The Road (8 page)

The reason for the anxiety shown by Grossman’s editors is that the Soviet victory at Stalingrad had acquired the status of a sacred myth—a myth that legitimized Stalin’s rule. With regard to a matter of such importance, there could be no room for even the slightest political error. Tvardovsky and Fadeyev found it necessary, even when they themselves were satisfied with the novel, to ask for approval from a variety of different bodies: the Writers Union; the Historical Section of the General Staff; the Institute of Marx, Engels, and Lenin; the Central Committee of the Communist Party. They were afraid of offending Nikita Khrushchev, who is portrayed in the novel in his role as a senior political commissar at Stalingrad, and they were, no doubt, still more concerned about Stalin’s reaction; they could not have forgotten that Grossman had twice been nominated for a Stalin Prize—for his novel about the Revolution,
Stepan Kolchugin
, in 1941, and for
The People Immortal
, his novel about the first year of the war, in 1943—and that his candidacy had been vetoed both times, almost certainly at the
instigation of Stalin himself. Grossman evidently understood the need for Stalin’s explicit approval, and in December 1950 he sent him a letter which ends, “The number of pages of reviews, stenograms, conclusions, and responses is already approaching the number of pages taken up by the novel itself, and although all are in favor of publication, there has not yet been a final decision. I passionately ask you to help me by deciding the fate of the book I consider more important than
anything else I have written.”

Stalin, it seems, did not reply. Nor did Molotov, to whom Grossman wrote
in October 1951. Nevertheless, after a last flurry of
new suggestions for the title, the novel was finally published in 1952, in the July through October issues of
Novy mir.
In a letter to Fadeyev, Grossman wrote, “Dear Aleksandr Aleksandrovich [...] Even after being published and republished for so many years, I felt more deeply and intensely moved, on seeing the July issue of the journal, than when I saw my very first story [‘In the Town of Berdichev’]
in
Literaturnaya gazeta
.”

Initial reviews were enthusiastic and on October 13 the Prose Section of the Union of Soviet Writers nominated the novel
for a Stalin Prize. On January 13, 1953, however, an article appeared in
Pravda
titled “Vicious Spies and Killers Passing Themselves off as Doctors and Professors.” A group of the country’s most eminent doctors—all of them Jewish—had allegedly been plotting to poison Stalin and other members of the political and military leadership. These accusations were intended to serve as a prelude to a vast purge of Soviet Jews.

A month after this, on February 13, Mikhail Bubyonnov, who in 1948 had won a State Prize for
The White Birch
—a novel, like Grossman’s
The People Immortal
, about the first year of the war—published a denunciatory review of
For a Just Cause.
A new campaign against Grossman quickly gathered momentum. Major newspapers printed articles with such titles as “A Novel That Distorts the Image of Soviet People,” “On a False Path,” and “In a Distorting Mirror.” In response, Tvardovsky and the editorial board of
Novy mir
duly acknowledged that publication of the novel had been a grave mistake. What seems to have hurt Grossman most was being betrayed by Tvardovsky; Tvardovsky was a true writer, not merely a literary functionary, and he probably genuinely liked and admired Grossman. When Grossman called in at
Novy mir
and—it would seem—spoke his mind, Tvardovsky retorted, “What, do you think I should have returned my Party membership card?” “Yes, I do,” said Grossman. Still more angrily, Tvardovsky said, “I know where you’re going now. Go on then, get going. There’s obviously a lot you haven’t understood yet. It’ll be explained to you there.”

Earlier that day Grossman had received a telephone call asking him to go to the head office of
Pravda
; he had called in at
Novy mir
on his way there. Grossman probably did not know the exact reason for his summons to
Pravda
; he had been told only that it was “in connection with the fate of the Jewish people.” Tvardovsky, however, evidently knew that Grossman was among the Jewish writers and journalists who were being asked to sign a letter calling for the execution of the “Killer Doctors.”

Not long before this, Grossman had stood firm when Fadeyev begged him to renounce his novel and make a show of public repentance. Uncharacteristically, however, Grossman agreed to sign the letter about the “Killer Doctors.” He was, no doubt, feeling lost and confused after quarreling with Tvardovsky. He may have thought—reasonably enough—that the doctors were certain to be executed anyway and that the letter was worth signing because it affirmed that the Jewish people
as a whole
was innocent. Whatever his reasons, Grossman at once regretted what he had done. He drank vodka on the street and, by the time he got back home,
he was feeling badly sick. This act of betrayal—as he himself soon saw it—haunted Grossman for the rest of his life; a passage in
Life and Fate
based on this incident ends with Viktor Shtrum (who has just signed a similar letter) praying to his dead mother to help him never to show such weakness again.

