When the song was over, the old man with black hair frowned still more fiercely and himself began to sing, very slowly and quite out of tune.
‘Away with the old world,
Let’s shake its dust from our feet . . .’
Spiridonov and Nikolayev, the delegate from the Central Committee, both laughed and shook their heads. Krymov grinned at Spiridonov.
‘So the old man was once a Menshevik?’
Spiridonov knew all there was to know about Andreyev. He would gladly have told Krymov, but he was afraid Nikolayev would overhear. For a moment the feeling of simplicity and brotherhood disappeared.
‘Pavel Andreyevich, that’s the wrong song,’ he interrupted gently.
Andreyev fell silent, looked at him and said:
‘I’d never have thought it. I must have been dreaming.’
The Georgian sentry was showing Krymov where he had rubbed the skin off his hand.
‘That’s from digging out my friend, Seryozha Vorobyov.’
His black eyes glittered. Then, rather breathlessly, he said:
‘I loved that Seryozha more than my own brother.’
The words were almost a scream.
Meanwhile the grey-haired night-watchman, covered in sweat and a little the worse for drink, had fastened onto Nikolayev.
‘No, you listen to me now! Makuladze says he loved Seryozha Vorobyov more than his own brother. I once worked in an anthracite mine. You should have seen the boss we had there. He really did love me. We drank together and I used to sing. He said straight out: “You’re just like a brother to me, even if you are only a miner.” We used to talk, we used to eat our lunch together.’
‘A Georgian, was he?’ asked Nikolayev.
‘What do you mean? He was Mr Voskresensky, the owner of all the mines. But you’ll never understand how much he respected me. A man who had a capital of millions. Is that clear?’
Nikolayev and Krymov exchanged glances. They both winked and shook their heads.
‘Well, well,’ said Nikolayev. ‘Now that really is something. You live and learn.’
‘That’s right,’ said the old man, apparently unaware that he was being made fun of.
It was a strange evening. Late at night, as people were beginning to leave, Spiridonov said to Krymov: ‘Don’t start looking for your coat, Nikolay. You’re staying here for the night.’
He started preparing a place for Krymov to sleep. He did this very slowly, thinking carefully what to put where: the blanket, the padded jacket, the ground sheet. Krymov went outside; he stood for a while in the darkness, looking at the dancing flames, then went back down again. Spiridonov was still at it.
Krymov finally took off his boots and lay down.
‘Well, are you comfortable?’ Spiridonov asked. He patted Krymov on the head and smiled a kindly, drunken smile.
To Krymov, the fire in the power station was somehow reminiscent of the bonfires in Okhotniy Ryad on that night in January 1924 when they had buried Lenin.
Everyone else who had stayed behind seemed to be already asleep. It was pitch-dark. Krymov lay there with his eyes open, thinking and remembering . . .
There had been a harsh frost for some days. The dark winter sky over the cupolas of Strastny monastery . . . Hundreds of men in greatcoats, leather jackets, caps with ear-flaps, pointed helmets . . . At one moment Strastnaya Square had suddenly turned white. There were leaflets, government proclamations, lying all over it.
Lenin’s body had been taken from Gorki to the railway station on a peasant sledge. The runners had squeaked, the horses snorted. The coffin had been followed by his widow, Krupskaya, wearing a round fur cap held on by a grey headscarf, by his two sisters, Anna and Maria, by his friends, and by some of the village peasants. It might have been the funeral of some agronomist, of a respected village doctor or teacher.
Silence had fallen over Gorki. The polished tiles of the Dutch stoves had gleamed; beside the bed with its white summer bedspread stood a small cupboard full of little bottles with white labels; there was a smell of medicine. A middle-aged woman in a white coat had come into the room; out of habit she walked on tiptoe. She had gone past the bed and picked up a ball of twine with a piece of newspaper tied to the end. The kitten asleep in the empty armchair had looked up as it heard the familiar rustle of its toy; it had looked at the empty bed, yawned and then settled down again.
