Everything Flows (16 page)

“The villagers were left on their own; the State withdrew from them. People began wandering from house to house, begging from one another. Poor begged from poor; the starving from the starving. People with large families begged from people with small families, and from those who had no children at all. They still had something left at the beginning of spring, and sometimes they gave away a handful of bran or a couple of potatoes. But the Party members never gave anyone anything at all—not because they were especially greedy, or especially bad, but simply because they were frightened. And the State didn’t give the starving so much as one grain of wheat—even though the grain grown by the peasants was its very foundation. Did Stalin know all this? The old people talked about the famine at the time of the tsar. Then there had been help. They had been given loans. The peasants had gone to the cities; they’d begged for alms ‘in the name of Christ.’ Soup kitchens had been opened, and students had collected donations. But under a workers’ and peasants’ government no one had given them a single grain. And there were roadblocks—manned by soldiers, police, and OGPU—on every road. The starving had to stay in their villages—they were not to walk to the cities. There were guards around every railway station, even around the smallest halts. For those who fed the nation there was no bread. And in the cities the workers were receiving eight hundred grams of bread a day on their ration cards. Eight hundred grams! Good God, it was unimaginable. And not a gram for the peasant children in the villages. It was the same as the Nazis putting Jewish children in the gas chambers: ‘You’re Yids—you’ve no right to live.’ But what we did was beyond all understanding: it was the Soviet people against the Soviet people, Russians against Russians. It was a government of workers and peasants. Why all this killing?

“It was when the snow began to melt that the real hunger began.

“The children were crying. They no longer slept; they were asking for bread even at night. People’s faces were ashen; their eyes were clouded, as if drunk. They walked about as if half asleep, keeping one hand against the wall and moving one foot at a time, testing the ground with it. Hunger shakes people. People began to move about less and to spend more and more time lying down. And they kept imagining they could hear the sound of a cart: flour, sent by Stalin from the district center, to save their children.

“The women turned out to be stronger, more stubborn, than the men; they kept a tighter hold on life. But they also had more to endure—it’s their mothers, after all, whom children turn to for food. Some women tried to reason with their children. They would kiss them and say, ‘Don’t cry. Be patient. There just isn’t anything.’ Others went almost out of their minds. ‘Stop that whining,’ they’d shout, ‘or I’ll kill you!’ And they’d lay into their children with whatever was at hand—anything to stop their pleading. Some escaped from their houses and sat with their neighbors so as not to hear their children crying.

“By this time there were no dogs or cats left. They had all been slaughtered. Not that it had been easy to catch them. They were afraid of people by then, and they looked at them with wild eyes. People boiled the animals, but there was nothing except dry tendons. They made a kind of meat jelly out of their heads.

“So the snow melted and people began to swell up. It was the dropsy of starvation. They had swollen faces and legs like pillows. Their stomachs were full of water and they were constantly peeing. They kept having to go outside. As for the children—did you see the newspaper photographs of children from the German camps? They looked just the same: heads heavy as cannonballs; thin little necks, like the necks of storks; and on their arms and legs you could see every little bone. Every single little bone moving under their skin, and the joints between them. And draped over their skeletons was a kind of yellow gauze. And the children’s faces looked old and tormented—it was as if they’d been on this earth for seventy years. By the spring they no longer had faces at all. Some had the heads of birds, with a little beak; some had the heads of frogs, with thin wide lips; some looked like little gudgeons, with wide-open mouths. Nonhuman faces. And their eyes! Dear God! Comrade Stalin, by God, did you see those eyes? Perhaps he truly did not know. It was he, after all, who wrote that article, the one about dizziness from success.

“There was nothing people didn’t eat. They caught mice; they caught rats, jackdaws, sparrows, and ants; they dug up earthworms. They ground up old bones to make flour. They cut up leather, the soles of shoes, stinking old animal hides to make something like noodles; then they boiled the noodles up to make a kind of gummy paste. When plants and grasses began to sprout, they started digging up roots and boiling leaves and buds. There was nothing they didn’t use: dandelions, burdock, bluebells, willow herb, goutweed, cow parsnip, nettles, stonecrop...They dried linden leaves and ground them into flour, but we only had a few lindens. The flatbreads made from linden leaves were green, worse than the ones made from acorns.

