Vasyl Barka (1908-2003) was a towering figure in 20th-century Ukrainian literature. A poet, novelist, translator and religious thinker, his epic and lyrical works are deeply rooted in the Christian mystical tradition.
Born and raised in Ukraine’s Poltava region, he witnessed the 1932-33 Holodomor firsthand, escaping to the Caucasus region, where he settled in Krasnodar.
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During World War II he fought for the Red Army, was severely wounded, then taken prisoner to Germany. After the war he settled in the United States, where he wrote his great works – among which, The Yellow Prince (published in 1961), a novel set in Ukraine at the peak of the famine. It is considered a masterpiece of Ukrainian prose.
The novel chronicles the Katrannyk family in the throes of hunger. In the chapter presented here, many of Myron Danylovych Katrannyk’s family have already died, so he attempts a journey to the Northern Caucasus, where there is less hunger, and he might find work with acquaintances. He never gets farther than the regional capital.
Chapter 20
He goes to the town with the others. The buildings are turning yellow. The gate of the huge courtyard keeps a sign: “Union Bread.” It strikes the farmer with dread. “Why union? Is the bread a union with the north, where the orders come from? What kind of union is it when they take your bread and you die?”
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He focuses on the pyramids of grain: through the holes in the tarpaulin, he can see a lot of rain-soaked cereal starting to mold.
The very color of the seeds is irresistible. There it is, salvific grain. Right in front of his eyes. Pure wheat. A bag is all it takes – his family will be saved! And yet, the grain will rot in a sodden place. From just what’s scattered into the mud, you can fill thousands of sacks and save souls. But no, both grain and people will die. Who gave the order?
Burly guards surround the rotting pyramids, all with rifles, speaking a foreign language.
The peasants, as if bewitched, look at the grain. They’re thin as rails and tattered worse than the beggars once were. Most of them are sitting or lying down – soon they’ll be dead. On top of the fierce hunger, they’re tormented by the sight of the grain nearby; as if by reaching for it, lunging forward, they might be – saved! There’s enough raw grain to eat and get some strength: your grain, taken from your field.
Temptation devours their feeble souls like an invisible fire, leading to a half-mad self-inflicted blindness. The wheat’s proximity enrages them, binds their hands, feet, thoughts, eyes, and deprives them of the will to look for some other rescue.
With shimmering eyes, they’re drawn to the grain, like a sleepwalker to the moon, or moths to a flame: drawn as their hearts’ sickly smoldering burns out.
Katrannyk is also in thrall to the vision of the pyramids. There it is, grain in the light of day! So close! Stay like this for a while, and you’re a goner; the soul sickness will torture you with its shackles. He breaks out of that paralysis as if from chains…
Not far from the sulfur-yellow door of the district executive committee building, a dead body lies in a ditch; its face can’t be seen because the rainwater has risen around it. A man walks by, stained and unshaven, holding a broken hacksaw in his hand. He’s talking to himself, but in a way so everyone can hear:
“The woman’s been dead two days already – and they do nothing...”
The workers, dressed in red leather coats, step out of the door. Katrannyk and the other man hurry off in separate directions. Looking back at the group near the house, the peasant thinks: “They’re going to take the body away – that’s why they came out in a group; though they might be Herod’s children, they’re still human.” But the group just stands on the steps, smoking cigarettes, not even glancing at the dead woman lying in front of them. They go down and walk past the corpse, disgusted, as ripples of light shimmer off the puddle of water. They bypass it as if it were a piece of wood blocking state affairs.
Katrannyk quickens his pace when he sees some of the workers have turned to follow him. He has to go to shops in town. Everywhere: old men, women and children walking under the windows, stopping in front of the door, begging for food. Many dead, no one takes them away. There’s a two-story building covered with rusty-brown sheet metal. On the first floor, from an open window, a full-cheeked man with dark skin and wearing a jacket over his shoulders looks out at the street. He’s chewing something. Below, on the sidewalk, an old lady approaches, extending her dried out twig of an arm:
“Give me just a crumb! I’m already dying…”
The man with gray stubble listens in the window as he chews, as if comforted by the pitiful request, and at the same time closes the window with a rattle and loud click of the latch.
Through the glass rectangle on the door, a red sign hanging from bronze screws informs Katrannyk that this is the editorial office of the magazine Lenin’s Way. A copy of the publication hangs in a pine frame with a wire mesh attached to the fence. Half of a magazine lies nearby, abandoned or thrown away. The peasant’s eye catches the articles with headlines screaming: “Kulaks in the city live off others’ bread… They don’t want to work in the fields… It’s sabotage!...” And so on in the same vein, thick and plenty.
