The visitors spent most of their time on the beach. But not even the keenest swimmers and sunbathers could match Goryacheva in their enthusiasm. She was mesmerized by the sea; it was as if she had fallen in love. In the morning she would quickly eat her breakfast, wrap some pears and some grapes in a shaggy towel, and walk down the narrow path to the beach.
“Wait a moment, Goryacheva!” jokers would call out. “Give us a moment to have a smoke—then we can go down together. Or are you afraid of being twenty-one minutes late? Don’t worry! There are enough rocks for everyone—there’s no shortage of tickets!”
She hurriedly undressed, then threw herself into the sea and began to swim—the way village girls swim, thrashing her legs, sticking her head right out of the water and screwing up her eyes, and choking on the spray she churned up with her powerful but clumsy arms. There was a childish pleasure on her face that verged on bewilderment; it was as if she were unable to believe it was possible to feel so good. She would swim for hours on end; often she would not even return for lunch. She particularly enjoyed her lunch hours by the sea. The beach would empty; the waves would gradually take hold of the grape skins and cigarette butts, and the remains of apples and pears, and carry them away. Goryacheva would help the water to clean the beach. When the rubbish had all gone and the waves were left with only the sand and shingle to play with, she would lie on her stomach and prop herself up on her elbows, her cheekbones cupped in her palms. Obstinately, as if waiting for something, she would gaze at the gleaming, pliant water and the deserted, rocky shore. She wanted it to remain deserted for longer, and she was upset when she heard the bell that marked the end of the quiet hour after lunch and the voices of people on their way down to the beach. But just why she should feel upset she could not understand; many of the other visitors, after all, were people she knew, pleasant, straightforward people with a sense of fun. There was Ivan Mikheyevich, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, who had once been a brigade leader on the collective farm where Goryacheva had operated a combine harvester. There were two Ukrainian women whom she had once met at a conference in Moscow, in the days when they too were still working on a collective farm. Now one of them was about to graduate from the Industrial Academy, and the other—Stanyuk—was working in the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian Republic. And there was the director of the Donetsk Coal Trust, a man who, only a few years ago, had been working at the pit face, hewing coal. Goryacheva recognized him. The two of them had been in the Kremlin on the same day; they had both gone there to receive awards. These were all people she liked; she felt close to them and enjoyed their company. Nevertheless, it was a relief to be alone on the beach. She would listen to the noise of the water and remember how, as a little girl, she had used to run to the river, not far from the mill, and swim across, her shirt ballooning out of the water. Then she would gaze at the sea and go into the water again and again.
***
The other visitors all began teasing her straightaway; they did not waste a moment.
Ivan Mikheyevich said, “Well, madam combine harvester, shouldn’t you be telegraphing home to say you’re about to combine with a husband?”
Stanyuk grinned and said, “Careful, Goryacheva. You might find you suddenly lose all your holiday weight!”
By the evening, even Gagareva, who never went down to the beach, had heard the news. Meeting Goryacheva in the glass-walled corridor, she said, “Doctor Kotova worries that too many hours in the sun might bring about a cardiac neurosis, but I think you need to be careful not to spend too long in the moonlight.”
“What do you mean?” asked Goryacheva, who was not used to Black Sea wit.
Goryacheva had got to know a certain Colonel Karmaleyev who was staying next door, in the house of recreation for senior Red Army commanders. They had chatted a little and then gone into the water together. He had told Goryacheva that he had been wounded in August 1938—only now were the doctors allowing him to go swimming again. Goryacheva had been terrified as she watched him strike out; she thought that his swift, powerful arm movements were going to reopen the wound on his chest, which was now covered by pink, fresh skin. And there had been moments when his face had looked not tanned but pale. When they went for walks together, she sometimes asked, “You’re not getting tired, are you?”
“What do you mean?” he would reply, a little affronted.
