The Road (21 page)

Grossman wrote this story nearly twenty-five years after Babel had been shot. Grossman admired Babel, and he would probably have considered it wrong to make any public criticism of such a tragic figure. In conversation, however, Grossman was more forthright. Lipkin remembers telling Grossman how, in 1930, he had heard Babel say, “Believe me [...] I’ve now learned to watch calmly as people are shot.” Lipkin quotes Grossman’s response at length: “How I pity him, not because he died so young, not because they killed him, but because he—an intelligent, talented man, a lofty soul—pronounced those insane words. What had happened to his soul? Why did he celebrate the New Year with the Yezhovs? Why do such unusual people—him, Mayakovsky, your friend Bagritsky—feel so drawn to the OGPU? What is it—the lure of strength, of power? [...] This is something we really need to think about. It’s no laughing matter,
it’s a terrible phenomenon.” There are no such criticisms in “Mama,” but Grossman delicately hints at Babel’s extreme curiosity in a sentence he deleted from one of his drafts: “[Marfa Domityevna’s] calm, just and straightforward mind noticed many things that the perceptive and sensitive Isaak Babel, who she thought was the kindest of Nikolay Ivanovich’s guests, would have been
avid to know.”

In his earlier “In the Town of Berdichev” Grossman implicitly criticizes Babel; in “Mama” he evokes him with respect and affection. Nevertheless, the two stories have much in common. In “Mama,” as in the earlier story, Grossman juxtaposes the world of male violence with the world of motherhood. Korotkova has written with great sensitivity about this aspect of “Mama”: “There are so many mothers in the story that one begins to feel that, if one were to look more closely, one would find more, maybe
even in the orphanage. The theme of ‘Mother’ washes through the whole story—sweet faces, kind eyes, seagulls, and the splash of waves that might be from a film or might be from the unknown depths known as the subconscious. It is very strange. A terrifying, hopeless story about loneliness, about talent that is crushed and people who are destroyed, gives off not only a breath of deathly cold but also
the warming breath of motherly love.”

***

Several of Grossman’s last stories can be read as a response to the work of Andrey Platonov, the one writer among his contemporaries whom
Grossman admired wholeheartedly.

Platonov was six years older than Grossman, but Grossman was the more established figure and there was at least one occasion when he succeeded in being of real help to Platonov; in 1942 he asked David Ortenberg, the chief editor of
Red Star
, to take Platonov under his protection, saying that “this good writer” was “defenseless” and “
without any settled position.” Ortenberg duly took Platonov on as a war correspondent. Later Grossman invited Platonov to collaborate on
The Black Book
; at some point in 1945 Platonov was given responsibility for all the
material relating to the Minsk ghetto. During Platonov’s final illness,
Grossman visited him almost daily, and he gave one of the main speeches at Platonov’s funeral. In a 1960 radio broadcast based on this speech, Grossman described Platonov as “a writer who wanted to understand the most complicated—which really means the most simple—foundations of human existence.” Lipkin refers to this broadcast as “the first sensible and worthwhile word
said in Russia about Platonov.”

Platonov and Grossman are in many respects very different. Platonov’s prose often moves close to poetry whereas Grossman’s is perhaps as close to journalism as great prose can be while remaining great prose. Nevertheless, the two writers evidently found much in common. Ortenberg writes in his wartime memoirs, “Grossman, like his friend Andrey Platonov, was not a talkative person. The two of them sometimes came to
Red Star
, settled on one of the sofas [...] and stayed there for an entire hour without saying a word. They seemed, without words, to be carrying on a conversation
known only to them.” Lipkin, for his part, describes Platonov as “more independent in his judgments” and Grossman as a “more traditional” writer. He goes on to relate how he used to sit with Platonov and Grossman on the street opposite Platonov’s apartment. The three of them would take turns making up stories about passersby. Grossman’s were detailed and realistic; Platonov’s were “plotless,” more focused on the person’s inner life, which was “both unusual and simple,
like the life of a plant.”

Still more interesting, however, is the extent to which Grossman, throughout the period from Platonov’s death in 1951 to his own death in 1964, seems to have absorbed something of Platonov’s idiosyncratic style and vision—almost as if he were trying to keep Platonov’s spirit alive. “The Dog” is about a mongrel by the name of Pestrushka—the first living creature to survive a journey in space. With her capacity for devotion, her past life as a homeless wanderer, and her quick understanding of technology, Pestrushka has much in common with Platonov’s peasant heroes. In another story, “The Road,” Grossman seems more Platonov-like than Platonov himself. Platonov often shows us uneducated people grappling with difficult philosophical questions; Grossman presents us with a mule who not only resolves Hamlet’s dilemma about whether to be or not to be but even arrives at the concept of infinity.

