Babi Yar, page 31
then been caught; there were people who were half, or even only a quarter Jewish; there were those who had been converted; and finally there were those who simply looked suspiciously like Jews. Radomsky delayed their end, apparently for his own pleasure, relishing the situation and devising special ways of disposing of them.]
For example, one of the ways he had devised was to make a prisoner climb a tree and then tie a rope to one of the top branches. Other prisoners were ordered to start sawing the tree down. Then they would pull on the rope, the tree would fall, and the prisoner on it would be killed. Radomsky always turned up personally to watch this scene, and they say he found it very funny. Those who were not killed in the fall were finished off by Anton with a spade.
Another of Radomsky’s amusements was to gallop into a crowd of prisoners when he was out on horseback. Those who didn’t manage to get out of the way, who were kicked by the horse or who fell would receive a bullet from Radomsky’s revolver, on the grounds that they were not fit to remain alive. More often than not this treatment was meted out to the men living in the ‘Jewish’ dugout, whom the German guards, with their typical sense of humour, called the ‘heavenly host’.
The prisoners were not issued with any clothes. As they arrived in the camp they were stripped of everything that was any good—boots, overcoats, jackets—which the police exchanged in the city for home-made spirits. Consequently everybody tried to get clothes off the corpses, and whenever anybody died in a dugout he was stripped naked in no time.
The food situation was more complicated. Apart from the morning ‘coffee’, they were given some thin soup in the middle of the day. People doing such exhausting work could not, of course, last long on such a diet, but occasionally they received parcels from outside.
Women were constantly hanging around outside the camp trying to spot their own men. Occasionally they would throw a piece of bread over the wire. If the policeman on the gate were given a litre or two of spirit he might pass a prisoner a bag of cereal or potatoes.
Every morning a special group was sent out under escort to go round the outer wires, which had a 2,200-volt charge in them, and hook out with long sticks the dogs, cats, crows and even, occasionally, hares, which had perished there in the course of the previous twenty-four hours.
They would bring them all back into the camp and then the haggling would begin. A piece of cat would be exchanged for a handful of grain, and so forth. Potato peelings could be extracted from the rubbish tip. They would put them together and boil up their own soup on the stove in the dugout, and it was thanks to this that Davydov and others like him managed to hang on to life.
One of the curses of camp life was scabies. The prisoners lived worse than animals in a hole in the ground, eaten up by thousands of insects, and those who went down with scabies were not given any treatment; they were simply shot. The wife of one prisoner, Trubakov, a carpenter, managed to get some ointment through to him, and that saved many of them from immediate execution.
A group of twenty men got together and planned an escape, but someone gave them away and all twenty were shot. All that is known of the plot is that the leader was a certain Arkadi Ivanov.
That was the way the days passed, and no one, including Davydov himself, had any idea how long the end would be delayed. The desire to live remains with us as long as we can still breathe; that is our nature.
They kept arriving and they kept dying, some on their own, some on the parade-ground, and some in the ravine.
It was a machine which went on working day after day.
GRAMP: ANTI-NAZI
It was as though we were living in a kingdom of the dead—it was practically impossible to find out what was going on in the world. We couldn’t believe the newspapers and we had no radio Maybe there were a few people who still listened to the radio and knew what was happening, but we didn’t. After a certain time, however, we no longer had any need of a radio. We had Grandpa.
He used to rush back from the market full of excitement and report to us which towns had been won back from the Germans and when, and how many aircraft had been shot down. The market was the best source of information.
‘Oh, no—Hitler won’t last!’ he would exclaim. ‘Our lads will put paid to those scoundrels—just mark my words. The Bolsheviks have learnt their lesson, they’ve come to their senses. They’re already saying definitely that there’ll be no more collective farms after the war, and they are going to allow private property and small-scale private business. After all, they could never get away with it again with the old system, the mess they made of things! Merciful Lord, let me live to see the day.’
After the failure of our last attempt at bartering things my grandfather got seriously scared. He began to loathe Hitler with all the venom of which he was capable.
The old people’s canteen was closed down, and there was no point in Grandpa going to work somewhere as a watchman because you couldn’t buy anything with what he was paid. So how was he to keep alive?
Suddenly the idea came into his head that my mother and I were a millstone round his neck. He straightway divided up such property as we had, taking the bigger and better part of it for himself.
‘You live on your own, on your side of the partition, and I’ll go bartering things and try and find a rich widow,’ he declared.
My mother only shook her head. Sometimes she would knock on his door and hand him two or three pancakes, which he would seize eagerly and eat; he was obviously terribly short of food. Nobody wanted the old clothes he took down to the market, yet he wanted so much to live to see better times when there would be scope for private enterprise and no more collective farms. For that reason he clung on to life as best he could. He envied me the money I made selling things, and he took up selling cigarettes himself. He dug over every bit of soil, even the little courtyard itself, and planted tobacco, picking the leaves and drying them, stringing them up and then shredding them with a knife. The stalks he crushed in a mortar and sold them off by the tumblerful. That was what saved him.
