The final work in this section, “The Sistine Madonna,” was inspired by a Raphael Madonna from Dresden that the Soviet authorities had taken to Moscow in 1945. Grossman saw it in 1955, when it was exhibited in the Pushkin Museum before being returned to the Dresden Art Gallery. For nearly 150 years The Sistine Madonna had been the object of something approaching a special cult in Russia. Dostoevsky, for example, saw the painting as a symbol of the faith and beauty that would save the world, and a large reproduction of it hung over his writing desk. Grossman’s article has a twofold importance. It too is a statement of faith, and its highly personal structure provides a transition to the freer, less genre-bound work of Grossman’s last years: the short novel Everything Flows, the travel sketch Good Wishes, the essay “Eternal Rest,” and the last short stories. Grossman is wrestling, in “The Sistine Madonna,” with huge questions. He is addressing such vast tragedies as collectivization and the Terror Famine; he is also—at a time when humanity’s very survival has become threatened as never before—questioning the nature and purpose of art.
Grossman wrote “The Sistine Madonna” in the second half of 1955—probably, given the number of times he mentions the hydrogen bomb, in November or December; the first American thermonuclear bomb had been tested in 1952, and the first Soviet test was carried out in November 1955. There are moments in the first section when Grossman’s prose cracks under this pressure, when he slips into sententiousness or sentimentality. But in the second section, and above all in his evocation of Christ as a thirty-year-old kulak deported to the taiga, he fuses poetry, religion, and fact to achieve a Dantesque intensity: “He was walking along a path through a bog. A huge cloud of midges was hanging above him, but he was unable to drive them away; he was unable to remove this living, flickering halo because he needed both his hands to steady the damp heavy log on his shoulder.”
The Old Man*
Old Semyon Mikheich—everyone said—was the quietest man in the village. He did not drink; he did not smoke; and he never complained to his neighbors. He was never heard to quarrel with his old woman. His voice was quiet and gentle; his movements were no less quiet and gentle.
As the Germans drew near, several of his neighbors got ready to join partisan groups.
“Granddad, are you going to come too?” they would ask jokingly.
He would reply, “Shooting and killing—I just don’t have it in me.”
“On the side of the Germans, are you?” Fedka once asked.
“On the side of the Germans!” answered Semyon Mikheich. “What truth do the Germans bring? But I’m still no warrior. It’s just not in my nature. I can’t even bear to strike a horse with a whip. I’m tenderhearted.”
Wanting to defend her husband, old Filippovna joined in. “He’s with his bees all the time. That’s why he’s so quiet. Bees don’t like a man who gets angry.”
“Too true,” said the old man. “Take our chairman, Prokofy. The bees can’t stand him. He’s always in a hurry, and he makes a lot of noise.”
Just then Prokofy himself came along. He had two hand grenades hanging from his belt and a rifle on his shoulder.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I’m saying that you’re a stern man,” said Semyon Mikheich. “But in my family we’ve never shed blood. My mother was afraid to slaughter a chicken—she used to ask a neighbor to do it for her.”
“Well,” said Prokofy, “don’t you be too kind to the Germans. Or you’ll have to answer for it before the people.”
And he strode off down the village street.
The old man just shook his head, but his wife was upset. She spat on the ground.
***
The Germans had been in the village for nearly three months. First the forward units had gone through. The village had been plundered. When the women went into the dark, empty sheds, they wept. All they could think about was the cows that were no longer there. Everything from their huts was vanishing: sheepskin coats, embroidered towels, quilted jerkins, pillows, and blankets. In the afternoons the old men and women would get together and curse the Germans, reciting long lists of grievances.
Semyon Mikheich would say nothing; he just listened to all the furious words and sighed. He himself had suffered as much as anyone at the hands of the Germans. They had ravaged his beloved hives; they had seized his stores of honey and wheat. Even the old bed, on which he had slept for long decades, had been taken off on the back of a truck by some corporal with bloodshot eyes.
In the evenings, in the dark empty hut, the old couple would kneel by the icons and pray to God. At night Filippovna would weep; Semyon Mikheich would try to comfort her.
