Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2)

by Vasily Grossman

Man and Fascism cannot co-exist. If Fascism conquers, man will cease to exist and there will remain only man-like creatures that have undergone an internal transformation. But if man, man who is endowed with reason and kindness, should conquer, then Fascism must perish, and those who have submitted to it will once again become people.

But the word, the free, intelligent word has great power.

Three days later she went up to the window. A woman’s hand with dark red fingernails handed back her passport with her papers folded carefully inside. Yevgenia read the neatly written statement: ‘Residence permit refused on grounds of having no connection with the living space in question.’ ‘Son of a bitch!’ said Yevgenia loudly. Unable to restrain herself, she continued: ‘You’ve just been making fun of me, you bastard!’ She was shouting, waving her unstamped passport in the air, turning to the people sitting in the queue, wanting their support but seeing them turn away from her. For a moment the spirit of insurrection, the spirit of fury and despair, flared up in her. Women had screamed like this in 1937 – as they waited for information about husbands, sons and brothers who had been sentenced, ‘without right of correspondence’,1 to the dark halls of the Butyrka, to Matrosskaya Tishina, to Sokolniki.

Everyone feels guilty before a mother who has lost her son in a war; throughout human history men have tried in vain to justify themselves.

Sofya now understood the difference between life and existence: her life had come to an end, but her existence could drag on indefinitely. And however wretched and miserable this existence was, the thought of violent death still filled her with horror.

The first half of the twentieth century may be seen as a time of great scientific discoveries, revolutions, immense social transformations and two World Wars. It will go down in history, however, as the time when – in accordance with philosophies of race and society – whole sections of the Jewish population were exterminated. Understandably, the present day remains discreetly silent about this. One of the most astonishing human traits that came to light at this time was obedience. There were cases of huge queues being formed by people awaiting execution – and it was the victims themselves who regulated the movement of these queues.

But the obedience of the vast mass of people is undeniable. What does this tell us? That a new trait has suddenly appeared in human nature? No, this obedience bears witness to a new force acting on human beings. The extreme violence of totalitarian social systems proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.

If anyone asked why he risked his life to sing among heaps of rubble, he wouldn’t answer. It may have been from a desire to prove – to himself, to his comrades and even to the enemy – that life’s grace and charm can never be erased by the powers of destruction, even in a place that stank day and night of decaying corpses.

It was as though the buildings destroyed by bombs and shells, the central courtyard ploughed up by the war – full of mounds of earth, heaps of twisted metal, damp acrid smoke and the yellow reptilian flames of slowly-burning insulators – represented what was left to him of his own life. Had he really once sat here in a room filled with light? Had he really eaten his breakfast here before going to work – with his wife standing next to him wondering whether to give him a second helping?

Life went on like an iceberg floating through the sea: the underwater part, gliding through the cold and the darkness, supported the upper part, which reflected the waves, breathed, listened to the water splashing

But this time was his own time: he lived in it and would be bound to it even after his death.

She was like someone deep in thought, who, quite without noticing them, skirts pot-holes and steps over puddles as he walks down a familiar road.

What a wonderful power and clarity there is in speaking one’s mind. What a terrible price people paid for a few bold words.

The air was thick and heavy, almost unbreathable. Everything that lies half-buried in almost every family, stirring up now and then only to be smoothed over by love and trust, had now come to the surface. There it had spread out to fill their lives. It was as though there were nothing between father, mother and daughter save misunderstanding, suspiciousness, resentment and anger.

‘Down there no one thinks it will be over soon. People think it will take a very long time indeed.’ The orderly looked at the naked lieutenant. Bach remembered that hospital personnel had instructions to report on the morale of the wounded. And he himself had just expressed a lack of confidence in the might of the armed forces. He said very distinctly: ‘Yes, just how it will turn out is anyone’s guess.’ What had made him repeat these dangerous words? No one can understand unless he himself lives in a totalitarian empire.

Once, when I lived in the Northern forests, I thought that good was to be found neither in man, nor in the predatory world of animals and insects, but in the silent kingdom of the trees. Far from it! I saw the forest’s slow movement, the treacherous way it battled against grass and bushes for each inch of soil . . . First, billions of seeds fly through the air and begin to sprout, destroying the grass and bushes. Then millions of victorious shoots wage war against one another. And it is only the survivors who enter into an alliance of equals to form the seamless canopy of the young deciduous forest. Beneath this canopy the spruces and beeches freeze to death in the twilight of penal servitude. In time the deciduous trees become decrepit; then the heavyweight spruces burst through to the light beneath their canopy, executing the alders and the beeches. This is the life of the forest – a constant struggle of everything against everything. Only the blind conceive of the kingdom of trees and grass as the world of good . . . Is it that life itself is evil?

