The Road (28 page)

***

(September 15, 1950)

Dearest Mama,

I learned about your death in the winter of 1944. I arrived in Berdichev, entered the house where you lived—the house that had been home to
Auntie Anyuta, Uncle David, and Natasha—and understood that you were no longer among the living. But in my heart I had known this as early as September 1941. One night, at the front, I had a dream. I entered a room, knowing that it was
your
room, and saw an empty armchair, knowing that it was where
you
slept. Draped across it was the shawl you used to put over your legs. I looked at this empty armchair for a long time; when I woke from the dream, I knew that you were no more. But I did not know what a terrible death you had; I learned about this only when I came to Berdichev and questioned people about the massacre that took place on September 15, 1941. I have tried dozens, perhaps hundreds of times to imagine how you died, how you walked to your death. I have tried to imagine the man who killed you. He was the last person to see you. I know that you were thinking about me a great deal—all this time.

It is now more than nine years since I stopped writing to you, since I stopped telling you what has been going on in my life. And so much has piled up in my heart during these nine years that I have decided to write to you, to tell you about it all and, of course, to complain about things, since there is, really, no one left who cares about my sorrows. You were the only person who cared.

I shall be frank with you and tell you everything that I feel, but this will not necessarily be the whole truth about me. Not all of my feelings, after all, are true; there is probably much in my feelings that is shallow and false. But I want first of all to tell you that during these nine years I have been able to prove to myself that I really do love you. My feelings for you have not diminished by one iota; I have not forgotten you and I have not found any consolation. Time has not healed me. To me you are as alive as when we saw each other for the last time, as alive as when I was a little boy and you used to read aloud to me. And my pain is still the same as when one of your neighbors on Uchilishchnaya Street told me that you were gone and that there was no hope of finding you among the living. And it seems to me that my love and this terrible grief will never change until the end of my days.

(September 15, 1961)

Dearest Mama,

It is now twenty years since your death. I love you, I remember you every day of my life, and through all these twenty years this grief has been constantly with me. I wrote to you ten years ago. And ten years ago, when I wrote my first letter to you after your death, you were the same as when you were alive—my mother in my flesh and in my heart. I am you, my dearest. As long as I am alive, then you are alive too. And when I die, you will continue to live in this book, which I have dedicated to you and whose fate is similar to your own fate.

During these twenty years many people who loved you have died. You no longer live in Papa’s heart, nor in Nadya’s,
nor in Auntie Liza’s. All are gone.

And it seems to me that my love for you is all the greater, all the more responsible, now that there are so few living hearts in which you still live. I have been thinking of you almost all the time, almost all these last ten years that I have been working; the love and devotion I feel for people is central to this work, and that is why it is dedicated to you. To me you represent all that is human, and your terrible fate is the fate of humanity in an inhuman time.

All my life I have believed that everything that is good, kind, and honorable in me—everything that is love—comes from you. Everything bad in me—and there’s more than enough of this—is not you. But you love me, Mama; you love me even with all that is bad in me.

Today, as I have done so often during these years, I have been rereading the few letters that still remain from among the many hundreds that I received from you. I have also reread your letters to Papa. Reading these letters, I have been crying once again. I cried over the words, “And also,
Syoma, I do not expect to live a long life. I’m expecting something to sneak up on me from a dark corner. But what if I were to suffer a long and difficult illness? What would my poor boy do with me then? How terrible it would all be!”

I cry reading the passage where you, who were so lonely and who imagined life under one roof with me as a supreme joy, say to Papa, “It seems to me, weighing everything up sensibly, that, if Vasya had any extra space, you should move in with him yourself. I’m saying this a second time, since things are going all right for me. And there is no need to worry about how I’m feeling; I know how to protect my inner world from the world around me.”

I cry over these letters, because you are present in them. Your kindness is there in them, and your purity, and your bitter, bitter life, and your nobility, your sense of justice, your love for me, your concern for others, and your wonderful mind.

