Babi Yar, page 23
I walked on. At the covered market there was a long queue of people, about two thousand of them, waiting to receive their rations of bread. With the approach of winter ration cards had been issued—workers were to receive less than two pounds of bread a week, other people only half a pound.
My grandparents, my mother and I had four cards between us, each for half a pound, and I used to spend a whole day fighting in the queue to bring back less than one whole loaf of fresh bread. We had never seen such bread before.
It was an ersatz bread: very crumbly and dry, with a crust like cardboard covered with millet husks. It was baked from some flour substitute made from maize tops, millet husks, barley and horse-chestnuts. It was gritty to eat and had a bitter-sweet taste. It was difficult to digest, but, of course, I treasured it, dividing my half-pound up into seven pieces—just over an ounce a day—never touching my next day’s ration.
My grandfather and I could not forgive ourselves for having gathered so few chestnuts in the parks before the snow began to fall. The city authorities now issued a printed appeal encouraging people to use chestnuts for food and explaining with scientific precision just how many calories and how much protein and starch they had in them. But we had been eating chestnuts for ages. The Germans were really extraordinary people —fancy trying to teach us Ukrainians what to eat, when we had lived through the famine of the ‘thirties … We could teach anybody that business.
My grandfather fell sick. What my grandmother and mother did to find a doctor and what it cost is a whole epic in itself. Gramp was found to have stones in his bladder, and he was operated on in the October Hospital beyond the Bessarabka market.
What happened to this hospital was a very strange story. Hospitals were usually taken over to serve as barracks and the patients were simply shot, but for some reason they left the October Hospital alone, and it went on functioning until the summer of 1942 when at last they shut it down. Even stranger was the fact that the wounded Red Army men who had been admitted under Soviet rule remained in it, and the Germans for some reason or other did not touch them.
The hospital kept going by using up the old supplies of medicaments, but there was nothing to eat. Once a day the patients were given a ladleful of hot water with a few grains of something floating in it. Patients from the city lived on what their friends and relations brought in for them, and the wounded soldiers lived on what was handed on to them. It was my job to take Gramp his food parcels and this became a real nightmare for me.
Even as I entered the hospital building I found myself in the doorway surrounded by patients. They didn’t rush at me, nor did they shout or snatch at me; they simply stood there in silence, craning their necks and looking. I would push my way through them, take a white coat from the hook and go on up the stairs.
Wide and ornate, the staircase led up to the second floor, and there were patients standing in a line all along the wall, looking like skeletons, with waxen faces and bandaged heads, many of them on crutches and none of them saying anything. They simply stared with their feverish, half-crazed eyes and from time to time shyly stretched out a grey, cupped hand.
I would shake my parcel and push into their hands microscopic bits of crust and potato, loathing myself as I did it—such a small benefactor among those grown men. Then, when I reached the ward at last, my grandfather would guess immediately and start wailing:
‘What the devil do you think you’re doing, giving stuff away, pretending to be so well-off. Don’t you give those crooks anything; they’re going to die anyway, and here am I dying too!’
I no longer knew what to do. Gramp really did look like a living corpse. They had already operated on him and inserted a little tube through his stomach, for his water, with a bottle attached to the end. Gramp was so weak he could hardly stir, but he could swear like a fit man, and he clutched on to the basket, stuffed the food into the little cupboard, moved a stool up against the door and for safety’s sake kept his hand resting on it.
In the next bed lay a patient who had lost his legs. He had a black beard and an expression of suffering on his face, like the Christ on my grandmother’s icon.
‘He’s a wicked old man, your grandad, son,’ he said in a hollow voice, turning only his eyes towards me. ‘He’s already managed to quarrel with everybody in the ward … But come over here a minute, I want to tell you something.’
I went across to him, only sorry that I hadn’t kept him a crust.
‘Gather up the fallen leaves,’ he said, ‘dry them well, clean them off and bring them here. I am longing for a smoke.’
I nodded: whatever else was lacking, there were plenty of leaves to be had.
‘The leaves of the cherry tree are the best,’ he said wistfully. ‘Cherry leaves.’
Back home I spent a long time scratching about in the snow, scraping up the blackened, frozen leaves, sorting out the ones from the cherry trees, drying them on the stove and cleaning them off. But when, a couple of days later, I again arrived with the food parcel, it turned out that the legless man had already died. I cannot tell you how guilty I felt … Had I known I would have made a special journey sooner so that he could at least have had a smoke before he died.
The other patients eagerly took the little bag of leaves from me, and later on I brought them more. But I’ve no idea what happened to those patients after the hospital was closed down.
* Count Bartolomei Rastrelli (1700-1771), the architect who was responsible for major palaces in St Petersburg (Leningrad).[ Tr.]
BUSINESS BECOMES DANGEROUS
I used to start my normal working day by taking a sack and going down to the corner of Kirillovskaya and Syretskaya Streets, where a dozen or so other traders like me would already have gathered. The trams carting peat to the canning factory turned off there, and we would leap on to the wagons like locusts, throw off pieces of peat, then gather them up and divide them between us.