As they followed the coffin, Lenin’s relatives and close comrades had begun reminiscing. His sisters remembered a little boy with fair hair and a difficult character. He had teased them a lot and been impossibly demanding. Still, he had been a good boy and he had loved his mother and his brothers and sisters.
His widow remembered him in Zurich, squatting on the floor and talking to the little granddaughter of Tilly the landlady. Tilly had said, in the Swiss accent that Volodya found so amusing:
‘You should have children yourselves.’
He had stolen a quick, sly look at Nadyezhda Konstantinovna.
Workers from the ‘Dynamo’ factory had come to Gorki. Volodya had forgotten his condition and got up to meet them. He had wanted to say something, but had only managed to give a pitiful moan and a despairing wave of the hand. The workers had stood around in a circle; watching him cry, they had started to cry themselves. And then that frightened, pitiful look of his at the end – like a little boy turning to his mother.
Then the station buildings had come into view. The locomotive, with its tall funnel, had seemed even blacker against the snow.
Lenin’s comrades – Rykov, Kamenev and Bukharin – had walked just behind the sledge, their beards white with hoar-frost. From time to time they had glanced absent-mindedly at a swarthy, pock-marked man wearing a long greatcoat and boots with soft tops. They had always felt a contemptuous scorn for his Caucasian style of dress. And had he been a little more tactful, he wouldn’t have come to Gorki at all; this was a gathering for Lenin’s very closest friends and relatives. None of them understood that this man was the true heir of Lenin, that he would supplant every one of them, even Krupskaya herself.
No, it wasn’t Bukharin, Rykov and Zinoviev who were the heirs of Lenin. Nor Trotsky. They were all mistaken. None of them had been chosen to continue Lenin’s work. But even Lenin himself had failed to understand this.
Nearly two decades had passed since that day, since the body of Lenin – the man who had determined the fate of Russia, of Europe, of Asia, of humanity itself – had been drawn through the snow on a creaking sledge.
Krymov couldn’t stop thinking about those days. He remembered the bonfires blazing in the night, the frost-covered walls of the Kremlin, the hundreds of thousands of weeping people, the heart-rending howl of factory hooters, Yevdokimov’s stentorian voice as he stood on a platform and read an appeal to the workers of the world, the small group who had carried the coffin into the hastily-built wooden mausoleum.
Krymov had climbed the carpeted steps of the House of Unions and walked past the mirrors draped in black and red ribbons; the warm air had been scented with pine-needles and full of mournful music. He had gone into the hall and seen the bowed heads of the men he was used to seeing on the tribune at the Smolny or at Staraya Ploshchad. In 1937 he had seen the same bowed heads in the same building. As they listened to the sonorous, inhuman tones of Prosecutor Vyshinsky, the accused had probably remembered how they had walked behind the sledge and stood beside Lenin’s coffin, listening to that mournful music.
Why, on this anniversary of the Revolution, had he suddenly remembered that distant January? Dozens of men who had helped Lenin to create the Bolshevik Party had proved to be foreign spies and provocateurs; and someone who had never occupied a central position in the Party, who had never been highly thought of as a theoretician, had proved to be the saviour of the Party’s cause, the bearer of its truth. Why had they all confessed?
Questions like these were best forgotten. But tonight Krymov was unable to forget them . . . Why did they all confess? And why do
I keep silent? Why have I never found the strength to say: ‘I really don’t believe that Bukharin was a saboteur, provocateur and assassin.’ I even raised my hand to vote. I signed. I gave a speech and wrote an article. And I still believe that my zeal was genuine. But where were my doubts then? Where was all my confusion? What is it that I’m trying to say? That I am a man with two consciences? Or that I am two men, each with his own conscience? But then that’s how it’s always been – for all kinds of people, not just for me.
Grekov had merely given voice to what many people felt without admitting it. He had put into words the thoughts that most worried Krymov, that sometimes most attracted him. But Krymov had at once been overwhelmed with hatred and anger. He had wanted to make Grekov lick his boots; he had wanted to break him. If it had come to it, he would have shot him without hesitation.
