The Road Read online

  In the Town of Berdichev*

  Vavilova’s face was dark and weather-beaten, and it was odd to see it blush.

  “Why are you laughing?” she said finally. “It’s all so stupid.”

  Kozyrev took the paper from the table, looked at it, and, shaking his head, burst out laughing again.

  “No, it’s just too ridiculous,” he said through his laughter. “Application for leave...from the commissar of the First Battalion...for forty days for reasons of pregnancy.” Then he turned serious. “So what should I do? Who’s going to take your place? Perelmuter from the Divisional Political Section?”

  “Perelmuter’s a sound Communist,” said Vavilova.

  “You’re all sound Communists,” said Kozyrev. Lowering his voice, as though he were talking about something shameful, he asked, “Is it due soon, Klavdiya?”

  “Yes,” said Vavilova. She took off her sheepskin hat and wiped the sweat from her brow.

  “I’d have got rid of it,” she said in her deep voice, “but I wasn’t quick enough. You know what it was like—down by Grubeshov there were three whole months when I was hardly out of the saddle. And when I got to the hospital, the doctor said no.” She screwed up her nose, as if about to cry. “I even threatened the bastard with my Mauser,” she went on, “but he still wouldn’t do anything. He said it was too late.”

  She left the room. Kozyrev went on staring at her application. “Well, well, well,” he said to himself. “Who’d have thought it? She hardly seems like a woman at all. Always with her Mauser, always in leather trousers. She’s led the battalion into the attack any number of times. She doesn’t even have the voice of a woman...But it seems you can’t fight Nature...”

  And for some reason he felt hurt, and a little sad.

  He wrote on the application, “The bearer...” And he sat there and frowned, irresolutely circling his pen nib over the paper. How should he word it? Eventually he went on: “to be granted forty days of leave from the present date...” He stopped to think, added “for reasons of health,” then inserted the word “female,” and then, with an oath, deleted the word “female.”

  “Fine comrades they make!” he said, and called his orderly. “Heard about our Vavilova?” he asked loudly and angrily. “Who’d have thought it!”

  “Yes,” said the orderly. He shook his head and spat.

  Together they damned Vavilova and all other women. After a few dirty jokes and a little laughter, Kozyrev called for his chief of staff and said to him, “You must go around tomorrow, I suppose. Find out where she wants to have it—in a hospital or in a billet—and make sure everything’s generally all right.”

  The two men then sat there till morning, poring over the one-inch-to-a-mile map and jabbing their fingers at it. The Poles were advancing.

  A room was requisitioned for Vavilova. The little house was in the Yatki—as the marketplace was called—and it belonged to Haim-Abram Leibovich-Magazanik, known to his neighbors and even his own wife as Haim Tuter, that is, Haim the Tatar.

  Vavilova’s arrival caused an uproar. She was brought there by a clerk from the Communal Department, a thin boy wearing a leather jacket and a pointed Budyonny helmet. Magazanik cursed him in Yiddish; the clerk shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.

  Magazanik then switched to Russian. “The cheek of these snotty little bastards!” he shouted to Vavilova, apparently expecting her to share his indignation. “Whose clever idea was this? As if there weren’t a single bourgeois left in the whole town! As if there weren’t a single room left for the Soviet authorities except where Magazanik lives! As if there weren’t a spare room anywhere except one belonging to a worker with seven children! What about Litvak the grocer? What about Khodorov the cloth maker? What about Ashkenazy, our number-one millionaire?”

  Magazanik’s children were standing around them in a circle—seven curly-headed angels in ragged clothes, all watching Vavilova through eyes black as night. She was as big as a house, she was twice the height of their father. All this was frightening and funny and very interesting indeed.

  In the end Magazanik was pushed out of the way, and Vavilova went through to her room.

  From the sideboard, from the chairs with gaping holes and sagging seats, from bedclothes now as flat and dark and flaccid as the breasts of the old women who had once received these blankets as part of their wedding dowries, there came such an overpowering smell of human life that Vavilova found herself taking a deep breath, as if about to dive deep into a pond.

  That night she was unable to sleep. Behind the partition wall—as if they formed a complete orchestra, with everything from high-pitched flutes and violins to the low drone of the double bass—the Magazanik family was snoring. The heaviness of the summer night, the dense smells—everything seemed to be stifling her.

  There was nothing the room did not smell of.

  Paraffin, garlic, sweat, fried goose fat, unwashed linen—the smell of human life, of human habitation.

  Now and then she touched her swollen, ripening belly; the living being there inside her was kicking and moving about.

  For many months, honorably and obstinately, she had struggled against this being. She had jumped down heavily from her horse. During voluntary working Saturdays in the towns she had heaved huge pine logs about with silent fury. In villages she had drunk every kind of herbal potion and infusion. In bathhouses, she had scalded herself until she broke out in blisters. And she had demanded so much iodine from the regimental pharmacy that the medical assistant had been on the point of penning a complaint to the brigade medical department.

