Life And Fate

work in the branches above; the icy surface of the snow was littered with gnawed fir-cones and flakes of wood.

The forest seemed silent. The many layers of branches kept off the light; instead of tinkling and gurgling, it was like a soft cloak swathed round the earth.

They walked on in silence. They were together – and that was enough to make everything round about seem beautiful. And it was spring.

Still without saying anything, they came to a stop. Two fat bullfinches were sitting on the branch of a fir tree. Their red breasts seemed like flowers that had suddenly blossomed on enchanted snow. The silence was very strange.

This silence contained the memory of last year's leaves and rains, of abandoned nests, of childhood, of the joyless labour of ants, of the treachery of foxes and kites, of the war of all against all, of good and evil born together in one heart and dying with this heart, of storms and thunderbolts that had set young hares and huge tree-trunks trembling. It was the past that slept under the snow, beneath this cool half-light -the joy of lovers' meetings, the hesitant chatter of April birds, people's first meetings with neighbours who had seemed strange at first and then become a part of their lives.

Everyone was asleep – the strong and the weak, the brave and the timid, the happy and the unhappy. This was a last parting, in an empty and abandoned house, with the dead who had now left it for ever.

Somehow you could sense spring more vividly in this cool forest than on the sunlit plain. And there was a deeper sadness in this silence than in the silence of autumn. In it you could hear both a lament for the dead and the furious joy of life itself.

It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open. Soon the house would be filled with the tears and laughter of children, with the hurried steps of a loved woman and the measured gait of the master of the house.

They stood there, holding their bags, in silence.

1960

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[1] Published in English translation in 1972 as Forever Flowing.

[2] The Jews of the Russian Empire, who were forced to live in special zones of residence, lived in small towns, shtetls, where they made up the majority of the population.

[3] Comrade, good, bread, soup, children, cigarettes, work… sickbay, block orderly, military police, extermination camp, roll-call, roll-call square, ablutions, flight point, camp guards.

[4] Lads, tobacco, comrade.

[5] + Passage missing in the original text.

[6] ++ General A. A. Vlasov was a Red Army officer who, after being captured by the Germans in 1942, formed an army of Russian prisoners to fight against the Soviet Union.

[7] The Russian Army on the right, or west, bank of the Volga, in the city of Stalingrad itself.

[8] A political officer was attached to each unit. The lowest rank was 'political instructor', the highest 'Member of the Military Soviet' for an Army or a Front. The intermediate ranks were 'battalion commissar', 'regimental commissar', etc. There was frequently friction between these political officers and the corresponding commanding officers.

[9] P. F. Yudin was one of Stalin's favourite hack philosophers.

[10] Based in the Kremlin, the Stavka was the Soviet equivalent of GHQ and was responsible for the strategic direction of the war.

[11] Kolkhoz: a collective farm.

[12] Obkom: the Party committee of an oblast or province.

[13] Nomenklatura: the register kept by the Party organs of persons professionally and politically eligible for posts of responsibility.

[14] An article condemning certain 'excesses' committed during collectivization - published when the famine resulting from the initial disasters threatened to get out of hand.

[15] This was in fact a death-sentence.

[16] Donskoy, Suvorov and Ushakov are Russian military heroes.

[17] Zemstvo: a local government institution.

[18] Byedniy was a mediocre propagandist poet at the time of the Revolution.