Babi Yar, page 34
We wandered for a long time through the side lanes, now quiet and overgrown with grass. I called the horse Old Grey and got to like him, because he showed no sign of wanting to kick or bite. I let him graze along the side of the road, sometimes let go of him altogether and then called him:
‘Come on, Grey, come on, then—the grass is better over here.’
He would lift his head, look at me and come across as if he understood what I said—he was a quiet, intelligent and good-natured old nag. We became very good friends.
Degtyaryov was waiting for me at Koshitse Street. We stood around there for a long time, waiting until there was nobody about on the street, and then quickly ran with Old Grey into the yard and straight into the barn.
‘Give him some hay, so as he doesn’t start neighing,’ Degtyaryov instructed me.
Old Grey perked up at the sight of the hay and proceeded to munch away vigorously. He had obviously not expected such good things to come his way.
Degtyaryov was in the best of humours and full of energy. He sharpened on a stone a couple of knives made out of strips of steel and bound with insulating tape instead of handles. In the entrance he picked up an axe, a tub and some buckets and we went into the barn, followed by two cats, both excited and miaowing and running ahead, as though we were bringing them some meat.
Old Grey was munching the hay, suspecting nothing. Degtyaryov turned him round, putting his head to the light, and ordered me to hold the bridle firmly. With a grunt he bent down and tied the horse’s legs together. Old Grey, who had apparently become accustomed to everything in this life, stood quiet, offering no resistance.
Degtyaryov stood facing the horse’s head, moved it a little as a hairdresser does, so that it was quite straight. Then he took a quick swing and struck the horse right above the eyes.
Old Grey didn’t stir, and Degtyaryov struck again and again, so that the skull was cracked. After that the horse began to sag, dropped on to its knees, rolled over on its side, and its legs stretched out convulsively and trembled, still bound together by the ropes. Degtyaryov threw the axe to one side, scrambled on to the horse and sat on top of it, exclaiming shortly:
‘Gimme the tub!’
I dragged the tub across to him. With both hands Degtyaryov raised the trembling head of the horse and I pushed the tub underneath its neck—and Degtyaryov plunged the knife into it. Underneath its coat could be seen the pink flesh and deeper still the white, slimy throat, still moving convulsively. The knife sliced ruthlessly through the throat tube, the cartilage and the vertebrae, so that the head was practically severed and slumped unnaturally to one side. Blood came gushing out of the neck in spurts, as if from a water-pump, and a red foam formed on top of the tub. Degtyaryov held on to the twitching body of the horse with all his strength so that the blood should not spill over from the tub. His hands were already covered in blood and his fleshy face was spattered with it. As he sat there on top of the horse, following the horse’s movements and clinging on as tightly as he could, Degtyaryov looked rather like a spider that had caught a fly.
I let out an exclamation for no particular reason, and he lifted up his spattered face.
‘What’s the matter—are you scared? You’ll get used to it; you’ll see much worse than this in your lifetime. A horse is just a pound of smoke. Gimme that board over there.’
The blood kept pouring out and then suddenly stopped, as though a tap had been turned off. Apparently the heart had stopped pumping. Degtyaryov rolled the horse over on its back and put pieces of wood at each side to support it. The four legs, unbound at last, splayed apart, sticking up in the air. Degtyaryov made incisions right round them at the joints and from them further incisions to the belly, and we set about skinning the animal. The skin came off easily, as if it were simply being unstuck, with a little assistance from the knife, and without the skin the carcass ceased to be a living thing and became meat such as you see hanging on hooks in the butcher’s.
At this point the cats crept up and started getting their claws into the meat, each one grabbing what it could, ripping pieces off and growling at each other. Degtyaryov paid no attention to them: he was in too much of a hurry; he didn’t even wipe the drops of sweat from his brow. And so between the four of us we proceeded to pull Old Grey to pieces.
