Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  “Come up on deck with me,” said Tokareva. “The captain promised we’d leave on the dot of four. I want to take one last look at Stalingrad!”

  Once the two women were out of the way, Slava Berozkin reached out to touch his silent companion’s shoulder and said, “Look!”

  But the silent Ukrainian did not turn his shaven, knobbly head towards the rectangular porthole beneath which the river was splashing by.

  Just outside the porthole there had been a tall, wet post, covered with green mould. This first post was now receding, and another was drawing nearer. The pier’s stout decking came into view, then the feet of people standing close to the railing, then the railing itself, then a strong brown arm with blue veins and an anchor tattooed in blue, then the tar-encrusted sides of a barge—and then a cliff and the steep streets climbing up into the city. A minute later, the whole city—dust-covered trees, the stone and board walls of buildings of every size—began to move slowly down the porthole. In the top right corner there appeared a crumbling clayey slope, yellow-green petrol tanks, a railway line and some red coaches, and huge, smoke-veiled factory buildings. Waves splashed noisily and chaotically against the hull, and the entire boat began to creak and tremble, shaken by the engine’s vibrations.

  This was Slava’s first journey by boat; he desperately wanted to talk and ask questions. He wanted to know how many knots the launch was making; he imagined huge knots, each the size of a cat’s head, on a thick rope stretching the entire length of the river. He wanted to discuss whether or not the launch had a keel and could withstand a storm at sea. Did they have enough lifeboats and lifebelts? Did they have cannons and machine guns? What if they met a German submarine? He could take aim at the fascists himself, but he didn’t know for sure whether submarines sailed up rivers or whether they just kept to the sea.

  And there were other things on his mind, concerns far from childish: he had kept hoping that his mother and sister would be able to come with him, that there’d be room on the boat for them too. He had been meaning to talk about this to Tokareva and the woman from the education section: little Luba wouldn’t take up any more space—she could sleep on his bed. He could then sleep on the floor, with her little shoes as a pillow. As for Mama—she could help with the laundry and cooking. She was a good cook and she worked quickly. Papa had always been surprised when he came home after some regimental exercise: he’d barely had time to clean his boots, have a wash and change his tunic—and there was dinner, already on the table. And then his mother was very, very honest; she wouldn’t take even a teaspoon of sugar or the smallest pat of butter for herself—everything would go to the children. He had already rehearsed all the arguments he could use. And he would help his mother to peel potatoes and turn the meat grinder . . . He remembered how, during the night, he had dreamed that everything had turned out fine: Luba was asleep on his bed and he was lying on the floor. Mama came in. He felt the warmth of her hands and he said to her, “Don’t cry, Papa’s alive, he’ll be back soon.” But even in the dream he knew this was not true. Papa was lying in the middle of a field, his arms stretched out beside him . . . A moment later his mother had white hair, and she was living with Luba in Siberia, and then he himself was there in the hut with her, stamping his heavy, frozen boots and saying, “We’ve routed the Germans—so here I am now and I’ll never leave you again!” He opened his knapsack, took out some biscuits, some fatback and some jars of jam. Then he felled a pine with a few blows of the axe and quickly chopped a pile of logs for the fire. Soon the hut was warm and full of light (he had brought electricity with him too). There was a large tub full of water and he was roasting a wild goose in the stove. He’d shot it himself, on the banks of the Yenisey. “Mama, darling Mama,” he said, “I’m not going to marry, I’m going to stay with you all my life.” And he stroked her white hair and wrapped his greatcoat around her legs.

  Meanwhile waves were knocking with bony fingers against the thin planks of the hull. The launch creaked and trembled. Grey water flowed past the porthole; it looked wrinkled, as if frowning. He was alone. How would his mother find him now? Where was his father? Where was the end of this turbid river? His hands were gripping the frame of the porthole so fiercely that his nails had turned white. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Serpokryl: Had his silent neighbour realized that he was crying? But Serpokryl seemed to be crying too; his shoulders were trembling and he’d turned his head to the wall.

