Stalingrad

by Vasily Grossman

  The thought of his mother, like a strong taproot, entered into every aspect of his life, big or small. Probably it always had done, but this root that had nourished his soul since childhood had previously been elastic, yielding and transparent, and he had not noticed it, whereas now he saw it and felt it constantly, day and night.

  Now that he was no longer drinking in what he had been given by his mother’s love but giving everything back in confusion and longing, now that his soul was no longer absorbing the salt and moisture of life but giving it back in the form of tears, Viktor felt a constant, incessant pain.

  When he reread his mother’s last letter; when he divined between its calm, restrained lines the terror of the helpless, doomed people herded behind the barbed wire; when his imagination filled in the picture of the last minutes of his mother’s life; when he thought about the mass execution she had known was imminent, that she had guessed about from stories told by a few people who had miraculously escaped from other shtetls; when he forced himself, with merciless obstinacy, to imagine his mother’s feelings as she stood in front of an SS machine gun, by the edge of a pit, amid a crowd of women and children—what he felt then was overwhelming. But it was impossible to change what had happened, what had been fixed forever by death.

  He did not want to show this letter to anyone. He did not want to speak about it even to his wife, his daughter or his closest friends.

  The letter contained no mention of Ludmila, Nadya or Tolya. His mother’s only concern was her son. There was just one brief mention of Alexandra Vladimirovna; one night she had dreamed about her.

  Several times a day Viktor passed his hand over his chest, over the jacket pocket where he kept it. Once, when the pain seemed unbearable, he thought, “If I hide it away somewhere, I might slowly start to calm down. As things are, this letter’s like an open grave.”

  But he knew that he would sooner destroy himself than part with this letter that had, by some miracle, managed to find its way to him.

  Viktor reread the letter again and again. Each time he felt the same shock as at the dacha, as if he were reading it for the first time.

  Perhaps his memory was instinctively resisting, unwilling and unable fully to take in something whose constant presence would make life unbearable.

  Everything around him seemed the same as before—yet there was nothing that had not changed.

  Viktor was like someone seriously ill trying to carry on as usual. The sick man still works, talks, eats and drinks, even laughs and makes jokes, but everything around him has become different—work, people’s faces, the taste of bread, the smell of tobacco, even the heat of the sun.

  And everyone around him also senses that something has changed, that there is something different about the way this man works, talks, argues, laughs and smokes—as if some thin, cold mist now separates him from them.

  Once Ludmila asked Viktor, “What are you thinking about when you talk to me?”

  “What do you mean? I think about whatever we’re talking about.”

  And at the institute, when he told Sokolov about his successes in Moscow, about all the new possibilities opening up, about his meetings with Pimenov, about his discussions with the Party scientific section, and about the astonishing speed with which all his proposals were acted on, Viktor was unable to escape the feeling that someone with tired, sad eyes was watching him, listening and shaking her head.

  And when Viktor thought about his time in Moscow with the beautiful Nina, his heart did not start to beat faster. It was as if it had all happened to someone else and was of no real interest. Was it really necessary to write to her and think about her?

  •

  Alexandra Vladimirovna arrived in the evening. No one had known when to expect her. It was Nadya, just returned from the kolkhoz, who opened the door to her.

  When she saw her grandmother, who was wearing a man’s black coat and carrying only one little bundle, Nadya leaped at her and flung her arms around her neck.

  “Mama, Mama, it’s Granny!” she called out. As she kissed her, she asked all in one breath, “How are you feeling? Are you well? Where’s Seryozha? Where’s Auntie Zhenya? Any news of Vera?”

  Ludmila came rushing out. Too breathless to speak, she kissed her mother’s hands, eyes and cheeks.

  Alexandra took off her coat, went through into the main room, smoothed down her hair, looked around and said, “Well, here I am. But where’s Viktor?”

  “He’s at the institute, he’ll be back later,” replied Nadya. “Our grandmother Anna Semyonovna’s probably dead. The Germans have killed her—a letter reached Papa.”

  “Anna?” cried Alexandra. “My darling Anna?”

