The Road (27 page)

And at the market there were people selling good-quality chickens, and fresh eggs, and early vegetables, and at prices that were not really that bad at all. And when they wanted something special, they ate bread with pressed caviar—during the period of chaos while the Germans were approaching, Nikolay Viktorovich had brought home two large jars of caviar from the sanatorium storeroom.

Cafés were opened. German films were shown in the cinema. There were unbearably tedious films about the National Socialist Party and its success in reeducating unprincipled, dissipated good-for-nothings and turning them into strong-willed, politically conscious young militants. But there were good films as well; Nikolay Viktorovich and Yelena Petrovna particularly liked one called
Rembrandt
. A Russian-language theater opened; the company included some excellent actors—and the famous
Blumenthal-Tamarin was outstanding. At first, the company’s only production was Schiller’s
Intrigue and Love
, but then they began putting on Ibsen,
Hauptmann, and Chekhov—all in all, it was possible to have quite a tolerable evening there. And there were, it turned out, some cultivated people left in the town—doctors, actors, and singers, and one very charming and erudite man, a scene painter from Leningrad—and so life carried on with its little excitements, and, just as before the war, Nikolay Viktorovich’s house was often full of people who understood the exquisite design of Persian carpets, people who could appreciate the supple lines of antique furniture and the charm of fine porcelain and crystal; and it turned out that these people preferred to keep their distance from the commandant and the town authorities, from the colonels and generals of Army Group B headquarters, and that they were happy rather than disappointed if they failed to receive an invitation to a reception presided over by General List, the master of the Caucasus. But if they did receive an invitation, it goes without saying that they put on their very best clothes and fretted about whether or not their wives were dressed fashionably enough or whether they looked absurd and provincial.

There were three small wards in Nikolay Viktorovich’s hospital, and he had two nurses and two assistant nurses.

There were enough provisions in the storeroom to feed the wounded quite decently, and there was a supply of drugs and dressings, and so Nikolay Viktorovich’s main concern was simply not to do anything that might attract the attention of the German authorities; afraid that the less seriously wounded might be transferred to a camp, he kept them in bed.

His little building in the depths of the sanatorium park had evidently been entirely forgotten by the Germans. The stronger patients played cards, flirted with the elderly nurses, and worshipped Nikolay Viktorovich, and it seemed to them that they owed their quiet, paradisical life to him alone.

When Nikolay Viktorovich came home from the hospital, his wife would ask, “Well, how are our boys today?”

They had no children, and so that is how the two of them referred to the wounded young soldiers. And Nikolay Viktorovich would laugh as he told his wife amusing stories about life in the little hospital.

But the Germans had not entirely forgotten about the little building in the depths of the park. One day Nikolay Viktorovich was called to the town council medical department and asked to supply a list of all the wounded under his supervision. He felt anxious as he compiled the list, but the official on duty did not even read it. He threw it carelessly into a file; evidently it was no more than a bureaucratic formality.

The Germans continued to advance; the military bulletins in the newspapers sounded more triumphant than ever, and Nikolay Viktorovich tried not to read them.

There were rumors that the Kislovodsk sanatoriums would soon be reopening, and that they would be receiving not only colonels and generals but also eminent members of the Reich’s intelligentsia.

It appeared that there were some people who had had well- educated Germans billeted on them, Germans who seemed to be afraid of Hitler and Himmler and who seemed to disapprove of the horrors reported by people living near the Gestapo headquarters. All in all, then, life was not really so very different from the life they had known before. Once again, Nikolay Viktorovich found himself delighting in the comfort of his house and the beauty and charm of his wife; once again, he was confident he had been right to prefer Yelena Petrovna Ksenofontova’s name-day party to the meeting of the revolutionary circle.

And now, just as Nikolay Viktorovich was about to go home, intending to relax for a while and then have something to eat before going with his wife to see a performance of Gerhart Hauptmann’s
The Sunken Bell
, a car crunched over the gravel and up to the little building in the depths of the park. Out of it stepped a stout man with high cheekbones, a snub nose, gray eyes, and fair hair; he could have been a Soviet district agronomist, or the manager of a shop, or someone giving a talk on social insurance at a meeting of a domestic workers’ Party committee.

It was clear, however, from the peaked cap, the belt, the armband, the shoulder straps on his gray uniform, and the swastika and Iron Cross on his chest that he was a Gestapo officer, equal in rank to a Wehrmacht colonel.

As always, Nikolay Viktorovich looked tall and sleek; his face had a handsome glow, his hair was an elegant shade of silver, and his eyes were almost indecently expressive. Beside this runt of a potbellied German, a man who looked as if he had been put together out of some kind of waste matter, Nikolay Viktorovich could have been a distinguished landowner whom Fortune smiled on; he could have been taken for an important Russian aristocrat or perhaps a foreign duke.

But it was not like that at all.

“
Sie sprechen Deutsch
?”

