Read Online A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Vasily Grossman
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race is continuing: who is faster, the Germans or us? We give a lift in our truck to the medical personnel from a regional hospital. The doctors aren’t used to walking. They are utterly exhausted. We give them a lift to Belev. The elderly doctor thanks us touchingly with lofty phrases like: ‘You’ve saved our lives.’ The old noblesse oblige . 1 The ‘doctoresses’ don’t even say goodbye to us. They pick up their bundles and hurry to the platform of the railway station.
Belev, with a steep drive into the town, horrendous mud, narrow and not so narrow streets, is unable to receive the whole mass pouring in from village roads. Lots of mad rumours are circulating, ridiculous and absolutely panic-stricken. Suddenly, there is a mad stormof firing. It turns out that someone has switched on the street lights, and soldiers and officers opened rifle and pistol fire at the lamps in order to put them out. If only they had fired like this at the Germans. Those who don’t know the reason for this shooting flee in all directions. They think that the Germans have broken through. What else could it be?
We sleep in a monstrously poor room. Such terrible, black poverty is only possible in a town, in a slum. The landlady, a real mastodon with a husky voice, rattles, swears, hisses at children and objects. I thought – we all thought – her a fury, a spawn of hell, but then we see that she is kind, generous, caring. With what anxiety she makes us rag beds on the floor, and how she treats us to the food!
At night, in the darkness I hear someone sobbing. ‘Who’s that?’ The landlady replies in a husky whisper: ‘It’s me. I’ve got seven children, I am lamenting them.’ This poverty, this urban poverty is somehow worse than the village sort. It’s deeper and blacker, an all-embracing poverty, deprived even of air and light.
In an izba , there are peacetime newpapers pasted on the walls instead of wallpaper. We look at them and say: ‘Look, it’s all about peacetime.’ Yesterday we saw a house with wartime newpapers instead of wallpaper. If that house survives, people will one day remark: ‘Look at these wartime newspapers!’
We spend the night near Belev, in the house of a young teacher. She is very pretty and very silly, an absolute lamb. A girlfriend of hers is staying there for the night, too. She is also very young but not so pretty. They talk throughout the night in a whisper, arguing passionately. In the morning we learn that our teacher is going to abandon the house and move east, while her friend has decided to go west to join her relatives who are living on the other side of Belev. That means to return to [enemy] occupied territory.
Our teacher asks us to give her a lift. We agree. I call our one-and-a-half-ton truck the Noah’s Ark. It has already saved so many dozens of people from the flood that came from the west. The two friends’ eyes are red in the morning from weeping all night. These days everyone cries at night and is calm, indifferent and patient in the daytime. We pack our things, and our young landlady comes out to the truck with a tiny bundle. She does not want to take hermirror, her curtains, her perfume bottles, not even her dresses. ‘I don’t need anything,’ she says. I think I’ve underestimated the spiritual wisdom in this eighteen-year-old girl.
We try to persuade her friend to go with us. Her face is dead, the lips are pressed together tightly, she says nothing and does not look at us. The two friends say goodbye coldly, they don’t even shake hands.
‘Start the engine, let’s go!’ Yes, the problems these eighteen-year-old girls now have to resolve are no trifle. At the last minute, we go into the sweet little room of the girl who is already sitting in the truck. It is nobody’s room now. We polish our boots using face cream and white collars. I think we do that to emphasise to ourselves that life has been ruined.
1 In the original, blagorodnaya kost , literally
Belev, with a steep drive into the town, horrendous mud, narrow and not so narrow streets, is unable to receive the whole mass pouring in from village roads. Lots of mad rumours are circulating, ridiculous and absolutely panic-stricken. Suddenly, there is a mad stormof firing. It turns out that someone has switched on the street lights, and soldiers and officers opened rifle and pistol fire at the lamps in order to put them out. If only they had fired like this at the Germans. Those who don’t know the reason for this shooting flee in all directions. They think that the Germans have broken through. What else could it be?
We sleep in a monstrously poor room. Such terrible, black poverty is only possible in a town, in a slum. The landlady, a real mastodon with a husky voice, rattles, swears, hisses at children and objects. I thought – we all thought – her a fury, a spawn of hell, but then we see that she is kind, generous, caring. With what anxiety she makes us rag beds on the floor, and how she treats us to the food!
At night, in the darkness I hear someone sobbing. ‘Who’s that?’ The landlady replies in a husky whisper: ‘It’s me. I’ve got seven children, I am lamenting them.’ This poverty, this urban poverty is somehow worse than the village sort. It’s deeper and blacker, an all-embracing poverty, deprived even of air and light.
In an izba , there are peacetime newpapers pasted on the walls instead of wallpaper. We look at them and say: ‘Look, it’s all about peacetime.’ Yesterday we saw a house with wartime newpapers instead of wallpaper. If that house survives, people will one day remark: ‘Look at these wartime newspapers!’
We spend the night near Belev, in the house of a young teacher. She is very pretty and very silly, an absolute lamb. A girlfriend of hers is staying there for the night, too. She is also very young but not so pretty. They talk throughout the night in a whisper, arguing passionately. In the morning we learn that our teacher is going to abandon the house and move east, while her friend has decided to go west to join her relatives who are living on the other side of Belev. That means to return to [enemy] occupied territory.
Our teacher asks us to give her a lift. We agree. I call our one-and-a-half-ton truck the Noah’s Ark. It has already saved so many dozens of people from the flood that came from the west. The two friends’ eyes are red in the morning from weeping all night. These days everyone cries at night and is calm, indifferent and patient in the daytime. We pack our things, and our young landlady comes out to the truck with a tiny bundle. She does not want to take hermirror, her curtains, her perfume bottles, not even her dresses. ‘I don’t need anything,’ she says. I think I’ve underestimated the spiritual wisdom in this eighteen-year-old girl.
We try to persuade her friend to go with us. Her face is dead, the lips are pressed together tightly, she says nothing and does not look at us. The two friends say goodbye coldly, they don’t even shake hands.
‘Start the engine, let’s go!’ Yes, the problems these eighteen-year-old girls now have to resolve are no trifle. At the last minute, we go into the sweet little room of the girl who is already sitting in the truck. It is nobody’s room now. We polish our boots using face cream and white collars. I think we do that to emphasise to ourselves that life has been ruined.
1 In the original, blagorodnaya kost , literally
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