The Road (9 page)

1.

During
the last few years, Boris Isaakovich Rosenthal had left the house only on warm still days. When it rained, or if there was fog or a heavy frost, his head would spin. Doctor Weintraub believed that the vertigo was caused by sclerosis; he prescribed a small glass of milk with fifteen drops of iodine before meals.

On warm days Rosenthal would go out into the yard. He did not take philosophy books with him: the noise of the children, and the women’s laughter and cursing, were entertainment enough. He would sit on the bench near the well with a small volume of Chekhov. Resting the open book on his knees, he would keep looking at one and the same page, half closing his eyes and smiling a dreamy smile like that of a blind man listening to the noise of life. He was not reading, but he was so used to having a book with him that he felt it necessary to stroke the rough binding and to check with his trembling fingers the thickness of the pages. The women sitting nearby would say, “Look—the teacher’s fallen asleep,” and go on talking about women’s matters as if he were not there. But he was not asleep. He was breathing in the smell of onions and sunflower-seed oil and enjoying the warmth of the sun-warmed stone; he was listening to the old women’s conversations about their sons- and daughters-in-law, and he was also aware of the ruthless, frenzied excitement of the little boys at their games. Sometimes the heavy wet sheets on the clotheslines would flap in the wind like sails, spraying fine drops of water onto his face. Once again, for a moment, he was a young student—sailing across the sea in a small boat.

He loved books—and books were not a barrier between him and life. His God was Life. And he learned about this God—a living, earthly, sinful God—by reading historians and philosophers, by reading the works of both greater and lesser writers. All of them, as best they could, celebrated, justified, blamed, and cursed Man on this splendid earth.

Sitting there in the yard, he could hear the children’s shrill voices:

“Quick, butterfly overhead—fire!”

“Got her! Finish her off with stones!”

Rosenthal was not horrified by this cruelty—he had known it all through his eighty-two years of life and he was not afraid of it.

Then six-year-old Katya, the daughter of Weissman, the lieutenant who had been killed, came up to him in her torn dress, shuffling along in galoshes that were falling off her dirty, scratched little feet. Offering him a cold, sour pancake, she said, “Eat, teacher!”

He took the pancake and began to eat it, looking at the little girl’s thin face. As he ate, there was a sudden hush in the yard. Everyone—the old women, the big-breasted young women who could no longer remember their husbands, the one-legged lieutenant Voronenko lying on a mattress under a tree—was looking at the old man and the little girl. Rosenthal dropped his book and did not try to pick it up—he was looking at the little girl’s huge eyes, which were intently, even greedily, watching him as he ate. Once again he felt the urge to understand a wonder that never ceased to amaze him: human kindness. Perhaps the answer was there in the child’s eyes. But her eyes must have been too dark, or maybe what got in the way were his own tears—once again he saw nothing and understood nothing.

The women were always surprised at the people who came to see this old man who lived on a pension of just 112 rubles a month and who did not possess even a paraffin stove or a kettle. There was the director of the teacher training college, and there was the chief engineer from the sugar refinery. Once there was even an officer with two medals who arrived in an automobile.

“My former pupils,” the old teacher would explain. And on days when the postman brought him two or three letters at once, he would say the same thing: “My former pupils.”

They remembered him, these former pupils.

And so here he was, on the morning of June 5, 1942, sitting out in the yard. Sitting beside him, on a mattress someone had carried out from the house for him, was Lieutenant Voronenko, whose leg had been amputated above the knee. Voronenko’s wife, the young and beautiful Darya Semyonovna, was cooking lunch on her summer stove, bending down over the saucepans and crying. Voronenko was teasing her, wrinkling his white face and saying, “Why are you crying, Dasha? Just wait—my leg will grow back again!”

“No, it’s not that. That’s not why I’m crying at all,” said Darya Semyonovna, still crying. “All that matters is that you stay alive.”

At one in the afternoon, there was an air-raid alert; a German airplane was approaching. Snatching up their children, the women ran to the slit trenches, looking back now and then to see if some thief was about to make off with the food they had left on the little tables and stools. Only Voronenko and Rosenthal remained in the yard. From out on the street a young boy shouted, “There’s a tanker nearby—it’s stopped on the road. It’s an easy target. The driver’s run away—he’s hiding in one of the trenches!”