  Seeing her mother go pale, Ludmila said, “Nadya, you must learn to say things more gently.”

  Alexandra stood silently by the table, then walked about the room a little and stopped in front of a small desk. She picked up a little wooden box and looked at it. “I remember this box,” she said. “Marusya gave it to you.”

  “Yes,” replied Ludmila.

  Mother and daughter looked at each other, both wrinkling their brows.

  “We’ve lost Marusya,” said Alexandra. “Viktor’s lost Anna—and here I am, still alive. But since that’s how it is, I have to keep going.” She turned to Nadya and asked, “Which class are you in now, kolkhoz worker?”

  “I’m in the top class,” said Nadya, through her tears.

  “Mama, do you want some tea, or would you rather wash first? We’ve got hot water.”

  “I’ll wash first. Then we can all have tea together.” Alexandra held out her hands, palms up, and said, “I need a towel, soap, underwear and a dress. I own only the clothes I stand up in—everything else has gone up in smoke.”

  “Yes, Mama, of course! But why isn’t Zhenya with you? She must have lost everything too.”

  “Zhenya’s going out to work now. After what happened she said to me, ‘I’m going to go out and work, as Marusya said I should.’ She met someone she knew in Kuibyshev, and he found her a job as a senior draughtsman in a military design bureau. Right up her street. And you know our Zhenya—she doesn’t do anything by halves. Now she’s got a proper job, she’s at it eighteen hours a day. But don’t worry—I’ll soon be earning my keep too. I’ll start looking for work tomorrow. Does Viktor know any factory directors I could speak to?”

  “Certainly, but there’s time enough,” said Ludmila, as she took some underwear out of a suitcase. “First you must rest. You’ve been through a lot—you need to get your strength back.”

  “All right, show me where I can wash,” said Alexandra. “But just look at Nadya—she’s so tall now! And tanned. And she looks unbelievably like Viktor’s mother. I’ve got a photograph of Anna when she was eighteen. Her mouth, the look in her eyes—Nadya couldn’t be more like her.”

  She put her arms around Nadya’s shoulders, and they all went through into the kitchen, where there was a basin of hot water on the stove.

  “What luxury—an ocean of hot water!” said Alexandra Vladimirovna. “On the steamer even one small cup of hot water was enough to make our day.”

  While Alexandra washed, Ludmila prepared dinner. She spread out a tablecloth—one she took out only on holidays and children’s birthdays. She put out all her supplies. She put out the pies she’d baked from white flour to celebrate Viktor’s and Nadya’s return. She put out half of the sweets she’d hidden away for Tolya.

  Then Ludmila brought in the little bundle her mother had left by the front door. She untied it. Next to the carefully laid table, it looked strangely touching: half a brick of stale soldier’s bread, turning grey with age; a little salt in a matchbox; three unpeeled boiled potatoes; a tired-looking onion; a sheet from a child’s cot that her mother must have been using as a towel.

  Then there was a sheaf of old letters, wrapped in newspaper that was falling apart at the folds. Ludmila glanced quickly through the yellowing pages, recognizing her father’s compressed, slanti
ng hand and the handwriting of her sisters when they were little. She saw a page from one of Tolya’s school exercise books, covered in his straight, even writing. She saw a postcard from her mother-in-law and two letters from Nadya. Scattered among all these letters were family photographs. It was strange and painful to look at these faces she knew so well. Some of these people were no longer alive, others had been scattered far and wide—but here they all were, all gathered together.

  Ludmila felt a surge of tenderness and gratitude towards her mother, whose presence of mind had saved these old letters and photographs from the fire—and who always had room in her heart for all her loved ones, bringing together both the dead she never forgot and the living she was always so ready to help.

  Her mother’s love was as precious, as simple and necessary as this chunk of aging bread.

  Alexandra came out of the kitchen. In her daughter’s housedress, which was too big for her, she looked thinner than ever. She looked younger now, with more colour in her cheeks and droplets of sweat on her forehead, yet she also looked sadder and more exhausted.

