The Road (20 page)

Their human strength triumphed over his violence. The Madonna walked toward the gas chamber, treading lightly on her small bare feet. She carried her son over the swaying earth of Treblinka.

German Fascism was destroyed. The war carried away tens of millions of people. Huge cities were reduced to ruins.

In the spring of 1945 this Madonna first saw our northern sky. She came to us not as a guest, not as a foreign tourist, but in the company of soldiers and drivers, along the smashed roads of the war. She is a part of our life; she is our contemporary.

She has seen everything before: our snow, the cold autumn mud, soldiers’ dented mess tins with their murky gruel, a limp onion with a crust of black bread.

She has walked alongside us; she has traveled for six weeks in a screeching train, picking lice out of her son’s soft, unwashed hair.

She is a contemporary of the total collectivization of agriculture.

Here she is, barefoot, carrying her little son, boarding a transport train. What a long path lies ahead of her—from Oboyan near Kursk, from the black-earth region of Voronezh, to the taiga, to marshy forests beyond the Urals,
to the sands of Kazakhstan.

And where is your father, little one? Where did he perish? In some bomb crater? Felling logs in the taiga? In some dysentery barrack?

Vanya, Vanya, why are you looking so sad? Fate took you away from the hut where you were born, nailing a wooden cross over its windows. What long journey lies ahead of you? Will you reach its end? Or will you come to the end of your strength and die somewhere along the way, in a station on a narrow-gauge railway, on the swampy bank of some little river beyond the Urals?

Yes, it was she. I saw her in 1930,
in Konotop, at the station. Swarthy from hunger and illness, she walked toward the express train, looked up at me with her wonderful eyes, and said with her lips, without any voice, “Bread...”

I saw her son, already thirty years old. He was wearing worn-out soldiers’ boots—so completely worn out that no one would even take the trouble to remove them from the feet of a corpse—and a padded jacket with a large hole exposing his milk-white shoulder. He was walking along a path through a bog. A huge cloud of midges was hanging above him, but he was unable to drive them away; he was unable to remove this living, flickering halo because he needed both of his hands to steady the damp heavy log on his shoulder. At one moment he raised his bowed head. I saw his fair curly beard, covering the whole of his face. I saw his half-open lips. I saw his eyes—and I knew them at once. They were the eyes that look out from Raphael’s painting.

We met his mother more than once in 1937. There she was—holding her son in her arms for the last time, saying goodbye to him, gazing into his face and then going down the deserted staircase of a mute, many-storied building. A black car was waiting for her below; a wax seal had already been affixed to the door of her room. How mute the tall buildings, how strange and watchful the silence of the ash-gray dawn...

And out of the half-light before dawn emerges her new life: a transport train, a transit prison, sentries looking down from wooden watchtowers, barbed wire, night shifts in the workshops, boiled water in place of tea, and bed boards, bed boards, bed boards...

With his slow soft stride, wearing his low-heeled kid-leather boots, Stalin went up to the painting and, stroking his gray mustache, gazed for a long, long time at the faces of mother and son.

Did he recognize her? He had met her during his own years of exile in eastern Siberia, in Novaya Uda, in Turukhansk and Kureisk. He had met her in transit prisons. He had met her when prisoners were being transferred from
one place of exile to another. Did he think of her later, during the days of his grandeur?

But we, we people, we recognized her, and we recognized her son too. She is us; their fate is our own fate; mother and son are what is human in man. And if some future time takes the Madonna to China, or to the Sudan, people will recognize her everywhere just as we have recognized her today.

The painting speaks of the joy of being alive on this earth; this too is a source of its calm, miraculous power.

The whole world, the whole vast universe, is the submissive slavery of inanimate matter. Life alone is the miracle of freedom.

And the painting also tells us how precious, how splendid life has to be, and that no force in the world can compel life to change into some other thing that, however it may resemble life, is no longer life.

The power of life, the power of what is human in man, is very great, and even the mightiest and most perfect violence cannot enslave this power; it can only kill it. This is why the faces of the mother and child are so calm: they are invincible. Life’s destruction, even in our iron age, is not its defeat.

Young or gray-haired, we who live in Russia stand before Raphael’s Madonna. We live in a troubled time. Wounds have not yet healed, burned-out buildings still stand black. The mounds have not yet settled over the shared graves of millions of soldiers, our sons and brothers. Dead, blackened poplars and cherry trees still stand guard over partisan villages that were burned to the ground. Tall dreary grasses and weeds grow over the bodies of people who were burned alive: grandfathers, mothers, young lads and lasses. Over the ditches that contain the bodies of murdered Jewish children and mothers the earth is still shifting, still settling into place. In countless Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian huts widows are still weeping at night. The Madonna has suffered all this together with us—for she is us, and her son is us.

