The Road (31 page)

It is possible that Grossman’s informant was Natalya’s former nanny, Marfa Grigoryevna. Even though the authorities repeatedly refused to give her any information, Marfa Grigoryevna managed to find out Natalya’s whereabouts, and she visited her in the orphanage soon after World War II, when Natalya was fourteen. Her intention was to adopt Natalya, but Natalya—wounded by her repeated experience of being abandoned—treated her with extreme aggression, and
Marfa Grigoryevna gave up the idea. Natalya and Marfa Grigoryevna do, however, seem to have met at least once more, in Moscow, around 1949. We also know that Natalya met Zinaida Ordzhonikidze in Moscow in 1957. It is possible that Grossman could have heard about this meeting, and he could have met Marfa Grigoryevna any time between 1946 and 1960, when he wrote “Mama.”

Grossman, however, was not simply observing the world of the Yezhovs from a distance; he was more personally involved than is immediately apparent. When Boris Guber, Ivan Kataev, and Nikolay Zarudin (all of them former members of the literary group known as Pereval and all of them friends of Grossman) were arrested in 1937, two main accusations were leveled at them. They were accused not only of a failed plot against Stalin’s life in 1933 but also of attempting, in late 1934, to organize a plot against Yezhov’s life. They intended—according to a scenario constructed by the NKVD with their characteristic blend of unbridled fantasy and careful attention to detail—to take part in one of the literary evenings presided over by Yevgenia Yezhova and then attack Yezhov when he came home late at night. Among the other writers expected—according to this scenario—to be taking part in the literary evening, though not in the “conspiracy,” were Babel, Grossman, and Boris Pilnyak. A woman by the name of Faina Shkol'nikova—a friend of Yevgenia Yezhova, and also of Grossman, Guber, and Kataev—was supposed to have provided the conspirators with information about the layout of the apartment and
the running of the household.

Guber, Kataev, and Zarudin were shot in 1937; Pilnyak and Babel in 1938. As on several other occasions in his life, Grossman seems to have been extraordinarily—almost miraculously—fortunate to survive.

The only other survivor among those implicated, however peripherally, in this “conspiracy,” was Faina Shkol'nikova. She too was arrested but, rather than being shot, she was sent to the Gulag. After returning to Moscow in 1954, she became one of the several camp survivors who paid regular visits to Grossman. Conversations with her—about the Yezhov family, about this imaginary “conspiracy”—may well have been at least part of the inspiration for “Mama.”

It is not difficult to imagine the impact of such conversations on Grossman. The “conspiracy,” which he was almost certainly
learning about for the first time, could easily have led to his own execution—and most of those implicated in the “conspiracy” were people who had played a crucial role in his life. Babel was one of the writers he most admired; Guber, Kataev, and Zarudin were his main sponsors at the beginning of his literary career; and Guber was the ex-husband of his second wife and the father of two boys he brought up as his own sons.

Part of the power of “Mama” derives from a tangible sense that there is much that Grossman does not tell us. He writes laconically and with tact and decorum. This is evident in his decision not to incorporate the personal material discussed above—which could easily have overloaded the story. It is still more evident in his matter-of-fact and
nonjudgmental portrayal of Yezhov. As if considering it dangerous to look for too long and too directly at Yezhov and his world, Grossman shows them to us, for the main part, through a protective prism of innocence—through the eyes of a child and the eyes of a peasant nanny with something of a child’s wisdom.

Both Grossman’s “Mama” and Natalya Khayutina’s true story encapsulate much of the lasting suffering inflicted on Russia by Stalin. Grossman’s version, however, is gentler. He describes only the general physical misery of the orphanage in Penza, saying nothing about the emotional torment Natalya underwent there. He says nothing about her fierce loyalty to the disgraced Yezhov. And as if wanting to find a way out for her, to give her at least the possibility of a better future, he ends the story on a note of quiet hope—in accord with the name he has given her.

