'I've become a mother,' she thought.

That was her last thought.

Her heart, though, still had life in it; it still beat, still ached, still felt pity for the dead and the living. Sofya Levinton felt a wave of nausea. She was hugging David to her like a doll. Now she too was dead, she too was a doll.

49

When a person dies, they cross over from the realm of freedom to the realm of slavery. Life is freedom, and dying is a gradual denial of freedom. Consciousness first weakens and then disappears. The life-processes – respiration, the metabolism, the circulation – continue for some time, but an irrevocable move has been made towards slavery; consciousness, the flame of freedom, has died out.

The stars have disappeared from the night sky; the Milky Way has vanished; the sun has gone out; Venus, Mars and Jupiter have been extinguished; millions of leaves have died; the wind and the oceans have faded away; flowers have lost their colour and fragrance; bread has vanished; water has vanished; even the air itself, the sometimes cool, sometimes sultry air, has vanished. The universe inside a person has ceased to exist. This universe is astonishingly similar to the universe that exists outside people. It is astonishingly similar to the universes still reflected within the skulls of millions of living people. But still more astonishing is the fact that this universe had something in it that distinguished the sound of its ocean, the smell of its flowers, the rustle of its leaves, the hues of its granite and the sadness of its autumn fields both from those of every other universe that exists and ever has existed within people, and from those of the universe that exists eternally outside people. What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone's consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

50

Semyonov, an army driver, was taken prisoner at the same time as Mostovskoy and Sofya Levinton. After ten weeks in a camp near the front, he was sent with a large party of captured Red Army soldiers in the direction of the western border. During these ten weeks he wasn't beaten or kicked with fists, rifle-butts or boots; all he suffered from was hunger.

Like water, hunger is part of life. Like water, it has the power to destroy the body, to cripple the soul, to annihilate millions of lives.

Hunger, ice, snowfalls, droughts, floods and epidemics can decimate flocks of sheep and herds of horses. They can kill wolves, foxes, song-birds, camels, perch and vipers. During natural disasters, people become like animals in their suffering.

The State has the power to dam life up. Like water squeezed between narrow banks, hunger will then cripple, smash to pieces or exterminate a man, tribe or people.

Molecule by molecule, hunger squeezes out the fats and proteins from each cell. Hunger softens the bones, twists the legs of children with rickets, thins the blood, stiffens the muscles, makes the head spin, gnaws at the nerves. Hunger weighs down the soul, drives away joy and faith, destroys thought and engenders submissiveness, base cruelty, indifference and despair.

All that is human in a man can perish. He can turn into a savage animal that murders, commits acts of cannibalism and eats corpses.

The State can construct a barrier that separates wheat and rye from the people who sowed it. The State has the power to bring about a famine as terrible as those which killed millions of people during the siege of Leningrad and in the cattle-pens of Hitler's camps.

Food! Victuals! Grub! Nourishment! Rations! Hard tack! Bread! A fry-up! Something to eat! A rich diet! A meat diet! An invalid diet! A thin diet! A rich, generous spread! A refined dish! Something simple! A peasant dish! A blow-out! Food! Food…!

Potato peelings, dogs, young frogs, snails, rotten cabbage leaves, stale beet, decayed horse-meat, cat-meat, the flesh of crows and jackdaws, damp rotting grain, leather from belts and shoes, glue, earth impregnated with slops from the officers' kitchen – all this is food. This is what trickles through the dam. People struggle to obtain all this; they then divide it up, exchange it and steal it from one another.

On the eleventh day of the journey, at Khutor Mikhailovsky, the guards dragged the now unconscious Semyonov out of the wagon and handed him over to the station authorities. The commandant, a middle-aged German, glanced at the half-dead soldier lying by the wall and turned to his interpreter.

'Let him crawl to the village. He'll be dead by tomorrow. There's no need to shoot him.'

Semyonov dragged himself to the village. At the first hut he was refused entrance.

'There's nothing here for you. Go away!' said an old woman's voice from behind the door.

No one answered when he knocked at the second hut. Either it was empty or the door was bolted on the inside.

The door of the third hut was half-open. He walked into the porch; no one challenged him. He went inside.

He could smell the warmth. He felt dizzy and lay down on the bench by the door. Breathing heavily, he looked round at the white walls, the icons, the table and the stove. After the cattle-pen of the camp, all this seemed very strange.

A shadow passed by the window. A woman walked in, caught sight of Semyonov and screamed.

'Who are you?'

Semyonov didn't say anything. The answer was obvious enough.

That day his life and fate was decided not by the merciless forces of warring States, but by a human being – old Khristya Chunyak.

She gave him a mug of milk. He drank, swallowing it greedily but with difficulty. After he finished the mug, he felt sick. He vomited over and over again; he felt he was being torn apart. He wept, sucking in each breath as though it were his last.

He tried to control himself. There was only one thought in his mind. He was unclean, foul – the woman would throw him out.

Through his swollen eyes he saw her fetch a rag and start to wipe the floor. He wanted to say that he'd clear it up himself, that he'd do anything she wanted – if only she didn't throw him out! But he could only mutter incoherently and point with his trembling fingers. Time passed; the old woman went in and out of the hut several times. She still hadn't tried to throw him out. Perhaps she was asking a neighbour to call a German patrol or the Ukrainian police?

She put an iron pot on the stove. The room grew hotter. Clouds of steam began to appear. The old woman's face looked hard, hostile.

'She's going to throw me out and then disinfect the place,' he thought to himself.

She took some trousers and some underwear out of a trunk. She helped Semyonov undress and made his clothes into a bundle. He could smell his filthy body and the stench of his pants; they were soaked with urine and bloody excrement.

She helped him into a bathtub. He felt the strong, rough touch of her palms on his louse-eaten body. Warm, soapy water ran over his chest and shoulders. He suddenly began to choke and tremble. He felt dizzy. Whining, swallowing down snot, he howled: 'Mama…! Mâmanka…! Mâmanka…!'

She wiped the tears from his eyes with a thick grey towel and dried his hair and shoulders. She put her hands under his armpits and lifted him onto a bench. She bent down to dry his thin, stick-like legs, slipped a shirt and some drawers over him and did up the white cloth-covered buttons.

She poured the filthy black water into a bucket and carried it away. She spread a sheepskin jacket over the stove, covered it with a piece of striped cloth, and put a large pillow at one end. Then she lifted Semyonov into the air, as easily as if he were a chicken, and laid him out on the stove.