Rather than being corroded by guilt, Grossman seems to have been able to find a way to draw strength from it. Most important of all, he was able to put his sense of guilt to creative use. Few writers have written more subtly about so many forms of personal and political betrayal, and it is possible that no one has articulated more clearly how hard it is for an individual to withstand the pressure of a totalitarian State. Several years later, in
Life and Fate
, Grossman was to write,

But an invisible force was crushing him. He could feel its weight, its hypnotic power; it was forcing him to think as it wanted, to write as it dictated. This force was inside him; it could dissolve his will and cause his heart to stop beating [...] Only people who have never felt such a force themselves can be surprised that others submit to it. Those who have felt it, on the other hand, feel astonished that a man can rebel against it even for a moment—with one sudden word of anger,
one timid gesture of protest.

At the time, however, Grossman’s act of betrayal did nothing to ease his position. The campaign against him continued to intensify. At a meeting of the Writers Union, Bubyonnov quoted Mikhail Sholokhov: “Grossman’s novel is spittle in the face of the Russian people.” Fadeyev published an article full of what Grossman described in his “Diary” as “mercilessly severe political accusations.” Voenizdat, the military publishing house that had agreed to publish
For a Just Cause
in book form, asked Grossman to return his advance—in view of what Grossman caustically referred to as “the now unexpectedly discovered
anti-Soviet essence of the book.”

All this happened in less than six weeks. The viciousness of the campaign, and its suddenness, is remarkable even by Soviet standards. David Fel'dman—a researcher into Soviet literary politics—has provided a striking explanation. Grossman was a central figure in what were probably the two most important postwar Soviet ideological projects. One was the creation of an internal enemy; now that the war was over, Stalin needed a new enemy in order to justify his continued dictatorship. The other was the creation of a “Red” Leo Tolstoy. The choice of internal enemy was simple enough— it could only be the Jews. The choice of a Soviet Tolstoy, however, was more complicated. There had always been rivalry between the Writers Union and the Agitprop Department (the Department of Agitation and Propaganda) of the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In this instance the Agitprop Department was backing Bubyonnov, while Fadeyev, Tvardovsky, and the Writers Union were backing Grossman, who was by far the greater writer. The two projects, inevitably, collided. Fadeyev and Tvardovsky had, for all their political acumen, underestimated how fiercely the anti-Jewish campaign would intensify. They began publishing
For a Just Cause
during the very month—July 1952—when most of the leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were undergoing secret trial.

During the war, Grossman was sometimes called “Lucky Grossman” because of the number of times he narrowly escaped death. On one occasion a grenade landed between his feet—and failed to explode. What happened in February and March 1953 was of the same order; Grossman was fortunate that Stalin died on March 5, 1953.

Denunciations of Grossman and his novel continued for another few weeks, but by April the campaign had petered out, and in mid-June Grossman received a letter from Voenizdat, repeating their original offer to publish
For a Just Cause.
The final, laconic entry in Grossman’s “Diary” reads, “26 October, 1954. The book is on sale on the Arbat, in the shop the Military Book.”

***

The period covered by this section begins with Grossman, after the Nazi invasion, feeling a renewed commitment to the Soviet cause, and ends with him, in the early 1950s, breaking with this cause irrevocably. The first of the stories, “The Old Man,” is based on accounts of the German occupation he had heard
from Russian villagers. No less vivid for being entirely Soviet in both matter and manner, it was published in
Red Star
in February 1942.

The second and much longer story, “The Old Teacher,” is set in an unnamed town that seems like a smaller Berdichev. It represents Grossman’s first attempt to address the fate of his mother. Soviet troops had not yet liberated the western Ukraine, but Grossman had evidently already learned a great deal about the massacres the Einsatzgruppen had carried out there. Published in the September and October 1943 issues of
Znamya
,
“
The Old Teacher” is among the first works of fiction about the Shoah in any language.