Grossman assigns a greater place to Natalya’s birth parents, whereas she herself assigns the determining role in her life to Yezhov. Grossman’s Nadya remembers seagulls and the splashing of waves; the real Natalya remembers nothing further back than her kind, loving, adoptive father. Central to both stories, however, is a sense of rupture—and a sense of the power of that from which we have been cut off, of recollections of still more distant recollections, of “echoes that had been repeated many times and were now dying away in the mist.”

by Fyodor Guber

In late
1937 or early 1938, my mother was arrested. My brother and I were still living, along with my nanny, Natalya Ivanovna Darenskaya, in the room on Spaso-Peskovsky Street where we had lived with my father before his arrest on June 20, 1937. Our mother was living with Vasily Grossman, whom she had married a year earlier in May 1936. She was arrested on one of her regular visits to us. The NKVD had evidently been too busy to spend time looking for her; instead, they must have asked a neighbor to phone when she appeared at what was still her official address.

Since Misha and I now had neither father nor mother, the authorities must have been intending to send us to a special orphanage—
or, more likely, orphanages. But Vasily Grossman insisted on looking after us himself. He was recovering from a severe attack of asthma, but he made sure that we were brought to him immediately. And so we were taken at night to Herzen Street, where Grossman had recently obtained two rooms in a communal apartment. My brother, who was five years older than me, had witnessed Mama’s arrest, but I myself had been sound asleep and I had no idea what was happening. All I remember is streets covered in snow and the uniformed men in the car. We drove into a yard and stopped beside a two-story building. One of the NKVD officers rang, and Grossman opened the main entrance door. Disturbed by our arrival, other tenants were looking out of their windows. The following morning—I was to learn later—Grossman went to the People’s Education Department and began the process of having himself appointed our legal guardian.

Anyone who remembers those years will appreciate the remarkable strength of character he showed in taking it upon himself to bring up the children of an “enemy of the people.” There was no realistic hope of my mother’s release. It was with regard to these months that Grossman once said to his friend Semyon Lipkin, “You can have no idea what life is like for a man trying to look after small children while his wife is in prison.” Nevertheless, Grossman’s determination, and the letters he wrote to Nikolay Yezhov and Mikhail Kalinin and many other important people, brought about a miracle. On April 1, 1938, my mother was released; she remembered the date all the more clearly because fellow inmates had thought that she was making an April Fools’ Day joke when she told them her news. One morning I woke up and saw Mama’s dressing gown hanging on the door between our two rooms. Misha and I rushed into the other room. There she was—our Mama. Misha at once understood that she had been released from prison. I, on the other hand, had been told that Mama had gone to see her parents in Siberia. Now I believed that she had, at last, come back. Only in 1944 did she tell me the truth—in response to my saying, “But Mama, you went to see grandmama and grandpapa in 1938!”

From the moment we moved in with him until the end of his life, I called Vasily Grossman “Papa.” Misha, however, always addressed him more formally, as “Vasily Semyonovich.” The fact that Misha was eleven when our father was arrested, while I was only six, was very apparent. Grossman looked on both of us as his sons; if he did not adopt us formally, this was only to avoid creating the impression that he was asking us to betray our father.

We continued to live in the apartment on the corner of Herzen Street and Bryusov Lane until 1947. It was in a two-story building said to have been built in the reign of Catherine the Great. It was now surrounded by eight-story buildings, and we shared it with three other families. Our two rooms must have once been one large room. Standing in what was the left-hand corner of our room and the right-hand corner of the room that served as Grossman’s study, bedroom, living room, and dining room was a large, snow-white Russian stove. In the shared kitchen there were tables with the small paraffin and Primus stoves that we used in those days for cooking. There was no bath in the apartment. We went regularly to the bathhouse, but we also greatly enjoyed going to my aunt Marusya’s or to the apartment of one of Grossman’s friends, Ruvim Fraerman, for what we called a “real bath.”

Grossman tried several times before the war to move to a self-contained apartment, but without success. The communal apartment was, of course, a considerable improvement on “nomadic” existence—on living in the corners of rooms belonging to friends and acquaintances, as he had done since the arrest of Nadya Almaz in 1933. Nevertheless, life in a communal apartment was far from conducive to literary creativity.

