The Road (5 page)

Stepanida
Yegorovna Goryacheva, head of a department of an
All-Union People’s Commissariat, was leaving for the Crimea that evening. Her vacation began on August 1, but since July 30 was a Saturday, she had decided to leave early, on the evening of the twenty-ninth.

First, however, she had to hurry straight from her office to her dacha in Kuntsevo. Her car was being serviced; afraid of being late, she telephoned her old comrade Cheryomushkin. In 1932 they had worked in the same brigade on a State grain farm; they had both been assistants to the operator of the combine harvester. Cheryomushkin immediately sent over a car—an M-1.

Now she was being driven down the broad new highway to
Kuntsevo.

“What’s that knocking?” Goryacheva asked the driver.

The driver gave her a sideways look, licked his upper lip, and by way of reply, asked a question himself: “Will you be needing me long?”

“I shall be needing you for as long as I need you.”

“The car should have gone in for a service today. I told Cheryomushkin.”

“I have to be at the station by eleven. I can’t let you go until then.”

Goryacheva glanced at the driver several times, but she did not say any more to him; he really did look very sullen. They continued along the road. Coming from the opposite direction were other M-1s, their paintwork gleaming, and
long ZIS’s—beige, green, or black. At intervals along the highway, which was delineated by a broken white line, were benches with awnings, so that people could wait for buses in comfort, and smart, brightly colored little bridges at places where pedestrians needed to cross over. There were also policemen in white gloves, patrolling the highway with the unhurried calm of men aware of their power. None of the cars was traveling at a speed of less than seventy kilometers an hour—barely had Goryacheva noticed a black point on the gray, matte roadway than this point began to increase in size with precipitate swiftness. And only a few seconds later she glimpsed people’s faces, shining glass, and then the oncoming car was gone—as if it had never been there at all, as if she had simply imagined a forage cap, a heap of wildflowers, a woman’s head below a broad hat. Equally swift, equally precipitate in their appearance and disappearance were a wooden shelter, little wooden houses with little windows crowded with flowerpots, and a woman in a black dress who was grazing a goat.

Goryacheva had driven to the dacha many times, and she was still always struck by this troubling swiftness, by the ease with which objects, people, and animals appeared, grew bigger, and then disappeared in a flash. In the dacha lived her mother, Marya Ivanovna, and her two nieces—Vera and Natashka, the daughters of her late sister. It was a big luxurious dacha, and she and her family shared the eight rooms with the family of another senior official. Until 1937 a certain Yezhegulsky, a man without any children, had lived there with his wife and his old father. Yezhegulsky had been arrested as an enemy of the people; it was over a year now since Goryacheva had moved in, and there was nothing left to recall Yezhegulsky’s existence except for the yellow lilies his father had planted outside the windows. And her fellow occupant, Senyatin—a director of the People’s Commissariat of State Farms—had once shown her a large chest he had found in a shed. It was filled with pinecones, each one wrapped in its own piece of white paper and surrounded by cotton wool. Some of the cones were huge, like strange birds whose wooden feathers, adorned with drops of amber resin, were all standing on end; some were tiny, smaller than acorns. There were pinecones from the Mediterranean and pinecones from the far north of Siberia. These hundreds of pinecones had been collected by the former occupant of their dacha. There was something comical about all these pinecones of different sizes, all so decorous and self-important, all of them wrapped like little dolls in paper and cotton wool. Goryacheva and Senyatin had looked at each other, shaken their heads, and smiled.

“We’ll just have to burn them in the stove,” she had said. “We can’t even use them for the samovar—hand grenades like these are too big!”

“What do you mean, comrade Goryacheva?” Senyatin had answered. “You’re lacking in consciousness. To a botanist they could be of real value. I’ll take the box to the Young Naturalists—or else to a museum.”