Occasionally the old Gardener would come and see him. Grandpa would give him unsweetened lime tea to drink and tell him stories of how, under Soviet rule, he had been his own master, had owned a cow and kept pigs for fattening, though they had caught the fever, and what wonderful sausages his wife had prepared for Easter.
‘I’ve worked all my life!’ Grandpa would complain. ‘Today I could live on my Soviet pension alone, if it weren’t for these filthy swine, these thieves and idiots! But our boys’ll kick ’em out yet, our lads’ll be back, you just mark my words! The folk realize now that it’s no good turning to others to help you out. Hitler’s taught ’em that, and the lesson’ll last ’em a thousand years!’
The hungrier he was the more his loathing increased. Lala’s grandfather died from old age, and Gramp rushed round in a state of joyous excitement.
‘Aha! There you are! He may have been a Volksdeutsch, but he died just the same!’
In the next house to ours, where Yelena Pavlovna lived, there was an empty flat left by some Jews who had been evacuated, and some aristocratic-looking Volksdeutsche arrived to take it over. Grandpa was the first to notice this.
‘Filthy devils, bourgeois swine, such posh people- don’t seem to have suffered much under Soviet rule, but just wait—too soon to celebrate yet, their time will come!’
[It was fascinating for me to see such a change come over my grandfather—it was as if he had completely lost his memory. What would my grandmother have said to him? I was sorry I couldn’t believe in God as she had done … I wouldn’t have put my trust in anything human, but would have simply prayed quietly to myself … What else could you do in this world, what could you put your hope in?
Sometimes I would talk to my cat Titus and try to elucidate his views on what was going on. His replies were somewhat obscure, and our conversations usually went something like this:
‘Titus, do some work.’
‘I’ve got a headache.’
‘Titus, go and eat.’
‘Where’s my big bowl?’
‘You are a very backward creature. What have you got in that head of yours?’
‘Brains.’
‘And what’s in your brain?’
‘Thoughts.’
‘And what’s in your thoughts?’
‘Mice.’]
RELICS OF EMPIRE
I was very curious to know exactly who the ‘wicked bourgeois’ were who had moved into the house next door. So I climbed up on to the fence.
In the courtyard was a great pile of their things which had been unloaded from a cart. A woman, very old and bent, and a youngish, intelligent-looking man in glasses were carrying the things in, trying rather clumsily to manage on their own but lacking the strength to move a heavy chest of drawers and a desk.
I hopped over the fence and offered my services.
‘Let me help you. What shall I carry?’
This produced a very strange reaction. They stood stock-still and eyed me in horror. I stood there, rather put out, while they exchanged glances and the fear in their eyes began to pass. Finally the old lady indicated with a gesture of her slender hand some little footstools and said:
‘Those—into the drawing-room, please.’
I grabbed the two stools and carried them into the house, without having any clear idea where the drawing-room was supposed to be, but I put them down anyway in the biggest of the rooms.
‘I live right here, just on the other side of the fence,’ I told the old lady. ‘You must be the new tenants?’
‘That’s right,’ she said shortly. ‘Do you have any parents?’
‘A mother,’ I said.
‘Who is your mother?’
‘My mother’s a school-teacher, but at the moment …’
‘Ah, a pedagogue,’ the old lady exclaimed. ‘So your mother’s a pedagogue. That explains it.’
‘A pedagogical upbringing,’ the man said, studying me with a strange expression on his face, ‘is hardly an expedient occupation in the light of a certain de facto depression, although from the practical point of view it is also rather sad to remark that …’
‘Mima,’ said the old lady, interrupting him, ‘the pedagogues are all that is left of the intelligent people. Listen, young man, once we have settled in we shall be very happy indeed to invite you and your mother to visit us, and, for our part, we hope to have the pleasure of visiting you too.’
I was rather taken aback by their highfalutin language, but I dutifully transported everything the old lady indicated. Then I dashed home, fetched some nails and a hammer and helped them to hang up some of their photographs in antique frames.
What I liked most among their things were the wonderful stuffed heads of animals. There was the enormous hairy head of a wild boar with fierce, bloodshot eyes, the heads of a wolf and a deer, and an elk’s antlers. They also had a great quantity of books in old bindings, a dinner-set all embossed with monograms, little china statues, but not one new book or any modern article at all.
When everything had been put in its place the old lady thanked me in very refined language and repeated her invitation to visit them.
Next day she caught sight of my mother over the fence. They got to know each other and in the evening we went to call on them.
My mother was introduced very formally to the strange-seeming Mima (his full name, it appeared, was Mikhail), who shuffled his feet, clicked his heels and kissed my mother’s hand. We sat on old Viennese chairs at a round antique table.
‘I will tell you frankly that what we were most afraid of was having really uncultured people for neighbours,’ the old lady said in a confidential tone. ‘How lucky for us that you are people of education.’
‘Cultured people, as an essential integral in the present situation—’ Mima was about to say something, but the old lady broke in:
’Mima, you are right. Culture has remained only with a few individuals. The Bolshevik terror destroyed culture along with the educated class and in their place we have an era of ignorance and the triumph of mediocrity. As for the so-called Soviet cultural workers why, in the old days the servants used to be a hundred times more cultured than they are today.’