He wants to throw it away, it depresses him: “Look at that fat-face chomping in the window, spouting lies as long as he’s paid. Like hell he’d come down to earth for any reason to make bread – not like us and our family and ancestors.” But the peasant holds on to it; the paper will come in handy on the road.
Nearby, in front of a house with a rusted roof like at the editorial office, but only one-story, there’s a canvas-covered cart. A hunchbacked man with a black leather cap over his curly hair hops out onto the cobblestones and shouts something to the driver while stomping toward the door. He pulls a wooden handle at the end of a wire running up to ring a bell, pulls just once, then goes back to the cart where the driver is tugging a sack dusted gray on top with what looks like flour from a mill. The two of them hoist it up and haul it to the door, which opens just then, because someone is standing behind it, waiting to let them in. In the blink of an eye, the sack is inside. The two turn back, door bolt clanging behind them, and drive off as fast as they can. Heavy thumps echo across the gray-green cobblestones, glistening darkly after the rain like skulls packed tightly in the ground.
Hungry people huddle in front of the door as he walks by; an old man staggers, as if mortally wounded, pulls the handle of the bell – no movement, no answer. As if there were no soul inside. The beggars, nerves aching from the futile wait, go away.
The peasant finds it puzzling: Why are they moving food during the day? “Probably afraid people will become bolder in the twilight and take it away.”
The queue to the store, where they’re giving away sauerkraut, stretches like a stream over the cobblestones. Suddenly passers-by rush toward it; the peasant as well — into the fresh and much shorter “tail,” straightened by the flow of waiting people now shouting at each other. Eventually, everyone backs off, and the normal order returns.
Myron Danylovych gets a kilo of sauerkraut: once moist, now dry and stale. Turns out it’s tastier than desserts! He hides most of it in a bag, wrapped into a ball with that vile newsprint. He cheers up a little, now more assured that he’ll reach the Caucasus. He’ll have enough food for three days. And there he can borrow money from an acquaintance – until he earns his first wages.
On the way to the station, he figures: “They were generous with the sauerkraut – they could see it was rotting in the warehouse.” He crouches under the red wall, with people just like himself. It looks like there won’t be any train, and there won’t be any traffic either. They’ve all been waiting for so long.
Just before daybreak, Katrannyk jostles his way through the wagon’s door and immediately lays down on an upper bunk.
Sleep comes dead and heavy. As he wakes up, Myron Danylovych feels the sweat of a feverish chill.
He must have caught cold from walking in the rain, then sitting on the ground.
* * *
By evening, he’s at the junction station; get off here and wait again.
The square is like an anthill, where the superiors’ power is paraded with briefcases and thick dossiers; trump cards in cars; squeezed by institutions and dripping out from them, exaggeratedly grandiose faces looking askance at the “gray” masses. The difference comes in clothes and party tickets, those shibboleths of power which, even hidden and locked at home in a drawer, cover them with an imperceptible property of evil. They are their talismans, arousing revulsion: above all for any villager agonizing as per the decrees of party leaders in the capital.
The peasant looks around: “Wow! So many, they’ll bleed us to the end.” He goes to look at the rotting vegetable scraps, sold mercifully to the “tail” for an insane price.
Queues gather at sunrise, drifting and meandering till midnight: standing, lost, torn by unexpected pressures, soldered back together by starvation. People hold on to each other in order to save their place in the four-row crowd – like bees in tight strands.
Katrannyk has been hoping for commercial bread. He finds a position and waits, suffering fever-chills, fatigue and unbearable pangs down to the depths of his being, constantly whispering to him inaudibly: “Eat! eat!” His attention and eyes bound to the door in the distance, fading like an empty oil lamp.
Word spreads that they’ll be giving out some herring. Maybe he can get some fish scraps right away and eat it with the sauerkraut instead of bread.
The people are exhausted, standing for so long they can’t move or feel anymore. That’s when the cars pull up full of guards. Katrannyk freezes. If he were healthier, he could push through the ranks and escape. But his weakness keeps him motionless amid the crowd, as if riveted by the eyes of a boa.
The guards manhandle the peasants brutally, like wolves grabbing sheep, lead them straight to the truck beds, fill them up, then quickly circle around with the engine running. One man armed with a pistol sits in the cab with the driver, the rest go back to get a new batch of victims.
They drive unusually fast – through the deadest streets.