He was four years older than her, but their life stories had much in common. Until 1926, he too had lived in a village and been a member of the Komsomol. Then he had gone to the Far East to serve in the frontier forces. After his military service, he had joined a military-command training course and remained in the Far East. He seemed to be someone very calm; he spoke slowly, articulating each word clearly. Even though his movements were quick and effortless, their measure and precision somehow added to this general impression of slowness. Goryacheva thought he spoke to her like a teacher; this amused her, and on one occasion she commented on it. He was embarrassed and said it was a habit he had slipped into; it was because he had to spend a lot of time dinning things into the soldiers and junior commanders.
“So I’m like a junior commander, am I?” said Goryacheva. It was now her turn to feel affronted. “I’ll have you know that a departmental head in an All-Union People’s Commissariat is superior to a colonel!”
“Yes, you’d be a corps commander at the very least!” Karmaleyev replied with a smile. His teeth were so straight and even that they seemed like a single white strip. He had fair hair that looked soft, and his eyes were pale, serious, and sad.
The two houses of recreation watched the growth of their relationship with interest, laughing and joking, but from the very first day everything between Goryacheva and Karmaleyev was so utterly clear and straightforward that neither of them ever felt the least embarrassment. In the evenings they carried on going out for walks, hand in hand, around the park or down to the sea. Karmaleyev would bring some special kind of grapes to the dining room for Goryacheva, and in the morning he would go to the post office for the newspaper and then give it to her before he had so much as glanced at it.
His comrades continued to make jokes. “So, Aleksandr Nikiforovich, you’re going to be the husband of a deputy people’s commissar. One word from her, and they’ll transfer you to Moscow, to the General Staff Academy. You’ll have quite a life!”
He smiled calmly and said nothing.
Gagareva was moved by this development, which really, of course, concerned only Goryacheva and Karmaleyev. She observed Goryacheva benevolently, with sadness and resignation. There seemed to be some law governing the fates of different generations. “So now it’s their turn to be happy,” she would say to herself. “Well then, may they be happy!” And she would recall her own youth—political debates, trips to Sparrow Hills, and years in exile after her husband had escaped from a tsarist prison colony and she had abandoned her studies to join him in France. She even felt proud that she had come to a philosophical understanding of time and of Russian life, that she had grasped the meaning of all the sacrifices, the meaning of movement itself. “Yes, yes,” she thought. “It’s true, we didn’t struggle and suffer in vain. Whole generations didn’t sacrifice themselves for nothing.” She did a great deal of thinking, and she was so taken up with her thoughts that she stopped visiting Kotova, preferring to spend all her time on her own. To have reached this universal understanding was no mean achievement—and Gagareva looked at the young people around her with a kindly but condescending smile.
During the last week of August it began unexpectedly to rain; this, apparently, was very unusual—something that happened only once every ten or fifteen years. The mountains were hidden by clouds, a cold wind was blowing off the sea, and it rained several times every day. Many of the visitors left. Goryacheva left on the twenty-sixth. She might have stayed longer, but Karmaleyev had received a telegram recalling him to the Far East. He had to set off on the twenty-sixth, and Goryacheva had decided to go with him as far as Moscow. Gagar
eva, however, stayed in the house of recreation; she did not mind the bad weather. She had brought her galoshes and raincoat with her and, unless it was raining particularly hard, she carried on going out for walks down the graveled paths. She even liked this kind of weather. It was more in keeping with her mood; her mind worked better during these gray sad days.
***
Late one November afternoon Gagareva called on Goryacheva in her office. She found her in conversation with a visiting instructor, a man who worked in the provinces.
“Is this going to take long?” Goryacheva asked her.
“No, no, it’s all right, I’ll wait, it’s about something very particular,” said Gagareva, smiling and sitting herself down on the sofa. She looked at Goryacheva’s face, which was lit by the lamp on her desk, and thought, “She’s lost her tan, and she looks very thin. She never stops, she works day and night—she must be missing her husband.”
The instructor left. With an embarrassed little laugh, Gagareva said, “Comrade Goryacheva, there’s something I want to say to you. I do, after all, know the stand you took last year, when there was a possibility of my being dismissed. Well, now I want to share some good news with you: my daughter’s case is to be reviewed. She may soon be back here in Moscow.”