And yet it was in this building on the corner of Herzen, with its six-foot-thick walls, that Grossman wrote his second novel,
Stepan Kolchugin
, and a great number of stories. It was from here that he set out, in a jeep provided by
Red Star
, to work as a war correspondent. And it was in this building, immediately after the war, that he wrote a large part of
For a Just Cause—
the prequel to
Life and Fate
.

***

When I was a child, Grossman spent a lot of time reading poetry to me. He sang songs and even arias from operas, although he did not have a musical ear. He especially loved Tchaikovsky’s
The Queen of Spades.
He told me stories from his own childhood and youth, and fairy tales that he made up as he went along. He retold Jack London’s
Star Rover
and Charles de Coster’s novel about the adventures of Till Eulenspiegel—, and all for my benefit alone. He did not carry on reading poetry aloud after I had grown up.

The poet he read to me most often was Nikolay Nekrasov, the great “civic” poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. He also read Eduard Bagritsky’s “The Lay of Opanas,” a long poem, in the style of a folk epic, about the Russian civil war. Opanas is a simple Ukrainian peasant caught up in the complex struggle between the Reds (Communists), the Whites (anti-Communists), and the Greens (peasant anarchists). Grossman knew the whole of this poem by heart, and often quoted his favorite lines from it. He also read me more modernist poems that were far from standard fare at the time: Sergey Yesenin, Innokenty Annensky, and Osip Mandelstam—and even Ivan Bunin and Vladislav Khodasevich, both of whom had emigrated.

Grossman often told me about the Museum of New Western Art, the fine museum of impressionist and early-twentieth-century art based on the collections built up before the Revolution by Sergey Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. This museum was closed after the Second World War; the paintings were divided between the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum, but many were not exhibited for several decades. He told me about Gauguin, Monet, and Matisse, about Picasso’s Blue Period and Rose Period, and about Matisse’s friend Albert Marquet. I was able to imagine these paintings vividly from his descriptions of them.

I often saw Grossman reading his black volumes of Tolstoy and his red volumes of Dostoevsky, but the writer he loved most of all was Chekhov. The small Marx Publishing House volumes were always on his writing desk. He also very much admired Ibsen and Knut Hamsun. Before the war I saw him read and heard him talk about many other writers and works of literature: Homer, Aristotle, Longus’s
Daphnis and Chloe
, Catullus (whom he often quoted), Machiavelli, Eckermann’s
Conversations of Goethe
, Shakespeare...

Grossman often reread the work of Isaak Babel—both
Red Cavalry
and the Odessa stories
.
He more than once read his favorite stories aloud to us, and there were particular sentences that remained with him throughout his life. He always spoke with passionate enthusiasm about the work of his friend Andrey Platonov. He knew not only the published work but also the unpublished stories and novels.

He admired the first two volumes of Mikhail Sholokhov’s
The Quiet Don
, but he had a low opinion of Sholokhov’s later work.

He read Rider Haggard with real interest. He read and reread Sherlock Holmes. And there was a series—
Geografgiz—
of popular-science books about animals that he greatly enjoyed. One book from this series, about a man-eating black panther, was in his hospital room during his last days. I read to him from it one evening, and the following morning he said to me, “I dreamed of the panther. I felt real terror.”

***

In 1938 Mama exchanged the room in which we had lived with my father on Spaso-Peskovsky Street for rooms in a two-story wooden house in Lianozovo, a dacha village not far from Moscow. The house had a large garden, with bushes and thickets big enough to hide in. Part of the garden was turned over to flower and vegetable beds. My mother grew a variety of vegetables, including cucumbers and tomatoes. She also grew flowers. For some reason I particularly remember her snapdragons and tobacco plants.

There was also a parking place for an M-1 looked after by one of our neighbors, a professional driver; he would sometimes lie on the grass beneath it and carry out repairs. I thought the smell of gasoline and leather was quite wonderful.