And all this is frightening, and shaming, and painful. Why has life been so terrible? Are you and I not to blame? Why are we alive? A difficult and terrible question—only the dead can ask it. Yet the dead are silent; they ask nothing.

Every now and again the postwar silence is disrupted by the thunder of explosions, and a radioactive cloud spreads across the sky.

And then the earth on which we live shudders; the atom bomb has been replaced by the hydrogen bomb. Soon we must see
The
Sistine Madonna
on her way. She has lived with us; she has lived our life. Judge us then, judge us all—along with the Madonna and her son. Soon we will leave life; our hair is already white. But she, a young mother carrying her son in her arms, will go forward to meet her fate. Along with a new generation of people, she will see in the sky a blinding, powerful light: the first explosion of a thermonuclear bomb, a superpowerful bomb heralding the start of a new, global war.

What can we, people of the epoch of Fascism, say before the court of the past and the future? Nothing can vindicate us.

We will say, “There has been no time crueler than ours, yet we did not allow what is human in man to perish.”

Seeing
The
Sistine Madonna
go on her way, we preserve our faith that life and freedom are one, that there is nothing higher than what is human in man.

This will live forever and triumph.

Late Stories

Grosssman in Armenia, late 1961

During
the second half of the 1950s Grossman enjoyed public success. Three separate editions of
For a Just Cause
were published— in 1954, 1955, and 1959—and he was awarded a prestigious decoration, the Red Banner of Labor. Meanwhile he was writing
Life and Fate—
the sequel to
For a Just Cause
and the work
usually considered his masterpiece.

Grossman’s personal life, however, was troubled. He was growing estranged from his wife, Olga Mikhailovna, and he was deeply in love with Yekaterina Vasilievna Zabolotskaya, the wife of the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky. The Grossmans and the Zabolotksys were neighbors, and the two families—parents and children alike—saw a great deal of each other. The first stages of the relationship between Zabolotskaya and Grossman have been convincingly described by Nikita Zabolotsky, the Zabolotskys’ only son. After saying that Grossman’s political outspokenness often led him into awkward situations, Nikita Zabolotsky continues: “At such moments [Grossman] was particularly touched by Yekaterina’s innate sensitivity and sympathy, her readiness to come to his help every time he needed moral support. Their relations were for a long time limited to family gatherings, but then they sometimes started to take walks together in the Neskuchny Park or on the city streets. Zabolotsky saw that Grossman’s friendship with his wife was
growing into a deeper feeling.”

The story of this relationship is complex. In late 1956 Grossman left Olga Mikhailovna and moved, with Zabolotskaya, first to a room he rented privately and then to a small room—officially “a study”—that he had obtained from the Literary Fund. For around two years Grossman and Zabolotskaya lived together most of the time in this small room in an apartment on Lomonosovsky Prospekt. In early September 1958, they both went back to their partners, probably intending this return to be permanent. On October 14, however, Nikolay Zabolotsky unexpectedly died, of a heart attack, and within a year Grossman and Zabolotskaya were once more living together; Yekaterina Korotkova remembers introducing her future husband to them in 1959, in the room on Lomonosovsky Prospekt. And in 1961 Grossman obtained a small apartment in a new Writers Union block near the Airport Metro Station; Zabolotskaya was a close neighbor, living in the same section of the building, and they saw each other every day for nearly all that remained of Grossman’s life.

***

The other sorrow that hung over Grossman’s last years was the “arrest”—as Russians still refer to it—of
Life and Fate.
In October 1960, against the advice of both Semyon Lipkin and Zabolotskaya, Grossman delivered the manuscript to the editors of
Znamya.
It was the height of Khrushchev’s “thaw” and Grossman seems to have believed that
Life and Fate
could be published, even though one of its central themes is the identity of Nazism and Stalinism. Grossman is generally thought to have behaved naively, but he was evidently clearheaded enough to take precautions. He himself censored about fifteen percent of
the text he submitted. He left a copy of the complete typescript with Lipkin, and he entrusted his original manuscript to
Lyolya Klestova, a friend from his student days who had no connection with the literary world.

