Babi Yar, page 17
My mother and grandmother scraped together all our stores of food and dried peel, brushed up every crumb of food, scratched their heads trying to work out exactly how much we should eat each day, devised ways of making pancakes from potatoes and peas. They had to fry without any fat. My grandfather was furious when he remembered Uncle Peter:
‘What did you want to go and give that scoundrel a pot of lard for? He’s got a good job with the Bolsheviks and he’ll be able to eat his fill out there in the Urals, and yet you went and gave him our last pot of lard!’
And so we started to economize.
It was a new word in my vocabulary, and I rather liked it. I had a little box hidden away on the stove in which I began to build up my own private reserves. I never ate the whole of anything that Grandma gave me, especially if it was dried bread. I used always to hide a bit of it away against the day when there would be nothing at all left and I would be able to offer everybody food from my store.
There was an old nut tree with long, overhanging branches growing next to our house. Every autumn Grandma used to pick a whole bag of nuts and keep them on one side for Christmas. This bag now became our emergency rations and our last hope.
My grandfather and I climbed the fence and set about digging the land belonging to the vegetable farm, from time to time coming across a few potatoes that had been left in the ground. I would simply scream with delight whenever I found one.
On Peter-Paul Square we combed through the little garden and managed to collect half a sack of chestnuts. Those wild horse-chestnuts are sharp and bitter to the taste, but when they are dried and roasted they are not so bad. If you’re really hungry they are even quite tasty; it’s all a matter of getting used to them. At the time I was reading Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, and as I read I ate the chestnuts that had been dried on the stove. As a result I have associated Sholokhov’s book ever since with the taste of chestnuts. Despite the passing of the years, and the number of times I have re-read it and seen it as a film, and even written examination papers about it, the taste of chestnuts still lingers on!
One morning, as she was washing herself, my mother commented:
‘How extraordinary—I can feel all the bones in my face.’
I started to probe my own face, and found I could feel how the thin skin was drawn so tightly over it that I could study the whole bone structure. As I kept on poking and probing I began to feel quite ill at ease.
‘Eat, eat.’ For days on end the little worm of hunger was gnawing away inside my stomach. ‘What would you like to eat?’ At night I dreamt of real meals, of luscious, luxurious dinners; but I was very strong-willed and I would go for days eating hardly anything but the chestnuts. Grandma used to wash the potato peelings and grate them down to make pancakes. They were sort of bitter-sweet, but they made a good meal.
We kept a flat brick in the pantry to put frying-pans and saucepans on. Scores of times I made the mistake of thinking it was a loaf of bread, and finally I threw it out. I simply couldn’t bear to see it in the pantry any longer.
Suddenly the word went around that the authorities in Kurenyovka were opening a canteen for starving children. My mother hurried off to see about it, and I was issued with a special card. The first time I went along there was with Lala.
The canteen had been set up in Bondar Lane in what used to be the nursery school. We entered the large building, full of ragged, skinny children of all ages, from the very youngest up to thirteen year olds. But it was terribly quiet there; the only noise was the cook’s ladle knocking against the bowls.
We stood in a queue to be served and each of us received a plateful of real hot soup. We carried our plates across to the table, sat ourselves down and, so long as we ate, we were happy. I lingered over every spoonful, held the soup in my mouth and strained it through my teeth before swallowing it, feeling each mouthful as it went down inside me and produced a lovely sense of warmth, although there was nothing in that soup but water and wheat grains, nothing at all. And the children would sit there so quietly, none of them making a fuss, some of them rather shamefacedly licking their plates with their tongues.
We started going down every day for our plate of soup as if it were some miraculous gift from above, and I went down regularly all through the winter, always trying to get there just before it closed, because towards the end the soup was thicker at the bottom, and I used to watch greedily to see how deeply the woman serving the soup dipped her ladle in.
