27

In the summer Ivan Grigoryevich traveled to the seaside town where, beneath a green hill, his father’s house had stood.

The train went right along the shore. During a short stop, Ivan Grigoryevich got out and looked at the green-and-black water. It was always moving, and it smelled cool and salty.

The wind and the sea had been there when the investigator summoned him for interrogations during the night. They had been there while a grave was being dug for a prisoner who had died in transit. They had been there while guard dogs barked beneath the barrack windows and the snow creaked beneath the boots of the guards.

The sea was eternal, and the eternity of its freedom seemed to Ivan Grigoryevich to be akin to indifference. The sea had not cared about Ivan Grigoryevich when he was living beyond the Arctic Circle, nor would its thundering, splashing freedom care about him when he ceased to live. No, he thought, this is not freedom. This is astronomical space come down to earth, a splinter of eternity, indifferent, always in motion.

The sea was not freedom; it was a likeness of freedom, a symbol of freedom...How splendid freedom must be if a mere likeness of it, a mere reminder of it, is enough to fill a man with happiness.

After passing the night in the station, he set off early in the morning toward the house. An autumn sun was rising in a cloudless sky, and it was impossible to distinguish it from a spring sun.

The silence around him was deserted and sleepy. He felt such an intensity of emotion that it seemed as if his heart, which had endured everything, would be unable to endure it. The world became divinely still; the dear sanctuary of his childhood was eternal and immutable. His feet had long ago trodden these cool cobbles; his child’s eyes had gazed at these rounded hills now touched by the red rust of autumn. He listened to the noise of the stream, on its way to the sea amid watermelon rinds, gnawed corncobs, and other town detritus.

An old Abkhazian man, wearing a black sateen shirt girded by a thin leather belt, was carrying a basket of chestnuts toward the bazaar.

Ivan Grigoryevich might perhaps, in his childhood, have bought figs and chestnuts from this same unchanging old graybeard. And it was the same southern morning air—both cool and warm, smelling of the sea and of the mountain sky, of roses and of garlic from the kitchens. And the same little houses with closed shutters and drawn curtains. And behind these shutters were sleeping the same children—children who had never grown up—and the same old men as forty years ago, still not gone to their graves.

He came out onto the main road and began to climb the hill. There was the sound of the stream again. Ivan Grigoryevich could remember its voice.

Never before had he seen his life as a whole—but now here it was, lying there before him.

And, seeing his life, he felt no resentment toward anyone.

All of them—those who had prodded him with their rifle butts as they escorted him toward the investigator’s office, those who had subjected him to long interrogations without letting him sleep, those who had said vile things about him at public meetings, those who had officially renounced him, those who had stolen his camp ration of bread, those who had beaten him—all of them, in their weakness, coarseness, and spite, had done evil without wanting to. They had not wanted to do evil to him.

They had betrayed, slandered, and renounced because there had been no other way for them to survive. And yet they were people; they were human beings. Had these people wanted him to be making his way like this to his abandoned home—old, alone, and without love?

People did not want to do evil to anyone, but they did evil all through their lives.

All the same, people were people, they were human beings. And the wonderful, marvelous thing is that, willingly or unwillingly, they did not allow freedom to die. In their terrible, distorted, yet still-human souls, even the most terrible of them looked after freedom and kept it alive.

He himself had achieved nothing. He would leave behind him no books, no paintings, no discoveries. He had created no school of thought, no political party, and he had no disciples.

Why had his life been so hard? He had not preached; he had not taught; he had simply remained what he had been since birth—a human being.

The mountainside opened out before him. From the other side of the pass appeared the tops of oak trees. He had walked there as a child, searching in the half dark of the forest for traces of the Circassians and their vanished life: fruit trees gone wild, remnants of what had once been a fence around a house.

Perhaps his own home would still be as unchanged as the town streets and the stream?

It would be at the next turn of the road. For a moment it seemed to him as if an improbably bright light, brighter than any light he had ever seen, had flooded the whole earth. A few more steps—and in this light he would see his home, and his mother would come out toward him, toward her prodigal son, and he would kneel down before her, and her young and beautiful hands would rest on his gray, balding head.

He saw thickets of thorns and hops. There was no house and no well—only a few stones shining white amid dusty grass that had been burned by the sun.

Here he stood—gray-haired, stoop-shouldered, yet still the same as ever, unchanged.

1955–63