My mother and I maintained a rather embarrassed silence. Mother was, after all, the sort of ‘cultural worker’ she was talking about. But the old lady had apparently lost her sense of time and took my mother for a prerevolutionary pedagogue.
‘We are Kobetses, you know,’ she informed us. ‘I am the widow of the late Mr Kobets. You have heard of him, of course?’
Yes, we had heard of him. The older people still called the Kurenyovka leather works the ‘Kobets’ Factory. Its owner had been executed during the revolution.
‘We had a large family,’ the old lady said, shaking her head sadly, and she started going through the names of her family one by one, adding after each one of them: ‘Executed in 1918’, ‘Killed in action with Denikin’, ‘Executed in 1937’, ‘Died in a prison camp in 1940’.
It was as though a procession of dead men had gone past the table.
‘I have two sons left,’ the old lady said. ‘Mima and Nikolya, that’s all there is left of us. And here you see all we have to our name.’
She took in the whole drawing-room with one sweeping gesture, but all those old, dilapidated pieces and the moth-eaten animal heads now produced only a feeling of depression.
‘Mima was quite a small boy when it all started,’ the old lady went on. ‘About the same age as your boy, perhaps a little older. He was studying mathematics. The Bolsheviks put him up against a wall and were going to shoot him as the offspring of a bourgeois family, but I went down on my knees and pleaded with them to spare him. They uttered a lot of threats but finally went away without shooting him, but it made such an impression on him that it affected his mind.’
‘Insanity as such, for an elementary understanding of the phenomenon, if it is differentiated into …’
‘Yes, yes, Mima,’ the old lady said quietly, without interrupting her story. ‘He spent twenty years in the Kirillovskaya Hospital—he is not at all violent and he was allowed out when I went to visit him. It is amazing that God put it into my head to take him home with me when the front line came near. We took refuge in an underground shelter, but then I got to know that they were not providing any food in the hospital, so I stopped taking him along there. They shot all the patients there, and Mima remained with me. He is my only consolation.
She stroked his head tenderly. I was very moved.
As far as appearance went there was nothing to suggest that Mima was not normal. He had an intelligent, thoughtful and very sensitive face. He wore very powerful spectacles with heavy horn rims. He had very gentle manners, even a little ingratiating, and he would listen to everything people said, even if it were about himself, with attention and the appearance of complete understanding.
‘And what about your other son?’ my mother asked.
‘Nikolya is the only lucky one; he fled abroad. He is now a taxi-driver in Paris. A taxi-driver and a translator from German into French. I had no news of him for twenty years, but now he has got in touch with us again and we have started writing to each other. He even sends us parcels—washing powder, cotton, needles and eau-de-Cologne. You must understand that it’s difficult enough for him to make a living there. Here, out of respect for our family, we are regarded as Volksdeutsche, but there he is just a Russian émigré, a taxi-driver and a translator from German to French, and there are plenty of people like that …’
‘How odd,’ my mother said, ‘from German into French.’
‘It is not the difference between the languages that is strange,’ Mima said quietly. ‘What is strange is that people are so different, that it is impossible for them to agree with one another or to understand each other, so that there is, apparently, no hope for the world.’
The old lady brought out some heavy albums in morocco bindings, took from a drawer of the chest a great heap of old photographs mounted on thick cardboard with gold edging, and went through them, looking for a picture of Nikolya as a young man. There he was, a sprightly lad, standing beside a motor-car made at the beginning of the century with what looked like cart wheels and an old-fashioned rubber klaxon.
‘Sevochka’, the old lady said, ‘was mad on aeroplanes. There he is with his own plane.’
Another lad—curly haired and well built, wearing overalls and carrying an airman’s helmet—was leaning on the wing of an ancient biplane.
‘We bought him that aeroplane,’ the old lady explained. ‘We had three motor-cars, apart from our horses and carriages. In my younger days I never knew what it was to go on foot. And I was so good-looking! When we arrived in Petersburg they said I was one of the most beautiful women in society. I was expected to enter the Court, and I was presented to the Empress Maria Fyodorovna … You are also Maria Fyodorovna, aren’t you? It’s a nice name. Well, the Empress was a very beautiful woman, despite her age. When she was at the height of her beauty the doctors gave her some injections in the skin of her face, so that it ceased to age and remained for ever dazzlingly beautiful. When I was presented to her and made my curtsey she started to say something very amusing, but I was completely fascinated by her face, which stayed quite motionless. Her mouth was open—a sort of round opening in her face—and I sensed that she was saying something very amusing, but her face remained absolutely immobile, like a mask. It was most strange.’
‘Even rather frightening,’ my mother muttered.
‘There is so much that is frightening in this world,’ said Mima sadly, ‘that one ceases to react to it. I do not believe in universal good.’
‘Mima, better show the people some photographs and not chatter,’ the old lady said rather sharply and a little upset. ‘And I’ll go and make the tea.’
She proceeded to set the table with tiny little cups and saucers, sugar bowls and tongs, and little twisted spoons, gilded but rather worn.
