Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman

were closest to him.
    It may have been because of these very traits that Ivan failed to justify people’s hopes. His life had been broken, and it was he himself who had done the most to break it.
    During the 1920s many talented young people were denied higher education because of their social origin. The children of the nobility, of priests, of factory owners, and of merchants were all unable to study.
    But Ivan’s parents were educated working class, and he was able to go to a university. And he was not affected by the harsh purge of the socially alien.
    And had he been beginning his life now, he would not have had any problems when he came to point five (nationality) of the countless questionnaires one had to fill in.
    But had Ivan been beginning his life now, he would, probably, once again have chosen the path of failure.
    It was evidently not a matter of external circumstances. It was Ivan, Ivan himself, who was responsible for his misfortunes, for his bitter fate.
    In a philosophy discussion group at the university he had had fierce arguments with the teacher of dialectical materialism. The arguments had continued until the discussion group was shut down.
    Then Ivan had spoken out against dictatorship in one of the lecture halls. He had declared that freedom is as important a good as life itself, that any limitation of freedom mutilates a person as surely as an ax blow to a finger or an ear, and that the annihilation of freedom is the equivalent of murder. After this, he had been expelled from the university and exiled for three years to Kazakhstan, to the province of Semipalatinsk.
    All that had happened around thirty years ago, and since then Ivan had not, it seemed, spent more than a year as a free man. Nikolay Andreyevich had last seen him in 1936, not long before his final arrest, after which he had been in the camps for nineteen years at a stretch.
    His childhood friends and student comrades had remembered him for a long time. “By now, Ivan would have been a member of the Academy of Sciences,” they used to say. Or, “Yes, there was no one like him, but then, of course, he was unlucky.” Some said, “But all the same, he’s mad.”
    Anya Zamkovskaya, Ivan’s love, had probably remembered him longer than anyone else.
    But time had done its work and Anya, or rather, Anna Vladimirovna, by now gray-haired and in poor health, no longer asked after Ivan when Nikolay Andreyevich happened to meet her.
    He had slipped away, out of people’s minds, out of cold hearts and warm hearts alike. He existed in secret, finding it ever harder to appear in the memories of those who had known him.
    Time worked unhurriedly, conscientiously. First the man was expelled from life, to reside instead in people’s memories. Then he lost his right to residence in people’s memories, sinking down into their subconscious minds and jumping out at someone only occasionally, like a jack-in-the-box, frightening them with the unexpectedness of his sudden, momentary appearances.
    Time carried on with its extraordinarily simple work, and Ivan had already lifted one foot, about to leave the dark cellar of his friends’ subconscious minds and take up permanent residence in nonbeing, in eternal oblivion.
    But a new, post-Stalin time began, and fate decreed that Ivan should step back into the life that no longer thought of him and no longer knew what he looked like.

4

    He did not arrive until evening.
    There were many elements to their meeting. There was irritation because the lavish meal had been left so long on the table; there was anxious excitement; there were exclamations about gray hair, about wrinkles, about all the years that had passed. And Nikolay Andreyevich’s eyes grew moist, the way water suddenly rushes into a dry ravine after a storm, and Maria Pavlovna began to weep, once again experiencing the funeral of her son.
    The dark, wrinkled face, the Hessian jacket padded with cotton