A tram drawing goods wagons came down the road, with a guard in a long fur-lined coat and felt boots sitting on the front platform. We leapt on to the step and then saw that the wagon was not carrying peat but beetroot.
We really descended on them like young wolves. They were frozen hard, landed with a thump on the roadway and bounced about like little footballs. I managed to hang on in a good place and stayed throwing them off longer than the others, until I saw the guard standing over me in his coat and I slipped away from under his very hands.
But while I was running back a fight had started up on the roadway. The mere sight of the beetroot had made the others wild, and they had forgotten about dividing them up. The more dishonest ones had not thrown any off, but only gathered them off the roadway, and there was nothing left for fools like me. I was so hurt by this that I really lost my temper, because I had thrown off more than anybody. I let out a filthy swear-word—for the first time in my life, I believe—and rushed into the fray. I snatched a beetroot away from a small boy and stuffed it under my coat, but then I got such a punch in the eyes that I saw stars and for a moment was unable to see anything. Then someone tripped me and I fell to the ground, where I covered my head with my hands, while somebody kicked me viciously in the side trying to make me turn over to get the beetroot off me. If at that moment I had had a knife or a gun, I would have murdered the lot of them; I would have murdered them, screaming like a little animal. I don’t know how it might have ended if another tram had not appeared.
I picked myself up, trembling and quite alone in the world, like a young wolf, with only myself to rely on, and immediately saw what to do. While all the others were hanging along the sides of the wagons with the guard swearing at them, stumbling across the beet, hitting at their hands and trying to drive them away, I hopped on to the front platform which he had abandoned.
The steps up to the platform were very awkward, no wider than my hand, and instead of handles they had a thin iron rail welded on. I seized hold of the rail and, with one felt boot on the step, I stretched out as far as I could and started knocking one beet after the other off the wagon—and at that moment my foot slipped. I hung there, holding on to the rail by my hands, watching the grey steel wheel rolling along the grey steel rail and my legs dangling in front of it. I had no feeling in my hands—they were numb from the ice-cold rail—and I hadn’t a drop of strength left to pull myself up by. Way up above me I could see the guard who had turned towards me; I let out a thin, brief shout: ‘Help!’
He realized at once what had happened, grabbed me by the arms and drew me up on to the platform. Then he pulled on the rope to separate the pole from the overhead wires. The tram ran on a little and came to a standstill.
With a sudden jerk I twisted myself out of his hands, jumped down on to the roadway and ran as I had never run before. The tram-driver and the guard shouted to each other and cursed but I did not turn round. I ran all the way home, burst into the barn, bolted myself in and sat there on a box until I had recovered. Then I went indoors and triumphantly laid three beetroots before my grandmother. She threw up her hands in amazement.
I had a little rest and then got out my sledge, a little chopper and some rope, and set off for Pushcha-Voditsa.
It was a beautiful, well-kept pine forest, in which every single tree used to be cared for. It was considered to be a health-giving forest, and there were lots of nursing-homes in it, especially for people suffering from tuberculosis, as well as enormous country houses in the best parts of the forest belonging to government officials.
The Germans had started cutting the forest down. Not the Germans themselves, but workers who were paid a pound of bread a week for doing it. They were felling the trees along the tramline, so that they could be easily transported, and there were already big clearings which had been cut in the forest with stacks of logs in them. The saws rang out, the tractors chugged away, and the tops of the fir trees trembled and shed their snow and then came sailing down, to hit the ground with a crash like an explosion.
A great number of old women and children were swarming around with their sledges. In the clearings everything had been cleaned up; they had even gathered up the pine needles, and only the thick, strong-smelling stumps of the trees remained sticking up. Every time a tree was felled the women and children rushed at it from every side, while the workers swore at them and tried to drive them away.
Having made sure in which direction the next tree was going to fall I rushed through the deep snow towards it and managed to be first on the spot. There was no need for my chopper—there were so many branches broken off—and I had just grabbed hold of the biggest when I heard a shout and saw the top of another fir tree descending out of the grey sky right on top of me, getting bigger and bigger every second. The reason why I had been first was that no one had been allowed to go there yet.
I dived into a bush, fell and rolled over, trying to get my body as far away as possible; then came the explosion, and the sound of the branches and cones falling like shrapnel, and for a second I could see nothing for the snow that hung in the air.
‘What are you trying to do—you nearly killed someone!’ a woman called out.
‘That’ll teach him not to go there,’ the workmen replied. ‘Now, you little devil, get out of there or you’ll cop it!’
I dragged my sledge out of the mass of branches; by sheer luck it was undamaged, and I scrambled around the clearing. The workmen were shouting at me, but I couldn’t leave the place with empty hands. I had learnt my lesson, however, and I didn’t dash in first, but snatched the branches from under the women’s noses, got wet through in the struggle, and gathered such a pile of branches on my sledge that I could hardly move it.
