they never attempted to separate bodies locked in a close embrace.
There were screams from near the entrance; seeing the dense human mass inside, people were refusing to go through the door.
David watched the door close: gently, smoothly, as though drawn by a magnet, the steel door drew closer to its steel frame. Finally they became one.
High up, behind a rectangular metal grating in the wall, David saw something stir. It looked like a grey rat, but he realized it was a fan beginning to turn. He sensed a faint, rather sweet smell.
The shuffling quietened down; all you could hear were occasional screams, groans and barely audible words. Speech was no longer of any use to people, nor was action; action is directed towards the future and there no longer was any future. When David moved his head and neck, it didn't make Sofya Levinton want to turn and see what he was looking at.
Her eyes – which had read Homer,
She was still breathing, but breathing was hard work and she was running out of strength. The bells ringing in her head became deafening; she wanted to concentrate on one last thought, but was unable to articulate this thought. She stood there – mute, blind, her eyes still open.
The boy's movements filled her with pity. Her feelings towards him were so simple that she no longer needed words and eyes. The half-dead boy was still breathing, but the air he took in only drove life away. His head was turning from side to side; he still wanted to see. He could see people settling onto the ground; he could see mouths that were toothless and mouths with white teeth and gold teeth; he could see a thin stream of blood flowing from a nostril. He could see eyes peering through the glass; Roze's inquisitive eyes had momentarily met David's. He still needed his voice – he would have asked Aunt Sonya about those wolf-like eyes. He still even needed thought. He had taken only a few steps in the world. He had seen the prints of children's bare heels on hot, dusty earth, his mother lived in Moscow, the moon looked down and people's eyes looked up at it from below, a teapot was boiling on the gas-ring… This world, where a chicken could run without its head, where there was milk in the morning and frogs he could get to dance by holding their front feet – this world still preoccupied him.
All this time David was being clasped by strong warm hands. He didn't feel his eyes go dark, his heart become empty, his mind grow dull and blind. He had been killed; he no longer existed.
Sofya Levinton felt the boy's body subside in her hands. Once again she had fallen behind him. In mine-shafts where the air becomes poisoned, it is always the little creatures, the birds and mice, that die first. This boy, with his slight, bird-like body, had left before her.
'I've become a mother,' she thought.
That was her last thought.
Her heart, though, still had life in it; it still beat, still ached, still felt pity for the dead and the living. Sofya Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She was hugging David to her like a doll. Now she too was dead, she too was a doll.
49
When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.
The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.
50
Semyonov, an army driver, was taken prisoner at the same time as Mostovskoy and Sofya Levinton. After ten weeks in a camp near the front, he was sent with a large party of captured Red Army soldiers in the direction of the western border. During these ten weeks he wasn't beaten or kicked with fists, rifle-butts or boots; all he suffered from was hunger.
Like water, hunger is part of life. Like water, it has the power to destroy the body, to cripple the soul, to annihilate millions of lives.
Hunger, ice, snowfalls, droughts, floods and epidemics can decimate flocks of sheep and herds of horses. They can kill wolves, foxes, song-birds, camels, perch and vipers. During natural disasters, people become like animals in their suffering.
The State has the power to dam life up. Like water squeezed between narrow banks, hunger will then cripple, smash to pieces or exterminate a man, tribe or people.
Molecule by molecule, hunger squeezes out the fats and proteins from each cell. Hunger softens the bones, twists the legs of children with rickets, thins the blood, stiffens the muscles, makes the head spin, gnaws at the nerves. Hunger weighs down the soul, drives away joy and faith, destroys thought and engenders submissiveness, base cruelty, indifference and despair.
All that is human in a man can perish. He can turn into a savage animal that murders, commits acts of cannibalism and eats corpses.
The State can construct a barrier that separates wheat and rye from the people who sowed it. The State has the power to bring about a famine as terrible as those which killed millions of people during the siege of Leningrad and in the cattle-pens of Hitler's camps.
Food! Victuals! Grub! Nourishment! Rations! Hard tack! Bread! A fry-up! Something to eat! A rich diet! A meat diet! An invalid diet! A thin diet! A rich, generous spread! A refined dish! Something simple! A peasant dish! A blow-out! Food! Food…!
Potato peelings, dogs, young frogs, snails, rotten cabbage leaves, stale beet, decayed horse-meat, cat-meat, the flesh of crows and jackdaws, damp rotting grain, leather from belts and shoes, glue, earth impregnated with slops from the officers' kitchen – all this is food. This is what trickles through the dam. People struggle to obtain all this; they then divide it up, exchange it and steal it from one another.
On the eleventh day of the journey, at Khutor Mikhailovsky, the guards dragged the now unconscious Semyonov out of the wagon and handed him over to the station authorities. The commandant, a middle-aged German, glanced at the half-dead soldier lying by the wall and turned to his interpreter.
'Let him crawl to the village. He'll be dead by tomorrow. There's no need to shoot him.'
Semyonov dragged himself to the village. At the first hut he was refused entrance.
'There's nothing here for you. Go away!' said an old woman's voice from behind the door.
