record. He then put the red bundle with his little boy’s birth certificate and his wife’s and his daughter’s work records back into the chest, slipped his own document into his jacket pocket—and felt as if he had severed himself from his family. His daughter was looking at him with a new, questioning look. During these last moments he seemed to her to have changed, as if an invisible veil now hung between them. His wife would not be coming back until late; she and the other women had been sent to level the road to the station—army trucks now used this road to take hay and grain to trains bound for the front.
“Well, my daughter,” he said, “now it’s my turn.”
And she replied quietly, “Don’t worry about me and Mama. We’ll keep working. Just be sure to come back in one piece.” Looking up at him, she added, “Maybe you’ll come across our Alyosha. That would be good. Then neither of you will be lonely.”
Vavilov was not yet thinking about what lay ahead. He was still thinking about his home and the various tasks at the kolkhoz that he had left unfinished. Nevertheless, his thoughts had changed; they were no longer the thoughts of a few minutes earlier. His intention this morning had been to patch a felt boot, to solder a leaking bucket, to adjust and set the saw, to mend his sheepskin coat, and to re-heel his wife’s boots. What mattered now, though, were the jobs his wife would be unable to manage on her own. He had to be at the office in the district town, eighteen kilometres away, by nine o’clock the following morning.
He began with the very simplest job; he replaced the haft of his axe—he had a spare ready and waiting. Then he replaced a shaky rung in the ladder and went up to repair the roof, taking with him a few new planks, the axe, a hacksaw and a small bag of nails. For a moment he felt as if he were not a forty-five-year-old man, the head of a family, but a naughty boy who had climbed up onto the roof for fun. Soon his mother would come out of the house. Shading her eyes from the sun with the palm of one hand, she would look up and shout, “Get down, you little rascal!” And she would stamp her foot impatiently, wishing she could grab hold of him by the ear and repeat, “Petya, I’m telling you to get down!”
Without thinking, he glanced at the hill behind the village. It was overgrown with elders and rowans and the few crosses still visible had sunk into the ground. For a moment he felt guilty before everyone and everything. He felt guilty before his late mother—there would be no time now to mend the cross on her grave. He felt guilty before his eldest son, Alyosha—the kolkhoz chairman had found his own son a job in a military factory where he’d be exempt from conscription, but he himself hadn’t managed to get Alyosha exempted. He felt guilty before the earth—before the fields he would no longer be able to plough this autumn; and he felt guilty before his wife, on whose shoulders he would be laying a burden he had until then borne himself. He looked up and down the village—at its one wide street, at its huts and yards, at the high, clear sky, and at the dark forest in the distance. Yes, this was where his life had gone by. The new school was a vivid splash of white, the sun shining on its large expanse of glass. The long wall of the kolkhoz cattle-yard was equally white.
How hard he had worked, without ever a break. At the age of four, plodding about on his bandy legs, he had looked after the geese. A year or two later, when his mother was digging u
p potatoes, he had searched for the ones she’d missed and brought them along to the main pile. When he was older still, he’d taken the cows to pasture, and then he’d dug the vegetable garden, fetched water from the well, harnessed the horse and chopped firewood. Then he’d become a ploughman, and he had learned to scythe and work the combine harvester.
He had worked as a carpenter. He had put in windows; he had sharpened tools; he had done the plumbing; he had made felt boots and repaired leather boots; he had flayed horses and sheep and tanned their skins; he had made sheepskin coats; he had sown tobacco; he had built a stove. And then there had been all the voluntary work. Standing in cold September water, he had constructed a dam. He had helped build a mill; he had paved a road; he had dug ditches; he had kneaded clay; he had crushed stone when they were building the kolkhoz stockyard and barn; and he had dug trenches for the kolkhoz potatoes. And there was all the land he had ploughed, all the hay he had mown, all the grain he had threshed, all the sacks he had carried. There were all the planks he had transported to the new school, all the forest oaks he had felled and rough-hewn, all the nails he had hammered, all the blows he had struck with an axe, all the work he had done with a spade. He had spent two summers digging peat, turning out 3,000 bricks a day—and what had he and his two mates been given to eat? A kilo of bread, a bucket of kvas9 and a single egg for the three of them, while the mosquitoes buzzed so loudly that they drowned the sound of the diesel engine. And there were all the bricks he had moulded—bricks for the hospital, and the school, and the club, and the village soviet,10 and the kolkhoz administration building, and even for buildings in the district town. And he had worked two summers as a boatman, taking materials to the factory. The current had been too strong to swim against—and there they were taking eighty-ton loads. They had had to row for all they were worth.
He looked around him: at the buildings, the vegetable patches, the street and the paths. He looked at the whole village—and it was as if he were looking back at his life. Two old men—Pukhov, who was cross and quarrelsome, and Vavilov’s neighbour Kozlov, known behind his back as Billy Goat11—were on their way to the administration building. Another neighbour, Natalya Degtyarova, came out of her hut, went up to her gate, looked first to the right and then to the left, shook an arm threateningly at the chickens and went back into the house.
Yes, traces of his work would remain.
He had seen tractors and combine harvesters, mowing machines and threshing machines invade this village where his father had known only sickle and scythe, only the wooden plough and the flail. He had seen young men and women leave the village to study, then return as agronomists, teachers, mechanics and livestock experts. He knew that the son of Pachkin the blacksmith had become a general, and that other young men who’d come back to the village to see their parents were now engineers, factory directors, and officials in the provincial party apparatus.
