Free Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman Page A

traffic lights, the crowds walking along the sidewalks—everything had seemed strange and alien. The whole city had seemed like a single great mechanism, schooled to freeze on the red light and to start moving again on the green...During the thousand years of her history Russia had seen many great things. During the Soviet period the country had seen global military victories, vast construction sites, whole new cities, dams across the Dnieper and the Volga, canals joining different seas. The country had seen mighty tractors and skyscrapers...There was only one thing Russia had not seen during this thousand years: freedom.
    He had gone by trolleybus to the southwestern part of the city. There, amid country mud, amid village ponds that had only partly dried up, huge eight- and ten-story apartment blocks had appeared. Village huts, small sheds, and vegetable patches were living out their last days, squeezed from all sides by this vast offensive on the part of stone and asphalt.
    In the chaos, amid the roar of five-ton trucks, could be glimpsed the future streets of a new Moscow. Ivan Grigoryevich had wandered through this city that was coming into being, where there were still no roadways and sidewalks, where people walked to their homes along paths that wound between heaps of rubble. Again and again he saw the same signs: MEAT and HAIRDRESSER . In the twilight the vertical MEAT signs shone red; the horizontal HAIRDRESSER signs were a piercing green.
    These signs, which had appeared along with the first residents, seemed to reveal man’s carnivorous essence.
    Meat, meat, meat...Human beings devoured meat. They could not do without it. There were still no libraries, no theaters, no cinemas, no tailors. There were not even hospitals, pharmacies, or schools, but at once, amid the stone, a red light had begun to shine: MEAT , MEAT , MEAT .
    And immediately after this—the emerald of the HAIRDRESSER signs. Man eats meat, and he grows fur.
    Ivan Grigoryevich had gone to the station during the night and found that the last train for Leningrad left at two. He had bought a ticket and taken his things from the left-luggage office.
    He had been surprised by his sense of peace on finding himself in a cold, empty coach.
    The train had passed through the outskirts of Moscow. Dark autumn copses and glades had slipped by. It was good to be escaping from the vastness of Moscow—from its stone and cars and electricity; it was a relief not to have to listen any longer to his cousin’s story about how the rational progress of history had cleared the ground for his own success.
    On the shiny board, as if on water, gleamed a flashlight.
    “Grandad, have you got your ticket?” a conductress asked.
    “Yes, I’ve already shown it.”
    For many years he had imagined the hour of returning from the camps and meeting his cousin, the only person in the world who had known him as a child, who had known his mother and father. But his sense of calm and relief on getting into the night train was not really so very surprising.
    His sense of loneliness when he awoke was so total that it seemed to him more than any creature on earth, any air-breathing creature, could survive.
    He was on his way to the city where he had spent his student years, the city where his love still lived.
    When she had stopped writing to him many years ago, he had mourned for her. He had not doubted that only death could have broken off their correspondence. But she was still living. She was alive...

6

    I van grigoryevich spent three days in Leningrad. He went twice to the university; he went to the Okhta district and to the Polytechnical Institute. He searched for the streets where his friends and acquaintances had lived. Some streets and buildings had been destroyed during the Siege . Sometimes the streets and buildings were still there—but the boards in the main entrances bore no names he recognized.
    There were times, as he walked through all these familiar places, when he