Lala’s mother worked as a forewoman in the canning factory and was a good friend of my mother’s. When she went out to work she used to leave her little girl with my grandmother, and I used to look after her like a sister when we were very young. Later we went to different schools and I acquired a lot of rowdy friends among the boys, while her friends were all girls. But with the opening of the canteen we again became inseparable.
Lala’s mother was a party member and was evacuated on her own, leaving her daughter behind with her sister, an elderly, bad-tempered and unsociable spinster who taught German. They bore the oddly non-Russian name of Engstrem. But there are plenty of names like that in the world, I suppose.
On one occasion after we had been to the canteen we dropped into Lala’s home. There to my astonishment I saw a big loaf of real fresh bread on the table, a pot of jam and carrier-bags.
I was literally struck dumb.
‘We have it issued to us,’ Lala said.
‘Where?’
I very nearly ran off at once shouting: ‘Granny, how come you didn’t know they’re giving food out and we’re not getting any; go down there at once!’
Lala showed me a circular they had received. It said that Volksdeutsche were to report on such-and-such a day to a certain shop, bringing with them their shopping bags and pots.
‘What’s that mean—Volksdeutsche?’
‘It means we’re half German—almost Germans.’
‘Are you really Germans?’
‘No, we are Finns. But the Finns are an Aryan people, Volksdeutsche. My aunt says that I am going to attend a school for Volksdeutsche and become a translator like her.’
‘So you’ve got yourselves nicely fixed up,’ I muttered, still not quite grasping the complicated situation —I had always known Lala as a friend, almost a sister with whom I had shared everything, and now, all of a sudden, she was an Aryan, and I was something lower …
[In the old days it had been the party elite who had lived well, received all they wanted from special shops and never had to stand in queues. Now it was the same for the Aryans. Then it was the Communists; now it was the Aryans.] I felt ready to burst with a mixture of rage and hunger. So the shops were all closed for us, so we had to munch horse chestnuts, while they were doing all right!
‘So that’s it, eh? Volksdeutsche,’ I said solemnly. ‘And you still keep going to the canteen for starving children, you little horror!’
Off I went, slamming the door so violently that I felt a little ashamed. But I went on hating her for many a long year, although somewhere deep inside me I understood that it wasn’t really Lala’s fault.
I GO INTO BUSINESS
By this time everybody knew that Shurka Matso had not been sent to Babi Yar, that he was at home but never went out anywhere; his mother was keeping him hidden. She was Russian herself, but had been married to a Jew, which made her son a little Jew.
When Matso finally decided to run the risk of leaving his house, the first thing he did was to rush round to see me, and I hardly recognized him: he was as skinny as a stray kitten, suffering from terrible hunger, with a bluish look about him, and his eyes glistening like little lamps. You could see that they were really in a bad way.
‘Let’s go down the market and sell matches. You come with me, ’cos I’m scared to go on my own’—he shook his little bag full of boxes of matches. ‘Mum asked me to say that you shouldn’t call me Matso. My name is Krysan. Alexander—from the Greek Alexandros or Alexandris. I am Alexander Krysan —please don’t give me away … ’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So we’ll call you Alexandrat, chairman of the dead rats.’
He smiled weakly, and I dashed off to my grandmother.
‘Give me some matches. We’re going down to the market.’
Grandma had a stock of about fifteen boxes of matches, and, after some hesitation, she handed over ten of them. After all, she could simply keep the fire going all the time, or she could slip next door for a hot coal—there was no real need for matches.
It was very cold out of doors. Shurka was shivering in his light overcoat and kept looking around him like a hunted thing, as if he were in a zoo with the wild animals loose.
The market was almost empty. The price of matches was well known—ten roubles a box. We set them out in nice tidy piles on the bare counter of a market-stall and stood there waiting.