“
Jawohl
,” Nikolay Viktorovich replied. When he was a boy, he had learned German from a governess called Augusta Karlovna.

“Heavens!” he said to himself, realizing what grace, what coquettish eagerness, what a passionate desire to seem polite, pleasant, and obedient he had infused into his cooing
Jawohl
.

And the German, hearing the voice of the gray-haired aristocrat and quickly appraising him through almost divinely omniscient eyes—the eyes of a being who existed on some exalted height, decreeing who should live and who should die—immediately understood what kind of man he was talking to.

The stout, stocky Gestapo officer had been given the task of destroying vast mountains of human flesh.

There were thousands of human spirits that he had had to break—to cleave or shatter, to bend or fragment: there were Catholics and Orthodox, there were fighter pilots, princes who were passionate monarchists, Party functionaries, inspired poets who had trampled over every convention, nuns whose spiritual frenzy had led them to renounce the world. When life is under threat, everything cracks and splits apart, everything turns upside down, sometimes slowly, sometimes resisting obstinately, sometimes yielding with an ease that makes you want to laugh. But the result is always the same, and the exceptions only proved the rule. Like children in front of a Christmas tree, people had pushed and shoved as they reached out to grab the simple, crude little toy that a Gestapo Grandfather Frost now offered, now snatched away...Yes, everyone wants to live—Schmulik from the ghetto no less than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

It was not a complicated matter, and the Gestapo bureaucrat explained everything concisely and clearly, without a single coarse or cynical word, and he even came out with a few sentences that were not strictly necessary—about how civilized people all understand that, when it comes to matters of worldwide historical importance, there can be only one morality: the morality of state expediency. In Germany, doctors had understood this long ago.

Nikolay Viktorovich listened, nodding quickly and obediently, and the look in his eyes was that of an attentive pupil, a pupil determined to memorize as accurately and conscientiously as possible everything that his teacher says. Or perhaps it could better be described as a look of servility, of servile devotion to power.

Examining this sanatorium doctor, this well-groomed aristocrat, the Gestapo bureaucrat thought good-naturedly that he did not really have the right to laugh at him after all. This man had been exposed to overwhelming temptation; he had been enslaved by his many years of sweet living in the wonderful climate of a spa town, surrounded by flower beds and bubbling, purling, health-giving Russian water. No doubt, he had many well-tailored Russian suits and an apartment full of expensive antique furniture. And no doubt this apartment was well stocked with delicacies; no doubt he regularly ate Russian caviar that he had stolen from the sanatorium stores. No doubt he collected fine crystal, or amber cigarette holders, or walking sticks with ivory handles...And there was no doubt at all that he would have a beautiful wife.

The stocky, thick-necked German, this man who looked as if he had been molded out of some kind of waste matter, was by no means simpleminded. His work had to do with the human soul, that mystery of mysteries; when it came to clarity of vision, and one or two other things, this man could vie with God.

The men left the hospital together and Nikolay Viktorovich saw two German sentries standing beside the doors; no longer were people free to enter or leave the hospital as they chose.

The Gestapo bureaucrat offered to drive Nikolay Viktorovich home. Sitting in silence on the hard seats of the staff car, they looked out at the friendly streets and comfortable houses of the world- famous spa town.

Before saying goodbye to Nikolay Viktorovich, the German quickly went through everything once again: “A car will come for you in the morning. The hospital staff will have to leave the building for a brief period while you attend to the medical side of proceedings. Once the covered trucks have left the hospital, it must be explained to the staff that the chronically ill and seriously wounded have been transferred, on instructions from higher authorities, to a special hospital outside the town. It is, of course, crucial that you should exercise discretion; there is probably no one to whom it matters more that this operation should not become public knowledge.”

Nikolay Viktorovich recounted all this to Yelena Petrovna and said, “Forgive me.” After a minute or two of silence, she said, “And I’d got everything ready for the theater. I’ve taken your suit out and ironed my dress.”

He did not answer. She went on: “You’re right. There’s nothing else you can do.”

“I’ve just had a thought, you know,” said Nikolay Viktorovich. “In twenty years I’ve never once been to the theater without you.”

“I’m going with you this time too. This is one more theater we’ll be going to together.”

“You’re out of your mind!” he shouted. “Why?”

“
You
can’t stay here. So how can
I
?”

He began kissing her hands. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips; she kissed his gray hair.

“My handsome one,” she said. “What a lot of orphans we’re going to leave behind.”

“My poor boys—but there’s nothing I can do for them, only this.”

“It wasn’t them I meant. I meant our own orphans.”

They behaved very vulgarly. They put on the clothes she had got ready for their evening at the theater and she doused herself with French perfume. Then they had supper. They ate pressed caviar and drank wine; he clinked glasses with her and kissed her fingers as if they were young lovers in a restaurant. Then they wound up the gramophone, danced to vulgar songs by Vertinsky, and wept because
they worshipped Vertinsky. Then they said goodbye to their dear children—and this was more vulgar still. They kissed their porcelain cups goodbye; they kissed their paintings goodbye. They stroked their carpets and their mahogany furniture. He opened her wardrobe and kissed her underwear and her slippers.