Above us lived the family of an artillery commander. After the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States and western Ukraine in 1939, he was posted somewhere close to the Soviet frontier. His son used to visit him there and come back with wonderful toys; we all felt envious. Once, in 1940, Grossman was sent to one of the Baltic states with Aleksandr Tvardovsky to write an article about one of the Soviet divisions there, and he brought me back similar toys—a little tank, and a toy pistol that flashed and let out puffs of smoke.

Grossman’s mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, spent two summers with us in Lianozovo, and his daughter, Katya, also stayed with us sometimes; I remember her as tall and thin. Many of Grossman’s friends also used to visit us there.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Lianozovo was a dacha belonging to Marshal Voroshilov, the People’s Commissar for Defense. When we went for walks in the forest, serious-looking figures in plain clothes would sometimes make us turn back just as we reached some particularly picturesque spot.

The path from the railway station to our house led through dense forest, and we often picked mushrooms on the way. We would cut hazel branches and use them to hold back the long grass and bushes so we could see the mushrooms more easily. Grossman had a Swiss penknife with a red handle and a red leather case; I think he had been given it by his mother. He often used to decorate our hazel sticks, carving little circles and squares on them. We would collect pieces of bark and he would make them into little boats or other small toys for me. As well as spending our summers in Lianozovo, we sometimes went there in winter to ski.

In summer Grossman used to wear a
tyubeteika
(a central Asian skull cap), a white shirt, white tussah-silk trousers, and sandals on bare feet. Before the war he was stout, and he walked with a stick. He looked older than his thirty-five years. The young women used to address him as “Uncle,” even though he was only slightly older than they were—young enough to have been one of their admirers.

Grossman and my mother never said a word to us about their fears, or about any of the terrible experiences they had gone through. I remember those years before the war as a happy time, the happiest time of my life. But my brother was almost certainly less happy.

***

Grossman had a touching love for the animal world. For many years we had fish in small aquariums. At one time we kept a very aggressive squirrel, and we had a number of cats and dogs over the years. Grossman was especially fond of a white poodle named Lyubka, who lived with us for about twelve years. During her last days she could hardly move, and we used to carry her out in our arms “for a walk.” We buried her opposite our apartment.

Grossman loved going to the zoo; he went several times a year. Once he spotted a porcupine quill lying on the ground. He climbed over the fence of the porcupine’s little enclosure and picked it up. I just stood and watched. To this day the porcupine quill lies on his writing desk in my daughter’s apartment in Moscow, along with his inkwell and penholder—Grossman often wrote not with a fountain pen but with a simple dipping pen.

***

Grossman was not—as has sometimes been said—gloomy and unsociable. It is simply that his last years brought him little to celebrate. He did, nevertheless, greatly enjoy convivial meals, and one or another of his friends would call on him almost every day. They would tell jokes and sometimes they would sing together. He would read aloud his stories, or extracts from his longer works.

Friends and relatives would come around every Sunday. Most often, at least from the mid-1950s, we would see two of Grossman’s oldest friends, Faina Abramovna Shkol'nikova and Yefim Abramovich Kugel (described with great warmth in Grossman’s autobiographical story “Phosphorus”), along with Nikolay Mikhailovich Sochevets (my maternal uncle, on whom Grossman based the hero of
Everything Flows
). We would all do a crossword together. Yefim Abramovich would say, “A four-letter word beginning with K,” “A seven-letter word beginning with N,” and so on. Uncle Kolya would be standing by the bookshelf leafing through a book, or working on one of the remarkably lifelike little animals he used to mold from clay. His eyesight was extremely poor and he was usually looking somewhere else, “seeing” the clay not with his eyes but with his hands. Faina Abramovna would always be smoking; Grossman would be making jokes or teasing us. When it was time for our main meal, we would have vodka and wine, and I would often be sent out to buy ice cream.

There were three other old friends Grossman saw a great deal: Semyon Tumarkin, Aleksandr Nitochkin, and Vyacheslav Loboda, who preserved the original manuscript of
Life and Fate.
And there was the poet Semyon Lipkin, who wrote an important memoir about Grossman. He and Grossman used to meet several times a week, and they often went out for walks lasting several hours.

Translated by Robert Chandler, with the author