They chatted for a few minutes. Then Goryacheva remembered that she had a meeting. She left the room. Gagareva went to the secretariat and said to Goryacheva’s secretary, “Lydia Ivanovna, do you know what? It may not be long till my daughter comes back.”
The usually stern secretary looked Gagareva straight in the eye, laughed joyfully, and shook her hand.
“But tell me—is everything all right with Goryacheva? She’s not ill, is she?” asked Gagareva. “She seemed a little strange just now.”
Glancing at the door, the secretary said quietly, “She’s been having a terrible time. It’s been one tragedy after another for her. In October her mother died of a heart attack. She was doing the laundry—and she just dropped dead. And then, only a few days ago, she was told that her husband had been killed in action, on the Far East border. They were married the day they got back from the Crimea, and he had to leave that same evening.”
Gagareva walked across to the window and watched the bright automobile headlights down below. Precipitately, as if out of nowhere, they arose out of the fog and gloom, then swiftly traversed the square. “No, it’s not like I thought,” she said to herself. “I don’t understand anything at all about the laws of life.”
But she was feeling happy, and so she no longer wanted to think. She no longer wanted to understand the laws of life.
Part Two *
The War, the Shoah
Grossman (far left) in a just-liberated village, January 1942
In the early hours of June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had refused to believe more than eighty intelligence warnings of Hitler’s intentions, and Soviet forces were taken by surprise. More than two thousand Soviet aircraft were destroyed within twenty-four hours. The Germans repeatedly encircled entire Soviet armies. By the end of the year the Wehrmacht had reached the outskirts of Moscow and more than three million Soviet soldiers had been captured or killed.
Before the German invasion, Grossman appears to have been depressed. He was overweight and, though only in his mid-thirties, he walked with a stick. In spite of this—and his poor eyesight—he volunteered to serve in the ranks. Assigned instead to Red Star (Krasnaya zvezda), the Red Army newspaper, he quickly became one of the best-known Soviet war correspondents, astonishing everyone with his courage, tenacity, and physical endurance; he even proved to be an excellent shot with a pistol.
David Ortenberg, the chief editor of Red Star, was evidently impressed by the articles and stories that Grossman contributed. In May 1942 he allowed Grossman a three-month leave to work on a novel about a Soviet military unit that breaks out of German encirclement. Grossman worked fast, and The People Immortal—the first Soviet novel about the war—was serialized in Red Star in July and August. Today much of it seems propagandistic, but at the time it was admired for its realism. As always, Grossman not only has a fine eye for a vivid detail but also the ability to make unexpected use of this detail. One memorable passage ends with a political commissar glimpsing the burning ruins of the town of Gomel as reflected in the eye of a dying horse: “The horse’s dark, weeping, torment-filled pupil, like a crystal mirror, absorbed the fire of the burning buildings, the smoke swirling through the air, the luminous, incandescent ruins and this forest of thin, tall chimneys now growing in the place of the buildings which had vanished in flames. And Bogaryov suddenly had the thought that he too had taken into himself all this destruction—this nighttime destruction of an ancient and peaceful town.”
In the autumn of 1942, Grossman was posted to Stalingrad. Unlike other Soviet journalists, who stayed in relative safety on the left bank of the Volga, Grossman spent nearly three months on the right bank. Earlier, before crossing the Volga, he had said to a group of colleagues, “To write about the Stalingrad battle one needs to have been on the right bank of the Volga, among those who are fighting in the ruins and on the bank of the river. Until I have been there I do not have the moral right to write about the defenders of Stalingrad.” Once on the right bank, he shared the soldiers’ lives and won their trust. In the words of his fellow war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg, “The soldiers at Stalingrad did not consider Grossman a journalist, but rather one of their comrades in arms.”