In February 1961, three KGB officers came to Grossman’s apartment. They confiscated the typescript and everything bearing any relation to it, even carbon paper and typing ribbons. This is one of only two occasions when the Soviet authorities “arrested” a book while leaving the writer at liberty; no other book, apart from
The Gulag Archipelago
, was
ever considered so dangerous. Grossman refused to sign an undertaking not to speak of this visit. He agreed to take the KGB officers to his two typists and to his cousin Viktor Sherentsis in order for them to confiscate other copies of the typescript, but he may well have done this in the hope of deflecting attention from the copies he had left
with Lipkin and Klestova. The KGB, in any case, did not find the remaining copies, even though they evidently made considerable efforts. According to Tatiana Menaker, a distant younger relative of Grossman’s, they went to Viktor Sherentsis’s dacha and dug up the whole of
his vegetable garden.

In 1975, more than ten years after Grossman’s death, Lipkin asked the writer Vladimir Voinovich to help get
Life and Fate
published in the West. After making what turned out to be an inadequate microfilm, Voinovich asked Andrey Sakharov to make a second microfilm; Voinovich then sent this abroad. The microfilm reached Vladimir Maksimov, the chief editor of the émigré journal
Kontinent
, but Maksimov published only a few somewhat randomly chosen chapters; his lack of interest probably stemmed from his anti-Semitism. In 1977 Voinovich made a third microfilm, which he entrusted—along with his first, poor-quality microfilm—to an Austrian professor, Rosemarie Ziegler. These two microfilms reached Yefim Etkind, a writer and scholar then living in Paris. With the help of a colleague, Shimon Markish, Etkind established an almost complete text; this was not easy, since both microfilms were flawed. Several émigré publishing houses then turned the novel down. Vladimir Dimitrijevic—a Serb working for the publishers Éditions L’Âge d’Homme in Lausanne—eventually accepted the novel and in 1980 published an almost-complete Russian text. At a conference about Vasily Grossman in 2003 in Turin, Dimitrijevic said how he had sensed at once that Grossman was portraying “a world in three dimensions” and that he was one of those rare writers whose aim was “not to prove something but to make people live something.”

Grossman, however, did not live to see any of this; he did not know that his manuscripts would be preserved, let alone published. According to Lipkin: “Grossman aged before our eyes. His curly hair turned grayer and a bald patch appeared. His asthma [...] returned.
His walk became a shuffle.” Grossman himself said, “
They strangled me in a dark corner.”

Menaker has provided us with another glimpse of Grossman during these years—although the first of her memories, in fact, dates back to 1959, two years before the “arrest” of
Life and Fate
:

A mysterious stone wall of unsaid things and secrecy always surrounded him. My first memory of this sadness and secrecy belongs to the year 1959, when I spent a winter vacation in Viktor Sherentsis’s house in Moscow. Grossman came to visit every day and I was constantly being kicked out into the corridor stuffed with books. No wonder: as my grandma was always repeating, “
Even the cat reports to the OGPU.” I knew that Grossman was a famous writer. We had his huge novels, which were published in millions of copies, but the aura of sadness and tragedy was never explained to me in his lifetime. Later I realized that the people who came to our apartment had been sharing with Grossman their prison camp memories. I vividly recall that I felt in their presence the truth of Grossman’s observation that these people are
“frozen in time.”

From late 1961 Grossman was often seriously ill. He did not realize this, but he was suffering from the first stages of cancer. A doctor ascribed his symptoms to eating too much spicy food during his journey to Armenia in November and December 1961. Lipkin also remembers Grossman telling him in late 1962 that there was blood in his urine; he seems to have failed to act on a doctor’s advice
to visit a urologist. In May 1963 Grossman underwent an operation to remove one of his kidneys—the initial site of his cancer.

Late on September 14, 1964, after a period of
several months in the hospital, Grossman died of lung cancer.

***

For all Grossman’s trials, the three and a half years from the “arrest” of
Life and Fate
to his death constitute a remarkably creative period. As well as
Good Wishes
—a vivid account of his two months in Armenia—he wrote the finest of his short stories and around half of
Everything Flows
, including the trial of the four Judases, the account of the Terror Famine, and the chapters about Lenin, Russian history, and the Russian soul that arguably constitute the greatest passage of historico-political writing in the Russian language. This degree of creativity casts doubt on the widely held view that Grossman was severely depressed throughout his last years. Grossman himself wrote to his wife in October 1963, “I’m in good spirits, and I’m working eagerly. This greatly surprises me—where do these good spirits come from? I feel I should have thrown up my hands in despair long ago, but they keep stupidly
reaching out for more work.”

