Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

I arrived here last night from Leningrad. When I went to bed, I had made up my mind to go into town and visit the Old Fortress first thing in the morning.

My hostess, Elena Lukyanovna, is a nerve specialist. She lost all her family in Leningrad, during the first winter of the blockade, and after demobilization came to work in my home district. We got talking on the train. The mere fact that we had both lived for ten years in Leningrad at once drew me towards this thoughtful, prematurely grey-haired woman in a green army tunic with the marks of shoulder-straps that had only recently been discarded. My father had suffered the same fate as her parents. Not long before the war he had come to Leningrad from Cherkassy to work at the Printing-House. He died in my arms of starvation, in December 1941.

"I'm afraid you won't find anywhere to live," said Elena Lukyanovna towards the end of the journey. "The town's just a heap of ruins... If you like, you can stay with me." Since I had no longer any relatives in the town, I gladly accepted her invitation.

And overnight it started raining. The rain is still pelting down now, although it is four o'clock in the afternoon and high time I went out to see the town I have not seen for over twenty years.

When Elena Lukyanovna went out to the hospital, I asked her if she could let me have something to read.

"All my books are about medicine," she said. "My library hasn't arrived yet.. . But there are some books and magazines up in the attic. They've been there ever since the occupation. Have a look through them. Perhaps they need burning."

And now for two hours I have been turning the gaudy pages of Die Woche, Signal, and other Nazi magazines. Hitler's frenzied face glares at me from every page—meeting Mussolini, receiving the Spanish ambassador, admiring Warsaw destroyed by German bombs. Petrified ranks of Hitlerite troops line the deserted squares, banners with the sign of the swastika wave over the stricken city. . . But what is this?. .

I pull a heavy bundle of newspapers out of the bottom of the basket. Its title, the Podolian, sends my thoughts racing back to the days of my childhood. The Russian newspaper that was published in our provincial town in the time of the tsar used to be called the Podolian. But why is it in Ukrainian?

I look for the date: 1942. As I turn the pages of this Nazi Podolian, I seem to see the invaders' chronicle of the war turned inside out. I see Hitlerites driving through the deserted streets of Kiev, I read the screaming head-lines about the inevitable fall of Leningrad and Moscow, and other Nazi announcements. One reads them now with the laughing contempt that one feels after a bad dream. And suddenly a familiar name leaps to my eye—"Grigorenko." I read hastily: "On the 12th of this month, by order of the District Commissar Baron von Reindel, a Ukrainian Committee was set up in the town. It is composed of the following persons: Evgen Vikul, Tser (interpreter), Yuri Ksezhonok (chairman of the committee), Kost Grigorenko. The committee will supervise collection of taxes and help the German authorities to levy contingents. The committee is an organ of the District Commissar and acts under the Commissar's orders."

Grigorenko! The Petlura boy scout, the doctor's son, serving Petlura and the Germans! So this was where he had turned up again!

"I see you've found an interesting pastime?" Elena Lukyanovna says entering the room.

"I've just traced some old acquaintances, Elena Lukyanovna, and there are one or two whom I wish I had handed over to justice when I was young."

"Yes, I met some old acquaintances today, too," Elena Lukyanovna replied, missing the point of my remark. "One of them was a boy from Siberia, Dima. He was wounded in the fighting' when our town was liberated. He's a very difficult case. For over a year now he hasn't been able to say a single word. We've got to decide whether to operate on him or not," she went on, seeming to think aloud as she took off the hospital gown she has been wearing under her great-coat. "Today I called up Lvov and asked them to send a consultant. There's an old friend of mine working there, a professor of neuropathology from Leningrad. . ."

" 'I called up a professor in Lvov!' " I repeated. "It sounds so simple nowadays, Elena Lukyanovna. But if only you knew how much that phrase means to a person like me, who was born here! It sums up the immense changes that have taken place in the Ukraine. Twenty years ago Lvov was very far away from us, like Paris, London, or Madrid. Now it will take your professor only two hours to fly here."

"Yes, not more than that," Elena Lukyanovna agreed.

It is the second morning of my stay. I open my eyes. Good! Blue sky is shining through the window and the dark green leaves of the chestnut-trees, still dripping with last night's rain, are looking up to greet the sun.

I dress quickly and dash off to the town.

Weeds and flowers are sprouting everywhere from the stone walls at the side of the road. Rattling the old tin cans that have been tied round their necks instead of bells, the goats are having a fine time in this profusion of green. That is familiar enough, I remember that from the days when I was a boy.

But I can't understand why the road leading down to the New Bridge is overgrown with weeds. Surely people still drive over these cobble-stones! This used to be the main road through town to the Dniester.

A sorry picture confronts me as I reach the cliffs. All that remains of the beautiful New Bridge are the tall stone piles at the foot of which the Smotrich gleams in the sunlight. They are spanned by a narrow wooden strip whose planks creak and sag underfoot.

No one crosses the bridge now. Nearly all the buildings of the old town perched on its high cliff above the river are in ruins.

With great difficulty I guess from the shattered walls what part of the town I am in. This must be Post Street. That's where we used to buy scraps of sausage on the days we received our factory-school grants...

And over there, that's where the Venice Restaurant used to be, where Monus Guzarchik held that rowdy party after his grandmother died...

Where is he now, our rowdy Monus, "non-Party" man, builder of electric locomotives? The last letter "I had from him was in 1940, when I was in Leningrad. Guzarchik wrote me that he was chief foreman at the Kharkov Locomotive Works, and sent me a booklet about his method of converting plants to assembly line production. . .

Many of the cottages round the huge Stephen Bathori Tower look as if they had been struck by a hurricane.

The tower was" built here on the orders of a Hungarian king, the usurper of the Polish throne who was seeking to conquer the Ukrainian lands of Podolia. And in 1943, (I heard this from Elena Lukyanovna), the Hitlerites shot more than seven thousand of the finest people in Hungary, who had refused to help the German invaders. The Gestapo officials had been afraid to slaughter them in Budapest, so they sent them to their death in this little Ukrainian town. Not far away I noticed the ruins of the building where Shipulinsky's cafe with its broad windows used, to stand. I remembered how I had invited Galya Kushnir to that tempting cafe. There we sat, Galya and I, chatting and sipping our coffee like grown-ups, when Father on his way home from the print-shop glanced in and saw us. The trouble I had then!...

And where is Galya Kushnir now? She and I were separated by the war. I received my last letter from her in the spring of 1941, from Odessa. She wrote that her thesis for a degree in history had been successful, and that she was continuing her studies on the history of the Black Sea Straits. Had she managed to get out of Odessa in time? And would I ever meet her again, my first love, a working girl who had become a historian?