“What’s the good of tears?” he would say. “Everyone’s grieving now. The whole people is suffering. We’re old, there’s just the two of us, we’ll get by somehow.”
In December the village became the headquarters of a German division. The billeting officers chose the best house, the one with an iron roof, for the generals. Then they made the men lay a red-brick pavement in front of the house while the women cleaned the floors and whitewashed the walls. Old Semyon Mikheich was ordered to lay a long brick path from the yard to the outhouse in the kitchen garden. The corporal got cross with him for not making the path straight enough. He made him redo it twice. For the first time in his life Semyon Mikheich used foul language.
The old couple’s hut was requisitioned for a doctor, a thin man with a small bald head. The old couple had to move into the entrance room, which was so cold at night that they were unable to sleep. Instead, they heard der Arzt shouting down the telephone in a rasping voice, “Kamyshevakha! Kamyshevakha!”
The doctor was demanding coaches for the evacuation of the wounded. There were many soldiers suffering from wounds and frostbite, and very few trains indeed, since the partisans were destroying the tracks. “That must be Prokofy’s doing,” the old man said to himself. “He’s hard at it!”
Der Arzt shouted hoarsely at everyone who came in to see him. Every now and then he called the orderly and sent him on some errand. The orderly was scared to death of him. The look on the orderly’s face when he entered the room was always so pale and anguished that Semyon Mikheich couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
Der Arzt had ordered Semyon Mikheich to chop wood for the stove. He liked listening to the sound of the ax. Sometimes he summoned the orderly during the night and told him to send Semyon Mikheich out to chop wood.
“Why is the Russian not working? The Russian sleeps too much.”
And so Semyon Mikheich would chop wood beneath the German’s window. He turned gloomy and taciturn, sometimes not saying a word for days on end. He even stopped sighing. Silently, as if made of stone, he would just stand and stare. His old woman would look at him in fear: Had he lost his mind?
One night he said to her, “You know, Filippovna, a wild beast will devour what it needs. It may slaughter a cow or destroy a hive—and that’s life. But these...these ones have been spitting on my soul—and beasts don’t do that. I used to think that these ones are not people. But now I can see they’re not even beasts. They’re worse than beasts.”
“Pray to God,” said Filippovna. “That will help.”
“No,” said the old man. “It won’t help.”
In the morning one of their neighbors, Galya Yakimenko, came by. She was in tears. In a whisper, looking around all the time at the door—on the other side of which was sitting the terrible Arzt—she began talking about the five staff officers now quartered in her hut. “They’re like bears. They eat and drink all day and all night. They get drunk, they shout, and they throw up. They have no shame. They walk about naked in front of me. And now, now it’s turned cold, no, you wouldn’t believe it...They’ve begun soiling their beds. Until now, at least, they used to do it on the floor, but now they don’t even get out of bed. Then they pull the fouled sheets off the bed and tell me to wash them. I say, no, I’m not going to, not even if you beat me to death. So they beat me. You can do what
you like, I say, but it’ll make no difference. I’m not going to shame myself. And off I went. What are they—people or beasts?”
Semyon Mikheich said nothing. A dark cloud of shame and suffering was hanging over the village. It seemed as if life had come to an end, as if the sun had stopped shining, as if there were no air left to breathe. Most terrible of all, worse than the cold nights in cellars and dugouts, were the humiliations to the soul.
Deep in the soul of the old beekeeper something was changing. Any time at night that der Arzt wanted to hear the sound of the ax, the old man had to get up, put on his hat, and go out to chop wood. His ax resounded against the frozen logs. Sometimes the old man would stop for a moment to straighten up and get his breath back. At once the division’s senior doctor would go to the window. He would look out into the yard, wondering why the ax had gone silent. A moment later the orderly would dart out. In a terrified voice, he would shout, “Chop wood, Russki! Chop, Russki, chop wood!”
On one occasion the orderly whispered excitedly to the old man, “General—kaput! Fly front line. Russkies—Tara-tara! General—kaput!”
And the Germans never saw their divisional commander again.
