Free Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman

small bay. The water was calm, the bottom was covered with pebbles, and some little crabs had hurried past, moving sideways and silently in their underwater way, and disappeared into the seaweed. He had walked slowly over the rounded stones, feeling the gentle touch of the sea grass on his feet, and then dozens of elongated drops of quicksilver—baby scad and mackerel—had spurted up out of the water and scattered. The sun had lit up the green underwater meadows and clumps of spruce—and this beloved little bay had seemed to be filled not with salty water but with salty light.
    He had dreamed this dream in a freight wagon. That had been twenty-five years ago, but he still remembered the despair that had gripped him when he saw the gray wintry light and the gray faces of the other prisoners, when he heard the creak of boots in the snow outside, the resonant knocking of the guards’ hammers as they checked the bottom of the carriage.
    Sometimes he saw a house overlooking the sea, the branches of an old cherry tree bending over the roof, a well...
    He had developed his memory to a painful degree of sharpness, and he could remember the gleam of a thick magnolia leaf, the flat stone in the middle of the stream. He remembered the design of the tablecloth—and the quiet cool of rooms with white, limewashed walls. He remembered reading, on the couch with his legs drawn up—on a hot summer day the oilcloth was pleasantly cool. Sometimes he tried to remember the face of his mother, and his heart would ache, and he would screw up his face, and there would be tears in his tightly closed eyes—just as in childhood, when you try to look at the sun.
    He could remember the mountains easily, and in full detail; it was as if he were leafing through a familiar book, one that falls open of itself at the right page.
    Scrambling through brambles and twisted elms, slipping on the stony, cracked, yellowy-gray earth, he would make his way to the pass and, after looking back at the sea, enter the cool half dark of the forest...With their stout branches, the powerful oaks effortlessly raised up to the very sky their hills of intricate foliage; all about, a solemn silence reigned.
    In the middle of the previous century, the coastal areas had been inhabited by Circassians.
    The old Greek, the father of Methodius the gardener, had as a boy seen Circassian gardens and orchards, Circassian villages full of people.
    After the Russian conquest of this part of the Black Sea coast, the Circassians had disappeared and life had died out in the coastal mountains. Here and there among the oaks were hunched-up plums, pears, and cherries, now growing wild again, but there were no longer any peaches or apricots—their brief span was over.
    Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground.
    Everything inanimate—stones, iron—was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful. And when he came back home, the smell of smoke from the kitchen, the barking of dogs, and the cackling of hens somehow seemed all the sweeter.
    Once he went up to his mother, who was sitting at the table with a book, and hugged her, pressing his head against her knees.
    â€œAre you ill?” she asked.
    â€œNo, I’m well, I’m just so happy,” he muttered, kissing his mother’s dress and her hands, and then he burst into tears.
    He was quite unable to explain to his mother what it was that he felt. It was as if, there in the half dark of the forest, someone were lamenting, searching for people who had vanished, looking behind trees, listening for the voices of Circassian shepherds or the crying of babies, sniffing the air, hoping to sense the smell of