The story’s main character is male but, like Grossman’s mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, he is a retired schoolteacher. The final scene, during which a small child shows great kindness to this teacher just before they are both shot, is one of several scenes in Grossman’s work that show a Jewish parent—or parent figure—and a child affirming their love during the last minutes of their lives. In a memorable chapter from
Life and Fate
, Sofya Levinton, an unmarried doctor, befriends a child on the way to the gas chamber and feels that she has, at last, become a mother. In “The Old Teacher,” however, it is the bachelor teacher who feels like an abandoned child and the little girl who unexpectedly takes upon herself the role of mother.

The next piece in this section, “The Hell of Treblinka”—one of the first publications in any language about a Nazi death camp—was quickly translated into
a number of European languages. Grossman presents a clear overall picture of the camp’s organizational structure, and he writes with insight about the satanically astute understanding of human psychology that made it possible for so few SS guards to murder such a vast number of people. There are, however, both major errors and minor inaccuracies, and there is no doubt that Grossman would have corrected these had he been granted the opportunity. We have therefore provided both detailed notes and a separate appendix.

The final work in this section, “The Sistine Madonna,” was inspired by a Raphael Madonna from Dresden that the Soviet authorities had taken to Moscow in 1945. Grossman saw it in 1955, when it was exhibited in the Pushkin Museum before being returned to the Dresden Art Gallery. For nearly 150 years
The
Sistine Madonna
had been the object of something approaching a special cult in Russia. Dostoevsky, for example, saw the painting as a symbol of the faith and beauty that would save the world, and a large reproduction of it hung over his writing desk. Grossman’s article has a twofold importance. It too is a statement of faith, and its highly personal structure provides a transition to the freer, less genre-bound work of Grossman’s last years: the short novel
Everything Flows
, the travel sketch
Good Wishes
, the essay “Eternal Rest,” and the last short stories. Grossman is wrestling, in “The Sistine Madonna,” with huge questions. He is addressing such vast tragedies as collectivization and the Terror Famine; he is also—at a time when humanity’s very survival has become threatened as never before—questioning the nature and purpose of art.

Grossman wrote “The Sistine Madonna” in the second half of 1955—probably, given the number of times he mentions the hydrogen bomb, in November or December; the first American thermonuclear bomb had been tested in 1952, and the first Soviet test was carried out in November 1955. There are moments in the first section when Grossman’s prose cracks under this pressure, when he slips into sententiousness or sentimentality. But in the second section, and above all in his evocation of Christ as a thirty-year-old kulak deported to the taiga, he fuses poetry, religion, and fact to achieve a Dantesque intensity: “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 his hands to steady the damp heavy log on his shoulder.”

Old
Semyon Mikheich—everyone said—was the quietest man in the village. He did not drink; he did not smoke; and he never complained to his neighbors. He was never heard to quarrel with his old woman. His voice was quiet and gentle; his movements were no less quiet and gentle.

As the Germans drew near, several of his neighbors got ready to join partisan groups.

“Granddad, are you going to come too?” they would ask jokingly.

He would reply, “Shooting and killing—I just don’t have it in me.”

“On the side of the Germans, are you?” Fedka once asked.

“On the side of the Germans!” answered Semyon Mikheich. “What truth do the Germans bring? But I’m still no warrior. It’s just not in my nature. I can’t even bear to strike a horse with a whip. I’m tenderhearted.”

Wanting to defend her husband, old Filippovna joined in. “He’s with his bees all the time. That’s why he’s so quiet. Bees don’t like a man who gets angry.”

“Too true,” said the old man. “Take our chairman, Prokofy. The bees can’t stand him. He’s always in a hurry, and he makes a lot of noise.”

Just then Prokofy himself came along. He had two hand grenades hanging from his belt and a rifle on his shoulder.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I’m saying that you’re a stern man,” said Semyon Mikheich. “But in my family we’ve never shed blood. My mother was afraid to slaughter a chicken—she used to ask a neighbor to do it for her.”

“Well,” said Prokofy, “don’t you be too kind to the Germans. Or you’ll have to answer for it before the people.”

And he strode off down the village street.

The old man just shook his head, but his wife was upset. She spat on the ground.

***

The Germans had been in the village for nearly three months. First the forward units had gone through. The village had been plundered. When the women went into the dark, empty sheds, they wept. All they could think about was the cows that were no longer there. Everything from their huts was vanishing: sheepskin coats, embroidered towels, quilted jerkins, pillows, and blankets. In the afternoons the old men and women would get together and curse the Germans, reciting long lists of grievances.