“And still no help. Not that anyone was asking for it any longer. Even now, when I start to think of it all, I feel I’m losing my mind. Did Stalin really turn his back on all these people? Did he really carry out such a massacre? Stalin had food; Stalin had bread. It seems that he chose to kill all these people, that he starved them deliberately. They didn’t even help the children. So was Stalin, then, worse than Herod? Did he really take away people’s last kernels of grain—and then starve them? ‘No,’ I say to myself, ‘how could he?’ But then I say to myself, ‘It happened, it happened.’ And then, immediately: ‘No, it couldn’t have!’

“While they still had a little strength, people used to walk through the fields to the railway. Not to the station—no, the guards didn’t let them anywhere near it—but just to the track itself. When the Kiev–Odessa express came by, they used to kneel down and shout, ‘Bread! Bread!’ Sometimes they held their children up in the air—their terrible children. And sometimes people would throw them pieces of bread or some scraps. The dust would settle, the rumble of the train would pass—and the whole village would be crawling along the track, searching for crusts. But then came new regulations; when trains were going through the famine provinces, the OGPU guards had to close the windows and lower the blinds. Passengers weren’t allowed to look out. And the peasants stopped going to the railway anyway. They no longer had the strength to go outside their huts, let alone as far as the railway.

“I remember how one old man showed the farm chairman a piece of newspaper he’d picked up by the railway. There was an item about some Frenchman, a famous minister, who’d come to the Soviet Union. He was taken to the Dnepropetrovsk Province, where the famine was at its most terrible, even worse than where we were. People were eating people there. He was taken to some village, to a collective-farm nursery school, and he asked the children what they’d had for lunch that day. ‘Chicken soup with pies and rice croquettes,’ came the answer. I saw those words with my own eyes, I can see that piece of newspaper even now. There’s never been anything like it. Killing millions of people on the quiet and then duping the whole world. Chicken soup! Rice croquettes! Where we were, every last worm had been eaten. And the old man went on, ‘Under Tsar Nicholas our newspapers told the whole world about the famine. “Help us, help us!” they wrote. “Our peasants are dying.” But you monsters, you Herods—you just turn it all into
one big show
!
’

“From the village came a howl; it had seen its own death. The whole village was howling, without mind, without heart. It was a noise like leaves in the wind, or creaking straw. It made me angry. Why did they have to howl so pitifully? They had ceased to be human—so why were they crying so pitifully? You’d have to be made of stone to carry on eating your ration of bread to the sound of that howling. I used to go out into the fields with my bread ration; I’d stop—and I could still hear them howling. I’d go a bit farther—and it would seem they’d gone silent. Then I’d go farther still—and I could hear it again. Only by then it was from the next village along. It would seem as if, along with the people, the whole earth had begun to howl. ‘Who’s going to hear them?’ I’d think. ‘There’s no God.’

“An OGPU officer once said to me, ‘You know what your villages are called by people at provincial headquarters? Cemeteries of the hard school!’ But at first I didn’t understand what he meant. And the weather was wonderful. We had quick, light showers early that summer, alternating with a hot sun. The wheat stood thick as a wall, taller than a man—as if you’d need an ax in order to cut it! I saw any numbers of rainbows that summer, and thunderstorms, and warm ‘gypsy’ rain, as they call it.

“All winter long everyone had been wondering about the harvest, searching for omens and questioning the old men. The winter wheat had been their only hope. And it proved everything they’d hoped for—but they were too weak to harvest it. I went into one hut. Everyone was lying down, barely breathing, or maybe not breathing at all, it was hard to tell. Some were on beds, some
on the stove
. The daughter—a girl I knew—was lying on the floor in a kind of madness, gnawing the leg of a stool. And what was worst of all is that she just growled when I came in. She didn’t look around when she heard me. She just growled, the way a dog growls if you go too close when he’s gnawing a bone.