The dogs had already seen many air raids. Tails between their legs, they would follow the women into the trenches at the very first distant sounds of a German plane.

There was a moment of silence, and then the boys announced in their shrill voices, “Overhead...Now he’s banking...Now he’s diving, the swine!”

The little town shook from the blow; smoke and dust rose up; there was shouting and loud weeping from the trenches. Then it was quiet again, and the women were climbing out of the earth. Shaking themselves, laughing at one another, straightening their dresses, and brushing the dust and dirt off their children, they hurried back to their stoves.

“He’s put out the fire—damn him!” the old women grumbled. Puffing at the embers, tears in their eyes from the smoke, they went on muttering away: “May he find no peace—neither in this world nor in the next!”

Voronenko explained that it had been a two-hundred-kilogram bomb and that the antiaircraft guns had been five hundred meters off target. Old Mikhailyuchka muttered, “If only the Germans would get a move on and bring an end to this misery. During yesterday’s alert someone made off with a whole pot of borshch I was cooking.”

The neighbors all knew that her son, Yashka, had deserted and was hiding away in her attic, coming out only at night. Mikhailyuchka said that if anyone snitched, she’d have them executed when the Germans arrived. And the women were afraid to say anything—the Germans were very close now.

Koryako the agronomist, instead of letting himself be evacuated with the district soviet agricultural section, had boasted that he would stay in the town until the very last moment and only leave when the troops left. As soon as an alert sounded, he would run to his room on the ground floor, knock back a glass of home-distilled vodka—which he referred to as “anti-bombine”—and then go down into the cellar. After the all clear, he would walk up and down the yard, saying, “You can’t deny it—our town’s im-impregnable! Jusht one little hut—all the Jerries could do was shmash up one little hut!”

The boys were the first to bring back precise information: “It fell just opposite the Zabolotskys. It killed Rabinovichka’s goat. Old Miroshenko had her leg blown off. She was taken away on a cart and she died on her way to the hospital. Her daughter’s making such a hullabaloo you can hear her four whole blocks away.”

That evening Doctor Weintraub called on Rosenthal. Weintraub was sixty-eight years old. He was wearing a light jacket made from tussah silk. His Russian shirt was unbuttoned, showing a plump chest covered with gray hair.

“How are you doing, young man?” asked Rosenthal.

But, after climbing the stairs to the first floor, the young man was breathing heavily. He pointed to his chest and sighed. Then he said, “It’s time to go. They say the last trainload of workers from the sugar refinery will be leaving tomorrow. I’ve reminded Shevchenko the engineer—he’s promised to send a cart to pick you up.”

“Shevchenko was once a pupil of mine. He was brilliant at geometry,” said Rosenthal. “We must ask him to take Voronenko. He’s wounded. His wife found him five days ago in the hospital and now he’s convalescing at home. And Weissman and her little girl. Her husband’s been killed—she’s received an official letter.”

“There may not be room—there’ll be several hundred workers,” said Weintraub. Then he began speaking more quickly, his breath still hot and heavy. “Just think—I came here on June 16, 1901.” He smiled. “It’s quite a coincidence. I came here forty-one years ago to see my first patient. Mikhailyuk had got food poisoning—from some fish he’d eaten. Since then I’ve treated everybody in this house; I’ve treated him and I’ve treated his wife. I treated their son, Yashka, with his never-ending diarrhea. I treated Dasha Tkachuk before she married young Vitya Voronenko. I’ve treated Dasha’s father, and I’ve treated Vitya himself. And I’ve done the same in every house. Who’d have thought it? Who’d have thought that one day I’d have to run away from here? And to be honest with you—the nearer that day comes, the less certain I feel. I keep thinking I’ll stay behind. Let fate take its course!”

“Well,
I
feel all the more determined to leave,” said the teacher. “I’m eighty-two years old. Don’t think I don’t know how hard it will be for me—an endless journey in a crowded freight wagon. I have no relatives in the Urals. I haven’t got a kopeck to my name. More than that,” he went on with a shrug of the shoulders, “I know, I’m as sure as sure can be, that I won’t even get as far as the Urals. But it’s still a better way out—if I have to die anyway, I’d rather die with dignity on the dirty floor of a dirty freight wagon. I’d rather die in a country where I’m seen as a human being.”

