“The whole village died. First it was the children that died, then it was the old people, then it was the middle-aged. At first people dug graves for them, but then they stopped. And so the dead were lying on the streets, in the yards, and the last to die just remained in their huts. It went quiet. The whole village had died. Who was the last to die, I don’t know. Those of us who worked in the administration were taken off to the town.
“I ended up in Kiev. This was the time when bread came back on sale again. Even without a ration card, you could buy bread. You should have seen it. People began queuing the evening before—and even then the queues were half a mile long. There are many kinds of queues, you know: queues where people make jokes and crunch sunflower seeds; queues where your number is written down on a piece of paper; and queues where no one is joking and your number is written on the palm of your hand or chalked on your back. But these queues weren’t like any of these; no, I’ve never seen anything like them. People put their arms around the waist of the person in front and clung up against them. If anyone stumbled, the whole queue would sway; it was as if a wave had passed through it. And a kind of dance would begin, people swaying from side to side. The swaying would get wilder and wilder. People were afraid they wouldn’t have the strength to keep hold of the person in front, that they’d lose their grip—and this fear would make the women start howling, and soon the whole queue would be screaming and it was as if they’d all gone out of their minds, as if they were singing and dancing. Sometimes young louts would try to break into the queue; you could see them looking for the weakest link. When these louts came close, everyone would be howling with fear again—and again, it was as if they were singing. All this was just town folks without ration cards queuing to buy bread—people without passports, people stripped of their civic rights, ordinary artisans, or people who lived out in the suburbs.
“And then there were the peasants—crawling out of their villages, crawling toward the city. The stations were all cordoned off, and the trains were constantly searched. There were army and OGPU roadblocks on every road. All the same, people were getting to Kiev, crawling through fields and bogs, through woods and open country—anything to bypass the roadblocks. It was impossible, after all, to set up blocks everywhere. The peasants could no longer walk—they could only crawl. And so people in Kiev would be hurrying about their affairs—on their way to work, on their way to a cinema...Trams would be running...And in the middle of all this, crawling about among these people, were the starving. Children, men, young girls—all on all fours. They looked more like some kind of filthy little cats or dogs. But they seemed to be trying to be like people. They knew modesty; they knew shame. You’d see a young girl crawling along—all swollen, whining, looking like some kind of monkey. And then she’d be putting her skirt straight, blushing, tucking her long hair under her kerchief. She was, after all, from a village, and this was her first time in Kiev. But it was only the lucky few, only one in ten thousand, who managed to crawl as far as Kiev. Not that it did them any good—there was no salvation even in Kiev. Starving people lay on the ground. They begged, they tried to hiss out words—but they were unable to eat. Someone might have a crust of bread beside him but he couldn’t see it any more; he was too far gone.
“Every morning horses pulled flat-top carts through the city. Those who’d died in the night were taken away. I saw one cart, it was stacked with the bodies of children. It was like I’ve already said. They looked thin and long—faces like dead birdies, sharp little beaks. These little birds had flown to Kiev—and what good had it done them? Some of them were still making cheeping noises; their little heads were like ripe ears of grain, bending the thin stalks of their necks. I asked the driver. He just gave a shrug of the shoulders. ‘They’ll quieten down soon enough,’ he said.
“I saw one young girl crawl across the sidewalk. A street sweeper gave her a kick, and she rolled onto the roadway. She didn’t look around. She just crawled on, fast as she could, heaven knows where she got the strength from. And she even tried to shake the dust off her dress. That same day I bought a Moscow paper. I read an article by Maksim Gorky about how children need cultured toys. Did Gorky not know about the children stacked on the cart? Did they really need cultured toys? Or maybe Gorky did know—and kept silent, like everyone kept silent. And maybe he too wrote that those dead children were enjoying chicken soup. That same driver told me that the greatest number of dead was by the shops that sold unrationed bread. If you’re starving, if you’re swollen with dropsy, a single crust can finish you off. Yes, I remember Kiev all right, even though I only spent three days there.
“And this is what I came to understand. At first, hunger drives you out of your home. In the beginning, it burns and torments you—it tears at your guts, at your soul. And so you try to escape your home. People dig for worms, they gather grass—and yes, they even try to fight their way through to Kiev. Whatever they do, they’ve got to get out, they’ve got to get away. And then the day comes when the starving man crawls back into his home. That means hunger has won. This one has given up the struggle; he lies down on his bed and stays there. And once hunger has won, you can’t get the man up again, try as you might. Not just because he doesn’t have the strength but because it’s all the same to him; he no longer wants to go on living. He just lies there quietly. All he wants is to be left alone. He doesn’t want to eat, he can’t stop peeing, he has the runs. All he wants is to sleep, to be left in peace. If you just lie there quietly, it means you’re near the end. I’ve heard the same from prisoners of war. If a prisoner just lay there on the boards, if he stopped caring about his rations, that meant he was close to dying. But there were some people who lost their minds. They only went still at the very end. You could tell who these people were by their bright, shining eyes. These were the ones who cut up corpses and boiled them, who even killed and ate their own children. As the human being died in them, the wild beast came to the surface. I saw one woman who’d been brought to the district center under guard. She had a human face, but the eyes of a wolf. Cannibals, I’ve heard, were all shot, every last one of them. But these cannibals were not guilty. The guilty ones were those who drove a mother to eat her own children. But you can look all you like—you won’t find anyone who admits to being guilty. What they did, they did for the good of everyone. That’s why they drove mothers to eat their own children.