Semyon Mikheich would say nothing; he just listened to all the furious words and sighed. He himself had suffered as much as anyone at the hands of the Germans. They had ravaged his beloved hives; they had seized his stores of honey and wheat. Even the old bed, on which he had slept for long decades, had been taken off on the back of a truck by some corporal with bloodshot eyes.

In the evenings, in the dark empty hut, the old couple would kneel by the icons and pray to God. At night Filippovna would weep; Semyon Mikheich would try to comfort her.

“What’s the good of tears?” he would say. “Everyone’s grieving now. The whole people is suffering. We’re old, there’s just the two of us, we’ll get by somehow.”

In December the village became the headquarters of a German division. The billeting officers chose the best house, the one with an iron roof, for the generals. Then they made the men lay a red-brick pavement in front of the house while the women cleaned the floors and whitewashed the walls. Old Semyon Mikheich was ordered to lay a long brick path from the yard to the outhouse in the kitchen garden. The corporal got cross with him for not making the path straight enough. He made him redo it twice. For the first time in his life Semyon Mikheich used foul language.

The old couple’s hut was requisitioned for a doctor, a thin man with a small bald head. The old couple had to move into the entrance room, which was so cold at night that they were unable to sleep. Instead, they heard
der Arzt
shouting down the telephone in a rasping voice,
“Kamyshevakha! Kamyshevakha!”

The doctor was demanding coaches for the evacuation of the wounded. There were many soldiers suffering from wounds and frostbite, and very few trains indeed, since the partisans were destroying the tracks. “That must be Prokofy’s doing,” the old man said to himself. “He’s hard at it!”

Der Arzt
shouted hoarsely at everyone who came in to see him. Every now and then he called the orderly and sent him on some errand. The orderly was scared to death of him. The look on the orderly’s face when he entered the room was always so pale and anguished that Semyon Mikheich couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

Der Arzt
had ordered Semyon Mikheich to chop wood for the stove. He liked listening to the sound of the ax. Sometimes he summoned the orderly during the night and told him to send Semyon Mikheich out to chop wood.

“Why is the Russian not working? The Russian sleeps too much.”

And so Semyon Mikheich would chop wood beneath the German’s window. He turned gloomy and taciturn, sometimes not saying a word for days on end. He even stopped sighing. Silently, as if made of stone, he would just stand and stare. His old woman would look at him in fear: Had he lost his mind?

One night he said to her, “You know, Filippovna, a wild beast will devour what it needs. It may slaughter a cow or destroy a hive—and that’s life. But these...these ones have been spitting on my soul—and beasts don’t do that. I used to think that these ones are not people. But now I can see they’re not even beasts. They’re worse than beasts.”

“Pray to God,” said Filippovna. “That will help.”

“No,” said the old man. “It won’t help.”

In the morning one of their neighbors, Galya Yakimenko, came by. She was in tears. In a whisper, looking around all the time at the door—on the other side of which was sitting the terrible
Arzt
—she began talking about the five staff officers now quartered in her hut. “They’re like bears. They eat and drink all day and all night. They get drunk, they shout, and they throw up. They have no shame. They walk about naked in front of me. And now, now it’s turned cold, no, you wouldn’t believe it...They’ve begun soiling their beds. Until now, at least, they used to do it on the floor, but now they don’t even get out of bed. Then they pull the fouled sheets off the bed and tell me to wash them. I say, no, I’m not going to, not even if you beat me to death. So they beat me. You can do what you like, I say, but it’ll make no difference. I’m not going to shame myself. And off I went. What are they—people or beasts?”

Semyon Mikheich said nothing. A dark cloud of shame and suffering was hanging over the village. It seemed as if life had come to an end, as if the sun had stopped shining, as if there were no air left to breathe. Most terrible of all, worse than the cold nights in cellars and dugouts, were the humiliations to the soul.

Deep in the soul of the old beekeeper something was changing. Any time at night that
der
Arzt
wanted to hear the sound of the ax, the old man had to get up, put on his hat, and go out to chop wood. His ax resounded against the frozen logs. Sometimes the old man would stop for a moment to straighten up and get his breath back. At once the division’s senior doctor would go to the window. He would look out into the yard, wondering why the ax had gone silent. A moment later the orderly would dart out. In a terrified voice, he would shout, “Chop wood, Russki! Chop, Russki, chop wood!”

On one occasion the orderly whispered excitedly to the old man, “General—kaput! Fly front line. Russkies—Tara-tara! General—kaput!”

