And friends were what we lacked most in those increasingly troubled days. After my father’s arrest I was to lose mother, as well. Formerly friendly and happy, she became unrecognizable after that grim day when papa was led from the room where just two weeks before they had celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary. She was now apathetic and immobile, and had lost in-
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terest in all things. My attempts to console her were rebuffed with “Leave me alone. . . . Don’t bother me.”
Our tightly-knit and amicable family had disintegrated. Gone were friends, gone was my beloved profession. The useless books and notes were gathering dust. Something horrific and implacable was coming. It had shattered the habitual patterns of being, had taken thousands of lives and one did not know whether it was bringing agony to the nation or an “unprecedented flowering” as Shura kept insisting.
Andrei and I stood watch in the evenings, patrolled the yard, stood by the gate and then for a long time would sit on the steps of the porch, covered in wild grapes, listening to the distant grunting of heavy artillery. Golden stars, falling, traced the sky. It was their time [the August meteorite showers]. But even more frequently crimson and emerald-green signal flares soared upward, saying something to some unseen presence in an anxious and incomprehensible tongue.
It was stifling in the garden, even at night, and breathing was becoming increasingly difficult for Andrei. He complained of being choked by cobwebs, of a weight in his chest. And then, all of a sudden, there was a frightening, inexplicable seizure. The experienced doctor at the clinic immediately diagnosed it as severe bronchial asthma. While writing the prescription he said that it might be the after-effect of a bad cold, but could have a psychosomatic basis. The symptoms should dissipate after an injection. The prescribed regimen was bed rest.
In fact, Andrei did feel better, but not for long. He lay in bed for several days, but then leapt up. It wracked his nerves to stay in bed. He became pale to the point of transparency. He would walk around very slowly, biting his lips, trying to suppress his garroted breathing. Could this be Andrei, the tennis player, swimmer, tireless dancer, mad party-goer?
There was a rumor that army headquarters, to which my dear university friend, Lenia, was attached, was retreating through Kiev. I had not heard from him, and then suddenly there he was: a skinny man in uniform, dusty and sunburned, squeezing my hand and calling me by name.
It was a piece of luck, he said hurriedly. Headquarters was on the left [eastern] bank, but he was sent into the city. He had half an hour and was determined to see us, but the trolleys were not running, and he was about to give up. We just stood there amidst the crowd, holding each other by the hands, rushing to say all we could in the time we had, interrupting each other, sharing our news.
A day later Lenia was sitting on our porch, anxiously talking about what disturbed him. Honest, shy, and idealistic, he was indignant at the deception
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in which he had to take part while working in the political section at headquarters. He told us that his family’s apartment had been abandoned, that his parents left in a great hurry, leaving everything, and asked whether we could keep his notes and dissertation drafts. Should he live, he said, then he would resume his work where he had left off. We managed to do all that, and as a memento I received Jerome K. Jerome’s
Dear friend, never again shall the three of us go for a boat ride as we used to, you and Andrei at the oars, myself at the tiller. Your notes have been left lying next to mine on the lower shelf of a bookcase in a house abandoned.
Lenia came by two more times and we expected him a third. But we never saw him again. The iron horseshoe of the German advance threatened to become an iron ring, and headquarters hurriedly retreated deeper into the rear.
Sinister conflagrations increasingly filled the sky as the retreating Red Army burned everything in its wake. And finally, the inevitable came.
An anti-tank gun thudded heavily at a nearby intersection. The staccato crack of machine guns burst through the still gardens. People instinctively inhaled deeply and whispered, “Here it comes.” The sky blazed all night; all night artillery thundered; all night people huddled against each other in slits in the raw earth. At dawn everything suddenly became quiet. Only below, along the river the snap of rifle fire continued and a German mortar stubbornly fired on the retreating troops. Then the whole earth shuddered from a powerful explosion—the gorgeous Dnieper bridges settled into the water. They had been dynamited while the last troops still crossed them. And again there was silence, full of anxiety and bewilderment.
We went out. Trolley cars, dispersed from the depots, were scattered everywhere along the streets. The water works and power plants had already been blown up, and the trolleys, empty and useless, seemed to have lost their way in the huge city. But there were many pedestrians—people with baby carriages filled with sacks of flour. We recalled how the day before the locals were hauling off bright blue beds with cheerful nickel-plated ornaments. Somewhere warehouses were being plundered, freight cars broken into. The “lumpen proletariat” were joyously dragging easy wartime booty to their lairs.
But the Germans were slow to appear. Rumor had it that they were already in the city. Wide-eyed, street- smart kids would announce that some guy named Joe had seen the hugest tank at the Haymarket. But in our district the Germans appeared only toward five in the evening. People poured into the street, examining the newcomers from the west with fear and curiosity. They marched handsome and huge in their strange grayish-green uniforms. Tired, covered with dust, but clean shaven, they smiled at the populace. They would
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pick up children, fearlessly enter yards and houses to wash themselves. They washed themselves with pleasure, pouring cold water over their taut, muscular backs.
But our own, our cherished army was marching eastward into a huge trap where it was to lose some 660,000 men.
The first evening star appeared in the sky, timid and small. The nineteenth day of the month of September of the year 1941 was nearing its end. Mother shut the gate, looked around our quiet green garden with its dahlias and nasturtiums and said with relief: “Well, the war is over for us.”
Poor mother, she had no way of knowing that the war had only just begun.
1. Viacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (1890–1986), foreign minister of the Soviet Union 1939–1949 and 1953– 1956; negotiated the Soviet-German non-aggression pact in 1939.