Like Platonov, Grossman moves freely between abstract ideas and an intense physicality. The account at the end of “In Kislovodsk” of a husband kissing his wife’s underwear and slippers is reminiscent of a passage from Platonov’s
Happy Moscow
: “She gave him her shoes to carry. Without her noticing, he sniffed them and even touched them with his tongue; now neither Moscow Chestnova herself, nor anything about her, however dirty, could have made Sartorius feel in the least squeamish, and he could have looked at the waste products of her body with the greatest of interest, since they too had not long ago formed
part of a splendid person.” More Platonov-like still is the moment in “Tiergarten” when a misanthropic zookeeper kisses his beloved gorilla on the lips.

Grossman and Platonov share an admiration for simple, unintellectual working people. Lipkin has suggested that in Grossman’s case this sprang from the populist beliefs he had imbibed from his parents, whereas in Platonov’s case it was simply part of a pantheistic reverence for
life in all its manifestations. By the end of Grossman’s career, however, this distinction has ceased to operate; his last stories are imbued with a pantheistic reverence very similar to Platonov’s.

***

Like “The Dog,” “Living Space” (written in 1960) is a response to an important historical event—in this case, the release of hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag between 1953 and 1956. In 1956, on the anniversary of Stalin’s death, the poet Anna Akhmatova had said, “Now those who have been arrested will return, and two Russias will look each other in the eye—the Russia that sent people to the camps, and
the Russia that was sent to the camps.” Grossman’s elderly heroine, however, returns to Moscow after nineteen years in the camps to meet with nothing more—nor less—than indifference. Soon after moving into a communal apartment with what the other tenants see as absurdly few belongings, she dies. Little is known about her except that she had once been someone important, and she is soon forgotten. One Sunday morning the tenants are playing cards when the postman brings a letter addressed to the old woman. Only one person, a teenage girl, even recognizes her name. It is an important official letter: the woman’s late husband, who died in prison in 1938, has been rehabilitated “due to the absence of a body of evidence.” At firsts no one knows what to do with this letter, but eventually the tenants agree that it should be handed in to the house management committee.

The story ends with a chilling—and sadly untranslatable—play on words. One of the cardplayers asks, “
Komu sdavat'
?” This can be understood both as “Whose deal?” and as “Who should hand in the document?” The reply, “
Kto ostalsya, tomu i sdavat'
,” can be understood either as “Whoever lost/ended up as ‘fool’ in the last round should deal” or as “Whoever is left alive should hand in the document to the house management committee.” Anatoly Bocharov has interpreted this dense bundle of disparate meanings as an expression of concern on Grossman’s part that “those who remain alive should not
allow themselves to be fooled.”

***

The three last stories in this collection, “The Road,” “The Dog,” and “In Kislovodsk,” all contain pointed repetitions of the phrase “life and fate.” The words are like markers—or like tolling bells, telling the reader how much the loss of his novel
dominates Grossman’s thoughts.

“The Road” (1961–62) can be read as a distillation of
Life and Fate
, a re-creation of it in miniature. It may even represent an attempt on Grossman’s part to compensate for the novel’s “arrest,” to get the better of the despair this had occasioned him. Not even in
Life and Fate
itself does he so powerfully evoke the relentlessness of the long winter campaign that culminated in the Battle of Stalingrad. The evocations of the horror of war and the miracle of love appear all the more universal because of the unexpected point of view from which the story is told—that of a mule from an Italian artillery regiment.

“In Kislovodsk”—the last story Grossman wrote—is also set during the first year of the war. Nikolay Viktorovich, a highly placed Soviet doctor with a perhaps excessive love of comfort and beauty, is not an evil man, nor is he entirely selfish—but he has always been too ready to make compromises. The story ends on a note of redemption. Asked by the Nazis to facilitate the murder of the wounded Soviet soldiers who are his patients, Nikolay commits suicide. His wife joins him. In their last hours the usually impeccably tasteful husband and wife allow themselves to behave “vulgarly,” to dance to “vulgar” music, to kiss goodbye to their beloved porcelain and to kiss goodbye to each other as if they were young lovers.

