Free Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman Page B

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.
    â€œGrandad, have you got your ticket?” a conductress asked.
    â€œYes, 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 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