There is nothing I fear, because your love is with me and because my love is eternally with you.

Eternal Rest

Grossman near his Moscow apartment, 1964 (a few months before his death).

“Eternal
Rest” is a meditation on cemeteries and on the relationship between the living and the dead. Much of the first part is about the battles people often have to fight in order to arrange for a loved one to be buried in a particular cemetery. It is ironic, in the light of Grossman’s delicate understanding of the feelings aroused by these battles, that there has been sharp disagreement about where he himself wished to be buried.

Olga Mikhailovna’s original wish was for Grossman’s ashes to be buried in the Vagankovo, the large and well-established cemetery opposite the Grossmans’ apartment that he
describes in “Eternal Rest.” Grossman had buried his father in the Vagankovo eight years before, and she wanted Grossman to be buried beside him. Her request, however, was refused; it was considered too soon to disturb the grave of his father. Olga Mikhailovna then tried to arrange for Grossman to be buried in the Novodevichye, the most famous of all Russian cemeteries. Wanting him to be honored as a great writer, she enlisted Semyon Lipkin to battle with the Writers Union on her behalf. The authorities, however, refused to allow Grossman—a nonperson during his last years—to be buried somewhere so prestigious. Eventually Grossman’s ashes were buried in the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery; this was farther from the city center, but it had been designated to become a branch of the Novodevichye. Although delays in carrying out this administrative reorganization led to a period during which the Troyekurovskoye was neglected, it is now one of Moscow’s most important cemeteries.

This picture, however, is complicated by a postscript Lipkin added in January 1989 to the memoir about Grossman that he had first published in 1984. In it Lipkin accuses Olga Mikhailovna of failing to honor her husband’s wishes. He claims that Grossman told both him and Yekaterina Zabolotskaya, shortly before his death, that he did not want an official ceremony in the Writers Union and that he wanted to be buried in
the Vostryakovo Jewish Cemetery. It is hard to know what to make of this postscript. Neither Grossman’s daughter nor his stepson have any recollection of their father expressing any such wish. According to Fyodor Guber, “Had Lipkin suggested the Vostryakovo, I think my mother would have done her best to achieve this.” And Lipkin does not say so much as a word about this wish in the main body of his memoir. On the contrary, he more than once, somewhat regretfully, mentions Grossman’s lack of interest in Jewish history and Jewish culture.

It is possible that Lipkin was fantasizing, that he added his postscript because his own sense of Jewishness had grown stronger in the six years since the memoir’s first publication and he wanted to make out that his admired friend shared his feelings. It is possible that Grossman truly did express this wish and that Olga Mikhailovna did indeed fail to honor it, that Lipkin chose not to criticize Olga Mikhailovna while she was still alive, and that her death in 1988 freed him to speak his mind. It is also possible, however, that it was Lipkin who for some reason failed to communicate this wish and that, reluctant to admit this, he preferred to blame Olga Mikhailovna.

It seems likely that “Eternal Rest” was written within a few years of the death of Grossman’s father in 1956. According to Guber, “Grossman often went for walks in the Vagankovo Cemetery, which lay very close to our apartment. After his father’s death, he began going there more often still, to visit his father’s grave. I think the essay was inspired by an occasion in May 1959 that he recounts in this letter to Olga Mikhailovna, who was then in the Crimea, ‘Yesterday I visited Papa’s grave—it was his birthday. A priest came up to me in his robes and said, “I imagine this is the grave of your father. Allow me to say a prayer for him.” I replied, “My father is a Jew.” He said, “That doesn’t matter. Before God, we are all equal.” And he recited a prayer of remembrance. I don’t think Papa will be angry, even though he was not a believer. I planted some pansies and daisies. I forgot to bring a knife with me, so
I dug the holes with my fingers.’”

1.

