The Road Read Free

contrast between some of our first glimpses of Gagareva, the older of the two women. First we hear her mouthing wooden platitudes about the attention being given by the authorities to “maintaining the health of the country’s citizens”; soon afterward we hear her sobbing, loudly and hoarsely, because her daughter is in the Gulag. Grossman does, admittedly, make a concession to Soviet orthodoxy by allowing a series of arrests on a State farm to end positively, with the triumph of justice, but the story’s Chekhovian musical structure—the various repeated words and images, the way the story both begins and ends with a description of speeding cars—leads the reader to a very different understanding. As Goryacheva is being driven to her dacha in the first scene, she is struck “by this troubling swiftness, by the ease with which objects, people, and animals appeared, grew bigger, and then disappeared in a flash.” In the story’s last lines, Gagareva looks down from the window of her Moscow office at the city below: “Precipitately, as if out of nowhere, [bright automobile headlights] arose out of the fog and gloom, then swiftly traversed the square.” The impression left by the story is of the randomness of Soviet life in the 1930s, the “precipitateness” (this word and its cognates are repeated even more times in the original) with which people are elevated to positions of great authority or cast out into darkness.

In the Town of Berdichev *

    Vavilova’s face was dark and weather-beaten, and it was odd to see it blush.
    “Why are you laughing?” she said finally. “It’s all so stupid.”
    Kozyrev took the paper from the table, looked at it, and, shaking his head, burst out laughing again.
    “No, it’s just too ridiculous,” he said through his laughter. “Application for leave...from the commissar of the First Battalion...for forty days for reasons of pregnancy.” Then he turned serious. “So what should I do? Who’s going to take your place? Perelmuter from the Divisional Political Section?”
    “Perelmuter’s a sound Communist,” said Vavilova.
    “You’re all sound Communists,” said Kozyrev. Lowering his voice, as though he were talking about something shameful, he asked, “Is it due soon, Klavdiya?”
    “Yes,” said Vavilova. She took off her sheepskin hat and wiped the sweat from her brow.
    “I’d have got rid of it,” she said in her deep voice, “but I wasn’t quick enough. You know what it was like—down by Grubeshov there were three whole months when I was hardly out of the saddle. And when I got to the hospital, the doctor said no.” She screwed up her nose, as if about to cry. “I even threatened the bastard with my Mauser,” she went on, “but he still wouldn’t do anything. He said it was too late.”
    She left the room. Kozyrev went on staring at her application. “Well, well, well,” he said to himself. “Who’d have thought it? She hardly seems like a woman at all. Always with her Mauser, always in leather trousers. She’s led the battalion into the attack any number of times. She doesn’t even have the voice of a woman...But it seems you can’t fight Nature...”
    And for some reason he felt hurt, and a little sad.
    He wrote on the application, “The bearer...” And he sat there and frowned, irresolutely circling his pen nib over the paper. How should he word it? Eventually he went on: “to be granted forty days of leave from the present date...” He stopped to think, added “for reasons of health,” then inserted the word “female,” and then, with an oath, deleted the word “female.”
    “Fine comrades
they
make!” he said, and called his orderly. “Heard about our Vavilova?” he asked loudly and angrily. “Who’d have thought it!”
    “Yes,” said the orderly. He shook his head and spat.
    Together they damned Vavilova and all other women. After a few dirty jokes and a little laughter, Kozyrev called for his chief of staff and said to