“I understood then that every starving man is a kind of cannibal. He eats the flesh off his own body. He leaves only the bones. He consumes his last droplet of fat. Then his mind goes dark—he has eaten his own brains. The starving man has eaten himself up.
“I also had the thought that every starving man dies in his own way. In one hut they’re at war, checking on one another, keeping watch on one another, stealing crumbs from one another. Wife against husband; husband against wife. The mother hates her children. But in another hut they live in indestructible love. I knew one woman with four children. She could hardly move her tongue, but she kept telling them fairy tales to try to make them forget their hunger. She hardly had the strength even to lift her own arms, yet she held her children in them. Love lived on in her. Where there was hate, it seemed people died more quickly. But love, for that matter, did not save anyone. Every last person lay down and died. There was no life left.
“The village, I learned later, went silent. There was no sound of children. There was no longer any need for cultured toys—or for chicken soup. There was no wailing—no one left to wail. I learned later that troops were sent in to harvest the winter wheat—but they weren’t allowed to enter the dead village. They camped in their tents. They were told that there’d been an epidemic. They kept complaining, though, about the terrible smell from the village. The troops also sowed winter wheat for the following year. And in the spring settlers were brought in from Oryol Province. This was, after all, the Ukraine. It was Black Earth—and Oryol has always been a land of bad harvests. The women and children were left in shelters by the
station, and the men were taken into the village. They were given pitchforks and told to go around the huts and drag out the bodies. The dead were just lying there, men and women, some on beds and some on the floor. The smell in the huts was awful. The men tied kerchiefs over their mouths and noses and began dragging out the bodies—but the bodies just fell apart. Finally, all the bits of bodies were buried outside the village. That’s when I understood that this was indeed a ‘cemetery of the hard school.’ Once all the corpses were gone, they brought in the women to clean the floors and whitewash the walls. Everything was done properly, but the smell was still there. They whitewashed the walls a second time and spread new clay on the floors, but the smell still wouldn’t go away. They couldn’t eat in those huts, and they couldn’t sleep in those huts; they all went back to Oryol. But still, earth like that doesn’t stay empty and unpeopled for long. How could it?
“And now it’s as if those people never lived. But the village had seen all kinds of things. There had been love. Wives leaving husbands, and daughters getting married. People had had drunken fights, and they had had friends and family to stay. They had baked bread. And how they had worked! They had sung songs. Their children had gone to school. Sometimes the mobile cinema had come, and everyone—even the old folks—had gone to see the movies.
“And nothing is left of all that. Where can that life have gone? And that suffering, that terrible suffering? Can there really be nothing left? Is it really true that no one will be held to account for it all? That it will all just be forgotten without a trace?
“Grass has grown over it.
“How can this be?—I ask you.
“Look—it’s getting light. Our night’s over now. It’s time we both got ready to go out to work.”
15
Vasily Timofeyevich had a quiet voice and a hesitant way of moving. And when someone talked to Ganna, she would look down at the ground with her brown eyes and reply almost inaudibly.
After their marriage, they both became still more timid. He was fifty years old, and the neighbors’ children called him “Grandad”; he was gray-haired, balding, and wrinkled—and he felt embarrassed to have married someone so young. He felt ashamed to be so happy in his love, to find himself whispering “My darling, my sweetheart” as he looked at his wife. As for her, when she was a little girl, she had tried to imagine her future husband. He was going to be a Civil War hero like Shchors; he was going to be the best accordion player in the village; and he was going to be a writer of heartfelt poems like Taras Shevchenko. Nevertheless, even though Vasily Timofeyevich was no longer young; even though he was poor, timid, and generally unlucky; even though he had always lived through others rather than living a life of his own, her meek heart understood the strength of the love he felt for her. And he understood how she, so young, had hoped for more, how she had dreamed of a village knight who would ride up and bear her away from her stepfather’s cramped hut—instead of which he had come along in his old boots, with his big brown peasant hands, coughing apologetically and clearing his throat. And now here he was, looking at her happily, adoringly, guiltily and with grief. And she, for her part, felt guilty before him and was meek and silent.
They had a son, Grisha, a quiet little baby who never cried. His mother, now once again looking like a skinny little girl, sometimes went up to his cradle at night. Seeing the boy lying there with open eyes, she would say to him, “Try crying a bit, little Grishenka. Why are you always so silent?”
Even when they were in their own hut, both husband and wife always talked in soft voices. “Why do you always speak so quietly?” neighbors would ask in astonishment.
It was strange that the young woman and her plain, elderly husband should be so alike, equally timid, equally meek in their hearts.