An important source for this story is “The Germans in Kislovodsk,” an article in
The Black Book
based on the recollections of an elderly Jew, Moisey Samuilovich Yevenson, who, protected by his Russian wife, survived the German occupation. His recollections were prepared for
The Black Book
by the scholar and literary theorist
Viktor Shklovsky. The article includes a brief mention of two Jewish doctors who commit suicide along with their wives— although they, unlike Nikolay Viktorovich, do this simply because they know they are about to be shot anyway. It is interesting that Grossman chose to return, during the last year of his life, to material from
The Black Book
, but it is no less interesting that he chose to excise from his story any reference to Jews and the Shoah. This casts at least some degree of doubt on the view held by Lipkin and John and Carol Garrard that Grossman, during his last years, was obsessed with questions of Jewish suffering and Jewish identity.

In response to the Nazis’ demands, Nikolay Viktorovich shows a moral strength he has never shown before. By most people’s standards, Grossman himself showed great moral strength throughout his life—but his own standards were severe and there is no doubt that he criticized himself for the various compromises he had made over the decades. Until the “arrest” of
Life and Fate
Grossman had tried to work within the system; only during his last three years did he cease to make compromises. This new intransigence cost him a great deal. In December 1962, for example, he chose not to publish
Good Wishes
in
Novy mir
rather than agree to the omission of a single short paragraph about the Shoah and Russian anti-Semitism. Lipkin, thinking that a new publication would greatly help Grossman, both financially and with regard to his public standing, pleaded with him to yield, but to no avail. Grossman seems to have thought it better to become a nonperson than to betray himself, his people, and his mother’s memory.

The intensity of Grossman’s determination to behave honorably, and his awareness of how hard it is to not to yield to pressure, are well illustrated by a passage from a memoir by Anna Berzer, the editor from
Novy mir
responsible for publishing several of his stories in the early 1960s. Berzer was one of Grossman’s most regular visitors during his last months in the hospital, and one of only four people to whom he showed
Everything Flows.
She relates how, on one occasion, Grossman awoke from sleep in her presence. Still half in the world of dreams, he said, “They took me off for interrogation during the night.
I didn’t betray anyone, did I?”

As she
was leaving for work, Aleksandra Andreyevna would spread a napkin on a chair. On it she would put a glass of milk, along with a white rusk on a saucer. Then she would kiss Dmitry Petrovich on his warm, hollow temple.

On her way back in the evening, she would imagine how lonely the sick man must be feeling. On seeing her, he would prop himself up on one elbow, and his empty eyes would come to life.

One evening he said, “You must see so many people at work and in the metro, while all I ever see is this moth-eaten head.” And he pointed a pale finger at a brown elk head hanging on the wall.

Aleksandra Andreyevna’s colleagues felt sorry for her. They knew that her husband was seriously ill and that he needed a lot of care, even during the night.

“You, Aleksandra Andreyevna,” they would say, “are a true martyr.”

“What do you mean? It’s really not difficult at all. Far from it.”

But a twenty-hour day, at home and at her workplace, was too great a burden for an aging woman who was in poor health herself. After night after night of too little sleep, she was suffering not only from headaches but also from high blood pressure.

Aleksandra Andreyevna said nothing about her poor health to her husband. Sometimes, though, she would come to a sudden standstill as she was walking about the room. As if trying to remember something, she would put her hand over her eyes and the lower part of her forehead.

“You need a rest, Shura,” he would say. “Be kind to yourself.”

But words like this upset her, and even angered her.

She was on the staff of the archives of the Central Library. When she got to work, she would forget about the difficulties of the night. Fair-haired Zoya, who had been sent there immediately after graduating from her institute, would say, “Sit down now. Take the weight off your poor swollen legs!”

“They’re not so bad,” Aleksandra Andreyevna would answer with a smile.

Back at home she would tell her husband about the manuscripts and documents she was analyzing at work. She loved the 1870s and 1880s. To her there was something deeply precious about every least trifle to do with the Populists of that era—every least trifle concerning not only the more famous figures such as Osinsky, Kovalsky, Khalturin, Zhelvakov, Zhelyabov, Perovskaya, and Kibal'chich but also dozens of other forgotten revolutionaries in the inner circles or on the outer fringes of the various revolutionary organizations of the time: the Chaikovtsy, the Ishutin circle, the Black Repartition, and
The People’s Will.

Dmitry Petrovich did not share his wife’s enthusiasm, which he put down to her coming from a revolutionary family. Her family photograph album was full of pictures of long-haired students with rugs thrown over their shoulders, of young women with short hair and severe faces, in dresses with narrow waists, long sleeves, and high black collars. Aleksandra Andreyevna remembered all their names. She—and she alone—remembered their sad and noble fates: this man had died, in exile, from tuberculosis; this woman had drowned herself in the Yenisey; another woman had perished while working in the province of Samara during a cholera epidemic; a third woman had lost her mind and died in a prison hospital.

