Babi Yar, page 5
It brought them no benefits at all, only more hunger and more fear—and it put an end to all their dreams. Grandpa put no faith in the Bolsheviks’ fine words about a heaven on earth in the dim and distant future. He was a very practical man.
After that my grandfather worked for many years as a mechanic on the drainage system in Boot and Shoe Factory No. 4. He would crawl around through the drains in his stinking overalls, and he was even injured while working at a machine—you could scarcely be more a member of the working-class than he was. And throughout those years he never ceased to loathe the rule of the ‘tramps and murderers’. ‘They don’t know how to run things,’ he would say.
But what finally reduced him, a former peasant, to a state of utter horror was the enforced ‘collectivization’ of agriculture, which produced a famine such as no one had experienced before. The building of new factories, the construction of the Dnieper power station, about which so much fuss was made in those years, the conquest of the North Pole and of the skies—all this made no impression at all on my grandfather.
The North Pole was indeed conquered, but when my grandparents at last realized their greatest dream—to own a cow—there was nothing for them to feed it on. The queues for manufactured feeding stuffs were enormous. Next to their cottage, just across the railway embankment, there was a vast, rich meadow going to waste, yet they were not allowed to graze the cow on it. There was no end to the dodges my grandfather got up to or the people he tried to bribe, so as to get hold of some hay. With his sack and a sickle he would scour the whole of Babi Yar and Repyakhov Yar and cut every blade of grass growing under the fences. He didn’t drink the milk himself: he sent my grandmother down to the market to sell it. He always remembered that the German landowner for whom he had worked had a cow which gave three pails of milk a day, and he thought that if he could only feed our poor Lyska properly she might also give as much.
He was, on the whole, a great one for getting things done somehow. But a life of repeated failure and grinding poverty had made him into a thoroughly disagreeable and unusually envious man. He envied half the population of Kurenyovka, especially the people who had a decent garden and were able to take whole basketfuls of radishes down to the market. From time immemorial Kurenyovka had relied on its radishes, as well as its suckling-pigs and chickens, and remained deaf to all kinds of scientific, artistic and political developments, demanding from the politicians only one thing freedom to sell radishes.
In his Childhood Gorky quotes this song:
A beggar hung out his socks to dry;
Another beggar pinched them.
And so, as I said, my grandfather was an envious man. But he had no hope of catching up with the more successful farmers of Kurenyovka. He had only a very small plot of land, about twenty feet wide, around the cottage and outbuilding. On the other side of the fence were the allotments belonging to the collectively owned market garden. One night my grandfather dug some new holes and moved the fence a couple of feet over, thus robbing the market gardeners of five or six square yards of land, but the lazy officials in charge of the collective didn’t even notice! For a whole week Grandpa was in an excellent frame of mind, full of his achievement, and he started planning to shift the fence over another couple of feet in a few years’ time.
In his old age he became terribly quarrelsome. He would pick his neighbour’s pears on the quiet, on the grounds that they were hanging over ‘his land’, he would set about the neighbour’s chickens if they wandered across to us, and in this way he managed to quarrel with the whole street.
When he started swearing and spluttering his ‘oo-too-too-too’ could be heard right down in the market, and they called him ‘Semerik, troo-too-too—three buckets of milk.’
Grandpa was so mean that he never drank vodka, never smoked, never went to the cinema, always tried to dodge paying his fare on the trams and wore his jackets and trousers until they were in shreds and fell to pieces on his back. If a hay-cart went down the street and dropped a little as it went, Grandpa would be first out on the roadway to rake it up carefully and carry it triumphantly home.
The cow turned out to be unprofitable and had to be sold. Then Grandpa tried keeping ducks, and I used to go with him down to the pond, where we would splash about with an old basket trying to collect ‘duckweed’ to feed them on, but the ducks did not do well on it—they were just skin and bones.
Grandpa then switched to keeping hens, which, he said, get around on their own, scratching about and finding their own food. But the hens were so hungry that they pecked up the plants in the vegetable garden and still didn’t lay any eggs. Then he got some piglets to eat up the kitchen waste. But Grandpa’s piglets grew up long-legged, muscular and wiry, more like greyhounds. And just before the Germans arrived both the piglets went down with the pest and died. We had to bury them.
Grandpa was certainly a very energetic man who would struggle and strive the whole day long from dawn till dusk. But he just couldn’t get rich.
[There were, however, others about the place who were able to ‘live it up’: party officials, secret police officers, thieves, informers and various trade-union officials. They went around in official cars, pampered their bodies at Caucasian health resorts, and regularly received secret supplements to their pay, delivered to them in plain envelopes.* For his frightful job of crawling round inside the drains my grandfather received a monthly salary which was only half the price of a cheap suit of clothes. All his life he never owned a proper suit; he died without ever wearing one.
But there were other people to whom the life of Grandpa’s family seemed like the joys of paradise. The peasants worked in the collective farms around Kiev as they had worked in the days of serfdom. No, it was even worse. Under serfdom the landowner used to leave the peasants whole days free to work for themselves on their own little plots of land. But in a collective farm a man had no such free days and had no land of his own. When he turned out to work in the fields he would be credited with one ‘workday’ by an entry in the register, and in the autumn he would receive some pay for it, or maybe he would receive nothing, or be paid at the rate of one kopek for each workday.]
