Free Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman Page A

smoke, of hot flatbreads.
    And so, when he came back from the forest to the beauty and charm of his own home, he felt not only joy but also shame...
    His mother had seemed unable to make any sense at all of his explanations. She had replied, “My poor silly boy, you’ll find life a struggle if you’re going to be so sensitive and easily wounded.”
    During supper, his father exchanged looks with his mother and said, “Vanya, you probably know that our Sochi was once called Post Dakhovsky and that the villages here in the mountains once had names like First Regiment and Second Regi-ment.”
    â€œYes, I know,” said Ivan, and sniffed sullenly.
    â€œThey were the bases of Russian military units. And these troops did not only carry rifles—they also carried axes and spades. They cut roads through forests inhabited by cruel, wild mountain people.”
    The father scratched his beard and added, “Excuse these grand words—but they were cutting a road for Russia. That’s how we’ve ended up here...I’ve helped set up schools, and Yakov Yakovlevich, among others, has planted orchards and vineyards, and still other people have built roads and hospitals. Progress demands sacrifices, and it’s no use weeping over what’s inevitable. You understand what I’m trying to say?”
    â€œYes,” said Ivan, “but there were orchards here before us—and they’ve been left to go wild.”
    â€œYes, my friend,” said the father. “When you chop down a forest, splinters fly. But we didn’t, by the way, force the Circassians to leave. They themselves chose to go to Turkey. They could have stayed here and become a part of Russian culture. As it is, they suffered great poverty in Turkey, and many of them died...”
    In the camp, Ivan had remembered many things from his past. He had dreamed of his birthplace. He had heard familiar voices. Their old watchdog, with rheumy, red-rimmed eyes, had got up to meet him.
    And he had awoken to the ocean-like roar of the
taiga
, to the rage of a winter blizzard.
    And now he was free—and he was still waiting for something good, something from his youth, to come back to him.
    That morning he had woken in the train to a sense of irredeemable loneliness. The evening with his cousin had filled him with bitterness, and Moscow had seemed crushing and deafening. The vast tall buildings, the heavy traffic, the 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