What the Bolsheviks were up to, words cannot describe. One time, someone brought a newspaper from town. Inside, a photograph — grain growing high in the fields. And the accompanying text said that the cities were going hungry, that there were lines for bread night and day because the peasants were lazy, they didn’t want to harvest the crops, and everything was rotting in the field. The hatred toward the peasants was great, and yet it was after all the peasants themselves who were dying of hunger! When they put them on the train bound for Kazakhstan, they would pass through deserted villages. The windows boarded up, the doors ajar, swinging and squeaking in the wind. No people at all, maybe only an NKVD man. No livestock of any kind — the livestock had either died or been slaughtered. There wasn’t even a dog barking — the dogs had been eaten long ago.
MAKSUDOV believes that this genocide in the Ukraine called the Great Famine — although it was officially known as the collectivization of agriculture and the building of the kolkhoz system — brought such a terrible curse that this agricultural land has not recovered to this day. “But the life of the victors in this cruel war,” he writes,
turned out to be not so wonderful after all. For theirs was a Pyrrhic victory. Grain production, which had almost doubled between 1923 and 1928, remained after collectivization at the same level for twenty-five years, although the region’s population, naturally, was increasing. Cattle raising never got over the blow that was the slaughter or starvation of more than one hundred million horses, cows, bulls, sheep, and pigs. It is beyond any doubt that the ongoing agricultural crisis in the USSR has its roots in those distant years, in that “victory” that turned out to be a defeat. The land and the peasants retaliated the only way they were able to against those who had conquered them. The earth stopped giving birth, and the peasants lost their love of working the land. It was a terrible, but a just, revenge.
HISTORIANS EXPLAIN the genocide in the Ukraine (and in the northern Caucasus) in various ways. Russian historians see it as an instrument of the destruction of traditional society and the construction, in its place, of a formless, docile, half-enslaved mass of Homo sovieticus. Ukrainian historians (among them Valentin Moroz) believe that Stalin’s goal was to save the Imperium: the Imperium cannot exist without the Ukraine. Yet the twenties witness a renascence of Ukrainian nationalistic ambition, which develops under the slogan “Far from Moscow!” The main repository of the Ukrainian spirit is the peasantry. To break that spirit, Stalin must destroy the peasantry. At the time, there were around thirty million Ukrainian peasants. Technically, one could have annihilated a significant portion of them by building a network of gas chambers. But that is an error Stalin did not commit. He who builds gas chambers bears all the blame, brings the disgrace of being a murderer down upon himself. Instead, Stalin saddled the victims of the crime with all the guilt for it: You are dying of hunger because you do not want to work, because you do not see the advantages of the kolkhoz. Furthermore, he complained, because of you the inhabitants of the cities are going hungry, women cannot nurse because they have no milk, children cannot go to school because they are too weak.
The Ukrainian countryside died in silence, isolated from the world, gnawing on the bark of trees and on the leather laces of its own shoes, looked upon with contempt by people from the cities, who stood in the streets in unending lines for bread.
• • •
I RISE in Lvov near dawn. It is still dark when I walk out into the street. I see a little light swaying in the distance: the day’s first streetcar is approaching. I take it to the train station and buy a ticket to Drohobych, on the suburban line. It is bright daylight by the time I arrive, and a pale sun appears between the thinning clouds. (It is February.) Leszek Gałas and Alfred Szrejer are waiting for me on the platform. Mr. Gałas must hurry to work, but Mr. Szrejer is retired and can spend the day with me.
Pilgrimages are made to Drohobych because this is where the writer Bruno Schulz lived, created, and died. Mr. Szrejer was a pupil of Schulz’s who, in addition to writing and painting, taught crafts and drawing in the Władysław Jagieło Secondary School. “When we didn’t feel like doing anything in class, we asked him to tell us a story. He would stop the lesson and recite a tale. He liked to do this very much.”
Schulz lived in a one-story house at 12 Floriańska Street, from which he had a very short walk to the school on Zielona Street, maybe several hundred meters. All he had to do was cross two small streets and a beautiful old square. There is a church nearby, and then another square. Behind that church, at the edge of the square, stands a bakery today. It was there, in 1942, on the street, that Karl Gunter, a Gestapo agent, shot Bruno Schulz. Gunter had a small woman’s pistol.
Bruno Schulz’s life thus ran its course in this little town, and, finally, within that even smaller triangle between Floriańska Street, Zielona Street, and the square near the bakery. Today people can walk this route in several minutes, reflecting upon the mystery of Schulz’s extraordinary imagination. But it is doubtful that they would reach any clear and insightful conclusions. Only once did this beautiful little town yield its extraordinary secrets. Only once, and only to Bruno Schulz, who was a vigilant and sensitive particle of it, its discreet, silently passing spirit.
That is why my question is utterly absurd: “Mr. Szrejer, where are the cinnamon shops?”
Szrejer stops, and there is a mixture of surprise, irony, and even reprimand in his gaze. “Where are the cinnamon shops?” he echoes. “Why, they were in Schulz’s imagination! It is there that they shone. It is there that they emitted such a unique fragrance!”
Mr. Szrejer wants to show me his properties, or, more precisely, that which once belonged to his family. This pharmacy belonged to his grandfather, and this house to his father, who got his Ph.D. in chemistry in Zurich and was the director of an oil-refinery laboratory in Jassy.
His family perished in the ghetto, and the few survivors emigrated to Argentina.
For sixteen years after the war, Mr. Szrejer played the violin and sang in a movie-house orchestra, first at the Kirov (formerly Wanda), and then at the Komsomolec (formerly Sztuka). Later, he taught in a school of music.
“And here,” says Mr. Szrejer, when we had already been walking a long time around the town, “here was a synagogue — now it’s a furniture warehouse. Those dry sticks you see there? Countless weeds grow here in the summer.” Could that idiot girl, Tluya, have had her bed here? Maybe she could have.
Everything is so unclear, so unfathomable. Schulz wrote The Cinnamon Shops during the most terrible year of the Great Famine in the Ukraine, not far from Drohobych. Schulz most certainly knew nothing of this great tragedy, hidden as it was from the world. Yet what forces could have been at work here, what mysterious currents, associations, connections, and oppositions, that would lead him to begin his book with a magnificent, stupefying vision of satiety?
On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun — the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins, the mysterious black morellos that smelled so much better than they tasted; apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons. And next to that pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead octopuses and squids — the raw material of meals with a yet undefined taste, the vegetative and terrestrial ingredients of dinner, exuding a wild and rustic smell.