They both worked without a word of complaint. They did not even dare let out a sigh when the brigade leader was unjust, when he sent them out into the fields even if it was not their turn.
Once, Vasily Timofeyevich was sent to the district center on an errand for the collective-farm stables; he went with the farm chairman. While the chairman was going about his business in the land and finance offices, he tied the horses to a post, went into the shop, and bought his wife a treat: some poppy-seed cakes, some candies, some bread rings, some nuts. Not a lot, just 150 grams of each. When he got back home and untied his white kerchief, his wife flung her hands up in the air with joy and cried out, “Oh! Mama!” In his embarrassment, Vasily Timofeyevich went off into the storeroom, so that she would not see the tears of happiness in his eyes.
For Christmas she embroidered a shirt for her husband. Never did she learn that, after she had given it to him, Vasily Timofeyevich Karpenko was hardly able to sleep. All through the night he kept getting up and walking across, in his bare feet, to the little chest of drawers on top of which he had put the shirt. He kept stroking it with the palm of his hand, feeling the simple cross-stitch design...And when he was taking his wife home from the maternity ward of the district hospital, when he saw her holding their child in her arms, he felt that he would never forget this day—even if he were to live a thousand years.
Sometimes he felt frightened. How was it possible for such happiness to have come into his life? How was it possible that he could wake in the middle of the night and find himself listening to the breathing of a wife and a son?
Whoever he was with, Vasily Timofeyevich felt shy and timid. How could he have the right to something like this?
But that was how it was. He came home from work and saw smoke coming out of the chimney and a baby’s nappy drying on the fence. He would see his wife bending down over the cradle or smiling about something as she put a bowl of borsch on the table. He would look at her hands, at her hair peeping out from beneath her kerchief. He would listen to her talking about their little one or about the neighbor’s ewe. Sometimes she would go out into the storeroom and he would miss her and even feel lonely. As soon as she came back, he would feel happy again. Catching his eye, she would give him a sad, meek smile.
Vasily Timofeyevich died first, two days ahead of little Grisha. He had been giving almost every crumb to his wife and child, and so he died before them. Probably there has been no self-sacrifice in the world greater than this—and no despair greater than his despair as he looked at his wife, already disfigured by the dropsy of death, and at his dying son.
Even during his last hour he felt no indignation, no anger with regard to the great and senseless thing that had been accomplished by the State and Stalin. He did not even ask, “Why?” He did not once ask why the torment of death by starvation had been allotted to him and his wife—meek, obedient, and hardworking as they were—and to their quiet little one-year-old boy.
Still in their rotten rags, the skeletons spent the winter together. The husband, his young wife, and their little son went on smiling whitely, not separated even by death.
The next spring, after the first starlings had arrived, the representative from the district land office entered the hut, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. He looked at the paraffin lamp with no glass, at the icon in the corner, at the little chest of drawers, at the cold cast-iron pots, and at the bed.
“Two and a child,” he called out.
The brigade leader, standing on this most holy threshold of love and meekness, nodded his head and made a mark on a scrap of paper.
Back in the fresh air, the representative looked at the white huts and the green orchards and said, “Take the corpses away—but don’t bother about this ruin. It’s not worth trying to repair it.”
Once again the brigade leader nodded.
16
At work Ivan Grigoryevich learned that the officials in the municipal court accept bribes; that it’s possible to buy good grades for young people taking the entrance exams for the radio technical college; that a factory director will, for a bribe, supply cooperatives producing consumer goods with metals that are otherwise almost unobtainable; that, with the money he
had stolen, the director of a mill had built himself a two-story house and had had the floors laid with oak parquet; that the chief of police had released a notorious wheeler-dealer of a jeweler after his family had paid him the unbelievable sum of 600,000 rubles; and that the first secretary himself—the town boss—was willing, if properly compensated, to order the chairman of the town soviet to sign the certificates entitling you to an apartment in a new building on the main street.
All morning Ivan Grigoryevich’s fellow workers had been talking excitedly. They had just heard some important news from the provincial capital; a verdict had finally been reached in the case against the stockkeeper of the town’s biggest cooperative, a manufacturer of fur coats, ladies’ winter coats, and reindeer and astrakhan fur hats. Although the principal defendant was only a humble stockroom boss, the case had taken on spectacular dimensions; like some giant octopus, it had wound its tentacles around the entire life of the city. The verdict had been impatiently awaited for a long time, and there had been many arguments about it during lunch breaks. Some people thought that the investigator for especially important cases, who was from Moscow, would fearlessly expose every one of the town’s most important officials.
After all, even little children knew that the town prosecutor drove about in a Volga given to him by that balding stammerer of a stockroom boss; that the Party secretary now had new bedroom and dining-room suites that had been brought all the way from Riga; that the wife of the chief of police had gone for two months to the Black Sea coast, by plane, to stay—at the expense of this same stockroom boss—in the Council of Ministers’ sanatorium in Adler; and that, before she left for the airport, she had received an emerald ring.