Everything Flows (7 page)

He went on to say how much he hated the
Black Hundreds
, the organizers of pogroms. And yet he could also see that Mandelstam and Khavkin—who were undoubtedly gifted, capable people—had gone blind. To them, everything that was happening had seemed to be simply an expression of Judophobia—and nothing else. Similarly, people like Pyzhov and Radionov had been unable to grasp that what really mattered was not Lysenko’s coarseness and intolerance; what mattered was the national, Russian science that he and his new men were affirming.

Ivan Grigoryevich’s eyes were watching him attentively. Deep inside him Nikolay Andreyevich began to feel the kind of anxiety you feel as a child when you notice a sad look in your mother’s eyes and you vaguely realize that you’re doing or saying something wrong, something bad. Wanting to quieten this confused feeling, he adopted a tone of heartfelt eloquence. “I’ve been though many tribulations,” he began eloquently. “I’ve lived through a difficult, stern epoch. It goes without saying that I did not ring out loud and clear, like Herzen’s Bell. I did not try to expose Beria, or the errors of Stalin. But it makes no sense even to try to imagine such things.”

Ivan Grigoryevich let his head droop—and it was impossible to tell whether he was dozing, daydreaming, or pondering Nikolay Andreyevich’s words. His hands were dozing; his head had sunk into his shoulders. Yesterday, listening to his traveling companions, he had sat in exactly the same way in the train.

Nikolay Andreyevich went on. “I had a hard time under Yagoda, and I had a hard time under Yezhov. But now that Beria and Abakumov and Ryumin and Merkulov and Kobulov are no longer, I’m well and truly back on my feet. The main thing is that I sleep peacefully—I no longer expect visitors in the night. And it is the same, of course, for others. And now, now one can’t help thinking that those cruel times did not pass in vain. A new life has been born, and we can all do our best to participate in it.”

“Kolya, Kolya,” Ivan Grigoryevich said quietly.

This angered Maria Pavlovna, who had noticed the look of bleak compassion on their guest’s face.

Turning to her husband—who had also noticed this look—she said, “Why are you too timid to say that Mandelstam and Pyzhov are infatuated with their own selves? Why keep lamenting that life has put them in their place? It certainly has—and thank God!”

This reproach, of course, was really aimed at their guest. Worried that she might have spoken too sharply, she continued, “I’ll go and get the bed ready. Vanya’s probably tired—more than we realize.”

But Ivan Grigoryevich—already fully aware that this meeting, far from bringing him relief, was merely adding to his burden—asked his cousin in a sullen tone, “And you? Did
you
sign the letter condemning the Killer Doctors? I heard about that letter in the camps—from those who learned that your ‘process of substitution’ was not over yet...”

“What a dear, sweet eccentric you are!” said Nikolay Andreyevich—and faltered, and fell silent.

Deep inside him everything had gone cold with anguish, and at the same time he could feel that he had broken out in a sweat, that he had gone red, that his cheeks were burning.

But he didn’t fall on his knees. He said, “My friend, my dear friend, it’s not only in the camps that people had hard lives. Our lives have been hard too.”

“I’m not judging you!” Ivan Grigoryevich said hurriedly. “I’m not judging you—or anyone else. Heaven forbid! No, no...How could I? Anything but...”

“No, no, that’s not what I mean,” said Nikolay Andreyevich. “What I’m trying to say is how important it is, in the midst of dust and smoke, in the midst of terrible contradictions, not to be blind—how important it is to keep seeing, to keep seeing the vastness of the road. If you go blind, after all, you can go mad.”

Ivan Grigoryevich said apologetically, “The trouble is, it seems, that I don’t know what’s what, that I mistake vision for blindness.”

“So where are we going to put Vanya?” asked Maria Pavlovna. “Where’s he going to be most comfortable?”

“No, no thank you,” said Ivan Grigoryevich. “I won’t be able to spend the night with you.”

“Why not? Where else are you going to go? Come on, Masha, we’ll have to tie him up.”

“No, no,” said Ivan Grigoryevich. “Not that.”

Nikolay Andreyevich fell silent and frowned.

“Forgive me, I just can’t, but it’s not...it’s something quite different.”

“Listen, Vanya...” said Nikolay Andreyevich, and then said nothing.