Degtyaryov hurled the hooves, the head and the skin into a corner, and with one swift movement opened the belly, scooped out the intestines; the liver went into one bucket and the lungs into another. The legs and the brisket were removed in one stroke of the knife, as though there were no bones at all. Degtyaryov was a master at carving up a carcass. Wet through, with stains all over him and streaks of hair stuck to his forehead, he nodded at the shapeless pile of meat and said:
‘Carry it in the house!’
His house was very cunningly arranged: at the front there were the living-rooms and a veranda, but at the back there was yet another room with an entrance through a narrow passage cluttered up with rubbish, and no one would ever guess there was a door there.
We cut the meat off the bones on big tables covered with tin, and smothered it with salt. The knives were as sharp as razors; I cut myself a hundred times and the salt stung fiercely in the cuts. Later on I was always going around with my fingers in bandages. Degtyaryov consoled me, saying:
‘This is the way I started; I made my way up from working as a labourer. I’m going to feed you, but no one ever fed me a damned thing; I just worked to learn the trade. You’re a smart kid—you learn it too. I’ll make a man of you. Once you know the business of making sausages, that’s no pound of smoke—with that you’ll never be lost; you’ll be able to get through all the perturbations and devaluations. Don’t try and make yourself a minister—they always get shot. Just be a humble sausage-maker. Learn the trade.’
I learnt it.
Bolted to the ground in the middle of his workshop stood a sausage machine as big as a man, with two handles. Degtyaryov knocked on the wall and his wife appeared, frail and stolid with the pale complexion of a countrywoman. With a sigh she got herself up on to a stool and began forcing the meat down into the funnel with a wooden ram. We got hold of the handles, the machine crunched and squeaked and the ancient gears began to grind. Lack of food had left me without much strength, so Degtyaryov did most of the turning; he worked like an ox, breathing heavily, but he kept on turning with great force. He really punished himself at his work. I got short of breath and at times I wasn’t so much helping as being carried round by the handle.
The minced meat flopped out into the buckets. Then Degtyaryov tipped it out into a trough and sprinkled it with salt, pepper and some whitish crystals of dirty-looking saltpetre.
‘Isn’t that bad for you?’ I asked.
‘You have to do it for the colour. Goodness only knows: they seem to eat it; nobody’s died from it. I don’t eat sausage myself, personally, and I advise you to keep off it, too … Now, this is what you’ve got to know—you add water to it, and two bucketfuls of meat will soak up a bucket of water. That’s where you get the weight and there’s your profit.’
I was really amazed. We put on some aprons and proceeded to work the minced meat in with the water as women work their washing on a scrubbing board. The more we worked it the more water it absorbed.
Once again I felt faint. I jabbed my finger on something in the mince and cut myself: it was a piece of tin.
‘The funnel in the machine is losing its plating,’ said Degtyaryov in some concern. ‘Go and bandage it up so that it doesn’t bleed.’
‘But are people going to eat that?’
‘Be quiet. They don’t have to eat it, do they? I don’t force them. They are free people.’
The sausage filler, which looked like a red fire-bucket on its side, also had a funnel with a handle, some gear wheels and a long tube at the end. Degtyaryov filled it with the minced meat and began turning the handle to build up the pressure, while I put the sausage skin over the end of the tube and tied it off when it was full.
We worked for many long hours as if we were on a factory conveyor and in the end we were surrounded with piles of slippery, raw, rings of sausage. But most unpleasant of all was the blood sausage. The liquid seeped out of the pump, and the blood left in there from the previous time was stale; it had already gone bad, and stank. You couldn’t breathe; there seemed no end to the sausage skin, and our arms were thick with blood to the very top. When it was all over I staggered out into the yard and stood there a long time, breathing in the fresh air.
But Degtyaryov worked like a machine. In the corner of the workshop there was a stove with a boiler built into it, full of green, stinking water left over from previous operations. Degtyaryov tipped the sausages into the boiler and when they came to the boil they turned red from the saltpetre. I had always wondered why home-made sausage never looked as attractive as the sausage you saw in the shops. Then we hung the strings of sausages on sticks and carried them across to the curing shed in the garden, which was disguised as a lavatory.