And so, whenever we had visitors, Grandpa had only one topic of conversation: that in the past everything had been fine, people had been well fed and able to get rich, but that the Bolshevik good-for-nothings had ruined everything.
But when in 1937 his friend, old Zhuk, was arrested for telling a stupid joke in a queue and poor Zhuk vanished at once from sight as though he had been drowned, Grandpa got terribly frightened, kept himself to himself and was left with only half a topic—how good things had been in the past.
I suppose there was as much truth in what he said as there was fiction. The ‘good’ he talked about made sense only by comparison. And by 1937 Tsarist Russia already seemed to my poor grandfather like a paradise of justice lost.
For some reason or other he never recalled the old shack belonging to his father, who had had to rent a piece of someone else’s land. He would recall only how marvellously the general had lived and how open-handed he had been. And how low prices had been under the Tsar: five kopeks for a loaf, two kopeks for a herring, while nobody bothered even to look at the dried fish.
The only person he now told about his hatred for the Bolsheviks was God. He would remain for long stretches on his knees in front of the icons, whispering away to himself, telling them something with great earnestness. He knew that God at least would listen to him and not betray him.
Shortly after the beginning of the war a German leaflet fell on to our roof and stuck there on the chimney in the morning dew. Grandpa saw it, put the ladder up and sent me to get it. With some difficulty I got hold of the sodden bit of paper and we proceeded to read it.
The leaflet declared that Germany’s mission was to destroy the Bolsheviks and set up a new and just system under which ’he who does not work shall not eat’ but, at the same time, ‘everyone who works honestly and well will be rewarded according to his merits’. It said that life in the liberated territory was marvellous, that butter cost ten kopeks a pound, bread seven kopeks and a herring three.
Grandpa’s eyes looked up to the heavens. It was a message for him personally.
He learnt the leaflet off by heart and only then did he tear it up into small pieces. He was in his seventy-second year and here was hope reborn—it was unbelievable—maybe he would yet be able to graze his cow on the meadow and get three pails of milk a day; maybe there would yet be enough food in the house for the next day and even the day after; and maybe he might even buy himself at last his first suit of clothes.
MARTHA YEFIMOVNA sEMERIK (her maiden name was Dolgoruk), my grandmother, was born and grew up in the village of Deremezna in the Obukhov district in a godforsaken old shack, with scarcely room to move because of all the children.
[It was the sort of shack in which Taras Shevchenko, the great Ukrainian poet, who also came from a family of serfs, spent his childhood:
I cannot call it paradise …
I shed so many tears there,
My very first tears. And I do not know
Whether there is anywhere in the world a misfortune
That this house does not know.]
There were so many members of my grandmother’s family, some living in Deremezna and Peregonovka, others working as hired labour in Kiev, that I could never work out exactly how many of them there were or how they were related to me: Gapka and Konon, Ganna and Nina, Thoma and Katka, who was not quite right in the head … From time to time they would come and see us and Grandma would give one an old skirt, another some worn-out galoshes.
It was only in the case of the feeble-minded Katka that I knew she was my aunt once removed. A bout of typhus had affected her mind and she had taken to begging; she would sit around the churches with a bag in her hand, or go begging round the houses and bring home bits of bread in her bag, which my grandfather would take off her and give to the pigs, muttering: ‘It makes you think, the way these beggars live and how much people give them at Easter!’
I was very fond of Katka; she was like a saint, so inoffensive and good-hearted. If anyone gave her a sweet she always saved it for me, and sometimes she would go down to the market and use the kopeks she had collected to buy me a present—usually a clay whistle in the shape of a horse. As I grew bigger she did not notice it and went on bringing me clay whistles, always muttering something unintelligible to herself… Katka died on the street, quietly and unnoticed, as sparrows die. They took her off in a cart and buried her somewhere.
At the age of twelve my grandmother went out to work; she looked after other people’s children, worked as a domestic servant and then became a washerwoman. However much I asked her she would never tell me anything about her young days nor about her loves, perhaps because all she could remember was unpleasant.
She was completely illiterate. She distinguished paper money by the design and colour, and coins by their size.
Because my mother, who was a teacher, had to work a double shift at her school and, moreover, stayed on to work after lessons, I was brought up entirely by my grandmother. She used to wake me up, wash me, feed me, smack me and amuse me with Ukrainian fairy tales, and at the same time she kept the fire going, did the cooking, mixed and ground our food, made the mash for the pigs, chased the cat out, worked in the vegetable garden and chopped wood. She always suffered with her back, and from time to time she would lie down, groaning quietly; but she would soon be up again and at her work.
She was a gentle, frail person, with the heavy features of a countrywoman, and she always wore an old, threadbare shawl or a spotted scarf round her head.