“I’m not so sure,” said Weintraub. “I don’t think it’ll be so terrible as all that. They’re going to need people like us—surely you can see that they’re going to need doctors and teachers?”

“You’re a naive young man,” said Rosenthal.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said the doctor. “I can’t make up my mind. Many of my patients keep telling me to stay. But there are others who say I absolutely must leave.” Then he jumped to his feet and shouted, “What’s happening? Tell me! I’ve come here, Boris Isaakovich, so that you can give me an explanation! You’re a philosopher and a mathematician. Please explain to me—a doctor—what on earth is happening! Some kind of delirium? How can a cultured European people, a people that has built such fine clinics, a people that has engendered such luminaries of advanced medicine—how can such a people now be spreading medieval darkness and the philosophy of
the Black Hundreds? Where has this infection of the soul come from? What is it? A mass psychosis? Mass insanity? Some evil spell? Or could things really be a little bit different? Have the colors all been piled on a bit thick?”

From out on the staircase came the sound of crutches. It was Voronenko.

“Permission to report, comrade Colonel?” he asked with a wry smile.

Weintraub immediately calmed down and asked, “So, young Vitya, how are you doing?” He used the familiar
Ty
, rather than the more formal
Vy
, to address nearly the entire population of the town. All the men now in their thirties and forties had, after all, once been little boys he had treated.

“One of my legs has deserted,” Voronenko answered wryly. Embarrassed by his loss, he always spoke about it with a smile.

“Well?” asked Rosenthal. “Have you finished that little book yet?”

“What little book?” Voronenko repeated, still smiling. “Wait till you see the book that’s going to be written now!”

And Voronenko bent down toward them, his face now calm and still. In a quiet, steady voice he said, “German tanks have crossed the railway and taken the village of Malye Nizgurtsy. That’s about twenty kilometers east of here.”

“Eighteen and a half,” said the doctor. “So there’ll be no train evacuating the sugar-refinery workers?”

“That goes without saying,” said the old teacher.

“We’re trapped now,” said Voronenko. He went silent for a moment, then added, “Well and truly in the bag.”

“Well,” said Weintraub, “fate’s fate. We’ll see what happens. I’m off home now.”

Rosenthal looked at him. “As you know, I’ve never been one for medicines, but now you must give me the one medicine that can help.”

“What? What can save us now?” Weintraub asked quickly.

“Poison.”

“Never!” said Weintraub, raising his voice. “Never in all my life have I given anyone poison!”

“You’re a naive young man,” said Rosenthal. “Epicurus taught that, if his sufferings become unbearable, a wise man can kill himself out of love of life. Well, I love life no less than Epicurus did.”

He rose to his full height. His hair, his face, his trembling fingers, his thin neck—everything had been dried out and made colorless by time. Everything about him looked transparent, light, weightless. Only in his eyes was there something not subject to time: the power of thought.

“No, no!” Weintraub moved toward the door. “You’ll see—one way or another we’ll get through all this.”

And he left.

“There’s one thing I fear more than anything,” said the teacher. “That the people among whom I have lived my whole life, the people I love and trust—that this people will be taken in by a vile, cheap lie.”

“No,” said Voronenko. “It won’t be like that.”

The night was dark because heavy clouds had covered the sky and shut out the light of the stars. And it was dark from the darkness of the earth. The Nazis were a great falsehood, life’s greatest falsehood. Wherever they passed, up from the depths rose cowardice, treachery, murderousness, and violence against the weak. The Nazis drew everything dark up to the surface, just as a black spell in an old tale calls up the spirits of evil. That night the little town lay stifling, gripped by something foul and dark. Something vile had awoken; stirred by the Nazis’ arrival, it was now reaching toward them. The treacherous and the weak-spirited had emerged from their cellars and gullies and were ripping up letters, Party cards, and books by Lenin; they were tearing down portraits of their own brothers from the walls of their rooms. Fawning speeches of disavowal were taking shape in the hearts of the poor in spirit. Thoughts of revenge—for some chance word or for some marketplace quarrel—were being conceived. Hearts were being infected by callousness, pride, and indifference. Cowards, fearing for their own lives, were thinking how to save themselves by denouncing a neighbor. And so it was in every town large and small, in every country large and small where the Nazis set foot. Murk rose from the beds of lakes and rivers; toads swam to the surface; thistles sprang up where wheat had been planted.