Then, in a harsh voice, she said, “And now poison me, like a mad dog—and yourself too!”

Three Letters

Grossman with his mother, probably 1913–14

Grossman
dedicated
Life and Fate
to his mother. Yekaterina Savelievna’s death, Grossman’s guilt, and the ensuing recriminations between him and his wife are all reflected in
Life and Fate
. Grossman evidently felt that his mother remained alive in his novel, and this sense of his mother’s continued presence seems to have led him to look on
Life and Fate
almost as a living being. His letter to Khrushchev in 1961 ends, “There is no sense or truth in my present position, in my apparent freedom, while the book to which I have given my life is in prison. For I have written it, and I have not renounced it and am not renouncing it. Twelve years have passed since I began work on this book. I still believe that I have written the truth, and that I wrote this truth out of love and pity for people, out of faith in people.
I ask for freedom for my book.”

There is perhaps no more powerful lament for Eastern European Jewry than the chapter from
Life and Fate
now often referred to as “The Last Letter”—the letter that Anna Semyonovna, a fictional portrait of Grossman’s mother, writes to her son and manages to have smuggled out of the ghetto. Though probably always intended as a chapter in
Life and Fate
, this letter is first mentioned in
For a Just Cause
, which contains a number of moving accounts of Viktor’s feelings about his mother’s death. The first is based on a dream that Grossman himself dreamed in September 1941, around the time of the Berdichev massacre.

During the night Viktor dreamed that he entered a room full of pillows and sheets that had been thrown onto the floor. He went up to an armchair that still seemed to preserve the warmth of someone who had recently been sitting in it. The room was empty; the people who lived there had evidently left all of a sudden in the middle of the night. He looked for a long time at the kerchief hanging over the chair and almost down to the floor—and then realized that his mother had been sleeping in this chair. Now the chair was empty,
standing in an empty room.

The second passage comes later, after Viktor Shtrum has received his mother’s letter and when he no longer has any doubt of her death.

Getting on the plane for Chelyabinsk, he had thought, “She’s gone. And now I’m flying east, I’ll be farther away from where she is lying.” On the way back from Chelyabinsk, as the plane was approaching Kazan, he had thought, “And she’ll never know that we’re here in Kazan.” In the midst of his joy and excitement at seeing his wife again, he had said to himself, “When I last saw Lyudmila, I was thinking I’d be seeing Mother again once the war is over.”

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

Now that he was no longer imbibing what he had been given by his mother’s love but was giving it all back in confusion and anguish, now that his soul was no longer absorbing the salt and moisture of life but was giving it all back in the form of tears, Shtrum 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 who had been herded behind the barbed wire; when his imagination filled in the picture of the last minutes of Anna Semyonovna’s life, on the day of the mass execution that she had known was imminent, that she had guessed about from the stories of a few people from other shtetls who had miraculously survived; when he forced himself, with merciless obstinacy, to imagine the intensity of his mother’s suffering as she stood in front of an SS machine gun, by the edge of a pit, among a crowd of women and children; when he did this, he was gripped by a feeling of terrifying strength. But it was impossible to alter what had happened, what had been fixed forever by death. [...]

Shtrum had no wish to show this letter to any of his family. Several times a day he would bring the palm of his hand to his chest and pass it over the jacket pocket where he kept the letter. Once, in the grip of unbearable pain, he thought, “If I kept it somewhere else, somewhere farther away, I should gradually start to feel calmer. As it is, it’s like an open grave in my life—a grave that is never filled in.”

But he knew that he would sooner do away with himself than part with the letter that had
so miraculously found him.

***

Grossman not only wrote the farewell letter he wished he had received from his mother; he also replied to it. After his death, an envelope was found among his papers; in it were two letters he had written to his mother on September 15, 1950, and September 15, 1961, on the ninth and twentieth anniversaries of her death, along with two photographs. One photograph shows his mother with Grossman when he was a child; the other, taken by Grossman from the pocket of a dead SS officer, shows hundreds of naked dead women and girls in a large pit. We have included the first of these photographs but not the second. In both his fictional and his journalistic treatments of the Shoah, Grossman always does all he can to restore dignity to the dead and to enable the reader to see them as individuals. He does not appear to have shown this photograph to his friends and family, and it is unlikely he would have wanted to show it to his readers. Very likely he would have agreed with Claude Lanzmann, who dismissed such photographs as “images without imagination [...] inexact visual renderings that allow viewers to indulge in an unsavory and misleading spectacle at the expense of a past that could only be tapped by a strenuous effort of
listening, learning and imagining.”

Grossman devoted many years to precisely such a “strenuous effort of listening, learning and imagining.” We include both of his letters to his mother in full.