  But the child had obstinately gone on growing, making it hard for her to move, making it hard for her to ride. She had felt nauseous. She had vomited. She had felt dragged down, dragged toward the earth.

  At first she had blamed everything on him—on the sad, taciturn man who had proved stronger than her and had found a way through her thick leather jacket and the coarse cloth of her tunic and into her woman’s heart. She had remembered him at the head of his men, leading them at a run across a small and terrifyingly simple wooden bridge. There had been a burst of Polish machine-gun fire—and it was as if he had vanished. An empty greatcoat had flung up its arms, fallen, and then hung there over the stream.

  She had galloped over him on her maddened stallion and, behind her, as if pushing her on, the battalion had hurtled forward.

  What had remained was it. It, now, was to blame for everything. And Vavilova was lying there defeated, while it kicked its little hoofs victoriously. It was living inside her.

  Before Magazanik went out to work in the morning, when his wife was serving him breakfast and at the same time trying to drive away the flies, the children, and the cat, he said quietly, with a sideways glance at the wall of the requisitioned room, “Give her some tea—damn her!”

  It was as though he were bathing in the sunlit pillars of dust, in all the smells and sounds—the cries of the children, the mewing of the cat, the muttering of the samovar. He had no wish to go off to the workshop. He loved his wife, his children, and his old mother; he loved his home.

  Sighing, he went on his way, and there remained in the house only women and children.

  The cauldron of the Yatki went on bubbling all through the day. Peasant men traded birch logs as white as chalk; peasant women rustled strings of onions; old Jewish women sat above downy hillocks of geese tied together by their legs. Every now and then a seller would pluck from one of these splendid white flowers a living petal with a snaking, twisting neck—and the buyer would blow on the tender down between its legs and feel the fat that showed yellow beneath the soft warm skin.

  Dark-legged lasses in colorful kerchiefs carried tall red pots brimming with wild strawberries; as if about to run away, they cast frightened looks at the buyers. People on carts sold golden, sweating balls of butter wrapped in plump burdock leaves.

  A blind beggar with the white beard of a wizard was stretching out his hands and weeping tragically
and imploringly, but no one was touched by his terrible grief. Everyone passed by indifferently. One woman, tearing the very smallest onion off her string, threw it into the old man’s tin bowl. He felt it, stopped praying, and said angrily, “May your children be as generous to you in your old age!” And he again began intoning a prayer as ancient as the Jewish nation.

  People bought and sold, poked and prodded, raising their eyes as if expecting someone from the tender blue sky to offer them counsel: Should they buy the pike or might they be better off with a carp? And all the time they went on cursing, screeching, scolding one another, and laughing.

  Vavilova tidied and swept her room. She put away her greatcoat, her sheepskin hat, and her riding boots. The noise outside was making her head thump, while inside the apartment the little Tuters were all shouting and screaming, and she felt as though she were asleep and dreaming somebody else’s bad dream.

  In the evening, when he came back home from work, Magazanik stopped in the doorway. He was astounded: his wife, Beila, was sitting at the table—and beside her was a large woman in an ample dress, with loose slippers on her bare feet and a bright-colored kerchief around her head. The two women were laughing quietly, talking to each other, raising and lowering their large broad hands as they sorted through a heap of tiny undershirts.

  Beila had gone into Vavilova’s room during the afternoon. Vavilova had been standing by the window, and Beila’s sharp feminine eye had made out the swollen belly partly concealed by Vavilova’s height.

  “Begging your pardon,” Beila had said resolutely, “but it seems to me that you’re pregnant.”

  And Beila had begun fussing around her, waving her hands about, laughing and lamenting.

  “Children,” she said, “children—do you have any idea what misery they bring with them?” And she squeezed the youngest of the Tuters against her bosom. “Children are such a grief, such a calamity, such never-ending trouble. Every day they want to eat, and not a week passes by but one of them gets a rash and another gets a boil or comes down with a fever. And Doctor Baraban—may God grant him health—expects ten pounds of the best flour for every visit he makes.”

  She stroked little Sonya’s head. “And every one of my lot is still living. Not one of them’s going to die.”

  Vavilova had turned out to know nothing at all; she did not understand anything, nor did she know how to do anything. She had immediately subordinated herself to Beila’s great knowledge. She had listened, and she had asked questions, and Beila, laughing with pleasure at the ignorance of this woman commissar, had told her everything she needed to know.

  How to feed a baby; how to wash and powder a baby; how to stop a baby crying at night; how many diapers and babies’ shirts she was going to need; the way newborn babies can scream and scream until they’re quite beside themselves; the way they turn blue and your heart almost bursts from fear that your child is about to die; the best way to cure the runs; what causes diaper rash; how one day a teaspoon will make a knocking sound against a child’s gums and you know that it’s started to teethe.

  A complex world with its own laws and customs, its own joys and sorrows.

  It was a world about which Vavilova knew nothing—and Beila indulgently, like an elder sister, had initiated her into it.