  “Why are you crying?” Slava asked, sniffing loudly.

  “They k-k-illed P-Papa.”

  “And your mama?” asked Slava in astonishment. He had never before heard Serpokryl’s voice.

  “They k-k-killed Mama too.”

  “Do you have a sister?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you crying then?” asked Slava—although he well understood that Serpokryl had more than enough to cry about.

  “I’m sca-a-ar-ed,” Serpokryl said into his pillow.

  “What of?”

  “Everything.”

  “Don’t be scared,” said Slava, his heart suddenly filling with love. “Don’t be scared. You and I are together now. I won’t ever leave you.”

  Quickly tucking his shoelaces inside his shoes, he went to the door. As he hurried out, he said, “I’ll tell Klava to give you your rations. We’re getting bread, two sweets and fifty grams of real butter.”

  A few minutes later he came back and said, “Here. This is for you.” And he took from his pocket a small red wallet. In it lay a piece of paper with his pre-war address, in large capital letters.

  Up on the deck, some of the children were looking at the city and the port, and two boys—Golikov from Oryol and Gizatulin the Tatar—were fishing for pike. They’d prepared a line in advance, making a spoonbait out of a piece of old tin and a safety pin. Darkhaired Zinyuk, who loved engines of every kind, had managed to get into the engine room and was admiring the boat’s diesel engine.

  Several children were standing behind a snub-nosed boy with ginger hair who was sketching the Stalingrad shoreline in his exercise book. Some of the youngest girls were holding hands and singing. The look on their faces was stern and severe, and they were opening their mouths very wide:

  A glitter of steel and a thunder of guns,

  As tank after tank grinds its way to the west.

  The girls’ singing was ineffably touching. Their birdlike voices were thin and trembling, out of keeping with the solemn words. And all around them the swiftly flowing Volga sparkled and splashed in the sun.

  “My darlings, my darlings,” said Marusya. She had been watching the girls and she felt a deep tenderness towards them, but her words were also addressed to all the other children from the home, to her daughter, to her mother and husband, to old Varvara Andreyeva, who was sitting in the stern and knitting a stocking, to everyone on the shore, and to the buildings, trees and streets of the city where she had been born and brought up.

  But Marusya did not want to give free rein to her feelings. Even though it felt awkward, she forced herself to say to Tokareva, “So you’ve still got Sokolova with you, have you? See the way she’s carrying on with that sailor? Laughing and joking with him in front of the children. Neighing like a horse. And she’s clearly a bad influence on Natalya Andreyeva.”

  Then Marusya heard shouting back on the shore. She also heard a low, monotonous hum, gradually breaking through the noise of the boat’s engine and the splash of the water. It was as if a black net had been thrown across the river.

  She saw the crowd on the quayside rush towards the landing stage. She heard a piercing shriek. A cloud of dust enveloped the shore and began to creep slowly towards the water. Then the crowd flowed back from the landing stage, dispersing along the railway line and the slopes up to the city.

  Noiselessly, as in a dream, a murky-green column with a curly white head rose high out of the water and then collapsed, sending spray all over the launch. Then more tapering columns appeared, ahead, behind and all
around the launch, rising high into the air and collapsing in clouds of spray and foam.

  German high-explosive bombs were bursting in the water all around them.

  Everyone looked in silence at the water, at the shore, and at the sky, now black and humming. Then came a loud cry, “Mama!”

  The sound of orphaned children crying out for their lost, murdered and disappeared mothers was unbearable. Tokareva seized Marusya by the hand and asked, “What can we do?”

  She imagined that the severe senior inspector—always energetic and resolute, always so intolerant of human weakness—could help her to save the children.

  The desperate captain kept changing direction, first heading back, then turning towards the far shore. Then the engine went dead. Turning sideways to the current, the launch began to drift lazily and sleepily back to the port. The captain flung his cap down on the deck in fury.