And the Germans never saw their divisional commander again.

Then a black marketeer from Kharkov passed through. He told them what the prices were for
makhorka
, bread, and peas. He told them about an outbreak of typhus among the German soldiers. Then he bent down and whispered in the old man’s ear, “I’ve seen it in leaflets and I’ve heard it on the radio: the Reds are on their way back. They’ve already recaptured thirty towns. They’ll be here any day.”

In response, the old man went to a secret place, dug a jar of honey out of the earth, and gave it to the black marketeer. “There!” he said. “For your good news!”

Then came an evening when the orderly rushed in and hurriedly began packing.

“
Zurück, zurück
,” he explained, gesticulating in the direction of
Poltava.

Some signalers came and quickly removed the telephone. There was no sound of shooting, but the Germans were in such a rush you would have thought that they were under fire already. They were running down the street with armfuls of all kinds of stuff, falling down in the snow and shouting. The village women saw several orderlies weeping. They were gasping for breath. Their frozen fingers kept losing their grip on the officers’ heavy cases. They were worn out before they had even reached the edge of the village—but they had to keep going on foot, across the steppe. Their vehicles were stuck in the snow, with no fuel; the officers had already taken the last sledges.

The old men, who had served in the militia during the First World War, explained to the women, “Looks like our boys are back on the offensive!”

The divisional staff left while it was still dark. They were replaced by retreating machine gunners. With unkempt red-and-black beards, their noses peeling, their cheeks burned by the frost, they talked in loud barks. When they went out into the street, they kept firing random bursts into the air. And every night they pestered the young women and girls.

The fighting started early one morning. The villagers crept down into their cellars. There was the sound of machine-gun fire and of shell bursts. The women screamed and the children cried, while the old men said calmly, “All right, all right. There’s no need to make such a racket. It’s our own boys, with their fifteen-pounders.”

Semyon Mikheich was sitting on an upturned bucket, saying nothing at all. He was thinking.

“Well, Mikheich,” said old Kondrat, who had won a George Cross back in 1905, during the Japanese war, “it seems no one can escape the sound of fighting—not even a quiet soul like you.”

Mikheich did not reply.

The fighting grew fiercer. The pounding grew so loud that the old women wrapped shawls around the little children. And then, not far away, they heard a muffled voice.

“It’s our boys, it’s our own boys!” shouted Galya Yakimenko. “Who’ll come up with me?”

“I will!” replied Semyon Mikheich.

They climbed up out of the cellar. Evening was already drawing in. A vast sun was sinking into snow made pink by blazing fires. In the middle of the yard stood a Red Army soldier with a rifle.

“Good people,” he said quietly, “help me. I’m wounded.”

“My darling boy!” Galya shouted, and rushed to the soldier. She embraced him and led him quickly toward the hut. Semyon Mikheich just walked on.

“My darlings,” said Galya, “you boys have been shedding your blood for us! Now it’s our turn to do something. Soon we’ll have you lying down in the warm!”

From somewhere near the well came the sound of shooting. A German submachine gunner came running toward the hut. He saw a wounded Red Army soldier and a woman with her arms around him. Still running, he fired a shot. The wounded soldier, suddenly heavy, began to sink to the ground, slipping out of the arms of the woman, who was still struggling to keep him upright. The German fired a second shot. Galya Yakimenko fell to the ground.

Semyon Mikheich could never remember how it was that he had come to be holding a heavy cudgel. For the first time in his life he was in the grip of a terrible rage, a rage that was burning away the humiliations of the previous months, a rage that he felt both on his own behalf and on behalf of others—on behalf of thousands and thousands of old men, children, young girls, and women, a rage on behalf of the earth herself, abused as she had been by the enemy. He raised the cudgel high above his head and advanced on the German. Tall and majestic, with snow-white curls, this old beekeeper was the living embodiment of the Great Patriotic War.

“Halt!” shouted the German, raising his submachine gun high into the air. But the old man smashed down his cudgel.

Just then a group of Red Army soldiers appeared. Leading them was a man in a black sheepskin coat, with a grenade in his hand. It was Prokofy, the chairman of the collective farm. What he saw was a terrifying picture: dead bodies lying outside a hut, a German lying beside a doorway and—brilliantly lit by the flames—the quiet beekeeper, cudgel in hand.

Lozovenka Village, Kharkov Province, 1942