It was late at night when we removed the last sausages from the curing shed. They were still hot and smelt very appetizing; we packed them into baskets, covering them up with the Novoye Ukrainskoye Slovo. I couldn’t remember Degtyaryov taking me off and putting me to sleep on a trestle bed. I lay there without moving the whole night, and it was hardly daylight when he was already shaking me and saying:
‘Come on now, down to the market! It’s the early bird that catches the worm.’
We carried the baskets down to the cab-rank hanging on stout sticks across our shoulders, like the Chinese, and took them to Podol where, in a dark and dirty yard, the women stallholders took them off him. Degtyaryov came away with his pockets bursting with money. Then we returned to the second-hand market, where he carried on whispered conversations with various characters, leaving me standing near a post, and returned with almost empty pockets. He asked me slyly:
‘Did you ever see gold coins?’
I had never seen any. He took me round behind a stall and pulled out a big handkerchief tied into a knot. Inside it were four gold ten-rouble pieces issued in Tsarist times. Degtyaryov gave me one to hold.
‘Come on, let’s go!’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s all we’ve managed to earn.’
I stared in astonishment at the tiny little coins into which poor Old Grey had been turned. I was even more surprised at the way Degtyaryov trusted me. Orders had been issued long before about handing over all gold, and the penalty for possessing it, or even simply for not informing about it, was the firing-squad.
‘Through all the revolutions and political changes and perturbations this is the only thing, my lad, that will never let you down. All the rest is a pound of smoke,’ Degtyaryov said. ‘When you grow up you’ll understand. You just mark my words—don’t bother about other things, and you’ll have many an occasion to remember old Degtyaryov … And now let’s go and haggle over another fiery steed.’
I worked like a slave for Degtyaryov. He handed over to me all the work of delivering the sausages to the stallholders; he had already attracted too much attention to himself with the baskets. He used to give me the fare for the cab, but I used to save it by hopping on a tram and not paying the fare. The drivers used to chase me off, striking at me with their whips. It was very difficult with the baskets. On one occasion I fell off a lorry and a crowd gathered. My clothes were in rags and I was always nervous and restless, like a stray cat.
Once when I was cleaning up the workshop I summoned up the courage to steal a big piece of sausage and hide it in the snow outside the window. I was scared the whole evening, because Degtyaryov always counted them again. But I had pinched it before he counted them. On my way home I went to get it in the snow and found the sausage had gone. At that my heart sank into my boots—Degtyaryov would surely get rid of me. Then I looked more carefully and saw signs of cats walking in the snow … Oh, the filthy creatures—I had cheated Degtyaryov, and they had cheated me. Consequently I never tried the sausage. On the first day Degtyaryov gave me four bones from Old Grey, and then gave me some bones from every horse he killed. But there wasn’t much fat to be got out of them, especially from the old ones.
CANNIBALS
They hanged a man for eating human flesh. There was a lot of talk about it in Kiev, and people went along eagerly to watch. I didn’t go—I was too busy.
In actual fact he did not himself eat human flesh, but he caused other people to do so. He was a sausage-maker like Degtyaryov. He would go around the market, pick on some likely man or woman, and offer to sell him or her some cheap salt which he would say he had in his home. He would take them home, let them through the door first, crack them over the head with an axe—and turn them into sausages. He got caught through sheer negligence. A woman took some sausages home and sat down to eat them when she came across a piece of a human finger in a sausage. The woman who had sold her the sausage was taxed with it, and through her they caught the man who made them. He admitted working like that for nearly a year. He caused a great many people to eat human flesh.