  Marusya could see everything, but she was somehow unable to hear sounds, as if she had been struck deaf. She saw the women from the children’s home, the children’s faces, the captain’s shiny bald head, the open mouths of some shouting sailors, the columns of water, boats moving every which way, but everything was happening in an awful silence. And she couldn’t bring herself to look up—it was as if an iron hand lay on the back of her head.

  Forgotten for thirty years, a picture had emerged from the depths of her memory: She was a little girl, crossing the Volga with her mother. The ferry had run aground and the passengers were being taken to the shore in a dinghy. She was very small and wearing a large straw hat. A sailor took her to the side of the launch, lifted her up and said very gently, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid. There she is, there’s your mama.” And then it was not her but Vera whom the kind sailor was lifting over the side of the boat, and she forgot about herself and thought instead about what would become of her daughter. As for her husband, she had always thought he needed her protection, but now she saw him as strong and decisive. Oh, if only he were with her now! But no, no, she was glad that Vera and Stepan, and her mother and sisters were not with her. Whatever was fated, was fated. But if only she could glimpse them one last time, just for a moment.

  Then she was standing beside Klava, at the stern. Klava was helping the children into a dinghy. She was shouting at everyone—at Tokareva, at Varvara, at the sailors and even at Marusya. Sensing her strength, the children were clinging to her.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Klava was shouting. “The sick ones first! That’s right, the little mute one! Yes, Berozkin, here! And now the little girl!”

  She was cursing and swearing. Her eyes shone. She seemed confident and inspired, as if intoxicated by her lack of fear. Many, many eyes were looking at her with pleading trust; amid the broad Volga and the howl of bombs she was a pillar of strength. “A real seahorse!” said an amazed sailor.

  “Throw them that basket!” she shouted at Tokareva. “There are blankets in it. Don’t just stand there, you great lump!”

  She helped Marusya into the dinghy. “No need to be frightened now!” she called out to the children. “You’ve got the inspector with you!”

  Marusya was now only just above the water; she could sense its breath, its silent depths. The children had gone quiet, gripping the dinghy’s sides as they peered into the turbid water. Suddenly Marusya felt more hopeful.

  She wanted to kiss the hull—it was salvation. She could see everything clearly now, as if in a vision: the dinghy would take them to the far shore; she would hide the children in the willows there, wait till the air raid was over and then return to Stalingrad in the same dinghy.

  Sitting on the floor of the dinghy were the two little boys. Slava Berozkin was hugging the mute Ukrainian. For some reason Slava was barefoot. He was repeating, “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, I won’t leave you.”

  Little Volodya Andreyev was wanting to jump straight down off the launch. His mother Natalya was having to hold him back. “What are you doing, you little horror?”

  “Quick, Natalya. Into the dinghy!” said Klava. “With your boy!”

  Natalya looked at her mother-in-law’s paper-white face. Her hands looked stiff and numb; she was still clutching her knitting.

  “You take my place,” said Natalya. “You be a mother to him.” In reply Varvara put her arms around her daughter-in-law and embraced her almost convulsively.

  “Natalya!” she said in a strangled voice, putting so much love, so much tenderness and repentance into the three syllables that Natalya was dumbstruck. The word seemed to have come not from Varvara’s lips but from her heart, like a jet of blood.

  But the sailor did not allow Varvara and Volodya into the dinghy: there was no more room.

  “Cast off now!” shouted the sailors. “Row across to the meadows, to Krasnaya Sloboda!”

  Listing to one side, the dinghy set off diagonally across the river. The launch drifted slowly back towards the terrifying Stalingrad waterfront.

  All of a sudden the engine came back to life, to the accompaniment of joyful shouts. The captain picked up his cap, gave it a good shake, put it on his head and, with trembling fingers, began to roll a cigarette. “One drag!” he muttered. “Just one good drag!”

  There was a whistle of iron over the Volga. A thick bubbly column of greenish water leapt up just in front of the dinghy’s bow, then crashed down on top of it. A moment later, in the middle of the river, amid foaming white water, the dinghy’s tarred black bottom was shining gently in the sun, clearly visible to everyone on the launch.