After Ivan Grigoryevich had left, Maria Pavlovna looked at the table, still covered with dishes, and at the chairs that had been pushed back from the table.

“We gave him a royal welcome,” she said. “As good as we gave the president of the Academy of Sciences and his wife.”

Mean, stingy people, on occasion, outdo generous, expansive people in the scale of their generosity. Maria Pavlovna had indeed prepared a lavish meal.

Nikolay Andreyevich went up to the table. “Yes,” he said, “if a man’s mad, then he stays mad forever.”

She placed her palms on his temples and, kissing him on the forehead, said, “Don’t let it upset you. You really mustn’t, my incorrigible idealist!”

I
van Grigoryevich
awoke at dawn, lying on the boards of a “hard-class” railway carriage. He listened to the noise of the wheels. Then he half opened his eyes and stared out into the gray dawn light beyond the window.

During his twenty-nine years as a prisoner, he had dreamed several times of his childhood. Once he had dreamed of a small bay. The water was calm, the bottom was covered with pebbles, and some little crabs had hurried past, moving sideways and silently in their underwater way, and disappeared into the seaweed. He had walked slowly over the rounded stones, feeling the gentle touch of the sea grass on his feet, and then dozens of elongated drops of quicksilver—baby scad and mackerel—had spurted up out of the water and scattered. The sun had lit up the green underwater meadows and clumps of spruce—and this beloved little bay had seemed to be filled not with salty water but with salty light.

He had dreamed this dream in a freight wagon. That had been twenty-five years ago, but he still remembered the despair that had gripped him when he saw the gray wintry light and the gray faces of the other prisoners, when he heard the creak of boots in the snow outside, the resonant knocking of the guards’ hammers as they checked the bottom of the carriage.

Sometimes he saw a house overlooking the sea, the branches of an old cherry tree bending over the roof, a well...

He had developed his memory to a painful degree of sharpness, and he could remember the gleam of a thick magnolia leaf, the flat stone in the middle of the stream. He remembered the design of the tablecloth—and the quiet cool of rooms with white, limewashed walls. He remembered reading, on the couch with his legs drawn up—on a hot summer day the oilcloth was pleasantly cool. Sometimes he tried to remember the face of his mother, and his heart would ache, and he would screw up his face, and there would be tears in his tightly closed eyes—just as in childhood, when you try to look at the sun.

He could remember the mountains easily, and in full detail; it was as if he were leafing through a familiar book, one that falls open of itself at the right page.

Scrambling through brambles and twisted elms, slipping on the stony, cracked, yellowy-gray earth, he would make his way to the pass and, after looking back at the sea, enter the cool half dark of the forest...With their stout branches, the powerful oaks effortlessly raised up to the very sky their hills of intricate foliage; all about, a solemn silence reigned.

In the middle of the previous century, the coastal areas had been inhabited by Circassians.

The old Greek, the father of Methodius the gardener, had as a boy seen Circassian gardens and orchards, Circassian villages full of people.

After the Russian conquest of this part of the Black Sea coast, the Circassians had disappeared and life had died out in the coastal mountains. Here and there among the oaks were hunched-up plums, pears, and cherries, now growing wild again, but there were no longer any peaches or apricots—their brief span was over.

Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground.

Everything inanimate—stones, iron—was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful. And when he came back home, the smell of smoke from the kitchen, the barking of dogs, and the cackling of hens somehow seemed all the sweeter.

Once he went up to his mother, who was sitting at the table with a book, and hugged her, pressing his head against her knees.

“Are you ill?” she asked.

“No, I’m well, I’m just so happy,” he muttered, kissing his mother’s dress and her hands, and then he burst into tears.

He was quite unable to explain to his mother what it was that he felt. It was as if, there in the half dark of the forest, someone were lamenting, searching for people who had vanished, looking behind trees, listening for the voices of Circassian shepherds or the crying of babies, sniffing the air, hoping to sense the smell of smoke, of hot flatbreads.

And so, when he came back from the forest to the beauty and charm of his own home, he felt not only joy but also shame...

His mother had seemed unable to make any sense at all of his explanations. She had replied, “My poor silly boy, you’ll find life a struggle if you’re going to be so sensitive and easily wounded.”

During supper, his father exchanged looks with his mother and said, “Vanya, you probably know that our Sochi was once called Post Dakhovsky and that the villages here in the mountains once had names like First Regiment and Second Regi-ment.”