Next to us an old woman was selling saccharine. She had it wrapped up in little packets, like the ones they sell powders in at the chemist’s, and people did not yet understand what it was. But the old woman was singing loud its praises, saying it was sweet, better than sugar and that one packet was enough for four cups of tea. Goodness only knows where it came from or how so much of it appeared all of a sudden, but throughout the war and for several years afterwards I never saw any sugar, but only saccharine.
Somebody bought a box of matches, and I received for it a crisp ten-rouble note—and that was the end of me. I had money. Money! Real money, with which I could already go and buy enough saccharine for four cups of tea. Shurka was cold and miserable, but I started to feel warm and I waited eagerly for more and more people to buy from me. For the next box I got one German mark, and at last we were able to examine real German money. The exchange at the time was one German mark to ten Soviet roubles. The mark was a small, yellowish-brown note with eagles and swastikas, half as big as our yellowish-brown rouble, on which the stars and hammer and sickle already began to look rather out of place.
By the time it was dark we had managed to sell all our matches and we had money. Our teeth were chattering from excitement and we eyed greedily the potatoes in piles of three on the stalls and the tumblers full of flour. We each bought a couple of pounds of bread and a packet of saccharine.
That evening we had a party at home—everybody was drinking tea with little crystals of saccharine in it and had real bread to eat. I was bursting with modest pride. I already knew what I would be doing the next day —selling nuts.
Shurka had nothing left to sell, so I went down on my own. I just guessed the price to ask—three roubles a nut, or thirty pfennigs—and people started buying them off me … Not many, but they bought.
Then a boy from next door appeared, Vovka Babarik, once a friend of mine but later my enemy. He slapped a three-rouble note down on the counter and chose himself a nut. A minute later he was back again.
‘Change it. It’s a bad one.’
‘And how do I know; maybe you had a bad one in your pocket,’ I said, because I was greedy for every single rouble.
‘Look here—that’s one of your nuts!’ and he shoved the two halves under my nose; it certainly was rotten inside.
‘You can still eat it!’ I argued, holding on to my precious bag of nuts with trembling hands.
‘Change it, Semerik, you greedy devil, or give me my three roubles back.’
‘Not me! You bought it, and that’s that,’ I said desperately, although deep inside I felt I was being pretty mean.
He made a move at me with his fist. But I was ready for him and dived underneath the counter. He came after me. I dashed off between the rows of stalls, ducking under the counters, holding my bag tightly, and I was ready to run as far as Podol rather than give up the three roubles. Vovka got tired of chasing me, stopped and, eyeing me with great scorn, said:
‘All right, Semerik, troo-too-too—three buckets of milk—’ there was loathing in his voice — ‘you skunk. We shall meet again.’
It was indeed our fate to meet again, and at the end I’ll tell you about it …
At that time you had to be careful how you moved about the city, but I was enjoying a sudden feeling of greed and satisfaction at having obtained three roubles for nothing at all.
At one time Vovka Babarik and I had been good friends, though he was somewhat older than I was. Our friendship came to an end when I let his birds out. He was a keen bird-fancier, and I used to go along with him and help him and spend hours looking at his goldfinches, siskins and tits. But later on I started urging him to let them out. I would say: ‘All right, why don’t you just catch them, keep them for a while, and then let them go. Otherwise they have to stay in their cages for ever until they die. I’m sorry for them.’ But he couldn’t bring himself to let them go. So one day he hung the cages out in the trees in the garden. Just as I came along he had gone off somewhere, and I opened the doors of all the cages and then ran away. He spent two weeks looking for me everywhere, trying to catch me and give me a hiding.
I had very few nuts left when Shurka came running up.
‘I’ve got hold of some papers. Do you want half?’
He had a basketful of cigarette papers.
‘A man I know got them in the looting and doesn’t know what to do with them—doesn’t smoke himself. He’s selling them at ten packets for a rouble, and we can sell them for a rouble apiece! He let me have them on tick for the time being. I thought there’s a lot of smokers, they’re bound to buy them.’