The Vagankovo
Cemetery is close to the tracks leading to the Belorussian Station. Between the trunks of the cemetery maples you can glimpse trains setting out for Warsaw and Berlin. You can see the blue Moscow–Minsk expresses and the shining windows of restaurant cars. You can hear the quiet hiss of suburban trains and the earthshaking rumble of heavy-goods trains.

The Vagankovo Cemetery is close to the main road to Zvenigorod, with its cars and vans full of clutter being transported to dachas. The Vagankovo Cemetery is also close to the Vagankovo market.

From up in the sky comes the racket of helicopters. From the station comes a resonant voice—a train controller giving clipped, precise instructions about the composition of trains.

While in the cemetery there is eternal peace, eternal rest.

On Sundays in spring it is difficult to squeeze onto the buses going in the direction of the cemetery. Coming from the Presnenskaya Gate, making their way past all the construction sites and ramshackle wooden buildings on “The Year 1905” Street, past the Radio Technical Institute and the lockers and booths of the Vagankovo market, are crowds of people carrying spades, saws, watering cans, paintbrushes, buckets of paint, and string bags full of food. It is spring; it is time to plant flowers on the graves and to repaint the little wrought-iron railings.

Just outside the cemetery the streams of people converge. This vast crowd makes it difficult for the new settlers in their funeral cars to inch their way through the gates. Everywhere there is spring sunshine and fresh green leaves. And what a lot of animated faces! What a lot of talk about the concerns of everyday life! And how very little sadness! Or so, at least, it seems.

There is the smell of paint and the knocking of hammers. There is the squeak of wheelbarrows, the creaking of little carts carrying loads of sand, turf, and cement. The cemetery is hard at work.

Men and women wearing protective canvas sleeves are laboring diligently and enthusiastically. Some are quietly humming to themselves; others are enjoying shouted exchanges with their neighbors.

While Mama paints the fence around Papa’s grave, a little girl is hopping about on one foot, trying to get all the way around the grave without letting her other foot touch the ground.

“And now your whole sleeve’s covered in paint—what a messy little creature you are!”

Over there, though, they have already knocked off for the day. The railings and the memorial itself have been painted some ridiculous shade of gold. A cloth has been spread out on a bench. They are having a bite to eat and, evidently, a little something to wash it all down with. Their voices are now very jolly, their honest, open faces look flushed. Suddenly there are peals of laughter. Do they then remember with a shock where they are? Do they look around in shame at the grave? No, they do not. But the deceased is not going to take offense—he is, after all, very pleased with the painting job they have done.

Working in the fresh air feels good. It’s satisfying to plant some flowers and to pull out a few weeds that have come up through the earth of the grave.

It’s Sunday. Where can you go? To the zoo? To Sokolniki Park? No, the cemetery’s more enjoyable. You can do a little leisurely work, and you can get some fresh air at the same time.

Life is powerful. It bursts through the fence around the cemetery. And the cemetery surrenders; it becomes a part of life.

There is almost as much everyday drama here, almost as much passionate excitement, as there is at work, or in a communal apartment, or in the great market nearby.

“Our Vagankovo, of course, isn’t the Novodevichye. Still, there are some important people buried here in the Vagankovo. We’ve got Surikov the painter. We’ve got Dahl who compiled the great dictionary. We’ve got Professor Timiryazev the botanist. And there’s the poet Sergey Yesenin. And we’ve got generals, and we’ve got important Old Bolsheviks. Bauman lies here—he gave his name to a whole district of Moscow. And we’ve got Kikvidze the civil war hero, the legendary divisional commander. And it wasn’t just merchants who were buried here in the days of the tsars—bishops were brought here too.”

It is difficult to get oneself a space in the Vagankovo Cemetery—every bit as difficult as to come to Moscow from the provinces and get oneself a residence permit.

And the arguments the families of the deceased adduce before the man with the brick-red face—the arguments this man in boots, a fur hat, and a leather jacket with a zip fastener has to listen to day after day are the very same as those that the passport-section staff have to listen to day after day.

