Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

The woman could no longer see anything at all except the face of the German with the handkerchief round his mouth. Not understanding what was happening to her, governed by a power she had just now seemed to control, she felt in the pocket of her jacket for a piece of bread that had been given to her the evening before by a soldier. She held it out to the German officer and said: ‘There, have something to eat.’ Afterwards, she was unable to understand what had happened to her, why she had done this. Her life was to be full of moments of humiliation, helplessness and anger, full of petty cruelties that made her lie awake at night, full of brooding resentment. There was the time she quarrelled with her neighbour who had accused her of stealing a bottle of oil; the time the chairman of the district soviet, not interested in her complaints about life in a communal flat, had her thrown out of his office; the time when her son began manoeuvring to get her out of the room they shared, when his pregnant wife called her an old whore . . . At one such moment, lying on her bed, full of bitterness, she was to remember that winter morning outside the cellar and think: ‘I was a fool then, and I’m still a fool now.’