Pryakhin’s words were spoken in the cold language of officialdom. He had talked, in the name of the State, about grain procurements, workers’ obligations and percentages of the plan. Krymov had always disliked the soulless speeches delivered by soulless bureaucrats – but these soulless bureaucrats were his oldest comrades, the men he had marched in step with. The work of Lenin was the work of Stalin; it had become embodied in these men, in this State. And Krymov wouldn’t hesitate to give his life for the glory of this work.
What about Mostovskoy? He too was an Old Bolshevik. But not once had he spoken out, even in defence of people whose revolutionary honour he had never questioned. He too had kept silent. Why?
And Koloskov, that kind, upright young fellow who’d attended Krymov’s courses in journalism. Coming from a village in the country, he’d had a lot to say about collectivization. He’d told Krymov about the scoundrels who included someone’s name on a list of kulaks simply because they had their eye on his house or garden, or because they were personal enemies. He’d told Krymov about the terrible hunger, about the ruthlessness with which the peasants’ last grain of corn had been confiscated. He’d begun to cry as he talked about one wonderful old man who’d given his life to save his wife and granddaughter . . . Not long afterwards, Krymov had read an article by Koloskov on the wall-newspaper: apparently the kulaks felt a violent hatred for everything new and were burying their grain in the ground.
Why, after crying his heart out, had Koloskov written such things? Why had Mostovskoy never said anything? Out of cowardice? Krymov had said things that went against his deepest feelings. But he had always believed what he said in his speeches and articles; he was still convinced that his words were a true reflection of his beliefs. Though there had been times when he’d said: ‘What else can I do? It’s for the sake of the Revolution.’
Yes, yes . . . Krymov had indeed failed to defend friends whose innocence he had felt sure of. Sometimes he had said nothing, sometimes he had mumbled incoherently, sometimes he had done still worse. There were occasions when he had been summoned by the Party Committee, the District Committee, the City Committee or the Oblast Committee – by the security organs themselves. They had asked his opinion about people he knew, people who were members of the Party. He had never said anything bad about his friends, he had never slandered them, he had never written denunciations . . .
What about Grekov? But Grekov was an enemy. Where enemies were concerned, Krymov had never felt a trace of pity. He had never worn kid gloves in dealing with them.
But why had he had nothing more to do with the families of comrades who had been arrested? He had stopped phoning or visiting them. Of course, if he had met them by chance, he had always said hello; he had never crossed over to the other side of the street.
But then there were some people – usually old women, lower-middle-class housewives – who would help you send parcels to someone in camp. You could arrange for someone in camp to write to you at their address. And for some reason they were quite unafraid. These same old women, these superstitious domestics and illiterate nannies, would even take in children whose mothers and fathers had been arrested, saving them from orphanages and reception-centres. Members of the Party, on the other hand, avoided these children like the plague. Were these old women braver and more honourable than Old Bolsheviks like Mostovskoy and Krymov?
People are able to overcome fear: children pluck up their courage and enter a dark room, soldiers go into battle, a young man can leap into an abyss with only a parachute to save him. But what about this other fear, this fear that millions of people find insuperable, this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the State . . . ?
No, no! Fear alone cannot achieve all this. It was the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality, that justified today’s pharisees, hypocrites and writers of denunciations in the name of the future, that explained why it was right to elbow the innocent into the ditch in the name of the happiness of the people. This was what enabled you to turn away from children whose parents had been sent to camps. This was why it was right for a woman – because she had failed to denounce an innocent husband – to be torn away from her children and sent for ten years to a concentration camp.
The magic of the Revolution had joined with people’s fear of death, their horror of torture, their anguish when the first breath of the camps blew on their faces.