As with my grandfather, she was not at all impressed by the aeroplanes or airships which were then flying around; on the contrary, they frightened her. As she was putting me to bed above the stove, she would tell me:
‘Now, when I was a little girl we used to squeeze up together above the stove, holding tightly to one another, naked and barefooted and hungry, like worms, and old Granny, when she was alive, used to say: “Now you sit there quietly while you can, because the time will come, a terrible time, when the enemy will swarm across the country and all the land will be covered with barbed wire, and there will be metal birds flying in the sky who will peck people with their iron beaks, and that will be just before the end of the world … “And our teeth used to chatter with fright and we would pray: “Please, Lord, do not let us live to see such things … “But the Lord did not heed us and we have lived to see the day. Everything has turned out as Granny foretold—the wire and the iron birds, and I suppose we shall soon see the end of the world … ’
It was probably in expectation of this event that Grandma had not the slightest interest in material possessions, and gave away a great deal for the good of her soul. Maybe we could have lived just a little better, but Grandma was capable of not eating herself and yet giving food away to others. She was always going down to the church with kopeks for the beggars, and then she would suddenly decide to make up parcels to send to the hospital or to friends and neighbours.
My grandfather would lose his temper and cry: ‘The wastrels! Who do you think you’re feeding, when we are short of food ourselves?’ But Grandma would simply dismiss him with a gesture of her hand. She would keep out of his way, and the ‘wastrels’ would dodge out of sight round the corners whenever Grandpa returned from work. And, to avoid quarrelling and committing a sin, Grandma would go down on her knees and pray.
She had a great many icons. There was a whole collection of them in the corner of the room, with a little oil-lamp burning dimly in front of it, little heaps of incense and bunches of grasses and two wooden crosses—one for Grandpa and one for her to have in their hands in their coffins—and little notebooks in which, at her dictation, I used to write down the names of her numerous relatives, noting whether they were ‘fit and well’ or had ‘passed away’.
The centrepiece was a Madonna, severe and suffering and with a fanatical look in her eyes. Even the child in her arms resembled a little angry old man who was saying: ‘You mustn’t, you mustn’t!’ They had such expressive faces that if you looked at them for any length of time it gave you the creeps. This icon was in a deep frame behind glass and had a richly gilded oklad with some strange flowers with bunches of metal berries on it … I wanted terribly to touch those berries, but they were out of reach behind the glass. Whenever Grandma went out to the market I would move a stool across and spend hours staring at those berries, and it was my dream that, when Grandma died, I would at last get my hands on them.
There was also a kindly-looking St Nicholas, with his white beard, a brave St George triumphing over Evil, and at the side there was another Madonna, with golden hair and a tender expression on her surprisingly familiar face. She was smiling, and the child on her knees was rather plump, apparently very pleased with life, his naked body covered with dimples.
Although this was a plain icon, without oklad, I was really in love with it. There are a lot of girls like that in Kurenyovka—fair-haired, soft and tender. They fall for the first good-looking lad that comes along; they get married and give birth to the same kind of tubby little children with dimples, but, unfortunately, their beauty soon fades and they grow old. My very first childhood love was the portrait of such a woman in Grandma’s icon, and when later, after the war, I became a man, my first love was exactly the same sort of girl in real life.
My father was a revolutionary and a Communist, and my mother was a teacher. For that reason when I was born there was no question of having me christened. But one day, when my parents had gone out to work, Grandma wrapped me up in a shawl and took me off to the church of SS Peter and Paul, where I was immersed in the font. Grandma could not permit me to remain without the prospect of heaven when I died. She revealed this secret only after I was ten years old, when she recalled how I protested and grabbed the priest by his beard. ’There’s a little bundle of flesh for you, so small and already joining up with the Antichrists of today!’ he said.
Under Grandma’s guidance, however, I remained a religious person until the age of six. She used to take me along to the church of SS Peter and Paul, take communion with me, stand me in front of the icons, take my little fist in her own brown, wrinkled hand and teach me how to cross myself and pronounce the magic words which, I believe, she did not herself understand. Because this is how her prayers sounded and how they have remained with me ever since:
‘Afather chart in Heaven. Hallowed be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom come. Onearth as it is in Heaven. Givussisday our daily bread, and forgive us our trespassers and liver us from evil …’
My grandmother obviously did not know that the mysterious ‘Afather’ was in fact ‘Our Father’. For my part I decided that God was called Afather, that his name shone out in the dark, that Granny was asking him for crusts of bread —‘our daily bread’—and I repeated mechanically after her all the mistakes she made.
But then my father got to know about it, was horrified and ordered my mother to snatch me immediately from the claws of ‘religion— opium of the people’. My mother, whom I trusted absolutely, had a little talk with me and, most important, said:
‘There is no God. People fly up in the sky in aeroplanes and they’ve never seen any God there.’
I was shaken by this. I immediately passed this devastating argument on to Grandma. She got cross and replied that such godless creatures as aeroplane pilots couldn’t expect to see God. I reflected on this and came to the conclusion that it would be better if God showed Himself to them or, if not to all of them, at least to the bravest and most famous airmen in the world, Chkalov or Baidukov,* who could then come back down and tell us all that there is a God, and then the arguments would be at an end. If He was up there sitting on the clouds, why did He hide Himself away, and why in any case did He let such nasty godless people fly about up there, and how, then, could He be said to be almighty?