At the station, everyone is loaded into freight wagons and locked in. The train clatters as if possessed. Sometimes it stops – a strange silence behind the wooden walls! Finally, when it arrives at its destination, the wagon doors start banging, screams and acrid smoke sift in from somewhere – through the darkness of night. Lanterns flash at the door. The guards jump inside. The train moves again, then stops at the edge of a deep chasm, where flames flare up like giant scraps of torn fabric through the smoke, curling languidly. Screams pierce the night.
Katrannyk is about to lose his mind when the guards start grabbing the peasants and throwing them out of the wagon into the ravine. Some of them slide down the sheer drop, clinging to whatever they can, others tumble over and disappear into the fire.
A minute later, they throw Katrannyk out the door – his hands breaking the fall into the dreaded grave. His fingers clutch the charred roots of some bushes, and a thought flashes involuntarily: “Must have been a hazel.” The peasant grabs desperately, but the roots snap and brake off at the last moment. He rolls farther down, clinging to a lump of earth with both hands. The chasm feels wider. Again he digs into the slope with his fingernails and boots to slow down, but it doesn’t help. He keeps falling faster into the suffocating smoke. His shoulder hits something hard – what’s that? He didn’t even see it. Something hot and sharp sears him into the earthen wall. He starts groping desperately. If there’s a rock or root, he can hold it, but nothing. He falls among some large trees engulfed in flames. “I’m dead!” flashes through his mind. He keeps tumbling till his back hits a tree, his head bangs the slope. In an instant, he crumples into a ball and rolls down like a spinning sun wheel into the blazing river. The hair above his right temple is singed, but he’s falling so fast that he feels no pain. He realizes he’s suffocating and his shoulder is broken. Then he passes out, coming to with a sharp pain from falling into a narrow channel. Katrannyk touches the soil, shaking. “I’m in wet clay! It’s a gully, I can climb through the water.” The thought consoles him. Like an animal on all fours he crawls through the swampy crevasse, squeezing between the rotting deadwood scattered all around.
The constant desperate cries from above could snuff his memory, if not for the fact he’s half-dead himself, stunned and staggered, writhing through the ravine and crawling amid the destruction.
High above he can hear the roaring flames, the cracking of a fallen tree; even the heat’s hum and hiss, muffled by the wild fear of fire about to fall on him.
All of it – like the flames of a big building after it’s collapsed: with crossbeams and fallen columns, burning with a roar and settling deep into the earth’s crevices.
Down below, at the edge of the channel, charred remains on both sides in front of him. Few have managed to make their way to the clay. People stuck, crushed, mutilated. Ravaged by fire. One man, completely burnt, hangs over the water, his feet caught between two trees, his hands and head swaying through gusting flames that the depth’s updraft bellows into a red flood.
Many peasants burn in the massive furnace-pit, columns of smoke billowing above like from a factory. The train brings fresh crowds. Dumped by the guards, they fall mangled by the tar-smeared crossbeams before fire ravishes them. Alternating with people, logs are also hauled from the wagons and thrown into the abyss.
Katrannyk makes his way under the debris and loses consciousness again. He comes to soon enough, feeling the fire above and the marshy stream’s dampness below. The heat penetrates his clothes. He crawls like a wounded snake. Although a draft at the bottom of the deep crevice brings some air, the suffocating smoke is lethal – it rips his chest, poisons his blood, blinds him and clouds his mind.
Eventually Myron Danylovych climbs into a pool where the water is deep, splashes there to keep the clothes on his back from burning. He feels something sloshing at his side! His own shoulder bag.
The bottom of the pool is full of pebbles and sandy clay. While splashing himself, Katrannyk whispers as if to someone else: “I’m still alive!” Then, emboldened by the apparent truth of what he says, begins to climb out. After a few minutes he’s so far from the swampy channel that when another collapse roars into the fire, he remains unscathed. Myron Danylovych picks up his pace and suddenly slips into an even deeper ravine. He winds up under a little waterfall flowing through the ruins, getting wet without wanting too. As he crawls through the slow-moving water, he’s able to pull himself up to the edge of the ravine: rolling hills and boulders beside charred bushes all around. There’s less burning wood fallen from above, and he manages to step over it, making his way from below, through a hollow full of residual thickets.
He gropes for something lodged in the ground, covered in mud. At first he passes the thing by, then changes his mind. He reaches down and grabs it.
He retreats behind a hill, where only a few scattered logs and pitch-coated beams roll down, smoldering. He crouches under the ledge of the slope – to rest and recover from the hell.
He unwraps his find, and to his surprise and immeasurable joy sees bread! – dry, a little stale, but still bread. Just from the touch he can tell it’s rye. Everyone all around is looking for bread and can’t find any, whereas he comes across some where you would never think – in the midst of ruin.