Sometimes people used to gather in the evenings and talk about how life had changed. Old Pukhov thought that life had got worse. He had worked out how much grain had cost in the days of the tsar, what you could buy in the village shop, the price of a pair of boots, and how much meat people had put in their cabbage soup. From all this it appeared that life had been easier in the old days. Vavilov disagreed. The more the people helped the state, he argued, the more the state would be able to help the people.
Old women said that peasants were now treated as human beings like any others; their children could get on in the world and become important. Maybe boots had been cheaper in the old days, but the peasants themselves were seen as worthless.
Pukhov replied that the peasants had always had to support the state and that the state was a heavy burden. There had been hunger in the days of the tsar—and there was hunger today. They had had ways of fleecing the peasant in the old days—and today’s taxes were no different. Peasants were looked down on in the past—and they still were. The kolkhozes might help the state, but they didn’t help people.
When the war began, Pukhov had thought that life would be better under the Germans. There’d be trade and smallholdings. There’d be clothes, tea, sugar, spiced breads, shoes, boots and coats. But the Germans had killed his three sons and his son-in-law. No one in the village had suffered more than Pukhov.
Vavilov saw the war as a catastrophe. He knew that war destroys life. A peasant leaving his village for the war does not dream of medals and glory. He knows he is probably on his way to die.
Vavilov looked around him once more. He had always wanted the life of mankind to be spacious and full of light like the sky today, and he had done what he could to build such a life. And he and millions like him had not worked in vain. The kolkhoz had achieved a great deal.
When he had finished, Vavilov got down from the roof and walked towards the gate. He remembered the last night of peace, the night before Sunday, 22 June: the whole of the vast young country, the whole of workers’ and peasants’ Russia had been singing and playing the accordion—in little city gardens, on dance floors, in village streets, in groves and copses, in meadows, beside streams.
And then everything had gone quiet; the accordions had suddenly broken off.
For nearly a year now there had been only stern, unsmiling silence.
4
VAVILOV set off towards the kolkhoz office. On the way, he saw Natalya Degtyarova again.
Usually she looked at Vavilov with sullen reproach—her husband had been called up some time ago, as had her son. Now, though, she was looking at him thoughtfully and with sympathy. She must have known that he had now received his papers.
“You too, Pyotr Semyonovich?” she asked. “Does Marya know yet?”
“She will soon enough,” he replied.
“That she will,” said Natalya. And she went back into her hut.
The kolkhoz chairman turned out to be away for a couple of days; he had gone to the district town. Vavilov went up to Shepunov, the one-armed accountant, and handed over the kolkhoz money he had collected the day before from the district office of the state bank. He took the receipt, folded it twice and put it in his pocket. “There you are,” he said. “Every last kopek due.”
Lying on the table was a copy of the district newspaper. Shepunov pushed it towards Vavilov, his “For Military Merit” medal jingling against a metal button on his soldier’s tunic. “Comrade Vavilov,” he asked, “have you read the latest news from the Sovinform Bureau?”
“No,” said Vavilov.
Shepunov began reading: “On 12 May our troops launched an offensive in the Kharkov area, broke through the German defences and, repelling counter-attacks by motor infantry and major tank formations, are continuing their drive west.” He raised a finger and winked at Vavilov. “Our troops have covered from twenty to sixty kilometres of ground and liberated more than 300 inhabited localities. Yes, and this too! Around 365 artillery pieces, twenty-five tanks and 1 million rounds of ammunition have now been captured.”
Looking at Vavilov with the benign interest an old soldier shows in a new recruit, he said, “Understand now?”
Vavilov showed him his call-up papers. “Of course I understand. Why wouldn’t I? And I also understand that this is only the beginning. I’ll be there in time for what really counts.” He smoothed his call-up papers between his hands.
“Anything I should say to Ivan Mikhailovich?” asked the bookkeeper.
“What’s there to say? He knows everything already.” They began talking about kolkhoz matters, and Vavilov, forgetting that the chairman knew everything already, began giving instructions for Shepunov to pass on to him: “Tell Ivan Mikhailovich not to allow the boards I brought from the sawmill to be used for repairs, only for construction. Yes, you must tell him that. Now, as for our sacks—the ones still in town—we must send someone to fetch them. Otherwise they’ll disappear, or we’ll be palmed off with who knows what. And the papers about the loan, just say that Vavilov. . .”
Vavilov did not like the chairman. He was
sly, out only for himself. He had lost touch with the earth. He drew up reports making out that the kolkhoz had overfulfilled its plan when everyone knew this was nonsense. He would think up spurious reasons to visit the district town and even the provincial capital, and he always made sure he had presents to give to the people he met there—sometimes honey, sometimes apples. Once he had even taken someone a piglet.
His reports to the authorities naturally contained no mention of the sofa, the large lamp and the Singer sewing machine he had once brought back from the city. When their province received some award, he was awarded a medal “For Excellence in Labour.” In summer he had worn it on his jacket and in winter he had pinned it to his fur coat. When he came into a heated room after being out in the cold, the medal would look as if it were covered in little droplets of dew.
What really mattered in life, to the chairman’s mind, was not work but knowing how to cultivate the right people. He would say one thing and do something quite different. His attitude to the war couldn’t have been simpler: he understood immediately that there were few people more important than the district military commissar. And his son Volodya did indeed start work in a military factory, which made him exempt from conscription; sometimes he came home to pick up supplies of fatback and moonshine to pass on to the appropriate people.
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