  35

  ALEXANDRA Vladimirovna finished her letter to Seryozha, the last she would be writing before her departure. She blotted the page, read through it again, took off her glasses and carefully wiped them with a handkerchief. Then she heard screams out on the street.

  She went out onto the balcony and saw a black, droning cloud of planes approaching the city.

  She hurried back inside and went straight to the bathroom. She could hear splashing and the contented grunts of Sofya Osipovna, who had returned only half an hour earlier from a long stint in the hospital. She knocked on the door and, articulating each syllable, said, “Sofya, get dressed at once! An air raid—a huge air raid!”

  “Are you sure?” replied Sofya.

  “Quick! I’m not a panic-monger.”

  With more noisy splashing, Sofya got out of the bath, muttering, “More like a hippopotamus getting out of its pool.” After a loud sigh, she went on, “And there I was, hoping to sleep till tomorrow. I’ve been up for the last forty-eight hours!”

  Sofya was unable to make out what Alexandra said in reply. The first bombs were already exploding. She flung open the door and shouted, “You run downstairs. I’ll follow. But mind you leave me the keys!”

  It was no longer a matter of individual explosions; all space was now filled by a single dense, protracted sound. When Sofya entered the living room a few minutes later, she found shards of glass and chunks of fallen plaster all over the floor. The lamp had been knocked off the table and was swinging from its flex like a pendulum.

  Alexandra Vladimirovna was standing by the open door in her winter coat and a beret, looking long and intently at the tables and bookshelves, at Zhenya’s paintings on the walls and at the empty beds of her daughters and grandson. As Sofya threw on her greatcoat, she glimpsed her friend’s sad, pale face. It had not been easy for Alexandra, on her own, to create a home for her children—and she was leaving it forever. There she stood, now an old woman, but still endowed with the same calm strength as on previous occasions when she had parted with everything she loved and to which she was accustomed: as a young student, leaving her wealthy father’s fine home; setting off on long journeys to Siberia and to the River Kara; and on the November night when she crossed the Bessarabian frontier.

  “Quick!” Sofya shouted. “You shouldn’t have waited!”

  Alexandra turned towards Sofya and said, with a sudden smile, “Have you got some tobacco?” And then, with
a kind of despairing bravado, “Oh, all right, let’s go!”

  A sharp, powerful blow shook the ground below, and the house gasped and trembled, as if in its death throes. More plaster scattered onto the floor.

  They left the apartment. Closing the door behind her, Alexandra said, “I thought these were just rooms, just an apartment—but I was wrong. Farewell, my home!”

  Sofya stopped on the landing. “Give me the key. I must get Marusya’s suitcase and Zhenya’s shoes and dresses.”

  “No!” said Alexandra. “They’re only things.”

  They set off down the empty staircase. Their steps were slow and shuffling. Sofya had to support Alexandra with one arm, while holding onto the rail with her other hand.

  They left the building, then stopped in shock. The two-storey house opposite had been destroyed: part of the front wall had collapsed into the middle of the street, while the roof now lay in the front garden, across the fence and the trees. The ceiling beams had fallen into the rooms below, and the doors and windows had been blown clean out of their frames. All over the street were piles of stone and broken brick. The air was cloudy, from a mixture of white dust and yellow, acrid smoke.

  “Lie down on the ground!” yelled a desperate male voice. “It’s not over yet!” Then came several more explosions. But the two women continued quietly on their way, stepping slowly and cautiously between the stones, dry flakes of mortar creaking beneath their feet.

  •

  The bomb shelter was crowded and there were heaps of bundles and suitcases all over the floor. There were only a few benches, and most people were either sitting on the floor or still on their feet, packed close together. The electricity had gone out, and the flames of the candles and oil lamps seemed wan and tired. Every least pause in the bombing brought more breathless tenants, rushing down into the cellar in the hope of salvation.