Still, it was only difficult in the deep snow: it would slide all right on the roadway. I pulled and tugged, too greedy to take off a single branch, grabbing hold of bushes and tree-stumps to help me along, moving only a few feet at a time. When I finally dragged it out on to the tramline steam was rising from my body and my hands were shaking like a paralytic’s. A pathway had been beaten down between the rails, and it took me some time to drag the sledge across the rails on to it. But then it became far easier to pull the sledge, and off I went, only hoping that no tram would appear.
At the edge of the wood was the forest-keeper’s house. I had forgotten about it and I became aware of the danger only when I caught sight of a pile of wood and two men waiting calmly for me. I looked behind me; but I was quite alone on the tram-track. The others no doubt went round the outside of the wood. The men said:
‘Stop. Undo it.’
My heart sank. I undid it.
‘Take off that piece. And that. And that.’
I meekly removed the biggest branches, but they left me the smallest pieces and the pine-needles. Then they said threateningly:
‘Next time we catch you we’ll hand you over to the police.’
Thank God they let me go, at least. So off I went again, thinking to myself: It’s an ill wind—the sledge ran very easily now. On the downhill parts I simply let it go, jumped on the pine-needles and had a ride.
At night I went off with the Gorokhovsky brothers to steal Christmas trees. Christmas was getting near, and little fir trees were selling at the market for twenty-five roubles apiece. It wasn’t all that much, but it was still half a pound of bread.
There were plantations of young saplings along the edge of Pushcha-Voditsa, beyond Priorka. We tried not to think about the fact that we were breaking the curfew—there was nothing we could do about it, we just had to take a chance. The patrols were almost never seen around Priorka, and we used only the little back streets. Because of our lack of experience we took an axe with us. We would have been better off with a little saw. The sound of an axe carries a long way, and then there’s the noise you make when you twist and bend the tree to break it off the stump … But everything went off all right; we put the trees on our shoulders and the tops trailed along behind us.
I put my fir tree away in the barn; but then greed began to get the better of me. I felt strong enough and eager enough to go on hauling fir trees the whole night. I found an old saw, listened to make sure that there were no patrols about and set off again, on my own this time. I picked a fir tree that wasn’t too big, with the intention of cutting two the same size. I sawed the trunk through with practically no noise at all and then, when it fell, I heard a bark and a shout in the distance:
‘Come here, you!’
I seized hold of the fir tree (could I leave such loot behind?) and bolted. I didn’t dare look round, but I could sense my pursuers behind me, and the dog’s yelping overtook me. The snow was deep and made it difficult to run, but it held back the dog too. I swung the fir tree round, hoping to drive the dog away with it, but it kept running alongside me. I no longer felt any pain, only as if something was hitting me around the legs and knees above my top boots.
I stopped and started swinging the saw furiously about. I felt really vicious, ready to kill the dog with the saw, attack it with my teeth or poke its eyes out with my fingers. But the animal kept out of my reach. I ran on, stopping from time to time, making threatening noises, hurling snow at the dog and then running farther. All dogs are afraid, just like people who behave like dogs, if you go for them or throw something at them. You have to attack them, to go for them, otherwise you are lost. Go straight for them, and they will jump back in their cowardice.
But there was a man chasing me as well. It was only later that I learnt that you had only to give him ten roubles to be able to cut down the whole plantation if you wanted to; but I didn’t know and, in any case, ten roubles! Better be bitten by the dog. Anyway, it had chased me as far as the first houses, but still hadn’t had the courage to bite me, and I hadn’t dropped the fir tree.
When I got home I felt my legs and found my trousers were all torn to pieces and my knees were bleeding. But I didn’t waste my time being sorry for myself, I sat in the barn resting and thinking about the bright side of things, about my achievements.
It had been a successful day, a very profitable day. In the first place, there were the few ounces of bread I was entitled to on my card. Then there was the plate of soup in the children’s canteen. Three beetroots. A sledge-load of fuel. Two fir trees. Goodness, I was a rich man. Of course, on the debit side there were my torn trousers; that really would have been a great loss if I had not been wearing some old trousers which could be patched up anyway. The most important thing was that I was still alive.
What do they teach you in books? That you have to love your fellow men and devote your life to the struggle for a better, brighter future. Which fellow men? What future, if I may ask? Whose?
DEATH
My grandfather was brought home from the hospital just before Easter. They brought him on my sledge, because he could hardly walk without assistance. He so wanted to be at home for Easter.
Would you like me to tell you what Easter, that most glorious of annual festivals, is like if it is properly celebrated?
In the first place, everything has to be ‘no worse than in the best homes’. Preparations begin already in the winter. Money is saved up and put on one side, one kopek after another, and regarded as untouchable, kept near the icons. Then flour is bought somewhere on the black market, in good time before the price rises: it is never to be found in the shops. Then the following problems arise: raisins, vanilla, cinnamon and little packets of colouring. My grandmother used to spend days on end at the market, running from one of her acquaintances to the other and carting home her spoils —some fresh sausage skins, eggs or rice. At home she would keep a sharp eye out to see that no one touched her stores. It was Lent, and my mother and I, although we were not believers, would never break the rules or do anything to upset Grandma.