  She looked at the table her daughter had laid and said, “From famine to feast!”

  Ludmila embraced her mother and led her to the table.

  “How many years older than Marusya are you?” Alexandra asked. And then she answered her own question, “Three years and six months.”

  As she sat down, she said, “It all seems as if it were only yesterday. Zhenya took it into her head to bake a pie for my birthday. And everyone was there—Marusya, Zhenya, Seryozha, Tolya, Vera, Stepan, Sofya Osipovna and Mostovskoy and Pavel Andreyev—all sitting down at table together. And now the house has burned down—and the table too. Here, it’s just you, me and Nadya. No Marusya ever again, though I still can’t believe it!” She spoke the last words very loudly. After that they all fell silent, for a long time.

  “Papa will be here soon,” said Nadya, unable to bear the silence any longer.

  “Oh, Anna, dear Anna,” Alexandra said very softly. “You lived alone and you died alone.”

  “Mama,” said Ludmila, “you just can’t imagine what a joy it is to see you!”

  After they had eaten, Ludmila persuaded her mother to go to bed. She sat down beside her and they talked, very quietly, until midnight.

  It was one in the morning when Viktor returned from the institute. Everyone was asleep.

  He went up to Alexandra’s bed, looked for a long time at her white hair and listened to her slow, rhythmic breathing. He remembered a sentence from his mother’s letter, “Yesterday I dreamed of my dear Alexandra.”

  The corners of her mouth trembled and she appeared to frown, but the sleeping woman didn’t moan or cry; she almost smiled.

  Viktor went quietly to his room and began to undress. He had imagined he would find it difficult to be with Ludmila’s mother again, that the sight of his mother’s dear friend would bring on yet another wave of anguish. But it was not like that at all; he felt only tenderness. It was like a moment in winter when, after a long period of harsh dry cold, when iron fetters seem to bind the earth and the trunks of trees, when the sun is a wan mauve, barely visible in the icy mist—it was like an unexpected breath of life in midwinter, when moist, almost warm snow gently brushes the earth, and, in the January dark, all nature seems to experience a premonition of the miracle of spring.

  In the morning Viktor had a long talk with his mother-in-law. She had heard no news about all too many of her friends and acquaintances, and she was anxious about them.

  She began to tell him about the terrible air raid, about the fire, about the tens of thousands made homeless, about people who had died, about her conversations with soldiers and workers on the ferry, about how many wounded children she had seen, about how she and Zhenya had walked through the Volga steppe with two other women each of whom was carrying an infant in arms. She talked about the sunrises, sunsets and starry nights she had seen in the steppe. She talked about the courage and endurance with which people were confronting these bitter times, about their faith in the triumph of a just cause.

  “You won’t be cross if Tamara Berozkina suddenly turns up on your doorstep?” she said. “I’ve given her your address.”

  “This is your home,” Viktor replied. “You don’t need to ask.”

  He saw that her daughter’s death had deeply shaken her but not depressed or enfeebled her. She was moved both by an iron determination and by love for others; she worried constantly about Seryozha, Tolya, Vera, Zhenya, Spiridonov and many others whom Viktor didn’t know. She asked him to find out the addresses and phone numbers of factories where she might be able to find work. When he suggested she rest for a while first, she replied, “What are you saying, Vitya? Who could rest after what I’ve just been through? I’m sure your mother went on working until her last day.”

  Then she asked him about his own work. He became more animated and began to talk more freely.

  Nadya went off to school. Ludmila went out too; the hospital commissar had asked her to call round. Viktor, however, stayed behind with Alexandra. “I’ll go to the institute after two, when Ludmila’s back. I don’t want to leave you on your own,” he said. Really, though, he simply wanted to spend more time with her.

  Late in the evening, Viktor was alone in his laboratory. He needed to check a photoelectric effect on one of the sensitive plates.

  He turned on the inductor current, and the bluish light of a vacuum discharge flickered down the thick-walled tube. In this dim light, which was like a pale blue wind, everything familiar seemed to quiver with excitement: the marble of the switchboards, the copper of the switches, the pale glow of the quartz, the dark lead plates of the photo screens, and the white nickel of the stands.

