And while we are inattentive, distracted, there is someone who leaves for the war. Someone who, in uniform, has to find the words for a goodbye. Because he knows it can be this, goodbye. It is not easy to find more exact words than those that Vasilij Grossman finds, in the pages of “Stalingrad”, to tell the character Vasilov who leaves home to go to the front. He chops a large amount of wood which in any case will not be enough for the whole winter, but he feels he has to do this, to leave a kind of legacy. Every now and then he raises his eyes to look for the profile of his wife, “the dark and intense eyes, the curve of his forehead high and without wrinkles, smooth. The same way. Fatigue hadn’t bent them, on the contrary: it had straightened the backs of both of them. Neither of them breathed: it was their way of saying goodbye. ”
He still looks at her while she sleeps. She thinks there would be no greater happiness than staying there, and not having to leave. Grossman adds that it is the saddest moment in Vasilov’s life: “in the sleepy silence that precedes the dawn he felt, not with his mind or thought, but with his eyes, skin and bones, all the evil force of a whirlpool cruel who cared nothing for him, for what he loved and wanted. He felt the horror that a piece of wood must feel when suddenly he realizes that it is not sliding along leafy and more or less high banks because of his will, but because driven by force Vavilov believed himself to be the bulwark of his family, the one who held them together, but he did not: the whirlpool had taken him and carried him away, and he no longer belonged.It’s a sIt’s himself, noIt’s to his family, No.It’s to nothing.
For a moment he forgot that his fate and the fate of the children asleep in their beds were one with the fate of his country and the people who lived there.