Free Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman Page B

felt calm and abstracted, still surrounded by prison faces and the sound of camp conversations; and there were other times when he would stand before a building he knew, on a crossroads he knew, and some memory from his youth would pierce right through him.
    He visited the Hermitage—to find that it left him cold and bored. How could all those paintings have remained as beautiful as ever while he was being transformed into an old man, an old man from the camps? Why had they not changed? Why had the faces of the marvelous Madonnas not aged? How come their eyes had not been blinded by tears? Maybe their immutability—their eternity—was not a strength but a weakness? Perhaps this was how art betrays the human beings that have engendered it?
    There was one occasion when the power of a sudden memory felt especially poignant—though the incident he remembered seemed random and insignificant. Once he had helped an elderly woman with a limp, carrying her basket up to the third floor for her. Afterward, running down the dark staircase, he had suddenly gasped with happiness: puddles instead of ice, March sun, spring! He went up to the building where Anya Zamkovskaya had lived. It had seemed unimaginable that he might look again at the high windows and the granite facing of the walls, at the marble steps shining white in the half dark, at the metal grille around the lift. How many, many times he had remembered this building. He had walked Anya home in the evenings; he had stood outside and waited until the light went on in her room. She had said, “Even if you fight in a war and come back blind, legless, and armless, I shall be happy in my love.”
    In a half-open window Ivan Grigoryevich could see flowers. He stood for a while by the main entrance, then went on his way. His heart had not missed a beat. While he was still behind the barbed wire of the camps, this woman he had thought dead had been closer to his heart than she was today, closer than when he was standing beneath her window.
    He both recognized and did not recognize the city. Many things seemed unchanged, as if Ivan Grigoryevich had last seen them only a few hours ago. Many buildings and streets had been reborn—entirely rebuilt. And much had disappeared completely, with nothing to take its place.
    But Ivan Grigoryevich did not understand that it was not only the city that had changed. He too had changed. His concerns had changed; his eyes now looked for other things.
    What he saw now was not what he had seen before; it was as if he had moved from one storey of life to another. Now he saw flea markets, police stations, passport registration offices, cheap canteens, employment bureaus, job announcement boards, hospitals, rooms in railway stations where transit passengers could pass the night...As for what he had known before—theater posters and concert halls, secondhand bookshops, sports stadiums and university lecture halls, libraries and exhibitions—that whole world had now disappeared; it had slipped away into some fourth dimension.
    In the same way, for a chronic invalid nothing exists in a city except pharmacies and hospitals, clinics and medical commissions pronouncing on categories of disability. For a drunk, a city is built from half-liter bottles of vodka to be shared with two chance companions . And for someone in love, a city consists of benches on boulevards, of two-kopek pieces for public telephones, of the hands of city clocks pointing toward the time of a rendezvous.
    Once these streets had been full of familiar faces; in the evenings he had seen lights in the windows of his friends’ rooms. But the familiar eyes smiling at him now were those of other prisoners, smiling at him from the bedboards of camp barracks. It was their pale lips that were whispering, “Hello there, Ivan Grigoryevich!”
    Here in this city he had once known the faces of assistants in bookshops and food stores, the faces of men selling newspapers from kiosks, the faces of