I took half of them from him on the spot and began to feel that I was really a great businessman. After all, 900 per cent profit on every packet of cigarette papers—it was enough to turn your head. And it was so easy—all you had to do was to stand there and shout: ‘Who wants cigarette papers? A rouble a packet!’
The papers were in little booklets of a hundred leaves—you simply tore one out and rolled yourself a fag from cheap tobacco. But the damned ignorant smokers of Kurenyovka had already got into the habit of rolling their cigarettes from the pages of Ukrainskoye Slovo, and business was very slack. Only a rouble, ten beastly little pfennigs, yet they were too mean, only glancing at us and walking past. Stingy devils!
To try and attract attention I constructed a little house from the packets, with their fancy labels on the outside. A woman was walking past with a little boy, and when he saw what I’d done his face lit up:
‘Mummy—buy me one!’
She had a look and stood there hesitating. I pleaded with her to buy one. The little boy thought that the papers inside the booklet were just as pretty and he was going to be disappointed. But I didn’t care; all I cared about was the rouble.
‘No, it’s a waste of money!’ his mother said and led him away.
I watched her go off with hatred in my eyes.
On the first day Shurka and I managed to sell only ten packets. But that was enough to buy us a hundred grammes of bread each, which we ate right there in the square, and I again had a great sense of pride at being able to earn my keep.
‘And we can sell newspapers and clean shoes!’ Shurka said, trying to think up other ways of making money. His eyes glistened with the fever of starvation.
And it was on all this that we spent our time, busy at the market from morning till night. My grandfather was right: a new life really had started for me.
BOLIK COMES BACK
Water won’t flow under a rock, and if you want to do business you have to keep on the move. You can’t afford to let the grass grow under your feet. So we split the market into spheres of influence and, to the best of our ability, restricted our operations to our own halves, hanging around the stalls and pestering people at the entrance.
‘Here you are then, cheaper than mushrooms, top quality cigarette paper! Come along now, roll up, let’s see your money! Here you are, sir, buy yourself a smoke—good for young and old, once you light up the smoke’ll come out your arse! Ugh!—mean old bastard from Kurenyovka … ’
Business was terribly slack; we barely managed to scrape enough together for a chunk of bread. But I was still going down for my plate of soup at the canteen, so it was just enough to make sure I didn’t die of hunger.
One day I was standing at the entrance to the market, trying to sell my wares, when I saw a strangely familiar figure staggering down the street dressed in rags and tatters.
‘Shurik!’—I let out a scream that covered the whole market. ‘Bolik’s back!’
It really was Bolik. My God, he could hardly drag himself along. And the way he looked—thin as a rake, cuts and scratches all over him and covered in dirt from head to foot.
He had returned from an unsuccessful attempt at being evacuated. He seemed every bit as tough as our cat Titus—no matter where you took him he’d always get back home.
We went back to his home with him, where Aunt Nina burst into tears and a plaintive stream of words: ‘Oh dear, oh dear, my only little boy, my precious darling, what have they done to him!’ The little darling stuffed himself with potato and crusts soaked in water, shaking and shuddering the whole time, while he told us how his train had been bombed and the whole thing had caught fire, and then German tanks had appeared ahead of them, and he had abandoned the train and set off back home along the tracks.
He had been sleeping in haystacks and fed by kind-hearted women in the villages, and here he was again.
‘Why didn’t you bring a machine-gun back with you?’ I asked.
Bolik dismissed this with a gesture of his hand.
‘Listen, lads, we’ll try and find the partisans. And if we don’t find ’em the three of us can be partisans ourselves.’
We were delighted—this was the old, fighting Bolik we knew; he’d had a rough time, but his spirit was undaunted. So all was well, and off we went round the streets.
The railway lines on the embankment were already covered with yellow rust, and in between them we found lots of spent cartridge cases. At this the three of us became excited, and we went off along the embankment, carefully examining the ground under our feet.
