Vol. 53 No. 1 1986 - page 33

VASILY GROSSMAN
33
ting herself be treated in the same manner as this miserable crowd of
relatives of the repressed.
Soon the queue began to move again ; a young woman who had
just left the window said quietly: "Everyone's getting the same answer:
parcel not accepted."
"That means the investigation's still not completed ," explained
the woman in front of Yevgenia.
"What about visits?"
"Visits?" The woman smiled at Yevgenia's na·ivete.
Yevgenia had never realized that the human back could be so
expressive, could so vividly reflect a person's state of mind . People
had a particular way of craning their necks as they came up to the
window; their backs, with their raised, tensed shoulders, seemed to
be crying, to be sobbing and screaming.
When Yevgenia was seventh in the queue, the window slammed
shut and a twenty-minute break was announced . Everyone sat down
on the chairs and benches .
There were wives and mothers; there was a middle-aged en–
gineer whose wife - an interpreter in the All Union Society for Cul–
tural Relations - had been arrested; there was a girl in her last year
at school whose mother had been arrested and whose father had been
sentenced in 1937 to "ten years without right of correspondence";
there was an old blind woman who had been brought here by a neigh–
bor to inquire after her son ; there was a foreigner, the wife of a Ger–
man Communist, who spoke very poor Russian . She wore a foreign–
looking checked coat and carried a brightly-colored cloth handbag,
but her eyes were the eyes of an old Russian woman .
There were Russian women, Armenian women, Ukrainian
women and Jewish women . There was a woman who worked on a
kolkhoz
near Moscow. The old man who had been filling in the form
turned out to be a lecturer at the Timiryazev Academy; his grand–
son, a schoolboy, had been arrested - apparently for talking too much
at a party .
Yevgenia learned a great deal during those twenty minutes .
The man on duty today was one of the good ones ... They
don't accept tinned food in the Butyrka ... You reaqy must bring
onion and garlic, they're good for scurvy ... There was a man here
last Wednesday who'd come to pick up his documents, he'd been
three years in the Butyrka without once being interrogated and had
then been released .. . Usually people are sent to a camp about a
year after they've been arrested ... You mustn't bring anything too
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