“The whole village died. First it was the children that died, then it was the old people, then it was the middle-aged. At first people dug graves for them, but then they stopped. And so the dead were lying on the streets, in the yards, and the last to die just remained in their huts. It went quiet.
The whole village had died
. Who was the last to die, I don’t know. Those of us who worked in the administration were taken off to the town
.

“I ended up in Kiev. This was the time when bread came back on sale again. Even without a ration card, you could buy bread. You should have seen it. People began queuing the evening before—and even then the queues were half a mile long. There are many kinds of queues, you know: queues where people make jokes and crunch sunflower seeds; queues where your number is written down on a piece of paper; and queues where no one is joking and your number is written on the palm of your hand or
chalked on your back
. But these queues weren’t like any of these; no, I’ve never seen anything like them. People put their arms around the waist of the person in front and clung up against them. If anyone stumbled, the whole queue would sway; it was as if a wave had passed through it. And a kind of dance would begin, people swaying from side to side. The swaying would get wilder and wilder. People were afraid they wouldn’t have the strength to keep hold of the person in front, that they’d lose their grip—and this fear would make the women start howling, and soon the whole queue would be screaming and it was as if they’d all gone out of their minds, as if they were singing and dancing. Sometimes young louts would try to break into the queue; you could see them looking for the weakest link. When these louts came close, everyone would be howling with fear again—and again, it was as if they were singing. All this was just town folks without ration cards queuing to buy bread—people without passports,
people stripped of their civic rights
, ordinary artisans, or people who lived out in the suburbs.

“And then there were the peasants—crawling out of their villages, crawling toward the city. The stations were all cordoned off, and the trains were constantly searched. There were army and OGPU roadblocks on every road. All the same, people were getting to Kiev, crawling through fields and bogs, through woods and open country—anything to bypass the roadblocks. It was impossible, after all, to set up blocks everywhere. The peasants could no longer walk—they could only crawl. And so people in Kiev would be hurrying about their affairs—on their way to work, on their way to a cinema...Trams would be running...And in the middle of all this, crawling about among these people, were the starving. Children, men, young girls—all on all fours. They looked more like some kind of filthy little cats or dogs. But they seemed to be trying to be like people. They knew modesty; they knew shame. You’d see a young girl crawling along—all swollen, whining, looking like some kind of monkey. And then she’d be putting her skirt straight, blushing, tucking her long hair under her kerchief. She was, after all, from a village, and this was her first time in Kiev. But it was only the lucky few, only one in ten thousand, who managed to crawl as far as Kiev. Not that it did them any good—there was no salvation even in Kiev. Starving people lay on the ground. They begged, they tried to hiss out words—but they were unable to eat. Someone might have a crust of bread beside him but he couldn’t see it any more; he was too far gone.

“Every morning horses pulled flat-top carts through the city. Those who’d died in the night were taken away. I saw one cart, it was stacked with the bodies of children. It was like I’ve already said. They looked thin and long—faces like dead birdies, sharp little beaks. These little birds had flown to Kiev—and what good had it done them? Some of them were still making cheeping noises; their little heads were like ripe ears of grain, bending the thin stalks of their necks. I asked the driver. He just gave a shrug of the shoulders. ‘They’ll quieten down soon enough,’ he said.

“I saw one young girl crawl across the sidewalk. A street sweeper gave her a kick, and she rolled onto the roadway. She didn’t look around. She just crawled on, fast as she could, heaven knows where she got the strength from. And she even tried to shake the dust off her dress. That same day I bought a Moscow paper. I read an article by Maksim Gorky about how children need
cultured toys.
Did Gorky not know about the children stacked on the cart? Did they really need
cultured toys
? Or maybe Gorky did know—and kept silent, like everyone kept silent. And maybe he too wrote that those dead children were enjoying chicken soup. That same driver told me that the greatest number of dead was by the shops that sold unrationed bread. If you’re starving, if you’re swollen with dropsy, a single crust can finish you off. Yes, I remember Kiev all right, even though I only spent three days there.