The car drew up outside the dacha. While Goryacheva was still talking to the driver, discussing what time they’d need to leave for the station, Vera and Natashka came running to meet her. Their grandmother, Marya Ivanovna, followed them out of the house. The driver parked the car in the shade, on some grass near the gate, as if it were nicer and more fun for the car to stand on fresh grass and in the shade of tall trees. He walked slowly around the car, admired the pneumatic tires, kicked one of them with his boot—not to check its condition but simply for his own satisfaction—wiped the windscreen with his sleeve, shook his head a little, walked over toward the fence, and lay down on the grass. The car smelled of gasoline and hot oil. He breathed this in with delight and thought, “She’s had a good run, she’s worked up a sweat.”

He was dozing off when old Marya Ivanovna walked by with a bucket.

“Our water’s no good, it’s stagnant,” she said, stopping beside him. “We can’t even use it for cooking.” He did not say anything himself, but she began telling him how their water would be fine too if it weren’t for their neighbor’s vicious dog. The dog didn’t let anyone near the well, so the water stagnated. “The well is sick,” she said, “it’s like a cow that isn’t being milked.”

“Why are you having to fetch water yourself?” he said, with a blend of mockery and reproach. Looking at her thin brown face and her gray hair, he went on: “Sending an old woman out to fetch water—important cadres ought to know better! You must be about sixty, yes?”

The old woman could not remember her age. When she wanted the women in the neighboring dachas to express surprise at her readiness to fetch water, scrub floors, and do the laundry, she would say that she was seventy-one. In the polyclinic, however, she had registered herself as being fifty-nine, and that was what she had said to her daughter. She wanted her daughter to feel sorry for her when she died, not to be saying, “Oh well, she had a good long life.” She sighed and said to the driver, “I’m into my seventies. Yes, my dear, well into my seventies.”

“Your daughter should be fetching the water herself,” said the driver. “Or she should send the girls. No, an old woman like you shouldn’t be having to fetch water.”

“You don’t understand,” said Marya Ivanovna. “It’s only today she’s here so early. It’s because she’s going on leave. Normally she doesn’t get back here until nighttime. The girl’s completely worn out. It’s getting better now, she’s calming down, but last winter, when she’d only just started working in Moscow, she’d get back here in her car—and burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ I’d ask. ‘Has someone upset you?’ ‘No,’ she’d reply, ‘it’s just that everything’s so new and strange.’ No, she’s certainly not going to start fetching water! As for the little girls, to be honest with you, they’re bitches, right little bitches. Yes, they tell lies and they use foul words. The older one’s not too bad—she just lies there and reads—but Natashka’s a horror. This morning she said to me, ‘Granny, you’ve guzzled all the sweets that my auntie left me. I’m going to punch you in the teeth.’ Yes, that’s Natashka for you.”

“Insulting the aged is a criminal offense. She should be tried in a people’s court,” said the driver. A moment later, he went on to ask, “So they’re not her own daughters?”

“They’re her nieces, they’re the children of my eldest daughter, Shura. Shura died in 1931, during the famine. Yes, she just swelled up and died. And my old man—he was such a hard worker—he died the same year. He was so swollen his heart could barely keep beating, but all he could think about was the house and the yard. I wanted to bake some flatbreads from
thorn apple and I needed wood for the fire, but he wouldn’t let me break up the fence. Then Stepanida took charge of us all. Her State farm gave her eight hundred grams of bread a day and so the four of us stayed alive. At the time she was just a little scrap of a girl—but look where she’s got now!”

“So everything’s all right now?” said the driver, pointing at the dacha and its tall windows.

“Yes, of course,” said the old woman. “Only I feel sad, there are things I’ll never forget. Shura, my eldest one, went out of her mind. She kept wailing, ‘Mama, the whole world’s on fire! Mama,
our wheat’s all burning!’ No, I won’t be forgetting that. My old man was so gentle...Heavens!” she exclaimed all of a sudden. “I’ve been talking and talking, but who’s going to give Stepanida her tea? She’s got a train to catch. And she’s still got to call at her apartment in town.”

“There’s time enough,” said the driver. “After all, we do have a car.”

Goryacheva was glad to be going away.