Life was terrible. It was as though they could understand, as though they could read in one another’s eyes, that the power which had ground them into the mud would continue – even after the war – to oppress both conquered and conquerors.

One might have expected this quarrel to be forgotten as easily as their previous quarrels. But for some reason this particular flare-up was not forgotten. If two men’s lives are in harmony, they can quarrel, be wildly unjust to one another and then forget it. But if there is some hidden discord, then any thoughtlessness, any careless word, can be a blade that severs their friendship. Such discord often lies so deep that it never reaches the surface, never becomes conscious. One violent, empty quarrel, one unkind word, appears then to be the fateful blow that destroys years of friendship.

their well-being. Liss had also noticed that the appearance of more limited minds in the higher echelons always heralded some sinister turn of events. The controllers of the social mechanism elevated the dogmatists only in order to entrust them with especially bloody tasks. These simpletons became temporarily intoxicated with power, but on the completion of their tasks they usually disappeared; sometimes they shared the fate of their victims.

People are able to overcome fear: children pluck up their courage and enter a dark room, soldiers go into battle, a young man can leap into an abyss with only a parachute to save him. But what about this other fear, this fear that millions of people find insuperable, this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the State . . . ? No, no! Fear alone cannot achieve all this. It was the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality, that justified today’s pharisees, hypocrites and writers of denunciations in the name of the future, that explained why it was right to elbow the innocent into the ditch in the name of the happiness of the people. This was what enabled you to turn away from children whose parents had been sent to camps. This was why it was right for a woman – because she had failed to denounce an innocent husband – to be torn away from her children and sent for ten years to a concentration camp. The magic of the Revolution had joined with people’s fear of death, their horror of torture, their anguish when the first breath of the camps blew on their faces.

What Khmelkov didn’t understand was that it wasn’t Zhuchenko’s greater guilt that made him so disturbing. What was disturbing was that Zhuchenko’s behaviour could be explained by some terrible, innate depravity – whereas he himself was still a human being. And he was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under Fascism, there is an easier option than survival – death.

A man may be led by fate, but he can refuse to follow. He may be a mere tool in the hands of destructive powers, but he knows it is in his interest to assent to this. Fate and the individual may have different ends, but they share the same path.

‘Just think,’ he went on in a quiet voice, ‘you only have to get talking over a glass of tea and everyone’s full of suspicion, you get summoned you know where . . .’

Suddenly the road and the ruined house were caught in the rays of the setting sun. The empty eye-sockets of the burnt-out building seemed to fill with frozen blood. The ploughed-up, soot-covered snow turned golden. The dark red cave of the horse’s innards was lit up. The snow eddying across the road turned into a whirl of bronze. The light of evening can reveal the essence of a moment. It can bring out its emotional and historical significance, transforming a mere impression into a powerful image. The evening sun can endow patches of soot and mud with thousands of voices; with aching hearts we sense past joys, the irrevocability of loss, the bitterness of mistakes and the eternal appeal of hope.

Adam, dear, faithful Adam: the purest souls are constantly and inevitably a prey to doubt. The world is always dominated by limited men, men with an unshakeable conviction of their own rightness. The purest souls never take great decisions or hold sway over States.

Sparrows were busying themselves in the straw beside the entrance to the cow-shed. Zhenya had once said that sparrows were her favourite bird . . . And now he was on fire – just like a house. The beams had given way. The ceiling was falling in. Cups and plates were crashing to the floor. Cupboards were toppling over. Books and pillows were tumbling about, flying through the smoke and the sparks like birds . . . ‘I shall be grateful all my life for everything pure and noble that you have given me. But what can I do? The past is stronger than I am. I can’t kill it, I can’t forget it . . . Don’t blame me – not because I’m not guilty, but because neither of us know quite what I am guilty of . . . Forgive me, forgive me, I’m crying for us both.’

How strange man is. Viktor had found the strength to renounce life itself – and now he seemed unable to refuse candies and cookies. But how can one just push off an omnipotent hand when it strokes your hair and pats you on the back?

Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed – while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.