“Comrade Director, his old mother’s lying here in the Vagankovo, his elder brother’s lying here in the Vagankovo. How can you even suggest such a thing? How can we possibly take him to the Vostryakovo?”

And, just as if this were indeed a Moscow police passport office, the director replies, “I can’t. I’ve received special instructions from the Moscow city soviet. We’ve exhausted our quota. Anyway, we can’t have the whole world coming to the Vagankovo—the Vostryakovo needs people too.”

A particularly strict regime was enforced during the weeks immediately before the World Festival of Youth in 1957. It was rumored that Christians participating in the festival were going to be taken on a tour of the Vagankovo, and so the cemetery workers were run off their feet. Everything had to be in order before the festival began.

The people who suffered most were the beggars: the hunchbacked, those who sang, those who whispered, those who shook, disabled veterans from the Great Patriotic War, the blind, the retarded. They were taken straight from the cemetery and packed off in trucks. The police too had received special instructions.

Anyone who came into the cemetery office during this period was told, “Come back again once the festival’s over.”

But when the festival came to an end, the life of the newly smartened-up cemetery simply returned to its normal course.

Once again people are begging the director and his assistants for “Just some earth, just a little patch of earth!”

What is to be done? There is very little space. The deceased—in the words of one of the cemetery workers—“just keep piling in.” And not one of them wants to go to the Vostryakovo.

People argue, threaten, and weep.

Some bring requests and certificates from different institutes and social organizations: the deceased was an expert who it will be impossible to replace; he was a remarkable social activist; he was awarded a special pension for achievements of significance to the entire Russian republic; he was awarded medals for his prowess during the war; he had been a Party member since before the Revolution.

Others try to cheat, to pretend they have important connections—and the cemetery administrators catch them out: “You stated that you wish to bury her beside her husband, but it turns out that we’re talking about her first husband and that she’s had two more. Have you no shame?”

A third group try to get their way through bribery, with the help of bottles of vodka or fine brandy. Some try to get around the administrators; others try to win over the men with the spades.

A fourth group just try to barge their way in—like someone who first moves into a room without authorization and only afterward sets about the long and tedious process of trying to obtain the necessary documents.

It has, however, been decreed that some neglected graves should be “liquidated” and new graves created in their place. This possibility excites no less passion than an area of living space inhabited by a lonely old woman who just refuses to lie down and die.

Eventually the authorization comes through: one of these sites can indeed be reused. Sometimes it is a matter of one of the old coffins being placed on top of another, while a third coffin lies still farther down. There they lie: a merchant who has now lost even his name; a no less forgotten Old Bolshevik, a true believer who showed no mercy toward the bourgeoisie, with a red ribbon—now half rotted away—still pinned to his lapel; and a director of the secret section of some government institution. Who will be the fourth person?

Why is it that so many people like to spend time in cemeteries?

It certainly is not just a matter of the large number of trees, of the pleasure people take in planting flowers and in working with planes and paintbrushes.

All that is secondary, superficial. The true reason, like most true reasons, lies hidden, deeply buried.

Worn out by grief, by sleepless nights—and often by unbearable feelings of guilt—people come to the cemetery and embark on the struggle to obtain a space there.

This struggle is painful and humiliating. Sometimes people feel resentment toward the deceased: It’s all very well for
him
—but what about
us
? What about our own suffering? What about all our sleepless nights while he lay dying? The times we had to rush to the drugstore for
oxygen pillows? The times we had to call for an ambulance? The medicines we had to try to get hold of? The fruit? And there’s still no end to it all. It may all be over for
him
, but it certainly isn’t for
us
.

Other people at the cemetery give wise advice: “Don’t get upset. It’ll be all right in the end. They may be bureaucrats, but they’ll still have to bury him. No one stays unburied forever—it just doesn’t happen.”

And they were right: he was buried.