To Dmitry Petrovich, an engineer and turbine specialist, all this seemed very noble and exalted but not exactly necessary. He was quite unable to remember the hyphenated surnames of so many of the populists. He was equally confused by the large number of them who shared the same surname; there were, for example, no less than three Mikhailovs: Adrian, Aleksandr, and Timofey. He also confused Sinegub of the Chaikovets with
Lizogub of The People’s Will.

Nor could Dmitry Petrovich understand why his wife had once got so upset during a summer cruise down the Volga. After passing through Vasilsursk they had seen a steamer that had once been called the
Sofya Perovskaya
and that, after a refit and a new coat of paint, had been renamed the
Valeriya Barsova
. Valeriya Barsova, after all, was a truly splendid singer.

On another occasion, during a trip to Kiev, he had said to Aleksandra Andreyevna, “Look! There’s a huge pharmacy over there—named after your Zhelyabov!”

In answer she had shouted angrily, “It’s the main street, the Kreshchatik, that should be named after Zhelyabov, not just a pharmacy.”

“Dear, darling Shura!” Dmitry Petrovich had replied. “You
do
get carried away.”

He had no sympathy for the asceticism—the almost religious fanaticism—of the members of The People’s Will.

Those men and women had passed on; new generations had forgotten them. What Dmitry Petrovich loved was beautiful things. He loved wine and opera; he had enjoyed hunting. Even when he was getting on in years, he still liked wearing a fashionable suit. He liked choosing the right tie; he liked tying the knot the correct way.

One might have imagined that Aleksandra Andreyevna, who was indifferent to clothes, would be irritated by her husband’s tastes. In reality, however, there was nothing about him that she disliked. She liked all his weaknesses, all his whims. And so she talked freely to him, sharing all her thoughts about the era that captivated her, about the tragic struggle fought by the members of The People’s Will.

Now too, as he lay sick in bed, she would tell him about the things that upset her.

“Do you know what happened today, Mitya? I was criticized at a meeting. Remember that enchanting young Zoya who’s been sent to us? Well, she said I burden her with lots of unnecessary work to do with the 1870s and ’80s.”

Listening to his wife, seeing her cheeks flush with agitation, Dmitry Petrovich thought about how she was the only person in the world who was inseparably joined to him—through thought, feeling, and constant attention. No one else truly kept him in mind. Yes, everyone else, even their own daughter, merely recalled him—merely called him to mind now and then.

It was strange to think about the moments when Aleksandra Andreyevna got carried away by her work and stopped thinking about him. At such moments there was no one at all remembering him—not even the very finest of threads to link him to other people: people in other towns and cities, people in villages, people on trains...

He talked about this to Aleksandra Andreyevna, and she replied, “Your turbines, your methods for calculating the reliability of a blade—these things truly exist. As for Zhenya, she’s devoted to you. She doesn’t often write to you, but that’s neither here nor there. And do you really think your friends have forgotten you? Life’s hectic nowadays and they get very tired—but don’t forget how caring your colleagues were when you first got ill.”

“Yes, darling, I know,” he replied, and gave an exhausted nod of the head.

But she too understood that not all of his complaints could be put down to the excessive anxiety of a sick man.

His friends were all getting older now and they did, of course, find it tiring having to travel to work on crowded buses and trolleys. And they had worries and obligations of their own; they had problems at work, and there were tasks to be done at the dacha during the summer. All the same, it was upsetting for him that his old friends seldom asked after him, and that, if they did occasionally pay him a visit, they came neither in order to make him feel better, nor because they truly enjoyed it, but to avoid being nagged by a guilty conscience.

At the start of his illness, his colleagues had brought him presents of sweets and flowers, but it had not been long before they gave up coming. The progress of his illness was of no interest to them, and he himself was no longer interested in the life of the institute.

Their daughter, Zhenya, had married and moved to Kuibyshev, on the banks of the Volga. She had used to send him detailed letters, but now she wrote only to her mother. In her last letter she had written as a postscript, “How’s Papa? No change, I suppose.”

Zhenya was upset with her mother. It was annoying enough that her mother should devote all her time to people whom no one needed any longer. And now she was wasting her time on a sick man who was every bit as forgotten and useless as those forlorn figures from the 1870s and ’80s.

Why was it that Shura was so devoted to him? Maybe it was not simply from love but also from a sense of duty? After all, when she had been sent into exile in 1929, he, a man who adored Moscow, had left everything. He had left his friends, the work he loved, their comfortable room in the center of town—and had gone to spend three years with her in Kazakhstan, living in a little wooden house in Semipalatinsk and working in a small brick factory.

