Nekrasov’s speech was improvised, a spontaneous reaction to people weeping all around him, to the shame and anger he felt over the profound, vicious disrespect shown to the dead and the living. Other non-Jewish Ukrainians spoke too. All said the same simple thing – Babi Yar was a common tragedy of the Ukrainian and Jewish people. Two weeks after the gathering, a grey stone of polished granite appeared on the site with a carefully vetted inscription. Authorities must have been outraged by the unauthorised, unlawful gathering, but they also understood they had to do something to control the situation. ‘A monument will be erected on this site,’ said the stone. Yet again there was no mention of Jews, only of peaceful Soviet citizens, victims of the Fascist occupation. (The official monument erected ten years later in 1976 followed the precedent, again invoking the theme of slain Soviet citizens.)
For his part, Nekrasov was to pay dearly for his involvement in ‘a mass Zionist gathering’ at Babi Yar. (The first ‘official’ ceremony at the site did not take place until 1991.) He was reprimanded, warned and threatened. Even Stalin’s Prize, the highest literary accolade in the land, which Nekrasov had received after the war for his good, honest, talented book on the Battle of Stalingrad, could no longer protect him. The writer’s refusal to leave Babi Yar alone sealed his fate. In 1974 he was pushed out of the country, spending the last thirteen years of his life in Paris. Anatoly Kuznetsov, who found himself in the West five years before Nekrasov, died in London from a heart attack in 1979, aged not yet fifty, only a few months after the birth of his daughter. His son from his first marriage, Alexey Kuznetsov, a young boy at the time of his father’s defection, had virtually no contact with his father before his death – any association with those who defected to the West had the most serious of repercussions. As a grown man, no longer living in the country where his father was persona non grata, Alexey translated Babi Yar into Ukrainian but, as it turned out, no one was particularly interested in publishing his translation. The son had to wait till 2008 for his father’s book to come out in Ukrainian in Kiev.
As Billie and I walked through Babi Yar, the site seemed vast and peaceful. There were no people around us, only birds, green grass, leaves and gentle wind. The area is now a memorial park with several monuments scattered around the place, disconnected from each other. Birch trees, three hundred of them, stand in the Alley of the Righteous. The vast ravine is now just a hollow in the ground; it may seem large at first, but it is a small, shallow fraction of the original pit. Yet its presence at the site is vital, providing as it does a moment in which the ground is taken from under your feet. ‘It is so beautiful here,’ Billie said dreamily.
‘How can you say this?’ I raised my voice and then began to shout, no longer caring if I was breaking some unspoken code of behaviour. ‘What’s wrong with you? This is a terrible, ugly place. How on earth can you call it beautiful?’
‘Saying that it is beautiful is a good thing, Mum. What would you like to see here instead? Death?’
By the time we walked back to Ira, we were barely speaking to each other. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. I told her what happened, expecting Ira to nail Billie with a disapproving look. Let Billie have it. I no longer wanted to protect her from anyone. ‘Billie is right,’ Ira replied. ‘It is beautiful here. What is it that you want?’ I felt devastated, first by Billie’s response to the site, which seemed to me to signify her refusal of engagement, then by Ira – honest, decent, stoic Ira – siding with Billie. For a while I wanted both of them to vanish so I could be left all alone. I wanted the world to stop. I did not want anything to be normal, beautiful or peaceful. It was at that moment I remembered a story my mother once told me, a story which, with time and rather unexpectedly, became deeply important to me. It happened more than fifty years ago, when my mum was just fourteen, and concerned the death of a much-loved uncle, Mitya.
The dead man had been handsome and universally liked, with a young family of his own. A tank commander who had come out of the war alive, in the postwar years he became a highly sought after professional. It was some mundane condition, such as appendicitis, that carried him off at the age of forty-two. After the funeral, his mother came home and, to the complete astonishment of the girl who was my mum, proceeded to wash and cut the vegetables for a salad. Instead of wailing and beating her head against the wall, the older woman calmly washed an assortment of cucumbers and tomatoes, one by one. The salad vegetables looked very fresh, straight out of the soil – the same soil in which her son was now ensconced forever. My mum, who was distraught at Uncle Mitya’s death, was shocked to see how her grandmother simply carried on in industrious fashion trying (or so Mum imagined) to fill the gap left by her son’s death with a ridiculous mountain of cut-up vegetables.
The girl, who couldn’t stand her grandmother at the time anyway, thought this behaviour one more proof that something was terribly wrong with her senior relative, who had somehow managed to march with a peeler in her right hand through devastating tragedy. By the time my mum told me this story, she was no longer disgusted with her grandmother, not by a long stretch. But I felt ill to my stomach. Just like the girl all those years before, I wanted Mitya’s mother to grieve so that walls would shake and little birds would fall from the sky crying, so nothing around her would ever be the same. And if she had to cut the bloody vegetables, she could at the very least cut off a finger or something.
It took me a while to see what Mum had also realised – that at that moment of acute, unbearable loss, chopping salad was not a manifestation of some kind of shameful repression, or an inability to mourn, or an attempt to take refuge in some kind of ‘pretend’ normality. All my great-grandmother was doing – unconsciously, unwittingly – was trying to take care of her broken heart. Staying plugged in, letting the rhythms of ordinary, everyday life wash through her and around her. It was about the basic human need for connectedness, for being needed, useful, a part of things.
American journalist Philip Gourevitch, who was in Rwanda in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, writes in We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families how he learned that in itself survival was meaningless until one found ‘a reason to survive again, a reason to look to tomorrow. The so-called survival instinct is often described as an animal urge to preserve oneself. But once the threat of bodily annihilation is relieved, the soul still requires preservation, and a wounded soul becomes the source of its own affliction; it cannot nurse itself directly.’ This is because, he says, the needy soul needs to be needed. ‘As I came to know survivors,’ Gourevitch continues:
I found that, when it comes to soul preservation, the urge to look after others is often greater than the urge to look after oneself. All across the ghostly countryside, survivors sought each other out, assembling surrogate families and squatting together in abandoned shacks, in schoolyard shanties and burned out shops, hoping for safety and comfort in hastily assembled households.
Soul preservation requires this reaching out, taking care of things and people. Not for some lofty moral reason, not because it is the right thing to do, but because often it is just about the only thing that works, the only thing that makes sense. I wanted Babi Yar to be frozen in the moment of catastrophe. I wanted my great-grandmother to reject rituals of everyday life surely rendered meaningless by her loss. But why? What was the alternative? In the face of loss, the idea of life going on may seem like an ultimate insult or a self-serving fiction, but this is all we have in the end. Green grass comes back. Birds return, caressed by gentle wind. Women put on make-up and heels again. Billie was right. Babi Yar is beautiful and all those other things.