For the first time in her life she was going for a holiday by the sea. She still had not got used to how precipitately life had changed. After finishing school, when she was just a fun-loving seventeen-year-old, she had gotten a job on the State farm, as a cleaner in the workers’ hostel. The other girls in the hostel had talked her into going on a nine-month course to become a combine-harvester operator. She had graduated without the least difficulty; she was one of the best students. She had absorbed technical information with extraordinary ease—an ease she herself found surprising—and her technical drawings were outstanding. It took her only a moment to memorize a complex diagram—and then she could dismantle an entire motor. In less than a year she became a senior combine- harvester operator. In 1935 her work had been named the best in the region. In 1937 the agronomist, the head of the repair workshops, and the director of the State farm had all been arrested. A new director was appointed, Semidolenko. Goryacheva did not like him; she was rather afraid of him. If anything went wrong on the farm, Semidolenko always made out it was because of sabotage. The slightest mechanical breakdown, the least delay in a workshop, and Semidolenko would be writing denunciations to the district representative. As a result, there were twelve arrests, one after the other. At public meetings, Semidolenko referred to those who had been arrested as saboteurs and provocateurs. At a meeting after the arrest of
Nevraev—a severe, taciturn old man who was an instructor in the repair workshop and who had won everyone’s respect by always working until late into the night and not taking any leave for five years on end, refusing all financial compensation—Semidolenko had said, “This fellow deceived us all. Behind the mask of a shock worker was hidden a sworn enemy of the people, an adept spy, working for a foreign State, who managed to penetrate to the very heart of our State farm.”

Then the director’s secretary had taken the floor: only now, he declared, had he understood why Nevraev had stayed on alone at night in the repair-workshop office and why he had ordered photographic apparatus from Moscow. Then Goryacheva had stood up. In a loud, clear voice she had said, “He had nothing whatsoever to do with any foreign State. He was sent here by the district Party committee, and he’s from Puzyri. It’s not far away. His sister and younger brother still live there.”

Semidolenko had turned on her, saying that the district Party secretary who had appointed Nevraev had turned out to be an enemy of the people and that Goryacheva too had evidently succumbed to enemy influence and that there were one or two more things he had recently learned. A few days after this, Semidolenko’s typist informed Goryacheva, after swearing her to secrecy, that she had just typed out a statement by Semidolenko, addressed to the district representative, to the effect that Goryacheva (a Komsomol member) had been cohabiting with Nevraev (an enemy of the people) and had regularly been receiving gifts of money from him. At that moment it had seemed the truth would never come out—everything was just a tangle of lies. Soon afterward, however, everything had changed. Semidolenko himself had been arrested—along with the district representative and a number of provincial officials. And then, suddenly, it had all begun. Goryacheva had been summoned before the secretary of the provincial Party Committee, a man with a broad face who wore a calico shirt and blue canvas shoes with rubber soles.

“We have decided to appoint you director of the State farm,” he told her.

This both frightened Goryacheva and made her angry. “What on earth do you mean? You must be joking. I’m twenty-four. I’m from a village. This is only the third time in my life I’ve been in a train.”

“And I’m twenty-seven,” said the Party secretary. “What can we do about it?”

Two years passed. Goryacheva was transferred to Moscow. She worked and studied at the same time. Often she had the feeling that everything was a dream—the telephones, the secretaries, the meetings of the Presidium, the cars, her Moscow apartment, her dacha. And there were nights when she really did dream that she was walking down the village street with her friends after work, singing songs to the accompaniment of a squeezebox. She would be smiling in these dreams, feeling how nice it was to walk barefoot over the soft cool grass on the little square in front of the village soviet. And only when she was being driven to the dacha and buildings were appearing from nowhere, then vanishing in front of her eyes, did she feel that there wasn’t really anything so extraordinary about her existence; it was just that her life too had subordinated itself to this precipitate movement, to this swiftness that took one’s breath away.

***

Goryacheva would not be traveling alone that evening; Gagareva, the deputy director of the planning department, was going with her, to the same resort on the Black Sea. Gagareva—who was not a Party member—was a stout old woman with gray hair and a pince-nez on her fleshy nose. Just before ten o’clock Goryacheva called by to collect her. Gagareva was ready and waiting. They did not talk in the car. Goryacheva just looked out of the window, and Gagareva polished her pince-nez. Then they got to the train and found their two-berth compartment.