His whole being lunges at the find with that rapacious ache of hunger. The rubble starts burning again. Myron Danylovych eats only one morsel, holding it in his cupped palms so as not to lose a single crumb. Then he wraps the bread back as it was and hides it in his bag, checking it regularly by running his hand over the cloth.
He overcomes the weakness causing him to keel, blinded by burning flashes from above and smoking debris cutting his eyes. He straightens up and starts off as fast as he can, away from there. He trips and falls. When he stands up, he touches the bag with his elbow, checking again: Is the bread there or not? It’s there!
When Katrannyk sees what he’s tripped over, he’s horrified: a dead man. The corpse’s charred clothes now an ashen crust. The left side of his head broken and burned, with congealing blood running red through the cracks. The sight of the dead man cuts through Myron Danylovych, who convulses painfully and nearly passes out. He girds himself back to his senses and moves on, afraid of remembering, though the stranger’s death invades his thoughts.
He steps carefully across the uneven clay. His fever has broken; the violent shivers, on the verge of madness, have shaken it out from his blood and nerves. But fear and pain torment him now that he realizes his remaining strength is nearly exhausted.
He sits down on a hump and starts eating, not just out of hunger, but to stave off despair. He’s already become stingy. After thinking for a moment, he eats some stale poppy cake from the bag first, then a bit of bread, as a snack.
In the twilight, after tripping over the dead man, a disturbing thought sprouts up from the depths of his consciousness: It’s his bread!... The poor man lost it before dying, when he was all wounded and burned. What’s bread for him? Left lying there, it’ll disappear in the mud and ash, when here the living need it to keep death away. That’s how it should be: the bread passes rightfully into the hands of another, who has also passed through these infernal depths. It wasn’t easy, and he shares all his grief with the deceased. It’s the only way to share someone else’s bread – bitter bread for life! And then Katrannyk wonders: “The unlucky man’s poor soul might still be watching. From heaven already, he’d say, ‘Take the bread, you need it. What’s it to me? My soul will rejoice for having helped someone in the world, even after my death.’”
He reassures himself again that there’s no crime in taking such bread, but still feels bitter; it’s not good to take someone else’s bread... “Tell you what, I’ll do you a favor, to keep you from any desecration,” he finally decides. He goes back and breaks off the branch of an unburnt hazel bush, digs a shallow hole in the soft clay near the burnt man. Overcoming his fear, he takes hold of him, moves him there and covers him. “God, have mercy on this man!” he says over him.
After washing his hands in the stream, he walks downhill, holding on to the bushes at his sides. He’s careful, alert to every noise. He remembers old man Hontar: “Like him, I’m walking out of the grave, only his was frozen, mine’s a furnace.” He steps out and looks around, afraid that those above, near the wagons, might spot him and chase after him – their monstrosity hovering like a fiery wraith of smoke rolling through the long chasm, reddening the clay havens and woods up the slopes.
Darkness thickens around the fugitive, enveloping the trees and ground over which the stream runs black, reflecting the abyss.
Myron Danylovych finds a dry ledge under the bushes where he can rest and hide unseen from above while there’s still light from the fire. His wide and wooly jacket, which serves as a coat, is quite clean after bathing in the stream, though singed everywhere. He only needs to wipe away the last stains.
The fugitive sits, leaning his shoulder against the trunk, and doesn’t realize he’s dozing off against his will and despite his fear. It’s as if he’s moved to another depth: one without pines and people burning in a fire. His sleep is dreamless; only at the end does a vague anxiety seep in. It pierces him awake and he sees that the fire has grown terribly, reaching the heights above the ravine. “They must’ve brought more wood and pitch; I’d be burnt there now!” Katrannyk deduces. He gets up with difficulty, his body broken. His leg is numb, and there’s a sharp pain in his shoulders and ribs. A wretched man: like a corpse.
When the flames reach their peak, there’s a collapse: explosions rush up to the heights, kick up blinding and swirling currents, like red geysers with blizzards of sparks and clouds of smoke. Then it subsides somewhat. Katrannyk walks away and looks back at the fiery grave; he wants to scream out of powerless despair for anyone still alive to get down to the stream. But would it help?
The clothes on his chest are steaming, his shoes are wet. Should he dry them? No, he has to go, otherwise the guards will shoot him from above. He remembers them and immediately hurries away. Fear assails him again – he pushes on relentlessly, across the uneven earth.
Translated by Stash Luczkiw (all rights reserved)
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