Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman Page A

wool, the clumsy soldier’s boots of the man from the camps—none of this fitted easily into a world of parquet floors and bookshelves, of pictures and chandeliers.
    Suppressing his agitation, looking at his cousin through eyes dimmed by tears, Ivan Grigoryevich said, “Nikolay, let me say first of all that I won’t be asking anything of you. I won’t be asking for money, or for help with getting a residence permit, or for anything else. And by the way, I’ve already been to the bathhouse, I won’t be bringing lice or any other forms of life into your house.”
    Wiping away tears of his own, Nikolay Andreyevich began to laugh. “Gray-haired and wrinkled—but our Vanya, our dear Vanya, is still the same as ever.”
    He traced a circle in the air and then jabbed one finger through this imaginary circle.
    â€œUnbearably direct, straight as a pole, and at the same time—God knows how—kind and good!”
    Maria Pavlovna looked at her husband. Only that morning she had been trying to convince him that Ivan Grigoryevich really ought to go the bathhouse to wash: a home bathtub just wasn’t the same—and if Ivan did use their bath, they’d never be able to get the bath properly clean again, neither with acid nor with lye.
    There was matter of consequence in their inconsequential conversation. There were smiles, looks, hand movements, little coughs; all this helped to explain, to clarify, to reveal.
    Nikolay Andreyevich wanted very much to talk about himself—more than he wanted to recall their childhood, or to list relatives who had died, or to question Ivan. But since he was someone polite—since he knew how to say and do things he did not want to say or do—he said, “We ought to go and stay in a dacha somewhere, somewhere without telephones, and listen to you for a week, for a month, for two months.”
    Ivan Grigoryevich imagined sitting in a dacha armchair, sipping wine, and talking about people who had departed into eternal darkness. Many of their fates were piercingly sad; even the tenderest, quietest, kindest word about these people would have been like the touch of a rough, heavy hand on a heart that had been torn open. No, there were things that could not be spoken.
    And, nodding his head, he said, “Yes, yes, yes, Tales of a Thousand and One Arctic Nights.”
    He was agitated. Which was the real Kolya? The young man in the worn sateen shirt, with a book in English under his arm, who had always been bright, quick-witted, and helpful? Or the man sitting opposite him—with the big soft cheeks and the waxen bald patch?
    All his life Ivan had been strong. People had always turned to him for explanations, for reassurance. Even the “Indians” —the criminals in the disciplinary barrac k —had sometimes asked his advice. Once he had even broken up a knife fight between the “thieves” and the “bitches.” He had won the respect of people from many different backgrounds:“engineer saboteurs”; a ragged old man who had once been a Guards officer in the Tsar’s army; a lieutenant colonel, a real master of the bow saw, who had served under Denikin in the Civil War; a gynecologist from Minsk who had been found guilty of Jewish bourgeois nationalism; a Crimean Tatar who used to complain about how his people had been driven from the shores of a warm sea to the Siberian
taiga
; and a collective-farm worker who had nicked a sack of potatoes after calculating that, after he had served his time in the camp, the document attesting to his release would entitle him to a six-month city passport and so enable him to get away once and for all from his collective farm.
    This day, however, Ivan Grigoryevich wanted someone’s kind hands to lift from his shoulders the burden that he himself was carrying. And he knew that there is only one power in the world before which it is good and wonderful to feel that you