Degtyaryov commented:
‘He was a fool. An old nag costs very little, but he was too mean for that. True, he sold them as pork sausages, and it’s a fact that human flesh and pork meat taste the same, so he made plenty of money at it. I knew the fellow, the same women used to buy from him as from me. No, there must be some limit to sharp practice in every trade. Did you ever hear about the graveyard gang?’
I had not heard.
‘But how come? It’s true they dealt with ’em without a lot of fuss. The keeper of the graveyard was their leader and thought it all up. They used to open up the grave after a funeral and take out the corpse, then turn it into food for pigs. They built up a whole pig farm right there next to the graveyard. Then the pigs went for sausages. It was all very well organized. Even if a corpse today is pretty skinny, it’s meat just the same, and what’s the sense of letting good stuff go to waste with such hunger about? And nobody would have known about it, but they started quarrelling among themselves, didn’t divide up the profits properly, and one of them gave the whole gang away. The main thing is not to know what you’re eating. And sausage is very convenient for that reason. You can stuff whatever you like into it so long as you make it a good colour. It was really a great idea, that pig farm; I admired them. If you feed pigs on meat they swell up like yeast. You’ll get used to it, I’m telling you—you’ll see worse than that yet. Does it still hurt you to have to slaughter horses?’
‘Yes, it hurts.’
‘Silly little fool, why bother about them? As you see, that’s the way life is—not only horses; even human beings go for sausages …’
I ALWAYS GET AWAY WITH IT, BUT I DON’T KNOW WHO TO THANK
Yes, I reckoned I was very lucky. I had to work hard, but I had enough to eat and I could bring bones home. My mother was much worse off: at the factory she received only a bowl of soup once a day.
But it was my grandfather who hit on the most artful dodge: he decided to marry himself off to a village woman. He spent much time at the market, gallantly offering himself as a husband to the peasant women who came in from the countryside. His main argument was that he was independent and a house-owner. But the elderly women living alone in the villages had their own cottages and no desire to move into the starving city even for the sake of acquiring such a remarkable husband.
Grandpa soon realized this, and decided that if the mountain would not go to Mahomet, then Mahomet must go to the mountain. He speedily fell in love with an elderly spinster by the name of Natalia from the village of Litvinovka, shut up his own room and left to make his home with her in the country.
Grandpa had based his negotiations on the idea that old Natalia would be cooking him stew and pancakes and serving it up to him at table, with a little home-made spirit to wash it down on Saturdays. But he didn’t realize that the contract was bilateral. Old Natalia was just as calculating as he was, and she had counted on Grandpa doing the ploughing, sowing, harvesting and threshing in her place. Old Semerik’s sojourn in Litvinovka turned into one big misunderstanding and a continual quarrel.
It went on for several months, because Grandpa still clung desperately to the opportunity he had of eating stew and cereals every day, but at seventy-two he was really no longer capable of handling a plough, and old Natalia, deeply hurt, threw him out without more ado. He consoled himself with the knowledge that he had got to know practically everybody in Litvinovka, and that the peasants now stopped more often overnight in his room, some paying with a few potatoes, some with a cup of peas, which was what he lived on. He began envying me again and wanted Degtyaryov to take him on as a second helper, but nothing came of it—after all, what help could he be?
Then, suddenly, Degtyaryov vanished.
I arrived as usual early one morning, but his wife, very worried, sent me off home—Degtyaryov had gone away on business and wouldn’t be back till the next day. But there was no sign of him the next day or the day after. Then he dropped in on me himself, very agitated, carrying a huge basket.
‘Quick—let’s get on with the job!’ he said.
He had some fresh fish in the basket which he had contracted to smoke. He scribbled out some notes and sent me with them to the market-women in Podol. When I returned the fish was already done and lay in a heap on the table in the workshop, shiny and bronze and smelling quite delicious.
Degtyaryov was sitting there pensively, his face looking rather sunken and tired, while his hands, which had previously looked so strong and capable, lay for the first time lifelessly on the table. I didn’t understand what was the matter, but it hurt me to look at him.
