Redemption

“The revolution was a great crime. And those who deceived the people, who led them astray, who provoked them into conflict, were pursuing entirely different goals from those they openly declared. There was a completely different agenda, one people didn’t even suspect…” (Patriarch Kirill)

The May of 1946 was extremely cold and damp. The sun shone but gave no warmth, so the air in the communal apartment kitchen on Lenivka felt thick, sticky, and layered—like a pie baked by a life of constant hunger. The bottom layer of that pie was the eternal smell of damp walls and brick pierced through with rusty pipes. Laid over it came the second layer — the sour breath of yesterday’s garbage pail that hadn’t been taken out, and the sharp sting of carbolic acid with which Anna Petrovna tried to smother all the other odors and, generally speaking, everything still alive. The topmost layer consisted of today’s reek of rancid sunflower oil from Klavdia Semyonovna’s frying pan, steam from potatoes boiled in their jackets, the biting smell of Belomorkanal cigarettes, and the faint but ever-present scent of iodoform — from the bandages Aunt Dusya from the third room changed every evening. The twelve-square-meter kitchen, once quite spacious for a single family, had become a battlefield now, divided by cracks in the linoleum and invisible but unbreakable frontiers marked by worktables with kerosene stoves on them. Every family had its own corner, its own chair, its own hook on the wall. Moving someone else’s pot even a centimeter could spark a week-long war.

Two women stood by the sink. Anna Petrovna, thin, her face seeming carved from an old plank, was fidgeting with a head of cabbage as though it were the severed head of an enemy. Her husband had gone missing near Rzhev in ’41. Since then, every morning she rearranged in the dresser his only surviving photograph — twenty-year-old, in a budyonovka, saber drawn. She moved it so the image wouldn’t fade, and each time whispered: “My Petka… Pyotr Ivanych…” Next to her — Klavdia Semyonovna, former kolkhoz brigade leader near Vyazma, stocky, with slit-like eyes. In ’42 the Germans burned her village to the ground; she was the only one left from the whole place, together with two relatives. She was frying some scrawny little fish; it hissed in the pan while Klavdia Semyonovna moved her lips, quietly calculating how much fish there would be for three — herself, her disabled son, and her old mother-in-law, whom she had brought to Moscow from the ashes of Vyazma. At the stove, on a stool, sat Aunt Dusya — former nurse, fifty years old, leg amputated above the knee at Stalingrad. She was brewing herself “tea” from dried carrots and nettles. Beside the wall leaned her homemade crutch, fashioned from two shovel handles. Whenever someone accidentally touched it, Aunt Dusya flinched with her whole body, as though the blast wave had lifted her again. On the windowsill stood a jar with three carnations — put there by Raissa Nikolaevna, the primary-school teacher from the fourth room. Her husband had been killed in May ’45, three days before Victory, and the carnations had been brought to her by a neighbor boy — one of her pupils. No one knew where he got them; most likely he stole them from someone’s grave at Vagankovo. Every morning Raissa Nikolaevna moved the jar so the flowers wouldn’t wilt, and whispered: “You wouldn’t have liked the city anyway, Lyonya…”

No one had had milk for three months now.

And at the table the main event of the day was unfolding. Vasily Andreevich Pyatkin — tanker, retired officer — sat with his back to the clouded window, through which nothing was visible except the brick wall of the opposite building. His face was the topography of the Kursk Bulge with burning tanks: crimson welts, white scar threads, left eyelid drooping heavily. He was slowly, laboriously peeling a potato. The knife in his twisted fingers scraped off thick slabs of peel together with flesh. Opposite him, on a stool, sat Kolya Zobnin — roommate and mechanical-mathematics student at Moscow State University, sharp elbows, burning eyes behind glasses perched on a long thin nose with a bump. His worn jacket was ironed with sharp creases; beside him lay a stack of books tied with twine. He was turning over in his hands a ballpoint pen made from a long rifle cartridge case — originally for a sniper rifle.“Vasily Andreevich,” he began, louder than usual, knowing the front-line soldier was slightly hard of hearing, “you went through the revolution, the civil war, served as an officer in peacetime, and finished the war at the Kursk Bulge… and yesterday I sat in the Lenin Library looking at materials on agrarian policy of the late twenties, then argued with classmates and… my head is spinning.”Pyatkin slowly raised his one intact eye to Kolya. The gaze was heavy and dull.
“From the Lenin Library everyone’s head spins, Kolya. Papers lie there, not life. Life — it’s right here.” He said this and jabbed the knife into the potato.
“I want to talk about responsibility!” Nikolai burst out. “About the responsibility the whole people took upon their soul in 1917. Everyone wanted things to be better, but what came of it — millions of mangled human fates, millions dead in the millstones of civil war, collectivization, prodrazvyorstka. What happened? Brother against brother, peasant against peasant… Dekulakization, famine… Yes, we built factories, almost turned rivers around, but at what cost!”