  “Get out from under our feet!” she had yelled at the children. “Out you go into the yard—quick march!” The moment they were alone in the room, Beila had lowered her voice to a mysterious whisper and begun telling Vavilova about giving birth. Oh no, childbirth was no simple matter—far from it. And like an old soldier talking to a new recruit, Beila had told Vavilova about the great joys and torments of labor.

  “Childbirth,” she had said. “You think it’s child’s play, like war. Bang, bang—and there’s an end to it. No, I’m sorry, but that’s not how it is at all.”

  Vavilova had listened to her. This was the first time in all the months of her pregnancy that she had met someone who spoke of the unfortunate accident that had befallen her as if it were a happy event, as if it were the most important and necessary thing in her life.

  Discussions, now including Magazanik, continued into the evening. There was no time to lose. Immediately after supper, Magazanik took a candle, went up into the attic, and with much clattering brought down a metal cradle and a little tub for bathing the new person.

  “Have no fears, comrade Commissar,” he said. He was laughing and his eyes were shining. “You’re joining a thriving business.”

  “Shut your mouth, you rascal!” said his wife. “No wonder they call you an ignorant Tatar.”

  That night Vavilova lay in her bed. The dense smells no longer felt stifling, as they had during the previous night. She was used to them now; she was not even aware of them. She no longer wanted to have to think about anything.

  It seemed to her that there were horses nearby and that she could hear them neighing. She glimpsed a long row of horses’ heads; the horses were all chestnut and each had a white blaze on its forehead. The horses were constantly moving, nodding, snorting, baring their teeth. She remembered the battalion; she remembered Kirpichov, the political officer of the Second Company. There was a lull in the fighting at present. Who would give the soldiers their political talks? Who would tell them about the July days? The quartermaster should be hauled over the coals for this delay in the issue of boots. Once they had boots, the soldiers could make themselves footcloths. There were a lot of malcontents in the second company, especially that curly-headed fellow who was always singing songs about the Don. Vavilova yawned and closed her eyes. The battalion had gone somewhere far, far away, into the pink corridor of the dawn, between damp ricks of hay. And her thoughts about it were somehow unreal.

  It gave an impatient push with its little hoofs. Vavilova opened her eyes and sat up in bed.

  “A boy or a girl?” she asked out loud.

  And all of a sudden her heart felt large and warm. Her heartbeats were loud and resonant.

  “A boy or a girl?”

  In the afternoon she went into labor.

  “Oy!” she screamed hoarsely, sounding more like a peasant woman than a commissar. The pain was sharp, and it penetrated everywhere.

  Beila helped her back to her bed. Little Syoma ran off merrily to fetch the midwife.

  Vavilova was clutching Beila’s hand. She was speaking quickly and quietly: “It’s started, Beila. I’d thought it would be another ten days. It’s started, Beila.”

  Then the pains stopped, and she thought she’d been wrong to send for the midwife.

  But half an hour later the pains began again. Vavilova’s tan now seemed separate from her, like a mask; underneath it her face had gone white. She lay there with her teeth clenched. It was as if she were thinking about something tormenting and shameful, as if, any minute now, she would jump up and scream, “What have I done! What have I gone and done!” And then, in her despair, she would hide her face in her hands.

  The children kept peeping into the room. Their blind grandmother was by the stove, boiling a large saucepan of water. Alarmed by the look of anguish on Vavilova’s face, Beila kept looking toward the street door. At last the midwife arrived. Her name was Rosalia Samoilovna. She was a stocky woman with a red face and close-cropped hair. Soon the whole house was filled by her piercing, cantankerous voice. She shouted at Beila, at the children, at the old grandmother. Everyone began bustling about. The Primus stove in the kitchen began to hum. The children began dragging the table and chairs out of the room. Looking as if she were trying to put out a fire, Beila was hurriedly mopping the floor. Rosalia Samoilovna was driving the flies away with a towel. Vavilova watched her and for a moment thought they were in the divisonal headquarters and that the army commander had just arrived. He too was stocky, red-faced, and cantankerous, and he used to show up at times when the Poles had suddenly broken through the front line, when everyone was reading communiqués, whispering, and exchanging anxious looks as though a dead body or someone mortally ill we
re lying in the room with them. And the army commander would slash through this web of mystery and silence. He would curse, laugh, and shout out orders: What did he care about supply trains that had been cut off or entire regiments that had been surrounded?

  Vavilova subordinated herself to Rosalia Samoilovna’s powerful voice. She answered her questions; she turned onto her back or her side; she did everything she was told. Now and then her mind clouded. The walls and the ceiling lost their outlines; they were breaking up and moving in on her like waves. The midwife’s loud voice would bring her back to herself. Once again she would see Rosalia Samoilovna’s red, sweating face and the ends of the white kerchief tied over her hair. Her mind was empty of thoughts. She wanted to howl like a wolf; she wanted to bite the pillow. Her bones were cracking and breaking apart. Her forehead was covered by a sticky, sickly sweat. But she did not cry out; she just ground her teeth and, convulsively jerking her head, gasped in air.