Life And Fate

46

Sofya Levinton was walking with heavy, even steps; the little boy beside her was holding her hand. His other hand was in his pocket, clutching a matchbox containing a dark brown chrysalis, wrapped in cotton wool, that had just emerged from the cocoon. The machinist, Lazar Yankevich, walked beside them; his wife, Deborah Samuelovna, was carrying a child in her arms. Behind him, Rebekka Bukhman was muttering: 'Oh God, oh God, oh God!' The fifth person in the row was the librarian Musya Borisovna. She had put up her hair and the nape of her neck seemed quite white. Several times during the journey she had exchanged her ration of bread for half a mess-tin of warm water. She never grudged anyone anything. In the wagon she had been looked on as a saint; the old women, good judges of character, used to kiss her dress. The rank in front consisted of only four people; during the selection the officer had called out two men from this rank straight away, a father and son, the Slepoys. In reply to the question about profession, they had shouted out, 'Zahnarzt'. [47] The officer had nodded; the Slepoys had guessed right, they had won life. Three of the men left in the rank walked with their arms dangling by their sides; it was as though they no longer needed them. The fourth walked with a carefree gait, the collar of his jacket turned up, his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back. Four or five ranks in front was a huge man in a soldier's winter cap.

Just behind Sofya Levinton was Musya Vinokur, who had celebrated her fourteenth birthday in the goods- wagon.

Death! It had become sociable, quite at home; it called on people without ceremony, coming into their yards and workshops, meeting a housewife at the market and taking her off together with her sack of potatoes, joining in children's games, peeping into a shop where some tailors were hurrying to finish a coat for the wife of a commissar, waiting in a bread queue, sitting down beside an old woman darning stockings.

Death carried on in its own everyday manner, and people in theirs. Sometimes it allowed them to finish a cigarette or eat up a meal; sometimes it came up on a man with comradely bluffness, slapping him on the back and guffawing stupidly.

It was as though people had now understood death, as though it had at last revealed how humdrum it was, how childishly simple. Really it was an easy crossing, just a shallow stream with planks thrown across from one bank – where there was smoke coming out of the wooden huts – to the other bank and its empty meadows. It was a mere five or six steps. That was all. What was there to be afraid of? A calf was just going over the bridge – you could hear its hooves – and there were some little boys running across in bare feet.

Sofya Levinton listened to the music. She had first heard this piece when she was a child; she had listened to it again as a student, and then as a young doctor. It always filled her with a keen sense of the future.

But this time the music was deceptive. Sofya Levinton had no future, only a past.

For a moment this sense of her past blotted out everything present, blotted out the abyss. It was the very strangest of feelings, something you could never share with any other person-not even your wife, your mother, your brother, your son, your friend or your father. It was the secret of your soul. However passionately it might long to, your soul could never betray this secret. You carry away this sense of your life without having ever shared it with anyone: the miracle of a particular individual whose conscious and unconscious contain everything good and bad, everything funny, sweet, shameful, pitiful, timid, tender, uncertain, that has happened from childhood to old age – fused into the mysterious sense of an individual life.

When the music began, David had wanted to take the matchbox out of his pocket, open it just for a moment – so the chrysalis wouldn't catch cold – and let it see the musicians. But after a few steps he forgot the people on the bandstand. There was nothing left but the music and the glow in the sky. The sad, powerful melody filled his soul with longing for his mother – a mother who was neither strong nor calm, a mother who was ashamed at having been deserted by her husband. She had made David a calico shirt and the people in the other rooms along the corridor had laughed at him because it had flowers on it and the sleeves weren't straight. She had been everything to him. He had always relied on her without thinking. But now, perhaps because of the music, he no longer relied on her. He loved her, but she was weak and helpless – just like the people walking beside him now. And the music was quiet and sleepy; it was like the little waves he had seen when he had had a fever, when he had crawled off his burning pillow onto warm, damp sand.

The band howled; it was as though some huge, dried-up throat had started to wail. The dark wall, the wall that had risen out of the water when he was ill, was hanging over him now, filling the whole sky.

Everything that had ever terrified his little heart now became one. The fear aroused by the picture of a little goat who hadn't noticed the shadow of a wolf between the trunks of the fir-trees, the blue eyes of the dead calves at market, his dead grandmother, Rebekka Bukhman's suffocated daughter, his first unreasoning terror at night that had made him scream out desperately for his mother. Death was standing there, as huge as the sky, watching while little David walked towards him on his little legs. All around him there was nothing but music, and he couldn't cling to it or even batter his head against it.

As for the cocoon, it had no wings, no paws, no antennae, no eyes; it just lay there in its little box, stupidly trustful, waiting.

David was a Jew…

He was choking and hiccuping. He would have strangled himself if he had been able to. The music stopped. His little feet and dozens of other little feet were hurrying along. He had no thoughts and he was unable to weep or scream. His fingers were wet with sweat; they were squeezing a little box in his pocket, he no longer even remembered what it was. There was nothing except his little feet, walking, hurrying, running.

If the horror that gripped him had lasted only a few more minutes, he would have fallen to the ground, his heart broken.

When the music stopped, Sofya Levinton wiped away her tears and said angrily: 'Yes, it's just what that poor man said!'

Then she glanced at the boy's face; even here, its peculiar expression made it stand out.

'What is it? What's the matter with you?' she shouted, gripping his hand. 'What is it? What's the matter? We're just going to the bathhouse to wash.'

When they had called for the doctors and surgeons, she had remained silent, fighting against some powerful force that she found repugnant.

The machinist's wife was walking along beside her; in her arms the pathetic little baby, its head too large for its body, was looking around with a calm, thoughtful expression. It was this woman, Deborah, who one night in the goods-wagon had stolen a handful of sugar for her baby. The injured party had been too feeble to do anything, but old Lapidus had stood up for her… No one had wanted to sit near him -he was always urinating on the floor.

And now Deborah was walking along beside her, holding her baby in her arms. And the baby, who had cried day and night, was quite silent. The woman's sad dark eyes stopped one from noticing the hideousness of her dirty face and pale crumpled lips.

'A madonna!' thought Sofya Levinton.

Once, about two years before the war, she had watched the sun as it rose behind the pine-trees on Tyan-Shan, catching the white squirrels in its light; the lake lay there in the dawn as though it had been chiselled out of some pure blue condensed to the solidity of stone. She had thought then that there was probably no one in the world who wouldn't envy her; and at the same moment, with an intensity that burnt her fifty-year-old heart, she had felt ready to give up everything if only in some shabby, dark, low-ceilinged room she could be hugged by the arms of a child.

She had always loved children, but little David evoked some special tenderness in her that she had never felt before. In the goods-wagon she had given him some bread and he had turned his little face towards her in the half- light; she had wanted to weep, to hug him, to smother him with kisses like a mother kissing her child. In a whisper that no one else could hear, she had said:

'Eat, my son, eat.'

She seldom spoke to the boy; some strange shame made her want to hide the maternal feelings welling up inside her. But she had noticed that he always watched anxiously if she moved to the other side of the wagon and that he calmed down when she was near him.

She didn't want to admit why she hadn't answered when they had called for doctors and surgeons, why she