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presents  fiction by VASILY GROSSMAN (1960) |
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presents fiction by VASILY GROSSMAN (1960) |
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aving received a place to live on the order of the Dzerzhinsky Neighborhood Committee, the elderly Anna Borisovna amused the residents of the apartment upon her moving in because she had no furniture, no kitchenware, no dresses, and not even any bedding. She didn’t live in her room for very long. Eight days after receiving her order, she suddenly screamed while walking down the corridor and fell to the floor.
A neighbor called for medical assistance. A doctor gave the old lady and injection, stated that everything would be okay, and left. However, towards the night Anna Borisovna felt very ill and the neighbors, having consulted with each other, called for an ambulance. An ambulance from the Sklifosovsky Institute arrived quickly, only six minutes after the call; however, by the time it arrived, the old lady had already died. The doctor checked the pupils of the recently departed, sighed for the sake of convention, and left.
The residents had found out a couple things about Anna Borisovna Lomova during the few days she spent living in her room in the southwest of Moscow. It appeared that as a young woman she had participated in the Civil War, seemingly the commissar of an armored train. Later she lived in Persia, in Tehran, then in Moscow working some sort of high level job, almost in the Kremlin itself. While speaking with schoolgirl Svetlana Kolotyrkina about the way that Soviet Russian literature was being taught she mentioned that, "There was a time when I was friends with Furmanov and Mayakovsky." She told Svetlana’s mother, the controller of the OTK* at the compact automobile plant, that she had been arrested in 1936 and spent nineteen years in camps and prisons. The Supreme Court had just recently rehabilitated her and recognized that she was completely innocent. She was registered in Moscow and given a room.
It seems that during her time in the camps she lost touch with all of her friends and relatives, and had not had the opportunity to find any kind of acquaintances in Moscow. No one came to the crematorium when her body was cremated. Immediately after Lomova’s death, her room was occupied by a streetcar driver named Zhuchkov, a very irritable man with a wife and child.
All of the residents of the apartment forgot with amazing quickness that a rehabilitated old lady had lived there for several days.
One Sunday morning, when the inhabitants of the apartment, having drank tea, were all playing cards, the mail lady brought the Sunday mail; the newspapers Moscow Pravda, Soviet Russia, and Lenin’s Path, the magazines Soviet Woman and Health, the television and radio guides, and a letter addressed to citizen Anna Borisovna Lomova.
"There’s no one here by that name," the various voices of the residents declared.
The driver Zhuchkov pushed the mail lady towards the door and said, "We don’t have anyone like that and never did.:"
And then Svetlana Kolotyrkina unexpectedly told him, "What do you mean 'never did', you live in her room."
All of a sudden everyone remembered Anna Borisovna Lomova and were surprised at how they had completely forgotten about her.
Having consulted with each other, the residents opened the envelope and read the typed print aloud.
"In connection with the newly reopened circumstances regarding the ruling of the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR from May 8th, 1960, your husband, Ardashelia, Terentii Georgievich, who perished during imprisonment on July 6th, 1937, is being posthumously rehabilitated. The sentence that was issued by the Military Board of the Supreme Court on September 3rd, 1937 has been overturned and the matter has been closed due to absence of corpus delicti."
"So where does this paper go now?"
"Where would it go? Send it back."
"I think we’re obligated to hand it over the house management committee since this lady was a permanent resident here."
"There, that’s right. But today the house management committee is off."
"What’s the rush?"
"Give it to me. I’ll stop in to ask about the broken faucets and drop it off while I’m there."
For a while afterwards everyone was silent, after which a male voice announced, "What are we sitting around for? Who’s dealing?"
1960
*OTK: Technical Inspection Department
Translated by: Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky Translated by: Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky
Original Russian text: http://lib.ru/proza/grossman/grossman18.txt
see also:
"In the War" by Vasily Grossman
"In the Country" by Vasily Grossman
"In the Main Line of Attack" by Vasily Grossman
Biography of Vasily Grossman
ANDREW GLIKIN-GUSINSKY is graduate student in Columbia University's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures specializing in literary translation. He is an alum of Vassar College.
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