Living Space by Vasily Grossman / Fiction / Untitled Books

"The doctor checked the pupils of the newly deceased, gave a sigh for the sake of decency, and left."

Living Space by Vasily Grossman

Anna Borisovna Lomova, an old woman, had been allocated a room by the Dzerzhinsky district soviet; when she moved in, her complete lack of furniture, pots, pans, dishes, clothes and even bedding was a source of amusement to the other tenants of the communal apartment. She did not live in her room for long. A week after being granted her living space, as she was walking down the corridor, she gave a sudden cry and fell to the floor.

One of the other women phoned for help. A doctor called round. She gave the old woman an injection, said that everything would be alright and went on her way. But in the evening Anna Borisovna began to feel a great deal worse. After a brief discussion, the other tenants phoned for an ambulance. The ambulance from the Sklifosovsky Institute came very quickly, only six minutes after being called, but the old woman had already died. The doctor checked the pupils of the newly deceased, gave a sigh for the sake of decency, and left.

During the few days that Anna Borisovna had spent in this room of hers in the southwest of Moscow, the other tenants had managed to find out a little about her. As a young woman, she had evidently taken part in the Civil War; it seemed she had been the commissar of an armoured train. Then she had lived in Persia, in Tehran. And then she had done some very important job in Moscow; she might even have worked in the Kremlin. In a conversation with Svetlana Kolotyrkina, a young girl, about how Soviet literature was being taught in schools, she had said, "I was once a friend of Furmanov and Mayakovsky." And she had told Svetlana's mother, who had worked as a technical inspector at a midget car factory, that she had been arrested in 1936 and spent nineteen years in prisons and camps. Not long ago the Supreme Court had reviewed her case, rehabilitated her and acknowledged her to be entirely innocent. And so she had been granted a Moscow residence permit and living space.

During her long years in the Gulag, after being transferred so many times from camp to camp, she had evidently lost contact with all her friends and family. And she had not yet had time to get to know anyone in Moscow. Nobody attended her cremation. Straight after her death her room was given to a trolleybus driver by the name of Zhuchkov, an extremely irritable man with a wife and child.

The other tenants were all astonishingly quick to forget that, for a few days, a rehabilitated old woman had shared their apartment.

One Sunday morning, when they were all playing cards together after breakfast, the postwoman came in with the mail: the newspapers Moscow Pravda, Soviet Russia and Lenin's Path; the magazines Soviet Woman and Health, the television and radio programmes, and a letter addressed to Anna Borisovna Lomova.

"We don't have anyone here with that name," declared a number of male and female voices. And Zhuchkov the trolleybus driver, ushering the postwoman towards the door, said, "No, there's no one here with that name - and there never has been."

At this point Svetlana Kolotyrkina suddenly said, "How can you say such a thing? You're living in Anna Borisovna's room!"

And all at once everyone remembered Anna Borisovna Lomova and felt astonished how quickly they had forgotten her.

After a little discussion, the envelope was opened and the typewritten letter was read out aloud:

"In view of circumstances that have recently come to light, in accordance with the ruling made on 8 May, 1960 by the Military Board of the Supreme Court of the USSR, your husband, Terenty Georgievich Ardashelia, who died in confinement on 6 July, 1938, has been posthumously rehabilitated. The sentence pronounced by the Military Board of the Supreme Court on 3 September, 1937, has been overturned, and the case has been closed due to the absence of a body of evidence."

"So what do we do with this letter now?"

"Send it back. What else can we do with it?"<br "I think it's our duty to hand it in to the house management committee, given that the woman was fully registered at this address."

"You're right. But it's Sunday today. There won't be anyone there."

"Anyway, what's the great hurry?"

"I can take it. I can hand it in when I go to see about the broken taps."

For a little while, everyone was silent, and then a male voice said, "Why are we all just sitting here? Whose deal is it?"

"Whose do you think? Whoever lost the last round."

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Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, with Olga Mukovnikova. Vasily Grossman (1905-64) is recognised by Russian scholars as one of the outstanding literary figures of the twentieth century. _The Road_, a collection of short fiction and essays, is published by MacLehose Press and NYRB Classics.

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Thursday, 23 September, 2010

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Issue 44 / May 2012

"The doctor checked the pupils of the newly deceased, gave a sigh for the sake of decency, and left."