The Road by Vasily Grossman Read Free Book Online Page B

stove,” she had said. “We can’t even use them for the samovar—hand grenades like these are too big!”
    “What do you mean, comrade Goryacheva?” Senyatin had answered. “You’re lacking in consciousness. To a botanist they could be of real value. I’ll take the box to the Young Naturalists—or else to a museum.”
    The car drew up outside the dacha. While Goryacheva was still talking to the driver, discussing what time they’d need to leave for the station, Vera and Natashka came running to meet her. Their grandmother, Marya Ivanovna, followed them out of the house. The driver parked the car in the shade, on some grass near the gate, as if it were nicer and more fun for the car to stand on fresh grass and in the shade of tall trees. He walked slowly around the car, admired the pneumatic tires, kicked one of them with his boot—not to check its condition but simply for his own satisfaction—wiped the windscreen with his sleeve, shook his head a little, walked over toward the fence, and lay down on the grass. The car smelled of gasoline and hot oil. He breathed this in with delight and thought, “She’s had a good run, she’s worked up a sweat.”
    He was dozing off when old Marya Ivanovna walked by with a bucket.
    “Our water’s no good, it’s stagnant,” she said, stopping beside him. “We can’t even use it for cooking.” He did not say anything himself, but she began telling him how their water would be fine too if it weren’t for their neighbor’s vicious dog. The dog didn’t let anyone near the well, so the water stagnated. “The well is sick,” she said, “it’s like a cow that isn’t being milked.”
    “Why are you having to fetch water yourself?” he said, with a blend of mockery and reproach. Looking at her thin brown face and her gray hair, he went on: “Sending an old woman out to fetch water—important cadres ought to know better! You must be about sixty, yes?”
    The old woman could not remember her age. When she wanted the women in the neighboring dachas to express surprise at her readiness to fetch water, scrub floors, and do the laundry, she would say that she was seventy-one. In the polyclinic, however, she had registered herself as being fifty-nine, and that was what she had said to her daughter. She wanted her daughter to feel sorry for her when she died, not to be saying, “Oh well, she had a good long life.” She sighed and said to the driver, “I’m into my seventies. Yes, my dear, well into my seventies.”
    “Your daughter should be fetching the water herself,” said the driver. “Or she should send the girls. No, an old woman like you shouldn’t be having to fetch water.”
    “You don’t understand,” said Marya Ivanovna. “It’s only today she’s here so early. It’s because she’s going on leave. Normally she doesn’t get back here until nighttime. The girl’s completely worn out. It’s getting better now, she’s calming down, but last winter, when she’d only just started working in Moscow, she’d get back here in her car—and burst into tears. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ I’d ask. ‘Has someone upset you?’ ‘No,’ she’d reply, ‘it’s just that everything’s so new and strange.’ No, she’s certainly not going to start fetching water! As for the little girls, to be honest with you, they’re bitches, right little bitches. Yes, they tell lies and they use foul words. The older one’s not too bad—she just lies there and reads—but Natashka’s a horror. This morning she said to me, ‘Granny, you’ve guzzled all the sweets that my auntie left me. I’m going to punch you in the teeth.’ Yes, that’s Natashka for you.”
    “Insulting the aged is a criminal offense. She should be tried in a people’s court,” said the driver. A moment later, he went on to ask, “So they’re not her own daughters?”
    “They’re her nieces, they’re the children of my eldest daughter, Shura. Shura died in 1931, during the