Then a black marketeer from Kharkov passed through. He told them what the prices were for makhorka, bread, and peas. He told them about an outbreak of typhus among the German soldiers. Then he bent down and whispered in the old man’s ear, “I’ve seen it in leaflets and I’ve heard it on the radio: the Reds are on their way back. They’ve already recaptured thirty towns. They’ll be here any day.”
In response, the old man went to a secret place, dug a jar of honey out of the earth, and gave it to the black marketeer. “There!” he said. “For your good news!”
Then came an evening when the orderly rushed in and hurriedly began packing.
“Zurück, zurück,” he explained, gesticulating in the direction of Poltava.
Some signalers came and quickly removed the telephone. There was no sound of shooting, but the Germans were in such a rush you would have thought that they were under fire already. They were running down the street with armfuls of all kinds of stuff, falling down in the snow and shouting. The village women saw several orderlies weeping. They were gasping for breath. Their frozen fingers kept losing their grip on the officers’ heavy cases. They were worn out before they had even reached the edge of the village—but they had to keep going on foot, across the steppe. Their vehicles were stuck in the snow, with no fuel; the officers had already taken the last sledges.
The old men, who had served in the militia during the First World War, explained to the women, “Looks like our boys are back on the offensive!”
The divisional staff left while it was still dark. They were replaced by retreating machine gunners. With unkempt red-and-black beards, their noses peeling, their cheeks burned by the frost, they talked in loud barks. When they went out into the street, they kept firing random bursts into the air. And every night they pestered the young women and girls.
The fighting started early one morning. The villagers crept down into their cellars. There was the sound of machine-gun fire and of shell bursts. The women screamed and the children cried, while the old men said calmly, “All right, all right. There’s no need to make such a racket. It’s our own boys, with their fifteen-pounders.”
Semyon Mikheich was sitting on an upturned bucket, saying nothing at all. He was thinking.
“Well, Mikheich,” said old Kondrat, who had won a George Cross back in 1905, during the Japanese war, “it seems no one can escape the sound of fighting—not even a quiet soul like you.”
Mikheich did not reply.
The fighting grew fiercer. The pounding grew so loud that the old women wrapped shawls around the little children. And then, not far away, they heard a muffled voice.
“It’s our boys, it’s our own boys!” shouted Galya Yakimenko. “Who’ll come up with me?”
“I will!” replied Semyon Mikheich.
They climbed up out of the cellar. Evening was already drawing in. A vast sun was sinking into snow made pink by blazing fires. In the middle of the yard stood a Red Army soldier with a rifle.
“Good people,” he said quietly, “help me. I’m wounded.”
“My darling boy!” Galya shouted, and rushed to the soldier. She embraced him and led him quickly toward the hut. Semyon Mikheich just walked on.
“My darlings,” said Galya, “you boys have been shedding your blood for us! Now it’s our turn to do something. Soon we’ll have you lying down in the warm!”
From somewhere near the well came the sound of shooting. A German submachine gunner came running toward the hut. He saw a wounded Red Army soldier and a woman with her arms around him. Still running, he fired a shot. The wounded soldier, suddenly heavy, began to sink to the ground, slipping out of the arms of the woman, who was still struggling to keep him upright. The German fired a second shot. Galya Yakimenko fell to the ground.
Semyon Mikheich could never remember how it was that he had come to be holding a heavy cudgel. For the first time in his life he was in the grip of a terrible rage, a rage that was burning away the humiliations of the previous months, a rage that he felt both on his own behalf and on behalf of others—on behalf of thousands and thousands of old men, children, young girls, and women, a rage on behalf of the earth herself, abused as she had been by the enemy. He raised the cudgel high above his head and advanced on the German. Tall and majestic, with snow-white curls, this old beekeeper was the living embodiment of the Great Patriotic War.
“Halt!” shouted the German, raising his submachine gun high into the air. But the old man smashed down his cudgel.
Just then a group of Red Army soldiers appeared. Leading them was a man in a black sheepskin coat, with a grenade in his hand. It was Prokofy, the chairman of the collective farm. What he saw was a terrifying picture: dead bodies lying outside a hut, a German lying beside a doorway and—brilliantly lit by the flames—the quiet beekeeper, cudgel in hand.
Lozovenka Village, Kharkov Province, 1942
The Old Teacher*
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!”