The Road by Vasily Grossman

famine. Yes, she just swelled up and died. And my old man—he was such a hard worker—he died the same year. He was so swollen his heart could barely keep beating, but all he could think about was the house and the yard. I wanted to bake some flatbreads fromthorn apple and I needed wood for the fire, but he wouldn’t let me break up the fence. Then Stepanida took charge of us all. Her State farm gave her eight hundred grams of bread a day and so the four of us stayed alive. At the time she was just a little scrap of a girl—but look where she’s got now!”
    “So everything’s all right now?” said the driver, pointing at the dacha and its tall windows.
    “Yes, of course,” said the old woman. “Only I feel sad, there are things I’ll never forget. Shura, my eldest one, went out of her mind. She kept wailing, ‘Mama, the whole world’s on fire! Mama,our wheat’s all burning!’ No, I won’t be forgetting that. My old man was so gentle...Heavens!” she exclaimed all of a sudden. “I’ve been talking and talking, but who’s going to give Stepanida her tea? She’s got a train to catch. And she’s still got to call at her apartment in town.”
    “There’s time enough,” said the driver. “After all, we do have a car.”
    Goryacheva was glad to be going away.
    For the first time in her life she was going for a holiday by the sea. She still had not got used to how precipitately life had changed. After finishing school, when she was just a fun-loving seventeen-year-old, she had gotten a job on the State farm, as a cleaner in the workers’ hostel. The other girls in the hostel had talked her into going on a nine-month course to become a combine-harvester operator. She had graduated without the least difficulty; she was one of the best students. She had absorbed technical information with extraordinary ease—an ease she herself found surprising—and her technical drawings were outstanding. It took her only a moment to memorize a complex diagram—and then she could dismantle an entire motor. In less than a year she became a senior combine- harvester operator. In 1935 her work had been named the best in the region. In 1937 the agronomist, the head of the repair workshops, and the director of the State farm had all been arrested. A new director was appointed, Semidolenko. Goryacheva did not like him; she was rather afraid of him. If anything went wrong on the farm, Semidolenko always made out it was because of sabotage. The slightest mechanical breakdown, the least delay in a workshop, and Semidolenko would be writing denunciations to the district representative. As a result, there were twelve arrests, one after the other. At public meetings, Semidolenko referred to those who had been arrested as saboteurs and provocateurs. At a meeting after the arrest ofNevraev—a severe, taciturn old man who was an instructor in the repair workshop and who had won everyone’s respect by always working until late into the night and not taking any leave for five years on end, refusing all financial compensation—Semidolenko had said, “This fellow deceived us all. Behind the mask of a shock worker was hidden a sworn enemy of the people, an adept spy, working for a foreign State, who managed to penetrate to the very heart of our State farm.”
    Then the director’s secretary had taken the floor: only now, he declared, had he understood why Nevraev had stayed on alone at night in the repair-workshop office and why he had ordered photographic apparatus from Moscow. Then Goryacheva had stood up. In a loud, clear voice she had said, “He had nothing whatsoever to do with any foreign State. He was sent here by the district Party committee, and he’s from Puzyri. It’s not far away. His sister and younger brother still live there.”
    Semidolenko had turned on her, saying that the district Party secretary who had appointed Nevraev had turned out to be an enemy of the people and that Goryacheva too had evidently succumbed to