Free The Road by Vasily Grossman

every day. Many of the visitors left. Goryacheva left on the twenty-sixth. She might have stayed longer, but Karmaleyev had received a telegram recalling him to the Far East. He had to set off on the twenty-sixth, and Goryacheva had decided to go with him as far as Moscow. Gagareva, however, stayed in the house of recreation; she did not mind the bad weather. She had brought her galoshes and raincoat with her and, unless it was raining particularly hard, she carried on going out for walks down the graveled paths. She even liked this kind of weather. It was more in keeping with her mood; her mind worked better during these gray sad days.
    ***
    Late one November afternoon Gagareva called on Goryacheva in her office. She found her in conversation with a visiting instructor, a man who worked in the provinces.
    “Is this going to take long?” Goryacheva asked her.
    “No, no, it’s all right, I’ll wait, it’s about something very particular,” said Gagareva, smiling and sitting herself down on the sofa. She looked at Goryacheva’s face, which was lit by the lamp on her desk, and thought, “She’s lost her tan, and she looks very thin. She never stops, she works day and night—she must be missing her husband.”
    The instructor left. With an embarrassed little laugh, Gagareva said, “Comrade Goryacheva, there’s something I want to say to you. I do, after all, know the stand you took last year, when there was a possibility of my being dismissed. Well, now I want to share some good news with you: my daughter’s case is to be reviewed. She may soon be back here in Moscow.”
    They chatted for a few minutes. Then Goryacheva remembered that she had a meeting. She left the room. Gagareva went to the secretariat and said to Goryacheva’s secretary, “Lydia Ivanovna, do you know what? It may not be long till my daughter comes back.”
    The usually stern secretary looked Gagareva straight in the eye, laughed joyfully, and shook her hand.
    “But tell me—is everything all right with Goryacheva? She’s not ill, is she?” asked Gagareva. “She seemed a little strange just now.”
    Glancing at the door, the secretary said quietly, “She’s been having a terrible time. It’s been one tragedy after another for her. In October her mother died of a heart attack. She was doing the laundry—and she just dropped dead. And then, only a few days ago, she was told that her husband had been killed in action, on the Far East border. They were married the day they got back from the Crimea, and he had to leave that same evening.”
    Gagareva walked across to the window and watched the bright automobile headlights down below. Precipitately, as if out of nowhere, they arose out of the fog and gloom, then swiftly traversed the square. “No, it’s not like I thought,” she said to herself. “I don’t understand anything at all about the laws of life.”
    But she was feeling happy, and so she no longer wanted to think. She no longer wanted to understand the laws of life.

Part Two *
    The War, the Shoah

    Grossman (far left) in a just-liberated village, January 1942
    In the early hours of June 22, 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin had refused to believe more than eighty intelligence warnings of Hitler’s intentions, and Soviet forces were taken by surprise. More than two thousand Soviet aircraft were destroyed within twenty-four hours. The Germans repeatedly encircled entire Soviet armies. By the end of the year the Wehrmacht had reached the outskirts of Moscow and more than three million Soviet soldiers had been captured or killed.
    Before the German invasion, Grossman appears to have been depressed. He was overweight and, though only in his mid-thirties, he walked with a stick. In spite of this—and his poor eyesight—he volunteered to serve in the ranks. Assigned instead to
Red Star
(
Krasnaya zvezda
), the Red Army newspaper, he quickly became one of the best-known Soviet war correspondents, astonishing everyone