Grossman achieved particular renown for his reports from Stalingrad, but he covered all the main battles of the war, from the defense of Moscow to the vast tank battle of Kursk and the fall of Berlin, and his articles were valued by ordinary soldiers and generals alike. Groups of frontline soldiers would gather to listen while one of them read aloud from a single copy of Red Star; the writer Viktor Nekrasov, who fought at Stalingrad as a young man, remembers how “the papers with [Grossman’s] and Ehrenburg’s articles were read and reread by us till they were in tatters.” And it was not only Soviet citizens who valued Grossman’s articles. The Years of War, a collection of Grossman’s reports from Stalingrad and elsewhere, was translated into a number of languages, including English, French, Dutch, and—in 1945—German. According to the historian Jochen Hellbeck, “a German Stalingrad veteran, Wilhelm Raimund Beyer, a young soldier during the war and later a noted philosopher and Hegel scholar, writes with great admiration about Grossman’s war stories [...] as coming very close to his own experience of the battle.”
Yekaterina Korotkova has written that “A Stalingrad veteran once told me that he witnessed my father drawing an entire platoon—every last man of them—into a general conversation. And I myself often saw him in conversation with yardmen or listening attentively to a little woman we all despised and whom we had nicknamed Zhuchka.” Grossman had a remarkable gift for listening and no less a gift for evoking—even in the space of only a few lines—the uniqueness of an individual life. Ortenberg records that Grossman was always interested in someone’s life as a whole, not merely in his or her wartime experiences, and he suggests that this may have been one of the reasons why otherwise inarticulate people were often so very ready to talk to him. This concern for the individual, perhaps not surprisingly, also sometimes brought Grossman into conflict with the authorities. For all his wholehearted commitment to the Soviet cause, he was no less wholeheartedly opposed to the unnecessary sacrifice of individual lives for the apparent good of this cause. Korotkova has summarized Grossman’s own account of a meeting at the editorial office of Red Star: “Ortenberg once summoned three correspondents—Aleksey Tolstoy, Vasily Grossman, and Pyotr Pavlenko—and suggested that one of them write an article to illustrate the necessity for the new decree about the execution of deserters. My father responded sharply, ‘I’m not going to write such a piece.’ Pavlenko somehow ‘wriggled up to my father and, hissing like a snake,’ said, ‘You’re a proud man, Vasily Semyonovich, a very proud man.’ Only one man remained silent
—Aleksey Tolstoy. It was he who then wrote the required article.”
After encircling the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad, the Red Army began its long march westward. The liberation of the Ukraine, however, almost certainly brought Grossman more bitterness than joy. In the autumn of 1943 he learned about the massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, where a hundred thousand people, nearly all Jews, were shot in the course of six months, more than thirty-three thousand of them during the first two days, September 29 and 30. Soon afterward, in Berdichev, he learned the details of the death of his mother, Yekaterina Savelievna, in what was probably the first of the Einsatzgruppen massacres carried out in the Ukraine in September 1941. This knowledge must have been all the harder to bear because Grossman blamed himself for failing to fetch Yekaterina Savelievna from Berdichev while this was still possible during the first weeks of the war.
One of the most striking of Grossman’s wartime works is “The Ukraine Without Jews”—an article that combines factual detail and moving lament. It also includes a remarkable passage in which Grossman not only analyzes the appeal of Nazism but also, through the use of incantatory, almost folkloric repetition, forces the reader to feel this appeal:
“You fear proletarian revolution,” the National Socialists said to the German industrialists. “You fear Communism, which is a hundred times more terrible for us than any Versailles treaty. We too fear proletarian revolution—so let us fight together against the Jews. They, after all, are an eternal source of sedition and bloody rebellion. They know how to incite the masses. They are orators and authors of revolutionary books. It is they who gave birth to the ideas of class struggle and proletarian revolution!”
“You are suffering from the consequences of the Versailles treaty,” the National Socialists said to the laboring masses of Germany. “You are hungry, you are without work. The heavy millstone of the reparations is crushing your exhausted shoulders. But look whose hands are turning the wheel that moves this stone. It is the hands of the Jewish plutocracy, the hands of Jewish bankers—the uncrowned kings of America, France, and England. Your enemies are our enemies—let us fight shoulder to shoulder against them!”