The kitchen fell silent. Only the oil hissed and Aunt Dusya breathed heavily. Vasily Andreevich set the knife down. The sound was muffled, like a shot into a pillow.

“Sin…” he repeated hoarsely. “There was sin. I myself was neck-deep in sin. I remember 1920 in Tambov region — Antonov’s uprising, ‘Robin Hood’ they called him, damn it. The people rose against prodrazvyorstka, and we crushed that people on orders. We thought that for the sake of the new life the old one could be thrown into the furnace…”He fell silent, staring through the wall into the smoky fires of the twenties.

“You say we took responsibility. True — we did. But then we answered for it too. Not at party meetings — we answered in the trenches at Stalingrad, on Mamayev Kurgan, in every mass grave from Moscow to Berlin — we answered with our blood and the blood of our sons. Commissars and penal battalion men, officers and ordinary soldiers — all of us were churned together into one trench mud because there were no innocents. And what came out of that meat grinder was no longer the pre-war people burdened with heavy sin. What came out was the Soviet people — pure as cherubim. Because we buried together, starved together, died for each other. That sin cannot be prayed away in church, but we washed it in the Volga, the Dnieper, the Bug, the Vistula — washed it so thoroughly that the water no longer took the earth, only blood remained in it. We redeemed it, Kolya, with interest. And now on our conscience… emptiness. Burned clean, like here on me.” He drew a gnarled finger across his cheek.

Nikolai gripped the books so hard his knuckles turned white. He wanted to say something — opened his mouth — but the words wouldn’t come. Only managed to force out: “And if… if the price turned out higher than the meaning?”  Pyatkin looked at him with a long, terrible gaze. The silence was broken by Aunt Dusya, who quietly and cynically let drop: “They don’t give change in church, Kolya.”  And Pyatkin continued: “There is no account for sacrifice! Otherwise you’d have to invent the meaning later — otherwise my three sons laid down their heads for nothing. And Lyonya of Raissa Nikolaevna, and Aunt Dusya’s leg lost for nothing. And Klavdia Semyonovna’s village. Understand?”  Nikolai was silent. Then he nodded faintly. Anna Petrovna dropped her knife into the sink — it clanged.
Klavdia Semyonovna turned off the burner and stood pressing her palm to her chest, where under her cardigan, on a thread around her neck, hung a wedding ring. Aunt Dusya stopped stirring her “tea” and stared at the floor. Nikolai stood up, adjusted the strap of his briefcase.

“I have to go to the university — seminar on mathematical analysis.”  “Go,” said Pyatkin. “You don’t need to dig trenches — you need to lift the country with your head.”  Kolya nodded to the women and left. The click of the door lock sounded like a full stop placed at the end of that conversation. Vasily Andreevich sat motionless for another minute. Then, with difficulty, he rose, poured the water out of the little pot, transferred three small over-boiled potatoes onto a plate, took from the cupboard a piece of black bread and a pinch of salt in a paper cone. Sat back down and began to eat — slowly, methodically, carefully breaking off pieces of bread. He was alone. The war had taken all three of his sons; his wife died of grief a week after the third funeral notice. Peacetime life returned neither his face nor his health, but in his movements there was the terrible clarity of a man who had defended his position to the end. He no longer had to prove anything to anyone — neither the world nor himself.The kitchen smelled of carbolic acid, iodoform, kerosene, and burnt oil. And no one spoke another word.

It was just a kitchen, smells, scars, three potatoes, and two people who spoke different languages yet lived their lives in the same hell. And this very impossibility of translating one into the other — the bookish truth of the student and the trench truth of the front-line soldier — is the chief pain of those generations. Millions of people who had paid such a price could no longer afford to say “it was all for nothing,” or they would simply lose their minds. Therefore they redeemed it. Therefore they became pure. It is hard to truly feel how terrifying that is — when the only way to preserve one’s sanity is to declare the blood around the altar to be fertilizer for new, blessed growth. But the new growth is incapable of understanding the sacrifice that was offered.And outside the window post-war Moscow roared — hungry, disheveled, but alive. Washed in blood and beginning everything anew, like the Phoenix.