“Yes, I know,” said Ivan, and sniffed sullenly.

“They were the bases of Russian military units. And these troops did not only carry rifles—they also carried axes and spades. They cut roads through forests inhabited by cruel, wild mountain people.”

The father scratched his beard and added, “Excuse these grand words—but they were cutting a road for Russia. That’s how we’ve ended up here...I’ve helped set up schools, and Yakov Yakovlevich, among others, has planted orchards and vineyards, and still other people have built roads and hospitals. Progress demands sacrifices, and it’s no use weeping over what’s inevitable. You understand what I’m trying to say?”

“Yes,” said Ivan, “but there were orchards here before us—and they’ve been left to go wild.”

“Yes, my friend,” said the father. “When you chop down a forest, splinters fly. But we didn’t, by the way, force the Circassians to leave. They themselves chose to go to Turkey. They could have stayed here and become a part of Russian culture. As it is, they suffered great poverty in Turkey, and many of them died...”

In the camp, Ivan had remembered many things from his past. He had dreamed of his birthplace. He had heard familiar voices. Their old watchdog, with rheumy, red-rimmed eyes, had got up to meet him.

And he had awoken to the ocean-like roar of the
taiga
, to the rage of a winter blizzard.

And now he was free—and he was still waiting for something good, something from his youth, to come back to him.

That morning he had woken in the train to a sense of irredeemable loneliness. The evening with his cousin had filled him with bitterness, and Moscow had seemed crushing and deafening. The vast tall buildings, the heavy traffic, the traffic lights, the crowds walking along the sidewalks—everything had seemed strange and alien. The whole city had seemed like a single great mechanism, schooled to freeze on the red light and to start moving again on the green...During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and the Volga, canals joining different seas. The country had seen mighty tractors and skyscrapers...There was only one thing Russia had not seen during this thousand years: freedom.

He had gone by trolleybus to the southwestern part of the city. There, amid country mud, amid village ponds that had only partly dried up, huge eight- and ten-story apartment blocks had appeared. Village huts, small sheds, and vegetable patches were living out their last days, squeezed from all sides by this vast offensive on the part of stone and asphalt.

In the chaos, amid the roar of five-ton trucks, could be glimpsed the future streets of a new Moscow. Ivan Grigoryevich had wandered through this city that was coming into being, where there were still no roadways and sidewalks, where people walked to their homes along paths that wound between heaps of rubble. Again and again he saw the same signs:
MEAT
and
HAIRDRESSER
. In the twilight the vertical
MEAT
signs shone red; the horizontal
HAIRDRESSER
signs were a piercing green.

These signs, which had appeared along with the first residents, seemed to reveal man’s carnivorous essence.

Meat, meat, meat...Human beings devoured meat. They could not do without it. There were still no libraries, no theaters, no cinemas, no tailors. There were not even hospitals, pharmacies, or schools, but at once, amid the stone, a red light had begun to shine:
MEAT
,
MEAT
,
MEAT
.

And immediately after this—the emerald of the
HAIRDRESSER
signs. Man eats meat, and he grows fur.

Ivan Grigoryevich had gone to the station during the night and found that the last train for Leningrad left at two. He had bought a ticket and taken his things from the left-luggage office.

He had been surprised by his sense of peace on finding himself in a cold, empty coach.

The train had passed through the outskirts of Moscow. Dark autumn copses and glades had slipped by. It was good to be escaping from the vastness of Moscow—from its stone and cars and electricity; it was a relief not to have to listen any longer to his cousin’s story about how the rational progress of history had cleared the ground for his own success.

On the shiny board, as if on water, gleamed a flashlight.

“Grandad, have you got your ticket?” a conductress asked.

“Yes, I’ve already shown it.”

For many years he had imagined the hour of returning from the camps and meeting his cousin, the only person in the world who had known him as a child, who had known his mother and father. But his sense of calm and relief on getting into the night train was not really so very surprising.

His sense of loneliness when he awoke was so total that it seemed to him more than any creature on earth, any air-breathing creature, could survive.

He was on his way to the city where he had spent his student years, the city where his love still lived.

When she had stopped writing to him many years ago, he had mourned for her. He had not doubted that only death could have broken off their correspondence. But she was still living. She was alive...