If
Life and Fate
has something in common with a Shostakovich symphony,
Everything Flows
,
Good Wishes
, and the stories he wrote during his last three years are more like Shostakovich’s quartets. Stylistically, structurally, and even philosophically, these works are more daring than
Life and Fate
. Their qualities show up especially clearly if we compare them with two stories from the mid-1950s. “Abel” (1953) is about the crew of the plane that dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima; “Tiergarten” (1955) is about a misanthropic Berlin zookeeper during the last days of the war. Important as these stories are in the development of Grossman’s political and philosophical thought, both are somewhat labored. A little like the caged animals he describes in “Tiergarten,” Grossman repeatedly goes over the same ground, asserting the value of freedom but failing to attain it himself. In his last works, however, Grossman succeeds—as in the second part of “The Sistine Madonna”—in reconciling moral, artistic, and even factual truth. These last works not only extol freedom; they also embody freedom. The subject matter is mostly dark, but the liveliness of Grossman’s intelligence makes these works surprisingly heartening.

***

The first story in this section is “The Elk,” which was probably written in 1954 or 1955. In February 1958 Grossman wrote in a letter, “I visited the Petropavlovsk Fortress, I went into the room where Andrey Zhelyabov was confined before his execution.
I want to write about him.” Zhelyabov was an important figure in the terrorist organization known as The People’s Will, and he was executed, in 1881, for his role in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Grossman never, in fact, wrote a story in which Zhelyabov plays a central role, but he is an important background presence in “The Elk.” Aleksandra Andreyevna, the story’s heroine, is obsessed with The People’s Will. As an archivist, she studies the various revolutionary organizations of the period, and a picture of Zhelyabov hangs on the wall of the room she shares with her husband. Grossman has even given her a name that brings together the first names of the assassinated tsar and the executed terrorist.

“The Elk” can be read in many ways. It is a truthful evocation of the misery of a terminal illness. It contains an implicit criticism of man’s violence against animals—a repeated
theme in Grossman’s work. And it hints at ways in which violence repeats itself in complex cycles. Just as Zhelyabov helps to assassinate the tsar and is then executed himself, so Dmitry Petrovich watches the cow elk through his rifle sights only to be watched over by the cow elk’s glass eyes, many years later, as he himself lies dying. It is also possible that Aleksandra Andreyevna’s obsession with The People’s Will is about to lead to her own execution; the early Bolsheviks venerated the terrorist revolutionaries of the 1870s, but by the mid-1930s these terrorists had again become suspect figures. Afraid that The People’s Will might inspire a new generation of terrorists, and perhaps even alarmed by its mere name, Stalin gradually closed down the journals and museums associated with it and removed all mention of the organization and its members from public places. The renaming of a Volga steamboat—previously the
Sofya Perovskaya
(after a famous revolutionary), the boat is renamed the
Valeriya Barsova
(after a famous singer)—is just one instance of this second silencing of The People’s Will. It is characteristic of Aleksandra Andreyevna to complain about the steamboat’s new name—and it is significant that a younger colleague, who may well be working for the NKVD, publicly criticizes Aleksandra Andreyevna for her excessive interest in the 1870s. At the end of the story Aleksandra Andreyevna fails to return home when expected. Neither her husband nor the reader ever learn what has happened to her.

***

“Mama”—the next story in this section—is also set in the 1930s. It is based on the true story of an orphaned girl who was adopted by Nikolay Yezhov and his wife, Yevgenia; Yezhov was the head of the NKVD between 1936 and 1938, at the height of the Great Terror. The orphaned girl, Natalya Khayutina, is still alive as we complete this introduction, and during the last twenty years she has given a number of interviews to journalists. Her story is of interest in its own right, independently of Grossman’s treatment of it, and is discussed in an appendix. Her own account of her first twenty years, however, diverges little from Grossman’s. As with his articles and stories about the war and the Shoah, Grossman seems to have done all he could to ascertain the historical truth, employing his imaginative powers not to create an alternative reality but to enter more deeply into the historical reality.

All the most prominent Soviet politicians of the time, including Stalin, used to visit the Yezhov household—as did many important artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers, including Isaak Babel. We see these figures, however, only through the eyes of Nadya, as Grossman calls the orphaned girl, or of her good-natured peasant nanny. Grossman leads us into the darkest of worlds, but with compassion and from a perspective of peculiar innocence—the nanny is described as the only person in the apartment “with calm eyes.” Grossman’s evocation of Babel’s ambivalence, his uncertainty as to what world he belongs to, is especially moving. For the main part, Nadya has no difficulty in distinguishing between the politicians who visit her father and the artists who visit her mother. Babel, however, confuses her; on the face of it, he has come to see her mother, but he looks more like her father’s guests and Nadya perhaps senses that it is indeed her father who interests Babel more deeply.