Shura was always saying things like, “Your turbines, your calculation methods—they’re still alive.” But there had never been any turbines of his design—that was just Shura getting carried away—and as for his methods for calculating turbine-blade reliability, they were no longer in use, they had been replaced by newer methods.

No one could go on and on being one of the ill; one was expected either to get better again or else to join the ranks of the dead. When his colleagues gave him sweets, what they had really been saying was “We’re helping you to overcome this illness of yours!” And when his childhood friend Afanasy Mikhailovich—Afonka—had talked about hunting trips, what he had really been saying was “It won’t be long, Mitya—soon you and I will be out there again, making our way through bogs and forests!” During the first two weeks of his illness Zhenya too had believed that her father would recover, that he would join her in the summer on the banks of the Volga, that he would help to look after his grandson, and that with his advice—and his many important contacts—he would be able to help her husband in his work as an engineer. She had believed that he would continue to play many different roles in her life. But time had passed, and Dmitry Petrovich’s life remained very different indeed from the lives of healthy people: he did not work, he did not pay court to pretty colleagues, he did not join in arguments at meetings. He did not receive his pay, nor did he receive encouragements or rebukes from his superiors. Nor did he dance at birthday parties, get caught in the rain, or go for a quick glass of beer after work.

Dmitry Petrovich’s present concerns were very different: Would the medicine from the pharmacy come as a powder or in capsules? Would the nurse who came to give him his injection be the friendly nurse with the light, delicate touch, or would it be the sullen, slovenly nurse with the blunt needle and cold, heavy hands? What would his next cardiogram show? And these concerns were of no interest to his friends and colleagues.

The day came when all of them—daughter, friends, and colleagues alike—ceased to believe in Dmitry Petrovich’s recovery and therefore ceased to be interested in Dmitry Petrovich. If a man cannot get better, he must die. It is cruel. As far as the people around someone terminally ill are concerned, the only thing that can give meaning to his or her existence is death. Death is of interest to healthy people, but the life of someone terminally ill holds no interest for anyone. The interests of the terminally ill can never coincide with the interests of those who are healthy.

His life could no longer lead to actions or events of any kind—neither at work, nor among his fellow hunters, nor among the friends who were used to drinking and arguing with him, nor in the life of his own daughter. His death, on the other hand, could bring about a number of events and changes and even emotional conflicts. This is why news of someone who is terminally ill feeling better is always less interesting than the news that they have taken a turn for the worse.

Dmitry Petrovich’s impending death was of interest to a broad circle of people: the other tenants of his communal apartment; the house manager; his daughter, who could not help thinking that her father’s death might make it possible for her to return to Moscow; the receptionist at the district polyclinic; his fellow hunters, with their selfless curiosity about what would happen to his unique hunting rifle; and the woman who came every two weeks to clean the communal toilet and bathroom.

His hopeless, terminal existence, on the other hand, was of interest to only one person: Aleksandra Andreyevna. He never had even the least difficulty reading the look on her face; he could see it shift between joy and anxiety depending on whether he said that he had been less short of breath and had suffered no pains in his chest or that he had had spasms that day and had had to take
nitroglycerine. Even if he was terminally ill, she still needed him. More than that—it was utterly impossible for her to exist without him. He knew this. She was horrified by the thought of his death, and this horror of hers was his only lifeline, the single thread that still tied him to life.

It was a quiet Saturday evening—a time when the other people in the apartment were usually at their dachas.

Sundays were a joy to Dmitry Petrovich. On Sundays he saw his wife all day long; he could hear her voice and the soft sound of her slippers.

He half opened his eyes and sighed. Aleksandra Andreyevna should have been home by now. But then he remembered: on her way back she was going to go to the pharmacy and the food shop.

He tried to doze off. When he dozed, he was less acutely aware of the agonizing slowness of time—and by evening his need for his wife was overwhelming. It was with a power equal to the power of extreme hunger that he felt the need to hear the familiar sound of the key, and then the sound of his wife’s voice, and to see in her eyes something that felt more necessary to him even than camphor: a living interest in a life that no one needed any longer.

“You know,” he had said a few days before this, “when you come near, I feel as if my mother were there beside me, as if I’m just a little baby lying in my cradle.”

“I’ve been missing you,” Aleksandra Andreyevna had replied.

***

He opened his eyes. The room was dark, although there was a little light from the streetlamps, and his wife was asleep in the bed beside him. He remembered that she had come back from work and given him some tea, and that he had then gone to sleep.

For a few moments he lay there half asleep, with a dim and anxious awareness that it was very silent. And then he realized. He realized that the silence was coming from Aleksandra Andreyevna’s bed.