Clods of earth knock against the coffin, and a first ray of light—a sense of peace and relief—finds its way into hearts that have been feeling bitter and inflamed. There—he’s in the ground now. It’s all over.

This very slight, delicate sense of relief is the bud that will develop into a new relationship—a new relationship between the living and the dead. It is this thin ray of light that engenders the animated crowds passing through the cemetery gates—all the joyful labor of painting, planting flowers, and tidying up the graves.

Just how does this relationship develop?

In order to get a sense of this, in order to understand how it is that the agony of an eternal separation can be transformed into the tender joys of the cemetery, we must leave the cemetery and return for a while to the town.

Few close relationships are entirely clear and transparent; they are seldom—as it were—linear and single-story.

More often they are buildings with thick walls and deep cellars, with dark, stuffy little bedrooms, with all kinds of little outbuildings, with extra floors added on top.

And there is no knowing all that goes on in these little rooms and cellars, in these little corridors and attics. There is no end to what has been seen and heard by the walls of these incorporeal structures deep inside the human heart. They have seen clear light, merciless reproaches, eternal lust, satiety to the point of nausea, truth, the desperate wish to have done with someone once and for all, year upon year of one trivial grievance after another and the need to account for every last kopek. They have seen terrible secret hatred. They have seen fights. They have seen blood being drawn.
They have seen meekness.

[...]

So here we are—a mound of earth over a grave, and a woman planting forget-me-nots. No, her husband won’t be seeing any more of his other woman now. Everything is so peaceful. Her only anxiety now is whether or not she should have planted pansies instead. She has forgiven him, and this forgiveness ennobles her.

Nearby is a young couple, lovingly painting some railings. They talk to the widow, who has already learned that the old woman buried inside these railings loved cats and rubber plants and that there was nothing she would not do for her son and his sweet wife. Peace, simplicity, a blue sky and—chirping over the grave—a young sparrow whose clear voice has yet to be roughened by cold January air. Gone are the old woman’s mad, grieving eyes.

And the tear-filled eyes of the paralyzed old man are gone too.

And the little mound over the poor insane boy also looks peaceful. There is an end now to the agonizing confusion felt by his parents, an end to their terror. Pansies, daisies, forget-me-nots.

“What torments the poor girl suffered!” the elderly woman says of her sister.

She has a good look at the grave. The sun shines through the new leaves; it lies bright on the ground. Everything is so quiet now, and relations with the dead are so easy, so peaceful.

“Soon I’ll plant some nasturtiums. They’ll do well here.”

And there is no longer a wall between the loving husband and wife. Their love is no longer poisoned by jealousy and fear, by his hostility toward her daughter by that first husband of hers and the little grandson whom she loves with such passion. “Sleep in peace, dear friend whom we shall always remember.”

It feels good in the cemetery. Everything confused and painful has become easy.

A loved one leads a particular kind of life here—a good, clear life—and there is real tenderness in your relationship with them.

A husband who used to come home from work feeling bored and depressed has now learned to enjoy the company of his wife; going to the cemetery on a day off has become his greatest joy. The trees and the grass and the flowers are so very beautiful. There are so many nice people who come regularly to the neighboring graves. He talks about his wife; he thinks about his wife. Remembering her, thinking about her, now feels anything but boring and depressing. Their relationship has been renewed.

Who told people that there is nothing more splendid than life? Who told them that death is terrible?

Here they come with their hammers and paintbrushes, with their spades and their saws—crowds of people ready to construct a new and better life. Their eyes are looking straight ahead. How difficult and painful it is in the city! How bright in the cemetery!

Had there ever been a way of bridging that gulf—the gulf between the father and his contemptible but ever-so-successful children? Now, anyway, there is no such gulf. “Sleep in peace, dear teacher, father, and friend.”

While they work on the grave, the children talk about their lives, their travels, their friends. He, their father, is there beside them. Everything feels so peaceful, so good. Never again will they see that anguished, pitying look on his face. Never again will he look as if he were ashamed of them.