  And suddenly he felt as if he were lit from within by this same light, as if a stark, radiant bunch of all-penetrating rays had entered his brain and chest.

  What he felt was very powerful, but it was not a presentiment of happiness; it was a sense of life, of something greater than happiness.

  Everything seemed to fuse together: his childhood dreams, his work, the sense of burning anguish that now never left him, his hatred of the dark forces that had burst into all their lives, Alexandra’s accounts of her last days in Stalingrad, the beseeching look of the kolkhoz woman in the railway station in Kazan, and his faith in the free, happy future of his motherland.

  At this difficult hour, this hour that was so difficult both for his people and for his own heart, he felt that he was not powerless, not at the mercy of fate.

  He sensed that the determination and perseverance of a researcher was not enough on its own. To maintain the strength required for his life of labour, he needed to draw on other resources too.

  And a momentary vision of a mankind that was happy and free—master of both earth and sky, disposing wisely of the most powerful energy in the world—flashed before him in the bluish, almost wind-like light of the cathode lamp.

  47

  IVAN PAVLOVICH Novikov, a shaft sinker, was walking back home after the night shift.

  His room was in a family barrack one and a half kilometres from the pit. Some of the ground was swampy and birches had been felled to make a corduroy road. Novikov’s heavy boots seemed to make the earth sigh, and here and there dark water oozed up between the white trunks.

  The autumn sun cast spots of light on the earth and the already brown grass. The many-hued birch and aspen leaves shone, greeting the morning. The air felt quite still, yet leaves here and there began to tremble; it was as if thousands of butterflies—small tortoiseshells, red admirals, swallowtails—were about to take wing and fill the transparent air with their weightless beauty. In the shade beneath the trees, fly agaric mushrooms held up their red umbrellas; amidst the lush, damp moss, lingonberries glowed like rubies on green velvet.

  The forest’s morning beauty had probably changed little over the last thousand years; it was composed of the same colours and the same moist, sweet smells. It was s
trange that this beauty should now exist side by side with the hum of the factory, with white clouds of steam escaping from the pithead, with the dense yellow-green smoke hanging over the coke furnaces.

  The pit had left its imprint on Ivan’s face, giving it a look of severity, even grimness. There seemed to be a constant frown on his forehead; thick slate dust had turned his dark eyelashes still darker and particles of coal had eaten into his skin, deepening the wrinkles around the corners of his mouth. Only his clear blue eyes remained cordial and welcoming, untouched by the darkness of work underground, by the coal and silicon dust that ate away at the miners’ skin and lungs.

  As a boy he had worked as an assistant in an underground stables. After that, he had worked in the lamp cabin, refilling the oil lamps. Then he had dragged a sledge along the low, hot galleries of a mine working very thin seams of coal; then as a pony driver on the main horizontal gallery, taking trams laden with coking coal to the central shaft; and then, for two years, on the surface, in one of the Yuzovka pithead workshops, using dynamite to break up slabs of old iron to be loaded into the open-hearth furnaces. From there he went to the bar-stock workshop; standing beside his mill, he had looked like a medieval knight in chain mail and a metal visor.

  Long before the war, however, he had gone back to working underground. Now a brigade leader, he had been in charge of everything from building new pump and storage rooms to digging new shafts, galleries, drifts and gravity planes. He had also been responsible for hole blasting and deep drilling.

  His younger brother had graduated from the military academy several years ago. Many of his contemporaries had also made their mark in the world. Smiraev, who had worked alongside him as a trammer when the two of them were mere boys, was now a deputy minister; another man his age had become mines administration director for the area; a third was in charge of a food-processing plant in Rostov-on-Don. Styopka Vetlugin, his best friend from childhood, was now a member of the miners’ trade union central committee, living in Moscow. Chetvernikov, who had also once worked beside him, had completed a correspondence degree at the metals institute and was now working somewhere either in Tomsk or Novosibirsk.