Once, if you took up the cause of the Revolution, you could expect prison, forced labour, years of homelessness, the scaffold . . . But now – and this was the most terrible thing of all – the Revolution paid those who were still faithful to its great ideal with supplementary rations, with dinners in the Kremlin canteen, with special food parcels, with private cars, trips to holiday resorts and tickets for first-class coaches.
‘Are you still awake, Nikolay Grigorevich?’ asked Spiridonov out of the darkness.
‘Just,’ said Krymov. ‘I’m just falling asleep.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry. I won’t disturb you again.’
39
It was over a week since the night when Mostovskoy had been summoned by Obersturmbannführer Liss. His feeling of tension, of feverish expectancy, had been replaced by a heavy depression. There were moments when he began to think he had been completely forgotten by both his friends and his enemies; that they looked on him as a weak, half-senile old man, a goner.
One clear still morning he was taken to the bath-house. This time the SS guard sat down on the steps outside, putting his tommy-gun down beside him, and lit a cigarette. The sky was clear and the sun was warm; the soldier obviously preferred not to enter the damp building.
The prisoner on duty inside came up to Mostovskoy.
‘Good morning, dear comrade Mostovskoy.’
Mostovskoy let out a cry of astonishment: in front of him stood Brigade Commissar Osipov; he was wearing a uniform jacket with a band on the sleeve and waving an old rag in his hand.
They embraced.
‘I managed to get myself a job in the bath-house,’ Osipov explained hurriedly. ‘I’m standing in for the usual cleaner. I wanted to see you. Kotikov, the general and Zlatokrylets all send their greetings. But first, how are they treating you, how are you feeling, what do they want from you? You can talk while you’re undressing.’
Mostovskoy told him about his interrogation.
Osipov stared at him with his dark, prominent eyes.
‘The blockheads think they’ll be able to win you over.’
‘But why? Why? What’s the point of it all?’
‘They may be interested in information of a historical nature, in the personalities of the founders and leaders of the Party. Or they may be intending to ask you to write letters, statements and appeals.’
‘They’re wasting their time.’
‘They may torture you, comrade Mostovskoy.’
‘The fools are wasting their time,’ repeated Mostovskoy. ‘But tell me – how are things with you?’
‘Better than could have been expected,’ said Osipov in a whisper. ‘The main thing is that we’ve made contact with
the factory workers. We’re stockpiling weapons – machine-guns and hand-grenades. People bring in the components one by one and we assemble them in the huts at night. For the time being, of course, the quantities are insignificant.’
‘That’s Yershov’s doing,’ said Mostovskoy. ‘Good for him!’
Then he shook his head sadly as he took off his shirt and looked at his bare chest. Once again he felt angry with himself for being so old and weak.
‘I have to inform you as a senior comrade that Yershov is no longer with us.’
‘What do you mean? How come?’
‘He has been transferred to Buchenwald.’
‘Why on earth? He was a splendid fellow.’
‘In that case he’ll still be a splendid fellow in Buchenwald.’
‘But how did this happen? And why?’
‘A split appeared in the leadership. Yershov enjoyed a widespread popularity that quite turned his head. Nothing would make him submit to the centre. He’s a doubtful individual, an alien element. The position became more confused with every step we took. The first rule in any underground work is iron discipline – and there we were with two different centres, one of them outside the Party. We discussed the position and came to a decision. A Czech comrade who worked in the office slipped Yershov’s card into the pile for Buchenwald. He was put on the list automatically.’
‘What could be simpler?’ said Mostovskoy.
‘It was the unanimous decision of all the Communists,’ said Osipov.
He stood in front of Mostovskoy in his miserable clothes, holding a rag in one hand – stern, unshakeable, certain of his rectitude, of his terrible, more than divine, right to make the cause he served into the supreme arbiter of a man’s fate.
And the naked skinny old man, one of the founders of a great Party, sat there in silence, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed.
It was night and he was back in Liss’s office. He was overwhelmed by terror. What if Liss hadn’t been lying . . . ? What if he had had no ulterior motive, if he had simply wanted to talk to another human being?